(electronic music) (background party chatter) >> All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Cube. Coming up, Bryan Talebi will be here with Ahura A.I? >> Ahura A.I. >> Ahura A.I. Bryan Talebi here with Ahura A.I. We are at The Cube post party networking event, special on the ground, extended coverage. Bryan, we were at The Futurist, not The Futurist Conference, The Future of Blockchain which was the Monaco Crypto Summit over at the Grimaldi Center. Now we're at the VIP gala, the prince is here, a lot of action's happening. You had a chance to look all the presentations we have all the heavy hitters here, kind of a movement going on, right? >> Absolutely. Well, first of all, I think it's absolutely amazing that Prince Albert II put this all together. He obviously understands the future and understands technology. It's absolutely brilliance. And Julio as well, I mean is incredible. So I take off my hat to all the people that put this event together and the speakers were brilliant. I mean, did you see all the speakers the technologies that they've built have the potential to radically transform billions of people's lives. >> It's interesting, you know, I've been covering crypto for a very long time and watched it emerge and then start exploding. And there's always been, and I saw this with the web too early on, legit versus not legit. And all early markets have the hype cycles go down and up, and you always kind of have that but now you're starting to see legitimate tie-in between physical digital assets where, and the confluence of the business value, societal value, government value, all across the spectrum. Every vertical, every use case is got a decentralized vibe going on right now because it's a forcing function. And, and here in Monaco, the price and the king they're leaning into it cause I think they see the future because they could answer their legacy. >> Yeah. Absolutely. And look, you're absolutely right about this because this downturn that we're facing, especially this new crypto winter, I think is the best thing that could possibly have happened to the crypto space because what it's doing is pushing out the let's call them the less than honest brokers within the crypto community, the people that were just in it for a buck, the pump and dumpers and so forth it's really pushing those folks out. And the companies that remain are the true technologists that aren't looking at crypto as just a speculative asset, but rather an underlying technology that can transform the way that we engage with the world in a decentralized way. >> Bryan, you know, we didn't mention in the intro but you also do investment. >> I do. >> You also have a lot of things going on. You got a great history, great pedigree of seeing the waves of innovation the best. That's something, an investment question, like are you in it for the money or are you in it for the make it happen mission? That becomes kind of like the probing question. Someone comes to the table, "Hey, I need some cash. We do funding." What's your exit strategy? "I want to make an exit in two years." Okay. You're out. (Bryan laughs) (John) But it's almost that easy now, right? >> Sure. >> (John) To figure out who's in it for the money. >> Sure. >> (John) Who's in it for the mission. Yeah, the mission's successful. You make a lot of money. >> That's exactly right. Look, one of my mentors once taught me is, money like power is only amassed in great amount if indirectly sought because money by itself is not intrinsically a motivator. And so, what we do at our AB+ Ventures, my venture capital fund, is we only invest, not only in companies that are impact driven and have the capacity to impact a billion people, but we invest in founders that are climbing their third or fourth mountain. So these are people who've already made their money. They either had a couple big exits at over a hundred million dollars or they became rock stars or they became astronauts. They did things where they achieved the highest levels of achievement. And now are building technologies because they believe that they're going to impact the world in a meaningful way. >> They kind of know it's important, right? They made some money, they've been successful. They have scar tissue and experience to apply almost I want to say for the legacy of it, but more for value. >> Yeah. >> For everybody. >> Absolutely. >> All right. So I got to ask about what your current venture, I know you got some good action going on. It's growing pretty good. As they say in golf, it's middle of the fairway. It's growing, got momentum. It's a turbine market. You probably has some offers on the table. I mean, I could imagine all the AI you got going on. Blockchain, very attracted. It's a hard problem, but it's the first inning. Not even. >> Yeah. >> What going on with the company? >> We're very early. Look, we've been building our technologies, the deep tech platform we've been building for four and a half years. There's a whole bunch of offers on the table to buy us. But look, the reality is right now is a fantastic hiring opportunity. There's a lot of amazing talent out there that now wants to come to us, which is great. Number one, number two, if you look back to the 2000 Dot-com bubble, what you saw is all of the companies that didn't really solve real problems went away and it left a more oxygen in the room for the companies that were really solving problems that needed to be solved. And those are now all trillion dollar companies. So, >> Well, Brian, you and I both got a little gray hair. So let's talk about the Dot-com bubble. The other thing, I'll add to that, by the way great commentary, is that everything that was like bullshit actually happened. People bought pet food online, >> Right. >> Groceries delivered to their house. So to your point, the things actually happen. See the visions and the aspirations were correct, timing and capital markets spree. >> Sure. >> Is there similarities going on in crypto? Is it the crypto winter, weeding out those pretenders? Is that what you're saying? >> Well, there's definitely a lot of similarities there but if you look at the example that you use, right, pets.com versus Amazon, people are still buying pet food online. I buy all my pet supplies for my two puppies online. However, if you look at the reason that Amazon works is because of their supply chain and the innovations that they created on being able to deliver anything to you within a day or two days in an extremely cost effective manner. It wasn't just because they had a website and they did some hand wavy stuff to say isn't this a good idea. You actually have to have the underlying operational capability and innovation from a technology standpoint to make it happen. And so, when we talk about crypto over the past number of years, and I've been in the crypto space for a long time, as you have there's been a lot of hand wavy stuff. There's been a lot of people like, "wouldn't this be a good idea?" but then you have the true operators that are able to find the underlying competitive advantages that actually make it work. And that's what I'm interested in. >> I'd love to get your thoughts on that. First of all, great point if you look at like, I was just commentating earlier I was asked the question what I think, and I said, well, I do a lot of lot of reporting and analysis on cloud computing. I watch what Amazon Web Service has done from many, many years ago. And all the followers now. Scale data, higher level services, they're all happening and it's creating a lot of value. Okay? That's going to come to crypto. And so, okay, the dots aren't connected there yet, but you've got this, but one of the things that has proven to be a success criteria, ecosystems. When you have enabling technology like DigitalBits, for instance, is kind the main powering of this ecosystem here, the value that's being created on top of it has to be a step function or multiple of the cost or operational cost to deploy the platform. Okay, so that's kind of in concert with everyone else. You product decentralized, what's your thoughts on that? Because now you have a lot of potential ecosystems that could connect together cause there's no one centralized ecosystem. >> (Bryan) Absolutely. >> But what is, what, how do you get that? How do you square that circle? So to speak. What's your take on that? How does ecosystems play into defi, decentralization, de-apps blockchain? >> So what you really talking about is interoperable, right? So again, if we use an analogy, if we look back to the late nineties, when Web 1.0 was really flourishing and then in the 2000s where everybody created their own websites, people went to the world wide web, but every company had their own website. They had their own social media platform. They had their entire Salesforce platform or what have you. So everyone had their entire separate organization. And so, I suspect that the future of crypto is going to be very similar, where there's going to be a bunch of different metaverses, a bunch of different ecosystems, but someone's going to come along, and I think there's a number of people on the back end that are actually working on this, Some of them are really brilliant, that are going to create an interoperable mechanism for people that jump from metaverse to metaverse from chain to chain in a completely easy experience from a user experience standpoint where you don't have to have a PhD in crypto, so to speak, that doesn't exist, but you don't have to have that level. >> Well, if you're working on crypto for the past five years you've got a PhD. >> Basically. >> The thesis is, you're still alive producing. (Brian laughs) Well, that's a good point. So I'm looking for like, this defacto enabler, right? Because TCP/IP was an example in the old days, you know, the levels of the stack that never, TCP/IP is part of the OSI model. It's just interconnect. That layer, nothing got above it, was open. It was just hard and top that TCP/IP the rest was all standard. Ethernet, token ring add that data layer and then cards. That worked, the industry could galvanize around that. I'm waiting for the crypto moment now, where, what is going to be that cloud (indistinct), Kubernetes and service matches and whatnot. What, is there anything on the horizon that you see that has that kind of coalescent ecosystem, let's get, if we all get behind this, we all win. Rather than chasing crumbs. >> Sure. >> You know, the bigger pie, rising tide, all that stuff. >> Well, so I think there's a really interesting analogy from a couple of hundred years ago on this. So most people don't realize that when the United States first had their railroad system which was the innovative infrastructure play at the time each state or each region had their own systems they had different size railroad. So what would happen if you were trying to ship a bunch of grain from one part of the country to the other you would take it by a train. You get to a train station, you'd have to take everything off, put it on a different train, on a different set of train tracks. You would go a couple states over. You'd have to do that again, go a couple states over. You have to do that again. Eventually what happened is the federal government came in and said, hey, we need to create a system of policies around one set of rules for all trains and all logistics across the country. And so, I do think there's a role for governments to come together, along with the operators and the companies to work collaboratively together to say, hey, what are the regulations? What are the rules of the road? How do we make sure we get all the scam artists out of the system? How do we create a system that actually works for everybody? Now, there's always dangers there, right? You have regulatory capture. Sometimes the government, oftentimes they're slow, they don't understand the technology. So they come down with a heavy hand. And so if it's done properly, and it's not just the United States alone, by the way, it's all the countries in the world. Now at this point, it's a global effort. >> There's money involved, too. >> Exactly. But if we are able to bring together people that are much smarter than me from the public and private sectors as well as the nonprofit sectors, together to come up with one set of rules I think that will enable crypto to massively expand across the entire globe. >> What are you passionate about right now? I know you got the investment fund for, you know, helping society and the planet, you get your project with your startup company, AI is in a hot area. What's going on? What's your top goals for the year? >> So there's two things. Number one, my company, Ahura A.I. is my baby. It's where I spend 70, 80 hours a week. We invent a technology that enables people to learn three to five times faster than traditional education. >> (John) Is that so? >> Because I believe that education is the first step. It's the first variable, that impacts all of the sustainable development goals, impacts the world in a very real way. >> And you're not wearing your UA pin. >> I'm not wearing my pin, I always point to it. >> I wanted to grab it, I saw it earlier. >> But then the second thing I'm super focused on is existential risk. Look, so I throw a lot of events where I bring together four categories of people, CEOs of impact driven companies, investors, whether they're VCs or billionaires or family offices, global experts, and celebrities that want to use their influence for good in the world. And one of the speakers that I had at one of my events is a guy at Stanford who runs their lab on existential risk and what he told the group, and what he told me, is according to Stanford and all the researchers, there's a one in six chance that we're all going to go extinct by 2050. One in six, that's a dice roll. And so to me, the most important thing I can do is bring people together that have capacity, have resources, have capabilities, to address these drivers of existential risk because selfishly, I don't want to live in a dystopian Hellscape. >> Exactly, yeah. Bryan, thanks for coming on. We're going to get back into dinner. Great to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> The Cube after dark, extended hours. Look at us, we're going the whole day. VIP gala, Prince Albert, the team, DigitalBits, The Cube, all here at the Yacht Club in Monaco. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

okay welcome back everyone we're here live in monaco for siliconangle thecube's coverage of the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier your host we're here with al berger the founder of the digital bits blockchain digital bits is presented it's an open ecosystem they're the main presenters bringing everybody together al burgia is the man of the hour al great to see you cube alumni great to see you again john thanks thanks for having me back on the show it's been this is an inaugural event yeah you you and your team put together the digital bits foundation um the digits blockchains enabling technology the proof is in the pudding as i always say now you're seeing companies building on top of the ecosystem why monaco this is inaugural event what's going on here what's the motivation what does all this mean all this stuff coming together share uh why monaco i mean there's uh it's part of this next chapter for us things are happening in monaco and and um um we've yet to unveil that and we thought you know what better place to unveil what we're doing in monaco other than to do it in monaco so that was really the genesis of what gave birth this idea to have the monaco crypto summit um but that evolved beyond just sharing the nexus of it all there are organizations that here that have come from all over the world and will be sharing for the first time how they're also utilizing the digital bits watching not bad to come to monaco in the summer though it's pretty pretty nice area beautiful views yeah summer time in monaco is always great but this inaugural event first of all i love the name so congratulations on the name i think it's got a lot of legs to it i think this will be something that's going to be around for a long long time so it's a good good call there there's a lot of other dynamics going on prince albert's got some involvement he's interested in crypto we're going to hear more about that in the yacht club presentation later tonight you got startups companies building on top of the capabilities of digital bits you know you and i have talked in the past on the cube about the technology um your technologists uh followed a lot of your adventures to success and exits multiple exits in tech silicon valley knows you everyone knows you know around the world it's kind of like a cloud game but it's decentralized you've got infrastructure platform applications um there's super applications and decentralized device to all kinds of new stuff going on so you have a stack kind of going on here in a decentralized way and been validated by all the big names jumping in and changing their business models and horowitz you name it now a global financial markets converging on this huge opportunity around crypto and d-apps everything's happening so what's your reaction to someone who's been through many cycles built companies and sold them and been successful what's your analysis i mean this journey is then different and you has a unique some similarities but definitely some unique characteristics in prior journeys uh in in you know venturing off to found a company and so forth and for me it's been obviously the traditional way um you know prior to this obviously it was in the valley and and had uh uh quite the journey um what i would say this time is um with all that's happening in blockchain and cryptocurrency it's the amount of say capital formation the amount of people involvement in into an early technology into an evolving technology and there's various subcategories now across nfts metabours and um and all things fungible um there's a global stage immediately and um and it sort of creates these sort of mini vortexes of getting more people involved um it's it's kind of some semblances of like the dot-com bubble in a sense but with a much bigger ecosystem um in comparison to what we saw in the 90s um the thing about blockchain is that it it needs to the more successful blockchains out there need to evolve into becoming as decentralized as possible and so as to use your analogy of stack i mean it is incredibly important to have contributors at all layers protocol layer application d app layer in many corners of the world but it all starts with an idea so it's really hard to go from point a to point b um like any other new opportunity and so for us it's been a journey we're evolving in this next chapter um and a lot of that will be evident today throughout the course of the summit we'll start to see and start to feel even more so how uh the digitalbits ecosystem is is becoming more and more decentral we're going to see a bunch of folks coming on us off stage are going to come here sit down on thecube and chat with me about their opportunities how would you describe for the folks watching now what's going on on stage here all day and then obviously there's a vip gala tonight at the yacht club with prince albert in attendance and his team and a bunch of big power players what's happening here what's the what's the vibe what's the purpose what's being presented can you just quickly share uh take a minute to explain what's going on so relative to to the summit um it's you know organizations uh platforms um there's there's uh a few metaverse uh platforms here that will be um i mean they've been in in existence but they'll be unveiling um their connection and how they're leveraging the digital business watching for the very first time and so um but also other categories as well even um soon here massive multi-billion dollar real estate development all coming to um the digital blockchain so this is the physical world massive uh resort um real estate development completely being tokenized you just had some success in digital assets obviously the roma team i saw the announcement on on youtube was pretty big um you get digital bits on the jersey a new player so caught my attention you got sports teams you got here you got applications people building on top of digital bits why for us it yeah vision is needs to be supported by a strategy um from inception it was finding ways to take an enterprise go to market strategy and and uh some of it may be a bit of trial and error in the early you know onset from 2017-18 when it when the journey kind of began for the digital biz blockchain but um also part of it is timing and one of the things that we saw more recently again kind of like the journey and the stack you're referring to before nobody foresaw the pandemic nobody foresaw that the whole world would be at home staring at a screen um and figuring out what to do with their time and many of the world for the first time began to learn about blockchain and cryptocurrency for the first time in the onset of this pandemic and so that became a huge accelerant for the space and so um another quote you know i've i'll take away from you that i you know recall you saying many years ago um you need to have a horse on the track to be in the race yeah we're very fortunate to have a horse in the track by having already a number of years of development um awareness so that when there's kind of like these market shifts that can become an accelerant we're in a position to to move with the industry um and so it's been an incredible couple of years i mean it was great for you guys yeah and so there you know there's different contributors in the ecosystem some some that i'm affiliated with that have done things in the sports space um and other things that i'm not affiliated with there's a lot of things that again are emerging today that are happening in different categories or themes of metaverse for example um and i'm humbled by it just simply by the virtue of the fact that they're utilizing the digital that's watching but i had no um stake in building what they've built in terms of this is enabling technology so just to kind of pivot off you said yeah the pandemic was a tailwind now for um this movement for many reasons one people sitting at home boy hey this is technically vegas work on the blockchain two the future of work or the future of how things are organized is was remote work remote work is like next door neighbor to decentralization like i mean come on you're talking about people going this is not the future is not where it used to be that kind of galvanized a lot of people and also the business models have shifted so now post pandemic everything's hybrid which is virtual physical so that's the perfect storm so total acceleration agree um and we're seeing the traction now what's interesting about what you guys are doing is you're enabling people to build apps on it that's the platform and and that's that's again what i want to ask you is i had people always ask me what's digital bits so i'm going to ask you what is digital bits well digital bits is both the name of a blockchain it's also the name of a cryptocurrency the native cryptocurrency of the digital bits blockchain and so um it began 2017 as a fork of stellar in terms of the original repository um and you know there's a question i was asked earlier today in a press conference of like oh there's all these blockchains well we're still in this like early stage uh this early part of this uh evolution and so i i don't necessarily see a lot of what's happening out there as competitive but rather complementary because in unison you know there's different use cases different categories uh where kind of a blockchain can find its array of adoption in in this sort of phase of it all um for us um we've been referred to as a few different things one of which is you know the aspiration become this blockchain for brands i think today we'll learn that it's become much bigger than that in terms of its capability it's not necessarily that um it's as a result of new technology it's the tech a lot of this technology has been there it's just how it's being exploited and used um we're unveiling today for example and part of now this chapter for me is working with um community um developers hold on before you get there so okay i see digital bits i love the name by the way so thanks for that you kind of get to the news now you have a press conference take me through the press conference what's the news what are you guys announcing here today so the press conference we we did share not everything uh there's more um uh likely in store by the end of today that's not on the agenda uh and and maybe i'll be back on the show later today um we will have you back we'll find out come on but in terms of in terms of what we shared so far at the press conference um uh it was centered around two key themes i wanted to um obviously talked about the array of things to come today but focus on some of the things i'm directly involved in one of which was nico swap and the other are the number of things involved here within monaco so in terms of nico swap um by way of nane nico and in the spirit of decentralization nico in ancient greek means victory for the people so we thought that was a fitting name for the platform it's a decentralized exchange platform on uh the digital bits blockchain um filled with liquidity pool technology automated market making technology it's it's but by way of comparison digital bits is version of let's say a uniswap but lower cost faster and so forth and there's a number of organizations here today that will uh are announcing that they're deploying on nicos bringing their token to the digital bits blockchain and and launching um on on nicoswap so we're i'm super excited about that this is you know part of evolution and part of fostering decentralization um and so what that enables is by virtue of uh being able to again help helping other organizations getting their horse on the track the common denominator for us is digital bits it's um you know the fact that every application every utility token every nft you know does require digital bits including the digital bits currency to provide that security to to be used for gas fees and and and so on and so forth so um the blockchain itself the cryptocurrency it's kind of a common denominator beneficiary uh the one way you can kind of think of it um but yeah we shared a lot around an ecoswap um uh what it looks like and um its key functionality and and who are some of the organizations that are uh on on board day one the other part of the press conference today we shared um was more monaco centric digital bits in monaco and this journey is just beginning uh it's super humbling it's super exciting for me to be a part of it um there is again no real particular order there's a an ecampus that's focused around cyber security and blockchain education for both private sector and public sector so um academia so skills government issues solve some skill gap correct right it's an organization a financial institution a whole department needs to know more about blockchain how they can leverage it um digitalbits um is the blockchain um that is forming the first part of the curriculum for this ecampus that's launching here in monaco with uh uh an organization called amvini the other thing uh that we shared and announced uh today is that um the first sov first and only sovereign cloud in europe is the monaco cloud as recently launched what makes it soft and in essence is a few aspects of its characteristics but digital bits blockchain nodes are being deployed in the monaco cloud um and so beyond the nodes that already exist it's um the network is further being let's say hardest to bring your scale in resiliency you know the whole thing around censorship resistance right the more nodes there's a huge strategic aspect to obviously deploying nodes in in sovereign clouds um and so in europe the first for that is the monaco cloud so we're really honored to be working with the team there and mvne and so forth for that and then um and then as well um a number of months ago we began a journey with the prince albert of monaco foundation um the the chair president is uh prince albert and um the uh vice president ceo is olivia windham who was in attendance at the uh at the press conference as well and um and we unveiled um the foundations uh platform entirely built on the digital bits blockchain uh utilizing the digital bits cryptocurrency um as well as uh nft ticketing and so forth uh so we unveiled that we showcased that for uh for members of the press um how it will be used and and so forth some of the questions you got um i mean it went everywhere from um there was a regulatory regulation question related to europe um to questions around decentralization what are what are we doing how do we compare to uh proof of work you know why why digital bits a big part of that is i think we have a lot of common values with um the foundation of prince albert foundation uh around the environment being eco-friendly and so on and so forth and so um um questions of that sort you know how what do you know what's the next chapter look like and and how how um is more and more decentralization in my view going to be fueled and you said you got some announcements you can't talk about um coming okay so is that what's that going to be related to you get a little bit of teaser on that is it going to be something how big we be massive is it the grand finale or is it it's not a finale the unveiling it's an op unboxing of a new deal what's what's what is it a deal is it technology um it is uh um it's it's um large uh organization um that um is is leveraging uh both um the digital bits watching and digital body swerve that one okay good well al thanks for coming on and congratulations we will catch up with you either at the end of the day here on the live program or we will be at the yacht club in monaco yacht club tonight for the big event we hope to be live there but if not we will report on that yeah thanks for having me john all right congratulations digital [ __ ] really rocking the world here in monaco love the name digital bits makes tons tons of sense platform to enable applications this is the future you're going to start to see this decentralized model that kind of looks like cloud computing but not it's a technology enabling the creative and the and and the application transformations to decentralization it's coming almost every single category will be centralized we'll be covering a blanket on the cube i'm john furrier thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

hello welcome everyone to thecube's coverage here in monaco i'm john furrier host of thecube the monaco crypto summit is happening we're here for the full day and tonight at the yacht club for special presentations crypto team is here digital bits and the industry's gathering and we get some great guests lined up throughout the day our first guest is michael gord co-founder and ceo of gda capital michael welcome to thecube cube great lunch on so we're kicking off the day here we got a lot of a lot of commentary around crypto and also we're in monaco so kind of a special inaugural event why this event why are people gathering here in monaco monaco has traditionally been a top financial jurisdiction but and there has been crypto events here before but never with participation from from prince albert so this being the first event first blockchain focus event in monaco that has participation from prince albert has brought a has brought a global audience and the fact that digital bets is intending to there's a a lot of excitement and and what uh what digital bits is going to be coming to market with yeah and i think i talked to alberto the founder and ceo of digitalbits um i've known him for many years he's a tech guy by heart but he's been in the trenches doing a lot of work over the years in crypto and one of the things i think digital bits has nailed this first the name's amazing but they got real deals i saw our announcement a couple days ago less than 48 hours roma soccer team has a new player they brought the big roll out digitalbits is on the uniform on the front of it huge crowd great visibility so this is a real trend where the the assets of physical and digital coming together there's certainly a lot of hype and a lot of kind of like cleaning up right now in the market but this train is definition is happening training has left the station there's been a lot of over the past decade a lot of startups building in the on blockchains and some of those startups have become big companies but big traditional enterprises have been slow to adopt digital assets and uh digitalbits is really well positioned to bring a lot of those and bring a lot of enterprise participation to the blockchain yeah i mean we met a couple days ago and we were talking in um at the hotel um you're you've been at this for a while you got some great successes talk about your firm what are you guys doing gda what are some of the things you're working on uh you're doing some investment what are some of the angles you're taking bets you've made things you're looking at yeah so i'm a serial entrepreneur and investor i've been focused on the mainstream adoption digital assets for the last decade went about that in in various different ways as i have as i've matured but the way our business looks now is uh is focused on bridging the gap between institutional capital markets and the blockchain and helping institutional capital participate in the market um so we help digital assets with their with their public offering we've gotten into traditional public markets through uh the blockchain moon acquisition corp spac that one of my co-founders is director of we have a brokerage business that does a few hundred million dollars about the transaction volume collateralized lending business we just started some some funds principal investments and then we incubate our own companies internally in category new categories like the metaverse nfts and um other things like that so pretty diversified across the boxing cabinet market at this point and in general looking to create solutions to um help the traditional capital market and the boxing cabinet market get get deeper exposure here you know it's interesting i hear you're speaking about the um how you guys are handling your your view of the landscape multiple moving parts on the investment thesis a lot of integration of instruments and vehicles it's a new creative structural change i mean if you look at just the money how crypto and the future of money this this cultural shift it's also some structural change on how to invest how to manage the investments how to bring on like incubation into most capital public private at the same time on the other side of the coin you have the entrepreneurial energy of um a lot of entrepreneurial ideas you see a lot of creative artists the creator culture has emerged in the past year and a half as a massive wave but to me that's just an application on top of the new infrastructure if you look at all the big investment houses that are pouring billions of whether it's industrial horowitz or other big vcs moving and shifting it's all the same game it's the infrastructure platform applications and it's but it's different it's not what we used to see because it decentralized how do you react to that what's your view on that concept you see it the same way yeah i think that there's everything with blockchains is novel but almost all of it we've seen before so um we've had games before now with the blockchain we have the ability to earn income by playing games we've had exchanges before but they've always been a centralized organization that everything that is now built on blockchains exists in the traditional internet or capital market or game industry or or whatever uh that you know there has been art for generations there's been uh now the ability to have art on the blockchain with provable nft like every everything is innovative because of the decentralization aspect but it's not it's not the first thing the first time that we've seen any of this stuff it's almost interesting you're seeing it recycling all the same concepts on the old web kind of come in the new web and there's also a gen z angle especially the metaverse metaverse the constant theme i'm seeing is hey you want to watch sports you can watch in the metaverse and do it differently and not have to attend so you know the whole pandemic has shown us that hybrid virtual and hybrid is coming together and so i see a huge tsunami of innovation coming from just the tailwind post pandemic i think still massive value in a real event like this us being able to sit in front of each other as real people is uh not replicatable in the metaverse but to be in monaco is not possible for everyone because uh visa reasons because they have something you know it's just you have to be here today is not possible for a hundred percent of the world or for a sports game or for a concert or for a music premiere movie premiere really anything that's happening in the real world is not the metaverse is not gonna replace the real world but it is gonna create a massive additional audience to anything that's happening in the real world that anyone around the world can participate and how amazing would it be for uh for someone from zimbabwe someone from sydney and someone from brazil to all be interested in what digital bits is doing in monaco and what prince albert is you know how how how how the monarchical crypto summit is looking to position monaco in the future of cryptocurrency the kind of theme of this event and they have the amazing fortune to meet in the metaverse it doesn't replace well i mean i think i mean i think this is a great point this to me is going to be the holy grail in my opinion i agree if you look at the notion of presence we're face to face we're here there's people here so we peace we see each other in the lobby maybe he's out sightseeing at dinners so when you have that face to face that's the scarce resource right that's going to be the intimacy sometimes it's not even just to learn about what the pro what's going on but if we're present here how do we create that same experience when you have presence not just some icon chatting but like just movement knowing that you're there connected to people first party is going to be no one's really done it well i think the metaverse is to me is showing the path to being a first-class citizen digitally with a real-time event it's new so it is possible to communicate in the metaverse through through a microphone so if if you're beside someone then similar to the real world you can say you know hey how's it going what do you think about the presentation or or whatever you want and if you're speaking in a conversational way then the person beside you will hear what the person down the hall might might not um it's also that i've i've seen new features in certain like experiences that are coming to market that kind of take the google hangout or skype yeah like video infrastructure and put that in so we could choose to have our cameras on which is it's getting better but it of course doesn't replace real presence there's no doubt in my mind that in near future soon sooner or later there's gonna be a guest sitting right next to you that's not here okay there will be a hologram model where people will be interviewed will have capability to visualize that person they'll be in a metaverse they'll be queuing up for interviews this is a game this is a mind-blowing thing i mean if you just think about that concept that we could have participation in real time here with expressions with their with their digital expression their icon whatever whatever their nfts are so i think this is going to be the blending of how communities gather and i think ultimately how truth and and journalism and news is going to change so to me yeah we're super excited we're here obviously because we want to get the stories and you know we love what digital bits is doing prince albert certainly a relevant figure on the global stage um i think this is a signal for a lot of things to come indeed indeed all right so final question before we move on what's your hottest thing you got going on what are you looking at what are you most excited about um well just just this conference um we've got quite a lot of of companies we have exposure in that are that are presenting and a lot of them are coining new new new niches of the market so um we have uh um we've spoken about a lot about the metaverse we have you know i'm and i think the metaverse is probably the the thing that i'm overall most excited about i think it's the next multi-trillion dollar market that feels like bitcoins in but in addition to that we have the first regenerative finance platform that is that is presenting here that's using decentralized finance and and blockchain technology to create a model that people can earn income while mining carbon credits essentially with an objective of having first boxing all blocking protocols but eventually creating a leader board of carbon positive businesses where businesses will challenge their competitors to be more carbon positive in a way that actually earns them earn some income outside of the potential value what's the name of that company that's kyoto protocol uh we have the first entertained to earn a company that is is presenting here it's playgood um the first uh e-commerce metaverse platform so integrated directly into e-commerce without needing to i think the future of the metaverse is is social links you have you know finest in the metaverse and you have all of the all the logos of metaverses that you have experiences in which is cool yeah that that's uh but then you're you're going out of the native website instead of having a um instead of you know native to the to the website having a metabolism experience so they're doing that um yeah really cool awesome final question one more final question i got for you because you made me think of it so metaverse obviously hot is there going to be an open metaverse you start to see walled gardens and you got facebook they got slam dunk by the u.s uh in terms of monopolistic move for buying a exercise act which you know i can i i don't think that was a good move by the u.s i think i let him do that but but there they're they're kind of the wall garden model the old facebook i mean decentralized about open yeah historically if we go back in time there's always open and closed infrastructure in the internet um there was there is companies building open infrastructure companies building closed infrastructure and we could have been talking in 1992 about whether the private intranet will create mass adoption or the open internet will create mass adoption and not that the the intranet is probably is even today still a multi-billion dollar per year business but it's not a multi-trillion dollar per year per year you know infrastructure like the public internet same with the blockchain in 2012 2013 um private blockchains were all the rage by banking raising hundreds of millions of dollars to build up private boxing infrastructure and private blockchains are generating probably today still multi-billion dollars of revenue annually but they haven't accrued multi-trillion dollars like the public watching has i think the same thing will be in the metaverse there will be open and closed infrastructure um but event and there already is close you know fortnight and and games are are essentially closed metaverses just without ownable land um i always look at the i'm old school i look at aol they had they monopolized dial up internet like where the hell did that go you know history so again yeah we don't know it's going to be maybe a connection a connection point between these open metaverses we'll see maybe i'm investment update michael thanks for coming on thecube appreciate you kicking off the event here monaco crypto summit powered by digital bits presented by digital bits uh the company really and behind all the innovation here and the companies i'm john furrier with more coverage after this short break thanks john [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation with Unstoppable Domains. It's a showcase we're featuring all the best content in Web 3 and with unstoppable showcase, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great guest here, Matt Mickiewicz who's the Chief Revenue Officer of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, welcome to the showcase, appreciate it. >> Thank you for having me. >> So the theme of this segment is the potential of the Web 3 marketplace with Unstoppable Domains. You're the Chief Revenue Officer, you guys have a very interesting concept that's going extremely well, congratulations. But you're using NFTs for access and domains, Of course through the metaverse is huge. People want their own domains, but it's not just like real estate in the sense of a website. It's bigger than that it's a lot going on. So take us through what is the value proposition and what is the product? >> Absolutely, so for the past 20 years, most of us have been interacting on the internet using usernames issued to us by big corporations like Facebook, Google, Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, et cetera. Whenever we get these usernames for free it's because we and our data are the product. As some of the recent leaks in the media have shown incentive individual in companies are not always aligned. And most importantly individuals are not in control of their own digital identity and the data, which means they can economically benefit from the value they create online. Think of Twitter as a two-sided marketplace with 0% revenue share back to its creators. We're now having in the creator economy and we believe that individuals should see the economic rewards of what they do and create online. That's what we are trying to do in** support of domains is provide user own and control identity to four and a half billion internet users. >> It's interesting to see change that's happening with Web3 and just in cultural terms, users are expecting to be part of the creator the personality of the company, there's this almost this intermediation of the middle man whether it's an ad network or a gatekeeper of any kind people going direct, right? So if I'm an artist, I can go direct to my fans. >> Exactly, so Web3 really shifts the power away from a aggregators. Aggregators and marketplaces have been some of the best business models for the last 20 years onto the internet. But Web3 is going to dramatically change all over the next decade. Bring more power back in the hands of consumers. >> What type of companies do you guys work with and partner with that we see out there? Give us some examples of the kinds of companies you're doing business with end partnering with. >> Yeah, so let's talk about use cases first actually. Was the big use case that we identified initially for NFT domain names was around cryptocurrency transfers. Anyone who's ever bought cryptocurrency and tried to transfer it between accounts or wallets is familiar with these awkwardly long hexa decimal strings of random numbers and letters, or even if you make a single type of money is lost forever. That's a pretty scary experience that exists today. That 2 trillion asset dollar as a class with 250 million users. So the first set of partners that we worked on integrating with, we're actually crypto wallets and exchanges. So we will allow users to do is replace all their long hexa decimal wallet addresses with a single human readable name, like John.NFT or MattMickiewicz.crypto to allow for simple crypto transfers. >> And how do the exchange work with you guys on that is it a plugin, is it co-locating code together? What's the relationship between exchanges and Unstoppable Domains? >> Yeah, absolutely great question. So exchanges actually have to do a little bit of engineering list to work with us and they can do that by either using our resolution libraries or using one of our APIs in order to look up an Unstoppable Domain and figure out all the wallet addresses that's associated with that name. So today we work with dozens of the world's top exchanges and wallets ranging from OKX to Coinbase wallet, to Trust wallet, to bread wallet, and many many others. >> I got to ask you on the wallet side, is that a requirement in terms of having specific code and are the wallets that you work well with? Explain the wallet dynamic between Unstoppable Domains and wallets. >> Yeah, so wallets all have this huge usability problem for their users because every single cryptocurrency held by every single one of their users has a different hexadecimal wallet address. And once again every user is subject to the same human fallacies and errors where if they make a single type their money can be lost forever. So what we enable these wallets to do is to make crypto transfer simple and less scary than the current status quo by giving the users an Unstoppable name that they can use to attach to all the wallet addresses on the back end. So companies like Trust Wallet for example, which has 10 million user or Coinbase Wallet. When you go to the crypto transfer fields, there you can just type in an unstoppable name It'll correctly route the currency to the right person, to the right wallet, without any chance for human error. >> When these big waves coming out I got to ask this question, 'cause a lot of people in the mainstream are getting into it now. It reminds me of the web wave that hit the big thing was how many people are coming online, was one of the key metrics and how many web pages are being developed was another metric, which meant that people were building out webpages. And it's hard to look back and think, wow, that was actually a KPI. So internet users and webpages where the two proxies 'cause then search engines came out and everything else happened. So I got to ask you, there are people watching, they're seeing it on commercials on TV, they're seeing it everywhere stadiums are named after crypto companies. So, the bottom line is people want to know how NFT domains take the fear out of working with crypto and sending crypto. >> Yeah, absolutely, so imagine we had to navigate the web using IP addresses rather than typing in Google.com. You'd have to type in a random string of numbers that you'd had to memorize. That would be super painful for users and internet wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with almost 5 billion people online. The history of computer networks we have human readable naming systems built on top in every single instance, it's almost crazy that we got to a $2 trillion asset class with 250 million users worldwide. 13 years after the Satoshi white paper, without a human readable naming system other Unstoppable Domains in a few of our competitors, that's a fundamental problem that we need to solve in order to go from 250 million crypto users in 2022 to 5 billion crypto users a decade from now. >> And just to point out, not to look back and maybe make a correlation but I will, if you look at the naming system of DNS, what it did to IP addresses, that's one major innovation that enabled the web. Then you look at what keyword navigation has done on top of DNS, what that did for the industry, and that basically birthed Google keywords basically ads. So that's trillions and trillions of dollars. Again, now shifting to you guys, is that how you see it? Obviously it's decentralized, so what's different? Okay, I get, so if you compare here Google was successful, keyword advertising industry for the last of 25 years or 20 years. >> What's different now is? >> yeah >> Yeah, what's different now is the technology inflection points. So Blockchains have evolved to a point where they enable high throughput high transaction volume and true decentralized ownership. The NFTs standard, which is only a couple years old, has taken off massively around trading of profile pictures like CryptoPunks and the Bored Apes Yacht Club where the use cases extend much more than just a cool JPEG that goes up in value two or three X year over year. There is a true use case here around ownership of identity ownership over data, a decentralized login authentication and permission data sharing. One of the sad things that happened on the internet the last decade really was, that the platforms built out have now allowed developers to build on top of them in a trustless comissionless way. Developers who built applications on top of them, the early monopolies in the last decade, got the rules changed on them. APIs cut off, new fees instituted. That's not going to happen in Web3 because all permission list. Once an NFT is minted, it's custody in a user's own wallet, we cannot take the way it will continue to exist in eternity, regardless of what happens to Unstoppable Domains, which gives developers a lot more confidence in building new products for the Web3 identity standard that we're building out. >> You know what's amazing is that's a whole another generational shift. I've always been a big fan of abstractions when innovation is needed when there are problems that need to be solved, messes to be cleaned up, a good abstraction layer on top of new architecture is really, really phenomenal. I guess the key question for I have for you is, theCUBE we have all this video where's our NFT how should we implement NFTs? >> There's a couple different ways you could think about it, you could do proof of attendance protocol NFTs, which are really interesting way for users to show that they were at particular event. So just in the same way that people collect T-shirts from conferences, people will be collecting NFTs to show they were attending in person cultural moments or that they were part of an event online or offline. You could do NFTs for our employees to show that they were at your company during certain periods of the company's growth. So think of replacing their resume with a cryptographically secure resume like this on the Blockchain and perpetuity. Now more than half of all resumes contain lies, which is a pretty gnarly problem as a hiring manager that we constantly have to sort through. There's where that this can impact that side of the market as well. >> That's awesome, and I think this is a use case for everything we appreciate that. And of course we can have the most favorite cube moments, it can be a cube host NFT at Board Apes out there. Why not have a board cube host going on and then.. >> We're an auction for charity and OpenSea. >> All right, great stuff, now let's get into some of the cool tech nerd stuff, which is really the login piece which I think is fascinating. The having NFTs be a login mechanism is another great innovation, okay. So this is cool, 'cause it's like think of it as one click NFTs, if you will. What's the response been on this login with Unstoppable for that product? What's some of the use cases, can you get some examples of the momentum intraction? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we launched a product less than 90 days ago and we already have 90 committed or integrated partners live today with a login product. And this replaces login with Google, login with Facebook with a way that it's user owned and user controlled. And over time people will be attaching additional information back to their NFT domain name, such as their reputation, their history, things they've done online and be able to permission to share that with applications that they interact with in order to gain rewards. Once you own all of your data, and you can choose who you shared with . Companies will incentivize you to share data. For example, imagine you just buy a new house and you have 3000 square feet to furnish. If you could tell that fact and prove it, to a company like Wayfair, would they be incentivized to give you discounts? We're spending 10, 20, $30,000 and you'll do all of your purchasing there rather than spread across other e-commerce retailers. For sure they would, but right now when you go to that website, you're just another random email address. They have no idea who you are, what you've done, what your credit score is, whether you're a new house buyer or not. But if you could permission to share that using a log and installable product, I mean the web would just be much much different. >> And I think one of the things too, as these, I call them analog old school companies, old guard companies as referred to in theCUBE talk here. But we always call that old guard as the people who aren't innovating. You could think about companies having more community too, because if you have more sharing and you have this marketplace concept and you have these new dynamics of how people are working together, sharing will provide more or transparency but yet security on identity. Therefore things are going to be happening organically. That's a community dynamic what's your view on that? And what's your reaction. >> Communities are such an important part of Web3 and the cryptos ecosystem in general. People are very tightly knit, they all support each other. There there's a huge amount of collaboration in this space because we're all trying to onboard the next billion users into the ecosystem. And we know we have some fundamental challenges and problems to solve, whether it's complex wallet addresses, whether it's the lack of portable data sharing, whether it's just simple education, right? I'm sure, tens of million of people have gone to crypto for the first time during this year's Super Bowl based on some of those awesome ads they ran. >> Yeah, love the QR code, that's a direct response. I remember when the QR codes been around for a long time. I remember in the late 90's, it was a device at red QR code that did navigation to a webpage. So I mean, QR codes are super cool, great way to get, and we all using it too with the pandemic to ordering food. So I think QR codes are here to stay, in fact, we should have a QR code on all of our images here on the screen too. So we'll work on that, but I got to ask you on the project side, now let's get into the devs and kind of the applications, the users that are adopting unstoppable and this new way of things. Why are they gravitating towards this login concept? Can you give some examples and give some color commentary to why are these D-application, distributed application, dApps guys and gals programming with you guys? >> Yeah, they all believe that the potential for what we're trying to create around user own controlled identity. Where the only company in the market right now with a product that's live and working today. There's been a lot of promises made, and we're the first ones to actually delivered. So companies like Cook Finance for example, are seeing the benefit of being able to have their users, go through a simple process to check in and authenticate into the application using your NFT domain name rather than having to create an email address and password combination as a login, which inevitably leads to problems such as lost passwords, password resets, all those fun things that we used to deal with on a daily basis. >> Okay, so now I got to ask you the kind of partnerships you guys are looking at doing. I can only imagine the old school days you had a registry and you had registrars, you had a sales mechanism. I noticed you guys are selling NFT kind of like domain names on your website. Is that a kind of a current situation, is that going to be ongoing? How do you envision your business model evolving and what kind of partnerships do you see coming along? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're working with a lot of different companies from browsers to exchanges, to wallets, to individual NFT projects, to more recently even exploring partnership opportunities with fashion brands for example. Monetarily, market is moving so so fast. And what we're trying to essentially do here is create the standard naming system for Web3. So a big part of that for us will be working with partners like blockchain.com and with Circle, who's behind the USDC coin on creating registry such as .blockchain and .coin and making those available to tens of millions and ultimately hundreds of millions and billions of users worldwide. We want an Unstoppable domain name to be the first asset that every user in crypto gets even before they buy their Bitcoin, Ethereum or Dogecoin. >> It makes a lot of sense to abstract the way the long hexa desal stream we all know, that we all write down, put in a safe, hopefully we don't forget about it. I always say, make sure you tell someone where your address is. So in case something happens, you don't lose all that crypto. All good stuff. I got to ask this the question around the ecosystem. Okay, can you share your view and vision of either yourself or the company when you have this kind of new market, you have all kinds of, we meant the web was a good example, right? Web pages, you need to web develop and tools. You had HTML by hand, then you had all these tools. So you had tools and platforms and things kind of came well grew together. How is the Web3 stakeholder ecosystem space evolving? What are some of the white spaces? What are some of the clearly defined areas that are developing? >> Yeah, I mean, we've seen explosion in new smart contract blockchains in the past couple of years, actually going live, which is really interesting because they support a huge number of different use cases, different trade offs on each. We recently partnered and moved over a primary infrastructure to Polygon, which is a leading EVM compatible smart chain, which allows us to provide free gas fees to users for minting and managing their domain name. So we're trying to move all obstacles around user adoption. Here you'll need to have Ethereum in your wallet in order to be an Unstoppable Domains customer or user, you don't have to worry about paying transaction fees every time you want to update the wallet addresses associated with your domain name. We want to make this really big and accessible for everybody. And that means driving down costs as much as possible. >> Yeah, it's a whole nother wave. It's a wave that's built on the shoulders of others. It's a shift in infrastructure, new capabilities, new applications. I think it's a great thing you guys do in the naming system, makes a lot of sense. It abstraction layer creates that ease of use, it simplifies things, makes things easier. I mean was the promise of these abstraction layer. Final question, if I want to get involved, say we want to do a CUBE NFT with Unstoppable, how do we work with you? How do we engage? Can you give a quick plug on what companies can do to engage with you guys on a business level? >> Yeah, absolutely, so we're looking to partner with wallet exchanges, browsers and companies who are in the crypto space already and realize they have a huge problem around usability with crypto transfers and wallet addresses. Additionally, we're looking to partner with decentralized applications as well as Web2 companies who perhaps want to offer logging with Unstoppable domain functionality. In addition to, or in replacement of the login with Google and login with Facebook buttons that we all know and love. And we're looking to work with fashion brands and companies in the sports sector who perhaps want to claim their Unstoppable name, free of charge from us. I might add in order to use that on Twitter or in other marketing materials that they may have out there in the world to signal that they're not only forward looking, but that they're supportive of this huge waves that we're all riding at the moment. >> Matt, great insight, chief revenue officer, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for coming on the showcase, theCUBE and Unstoppable Domains share in the insights. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Okay, this CUBE's coverage here with the Unstoppable Domain showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the metaverse and what it all means, what it brings to the table. We've got two pioneers here in the metaverse breaking it down, doing great stuff. Both co-founders of companies, Noah Gainer, co-founder and CEO Parcel. And CJ Hetherington Co-Founder of Atlantis World, digging deep and doing all the great stuff in the Midwest. Chill and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, first of all, I want to say congratulations for the work you guys are doing. This is one of the biggest waves we've seen coming on. It's a changing user expectations, it's a changing architecture, it's real technology involved, there's a lot of action. 30% of people at University of California, Berkeley are dropping out of the Computer Science program to get into Web3. This is the biggest technological change, business model change, user experience change. And we've been seeing going back multiple inflection points. This is a big deal. So the metaverse is real. Some people say, "Well, you know, it's not com..." It's coming it's just a matter of time. So let's get into it. What are you guys doing? Tell us about your company's Parcel and Atlantis World. Noah, start with you. >> Sure, so Parcel is a marketplace for virtual real estate. So you can think of something like OpenSea, which everyone is familiar with, but we solely focus on virtual land and virtual real estate in a number of virtual world, maybe part of decent land or the sandbox. So we feature those on our platform and, you know, we take it the next level with the user experience. So we have fully interactive maps. We have price estimates. You can think of it like a estimate on Zillow and in general, we're building the fully verticalized solution for virtual real estate users. And that will extend into rentals, like Airbnbing out your virtual condo or getting a mortgage on your virtual home, as well as, you know, cultivating the community around it. And especially helping empower creators and architects and builders and getting them work and getting their work on display. >> I'm looking forward to digging into that, that sounds very cool. CJ what's Atlantis world doing? What do you got going on? >> Yeah, exactly. So at Atlantis world, we're building the Web3, social metaverse by connecting Web3 with social, gaming, and education in one light web virtual world, that's accessible to everybody. So by going with actually a light web first and a pixel approach so that you can play on mobile or a really old device, because the problem with existing metaverses is that they set an incredibly high cost barrier to entry and also tech isn't necessarily readily available globally in terms of things like VR headsets and gaming PCs. Like for example, when I was in Africa, I travel a lot. If my book would break, it's not even that I couldn't necessarily afford to buy anyone, it's actually not available there. So we're ruling out a lot of the global kind of population from a metaverse experience. And we're building something which is like 3D pixel and super light weight, to kind of bridge that gap and build something which is ready to be massive up till now and onboard billions of users into Web3. So they'll all basically be using Web3 applications in a gamified way and going really hard on connecting that with social features, like voice chat and talking, getting, and virtual events and vaulting and all of that stuff. >> You know, I love what you guys are doing, you're pioneering a whole another area, but what's great about the whole crypto area, is that, since you know, 2017 onwards you saw Ethereum set the developer market started coming in strong. So you start to see that development. And now we got the metaverse. So I got to ask you guys what's the current definition of the metaverse. I mean everyone's... I mean, since Facebook changed their name to Meta, it's been a hype cycle and everyone's like, "Woh..." First of all, you know why they did that. But they're actually putting a lot of DAO in this. This is a wave, we talked about that. But what is the metaverse? How do you describe it? Why is it relevant? Virtual real estate, that sounds cool. What does this all come together? Explain it for the people out there that might not be getting it right. >> Yeah, I feel like for me, the critical difference between an ordinary gamer, what one might think of as game and a metaverse is actually Web3. For me, Web3 is metaverse. And for me it's really because Web3 enables real world utility, but inside of a virtual environment. So for example, inside of Atlantis, you might run into a DeFi bank and understand by interacting with other game characters, which are programmed to teach you about DeFi and like, what is Avel, how to deposit. And so you're actually getting a real world utility out of doing something in a virtual environment. And for me, that's what really bridges the gap into metaverse. Yeah, I'm really kind of bullish on that. (chuckles) >> Noah, what's your take? Define the current state of the definition of the metaverse? What is the metaverse? >> Yeah, to me, it's the 3D internet. And I do agree with what CJ's saying, how, you know, what makes it the most compelling and will ultimately the most successful is that addition of a blockchain and essentialized, you know, tributed ledger technology. Because you can have the closed metaverse, which nobody wants that future. And I don't believe that will be the future. you know, versus the open metaverse, which is blockchain-based, the users are the owners of the assets and the land and everything around it. And it's really foreign by the people. But I see the metaverse as just an extension of the internet we're already using today but we're going to have hardware that makes it 3D and more immersive like AR and VR. >> Yeah, I think- >> Yeah, definitely- >> Go on CJ. >> Around kind of like eight or nine months ago when we started to build Atlantis, we decided that the metaverse was a virtual world where you could live, work, play, and earn, and that's what we've been building. It started off as like building the metaverse that has DeFi and over the kind of time it's gone on our community has grown, we've started to understand the future of our product and our mission and values. It started to become the Web3 metaverse, right? And then on top of that, the Web3 social metaverse, so it's a combination of what all these things. >> You know, it's interesting. And I'm a little bit older than you guys, I wish I was your age, but when the web came along, people were saying the same thing. That the web's terrible. It's a stupid thing. It's never going to be real. And yeah, there was problems. It was slow to dial up back in the day. But yeah, now with gaming, I got to say, I had to look at the gaming evolution being a gamer myself, old school, I guess, but the gaming culture is proxy to what I see kind of happening in the metaverse. And let me get your reaction to that. I'm not saying directly, but you saw what gaming did, right? In game currency, some, you know, pockets of the same kind of dynamic where a lot of value is happening, the expectations were different for users. So how does the metaverse... How does gaming cross over? What's the ecosystem of metaverse? Obviously it's a cultural shift, one. Infrastructure, two. But I can just see this new generation of thinking. It's a whole nother level. Can you guys share your thoughts on that riff? >> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's like for us, we really believe that we can enable a social revolution, where workers from impoverished and remote regions can actually be onboarded into these digital player to earn economies and also learn to earn economies. So it's about leveraging Web3 and blockchain gaming, whatever actually you want to call it, to enable this revolution and actually onboard new people into a completely new working and dynamic. One of the other things we envision for Atlantis, imagine like you run around this game world and you complete quests inside of the game. And these quests basically involve talking to the non-player characters, the NPCs, which are basically pre-programmed. I don't know if anyone's ever played an MMORPG before, but it can be super fun. And they'll actually teach you how to use different crypto applications. Whether that's a DeFi bank, NFT marketplace, kind of digital asset exchange. And once you all do that, the kind of end goal in vision is that you'll be rewarded with tokens. So users will earn crypto for learning about crypto. And if anybody wants to do that right now, they can actually go to rabbithole.gg. It's a different project to Atlantis, but they building learn to earn, and you go on you complete quests and interact with different crypto applications. And it's so crucial for onboarding. And yeah, it's going to be really powerful, the kind of revolution that play to earn and learn to earn will enable. >> I'll check out the rabbihole.gg sounds awesome. What's your take on the reaction to that riff on this convergence of culture tech, gaming, vibe that's kind of divine the metaverse what's your take on that, Noah? >> Yeah, I mean... I think gaming will be the on ramp for maybe the first billion people, you know, into blockchain. It's something people already do and are already paying for, and they now have the opportunity to get paid to play. So the incentives are extremely strong and I think that will be a great way to usher people in, teach 'em about blockchain without realizing that they're using blockchain. And then once they're already in it and have already used it, then it becomes much more natural to user than other applications. >> It's funny, people always talk about, "Oh, user experience!" You know, expectations drive experience, right? If you expect something and if they're used to gaming, I see the great, great call out there, good point. Well, let me ask you guys a question, 'cause I think this is comes out a lot in terms of like the market shifts and metaverse, as an old expression, "Great markets pull the products out of companies or out of the industry." What organic growth have you guys seen in the metaverse that's been either a surprise or a natural evolution of just success and just growth, because the market's hungry for this and it is relevant. It's new, what's pulling out? What's coming out of the organic aspect of the metaverse? >> I think a lot of art and architecture and design. And, you know, it's empowering a lot of independent creators and allowing 'em to stretch their skills in a way that they maybe couldn't do before, but now can do and get compensated for. Like, we see really see the rise of the creator coming in the next couple of years in the open metaverse and finally they will be the ruling class. They won't get the short end of the stick, which artists have for... I mean all the time. >> Yeah, some of the wall street bet skies in the same way, feel the same way. CJ, What's your take on... What's getting pulled out on the organic execution growth of the interactions and metaverse evolution? >> Of course, yeah. I would, first of all love to go back to the previous point on gaming and just kind of like, definitely agree with what Noah said. And the thing is that gaming is 3.4 billion user market, and they're typically an experimental by nature people and group of users, right? So it's definitely a huge onboarding opportunity for teaching users about Web3 and using Web3 in a gamified way and making that kind of inherently fun and engaging. And again, in terms of organic growth, Web3 is incredible for that. We place a huge emphasis on, I think, collaborate versus compete and try to enable network effects for everybody who is involved in Atlantis and becoming part of our fast growing ecosystem. Like we have eight blockchain, more than 10 DeFi apps, like Aave, Yearn, Balanced, 1inch, Perpetual. All of the DAOs like The Exile, MetaCartel, lobsterdao, PizzaDAO, all of the NFT communities. Like we're actually building a yacht for bought yacht club on the beach in Atlantis. So that's fun. But yeah, we grew our community. We're very early stage still. We've been building only for eight or nine months, but we grew our community to like 20 to 30,000 community members across social channels. And we recently raised over a million dollars from our community and we're fully bootstrapped and taken no private money. So the ability to actually do that and to coordinate both kind of community efforts and fundraising and resources is really testament to Web3 and what it's becoming in the community aspect of that. And also its future and the kind of dawn and domination of the Metaverse. >> Well, I got to say, I just got to give you props for that. I think that fundraising dynamic is a real entrepreneurial new thing, that's awesome. You've got active community vote with their contribution and whether it's money and or other value, right? You got social value. This is the whole thing about the metaverse, there's a new community culture going next level here. >> We believe in community and we believe in Web3. And we know we don't understand why most leading metaverses are focusing fully on huge IP and actually ignoring Web3. So we're actually trying to build the infrastructure layer for Web3 applications and for Web3 driven utility inside of the metaverse. And what we mean by that imagine that any developer or any project or any team or any company could occupy a plot for free inside of the metaverse, customize it by branding and then effectively set up shop, whether that's a Web3 integration, so it's a DeFi Bank, or it's an exchange. Or whether that's an NFT marketplace or a music venue or a coworking space. We're really excited about that. And we really believe we've designed the value capture mechanism for virtual land in the metaverse and we're approaching it in a different way to land in the real world. >> That's awesome. Well, let's get that infrastructure conversation, unstoppable domains obviously there having the partner showcase here. You guys are partners. This NFT kind of like access method is a huge... I love it by the way. I think it's phenomenal. I love the value there, but it's also digital identity and it's distributed naming. So you kind of got this enablement vibe, you got solve a problem. How is it working with you guys? Take us through what does unstoppable metaverse... Why does unstoppable matter to the metaverse? >> Yeah, unstoppable is very great mostly for identity and having a kind of crush chain identity inside of the metaverse and just kind of in Web3 in general. And unstoppable, we enable log in with unstoppable. So if you have, for example, an unstoppable domain which is like a human readable kind of crypto wallet address, but you can also do some incredible, stuff with it, and there is a lot of fun and exciting utility, effectively, like if you would have, I don't know, like unstoppable.dao you would be able to use that to log in to the Atlantis metaverse and it would represent some of your identity and social graph in game with your peers. >> Awesome, Noah, what's your take on the unstoppable angle on this? >> Yeah, I mean, it makes it social. So, instead of you can have a feed, you know, something we're thinking about at Parcel is like a feed of all the real estate transactions, and you could follow certain people, you can follow your friends and see a feed of everything that your friends are doing in English or human readable terms that are not just like a wallet address. So, that's obviously a big one and they're also giving people more options in terms of, naming and top level domains if you want to be something.wallet or .nft, or hopefully eventually .metaverse- >> John: Yes. >> Will help expand that ecosystem much more. In addition to like on our... Like backend being able to capture email when they login and to provide better marketing for our users. >> What would you guys say to other metaverse partners looking for work with unstoppable domains for their login and digital identity, what would you recommend? >> It doesn't make sense to- >> I believe- >> Connect with the best DAO and integrate that if you want to keep shipping stuff for your community and keeping it exciting and engaging and enabling user choice in how they choose to display their identity in virtual environments. >> Yeah, there's practically no downside and plenty of upside, again, having those users who are already using unstoppable domains quickly, you know, log into your site and plug in. >> All right. That's awesome. Good stuff with unstoppable. I got to ask you guys give an example of on your products, I love the metaverse progression. I love the pioneering work you guys are doing. And again, the funding things are different. The user expectations are different. The technology experience are different. Billions of people going to be in enabled for it. What are the cool things you guys got going on? CJ, we were talking before we came on camera about the tree thing you got going on. Take us through some of the things that are exciting that people may not know about or may know about. What should they pay attention to share, share some insight? >> Yeah, of course. So one of the fun things, actually that we're building on that on these sites together with our full team and also some outside contributors from the community and two kin protocol, which is a regenerative finance protocol. And I'll get into that a little bit in a minute. Effectively what we're actually doing is planting a carbon capturing virtual forest inside of the metaverse that will in future also be bio diverse. So how we're approaching that is imagine that you can plant NFT trees inside of the metaverse, providing that your will deposit X amount of kind of USD stablecoin or Ether or some digital asset. You can actually use that to deposit inside of the tree. And we will use some, probably something like super fluid, which is like a kind of smart projecting infrastructure platform. And we all essentially enable every single second funds being sent from the contract and actually purchasing real world carbon credits. So legitimate, you know, government bags to carbon credits from the voluntary kind of public market that have actually been bridged on chain, transformed into a crypto asset, and they will be locked away inside of these trees inside of game forever. And in future, we also hope to have like user on animals, roaming the great forest of Atlantis, which will have biodiversity and endangered species credit, locked inside. And we hope to support a variety of different kind of sustainable assets and things like that to really populate this ecosystem. >> So it's you're doing climate change good for real, as well as rendering it as an asset for everyone to see and enjoy. >> Absolutely. And for me, that's what makes the metaverse the metaverse, that's what I talked about. It's how Web3 enables the metaverse to cross over into our real world, ordinary life from URL to IRL and actually provide some incredible positive impact for all of humanity on the planet. >> And Noah, you have some action going on there. I mean, I would be like, "oh, virtual real estate, isn't it unlimited real estate?" But when you have users come together, this value, we've seen this in gaming, what are some of the cool things you got going on over there at Parcel? >> Yeah, I think one thing that stands out, which maybe not enough people are thinking about are AR virtual world. So, right now a lot of people are focused on the VR types, central and sandbox and, and Atlantis, but there very well may be a billion people using augmented reality before there are a billion using virtual reality just because of the nature of the hardware development and apple may come out with their AR headset by the end of the year. So there are a few projects there they've taken the real world to map and Parcel it out into hexagons, and you can actually buy that, and you own that, that piece and you can put your own custom content there. And on that social impact point, we have heard about a few projects that are trying to use it for good. And like one project is bought up some land in the Amazon rain forest and some of the proceeds go to conservation of the rain forest. So, you know, we're all about using blockchain for good and right, coming together as a globe. >> I can't wait to see the commercial real estate division of your group with all the work from, a remote coming on. Guys, great stuff you got going on, again, you guys are pioneering an area that is coming big. It's coming strong, its got a lot of... A momentum, vitality, and energy to it. Put a plug in for your companies. Noah, we'll start with you. What's going on with Parcel, share a plug for the company. What you're looking for, do some key highlights, news, take a minute to, to give a plug. >> Sure. Yeah, great. We are the destination for virtual real estate and that extends well beyond just the buyers and sellers. That's everyone across the whole chain with property managers and property developers, but then also the builders and creators and artists, and we are working right now on aggregating the best creator directory in the metaverse. So you can think of it as a place where artists can come showcase their work and get hired. As well as just generally like bridging this knowledge gap that is much wider than we even expected. So we have our Parcel learn product coming soon, which is a fully fledged, knowledge base with education, informational content and lots of rich data. >> Where can people get involved? What's the channels? Are all channels open? Where can we find you? >> Yeah, our websites Parcel.so on Twitter, you can find us at ParcelNFT and you can link to our discord from either one of those. It's the best way to get involved. >> All right, CJ, put a plug in for the last world, I know you got a lot of action to share. >> Yeah, of course. I would love to see everybody there. Thanks so much for having us. And thanks for listening. Like I said, at the start of the call, we're building the Web3 social metaverse and we're connecting Web3 with social gaming and education, in one light web virtual world that's accessible to everybody. We're also doing some crazy stuff like planting their cabin, capturing virtual forest and all of that, and trying to be the infrastructure layer for Web3 driven real world utility inside of the metaverse. And we believe that we have designed the critical value capture mechanism for virtual learn. I we'll be sharing more all of that very soon and continuing to integrate the best apps from across the Web3 ecosystem and showcasing them at the center of Atlantis. You can go to discord.gg/atlantisworld. If you would love to learn more about us, you can go to wiki.atlantis.world. And there is some documentation now, which includes back story and team and some of our milestones and achievements so far from winning hackathons to raising grants and launching our Alpha belt, soft launching it. And we all have the public free to play coming in March. And where most active, I would say on discord and Twitter. On Twitter you can find us atlantisOx, or just search Atlantis world. And it's the first one that come up. >> All right. CJ, thank you. Noah, thanks for coming out. I really appreciate you spending the time here, and unstoppable showcase and being a partner. Again they got the great digital identity, great plug there for them here. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for sharing the time. Appreciate you guys are pioneer of some good stuff. Appreciate it. >> Thanks so much man. >> I so appreciate that. >> All right, theCUBE's unstoppable domains partner showcase. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>text, you know, consumer opens up their iphone and says, oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my eyes. What's it been like being on the shark tank? You know, filming is fun, hang out, just fun and it's fun to be a celebrity at first your head gets really big and you get a good tables at restaurants who says texas has got a little possess more skin in the game today in charge of his destiny robert Hirschbeck, No stars. Here is CUBA alumni. Yeah, okay. >>Hi. I'm john Ferry, the co founder of silicon angle Media and co host of the cube. I've been in the tech business since I was 19 1st programming on many computers in a large enterprise and then worked at IBM and Hewlett Packard total of nine years in the enterprise brian's jobs from programming, Training, consulting and ultimately as an executive salesperson and then started my first company with 1997 and moved to Silicon Valley in 1999. I've been here ever since. I've always loved technology and I love covering you know, emerging technology as trained as a software developer and love business and I love the impact of software and technology to business to me creating technology that starts the company and creates value and jobs is probably the most rewarding things I've ever been involved in. And I bring that energy to the queue because the Cubans were all the ideas are and what the experts are, where the people are and I think what's most exciting about the cube is that we get to talk to people who are making things happen, entrepreneur ceo of companies, venture capitalists, people who are really on a day in and day out basis, building great companies and the technology business is just not a lot of real time live tv coverage and, and the cube is a non linear tv operation. We do everything that the T. V guys on cable don't do. We do longer interviews. We asked tougher questions, we ask sometimes some light questions. We talked about the person and what they feel about. It's not prompted and scripted. It's a conversation authentic And for shows that have the Cube coverage and makes the show buzz. That creates excitement. More importantly, it creates great content, great digital assets that can be shared instantaneously to the world. Over 31 million people have viewed the cube and that is the result. Great content, great conversations and I'm so proud to be part of you with great team. Hi, I'm john ferrier. Thanks for watching the cube. >>Hello and welcome to the cube. We are here live on the ground in the expo floor of a live event. The AWS public sector summit. I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here for the next two days. Wall to wall coverage. I'm here with Sandy carter to kick off the event. Vice president partner as partners on AWS public sector. Great to see you Sandy, >>so great to see you john live and in person, right? >>I'm excited. I'm jumping out of my chair because I did a, I did a twitter periscope yesterday and said a live event and all the comments are, oh my God, an expo floor a real events. Congratulations. >>True. Yeah. We're so excited yesterday. We had our partner day and we sold out the event. It was rock them and pack them and we had to turn people away. So what a great experience. Right, >>Well, I'm excited. People are actually happy. We tried, we tried covering mobile world congress in Barcelona. Still, people were there, people felt good here at same vibe. People are excited to be in person. You get all your partners here. You guys have had had an amazing year. Congratulations. We did a couple awards show with you guys. But I think the big story is the amazon services for the partners. Public sector has been a real game changer. I mean we talked about it before, but again, it continues to happen. What's the update? >>Yeah, well we had, so there's lots of announcements. So let me start out with some really cool growth things because I know you're a big growth guy. So we announced here at the conference yesterday that our government competency program for partners is now the number one industry in AWS for are the competency. That's a huge deal. Government is growing so fast. We saw that during the pandemic, everybody was moving to the cloud and it's just affirmation with the government competency now taking that number one position across AWS. So not across public sector across AWS and then one of our fastest growing areas as well as health care. So we now have an A. T. O. Authority to operate for HIPPA and Hi trust and that's now our fastest growing area with 85% growth. So I love that new news about the growth that we're seeing in public sector and all the energy that's going into the cloud and beyond. >>You know, one of the things that we talked about before and another Cuban of you. But I want to get your reaction now current state of the art now in the moment the pandemic has highlighted the antiquated outdated systems and highlighted help inadequate. They are cloud. You guys have done an amazing job to stand up value quickly now we're in a hybrid world. So you've got hybrid automation ai driving a complete change and it's happening pretty quick. What's the new things that you guys are seeing that's emerging? Obviously a steady state of more growth. But what's the big success programs that you're seeing right now? >>Well, there's a few new programs that we're seeing that have really taken off. So one is called proserve ready. We announced yesterday that it's now G. A. And the U. S. And a media and why that's so important is that our proserve team a lot of times when they're doing contracts, they run out of resources and so they need to tap on the shoulder some partners to come and help them. And the customers told us that they wanted them to be pro served ready so to have that badge of honor if you would that they're using the same template, the same best practices that we use as well. And so we're seeing that as a big value creator for our partners, but also for our customers because now those partners are being trained by us and really helping to be mentored on the job training as they go. Very powerful program. >>Well, one of the things that really impressed by and I've talked to some of your MSP partners on the floor here as they walk by, they see the cube, they're all doing well. They're all happy. They got a spring in their step. And the thing is that this public private partnerships is a real trend we've been talking about for a while. More people in the public sector saying, hey, I want I need a commercial relationship, not the old school, you know, we're public. We have all these rules. There's more collaboration. Can you share your thoughts on how you see that evolving? Because now the partners in the public sector are partnering closer than ever before. >>Yeah, it's really um, I think it's really fascinating because a lot of our new partners are actually commercial partners that are now choosing to add a public sector practice with them. And I think a lot of that is because of these public and private partnerships. So let me give you an example space. So we were at the space symposium our first time ever for a W. S at the space symposium and what we found was there were partners, they're like orbital insight who's bringing data from satellites, There are public sector partner, but that data is being used for insurance companies being used for agriculture being used to impact environment. So I think a lot of those public private partnerships are strengthening as we go through Covid or have like getting alec of it. And we do see a lot of push in that area. >>Talk about health care because health care is again changing radically. We talked to customers all the time. They're like, they have a lot of legacy systems but they can't just throw them away. So cloud native aligns well with health care. >>It does. And in fact, you know, if you think about health care, most health care, they don't build solutions themselves, they depend on partners to build them. So they do the customer doesn't buy and the partner does the build. So it's a great and exciting area for our partners. We just launched a new program called the mission accelerator program. It's in beta and that program is really fascinating because our healthcare partners, our government partners and more now can use these accelerators that maybe isolate a common area like um digital analytics for health care and they can reuse those. So it's pretty, I think it's really exciting today as we think about the potential health care and beyond. >>You know, one of the challenge that I always thought you had that you guys do a good job on, I'd love to get your reaction to now is there's more and more people who want to partner with you than ever before. And sometimes it hasn't always been easy in the old days like to get fed ramp certified or even deal with public sector. If you were a commercial vendor, you guys have done a lot with accelerating certifications. Where are you on that spectrum now, what's next? What's the next wave of partner onboarding or what's the partner trends around the opportunities in public sector? >>Well, one of the new things that we announced, we have tested out in the U. S. You know, that's the amazon way, right, Andy's way, you tested your experiment. If it works, you roll it out, we have a concierge program now to help a lot of those new partners get inundated into public sector. And so it's basically, I'm gonna hold your hand just like at a hotel. I would go up and say, hey, can you direct me to the right restaurant or to the right museum, we do the same thing, we hand hold people through that process. Um, if you don't want to do that, we also have a new program called navigate which is built for brand new partners. And what that enables our partners to do is to kind of be guided through that process. So you are right. We have so many partners now who want to come and grow with us that it's really essential that we provide a great partner, experienced a how to on board. >>Yeah. And the A. P. M. Was the amazon partner network also has a lot of crossover. You see a lot a lot of that going on because the cloud, it's you can do both. >>Absolutely. And I think it's really, you know, we leverage all of the ap in programs that exist today. So for example, there was just a new program that was put out for a growth rebate and that was driven by the A. P. N. And we're leveraging and using that in public sector too. So there's a lot of prosecutes going on to make it easier for our partners to do business with us. >>So I have to ask you on a personal note, I know we've talked about before, your very comfortable the virtual now hybrid space. How's your team doing? How's the structure looks like, what are your goals, what are you excited about? >>Well, I think I have the greatest team ever. So of course I'm excited about our team and we are working in this new hybrid world. So it is a change for everybody uh the other day we had some people in the office and some people calling in virtually so how to manage that, right was really quite interesting. Our goals that we align our whole team around and we talked a little bit about this yesterday are around mission which are the solution areas migration, so getting everything to the cloud and then in the cloud, we talk about modernization, are you gonna use Ai Ml or I O T? And we actually just announced a new program around that to to help out IOT partners to really build and understand that data that's coming in from I O T I D C says that that idea that IOT data has increased by four times uh in the, during the covid period. So there's so many more partners who need help. >>There's a huge shift going on and you know, we always try to explain on the cube. Dave and I talked about a lot and it's re platform with the cloud, which is not just lift and shift you kind of move and then re platform then re factoring your business and there's a nuance there between re platform in which is great. Take advantage of cloud scale. But the re factoring allows for this unique advantage of these high level services. >>That's right >>and this is where people are winning. What's your reaction to that? >>Oh, I completely agree. I think this whole area of modernizing your application, like we have a lot of folks who are doing mainframe migrations and to your point if they just lift what they had in COBOL and they move it to a W S, there's really not a lot of value there, but when they rewrite the code, when they re factor the code, that's where we're seeing tremendous breakthrough momentum with our partner community, you know, Deloitte is one of our top partners with our mainframe migration. They have both our technology and our consulting um, mainframe migration competency there to one of the other things I think you would be interested in is in our session yesterday we just completed some research with r C T O s and we talked about the next mega trends that are coming around Web three dato. And I'm sure you've been hearing a lot about web www dot right? Yeah, >>0.04.0, it's all moving too fast. I mean it's moving >>fast. And so some of the things we talked to our partners about yesterday are like the metaverse that's coming. So you talked about health care yesterday electronic caregiver announced an entire application for virtual caregivers in the metaverse. We talked about Blockchain, you know, and the rise of Blockchain yesterday, we had a whole set of meetings, everybody was talking about Blockchain because now you've got El Salvador Panama Ukraine who have all adopted Bitcoin which is built on the Blockchain. So there are some really exciting things going on in technology and public sector. >>It's a societal shift and I think the confluence of tech user experience data, new, decentralized ways of changing society. You're in the middle of it. >>We are and our partners are in the middle of it and data data, data data, that's what I would say. Everybody is using data. You and I even talked about how you guys are using data. Data is really a hot topic and we we're really trying to help our partners figure out just how to migrate the data to the cloud but also to use that analytics and machine learning on it too. Well, >>thanks for sharing the data here on our opening segment. The insights we will be getting out of the Great Sandy. Great to see you got a couple more interviews with you. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate you And thanks for all your support. You guys are doing great. Your partners are happy you're on a great wave. Congratulations. Thank you, john appreciate more coverage from the queue here. Neither is public sector summit. We'll be right back. Mhm Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm robert Herjavec. People obviously know you from shark tank

>>from >>around the >>globe, it's the >>cube with digital >>coverage of IBM, >>Think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube, had a great line up here talking sustainability. Kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains, career great to see you and wayne both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you. What's driving? IBMS investment sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>you know, johN what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM is 100 10 year old company. We've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation, that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental, our stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. C. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense. It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson that IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error. How is that evolved in today's focus? Because you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have uh A I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So, you know, these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that. And that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they say, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. We supported the Paris agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council, which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term >>action. That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna. We leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you've got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're in the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right? Is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, all of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and the context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those needs. >>You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because this waste involved is also disruption to business a security issues. But when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne? Because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right? So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network, where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you onboard them and off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A. I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours, he uses maximum to really focus on the maintenance and sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection, actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging ai to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed um for our clients. >>It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, It's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh, how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now, thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation, which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, NGos and Academia. Some examples. There's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zar in that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment programs science policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'm just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under Call for Code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much, Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being in what we like to turn clients zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing, that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative. Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm.

>>From around the globe, it's the Cube with digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube. We had a great line up here talking sustainability, kary musa ph d general manager of AI applications and block chains going great to see you and wayne, both the vice president of corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainability officer, among other things involved in the products around that. Wait and korean, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you for having us. >>Well, I'll start with you what's driving? IBMS investment in sustainability as a corporate initiative. We know IBM has been active, we've covered this many times, but there's more drivers now as IBM has more of a larger global scope and continues to do that with hybrid cloud, it's much more of a global landscape. What's driving today's investments in sustainability, >>You know, jOHn what drives IBM in this area has always been a longstanding, mature and deep seated belief in corporate responsibility. That's the bedrock foundation. So, you know, IBM 110 year old company, we've always strived to be socially responsible, But what's not as well known is that for the last 50 years, IBM has truly regarded environmental sustainability is a strategic imperative. Okay, It's strategic because hey, environmental problems require a strategic fix. It's a long term imperative because you have to be persistent with environmental problems, you don't necessarily solve them overnight. And it's imperative because business cannot succeed in a world of environmental degradation that really is the main tenant of sustainable development. You can't have successful economies with environmental degradation, you can't solving environmental problems without successful economies. So, and IBM's case as a long standing company, We were advantaged because 50 years ago our ceo at the time, Tom Watson put in place the company's first policy for environmental a stewardship and we've been at it ever since. And he did that in 1971 and that was just six months after the U. S. E. P. A. Was created. It was a year before the Stockholm Conference on the Environment. So we've been added for that long. Um in essence, really it's about recognizing that good environmental management makes good business sense, It's about corporate responsibility and today it's the E of E. S. G. >>You know, wayne. That's a great call out, by the way, referencing thomas Watson, the IBM legend. Um people who don't may not know the history, he was really ahead of its time and that was a lot of the culture they still see around today. So great to see that focus and great, great call out there. But I will ask though, as you guys evolved in today's modern error, how has that evolved in today's focus? Because, you know, we see data centers, carbon footprint, global warming, you now have a I and analytics can measure everything. So I mean you can you can measure everything now. So as the world gets larger in the surface area of what is contributing to the sustainable equation is larger, what's the current IBM focus? >>So these days we continually look at all of the ways in which IBM s day to day business practices intersect with any matter of the environment, whether it's materials, waste water or energy and climate. And IBM actually has 21 voluntary goals that drive us towards leadership. But today john as you know, uh the headline is really climate change and so we're squarely focused like many others on that and that's an imperative. But let me say before I just before I briefly tell you our current goals, it's also important to have context as to where we have been because that helps people understand what we're doing today. And so again, climate change is a topic that the men and women of IBM have paid attention to for a long time. Yeah, I was think about it. It was back in 1992 that the U. S. C. P. A. Created something called Energy Star. People look at that and they said, well, what's that all about? Okay, that's all about climate change. Because the most environmentally friendly energy you can get is the energy that you don't really need to consume. IBM was one of eight companies that helped the U. S. C. P. A. Launched that program 1992. Today we're all disclosing C. 02 emissions. IBM began doing that in 1994. Okay. In 2007, 13 years ago, I'd be unpublished. Its position on climate change, calling for urgent action around the world. He supported the Paris Agreement 2015. We reiterated that support in 2017 for the us to remain a partner. 2019, we became a founding member of Climate Leadership Council which calls for a carbon tax and a carbon dividend. So that's all background context. Today, we're working on our third renewable electricity goal, our fifth greenhouse gas emissions reduction goal and we set a new goal to achieve net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Each of those three compels IBM to near term action. >>That's awesome wayne as corporate environmental affairs and chief sustainable, great vision and awesome work. Karim dr Karim use if I wanna we leave you in here, you're the general manager. You you got to make this work because of the corporate citizenship that IBM is displaying. Obviously world world class, we know that's been been well reported and known, but now it's a business model. People realize that it's good business to have sustainability, whether it's carbon neutral footprints and or intersecting and contributing for the world and their employees who want mission driven companies ai and Blockchain, that's your wheelhouse. This is like you're on the big wave, wow, this is happening, give us your view because you're commercializing this in real time. >>Yeah, look as you've already said and it's the way well articulated, this is a business imperative, right is key to all companies corporate strategies. So the first step when you think about operationalized in this is what we've been doing, is to really step back and kind of break this down into what we call five key needs or focus areas that we've understood that we work with our clients. Remember in this context, Wayne is indeed my clients as well. Right. And so when you think about it, the five needs, as we like to lay them out, we talk about the sustainability strategy first of all, how are you approaching it as you saw from Wayne, identifying your key goals and approaches right against that, you begin to get into various areas and dimensions. Climate risk management is becoming increasingly important, especially in asset heavy industries electrification, energy and emissions management, another key focus area where we can bring technology to bear resilient infrastructure and operations, sustainable supply chain, All of these kind of come together to really connect with our clients business operations and allows us to bring together the technologies and context of ai Blockchain and the key business operations. We can support to kind of begin to address specific news cases in the context of those >>needs. You know, I've covered it in the past and written about and also talked about on the cube about sustainability on the supply chain side with Blockchain, whether it's your tracking, you know, um you know, transport of goods with with Blockchain and making sure that that kind of leads your kind of philosophy works because there's waste involved is also disruption to business, a security issues, but when you really move into the Ai side, how does a company scale that Corinne, because now, you know, I have to one operationalize it and then scale it. Okay, so that's transformed, innovate and scale. How do I take take me through the examples of how that works >>well, I think really key to that, and this is really key to our ethos, it's enabling ai for business by integrating ai directly into business operations and decision making. So it's not really how can I put this? We try to make it so that the client isn't fixating on trying to deploy ai, they're just leveraging Ai. So as you say, let's take some practical examples. You talked about sustainable supply chains and you know, the key needs around transparency and provenance. Right. So we have helped clients like a tear with their seafood network or the shrimp sustainability network where there's a big focus on understanding where are things being sourced and how they're moving through the supply chain. We also have a responsible sourcing business network that's being used for cobalt in batteries as an example from mine to manufacturing and here our technologies are allowing us to essentially track, trace and prove the provenance Blockchain serves as kind of that key shared ledger to pull all this information together. But we're leveraging AI to begin to quickly assess based upon the data inputs, the actual state of inventory, how to connect dots across multiple suppliers and as you on board in an off board them off the network. So that's how we begin to put A I in action so that the client begins to fixate on the work and the decisions they need to make. Not the AI itself. Another quick example would be in the context of civil infrastructure. One of our clients son and Belt large, maximum client of ours he uses maximum too rarely focus on the maintaining sustainable maintenance of their bridges. Think about how much money is spent setting up to do bridge inspections right. When you think about how much they have to invest the stopping of the traffic that scaffolding. We have been leveraging AI to do things like visual inspection. Actually fly drones, take pictures, assess those images to identify cracks and use that to route and prioritized work. Similar examples are occurring in energy and utilities focused on vegetation management where we're leveraging AI to analyse satellite imagery, weather data and bringing it together so that work can be optimally prior authorized and deployed for our >>clients. It's interesting. One of the themes coming out of think that I'm observing is this notion of transformation is innovation and innovation is about scale. Right? So it's not just innovation for innovating sake. You can transform from whether it's bridge inspections to managing any other previous pre existing kind of legacy condition and bring that into a modern error and then scale it with data. This is a common theme. It applies to to your examples. Kareem, that's super valuable. Um how do you how do you tie that together with partnering? Because wayne you were talking about the corporate initiative, that's just IBM we learned certainly in cybersecurity and now these other areas like sustainability, it's a team sport, you have to work on a global footprint with other industries and other leaders. How was I being working across the industry to connect and work with other, either initiatives or companies or governments. >>Sure. And there have been john over the years and at present a number of diverse collaborations that we seek out and we participate in. But before I address that, I just want to amplify something Kareem said, because it's so important, as I look back at the environmental movement over the last 50 years, frankly, since the first earth day in 1970, I, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, I observed there have really been three different hair, it's in the very beginning, global societies had to enact laws to control pollution that was occurring. That was the late 60s 1970s, into the early 1980s and around the early 1980s through to the first part of this century, that era of let's get control of this sort of transformed, oh how can we prevent stuff from happening given the way we've always done business and that area ran for a while. But now thanks to technology and data and things like Blockchain and ai we all have the opportunity to move into this era of innovation which differs from control in which differs from traditional prevention. Innovation is about changing the way you get the same thing done. And the reason that's enabled is because of the tools that you just spoke about with Korean. So how do we socialize these opportunities? Well to your question, we interact with a variety of diverse teams, government, different business associations, Ngos and Academia. Some examples, there's an organization named the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, which IBM is a founding member of its Business Leadership Council. Its predecessor was the Q Centre on global climate change. We've been involved with that since 1998. That is a cross section of people from all these different constituencies who are looking for solutions to climate. Many Fortune 102000s in there were part of the green grid. The green grid is an organization of companies involved with data centers and it's constantly looking at how do you measure energy efficiency and data centers and what are best practices to reduce consumption of energy at data centers where a member of the renewable energy buyers alliance? Many Fortune 100 200 Zarin that trying to apply scale to procure more renewable electricity to actually come to our facilities I mentioned earlier were part of the Climate Leadership Council calling for a carbon tax were part of the United Nations Environment Programs science Policy business form that gets us involved with many ministers of Environment from countries around the world. We recently joined the new MITt Climate and sustainability consortium. Mitt Premier Research University. Many key leaders are part of that. Looking at how academic research can supercharge this opportunity for innovation and then the last one, I'll just wrap up call for code. You may be familiar with IBM s involvement in call for code. Okay. The current challenge under call for code in 2021 calls for solutions targeted the climate change. So that's, that's a diverse set of different constituents, different types of people. But we try to get involved with all of them because we learn and hopefully we contribute something along the way as well. >>Awesome Wayne. Thank you very much Karim, the last 30 seconds we got here. How do companies partner with IBM if they want to connect in with the mission and the citizenship that you guys are doing? How do they bring that to their company real quick. Give us a quick overview. >>Well, you know, it's really quite simple. Many of these clients are already clients of ours were engaging with them in the marketplace today, right, trying to make sure we understand their needs, trying to ensure that we tune what we've got to offer, both in terms of product and consulting services with our GPS brethren, you know, to meet their needs, linking that in as well to IBM being and what we like to turn client zero. We're also applying these same technologies and capabilities to support IBM efforts. And so as they engage in all these associations, what IBM is doing that also provides a way to really get started. It's really fixate on those five imperatives or needs are laid out, picked kind of a starting point and tie it to something that matters. That changes how you're doing something today. That's really the key. As far as uh we're concerned, >>Karim, we thank you for your time on sustainability. Great initiative, Congratulations on the continued mission. Going back to the early days of IBM and the Watson generation continuing out in the modern era. Congratulations and thanks for sharing. >>Thank you john. >>Okay. It's the cubes coverage. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching. >>Mm. Mhm.

>>We work with and we cover some of the old guard, older companies like Dell EMC, HPE, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft. And they're doing really good work pivoting and trying to be ready for this new wave. It's not just not a blockchain. It's just how the world works. Cloud, you know, IOT, but decentralized cannot be ignored. Are they ready? Do you think they're ready? Do you think they even understand what's coming and >>No, no, they're not ready. And it's not, to me. It's not even about just blockchain. I mean, blockchain technology they can adopt. The bigger issue is digital disruption and digital disruption is all about the data at the core of the organization and, and business models that are built around data. And if you think about the history of companies, it's human expertise and data is bolted on, and we've seen this time and time again. But if you look at the top five market cap companies, Facebook, Amazon, Google, et cetera, they're data companies. Data is at the center and they take human expertise and wrap it around there. So the future is going to be about innovation with data, with artificial intelligence and cloud economics, and the old guard doesn't have those things. Blockchain fits in there. To me, blockchain is about building out a new distributed web and on top of the old web and rewarding those who are building it. So it's a new form of open source where the builders get paid.

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation! >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, your host for Cloud Native Insight. When we launched this series, one of the things we wanted to talk about was that we're not just using cloud as a destination, but really enabling new ways of thinking, being able to use the innovations underneath the cloud, and that if you use services in the cloud, that you're not necessarily locked into a solution or can't move forward. And that's why I'm really excited to help welcome to the program, I have the co-founders of Vendia. First we have Dr. Tim Wagner, he is the co-founder and CEO of the company, as well as generally known in the industry as the father of Serverless from the AWS Lambda, and his co-founder, Shruthi Rao, she is the chief business officer at Vendia, also came from AWS where she worked on blockchain solutions. Tim, Shruthi, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us in here, Stu. Great to join the show. >> All right, so Shruthi, actually if we could start with you because before we get into Vendia, coming out of stealth, you know, really interesting technology space, you and Tim both learned a lot from working with customers in your previous jobs, why don't we start from you. Block chain of course had a lot of learnings, a lot of things that people don't understand about what it is and what it isn't, so give us a little bit about what you've learned and how that lead towards what you and Tim and the team are doing with Vendia. >> Yeah, absolutely, Stu! One, the most important thing that we've all heard of was this great gravitational pull towards blockchain in 2018 and 2019. Well, I was one of the founders and early adopters of blockchain from Bitcoin and Ethereum space, all the way back from 2011 and onwards. And at AWS I started the Amazon Managed Blockchain and launched Quantum Ledger Database, two services in the block chain category. What I learned there was, no surprise, there was a gold rush to blockchain from many customers. We, I personally talked to over 1,092 customers when I ran Amazon Managed Blockchain for the last two years. And I found that customers were looking at solving this dispersed data problem. Most of my customers had invested in IoT and edge devices, and these devices were gathering massive amounts of data, and on the flip side they also had invested quite a bit of effort in AI and ML and analytics to crunch this data, give them intelligence. But guess what, this data existed in multiple parties, in multiple clouds, in multiple technology stacks, and they needed a mechanism to get this data from wherever they were into one place so they could the AI, ML, analytics investment, and they wanted all of this to be done in real time, and to gravitated towards blockchain. But blockchain had quite a bit of limitations, it was not scalable, it didn't work with the existing stack that you had. It forced enterprises to adopt this new technology and entirely new type of infrastructure. It didn't work cross-cloud unless you hired expensive consultants or did it yourself, and required these specialized developers. For all of these reasons, we've seen many POCs, majority of POCs just dying on the vine and not ever reaching the production potential. So, that is when I realized that what the problem to be solved was not a trust problem, the problem was dispersed data in multiple clouds and multiple stacks problem. Sometimes multiple parties, even, problem. And that's when Tim and I started talking about, about how can we bring all of the nascent qualities of Lambda and Serverless and use all of the features of blockchain and build something together? And he has an interesting story on his own, right. >> Yeah. Yeah, Shruthi, if I could, I'd like to get a little bit of that. So, first of all for our audience, if you're watching this on the minute, probably want to hit pause, you know, go search Tim, go watch a video, read his Medium post, about the past, present, and future of Serverless. But Tim, I'm excited. You and I have talked in the past, but finally getting you on theCUBE program. >> Yeah! >> You know, I've looked through my career, and my background is infrastructure, and the role of infrastructure we know is always just to support the applications and the data that run business, that's what is important! Even when you talk about cloud, it is the applications, you know, the code, and the data that are important. So, it's not that, you know, okay I've got near infinite compute capacity, it's the new things that I can do with it. That's a comment I heard in one of your sessions. You talked about one of the most fascinating things about Serverless was just the new creativity that it inspired people to do, and I loved it wasn't just unlocking developers to say, okay I have new ways to write things, but even people that weren't traditional coders, like lots of people in marketing that were like, "I can start with this and build something new." So, I guess the question I have for you is, you know we had this idea of Platform as a Service, or even when things like containers launched, it was, we were trying to get close to that atomic unit of the application, and often it was talked about, well, do I want it for portability? Is it for ease of use? So, you've been wrangling and looking at this (Tim laughing) from a lot of different ways. So, is that as a starting point, you know, what did you see the last few years with Lambda, and you know, help connect this up to where Shruthi just left off her bit of the story. >> Absolutely. You know, the great story, the great success of the cloud is this elimination of undifferentiated heavy lifting, you know, from getting rid of having to build out a data center, to all the complexity of managing hardware. And that first wave of cloud adoption was just phenomenally successful at that. But as you say, the real thing businesses wrestle with are applications, right? It's ultimately about the business solution, not the hardware and software on which it runs. So, the very first time I sat down with Andy Jassy to talk about what eventually become Lambda, you know, one of the things I said was, look, if we want to get 10x the number of people to come and, you know, and be in the cloud and be successful it has to be 10 times simpler than it is today. You know, if step one is hire an amazing team of distributed engineers to turn a server into a full tolerance, scalable, reliable business solution, now that's going to be fundamentally limiting. We have to find a way to put that in a box, give that capability, you know, to people, without having them go hire that and build that out in the first place. And so that kind of started this journey for, for compute, we're trying to solve the problem of making compute as easy to use as possible. You know, take some code, as you said, even if you're not a diehard programmer or backend engineer, maybe you're just a full-stack engineer who loves working on the front-end, but the backend isn't your focus, turn that into something that is as scalable, as robust, as secure as somebody who has spent their entire career working on that. And that was the promise of Serverless, you know, outside of the specifics of any one cloud. Now, the challenge of course when you talk to customers, you know, is that you always heard the same two considerations. One is, I love the idea of Lamdba, but it's AWS, maybe I have multiple departments or business partners, or need to kind of work on multiple clouds. The other challenge is fantastic for compute, what about data? You know, you've kind of left me with, you're giving me sort of half the solution, you've made my compute super easy to use, can you make my data equally easy to use? And so you know, obviously the part of the genesis of Vendia is going and tackling those pieces of this, giving all that promise and ease of use of Serverless, now with a model for replicated state and data, and one that can cross accounts, machines, departments, clouds, companies, as easily as it scales on a single cloud today. >> Okay, so you covered quite a bit of ground there Tim, if you could just unpack that a little bit, because you're talking about state, cutting across environments. What is it that Vendia is bringing, how does that tie into solutions like, you know, Lamdba as you mentioned, but other clouds or even potentially on premises solutions? So, what is, you know, the IP, the code, the solution that Vendia's offering? >> Happy to! So, let's start with the customer problem here. The thing that every enterprise, every company, frankly, wrestles with is in the modern world they're producing more data than ever, IMT, digital journeys, you know, mobile, edge devices. More data coming in than ever before, at the same time, more data getting consumed than ever before with deep analytics, supply chain optimization, AI, ML. So, even more consumers of ever more data. The challenge, of course, is that data isn't always inside a company's four walls. In fact, we've heard 80% or more of that data actually lives outside of a company's control. So, step one to doing something like AI, ML, isn't even just picking a product or selecting a technology, it's getting all of your data back together again, so that's the problem that we set out to solve with Vendia, and we realized that, you know, and kind of part of the genesis for the name here, you know, Vendia comes from Venn Diagram. So, part of that need to bring code and data together across companies, across tech stacks, means the ability to solve some of these long-standing challenges. And we looked at the two sort of big movements out there. Two of them, you know, we've obviously both been involved in, one of them was Serverless, which amazing ability to scale, but single account, single cloud, single company. The other one is blockchain and distributed ledgers, manages to run more across parties, across clouds, across tech stacks, but doesn't have a great mechanism for scalability, it's really a single box deployment model, and obviously there are a lot of limitations with that. So, our technology, and kind of our insight and breakthrough here was bringing those two things together by solving the problems in each of them with the best parts of the other. So, reimagine the blockchain as a cloud data implementation built entirely out of Serverless components that have all of the scale, the cost efficiencies, the high utilization, like all of the ease of deployment that something like Lambda has today, and at the same time, you know, bring state to Serverless. Give things like Lambda and the equivalent of other clouds a simple, easy, built-in model so that applications can have multicloud, multi-account state at all times, rather than turning that into a complicated DIY project. So, that was our insight here, you know and frankly where a lot of the interesting technology for us is in turning those centralized services, a centralized version of Serverless Compute or Serverless Database into a multi-account, multicloud experience. And so that's where we spent a lot of time and energy trying to build something that gives customers a great experience. >> Yeah, so I've got plenty of background in customers that, you know, have the "information silos", if you will, so we know, when the unstructured data, you know so much of it is not searchable, I can't leverage it. Shruthi, but maybe it might make sense, you know, what is, would you say some of the top things some of your early customers are saying? You know, I have this pain point, that's pointing me in your direction, what was leading them to you? And how does the solution help them solve that problem? >> Yeah, absolutely! One of our design partners, our lead design partners is this automotive company, they're a premier automotive company, they want, their end goal is to track car parts for warranty recall issues. So, they want to track every single part that goes into a particular car, so they're about 30 to 35,000 parts in each of these cars, and then all the way from manufacturing floor to when the car is sold, and when that particular part is replaced eventually, towards the end of the lifecycle of that part. So for this, they have put together a small test group of their partners, a couple of the parts manufacturers, they're second care partners, National Highway Safety Administration is part of this group, also a couple of dealers and service centers. Now, if you just look at this group of partners, you will see some of these parties have high technology, technology backgrounds, just like the auto manufacturers themselves or the part manufacturers. Low modality or low IT-competency partners such as the service centers, for them desktop PCs are literally the IT competency, and so does the service centers. Now, most of, majority of these are on multiple clouds. This particular auto customer is on AWS and manufactures on Azure, another one is on GCP. Now, they all have to share these large files between each other, making sure that there are some transparency and business rules applicable. For example, two partners who make the same parts or similar parts cannot see each other's data. Most of the participants cannot see the PII data that are not applicable, only the service center can see that. National Highway Safety Administration has read access, not write access. A lot of that needed to be done, and their alternatives before they started using Vendia was either use point-to-point APIs, which was very expensive, very cumbersome, it works for a finite small set of parties, it does not scale, as in when you add more participants into this particular network. And the second option for them was blockchain, which they did use, and used Hyperledger Fabric, they used Ethereum Private to see how this works, but the scalability, with Ethereum Private, it's about 14 to 15 transactions per second, with Hyperledger Fabric it taps out at 100, or 150 on a good day, transaction through, but it's not just useful. All of these are always-on systems, they're not Serverless, so just provisioning capacity, our customers said it took them two to three weeks per participant. So, it's just not a scalable solution. With Vendia, what we delivered to them was this virtual data lake, where the sources of this data are on multiple clouds, are on multiple accounts owned by multiple parties, but all of that data is shared on a virtual data lake with all of the permissions, with all of the logging, with all of the security, PII, and compliance. Now, this particular auto manufacturer and the National Highway Safety Administration can run their ML algorithms to gain intelligence off of it, and start to understand patterns, so when certain parts go bad, or what's the propensity of a certain manufacturing unit producing faulty parts, and so on, and so forth. This really shows you this concept of unstructured data being shared between parties that are not, you know, connected with each other, when there are data silos. But I'd love to follow this up with another example of, you know, the democratization, democratization is very important to Vendia. When Tim launched Lambda and founded the AWS Serverless movement as a whole, and at AWS, one thing, very important thing happened, it lowered the barrier to entry for a new wave of businesses that could just experiment, try out new things, if it failed, they scrap it, if it worked, they could scale it out. And that was possible because of the entry point, because of the paper used, and the architecture itself, and we are, our vision and mission for Vendia is that Vendia fuels the next generation of multi-party connected distributed applications. My second design partner is actually a non-profit that, in the animal welfare industry. Their mission is to maintain a no-kill for dogs and cats in the United States. And the number one reason for over populations of dogs and cats in the shelters is dogs lost, dogs and cats lost during natural disasters, like the hurricane season. And when that happens, and when, let's say your dogs get lost, and you want to find a dog, the ID or the chip-reading is not reliable, they want to search this through pictures. But we also know that if you look at a picture of a dog, four people can come up with four different breed names, and this particular non-profit has 2,500 plus partners across the U.S., and they're all low to no IT modalities, some of them have higher IT competency, and a huge turnover because of volunteer employees. So, what we did for them was came up with a mechanism where they could connect with all 2,500 of these participants very easily in a very cost-effective way and get all of the pictures of all of the dogs in all these repositories into one data lake so they can run some kind of a dog facial recognition algorithm on it and identify where my lost dog is in minutes as opposed to days it used to take before. So, you see a very large customer with very sophisticated IT competency use this, also a non-profit being able to use this. And they were both able to get to this outcome in days, not months or years, as, blockchain, but just under a few days, so we're very excited about that. >> Thank you so much for the examples. All right, Tim, before we get to the end, I wonder if you could take us under the hood a little bit here. My understanding, the solution that you talk about, it's universal apps, or what you call "unis" -- >> Tim: Unis? (laughs) >> I believe, so if I saw that right, give me a little bit of compare and contrast, if you will. Obviously there's been a lot of interest in what Kubernetes has been doing. We've been watching closely, you know there's connections between what Kubernetes is doing and Serverless with the Knative project. When I saw the first video talking about Vendia, you said, "We're serverless, and we're containerless underneath." So, help us understand, because at, you know, a super high level, some of the multicloud and making things very flexible sound very similar. So you know, how is Vendia different, and why do you feel your architecture helps solve this really challenging problem? >> Sure, sure, awesome! You know, look, one of the tenets that we had here was that things have to be as easy as possible for customers, and if you think about the way somebody walks up today to an existing database system, right? They say, "Look, I've got a schema, I know the shape of my data." And a few minutes later I can get a production database, now it's single user, single cloud, single consumer there, but it's a very fast, simple process that doesn't require having code, hiring a team, et cetera, and we wanted Vendia to work the same way. Somebody can walk up with a JSON schema, hand it to us, five minutes later they have a database, only now it's a multiparty database that's decentralized, so runs across multiple platforms, multiple clouds, you know, multiple technology stacks instead of being single user. So, that's kind of goal one, is like make that as easy to use as possible. The other key tenet though is we don't want to be the least common denominator of the cloud. One of the challenges with saying everyone's going to deploy their own servers, they're going to run all their own software, they're going to build, you know, they're all going to co-deploy a Kubernetes cluster, one of the challenges with that is that, as Shruthi was saying, first, anyone for whom that's a challenge, if you don't have a whole IT department wrapped around you that's a difficult proposition to get started on no matter how amazing that technology might be. The other challenge with it though is that it locks you out, sort of the universe of a lock-in process, right, is the lock-out process. It locks you out of some of the best and brightest things the public cloud providers have come up with, and we wanted to empower customers, you know, to pick the best degree. Maybe they want to go use IBM Watson, maybe they want to use a database on Google, and at the same time they want to ingest IoT on AWS, and they wanted all to work together, and want all of that to be seamless, not something where they have to recreate an experience over, and over, and over again on three different clouds. So, that was our goal here in producing this. What we designed as an architecture was decentralized data storage at the core of it. So, think about all the precepts you hear with blockchain, they're all there, they all just look different. So, we use a no SQL database to store data so that we can scale that easily. We still have a consensus algorithm, only now it's a high speed serverless and cloud function based mechanism. You know, instead of smart contracts, you write things in a cloud function like Lambda instead, so no more learning Solidity, now you can use any language you want. So, we changed how we think about that architecture, but many of those ideas about people, really excited about blockchain and its capabilities and the vision for the future are still alive and well, they've just been implemented in a way that's far more practical and effective for the enterprise. >> All right, so what environments can I use today for your solution, Shruthi talked about customers spanning across some of the cloud, so what's available kind of today, what's on the roadmap in the future? Will this include beyond, you know, maybe the top five or six hyper scalers? Can I do, does it just require Serverless underneath? So, will things that are in a customer's own data center eventually support that. >> Absolutely. So, what we're doing right now is having people sign up for our preview release, so in the next few weeks, we're going to start turning that on for early access to developers. That'll be, the early access program, will be multi-account, focused on AWS, and then end of summer, well be doing our GA release, which will be multicloud, so we'll actually be able to operate across multiple clouds, multiple cloud services, on different platforms. But even from day one, we'll have API support in there. So, if you got a service, could even be running on a mainframe, could be on-prem, if it's API based you can still interact with the data, and still get the benefits of the system. So, developers, please start signing up, you can go find more information on vendia.net, and we're really looking forward to getting some of that early feedback and hear more from the people that we're the most excited to have start building these projects. >> Excellent, what a great call to action to get the developers and users in there. Shruthi, if you could just give us the last bit, you know, the thing that's been fascinating, Tim, when I look at the Serverless movement, you know, I've talked to some amazing companies that were two or three people (Tim laughing) and out of their basement, and they created a business, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I got VC funding, and it's usually sub $10,000,000. So, I look at your team, I'd heard, Tim, you're the primary coder on the team. (Tim laughing) And when it comes to the seed funding it's, you know, compared to many startups, it's a small number. So, Shruthi, give us a little bit if you could the speeds and feeds of the company, your funding, and any places that you're hiring. Yeah, we are definitely hiring, lets me start from there! (Tim laughing) We're hiring for developers, and we are also hiring for solution architects, so please go to vendia.net, we have all the roles listed there, we would love to hear from you! And the second one, funding, yes. Tim is our main developer and solutions architect here, and look, the Serverless movement really helped quite a few companies, including us, to build this, bring this to market in record speeds, and we're very thankful that Tim and AWS started taking the stands, you know back in 2014, 2013, to bring this to market and democratize this. I think when we brought this new concept to our investors, they saw what this could be. It's not an easy concept to understand in the first wave, but when you understand the problem space, you see that the opportunity is pretty endless. And I'll say this for our investors, on behalf of our investors, that they saw a real founder market-fit between us. We're literally the two people who have launched and ran businesses for both Serverless and blockchain at scale, so that's what they thought was very attractive to them, and then look, it's Tim and I, and we're looking to hire 8 to 10 folks, and I think we have gotten to a space where we're making a meaningful difference to the world, and we would love for more people to join us, join this movement and democratize this big dispersed data problem and solve for this. And help us create more meanings to the data that our customers and companies worldwide are creating. We're very excited, and we're very thankful for all of our investors to be deeply committed to us and having conviction on us. >> Well, Shruthi and Tim, first of all, congratulations -- >> Thank you, thank you. >> Absolutely looking forward to, you know, watching the progress going forward. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you. >> Thanks, Stu! >> All right, and definitely tune in to our regular conversations on Cloud Native Insights. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and looking forward to hearing more about your Cloud Native Insights! (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Executive Summit. Brought to you by Accenture. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Part of AW re:invent, of course. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Leandro Nunes. He is the Vice President of Product Development at Mastercard. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having me. >> And Christine Leong, she is the Managing Director, Accenture Blockchain and Biometrics. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> So sustainability is a hot topic in the industry, in all industry today and especially here at AWS re:Invent. I want to talk to you about circular supply chain which was an idea that germinated in your brain a couple of years ago, but it really just sort of launched a year ago. Tell us more about why you started CSC. >> Sure. We started this actually because, a couple of things. We drink coffee every single day, and as we go into every coffee shop and we think about, well, you see packets saying this is my single origin coffee. I pay extra for this and it's sustainably grown and yet so see news saying that the rain forest is being burned down and animals are being killed. And so about two years ago, I looked at this and I thought, "Wow, how do I know "this is really sustainable, what I'm drinking?" The extra five bucks that I'm paying at my coffee shop, is it really single origin? Is it really going to the right people? Is it really killing the orangutans and the rainforest and then I see a statistic that says, well, for every cup of coffee that we drink, a square inch of rainforest gets burned down. And, I mean, I drink at least five cups of coffee a day. So that's not good, right? So then I thought, and working, actually, with Mastercard at the time, I'm doing and still do actually do a lot of work with Mastercard around identity and biometrics and I thought, "Well, how can we combine "some of these capabilities we have "with Blockchain identity to say, "to put our money where our mouths is?" To change the incentives at the base of the pyramid where farmers, producers, smallholders. If I can say to them that I really want to care that you don't burn the forest down, that you produce in a good way. And they're just trying to survive. They're not bad people, if they are just hand to mouth. That if we can say, right, we'll pay you more as consumers and we know it's definitely going to that right person, then maybe we can help to change some of, you know, and not have the rainforests and not have my guilty cup of coffee, right? >> So even if we don't drink quite as much coffee as you, Christine, we are as a group, consumers are more socially conscious than they ever have been. What are some of the statistics here? That people just care more about this stuff, in general, and they're willing to pay premium for it. >> So, for example, the green trade is estimated, this came out from Unilever, at $2 trillion a year, by next year actually. I mean, that's a staggering statistic and as you see more and more on social media, on literally every platform that you can see. Sustainability is a huge topic with the recent UN climate discussions. I mean, next week in Madrid, it's a big topic that we should all, as responsible responsible consumers, care about. >> So Leandro, what do you see as the benefits of CSC of small actors? >> Well, it's a great point, because when you seriously think about it you usually say a lot about consumers and the big brands. And now we are protecting the big brands, but just think about the sourcing side of the supply chain, right? The small communities, the ones that are growing the coffee, the ones that are the farmers over there or the fishermen. Now, these ones have been there for a while, they are just being kind of squeezed by the whole supply chain, squeezed by the whole business. Right? You think like let's remove a little bit of their margin, let's put it into something else. Now, when you have the circle of supply chain, because consumers in this new generation is so interested in knowing where the product comes from, if they are doing the right thing. Now there's a chance that you can pay them back. It's all about coming up with an incentive model, that's what we see with Mastercard, right? When you create a network like that, which the Blockchain solution is, it's a big network. So how we can gain traction, how we can gain adoption? One thing is, you need to establish incentives through all of the parties that you have in the network. So if you're just taking care of the brand and they're going to say, "Brands, mandate to your suppliers "that needs to do that." This is not going to work. What will work is, what is the incentive the farmers are going to have? What is the sourcing? So, wait a minute. So, don't you think the farmers want to do the right thing? Of course they do, but do they have incentives for that? If it's just a letter, or if it's just someone mandating, they're not going to do it. But if you come with the idea of, "Hey, I pay you back your coffee "or whatever your product you're doing, "you can have a premium. "It's going to be sustainable to your family as well. "Your business can be more profitable." So they will see, "Okay, I want to be part of it." >> So, it's creating incentives for people, for the producers themselves to grow things more sustainably. >> It's all about that, it's not only them. And then you go to the suppliers, you go to the logistics, transportation companies. You give them the visibility. They always complain about, "How can I have the visibility of my supply chain?" "Why?" "Can you create the visibility?" You give the transparency that you create the trust. And if you'll ask people in a supply chain business what the big problem is in supply chain, it's trust. They don't trust each other, but they have to trade things and they don't trust each other. You do business with people you don't trust every single day. It's not a good thing. So, if you bring this visibility, you facilitate this and they see there's an incentive to be also part of it. >> So Christine, what are the kinds of technologies that are powering the CSC and how does it create that trust or cultivate that trust? >> And Leandro is spot on in terms of trust. It's about trusting the people, but trusting the data and trusting the entities that put in some of the data. There are components of Blockchain, of course, that serve the traceability aspects of any of the product. Blockchain also helps with the decentralized identity capability that we've put in. We've made also biometrics for the individual, but this is optional, depending on how, in terms of using it very responsibly. Payments of course, digital payments and having the ability to actually direct payments through the Mastercard rails. And then, of course, with the power of AWS and then hosting it on the cloud and be able to have that anywhere. And the different aspects of including IoT, so we know that let's say for fisheries, this product actually really came from this place, you know, there's sensors, we know that it's kept at the right temperature, therefore insurance payoffs and things like that will be right and tracked all the way through and knowing that the product is really fresh and really kept intact throughout the journey. So a whole bunch of different technology. >> Totally agreed. Projects with Blockchain only tend not to succeed and the reason is because you need to nurture the ecosystem. So how you bring the IoT-- >> Yes. >> To the table, how you bring payments, how you bring AI. You get all these solutions together and then you create what this visibility, that's the trust we need. Companies who are trying to do one side, which is just the Blockchain, they are not going anywhere. The reason that I like their alliance with Accenture and AWS is because we know that we needed to do this end-to-end and this is going to be broader than just talking about Blockchain. >> Rebecca: Yes. >> And it's about the people, because you have to, ultimately it's the consumer and the base of the pyramid, producer. Both have identities, and if we are able to say, "This is the identity of the person," I can then help to influence their livelihoods. >> So it's putting a real face on the supply chain for the end consumer. I mean, at a time where consumers are demanding more transparency in the supply chain, demanding to know more about the source of the goods, of the products that they're buying, what has been the reception and what are you hearing back? >> I think we've had great receptions. We launched it at Davos, earlier this year. We've had a huge amount of interest and now slowly we're gaining sort of traction in terms of getting the pilots and putting them in place. And I think it's also something that people need to, initially it's a little bit of education, understanding, well, how does this actually all work? You know, is it just traceability? Is it just identity? Or is it actually all of those things? Understanding the use cases and embracing that it's not just one way of doing something and it's really a concept of embracing better business through better technology and innovation can actually be more sustainable and responsible businesses. So the traction has been great and we have a number of pilots in the pipeline. >> Yeah, in the past I used to believe that some things we should stop doing or stop eating because of the sustainable part of it, and I have learned that is not the case. You can do the right thing, you can make sure that you are doing the right thing and you can eat with no guilt. That's what everybody wants, right? This is the type of visibility you want to give from the consumer side, but not from the company side of it. The brands are, "Okay, I'm safe," because brands, they have a very good visibility from the distributor on, but they don't know what's going on behind that, and our products, this is so globalized nowadays, so fragmented. You know, it comes from so many different places. Brands, there is no way that they can control it if they don't have this veil. That's why we're trying to bring together. >> So when this fully does launch and the consumer is then seeing the face of the coffee grower in Brazil or in Kenya-- >> Yeah. >> And saying, "Okay," so then what happens then? How are they able to incentivize that farmer to do the right thing, as you say? >> There is a digital payment channel, powered by Mastercard, that you can then tip, so to speak, tip the farmer, donate money and actually say, "Well, there's multiple ways of doing things." Right? For example, if I'm the consumer scanning the product and we have a whole Lego city built upstairs that can showcase this, and say, "Right, this is how it works," and scan the product and where I can say, "Right, I want to be able "to donate an extra dollar for this farmer "because I really like the fact that you are sustainable. "And not burning the rainforest down "and protecting the orangutans or elephants or the birds. "So great, I'm going to give you an extra dollar." So this is how it's going to work on the app. >> And there are other consequences as well. There are so many organic products nowadays, but they're not really organic. So if you can prove they're organic, the farmers would feel more motivated to really grow that as an organic product because there is a premium. So it's not only the tip that you give to them, but also the fact that you can create a premium price situation that will motivate others to do the same. So brands would give the differentiator, farmers would feel like, "Okay, if I do this way, "it would be more profitable," and consumers would benefit from a real organic or a real product with the sustainability behind it. >> Great, consumers can trust more. >> Exactly. >> It's not just fake news. What are some of the, I mean, this is such a cool concept. What are some of the biggest challenges in really launching it and making it a reality? What is keeping you up at night? >> I think some of it is actually just education and getting it out there. And understanding that this is a lot of stakeholders. So, from consumer brands all the way down to the smallholder providers. It's a lot of people to link up and a lot of organizations to talk to. So some of it is just getting through that process and getting people to understand. Also, actually, hopefully we'll get consumers to adopt. >> Yeah. >> And understand that this is something that they will want to do. >> Yeah, this whole integration, like Christine said, it is important, right? So you understand all the key stakeholders. It don't need to be all of them at the beginning, but at least the key stakeholders in a supply chain. And how you can create the business incentive model for them to be part of that. So it's a mapping exercise. We're getting there and that's where you gain adoption, and if you get the consumer side doing this as well, so it creates a network effect. And that's why we're trying to do it at Mastercard. It's in our DNA, like, build the networks, right. Everybody knows that. So we wanted to bring this to the ecosystem, to contribute that, okay, so how can I create a network effect that they can exponentially scale for their whole marketshare, for their whole marketplace. >> I want to ask you a personal question. You've been in technology for a really long time and now-- >> Not that old though. >> (laughing) No, no. You're just a babe. But in terms of of the kinds of projects you've worked on and the kinds of ways you're thinking about technology and then this particular project at a time where climate change is a monumental challenge and the fate of our planet really hangs in the balance with the decisions that we're making, policy makers and consumers are making today. I mean, what is it like to work on this kind of product? >> That's a great question. Yeah, well, for all of these years, I go to work with this business mentality, you know, you're going to make more money for someone else. You're going to work for big company. And see some friends and family doing things for the society, I say, "Oh my gosh, I should do something like that." And now I feel like I can do both. We're talking now as a business. It's a great solution, but it mixes so well for the, you know, for the whole society. It makes me feel really, everyday going to work and say, "Oh, this is what I want to do. "This is so cool." I mean, I'm helping, I'm benefiting myself 'cause I go to the supermarket, I'm going to be the one who's going to tip the farmer. I'm going to be the one who's going to check where my shrimp comes from, right? So I'm doing this for my family. My kids are, I hope they can live in a better planet that know exactly where the products come from. >> And the family that you have that's not even been born yet, so that's the other thing, too, helping future generations. >> That's amazing. We're doing things that, we never know. >> Yes, you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize, Leandro. (all laughing) Thank you so much, Leandro and Christine, for coming on theCUBE. A really fun and fascinating conversation. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage at the Accenture Executive Summit coming up after lunch. (upbeat music)

by from Las Vegas it's the cube coverage AWS executive summary brought to you by Accenture hello everyone and welcome back to the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas part of aw reinvent of course I'm your host Rebecca Knight we have two guests for this segment we have Leandro Nunez he is the vice president product development at MasterCard thank you so much for coming on the show thanks for having me and Christine Leung she is the managing director Accenture blockchain and biometrics thank you so much you so sustainability is a hot topic in the industry too in all industry today and especially here at AWS reinvent I want to talk to you about circular supply chain which was an idea that germinated in your brain a couple of years ago but it's really just sort of launched a year ago tell us more about why you started Cs sure we started this actually because a couple of things I we drink coffee every single day and we go into every coffee shop and we think about well you know you see packets saying this is my single origin coffee this is I pay extra for this and it's sustainably grown and yet you see news saying that you know the rain forest is being burnt down and animals are being killed and so about two years ago I looked at this and I thought wow you know how do I know this is really sustainable what I'm drinking the extra five books that I'm hanging at my coffee shop is it really is it really sink origin is it really going to the right people is it really killing the orangutans and the rainforest and then I see a statistic success well for every coffee a cup of coffee that we drink a square inch of rain forests get burnt down and I mean I drink at least five cups of coffee a day and working actually with MasterCard at the time I'm doing a and still do actually doing a lot of work with MasterCard in around identity and biometrics and I thought well you know how can we combine some of these capabilities we have with blockchain identity to say to put our money where our mouths is to change incentives as the base of the pyramid where you know performers produces smallholders if I can say to them that I really won't care but you don't burn a fat forest out that you produce in a good way and they just tried to survive they're not bad people if they're just hand-to-mouth but if they we can say right will hate you more as consumers and we know it's definitely going to that right person then maybe we can help to change some of you know and not have the rain force and don't have my guilty cup of coffee right so even if we don't drink quite as much coffee as you we are as a as a group consumers are more socially conscious than they ever have been what are some of the statistics here that people just care more about this stuff in general and they're willing to pay a premium for it so for example the green trade is estimated and this came out for Unilever at two trillion dollars a year by the by next year actually a growing statistic and let's just see I mean more and more on social media or literally you know every platform that you can see sustainability is a huge topic with you know sort of the the recent sort of UN climate discussions I mean it's this week with next week we're in Madrid this a big topic that we should all as a responsible consumers care about so Leander what do you see as the benefits of CSE to to small actors well it's a great point because when you see that just think about it do you usually say a lot about consumers in the big brands and now we're protecting the big brands but just think about the sourcing side of the supply chain right the small communities the ones that are growing the coffee the ones that are the farm the farmers over there or the fishermen now these ones are there's meaning for a while they're just been because it squeezed by the whole supply chain it's but the whole business right you think like let's remove a little bit of their margin let's put in something else now when they have the circular supply chain because consumers and this new generation is so interested in knowing where the product comes from you know if you're then doing the right thing now it has a change that you can pay them back it's all about come up with incentive model that's why we should in a MasterCard right when you create a network like that which the blockchain solution is a big network so how we can gain traction how we can gain adoption one thing is you need to establish incentives through all of the parties that you have at a network so if you're just taking care of the brand and they're gonna say bran mandate to your suppliers that needs to do that this is not going to work what it works is what is the incentive the farmers gonna have what's the sourcing so we don't mean it so don't don't you think the farmers wants to do the right thing of course they do but do they have incentives for that if it's just a letter if you're just someone mandating they're not gonna do it but if you come with the idea of hey I pay you back your your coffee or whatever your products you're doing we can help you can have a premium so we can it's going to be sustainable to your family as well your business can be more profitable so they you see okay I want to be part of it so it's creating incentives for people to for the for the for the producers themselves to grow things more sustainably it's all about that it's not only them and then you go to the suppliers you go to the logistic transportation companies how do you creative you give them the visibility they always complain about how can I have the visibility of my supply chain why can you create the visibility you give the transparency that you create the trust in and if you ask people in a supply chain business what the big problem is supply chain is trust they don't trust each other but they have to trade things and they don't trust each other you do business with people you don't trust every single day it's not a good thing so if we bring this visibility you facilitate this and they see there's an incentive to be also part of it so Christine what are the kind of technologies that are bad that are that are powering the CSC and and how are we how does it create that trust i cultivate that trust um and Leandra is for Honor's and in terms of trust it's about trusting the people but trusting the data and trusting the entities that I put in some of this data there are components of blockchain of course the surface the traceability aspects of the any of the product blockchain also helps with the decentralized identity capability that we've put in we've made also biometrics for the for the individual but this is optional depending on how you know in terms of using it very responsibly payments of course digital payments and you know having the ability to actually direct payments through the MasterCard rails and then of course with you know the power of AWS and then hosting on the cloud and be able to have that anywhere and the different aspects of including a iot so we know that let's say for fisheries this product is actually really came from displays you know the sensors we know that it's kept the right temperature we did that therefore you know insurance payers and things like that would be right and tracked all the way through and knowing that the product is really fresh and really kept you know intact throughout the journey so a whole bunch of different technology totally great projects with blockchain only would tend not to succeed and the reason is because you need to come up with you need to nurture the ecosystem so how you bring the IOT yes to the table how you doing you know payments how you bring AI so you get at all these solutions together and then you create what this visibility that's trust we need so companies are trying to do one side you know which is just a blockchain they're not going anywhere the reason that I like it our alliance with Accenture and AWS is because we know that we needed to do this end-to-end and this can be broader than just talk about watching and it's about the people because you have the ultimate is the consumer and the the base of pyramid producer both have identities and if we are able to say this is the identity of the person I can then help to influence their their livelihoods so it's putting a real face on the supply chain for the end consumer I mean at a time where consumers are demanding more transparency in the supply chain demanding to know more about the source of the goods that they put the products that they're buying what has been the reception and and what are you hearing back I think we've had great receptions we launched at Davos earlier this year we've had a huge amount of interest and now slowly we're gaining sort of traction in terms of getting the pilots I'm putting them in place and I think it's also something that we'll need to UM in initially it's a little bit of Education understanding well how does this actually all work you know is it just traceability is it just identity well it's actually all those things are understanding the use cases and embracing that there are it's not just one way of doing something and this is really a concept that embracing better business through better technology and innovation can actually be more sustainable and responsible businesses so the traction has been great and we've had a we have a number of pilots in the pipeline yeah well we will in the past I used to believe that some things we should stop doing or stop eating because of the sustainable part of it and I have learned that it's not the case you can do the right thing you can make sure that they're doing the right thing and you can eat with no guilt that's why everybody wants right so so this is this is the the type of you know visibility when to give from the consumer side but not from the from the company side of I like the brands are ok I'm safe because brands they have a very good visibility from the distributor on but they don't know what's going on behind that you know products the this is so globalized now they so fragmented you know it comes from so many different places Princeton that there's no way that they can control it if they don't have this you know there's this view so that's why we're trying to bring together so when so when this when this fully does launch and a consumer is then seeing the face of the coffee grower in Brazil or in Kenya and saying ok so then what what happens then how are they able to to to incentivize that farmer to do the right thing as you say there's a digital payment channel of powered by monster cop that you can then so sue speaks if the farmer donate money and actually say well there's multiple ways of doing things right so for example if I'm the consumer scanning the the product and there is we have a whole lego city built upstairs that can show cases and say right this is how it works and you know scan the product and what I can save right I want to be able to donate an extra dollar for this farmer because I really like the fact that you are sustainable and not burning the rainforests and protecting the orangutan or elephant so the the the birds so great I'm going to give you an extra dollar so this is how it's going to work on the app and there are other consequences well there's so many organic products nowadays they're not really organic so you can prove with the organic so the farmers would feel more motivated to really grow that as a organic product because there is a premium so it's not only the the tea that you give it to them but also the fact that you can create a premium price situation that will motivate others to do the same so brands would grieve the differentiator farmers would feel like okay if I do this way how to get will be more profitable and consumers will benefit from that from a real organic or a real product what the sustainability you know behind it consumers can trust more so how do what are some of the I mean this is such a cool concept what is what are some of the biggest challenges in in really launching and making it a reality what is keeping you up at night I think some of it is actually just education and getting it out there and understanding that this is it's a lot of stakeholders so from consumer brands all the way down to the the smallholder providers so it's a lot of people to link up and a lot of organizations to talk to so some of it is just getting through that process and getting people to understand and also actually hopefully we'll get consumers understand that this is something that they will want to do yeah and that this whole integration I Christine said it's in it's important right so you understand all the key stakeholders don't need to beat all of them at the beginning but at least the key stakeholders in the supply chain and how you can create this business incentive in a dissented model for them to be part of that so it's a mapping exercise which is we are getting there and in intestine we gain adoption and and if you gather the consumer side doing this as well so it creates a network effect and that's why we try to do in a MasterCard assist in our DNA like building networks right everybody knows that so we wanted to bring this to you know >> to the ecosystem to contribute okay so how can I create a network effect that they can it exponentially scale you know for for the whole market share for the whole you know marketplace so I want to ask you a personal question you've been in technology for a really long time time and now but in terms of the kinds of projects you've worked on and the kinds of ways you're thinking about technology and then this particular project at a time where climate change is a monumental challenge the fate of our planet really hangs in the balance with what with the decisions that we're making policymakers and consumers are making today wait how what is it like to work on this kind of products a great question I yeah I was for this all these years so go to work with this business mentality you know we're gonna make more money for someone else we're gonna work for a big company and see some friends and family doing things for the society and say oh my gosh there's something like that and now I feel like I can do both right we're talking you know it's a business it's it's a great solution but makes it so well for the you know for the whole society you know it makes me feel really every day going to work and say oh this is what I want to do you know this is so cool I mean I'm helping I'm benefiting myself as I go to the supermarket I'm gonna be the one who's gonna tip the farmer I'm gonna be the one who's gonna check where my shrimp comes from right so so I'm doing this for my family my kids are like I hope they can live in a better planet that know exactly where the products come from and the family that you have it's not even been born yet so that's the other generation that's amazing really doing things that we never know thank you so much Lee under and Christine for coming on the cube a really fun and fascinating conversation thank you thank you I'm Rebecca night stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage at the Accenture executive summit coming up after lunch [Music]

(energetic music) >> Hi, and welcome to another Cube conversation, where we go in-depth with the thought leaders in the industry that are making significant changes to how we conduct digital business and the likelihood of success with digital business transformations. I'm Peter Burris. Every organization today has some experience with the power of analytics. But, they're also warning that the value of their analytics systems are, in part, constrained and determined by their access to core information. Some of the most important information that any business can start to utilize within their new advanced analytic systems, quite frankly, is that operational business information, that the business has been using to run the business on for years. Now, we've looked at that as silos and maybe it is. Although, partly, that's in response to the need to have good policy, good governance, and good certainty and practicably in how the system behaves and how secure it's going to be. So, the question is, how do we marry the new world of advanced analytics with the older, but, nonetheless, extremely valuable world of operational processing to create new types of value within digital business today? It's a great topic and we've got a great conversation. Tendu Yogurtcu is the CTO of Syncsort. Tendu, welcome back to The Cube! >> Hi Peter. It's great to be back here in The Cube. >> Excellent! So, look, let's start with the, let's start with a quick update on Syncsort. How are you doing, what's going on? >> Oh, it's been really exciting time at Syncsort. We have seen a tremendous growth in the last three years. We quadrupled our revenue, and also number of employees, through both organic innovation and growth, as well as through acquisitions. So, we now have 7,000 plus customers in over 100 countries, and, we still have the eight 40 Fortune 100, serving large enterprises. It's been a really great journey. >> Well, so, let's get into the specific distinction that you guys have. At Wikibon theCube, we've observed, we predicted that 1919, 2019 rather, 2019 was going to be the year that the enterprise assert itself in the cloud. We had seen a lot of developers drive cloud forward. We've seen a lot of analytics drive cloud forward. But, now as enterprises are entering into cloud in a big way, they're generating, or bringing with them, new types of challenges and issues that have to be addressed. So, when you think about where we are in the journey to more advanced analytics, better operational certainty, greater use of information, what do you think the chief challenges that customers face today are? >> Of course, as you mentioned, that everybody, every organization is trying to take advantage of the data. Data is the core. And, take advantage of the digital transformation to enable them for taking, getting more value out of their data. And, in doing so, they are moving into cloud, into hybrid cloud architectures. We have seen early implementations, starting with the data lake. Everybody started creating the centralized data hub, enabling advanced analytics and creating a data marketplace for their internal, or external clients. And, the early data lakes were for utilizing Hadoop on premise architectures. Now, we are also seeing data lakes, sometimes, expanding over hybrid or cloud architectures. The challenges that these organizations also started realizing is around, once I create this data marketplace, the access to the data, critical customer data, critical product data, >> Order data. >> Order data, is a bigger challenge than I thought that it would be in the pilot project. Because, these critical data sets, and core data sets, often in financial services, banking and insurance, and health care, are in environments, data platforms that these companies have invested over multiple decades. And, I'm not referring to that as legacy because definition of legacy changes. These environment's platforms have been holding this current critical data assets for decades successfully. So-- >> We call them high-value traditional applications. >> High-valude traditional sounds great. >> Because, they're traditional. We know what they do, and there's a certain operational certainty, and we've built up the organization around them to take care of those assets. >> But, they still are very very high-value. >> Exactly. And, making those applications and data available for next generation, next wave platforms, is becoming a challenge, for couple of different reasons. One, accessing this data. And, accessing this data, making sure the policies and the security, and the privacy around these data stores are preserved when the data is available for advanced analytics. Whether it's in the cloud or on premise deployments. >> So, before we go to the second one, I want to make sure I'm understanding that, because it seems very very important. >> Yes. >> That, what you're saying is, if I may, the data is not just the ones and the zeroes in the file. The data really start, needs to start being thought of as the policies, the governance, the security, and all the other attributes and elements, the metadata, if you will, has to be preserved as the data's getting used. >> Absolutely. And, there are challenges around that, because now you have to have skill sets to understand the data in those different types of stores. Relational data warehouses. Mainframe, IBMI, SQL, Oracle. Many different data owners, and different teams in the organization. And, then, you have to make sense of it and preserve the policies around each of these data assets, while bringing it to the new analytics environments. And, make sure that everybody's aligned with the access to privacy, and the policies, and the governance around that data. And also, mapping to metadata, to the target systems, right? That's a big challenge, because somebody who understands these data sets in a mainframe environment is not necessarily understanding the cloud data stores or the new data formats. So, how do you, kind of, bridge that gap, and map into the target-- >> And, vice-versa, right? >> Yes. >> So. >> Likewise, yes. >> So, this is where Syncsort starts getting really interesting. Because, as you noted, a lot of the folks in the mainframe world may not have the familiarity of how the cloud works, and a lot of the folks, at least from a data standpoint. >> Yes. >> And, a lot of the folks in the cloud that have been doing things with object stores and whatnot, may not, and Hadoop, may not have the knowledge of how the mainframe works. And, so, those two sides are seeing silos, but, the reality is, both sides have set up policies and governance models, and security regimes, and everything else, because it works for the workloads that are in place on each side. So, Syncsort's an interesting company, because, you guys have experience of crossing that divide. >> Absolutely. And, we see both the next phase, and the existing data platforms, as a moving, evolving target. Because, these challenges have existed 20 years ago, 10 years ago. It's just the platforms were different. The volume, the variety, complexity was different. However, Hadoop, five, ten years ago, was the next wave. Now, it's the cloud. Blockchain will be the next platform that we have to, still, kind of, adopt and make sure that we are advancing our data and creating value out of data. So, that's, accessing and preserving those policies is one challenge. And, then, the second challenge is that as you are making these data sets available for analytics, or machine learning, data science applications, deduplicating, standardizing, cleansing, making sure that you can deliver trusted data becomes a big challenge. Because, if you train the models with the bad data, if you create the models with the bad data, you have bad model, and then bad data inside. So, machine learning and artificial intelligence depends on the data, and the quality of the data. So, it's not just bringing all enterprise data for analytics. It's also making sure that the data is delivered in a trusted way. That's the big challenge. >> Yeah. Let me build on that, if I may, Tendu. Because, a lot of these tools involve black box belief in what the tool's performing. >> Correct. >> So, you really don't have a lot of visibility in the inner workings of how the algorithm is doing things. It's, you know, that's the way it is. So, in many respects, your only real visibility into the quality of the outcome of these tools is visibility into the quality of the data that's going into the building of these models. >> Correct. >> Have I got that right? >> Correct. And, in machine learning, the effect of bad data is, really, it multiplies. Because of the training of the model, as well as insights. And, with Blockchain, in the future, it will also become very critical because, once you load the data into Blockchain platform, it's immutable. So, data quality comes at a higher price, in some sense. That's another big challenge. >> Which is to say, that if you load bad data into a Blockchain, it's bad forever. >> Yes. That's very true. So, that's, obviously, another area that Syncsort, as we are accessing all of the enterprise data, delivering high-quality data, discovering and understanding the data, and delivering the duplicated standardized enriched data to the machine learning and AI pipeline, and analytics pipeline, is an area that we are focused with our products. And, a third challenge is that, as you are doing it, the speed starts mattering. Because, okay, I created the data lake or the data hub. The next big use case we started seeing is that, "Oh yeah, but I have 20 terabyte data, "only 10% is changing on a nightly basis. "So, how do I keep my data lake in sync? "Not only that, I want to keep my data lake in sync, "I also would like to feed that change data "and keep my downstream applications in sync. "I want to feed the change data to the microservices "in the cloud." That speed of delivery started really becoming a very critical requirement for the business. >> Speed, and the targeting of the delivery. >> Speed of the targeting, exactly. Because, I think the bottom line is, you really want to create an architecture that you can be agnostic. And, also be able to deliver at the speed the business is going to require at different times. Sometimes, it's near real-time, and at batch, sometimes it's real-time, and you have to feed the changes as quickly as possible to the consumer applications and the microservices in the cloud. >> Well, we've got a lot of CIO's who are starting to ask us questions about, especially, since they start thinking about Kubernetes, and Istio, and other types of platforms that are intended to facilitate the orchestration, and ultimately, the management of how these container-based applications work. And, we're starting to talk more about the idea of data assurance. Make sure the data's good. Make sure it's been high-quality. Make sure it's being taken care of. But, also make sure that it's targeted where it needs to be. Because, you don't want a situation where you spin up a new cluster, which you could do very quickly with Kubernetes. But, you haven't made the data available to that Kubernetes-based application, so that it can, actually, run. And, a lot of CIO's, and a lot of application development leaders, and a lot of business people, are now starting to think about that. "How do I make sure the data is where it needs to be, "so that the applications run when they need to run?" >> That's a great point. And, going back to your, kind of, comment around cloud, and taking advantage of cloud architectures. One of the things we have observed is organizations, for sure, looking at cloud, in terms of scalability, elasticity, and reducing costs. They did lift and shift of applications. And, not all applications can be taking advantage of cloud elasticity, then you do that. Most of these applications are created for the existing on-premise fixed architectures. So, they are not designed to take advantage of that. And, we are seeing a shift now. And, the shift is around, instead of, trying to, kind of, lift and shift existing applications. One, for new applications, let me try and adopt the technology assets, like you mentioned Kubernetes, that I can stay vendor-agnostic, for cloud vendors. But, more importantly, let me try to have some best practices in the organization. The new applications can be created to take advantage of the elasticity. Even though, they may not be running in the cloud yet. So, some organizations refer to this as cloud native, cloud first, some different terms. And, make the data. Because, the core asset here, is always the data. Make the data available, instead of going after the applications. Make the data from these existing on-premise and different platforms available for cloud. We are definitely seeing that the shift. >> Yeah, and make sure that it, and assure, that that data is high-quality, carries the policies, carries the governance, doesn't break in security models, all those other things. >> That is a big difference between how, actually, organizations ran into their Hadoop data lake implementations, versus the cloud architectures now. Because, when initial Hadoop data lake implementations happened, it was dump all the data. And, then, "Oh, I have to deal with the data quality now." >> It was also, "Oh, those mainframe people just would, "they're so difficult to work with." Meanwhile, you're still closing the books on a monthly basis, on a quarterly basis. You're not losing orders. Your customers aren't calling you on the phone angry. And, that, at the end of the day, is what a business has to do. You have to be able to extend what you can currently do, with a digital business approach. And, if you can replace certain elements of it, okay. But, you can't end up with less functionality as you move forward in the cloud. >> Absolutely. And, it's not just mainframe. It's IBMI, it's the Oracle, it's the teledata, it's the TDZa. It's growing rapidly, in terms of the complex stuff, that data infrastructure. And, for cloud, we are seeing now, a lot of pilots are happening with the cloud data warehouses. And, trying to see if the cloud data warehouses can accommodate some of these hybrid deployments. And, also, we are seeing, there's more focus, not after the fact, but, more focus on data quality from day one. "How am I going to ensure that "I'm delivering trusted data, and populating "the cloud data stores, or delivering trusted data "to microservices in the cloud?" There's greater focus for both governance and quality. >> So, high-quality data movement, that leads to high-quality data delivery, in ways that the business can be certain that whatever derivative work is done remains high-quality. >> Absolutely. >> Tendu Yogurtcu, thank you very much for being, once again, on The Cube. It's always great to have you here. >> Thank you Peter. It's wonderful to be here! >> Tandu Yogurtcu's the CTO of Syncsort, and once again, I want to thank you very much, for participating in this cloud, or this Cube conversation. Cloud on the mind, this Cube conversation. Until next time. (upbeat electronic music)

(techno music) >> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to MIT CDOIQ. The CDO Information Quality Conference. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Paul Gillin. This is our day two of our two day coverage. Jean Ross is here. She's the principle research scientist at MIT CISR, Jean good to see you again. >> Nice to be here! >> Welcome back. Okay, what do all these acronyms stand for, I forget. MIT CISR. >> CISR which we pronounce scissor, is the Center for Information Systems Research. It's a research center that's been at MIT since 1974, studying how big companies use technology effectively. >> So and, what's your role as a research scientist? >> As a research scientist, I work with both researchers and with company leaders to understand what's going on out there, and try to present some simple succinct ideas about how companies can generate greater value from information technology. >> Well, I guess not much has changed in information technology since 1974. (laughing) So let's fast forward to the big, hot trend, digital transformation, digital business. What's the difference between a business and a digital business? >> Right now, you're hoping there's no difference for you and your business. >> (chuckling) Yeah, for sure. >> The main thing about a digital business is it's being inspired by technology. So in the past, we would establish a strategy, and then we would check out technology and say, okay, how can technology make us more effective with that strategy? Today, and this has been driven a lot by start-ups, we have to stop and say, well wait a minute, what is technology making possible? Because if we're not thinking about it, there sure are a lot of students at MIT who are, and we're going to miss the boat. We're going to get Ubered if you will, somebody's going to think of a value proposition that we should be offering and aren't, and we'll be left in the dust. So, our digital businesses are those that are recognizing the opportunities that digital technologies make possible. >> Now, and what about data? In terms of the role of digital business, it seems like that's an underpinning of a digital business. Is it not? >> Yeah, the single biggest capability that digital technologies provide, is ubiquitous data that's readily accessible anytime. So when we think about being inspired by technology, we could reframe that as inspired by the availability of ubiquitous data that's readily accessible. >> Your premise about the difference between digitization and digital business is interesting. It's more than just a sematic debate. Do companies now, when companies talk about digital transformation these days, in fact, are most of them of thinking of digitization rather than really transformative business change? >> Yeah, this is so interesting to me. In 2006, we wrote a book that said, you need to become more agile, and you need to rely on information technology to get you there. And these are basic things like SAP and salesforce.com and things like that. Just making sure that your core processes are disciplined and reliable and predictable. We said this in 2006. What we didn't know is that we were explaining digitization, which is very effective use of technology in your underlying process. Today, when somebody says to me, we're going digital, I'm thinking about the new value propositions, the implications of the data, right? And they're often actually saying they're finally doing what we thought they should do in 2006. The problem is, in 2006, we said get going on this, it's a long journey. This could take you six, 10 years to accomplish. And then we gave examples of companies that took six to 10 years. LEGO, and USAA and really great companies. And now, companies are going, "Ah, you know, we really ought to do that". They don't have six to 10 years. They get this done now, or they're in trouble, and it's still a really big deal. >> So how realistic is it? I mean, you've got big established companies that have got all these information silos, as we've been hearing for the last two days, just pulling their information together, knowing what they've got is a huge challenge for them. Meanwhile, you're competing with born on the web, digitally native start-ups that don't have any of that legacy, is it really feasible for these companies to reinvent themselves in the way you're talking about? Or should they just be buying the companies that have already done it? >> Well good luck with buying, because what happens is that when a company starts up, they can do anything, but they can't do it to scale. So most of these start-ups are going to have to sell themselves because they don't know anything about scale. And the problem is, the companies that want to buy them up know about the scale of big global companies but they don't know how to do this seamlessly because they didn't do the basic digitization. They relied on basically, a lot of heroes in their company to pull of the scale. So now they have to rely more on technology than they did in the past, but they still have a leg up if you will, on the start-up that doesn't want to worry about the discipline of scaling up a good idea. They'd rather just go off and have another good idea, right? They're perpetual entrepreneurs if you will. So if we look at the start-ups, they're not really your concern. Your concern is the very well run company, that's been around, knows how to be inspired by technology and now says, "Oh I see what you're capable of doing, "or should be capable of doing. "I think I'll move into your space". So this, the Amazon's, and the USAA's and the LEGO's who say "We're good at what we do, "and we could be doing more". We're watching Schneider Electric, Phillips's, Ferovial. These are big ole companies who get digital, and they are going to start moving into a lot of people's territory. >> So let's take the example of those incumbents that you've used as examples of companies that are leaning into digital, and presumably doing a good job of it, they've got a lot of legacy debt, as you know people call it technical debt. The question I have is how they're using machine intelligence. So if you think about Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, they own horizontal technologies around machine intelligence. The incumbents that you mentioned, do not. Now do they close the gap? They're not going to build their own A.I. They're going to buy it, and then apply it. It's how they apply it that's going to be the difference. So do you agree with that premise, and where are they getting it, do they have the skill sets to do it, how are they closing that gap? >> They're definitely partnering. When you say they're not going to build any of it, that's actually not quite true. They're going to build a lot around the edges. They'll rely on partners like Microsoft and Google to provide some of the core, >> Yes, right. >> But they are bringing in their own experts to take it to the, basically to the customer level. How do I take, let me just take Schneider Electric for an example. They have gone from being an electrical equipment manufacturer, to a purveyor of energy management solutions. It's quite a different value proposition. To do that, they need a lot of intelligence. Some of it is data analytics of old, and some of it is just better representation on dashboards and things like that. But there is a layer of intelligence that is new, and it is absolutely essential to them by relying on partners and their own expertise in what they do for customers, and then co-creating a fair amount with customers, they can do things that other companies cannot. >> And they're developing a software presumably, a SAS revenue stream as part of that, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> How about the innovators dilemma though, the problem that these companies often have grown up, they're very big, they're very profitable, they see disruption coming, but they are unable to make the change, their shareholders won't let them make the change, they know what they have to do, but they're simply not able to do it, and then they become paralyzed. Is there a -- I mean, looking at some of the companies you just mentioned, how did they get over that mindset? >> This is real leadership from CEO's, who basically explain to their boards and to their investors, this is our future, we are... we're either going this direction or we're going down. And they sell it. It's brilliant salesmanship, and it's why when we go out to study great companies, we don't have that many to choose from. I mean, they are hard to find, right? So you are at such a competitive advantage right now. If you understand, if your own internal processes are cleaned up and you know how to rely on the E.R.P's and the C.R.M's, to get that done, and on the other hand, you're using the intelligence to provide value propositions, that new technologies and data make possible, that is an incredibly powerful combination, but you have to invest. You have to convince your boards and your investors that it's a good idea, you have to change your talent internally, and the biggest surprise is, you have to convince your customers that they want something from you that they never wanted before. So you got a lot of work to do to pull this off. >> Right now, in today's economy, the economy is sort of lifting all boats. But as we saw when the .com implosion happened in 2001, often these breakdown gives birth to great, new companies. Do you see that the next recession, which is inevitably coming, will be sort of the turning point for some of these companies that can't change? >> It's a really good question. I do expect that there are going to be companies that don't make it. And I think that they will fail at different rates based on their, not just the economy, but their industry, and what competitors do, and things like that. But I do think we're going to see some companies fail. We're going to see many other companies understand that they are too complex. They are simply too complex. They cannot do things end to end and seamlessly and present a great customer experience, because they're doing everything. So we're going to see some pretty dramatic changes, we're going to see failure, it's a fair assumption that when we see the economy crash, it's also going to contribute, but that's, it's not the whole story. >> But when the .com blew up, you had the internet guys that actually had a business model to make money, and the guys that didn't, the guys that didn't went away, and then you also had the incumbents that embrace the internet, so when we came out of that .com downturn, you had the survivors, who was Google and eBay, and obviously Amazon, and then you had incumbent companies who had online retailing, and e-tailing and e-commerce etc, who thrived. I would suspect you're going to see something similar, but I wonder what you guys think. The street today is rewarding growth. And we got another near record high today after the rate cut yesterday. And so, but companies that aren't making money are getting rewarded, 'cause they're growing. Well when the recession comes, those guys are going to get crushed. >> Right. >> Yeah. >> And you're going to have these other companies emerge, and you'll see the winners, are going to be those ones who have truly digitized, not just talking the talk, or transformed really, to use your definition. That's what I would expect. I don't know, what do you think about that? >> I totally agree. And, I mean, we look at industries like retail, and they have been fundamentally transformed. There's still lots of opportunities for innovation, and we're going to see some winners that have kind of struggled early but not given up, and they're kind of finding their footing. But we're losing some. We're losing a lot, right? I think the surprise is that we thought digital was going to replace what we did. We'd stop going to stores, we'd stop reading books, we wouldn't have newspapers anymore. And it hasn't done that. Its only added, it hasn't taken anything away. >> It could-- >> I don't think the newspaper industry has been unscathed by digital. >> No, nor has retail. >> Nor has retail, right. >> No, no no, not unscathed, but here's the big challenge. Is if I could substitute, If I could move from newspaper to online, I'm fine. You don't get to do that. You add online to what you've got, right? And I think this right now is the big challenge. Is that nothing's gone away, at least yet. So we have to sustain the business we are, so that it can feed the business we want to be. And we have to make that transition into new capabilities. I would argue that established companies need to become very binary, that there are people that do nothing but sustain and make better and better and better, who they are. While others, are creating the new reality. You see this in auto companies by the way. They're creating not just the autonomous automobiles, but the mobility services, the whole new value propositions, that will become a bigger and bigger part of their revenue stream, but right now are tiny. >> So, here's the scary thing to me. And again, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. And I've been an outspoken critic of Liz Warren's attack on big tech. >> Absolutely. >> I just think if they're breaking the law, and they're really acting like monopolies, the D.O.J and F.T.C should do something, but to me, you don't just break up big tech because they're good capitalists. Having said that, one of the things that scares me is, when you see Apple getting into payment systems, Amazon getting into grocery and logistics. Digital allows you to do something that's never happened before which is, you can traverse industries. >> Yep. >> Yeah, absolutely >> You used to have this stack of industries, and if you were in that industry, you're stuck in healthcare, you're stuck in financial services or whatever it was. And today, digital allows you to traverse those. >> It absolutely does. And so in theory, Amazon and Apple and Facebook and Google, they can attack virtually any industry and they kind of are. >> Yeah they kind are. I would certainly not break up anything. I would really look hard though at acquisitions, because I think that's where some of this is coming from. They can stop the overwhelming growth, but I do think you're right. That you get these opportunities from digital that are just so much easier because they're basically sharing information and technology, not building buildings and equipment and all that kind of thing. But I think there all limits to all this. I do not fear these companies. I think there, we need some law, we need some regulations, they're fine. They are adding a lot of value and the great companies, I mean, you look at the Schneider's and the Phillips, yeah they fear what some of them can do, but they're looking forward to what they provide underneath. >> Doesn't Cloud change the equation here? I mean, when you think of something like Amazon getting into the payments business, or Google in the payments business, you know it used to be that the creating of global payments processing network, just going global was a huge barrier to entry. Now, you don't have nearly that same level of impediment right? I mean the cloud eliminates much of the traditional barrier. >> Yeah, but I'll tell you what limits it, is complexity. Every company we've studied gets a little over anxious and becomes too complex, and they cannot run themselves effectively anymore. It happens to everyone. I mean, remember when we were terrified about what Microsoft was going to become? But then it got competition because it's trying to do so many things, and somebody else is offering, Sales Force and others, something simpler. And this will happen to every company that gets overly ambitious. Something simpler will come along, and everybody will go "Oh thank goodness". Something simpler. >> Well with Microsoft, I would argue two things. One is the D.O.J put some handcuffs on them , and two, with Steve Ballmer, I wouldn't get his nose out of Windows, and then finally stuck on a (mumbles) (laughter) >> Well it's they had a platform shift. >> Well this is exactly it. They will make those kind of calls . >> Sure, and I think that talks to their legacy, that they won't end up like Digital Equipment Corp or Wang and D.G, who just ignored the future and held onto the past. But I think, a colleague of ours, David Moschella wrote a book, it's called "Seeing Digital". And his premise was we're moving from a world of remote cloud services, to one where you have to, to use your word, ubiquitous digital services that you can access upon which you can build your business and new business models. I mean, the simplest example is Waves, you mentioned Uber. They're using Cloud, they're using OAuth.in with Google, Facebook or LinkedIn and they've got a security layer, there's an A.I layer, there's all your BlockChain, mobile, cognitive, it's all these sets of services that are now ubiquitous on which you're building, so you're leveraging, he calls it the matrix, to the extent that these companies that you're studying, these incumbents can leverage that matrix, they should be fine. >> Yes. >> The part of the problem is, they say "No, we're going to invent everything ourselves, we're going to build it all ourselves". To use Andy Jassy's term, it's non-differentiated heavy lifting, slows them down, but there's no reason why they can't tap that matrix, >> Absolutely >> And take advantage of it. Where I do get scared is, the Facebooks, Apples, Googles, Amazons, they're matrix companies, their data is at their core, and they get this. It's not like they're putting data around the core, data is the core. So your thoughts on that? I mean, it looks like your slide about disruption, it's coming. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. >> No industry is safe. >> Yeah, well I'll go back to the complexity argument. We studied complexity at length, and complexity is a killer. And as we get too ambitious, and we're constantly looking for growth, we start doing things that create more and more tensions in our various lines of business, causes to create silos, that then we have to coordinate. I just think every single company that, no cloud is going to save us from this. It, complexity will kill us. And we have to keep reminding ourselves to limit that complexity, and we've just not seen the example of the company that got that right. Sooner or later, they just kind of chop them, you know, create problems for themselves. >> Well isn't that inherent though in growth? >> Absolutely! >> It's just like, big companies slow down. >> That's right. >> They can't make decisions as quickly. >> That's right. >> I haven't seen a big company yet that moves nimbly. >> Exactly, and that's the complexity thing-- >> Well wait a minute, what about AWS? They're a 40 billion dollar company. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah >> They're like the agile gorilla. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> I mean, I think they're breaking the rule, and my argument would be, because they have data at their core, and they've got that, its a bromide, but that common data model, that they can apply now to virtually any business. You know, we're been expecting, a lot of people have been expecting that growth to attenuate. I mean it hasn't yet, we'll see. But they're like a 40 billion dollar firm-- >> No that's a good example yeah. >> So we'll see. And Microsoft, is the other one. Microsoft is demonstrating double digit growth. For such a large company, it's astounding. I wonder, if the law of large numbers is being challenged, so. >> Yeah, well it's interesting. I do think that what now constitutes "so big" that you're really going to struggle with the complexity. I think that has definitely been elevated a lot. But I still think there will be a point at which human beings can't handle-- >> They're getting away. >> Whatever level of complexity we reach, yeah. >> Well sure, right because even though this great new, it's your point. Cloud technology, you know, there's going to be something better that comes along. Even, I think Jassy might have said, If we had to do it all over again, we would have built the whole thing on lambda functions >> Yeah. >> Oh, yeah. >> Not on, you know so there you go. >> So maybe someone else does that-- >> Yeah, there you go. >> So now they've got their hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> You know maybe it'll take another ten years, but well Jean, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, >> it was great to have you. >> My pleasure! >> Appreciate you coming back. >> Really fun to talk. >> All right, keep right there everybody, Paul Gillin and Dave Villante, we'll be right back from MIT CDOIQ, you're watching theCUBE. (chuckles) (techno music)

>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the M Wear Radio twenty nineteen brought to you by the M where >> welcome to Special Cube conversation here in San Francisco for PM wears radio event there. Top engineers air here for once a year Get together and show in the best stuff road map to get to great guests. Here we got Mike Petrillo is the senior director of Blockchain of'em were here where their journey is, where they come from and gone to today where they are up to and for Team A Gluckman Engineering leader Blockchain engine both with GM Where great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate spending the time My favorite topic block Jane our favorite topic to thanks for joining me. So, Mike, let's start with you. Take a street where you guys are now Because we talked about a year ago. Just getting the putting the team together. You were here last year radio kind of getting some core mo mentum. Where have you guys come from? And where are you now? Yeah, >> it's been quite a journey. You know, over the past five years, we've been doing a lot of research that research culminated in an open source project called Project Concorde that we announced last year. Then we wrapped some commercial offerings around it around really the operational side. How do you operate a blockchain at scale in an enterprise setting we introduced? That is Veum wear Blockchain. It's a very descriptive on the naming, and it really focuses on three core things. Enterprise grade, decentralized trust, not distributed trust but really decentralized trust. So being able to deploy it across multiple different cloud environments as well as on prim, it concentrates on robust Day two operations. How do you operate it at scale in an enterprise setting? How do you deal with stuff like GDP are the right to be forgotten? You know, data sovereignty issues, things like that, which is much different than other block Janes. And then the third thing is really being developer friendly. Last year we were fully Ethereum compatible. We had the Ethereum language sitting on top of our block chain. Since then, we've added support for Djamel from digital asset. So another language and we're adding more and more languages so the developers can develop in the framework that they're used to on the best scaleable. You know, Enterprise Supporter >> brings him Dev Ops Mojo Concepts to blockchain. Absolutely, absolutely somewhat. The demo you guys did you get on stage? I want to get too, because it's a really use case. So again, rnd concept jewel years of research started putting together making some progress on developer. So the solutions that you guys presented, we really take us through that. >> So the ocean plastics demo that we talked about a radio basically solves this problem or, you know, just the plastics polluted, polluting our oceans today. So if you look at the numbers are staggering and the BP that you actually a consume, you know, in fish it's pretty scary. The other thing is, you know, it's been predicted that we'll have mohr plastic in our oceans than fish by twenty fifty. And one of the things Dell is trying to do is clean up the environment, and they're building these reusable trays or packaging material for their Dell laptops. And so this use case was providing them that functionality. And if you look at del they you know, they have a massive supply chain. They've got hundreds and thousands of renders that you know, they use despite systems that don't actually talk to each other, they've got complicated work flows. There's also a lot off corruption in their supply chain. And one of the things that can really solve a lot of those problems is bmr blockchain. And they have an instance running on our service, which runs on VM CNW s and I walked through the devil of just going through an aggregator to getting to a manufacturer and then assembling these laptops with the trays and shipping them off to >> think this was something we covered. A del technology world. I just wanna point out for the folks watching Dell's taking recycled material from the ocean, using it as materials into their laptops as a part of sustainability. Great business. You know, Malcolm for del the supply chain pieces. Interesting. So you guys are using blockchain and track the acquisition of the plastic out of the ocean? >> Yes. To manufacturing and to end >> Yes. In tow? Yes. >> Using of'em were blocking. >> Yes. So who coded >> this up? It was actually >> del Del developers coded it up. So they quoted up. They took two weeks to code it. We had absolutely no support issues that came away, which really talks about these. A fuse of our platform. And, you know, just the applications that running. >> How does someone get involved real quick at the plug for they have someone joins the bm where? Blockchain initiative? Yes, Via more block >> change. That's ah, manage service offering from us. So it's a license, you know, product. If they're interested, they can go to the inn where dot com slash blockchain or emails? The blockchain dash info beyond where dotcom get it signed up on the beta. We have an active beta. We have lots of enterprise customers all around the planet using it today. You know, at scale >> is a free servicers are licensed paid license. >> There will >> be a paid license for it. You know, we're invader right now, so it is free, right? >> I get it. But we're gonna get you in the snow. So it is. It is a licence service. Yeah, It's Amanda's >> service offering on. That's you know, the beauty of it is that you don't have to worry about updating it, you know, keeping the nose live anything like that. We don't see the transactional data. We don't manage the nodes or anything like that. But we deploy and keep him updated. Keeping refresh. >> You know, one of the benefits Ray Farrell's on. Just how about the ape revolution? How I change the world with the Internet and the web that blockchain has that same kind of inflection point impact you mentioned GDP are that implies, Reed. You know, changing the the values on the block chain will dwell in the Ganges is immutable. How do you handle that? Because if it's already immutable on encrypted, how does Tootie pr work? >> Yeah, just doesn't take >> care of you. Why wait? If it's encrypted, no one can see it. >> Yeah, well, you know, block chains, not about encrypting the data, right? There are some block change that do encrypted data. People get confused because they associated the cryptography with it, which links the blocks together. But the data in there is still visible. Right? We're working on privacy solutions to make privacy per transaction. We're working on GDP our issues right now, because that is an issue. When you get into a regulated environment, which there isn't really a non regulated environment these days. You have to worry about these things. You know, Blockchain gives you a mutability and that gives you to trust. But really, Blockchain is about trust. It's about this decentralized trust. And when you think about it in that context, you say, Well, if I trust that I want to be able to delete that data and we reach consensus on it and we still maintain the order, right, the proper order of the bits, which is really what Blockchain is doing, is giving you trust on that order. Bits and I agree, is a consensus to delete one of those pieces out of the order bit, and we can still maintain trust of the order bits. And that's fine. Now I can't get into details on this engineering secret sauce. >> I. So one of the things I want to ask >> you guys just engineers, because I think this is one of the things that I see is that Blockchain is attractive. There's a lot of unknowns that coming down the pike, but we do know one thing. It's a distributed, decentralized kind of concept that people like it. I see a new generation of attracted the blockchain new generation of entrepreneurs, a new generation of young people, engineers who see use cases that others from old school industry might not. So you start to see. I won't say it's the hipster or cutting edge. It's just that it's attracting this kind of new generation developer for engineer. >> Why do you >> think that's the case? Why, and and is that right assumption to look at? Because, you know, when asked his blockchain, certainly state of the art. Yeah, it's not as fast as a database of I wanted to do something. Technically, that's like saying the Internet dial up was bad. But what happened after? So you know, a lot of people making these arguments, But I see it definitely resonating with young people. Yes, look at Facebook who tried looking blockchain and moving their entire a broken system. Teo blocked, Jammed. Try to fix that so you can feel these indicators. What's your thoughts? >> I think >> part of it. And I definitely saw this, you know, last Friday and Saturday, I was eighty three up in New York City, right, and it was very much that hipster crowd, and I was really attached to the crypto currency phase. Cryptocurrency allowed individuals to make investments. You know, the kind of millennials to make investments. They didn't have to go to a e trade or they didn't have to go to some broker. It wasn't caught up in anything. They could, you know, make these bets. And now they can build applications that are directly attached to that currency. They can make up their own currency. They can make up their own value system. You know, you've done some of that with a cube, right? We've launched an application that provides value around the content and token eyes. Is that value? And now it can transfer that value So it opens up the transfer of that value, the trust of that value. And I think, you know, we're in a generation of trust and transparency. That's what's powering the world right now is about trust and transparency, and that's what Blockchain gives you, gives you trust in the system that no one person or no one government owns, and >> I really like that. >> But one thing important is I mean, we just have to demystify this like we just have to say, This is not about Cryptocurrency. That's one thing, and what I am is doing is enterprise blockchain and, you know, and Mike, you've talked about this. You always say, you know, black jeans, not going toe, you know, save the world or, you know it's not going to get rid of poverty. But there's four use cases that we've drilled down to in the supply chain realm, and there's the financial services. And so those are some of the things we're tackling, and I think it's important to like talk about that. And, you know, there's these hipsters every time we go and talk anything with regarding the blockchain, we know a big chunk of people, therefore Cryptocurrency and apparently at consensus in New York, they reduce their audience from I can't remember the numbers. When >> I was >> in the two thousand >> last year were about House kicked out all the crypto >> currency people, and so it's important to make that distinction. >> I think the crypto winter probably hurt them more than taking up, because last year there was a lot of hype there, but I think the bubble was already burst around February last year. But this piece of the good point is something that we've been kind of covering on silicon angle. The Cube is there's infrastructure dynamic. The engineering goodness. I think that certainly is intoxicating to think about Blockchain as an impact. Engineering wise, the token conversation brings up utility, the decentralized crypto currency, the icy, his initial coin offerings. The fraud part or regulated part has caused a lot of problems. So to me, well, I tell people was looking the CEO kind of scams and fraud kind of put a shadow on token economics. And Blockchain is a technology so supply chain no doubt is great. Blockchain. That's where you guys are focused. That's what the enterprise want. Way start getting into tokens. Tokens is a form of measurement. Uh huh. And that's where I think the regulators to do your point earlier is it's caused a lot of problems. So you know, the says if you got a utility token and you're selling >> it, it's Zane exchanges, not kill each other. So that's you're >> called. A lot of it would call those app developers. >> Yeah, but the up developers were still out there, right? And what's nice is these app developers that are on the side building these unique little applications. They still end up working for these larger companies and driving interesting solutions through like we're doing with supply chain like we're doing financial services like what we're doing in Telco and Media. You look at the people that we're dealing with in these companies. They came from building those applications. Heck, some of our own product managers came from building unique things mining rigs and mining companies. So you still have that background. They still have that entrepreneurial, you know, asset. And that's what's changing these cos they're driving change these companies saying, Hey, look, we can use the blockchain for this really unique thing that opens up a brand new business line, you know, for this large corporation, >> you know, I showed you our check preview. We did a quick preview of'Em World last year with our block changing me with a cube coin token, kind of total experimental thing. And it was interesting time because I think you hit the nail on the head. We as entrepreneurial developers. I had this great application we want to do for the Cube community, but we were stalled by the you know, the crypto winter, and you know, we're Apple developers, so there's many use cases of such scenarios like that. That's kind of people are kind of halfway between a Z A B. What's your advice toe to us, or folks like us who were out there who want to get the project back on track? What what what should we and application will do? They should they free focus on the infrastructure peace? What's your advice for the marketplace? >> It's so early, it's It's so early to actually really comment on that. I mean, I would say Just keep at it because you never know. It's I feel like we're so early in the game that though we can solve world hunger, there's so many use cases and applications that come out of it and we just have to keep going. And I think the developer community is what's going to make this successful, you know, and even emerging standards. I think that's one thing is standards across, You know, these block chains like we don't have that right now, and that's something we really need to need to do. And >> I don't know we program in Ethereum. >> So the question is, is that a bad choice is a lot of cognitive dissonance around with the right to. >> That's what I was just going to bring up is that >> you know, you brought up the point of your an app developer and you become stalled, you know, in your project. And we see that exactly same thing happening in the enterprise. We go into account after account where they've chosen some block change solution that's out there and to become what I call a stalled pioneer. They've gone through. They develop that application. But they either hit a scale, ability issue and then, you know, throughput or the number of nodes. They hit an operations thing. You know, operations comes in and says, Whoa, how are you going to do an audit on that thing? What about data Sovereign? What about GPR? What about this one? How are we? My God, you're gonna operate it inside of my environment? You know, what's the security side? So it's really round scale ability. It's around operations. It's around security. Those are three things we hit on over and over and over again with the stalled pioneers. So those of the accounts that we go into and rescue them essentially right, we say we can provide you the scale. We can provide you the through, but we can provide you the operations. For twenty years, the Empire has been taking large, complex distributed systems and making you operate them at scale in an enterprise setting. Where the experts at it So we're doing that would block chain now and allowing your blockchain projects to succeed and >> really find that term. Yep. Yeah. Okay, So, radio. What's the feedback here? Obviously got. Got the demo. What's been some of the peer review Give us the the four one one on peer review here. People liking what's going on? >> I think the demo really talk to people. It was relatable. You're a There was a social good a demo. I think it really impacted them. Um, but some of the cool stuff we're doing is also like in the financial services side. You know, we've got Mohr interesting stuff on the supply chain, so the feedbacks been great. Ah, lot of focuses on VM are blockchain, which is also cool. We didn't quite have that last year. In radio, we had everyone running off in different directions. So now it's via more blockchain And what Mike talked about installed pioneers is you know, we were seeing scalability throughput on numbers. And, you know, we talked about it at the immoral Barcelona A numbers. They're looking really great. And, you know, we're we're optimizing pushing our platform so we could get to, you know, perhaps the papal numbers rave, and someday visa, >> you have high availability. You guys know scale. Yeah. You happy where you are right now? >> Very happy where we >> are right >> now. I mean, we've got great customers. Great feedback, you know, great solution that solving real world problems. You know, engineers like doing two things shipping code and solving stuff that's going to help the world. At least you're of'em where that's our culture, right? And And we're able to do that day in and day out and the entire block chains the cornerstone to that. That's what makes people happy. >> Mike Protein, We following your journey. Great. Teo, check in Great to hear the progress. Congratulations on the great demo reel Use cases in supply chain. We'LL be following you guys and keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the key. Absolutely. Thank you for >> the time >> chauffeur here with Lisa Martin here in San Francisco for work. You coverage of radio, the top engineering event where they all come together internally with GM, where one of a few press outlets here, the Cube bringing exclusive coverage. Thanks for watching.