>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cube, and we have a great guest here. Barack Shuster. Who's in Tel-Aviv senior director of chief architect at bridge crew, a part of Palo Alto networks. He was formerly the co-founder of the company, then sold to Palo Alto networks Brock. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation. >>Thanks John. Great to be here. >>So one of the things I love about open source, and you're seeing a lot more of the trend now that talking about, you know, people doing incubators all over the world, having open source and having a builder, people who are starting companies, it's coming more and more, you you're one of them. And you've been part of this security open source cloud infrastructure infrastructure as code going back a while, and you guys had a lot of success. Now, open source infrastructure as code has moved up to the stack, certainly lot going down at the network layer, but developers just want to build security from day one, right? They don't want to have to get into the, the, the waiting game of slowing down their pipelining of code in the CIC D they want to move faster. And this has been one of the core conversations this year is how to make developers more productive and not just a cliche, but actually more productive and not have to wait to implement cloud native. Right. So you're in the middle of it. And you've got you're in, tell us, tell us what you guys are dealing with that, >>Right? Yeah. So I hear these needles working fast, having a large velocity of releases from many of my friends, the SRAs, the DevOps, and the security practitioners in different companies. And the thing that we asked ourselves three years ago was how can we simplify the process and make the security teams an enabler instead of a gatekeeper that blocks the releases? And the thing that we've done, then we understood that we should do is not only doing runtime scanning of the cloud infrastructure and the cloud native clusters, but also shift left the findings and fixings the remediation of security issues to the level of the code. So we started doing infrastructure is good. We Terraform Kubernetes manifests cloud formation, server less, and the list goes on and we created an open source product around it, named checkup, which has an amazing community of hundreds of contributors. Not all of them are Palo Alto employees. Most of them are community users from various companies. And we tried to and succeeded to the democratic side is the creation of policy as code the ability to inspect your infrastructure as code and tell you, Hey, this is the best practice that you should use consider using it before applying a misconfigured S3 bucket into production, or before applying a misconfigured Kubernetes cluster into your production or dev environment. And the goal, >>The goal, >>The goal is to do that from the ID from the moment that you write code and also to inspect your configuration in CGI and CD and in runtime. And also understand that if there is any drift out there and the ability to fix that in the source code, in the blueprint itself. >>So what I hear you saying is really two problems you're solving. One is the organizational policies around how things were done in a environment before all the old way. You know, the security teams do a review, you send a ticket, things are waiting, stop, wait, hurry up and wait kind of thing. And then there's the technical piece of it, right? Is that there's two pieces to that. >>Yeah, I think that one thing is the change of the methodologies. We understood that we should just work differently than what we used to do. Tickets are slow. They have priorities. You have a bottleneck, which is a small team of security practitioners. And honestly, a lot of the work is repetitive and can be democratized into the engineering teams. They should be able to understand, Hey, I wrote the code piece that provision this instance, I am the most suitable person as a developer to fix that piece of code and reapply it to the runtime environment. >>And then it also sets the table for our automation. It sets the table for policies, things that make things more efficient scaling. Cause you mentioned SRS are a big part of this to dev ops and SRE. Those, those folks are, are trying to move as fast as possible at scale, huge scale challenge. How does that impact the scale piece become into here? >>So both themes Esri's and security teams are about a link to deploying application, but new application releases into the production environment. And the thing that you can do is you can inspect all kinds of best practices, not only security, best practices, but also make sure that you have provision concurrencies on your serverless functions or the amount of auto-scaling groups is what you expect it to be. And you can scan all of those things in the level of your code before applying it to production. >>That's awesome. So good, good benefits scales a security team. It sounds like too as well. You could get that policy out there. So great stuff. I want to really quickly ask you about the event. You're hosting code two cloud summit. What are we going to see there? I'm going to host a panel. Of course, I'm looking forward to that as well. You get a lot of experts coming in there. Why are you having this event and what topics will be covered? >>So we wanted to talk on all of the shifts, left movement and all of the changes that have happened in the cloud security market since inception till today. And we brought in great people and great practitioners from both the dev ops side, the chaos engineering and the security practitioners, and everybody are having their opinion on what's the current status state, how things should be implemented in a mature environment and what the future might hold for the code and cloud security markets. The thing that we're going to focus on is all of the supply chain from securing the CCD itself, making sure your actions are not vulnerable to a shut injection or making sure your version control system are configured correctly with single sign-on MFA and having branch protection rules, but also open source security like SCA software composition analysis infrastructure as code security. Obviously Ron thinks security drifts and Kubernetes security. So we're going to talk on all of those different aspects and how each and every team is mitigating. The different risks that come with. >>You know, one of the things that you bring up when you hear you talking is that's the range of, of infrastructure as code. How has infrastructure as code changed? Cause you're, you know, there's dev ops and SRS now application developers, you still have to have programmable infrastructure. I mean, if infrastructure code is real realize up and down the stack, all aspects need to be programmable, which means you got to have the data, you got to have the ability to automate. How would you summarize kind of the state of infrastructure as code? >>So a few years ago, we started with physical servers where you carried the infrastructure on our back. I, I mounted them on the rack myself a few years ago and connected all of the different cables then came the revolution of BMS. We didn't do that anymore. We had one beefy appliance and we had 60 virtual servers running on one appliance. So we didn't have to carry new servers every time into the data center then came the cloud and made everything API first. And they bill and enabled us to write the best scripts to provision those resources. But it was not enough because he wanted to have a reproducible environment. The is written either in declarative language like Terraform or CloudFormation or imperative like CDK or polluted, but having a consistent way to deploy your application to multiple environments. And the stage after that is having some kind of a service catalog that will allow application developer to get the new releases up and running. >>And the way that it has evolved mass adoption of infrastructure as code is already happening. But that introduces the ability for velocity in deployment, but also new kinds of risks that we haven't thought about before as security practitioners, for example, you should vet all of the open source Terraform modules that you're using because you might have a leakage. Our form has a lot of access to secrets in your environment. And the state really contains sensitive objects like passwords. The other thing that has changed is we today we rely a lot on cloud infrastructure and on the past year we've seen the law for shell attack, for example, and also cloud providers have disclosed that they were vulnerable to log for shell attack. So we understand today that when we talk about cloud security, it's not only about the infrastructure itself, but it's also about is the infrastructure that we're using is using an open source package that is vulnerable. Are we using an open source package that is vulnerable, is our development pipeline is configured and the list goes on. So it's really a new approach of analyzing the entire software bill of material also called Asbell and understanding the different risks there. >>You know, I think this is a really great point and great insight because new opera, new solutions for new problems are new opportunities, right? So open source growth has been phenomenal. And you mentioned some of those Terraform and one of the projects and you started one checkoff, they're all good, but there's some holes in there and it's open source, it's free, everyone's building on it. So, you know, you have, and that's what it's for. And I think now is open source goes to the next level again, another generational inflection point it's it's, there's more contributors there's companies are involved. People are using it more. It becomes a really strong integration opportunity. So, so it's all free and it's how you use it. So this is a new kind of extension of how open source is used. And if you can factor in some of the things like, like threat vectors, you have to know the code. >>So there's no way to know it all. So you guys are scanning it doing things, but it's also huge system. It's not just one piece of code. You talking about cloud is becoming an operating system. It's a distributed computing environment, so whole new area of problem space to solve. So I love that. Love that piece. Where are you guys at on this now? How do you feel in terms of where you are in the progress bar of the solution? Because the supply chain is usually a hardware concept. People can relate to, but when you bring in software, how you source software is like sourcing a chip or, or a piece of hardware, you got to watch where it came from and you gotta track track that. So, or scan it and validate it, right? So these are new, new things. Where are we with? >>So you're, you're you're right. We have a lot of moving parts. And really the supply chain terms of came from the automobile industry. You have a car, you have an engine engine might be created by a different vendor. You have the wheels, they might be created by a different vendor. So when you buy your next Chevy or Ford, you might have a wheels from continental or other than the first. And actually software is very similar. When we build software, we host it on a cloud provider like AWS, GCP, Azure, not on our own infrastructure anymore. And when we're building software, we're using open-source packages that are maintained in the other half of the war. And we don't always know in person, the people who've created that piece. And we do not have a vetting process, even a human vetting process on these, everything that we've created was really made by us or by a trusted source. >>And this is where we come in. We help you empower you, the engineer, we tools to analyze all of the dependency tree of your software, bill of materials. We will scan your infrastructure code, your application packages that you're using from package managers like NPM or PI. And we scan those open source dependencies. We would verify that your CIC is secure. Your version control system is secure. And the thing that we will always focus on is making a fixed accessible to you. So let's say that you're using a misconfigured backup. We have a bot that will fix the code for you. And let's say that you have a, a vulnerable open-source package and it was fixed in a later version. We will bump the version for you to make your code secure. And we will also have the same process on your run time environment. So we will understand that your environment is secure from code to cloud, or if there are any three out there that your engineering team should look at, >>That's a great service. And I think this is cutting edge from a technology perspective. What's what are some of the new cloud native technologies that you see in emerging fast, that's getting traction and ultimately having a product market fit in, in this area because I've seen Cooper. And you mentioned Kubernetes, that's one of the areas that have a lot more work to do or being worked on now that customers are paying attention to. >>Yeah, so definitely Kubernetes is, has started in growth companies and now it's existing every fortune 100 companies. So you can find anything, every large growler scale organization and also serverless functions are, are getting into a higher adoption rate. I think that the thing that we seeing the most massive adoption off is actually infrastructure as code during COVID. A lot of organization went through a digital transformation and in that process, they have started to work remotely and have agreed on migrating to a new infrastructure, not the data center, but the cloud provider. So at other teams that were not experienced with those clouds are now getting familiar with it and getting exposed to new capabilities. And with that also new risks. >>Well, great stuff. Great to chat with you. I want to ask you while you're here, you mentioned depth infrastructure as code for the folks that get it right. There's some significant benefits. We don't get it. Right. We know what that looks like. What are some of the benefits that can you share personally, or for the folks watching out there, if you get it for sure. Cause code, right? What does the future look like? What does success look like? What's that path look like when you get it right versus not doing it or getting it wrong? >>I think that every engineer dream is wanting to be impactful, to work fast and learn new things and not to get a PagerDuty on a Friday night. So if you get infrastructure ride, you have a process where everything is declarative and is peer reviewed both by you and automated frameworks like bridge and checkoff. And also you have the ability to understand that, Hey, once I re I read it once, and from that point forward, it's reproducible and it also have a status. So only changes will be applied and it will enable myself and my team to work faster and collaborate in a better way on the cloud infrastructure. Let's say that you'd done doing infrastructure as code. You have one resource change by one team member and another resource change by another team member. And the different dependencies between those resources are getting fragmented and broken. You cannot change your database without your application being aware of that. You cannot change your load Bonser without the obligation being aware of that. So infrastructure skullduggery enables you to do those changes in a, in a mature fashion that will foes Le less outages. >>Yeah. A lot of people getting PagerDuty's on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and on the old way, new way, new, you don't want to break up your Friday night after a nice dinner, either rock, do you know? Well, thanks for coming in all the way from Tel-Aviv really appreciate it. I wish you guys, everything the best over there in Delhi, we will see you at the event that's coming up. We're looking forward to the code to cloud summit and all the great insight you guys will have. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story. Looking forward to talking more with you Brock thanks for all the insight on security infrastructures code and all the cool things you're doing at bridge crew. >>Thank you, John. >>Okay. This is the cube conversation here at Palo Alto, California. I'm John furrier hosted the cube. Thanks for watching.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to this CUBE Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've been showcasing all the great content about Web3 and what's going around the corner for Web4. Of course, Unstoppable Domains is one of the big growth stories in the business. Brad Kam, the Co-founder is here with me, of Unstoppable Domains, Brad, great to see you, thanks for coming on this showcase. >> Thanks, pleasure for having me. >> So you have a lot of history in the Web3. They're calling it now, but it's basically crypto and blockchain. You know, the white paper came out and then, you know how it developed was organically. We saw how that happened. Now you're the co-founder of Unstoppable Domains. You're seeing the mainstream, I would say mainstream scene, Superbowl commercials, okay? You're seeing it everywhere. So it is here. Stadiums are named after cryptos, companies. It's here. Hey, it's no longer a fringe, it is reality. You guys are in the middle of it. What's going on with the trend, and where does Unstoppable fit in and where do you guys tie in here? >> I mean, I think that what's been happening in general, this whole revolution around cryptocurrencies and then NFTs and what Unstoppable Domain is doing. It's all around creating this idea that people can own something that's digital. And this hasn't really been possible before Bitcoin. Bitcoin was the first case. You could own money. You don't need a bank, no one else. You know, you can completely control it. No one else can turn you off. Then there was this next phase of the revolution, which is, assets beyond just currencies. So NFTs, digital art. What we're working on is like a decentralized identity, like a username for Web3 and each individual domain name is an NFT. But yeah, it's been a crazy ride over the past 10 years. >> It's fun because, you know, on siliconangle.com, which we founded, we were covering early days of crypto. In fact, our first website, the developer want to be paid in crypto. It's interesting. Price of Bitcoin, I won't say that how low it was. But then you saw the ICO Wave, the token started coming in. You started seeing much more engineering focus, a lot of white papers coming out, a lot of cool ideas. And then now you got this mainstream of this. So I got to ask you, what are the coolest things you guys are working on, because Unstoppable has a solution that solves a problem today, and that people are facing at the same time, it is part of this new architecture. What problem do you guys solve right now that's in market that you're seeing the most traction on? >> Yeah, so it's really about, so whenever you interact with a blockchain, you wind up having to deal with one of these really, really crazy public keys, public addresses. And they're like anywhere from 20 to 40 characters long, they're random, they're impossible to memorize. And going back to even early days in crypto, I think people knew that this tech was not going to go mainstream if you have to copy and paste these things around. If I'm getting ready to send you like a million dollars, I'm going to copy and paste some random string of numbers and letters. I'm going to have no confirmations about who I'm sending it to, and I'm going to hope that it works out. It's just not practical. People have kind of always known there was going to be a solution. And one of the more popular ideas was, doing kind of like what DNS did, which is, instead of having to deal with these crazy IP addresses, this long random string of numbers to find a website, you have a name like a keyword, something that's easy to remember. You know, like a hotels.com or something like that. And so what NFT domains are, is basically the same thing, but for blockchain addresses. And yeah, it's just better and easier. There's this joke that everybody, you know, if you want to send me money, you're going to send me a test transaction of, you know, like a dollar first, just to make sure that I get it. Call me up and make sure that I get it before you go and send the big amount. Just not the way of moving billions of dollars of value is going to work in the future. >> Yeah, and I think one of the things you just point out, make it easier. When you have these new waves, these shifts, we saw it with the web pages. More and more web pages were coming on, more online users. They called it the online populations growing. Here, the same thing's happening. And if the focus is on ease of use, making things simpler to understand, and reducing the step it takes to do things, right? This is kind of what's going on and with the developer community, and what Ethereum has done really well is, brought in the developers. So that's the convergence of all the action. And so, when you (John chuckles) so that's where you're at right now. How do you go forward from here? Obviously, there's business development deals to do, you guys are partnering a lot. What's the strategy? What are some of the things that you can share about some of your business activity that points to how mainstream it is and where it's going? >> So I think the way to think about an NFT domain name is that it's meant to be like your identity on Web3. So, it's going to have a lot of different context. So it's kind of like your Venmo account, where you could send me money to brad.crypto, can be your decentralized website, where you can check out my content at brad.crypto. It can also be my like login kind of like a decentralized Facebook O oth, where I can log into DApps and share information about myself and bring my data along with me. So it's got all of these different things that it can do, but where it's starting is inside of crypto wallets and crypto apps, and they are adopting it for this identity idea. And it's the same form of identity across all your apps. That's the thing that's new here. So, yeah, that's the really big and profound shift that's happening. And the reason why this is going to be maybe even more important than a lot of, you know, your listeners think is that, everyone's going to have a crypto wallet. Every person in the world is going to have a crypto wallet. Every app, every consumer app that you use is going to build one in. Twitter just launched, just built one. Reddit is building one. You're seeing it across all the consumer finance apps. So it's not just the crypto companies that you're thinking of, every app's going to have a wallet. And it's going to really change the way that we use the internet. >> I think there's a couple things you pointed. I want to get your reaction to and thoughts more on this concept of DApps or decentralized applications, DApps or depending on what you call it. This is applications. And that take advantage of the architecture, and then this idea of users owning their own data. And this absolutely reverses the script today. Today, you see Facebook, you see LinkedIn, all these silos, they own the data that you are the product. Here, the users are in control. They have their data, but the apps are being built for it for the paradigm shift here, right? That's what's happening. Is that right? >> Totally, totally. And so, it all starts. I mean, DApp is just this crazy term. It feels like it's this, like really foreign, weird thing. All it means is that you sign in with your wallet instead of signing in with a username and password, where the data is stored inside of that app. Like inside of Facebook. So that's the only real, like, core underneath difference to keep in mind, signing in with the wallet. But that is like a complete sea change in the way the internet works. Because I have this key, this private key, it's on my phone or my device or whatever. And I'm the only one that has it. So, if somebody wanted to hack me, they need to go get access to my device. Two years ago, when Twitter got hacked, Barack Obama and Elon Musk were tweeting the same stuff. That's because Twitter had all the data. And so, you needed to hack Twitter instead of each individual person. It's a completely different security model. It's way better for users to have that. But, if you're thinking from the user perspective, what's going to happen is, is that instead of Facebook storing all of my data, and then me being trapped inside of Facebook, I'm going to store it, and I'm going to move around on the internet, logging in with my Web3 username, my NFT domain name, and I'm going to have all my data with me. And then I could use 100 different Facebooks all in one day. And it would be effortless for me to go and move from one to the other. So, the monopoly situation that we exist in as a society is because of the way data storage works and- >> So that's a huge point. So let's double down on that for one more second. This is a huge point. I want to get your thoughts. So I think people don't understand that in the mainstream having that horizontal traversal or ability to move around with your identity in this case, your Unstoppable Domain and your data allows the user to take it from place to place. It's like going to other apps that could be like Facebook, where the user's in charge. And they're either deciding whether to share their data or not, or they're certainly continuate their data. And this allows for more of a horizontal scalability for the user, not for a company. >> Yeah, and what's going to happen is, as users are building up their reputation. They're building up their identity in Web3. So you have your username and you have your profile and you have certain badges of activities that you've done. And you're building up this reputation. And now apps are looking at that, and they're starting to create social networks and other things to provide me services because it started with the user. And so, the user is starting to collect all this valuable data, and then apps are saying, well, hey, let me give you a special experience based on that. But the real thing, and this is like the core, I mean, this is just like a core capitalist idea, in general. If you have more competition, you get a better experience for users. We have not had competition in Web2 for decades because these companies have become monopolies. And what Web3 is really allowing is, this wide open competition. And that's the core thing. Like, it's not like, you know, it's going to take time for Web3 to get better than Web2. You know, it's very, very early days. But the reason why it's going to work is because of the competitive aspect here. Like it's just so much better for consumers when this happens. >> I would also add to that, first of all, great point, great insight. I would also add that the web presence technology based upon DNS specifically is, first of all, it's asking, so it's not foreign characters, it's not Unicode for the geeks out there. But that's limiting too, it limits you to be on a site. And so, I think the combination of kind of inadequate or antiquated DNS has limitations. So if... And that doesn't help communities, right? So when you're in the communities, you have potentially marketplaces that could be anywhere. So if you have ID, I'm just kind of thinking it forward here. But if you have your own data and your own ID, you can jump into a marketplace, two-sided marketplace anywhere. An app can provide that, if the community's robust, this is kind of where I see the use case going. How do you guys, do you guys agree with that statement and how do you see that ability for the user to take advantage of other competitive or new emerging communities or marketplaces? >> So I think it all comes down. So identity is just this huge problem in Web2. And part of the reason why it's very, very hard for new marketplaces and new communities to emerge is 'cause you need all kinds of trust and reputation. And it's very hard to get real information about the users that you're interacting with. If you're in the Web3 paradigm, then what happens is, is you can go and check certain things on the blockchain to see if they're true. And you can know that they're true 100%. You can know that I have used Uniswap in the past 30 days, and OpenSea in the past 30 days. You can know for sure that this wallet is mine. The same owner of this wallet also owns this other wallet, owns this asset. So having the ability to know certain things about a stranger is really what's going to change behavior. And one of the things that we're really excited about is being able to prove information about yourself without sharing it. So I can tell you, hey, I'm a unique person. I'm an American, I'm not an American, but I don't have to tell you who I am. And you can still know that it's true. And that concept is going to be what enables what you're talking about. I'm going to be able to show up in some new community that was created two hours ago, and we can all trust each other that a certain set of facts are true. And that's possible because- >> And exchange value with smart contracts and other with no middle men involved activities, which is the promise of the new decentralized web. All right, so let me ask you a question on that. Because I think this is key. The anonymous point is huge. If you look at any kind of abstraction layers or any evolution in technology over the years, it's always been about cleaning up the mess or extending capabilities of something that was inadequate. We mentioned DNS, now you got this. There's a lot of problems with Web2, 2.0, social bots. You mentioned bots. Bots are anonymous and they don't have a lot of time in market. So it's easy to start bots, and everyone who does either scraping bots, everyone knows this. What you just pointed out was, in an ops environment that was user choice, but has all the data that could be verified. So it's almost like a blue check mark on Twitter without having your name, kind of- >> It's going to be 100s of check marks, but exactly. 'Cause there's so many different things that you're going to want to communicate to strangers, but that's exactly the right mental model. It's going to be these check marks for all kinds of different contexts. And that's what's going to enable people to trust that they're, you know, you're talking to a real person or you're talking to the type of person you thought you were talking to, et cetera. But yeah, it's, you know, I think that the issues that we have with bots today are because Web2 has failed at solving identity. I think Facebook at one point was deleting half a billion fake accounts per quarter. Something like the entire number of user profiles they were deleting per year. So it's just a total- >> And they spring up like mushrooms. They just pop up, to think that's the problem. I mean, the data that you acquire in these siloed platforms is used by them, the company. So you don't own the data, so you become the product as the cliche goes. But what you guys are saying is, if you have an identity and you pop around to multiple sites, you also have your digital footprints and your exhaust that you own. Okay, that's time, that's reputation data. I mean, you can cut it any way you want, but the point is, it's your stuff over time, that's yours. And that's immutables on the blockchain, you can store it and then make that permanent and add to it. >> Exactly. >> That's a time based thing versus today, bots that are spreading misinformation can get popped up when they get killed. They just start another one. So time actually is a metric for quality here. >> Absolutely. And people already use it in the crypto world to say like, hey, this wallet was created greater than two years ago. This wallet has had transactions for at least three or four years. Like this is probably a real, you know, this is probably a legitimate user. And anybody can look that up. I mean, we can we go look it up together right now on Etherscan, it would take a minute. >> Yeah, (indistinct). Yeah, I'm a big fan, I can tell, I love this product. I think you guys are going to do really well. Congratulations, I'm a big fan. I think this is needed. What are some of the deals you've done? blockchain.com is one and Opera. Can you take us through those deals and why they're working with you? Let's start with blockchain.com. >> Yeah, so the whole thing here is that, this identity standard for Web3 apps need to choose to support it. So, you know, we spent several years as a company working to get as many crypto wallets and browsers and crypto exchanges to support this identity standard. Some of the largest and probably most popular companies to have done this are, blockchain.com, for example, blockchain.com, one of the largest crypto wallets in the world. And you can use your domain names instead of crypto addresses. And this is super cool because blockchain.com in particular focuses on onboarding new users. So they're very focused on how we're going to get the next 4 billion internet users to use this tech. And they said, usernames are going to be essential. Like, how can we onboard this next several billion people if we have to explain to them about all these crazy addresses. And it's not just one, like we want to give you 10, 40 character addresses for all these different contexts. Like, it's just no way people are going to be able to do that without having a user name. So, that's why we're really excited about what blockchain.com's doing. They want to train users that this is the way you should use the tech. >> Yeah, and certainly no one wants to remember. I remember how writing down all my... You know, I was never a big wallet fan 'cause of all the hacks I used to write it down and store it in my safe. But if the house burns down or I kick the can who's going to find it, right? So again, these are all important things. Your key storing it, securing it, super important. Talk about Opera. That's an interesting partnership because it's got a browser that people know what it is. What are they doing different? Almost imagine they're innovating around the identity and what people's experiences with what they touch. >> Yeah, so this is one of those things that's a little bit easier and I strongly encourage everybody to go and try DApps after this. 'Cause this is going to be one of those concepts, it can be a little easier if you try it than if you hear about it. But the concept of a wallet and a browser are kind of merging. So it makes sense to have a wallet inside of your browser. Because when you go to a website, the website's going to want you to sign in with your wallet. So having that be in one app is quite convenient for users. And so Opera was one of the trailblazers, a traditional browser that added a crypto wallet so that you can store money in there. And then also added support for domain names for payments and for websites. So, you can type in brad.crypto and you can send me money, or you can type in brad.crypto into the browser and you can check out my website. I've got a little NFT gallery. You can see my collection up there right now. So that's the idea is that, browsers have this kind of superpower in Web3. And what I think is going to happen, Opera and Brave have been kind of the trailblazers here. What I think is going to happen is that, these traditional browsers are going to wake up and they're going to see that integrating a wallet is critical for them to be able to provide services to consumers. >> I mean, it is an app. I mean, why not make it a DApps as well? Because why wouldn't I want to just send you crypto, like Venmo, you mentioned earlier, which people can understand that concept. Venmo, let me make my cash. Same concept here. But built in to the browser, which is not a browser anymore it's a reader, a DApp reader, basically with a wallet. All right, so what does this mean for you guys and the marketplace? You got Opera pushing the envelope on browsing, changing the experience, enabling the applications to be discovered and navigated and consumed. You got blockchain.com with the wallets and being embedded there. Good distribution. Who are you looking for for partners? How do people partner? Let's just say theCUBE wants to do NFTs, and we want to have a login for our communities, which are all open. How do we partner with you? Or do we? We have to wait or is there a... I mean, take us through the partnership strategy. How do people engage with Unstoppable Domains? >> Yeah, so, I mean, I think that if you're a wallet or a crypto exchange, it's super easy, we would love to have you support being able to send money using domains. We also have all sorts of different kind of marketing activities we can do together. We can give out free stuff to your communities. We have a bunch of education that we do. We're really trying to be this onboarding point to Web3. So there's, I think a lot of cool stuff we can do together on the commercial side and on the marketing side. And then the other category that we didn't talk about was DApps. And we now have this login with ensemble domains, which you kind of alluded to there. And so you can log in with your domain name and then you can give the app permission to get certain information about you or proof of information about you, not the actual information, if you don't want to share it, because it's your choice and you're in control. And so, that would be another thing. Like, if you all launch a DApps, we should absolutely have login with Unstoppable there. >> Yeah, there's so much headroom here. You got a short term solution with exchange. Get that distribution, I get that, that's early days of the foundation, push the distribution, get you guys everywhere. But the real success comes in for the login. I mean, the sign in single sign in concept. I think that's going to be powerful, great stuff. Okay, future, tell us something we don't know about Unstoppable Domains that people might be interested in. >> I think the thing that you're going to hear about a lot from us in the future is going to be around this idea of identity, of being able to prove that you're a human and be able to tell apps that. And apps are going to give you all kinds of special access and rewards and all kinds of other things, because you gave 'em that information. So that's probably, that's the hint I'm going to drop. >> You know, it's interesting, Brad. You bring trust, you bring quality verified data, choose intelligence software and machine learning, AI and access to distributed communities and distributed applications. Interesting to see what the software does with that. Cause it traditionally didn't have that before. I mean, just in mind blowing. I mean, it's pretty crazy. Great stuff. Brad, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. The Co-founder of Unstoppable Domains, Brad Kam. Thanks for stopping by theCUBE's Showcase with Unstoppable Domains. >> Thanks for having me. (bright upbeat music)

>>Oh, welcome to this cube unstoppable domain showcase. I'm John for your host of the cube and showcasing all the great content about web three. And what's around the corner for web. For of course, stoppable domains is one of the big growth stories in the business bread. Can the co-founders here with me have ensembles mains break. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the showcase. >>So you have a lot of history in the, in the web three, they're calling it net, but it's basically crypto and blockchain. You know, the white paper came out and then, you know how it developed was organically. We saw how that happened. Now, the co-founder was titled domains. You seeing the mainstream, I would say main street scene, super bowl commercials. Okay. You're seeing it everywhere. So it is, it is here. Stadiums are named after cryptos companies. It's here. Hey, it's no longer a fringe. It is reality. You guys are in the middle of it. What's what's going on with the trend. And where does unstoppable fit in? Where do you guys tie in here? >>I mean, I think that what's been happening in general, this whole revolution around cryptocurrencies and then in FTEs and what unstoppable domains is doing, it's all around creating this idea that people can own something that's digital. And this hasn't really been possible before Bitcoin Bitcoin was the first case. You could own money. You don't need a bank. No one else. You can completely control it. No one else can turn you off. Then there was this next phase of the revolution, which is assets beyond just currencies. So, and if T is digital art, what we're working on is like a decentralized identity, like a username for web three and each individual domain name is a is an NFT. But yeah, it's a, it's been a, it's been a, it's been a crazy ride over the past. >>It's fun because you on siliconangle.com, which we founded, we were covering early days of crypto. In fact, our first website, the developer want to be paid in crypto is interesting price of Bitcoin. I won't say that how low it was, but then you saw, you saw the, you know, the ICO way, the token started coming in, you started seeing much more engineering, focused, a lot of white papers coming out, a lot of cool ideas. And then now you got this mainstream of it. So I had to ask you, what are the coolest things you guys are working on because ensemble has a solution that solves a problem today, and that people are facing at the same time. It is part of this new architecture. What problem do you guys solve right now? That's in market that you're seeing the most traction on. >>Yeah. So it's really about, so whenever you inter interact with a blockchain, you wind up having to deal with one of these really, really crazy public keys, public addresses. And they're like anywhere from 20 to 40 characters, long they're random, they're impossible to memorize. And going back to even early days in crypto, I think if people knew that this tech was not going to go mainstream, if you have to copy and paste these things around, if I'm getting to send you like a million dollars, I'm going to copy and paste some random string of numbers and letters. I'm going to have no confirmations about who I'm sending it to. And I'm going to hope that it works out. It's just not practical people. Who've kind of always known there was going to be a solution. And one of the more popular ideas was doing kind of like what DNS did, which is instead of having to deal with these crazy IP addresses this long, random string of numbers to find a website, you have a name, like a keyword, something that's easy to remember, you know, like a hotels.com or something like that. And so what NFT domains are, is basically the same thing, but for blockchain addresses and yeah, it's just, it's just better and easier. There's this joke that everybody, if you want to send me money, you're going to send me a test transaction of, you know, like a dollar first, just to make sure that I get it, call me up and make sure that I get it before you go and send the big amount. I'm just not the way moving, you know, billions of dollars of value is going to work in the future. >>Yeah. And I think one of the things you just pointed out, make it easier. One of these, when you have these new waves, these shifts we saw with the web web pages, more and more web pages were coming on more online users, they call the online population is growing here, the same thing's happening. And the focus is on ease of use, making things simple, to understand and reducing the step it takes to do things, right. This is kind of, kind of what is going on and with the developer community and what a theory has done really well is brought in the developers. So that's the, that's the convergence of all the action. And so when you, so that's where you're at right now, how do you go forward from here? Obviously see this business development deals to do. You guys are partnering a lot. What's the strategy? What are some of the things that you can share about some of your business activity that points to how mainstream it is and where it's going? Okay. >>So I think the, the, the, the way to, the way to think about, and, and T domain name is that it's meant to be like your identity on web three. So it's gonna have a lot of different contexts. It's kind of like your, your Venmo account, where you could send me money to Brad dot crypto can be your decentralized website, where you can check out my content at Brad dot crypto. It can also be my like login kind of like a decentralized Facebook OAuth, where I can log into ADAPs and share information about myself and bring my data along with me. So it's got all of these, all of these different, all these different things that it can do, but where it's starting is inside of crypto wallets and crypto apps, and they are adopting it for this identity, this identity idea. And it's the same identity across all your apps. >>That's the thing that's kinda, that's new here. So, so yeah, that's the, that's the really, that's the really big and profound shift that's happening. And the reason why this is going to be maybe even more important, a lot of, you know, your, your listeners thing is that everyone's going to have a crypto wallet. Every person in the world is going to have a crypto wallet. Every app, every consumer app that you use is going to build one in Twitter, just launched, just built one. Reddit is building one. You're seeing it across all the consumer finance apps. So it's not just the crypto companies that you're thinking of. Every app is going to have a wallet, and it's going to really, it's going to really change the way that we use the internet. >>I think there's a couple of things you pointed. I want to get your reaction to and thoughts more on this constant adapts or decentralized applications or dimension when you call it, this is applications and that take advantage of, of the architecture and then this idea of users owning their own data. And this absolutely reverses the script today. Today, you see Facebook, you see LinkedIn, all these silos, they own the data. The, you are the product here. The users are in control. They have their data, but the apps are being built for it for the paradigm shift here. Right. That's what's happening. Is that right now? >>Totally, totally. And, and so it all starts, I mean, DAP is just this crazy term. It feels like it's this like really foreign, weird thing. All it means is that you sign in with your wallet instead of signing in with a username and password where the data is stored inside of that app, like inside of Facebook. So that's, that's the only real, like core underneath difference to keep in mind signing in with a wallet. But that is like a complete sea change in the way the internet works, because I have this, this key, this private key it's on my phone or my device or whatever. And I'm the only one that has it. So if somebody wanted to hack me, they need to go get access to my device. Two years ago, when Twitter got hacked, Barack Obama and Elon Musk were tweeting the same stuff. >>That's because Twitter had all the data. And so you needed to hack Twitter instead of each individual person, it's a completely different security model. It's, it's way better for users to have that. But if you're thinking from the user perspective what's going to happen is, is that instead of Facebook storing all of my data, and then me being trapped inside of Facebook, I'm going to store it. And I'm gonna move around on the internet, logging in with my web three username, my, my, my NFT domain name. And I'm going to have all my data with me. And then I could use a hundred different Facebooks all in one day. And it would be effortless for me to go and move from one to the other. So the monopoly situation that we exist in as a society is because of the way data storage works. >>So that's the huge point. So let's just, let's double down on that for one more. Second, this is huge point. I want to get your thoughts. I think people don't understand that in the mainstream having that horizontal traversal or, or, or the ability to move around with your identity in this case, your unstoppable domain and your data allows the user to take it from place to place. It's like going to other apps that could be Facebook where the user's in charge. And they're either deciding whether to share their data or not, or are certainly continually their data. And this allows for more of a horizontal scalability for the user, not for a company. >>Yeah. And what's going to happen is, is users are building up their reputation. They're building up their identity in web three. So you have your username and you have your, your profile and you have certain badges of, you know, activities that you've done. And you're building up this reputation. And now apps are looking at that and they're starting to create social networks and other things to provide me services because I, it started with the user as, or the user is starting to collect all this valuable data. And then apps are saying, well, Hey, let me give you a special experience based on that, but the real thing, and this is like, this is like the core mean, this is just like a core capitalist idea. In general, you have more competition, you get a better experience for users. We have not had competition on, on, in web two for decades because these companies have become monopolies. And what web three is really allowing is this wide open competition. And, and that is what, that's the core thing. Like, it's not like, you know, it's going to take time for, for, for web three to get better than web two. You know, it's very, very early days, but the reason why it's going to work is because of the competitive aspect here. Like you can just, it's just so much better for consumers when this happened. >>I would also add to that, first of all, great point, great insight. I would also add that the web presence technology based upon DNS specifically is first of all, it's asking, so it's not foreign characters. It's not union code for, for the geeks out there, but that's limiting to its limits you to be on a site. And so I think the combination of kind of inadequate or antiquated DNS has limitations. So if, and that doesn't help communities, right? So when you're in the communities, you have potentially marketplaces, that could be anywhere. So if you have a ID and just kind of thinking it forward here, but if you have your own data and your own ID, you can jump into a marketplace two-sided marketplace anywhere. And app can provide that if the community is robust, this is kind of where I see the use case going. How do you guys, do you guys agree with that statement and how do you see that ability for the user to take advantage of other competitive or new emerging communities or marketplace? >>So I think it all comes down. So I identity is just this huge problem in web two. And part of the reason why it's very, very hard for new marketplaces and new communities to emerge is because you need all kinds of trust and reputation. And it's very hard to get, to get real information about the users that you're interacting with. If you're, if you're in the web three paradigm, then what happens is, is you can go and check certain things on the blockchain to see if they're true. And you can know that they're true. A hundred percent. You can know that I have used unit swab in the past 30 days and open, see in the past 30 days, you can know for sure that this wallet is mine. The same owner of this wallet also owns this other wallet, owns this certain asset. So all of having the ability to know certain things about a stranger is really what's going to change behavior. >>And one of the things that we're really excited about is being able to prove information about yourself without sharing it. So I can tell you, Hey, I'm a unique person. I'm an American, I'm not an American, but I don't have to tell you who I am. And, and you can still know that it's true. And, and that is that concept is going to be what enables, what you're talking about. I'm going to be able to show up in some new community that was created two hours ago, and we can all trust each other that a certain set of facts are true. And that's possible because of >>Exchange and exchange value with smart contracts and other no middlemen involved activities, which is the promise of the new decentralized web. All right. So let me ask you a question on that, because I think this is key. The anonymous point is huge. If you look at any kind of abstraction layers or any evolution in technology over the years, it's always been about cleaning up the mess or the, or extending capabilities of something that was inadequate. We mentioned DNS. Now you got this, there's a lot of problems with web two, 2.0, social bots. You mentioned bots, bots are anonymous and they don't have a lot of time in market. So it's easy to start bots and everyone who does either scraping bots, everyone knows this. What you just pointed out was an ops environment that was user choice, but has all the data that could be verified. So it's almost like a blue check mark on Twitter without your name, >>Kind of, it's good. It's going to be hundreds of check marks, but exactly, because there's so many different things that you're going to want to be, you're going to want to communicate to strangers, but that's exactly the right. That's exactly the right mental model. It's going to be these check marks for all kinds of different contexts. And that's, what's going to enable people to trust that they're, you know, you're talking to a real person or you're talking to the type of person you thought you were talking to, et cetera. But yeah, it's, it's, you know, I, I think that the issues that we have with bots today are because a web tool has failed at solving identity. I think Facebook at one point was deleting half a billion fake accounts per quarter. Something like the entire number of user profiles. They were deleting per you know, per year. So it's just a total. >>They spring up like mushrooms. They just pop up the thing. This is the problem. I mean, the data that you acquire in new siloed platforms is used by them, the company. So you don't own the data. So you become the product as the cliche goes. But what you're saying is if you have an identity and you pop around to multiple sites, you also have your digital footprints and your exhaust that you own. Okay. That's time. That's reputation data. I mean, you can cut it any way you want, but the point is, it's your stuff over time, that's yours and that's immutable. It's on the blockchain. You can store it and make that permanent and add to it. Exactly. That's, that's a time-based thing versus today, bots that are spreading misinformation can, can get popped up when they get killed. They just start another one. So time actually is a metric for quality here. >>Absolutely. And people already use it in the crypto world to say like, Hey, this wallet was created greater than two years ago. This wallet has had, you know, head has had transactions for at least three or four years. Like this is probably a real, you know, this is probably a legit legitimate user and anybody can look that up. I mean, we could go look it up together right now on, on ether scan. It would take, you know, a minute. >>Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. I'm a big fan. I can tell, I love this product. I think you guys are gonna do really well. Congratulations. I'm a big fan. I think this is needed. What are some of the deals you've done? blockchain.com has won an opera. Can you take us through those deals and why they're working with you? We'll start with blockchain.com. >>Yeah. So the whole thing here is that this identity standard for web three apps need to choose to support it. So we spent several years as a company working to get as many crypto wallets and browsers and crypto exchanges to support this, to support this identity standard. Some of the, some of the, the, the largest, and probably, you know, most, most popular companies to have done. This are blockchain.com. For example, blockchain.com, one of the largest crypto wallets in the world. And you can use your domain names instead of crypto addresses. And, and, and this is, this is, this is super cool because blockchain.com in particular focuses on onboarding new users. So they're very focused on how we're going to get the next 4 billion internet users to use this tech. And they said, you know, usernames are going to be essential. Like, how can we onboard this next several billion people? If we have to explain to them about all these crazy addresses, and it's not just one, like we want to give you 10 40 character addresses for all these different contexts. Like, it's just, it's just, it's just no way people are gonna be able to do that without, without having a username. So that's why we're really excited about, about what blockchain that comes through. And they, they, they want to train users that this is the way you should use it. >>Yeah. And certainly no one wants to remember. I remember writing down all my writing. I, I'm not, I was never a big wallet fan cause all the hacks, I used to write it down and store it in my safe. But if the house burns down or I, I kick the can I'm, who's going to find it. Right? So again, these are all important things, your key storing it, securing it, super important. Talk about opera. And that's an interesting partnership because it's got a browser and people know what it is, what are they doing? Different almost imagine they're innovating around the identity and what people's experiences with, what they touch. >>So this is, this is one of those things. That's a little bit easier. And I strongly encourage everybody to go and try dApps after this. Cause this is going to be one of those concepts to be a little easier. If you, if you try it, then if you hear about it, but the concept of a wallet and a browser are kind of merging. So it makes sense to have a wallet inside of your browser. Because when you go to a website, the website is going to want you to sign in with your wallet. So having that be in one app is quite convenient for users. And so opera was one of the trailblazers, a traditional browser that added a crypto wallet so that you can store money in there. And then also added support for domain names, for payments and for websites. So you can type in Brad dot crypto and you can send me money or you can type in Brad dot crypto into the browser and you can check out my website. I've got a little NFT gallery. You can see my collection up there right now. So that's the, that's the idea is that browsers have this kind of super power in a web three. And what I think is going to happen opera and brave have been kind of the trailblazers here. But I think is going to happen is that these traditional browsers are going to wake up and they're going to see that integrating a wallet is critical for them to be able to provide services to consumers. >>I mean, it is an app. I mean, why not make it a D app as well? Because why wouldn't I want to just send you crypto, like Venmo, you mentioned earlier, which people can understand that concept. Ben, let me make my cash. Same concept here, but built in to the browser, which is not a browser anymore. It's a, a reader, a D app reader, basically with a wallet. All right. So, so what does this mean for you guys in the marketplace? You've got opera pushing the envelope on browsing, changing the experience, enabling the applications to be discovered and navigated and consumed. You got blockchain.com, blockchain.com with the wallets and being embedded there. Good distribution. How, what, who are you looking for for partners? How do people partner? Let's just say the cube wants to do NFTs and we want to have a login for our communities, which are all open. How do we partner with you? Or do we have to wait? Or is there a, I mean, take us through the partnership strategy. How do we, how do people engage with unstoppable Dwayne's >>Yeah, so, I mean, I think that if you're, you know, if you're a wallet or a crypto exchange, it's super easy, we would love to have you support being able to send money using domains. We also have all sorts of different kind of marketing activities we can do together. We can give out free stuff to, to your communities. We have a bunch of education that we do. We're really trying to be this onboarding point to web three. So there's, I think a lot of, a lot of cool stuff we can do together on the commercial side and on the, the, the marketing side. And then the other category that we didn't talk about was dabs. And we now have this login with unstoppable domains, which you kind of alluded to there. And so you can log in with your domain name and then you can give the app permission to get certain information about you or proof of information about you, not the actual information, if you don't want to share it because it's your choice and you're in control. And so that would be, that would be another thing. Like if you all launch a DAP, we should absolutely have log-in with unstoppable. >>Yeah. There's so much headroom here. You've got a short-term solution with exchange. Get that distribution. I get that that's early days of the foundation, push the distribution, get you guys everywhere. But the real success comes in for the login. I mean, the sign-on single sign-on concept. I think that's going to be powerful, great stuff. Okay. Future, tell us something we don't know about ensemble domains that people might be interested in. >>I think it's really, I think the thing that you're going to hear about a lot from us in the future is going to be around this idea of identity, of being able to prove that you're a human and be able to tell apps that and apps are going to give you all kinds of special access and rewards and all kinds of other things, because, because you gave them that information. So that's the that's, that's probably, that's the hint I'm going to drop. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Brad, you bring trust, you bring quality verified data to intelligence, software, and machine learning, AI and access to distributed communities and distributed applications. Interesting to see what the software does, what that, cause it traditionally didn't have that before. I mean just in mindblowing, I mean, it's pretty crazy great stuff, Brad. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing the insight. Co-founder unstoppable domains, Brad camp. Thanks for stopping by the cubes. Showcase with unstoppable domains.

>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering splunk.com 19 brought to you by Splunk. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's the cubes coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunk's dot com I'm John, the host of the cube. This is Splunk's 10th year user conference is the cube seventh year. We've been riding on the same wave with Splunk over the years and just watching the phenomenal growth and changes at the level of data at scale we've been covering. We can remember I said from day one data at the center of this, not just log files is now gone. Beyond that, we're here with Carrie Pailin, the CMO, chief marketing officer for Splunk. Welcome to the cube. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. The folks that know us know about spunk. Notice the color changes in the background, the popping kink, burning yellow, orange underneath, new branding. You're new to Splunk story, career in technology. Um, this is exciting. And then portfolio, there's all the news is a phenomenal good news flow. >>Very relevant, right on Mark. Data is now creating value and datas like software. It's enabling value. Splunk software and solution platform has done that and this new new grounds to take. But you're now setting the agenda for the brand and the company tell us, I mean, it's a marketer's dream. What can I say? It's a, you know, I joined nine months ago and when I was interviewing for the role, I remember Doug Merritt saying to me, Hey, you know, we might be the only $2 billion enterprise software company that nobody's ever heard of. Amy said, I want to go solve for that. Right? Like the folks who know Splunk and our customers, they love us, our product is awesome and our culture is awesome, but the world doesn't know about us yet and we haven't invested there. So I want to go take the brand to the next level. >>And I want the world to understand what data use cases are out there that are so broad and so vast. And we believe that every problem ultimately can be solved through data or almost every problem. And we wanted to set the stage for that with this new brand campaign. Yeah. Just on a personal note. And following the journey of Splunk, a scrappy startup goes public and growth modes. When you're a growth Moe is hard to kind of lay down foundational things like branding and whatnot. But now sponsor leader, we did a poll within our community and for cloud and on premise security, Splunk's the number one supplier for just laws with workloads. And then now cloud security is kicking in. So the relationship to Amazon, Google cloud platform and Azure is a critical part of Splunk is now the leader. So leaders have to do things like make sure that their brand's good. >>This is what you're doing. Take us behind the scenes of the branding, the things you chose and data for everything. Yeah. D the little small nuance data to everything. Um, and the reason behind that was we believe you can bring and we can enable our customers to bring data to every question, every decision and every action to create meaningful outcomes. And the use cases are vast and enormous. We talked about some of them before the show started, but helping look at global law enforcement, get ahead of human trafficking through SPOHNC and spelunking. What's going on across all sorts of data sources, right? Helping zone Haven, which is our first investment from Splunk ventures, which startup that's actually helping firefighters figure out burn burn patterns with fire wildfires. But also when temperatures and humidity change where sensors are, they can alert firefighters 30 to 45 minutes earlier than they would usually do that. >>And then they can also help influence evacuation patterns. I mean it's, it's remarkable what folks are doing with data today and it's really at the, at the core of solving some of the world's biggest issues. It's hard to tell a story for a company that solves some of the use cases. Yes. Because depending on who you talk to, that's the company. This is what we should be telling them. I know you do this over here, so when you're horizontally creating this kind of value, yeah, it's hard to kind of brand that because it will get a lot of opinions because you're doing a lot of different things. There's not like one vertical. That's right. So this is the challenge that most B to B marketers will fall on the trip. We do this because we have a lot of customers in this one segment. But yes, you guys are hitting so much more. >>How did you deal with that? Ha, we had a lot of talks about it, a lot of discussions, a lot of debate and I love diversity of thought. It usually drives the right outcomes, but we had a lot of this, this is not an easy answer. If it had been, it would have been done years ago and we really talked about setting the stage for where, you know, I love the Wayne Gretzky quote about skate to where the puck is going and that's what he always did and that's why he was so good. We believe there will ultimately be a data platform of platforms and we believe Splunk is that platform, right? And so that's where the industry's going. We wanted to cast a net that would take us there so that this is the beginning of a brand evolution for us and not a total rebrand, but it's setting the stage for a category creation that we believe is coming in the industry. >>A few. You guys are smart and I think my observation would be looking at some of our 10 years of reporting and sharing some on digital is that all the conversations around data is impacting the real world. Yes. You see Mark Zuckerberg and on Capitol Hill having the answer to the date of debacles, he has cybersecurity attacks, national security, um, ransomware taking down cities and towns. This is a real impact. Forest fires disrupting rolling blackouts. So technology's impacting real world lives. That's right. This is really new to tech. I mean usually behind the scenes, you know, coding, but not anymore. We're the front lines of real societal, global. Yes. Jade is at the forefront and it's really exciting. It's also frightening, right? Because we believe data presents the greatest opportunity for humanity, but also some of the greatest threats. And so hence our ability to really dig in on data security. >>It's important to do that while we're actually also surfacing data to solve real world issues. You've been in the industry for a while and when you came to Splunk, boasts a couple of things that surprised you as you, you had some thoughts going in, you knew Splunk. Yes. What are some of the things that surprised you when you got here? Oh, I mean, in such a good way. A few things, you know. Well, here's the story. Three days into being at Splunk, my dad got very ill and I wasted him to Austin for heart surgery and he actually didn't make it. Um, and so it's been a rough year to say the least. And uh, the way that Splunk's culture, I knew about it before I came, but the way that this company treated me, like I had been here 10 years, uh, when I'd really only been an employee three days was something I'll never forget. >>And it's, it's special. Um, and so I believe that companies are successful if they are smart and healthy and in Splunk has the healthy and droves and not just the compassion and the empathy, but you know, a very transparent culture. We debate things, we talk about things, we support each other. We are accountable. And I believe that's a big part of why we've grown so fast because our culture is incredibly healthy and very, um, collaborative as a team. I'm sorry for your loss. Thank you. Um, you mentioned the culture is a big part of Splunk. Yes. In talking to some of the folks that spoke over the years, there's no, I will, I'll totally say this. There's no shortage of opinions, so have not volunteered. These are robustness. Yes. Diversity of thoughts, very actionable communities. How do you, um, how do you look at that? Because that's a, could be a force, a force multiplier. >>Yes. For the brand. How are you going to tie in to everything with the community? How are you going to harness that energy? Yeah. So it's coming and the reality is data to everything is actually a set up to tell the stories of everyone who is using data today. And so the community is going to be one of the first places we go to surface. Some of those amazing stories. Um, and some of the things you see here at the show are actually showcasing that in the keynote today we heard from zone Haman and Porsche and so many others around their use cases. But the community is where it all begins and that's the lifeblood of our sort of spunkiness and a something that we don't take for granted once. One second. Sorry about the Barack Obama. Yeah. Directions with him and his interest in Splunk. Yeah. So we had our big re rebrand a reveal last month we had an event and it was for C suite type of folks. >>That was a very intimate event and we wanted somebody to keynote that and headline that that really brought to life the whole notion that you can bring data to everything. And president Obama was the first POTUS that actually use data in his campaign strategy. He's very open about that. He's the first president to appoint a chief data scientist to the white house. He's actually exceptionally geeky and very data-driven. And so when we asked him to come and headline this, he actually was really excited about it. Um, and you know, in, in great fashion, his communications team was really strict on curating the questions that we had for him. And he was so cute. He showed up to the event and he said, look, um, I'm so thrilled to be here. I love what you guys are doing and you can ask me anything. It's just like ready to go. >>And he was so wonderful and teed up this, this notion of day bringing data to everything so brilliantly. He's kicking, dig and be ad live all the time. He's very colorful as well as personality. Yes. He's kind of nerdy and you know, he was very open and OpenGov too. One of the things that I remember and when big data really started rolling into the scene around 2009, 2010 yes. You saw that opening up data registries from cities and towns and actually created innovation from health care medical supplies? Yes. Yes. So this has been a big part of it. Huge. You guys are doing some things out here and I see the exhibits we're using the day you're doing demos. How do you see you guys helping society with that? Because if you get to the next level, you've got some great use cases. Yes, the public sector is a big part of some news here. >>Fed ramp is one little technicality, but you got some certification, but government's modernizing now. So you know post Obama, you're seeing modernization of procurement roll with cloud, certainly cyber security. Amazon with the CIA, department of defense, role of data in the military and public sector. Yes, education. This is going to be a disruptive enabler for faults on the public impact. I mean, look, there's, you know, Doug touched on this a little bit this morning, the reality in our press conference, but the reality is if you do it right, opening up datasets to communities of people that can do better together and you can get this collective momentum going. For instance, in healthcare, I mean I'm a little bit of a health care nerd and I don't know if you've watched the PBS special on the Mayo clinic, it's spectacular. But one of the reasons the Mayo has been amazing for years is because their doctors all work off the same systems in every discipline in that facility and they can learn more holistically about a patient. >>And I think about the impact that data could have if we could open up those data sets across every health provider for one person or the same illness with every major institution across the U S collaborating and sharing and what we could actually do to make real impact and strides against some of the diseases that are really crippling society today. So I think that the good that we can do with data, if we open up those data sets and do it in a way that, that it's safe. It's remarkable the progress we can make. You know, one of the from machine learning has been a big success story. Machine learning toolkit. Customers are raving about it. Opening up the data creates better machine learning. AI creates better business value. That's right. That's that part of how you guys see things rolling out. Sure. I mean, as a marketer we use AI today and it's really more machine learning. >>It's sad pattern recognition. But we use, uh, you know, my last stand as a CMO, the last company I was at, we use an AI bot to augment our sales headcount for following up on leads. And it looked like a human being. I mean, same thing for Splunk. I mean, the more we can see pattern recognition, proffer up insights, the better off we are to help out our customers. And so Tim Teles team is driving that hard and fast into our innovation curve with everything that we do. Innovation culture, big time here, right? Huge, huge and one of the reasons I came to Splunk is when I interviewed with Tim and I said, Hey, how are you doing on recruiting engineers in the Valley? We all know that that is liquid gold, and he said that he had hired 370 odd engineers in less than a year and from really big brands like Airbnb and I thought, all right, there's some really cool innovation going on here. >>If some of the best engineers in the Valley really want to come work here and they want to work for a great leader, and Tim and his team are that. so.com is 10 years now this year has been riding the wave together. It's been fun. Your first, my very first dotcom. Yes. Your thoughts on this, on this community, this event. Share your, your thoughts. I mean I'm blown away and this is a team sport. I'm so proud of the events team, the creative team, the sales teams, everybody who's come together to make this event so spectacular. It's just sort of mind numbing that a company of our size can put on such an experience for our user community, but I'm also thrilled with the engagement. We have over 300 sessions this week and most of them are user and customer use, case driven and the stories they are telling are magnificent. >>They're doing this all with Splunk, so it's pretty special. And the ecosystem and the app showcase is pretty hot here. You're seeing real applications, people writing code on top of Splunk? Yes, it's, it's, I'm sorry I don't use this word often. I'm 48 but it's rad. It's so cool. Yes. Harry, thanks so much for coming on the cube and sharing your insights. Absolutely. Final thoughts for the people who aren't here at the event, watching on camera, what, how would you encapsulate.com this year? What's the top story that needs to be told? I mean, look, the reality is that we are bringing data to way more than just security and it ops, which has been our core use cases forever, and they will continue to be, but folks are that are not incredibly data literate or through Splunk bringing data to everything and solving some big gnarly issues in the world. And it's pretty exciting stuff. So check us out. All right. Thanks. Gnarly red. Cool. I need a surf board, Jerry. Thanks for coming on Friday. Thank you so much. Coverage here@thetenth.com I'm Jennifer with the cube, bringing you all the action here in Las Vegas. Three days of cubed wall to wall coverage. We've got one more after this short break.

>> from Austin, Texas. It's Theo Cube, covering pure storage. Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by pure storage. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin Day Volante is my co host were a pure accelerate 2019 in Austin, Texas. A couple of guests joining us. Next. Please welcome Barack elected director product management for slunk. Welcome back to the Cube. Thank you. And guess who's back. Von Stewart. V. P. A. Technology from pure Avon. Welcome back. >> Hey, thanks for having us guys really excited about this topic. >> We are too. All right, so But we'll start with you. Since you're so excited in your nice orange pocket square is peeking out of your jacket there. Talk about the Splunk, your relationship. Long relationship, new offerings, joint value. What's going on? >> Great set up. So Splunk impure have had a long relationship around accelerating customers analytics The speed at which they can get their questions answered the rate at which they could ingest data right to build just more sources. Look at more data, get faster time to take action. However, I shouldn't be leading this conversation because Split Split has released a new architecture, a significant evolution if you will from the traditional Splunk architectural was built off of Daz and a shared nothing architecture. Leveraging replicas, right? Very similar what you'd have with, like, say, in H D. F s Work it load or H c. I. For those who aren't in the analytic space, they've released the new architecture that's disaggregated based off of cashing and an object store construct called Smart Store, which Broth is the product manager for? >> All right, tell us about that. >> So we release a smart for the future as part of spunk Enterprise. $7 to about a near back back in September Timeframe. Really Genesis or Strong Smart Strong goes back to the key customer problem that we were looking to solve. So one of our customers, they're already ingesting a large volume of data, but the need to retain the data for twice, then one of Peter and in today's architecture, what it required was them to kind of lean nearly scale on the amount of hardware. What we realized it. Sooner or later, all customers are going to run into this issue. But if they want in just more data or reading the data for longer periods, of time, they're going to run into this cost ceiling sooner or later on. The challenge is that into this architecture, today's distributes killer dark picture that we have today, which of all, about 10 years back, with the evolution of the Duke in this particular architecture, the computer and story Jacqui located. And because computer storage acqua located, it allows us to process large volumes of data. But if you look at the demand today, we can see that the demand for storage or placing the demand for computer So these are, too to directly opposite trans that we're seeing in the market space. If you need to basically provide performance at scale, there needs to be a better model. They need a better solution than what we had right now. So that's the reason we basically brought Smart store on denounced availability last September. What's Marceau brings to the table is that a D couples computer and storage, So now you can scale storage independent of computers, so if you need more storage or if you need to read in for longer periods of time, you can just kill independent on the storage and with level age, remote object stores like Bill Flash bid to provide that data depository. But most of your active data said still decides locally on the indexers. So what we did was basically broke the paradigm off computer storage location, and we had a small twist. He said that now the computer stories can be the couple, but you bring comfort and stories closer together only on demand. So that means that when you were running a radio, you know, we're running a search, and whenever the data is being looked for that only when we bring the data together. The other key thing that we do is we have an active data set way ensure that the smart store has ah, very powerful cash manager that allows that ensures that the active data set is always very similar to the time when your laptop, the night when your laptop has active data sets always in the cash always on memory. So very similar to that smarts for cash allows you to have active data set always locally on the index. Start your search performance is not impact. >> Yes, this problem of scaling compute and storage independently. You mentioned H. D. F s you saw it early on there. The hyper converged guys have been trying to solve this problem. Um, some of the database guys like snowflakes have solved it in the cloud. But if I understand correctly, you're doing this on Prem. >> So we're doing this board an on Prem as well as in Cloud. So this smart so feature is already available on tramp were also already using a host all off our spun cloud deployments as well. It's available for customers who want obviously deploy spunk on AWS as well. >> Okay, where do you guys fit in? So we >> fit in with customers anywhere from on the hate say this way. But on the small side, at the hundreds of terabytes up into the tens and hundreds of petabytes side. And that's really just kind of shows the pervasiveness of Splunk both through mid market, all the way up through the through the enterprise, every industry and every vertical. So where we come in relative to smart store is we were a coat co developer, a launch partner. And because our object offering Flash Blade is a high performance object store, we are a little bit different than the rest of the Splunk s story partner ecosystem who have invested in slow more of an archive mode of s tree right, we have always been designed and kind of betting on the future would be based on high performance, large scale object. And so we believe smart store is is a ah, perfect example, if you will, of a modern analytics platform. When you look at the architecture with smart store as brush here with you, you want to suffice a majority of your queries out of cash because the performance difference between reading out a cash that let's say, that's NAND based or envy. Emmy based or obtain, if you will. When you fall, you have to go read a data data out of the Objects store, right. You could have a significant performance. Trade off wean mix significantly minimized that performance drop because you're going to a very high bandwith flash blade. We've done comparison test with other other smart store search results have been published in other vendors, white papers and we show Flash blade. When we run the same benchmark is 80 times faster and so what you can now have without architecture is confidence that should you find yourself in a compliance or regulatory issue, something like Maybe GDP are where you've got 72 hours to notify everyone who's been impacted by a breach. Maybe you've got a cybersecurity case where the average time to find that you've been penetrated occurs 206 days after the event. And now you gotta go dig through your old data illegal discovery, you know, questions around, you know, customer purchases, purchases or credit card payments. Any time where you've got to go back in the history, we're gonna deliver those results and order of magnitude faster than any other object store in the market today. That translates from ours. Today's days, two weeks, and we think that falls into our advantage. Almost two >> orders of magnitude. >> Can this be Flash Player >> at 80%? Sorry, Katie. Time 80 x. Yes, that's what I heard. >> Do you display? Consider what flashlight is doing here. An accelerant of spunk, workloads and customer environment. >> Definitely, because the forward with the smart, strong cash way allow high performance at scale for data that's recites locally in the cash. But now, by using a high performance object store like your flash played. Customers can expect the same high performing board when data is in the cash as well as invented sin. Remorseful >> sparks it. Interesting animal. Um, yeah, you have a point before we >> subjects. Well, I don't want to cut you off. It's OK. So I would say commenting on the performance is just part of the equation when you look at that, UM, common operational activities that a splitting, not a storage team. But a Splunk team has to incur right patch management, whether it's at the Splunk software, maybe the operating system, like linen store windows, that spunk is running on, or any of the other components on side on that platform. Patch Management data Re balancing cause it's unequal. Equally distributed, um, hardware refreshes expansion of the cluster. Maybe you need more computer storage. Those operations in terms of time, whether on smart store versus the classic model, are anywhere from 100 to 1000 times faster with smart store so you could have a deployment that, for example, it takes you two weeks to upgrade all the notes, and it gets done in four hours when it's on Smart store. That is material in terms of your operational costs. >> So I was gonna say, Splunk, we've been watching Splunk for a long time. There's our 10th year of doing the Cube, not our 10th anniversary of our 10th year. I think it will be our ninth year of doing dot com. And so we've seen Splunk emerged very cool company like like pure hip hip vibe to it. And back in the day, we talked about big data. Splunk never used that term, really not widely in its marketing. But then when we started to talk about who's gonna own the big data, that space was a cloud era was gonna be mad. We came back. We said, It's gonna be spunk and that's what's happened. Spunk has become a workload, a variety of workloads that has now permeated the organization, started with log files and security kind of kind of cumbersome. But now it's like everywhere. So I wonder if you could talk to the sort of explosion of Splunk in the workloads and what kind of opportunity this provides for you guys. >> So a very good question here, Right? So what we have seen is that spunk has become the de facto platform for all of one structure data as customers start to realize the value of putting their trying to Splunk on the watch. Your spunk is that this is like a huge differentiate of us. Monk is the read only skim on reed which allows you to basically put all of the data without any structure and ask questions on the flight that allows you to kind of do investigations in real time, be more reactive. What's being proactive? We be more proactive. Was being reactive scaleable platform the skills of large data volumes, highly available platform. All of that are the reason why you're seeing an increase that option. We see the same thing with all other customers as well. They start off with one data source with one use case and then very soon they realize the power of Splunk and they start to add additional use cases in just more and more data sources. >> But this no >> scheme on writer you call scheme on Reed has been so problematic for so many big data practitioners because it just became the state of swamp. >> That didn't >> happen with Splunk. Was that because you had very defined use cases obviously security being one or was it with their architectural considerations as well? >> They just architecture, consideration for security and 90 with the initial use cases, with the fact that the scheme on Reid basically gives open subject possibilities for you. Because there's no structure to the data, you can ask questions on the fly on. You can use that to investigate, to troubleshoot and allies and take remedial actions on what's happening. And now, with our new acquisitions, we have added additional capabilities where we can talk, orchestrate the whole Anto and flow with Phantom, right? So a lot of these acquisitions also helping unable the market. >> So we've been talking about TAM expansion all week. We definitely hit it with Charlie pretty hard. I have. You know, I think it's a really important topic. One of things we haven't hit on is tam expansion through partnerships and that flywheel effect. So how do you see the partners ship with Splunk Just in terms of supporting that tam expansion the next 10 years? >> So, uh, analytics, particularly log and Alex have really taken off for us in the last year. As we put more focus on it, we want to double down on our investments as we go through the end of this year and in the next year with with a focus on Splunk um, a zealous other alliances. We think we are in a unique position because the rollout of smart store right customers are always on a different scale in terms of when they want to adopt a new architecture right. It is a significant decision that they have to make. And so we believe between the combination of flash array for the hot tear and flash played for the cold is a nice way for customers with classic Splunk architecture to modernize their platform. Leverage the benefits of data reduction to drive down some of the cost leverage. The benefits of Flash to increase the rate at which they can ask questions and get answers is a nice stepping stone. And when customers are ready because Flash Blade is one of the few storage platforms in the market at this scale out band with optimized for both NFS and object, they can go through a rolling nondestructive upgrade to smart store, have you no investment protection, and if they can't repurpose that flash rate, they can use peers of service to have the flesh raise the hot today and drop it back off just when they're done within tomorrow. >> And what about C for, you know, big workloads, like like big data workloads. I mean, is that a good fit here? You really need to be more performance oriented. >> So flash Blade is is high bandwith optimization, which really is designed for workload. Like Splunk. Where when you have to do a sparse search, right, we'll find that needle in the haystack question, right? Were you breached? Where were you? Briefed. How were you breached? Go read as much data as possible. You've gotta in just all that data, back to the service as fast as you can. And with beast Cloud blocked, Teresi is really optimized it a tear to form of NAND for that secondary. Maybe transactional data base or virtual machines. >> All right, I want more, and then I'm gonna shut up sick. The signal FX acquisition was very interesting to me for a lot of reasons. One was the cloud. The SAS portion of Splunk was late to that game, but now you're sort of making that transition. You saw Tableau you saw Adobe like rip the band Aid Off and it was somewhat painful. But spunk is it. So I wonder. Any advice that you spend Splunk would have toe von as pure as they make that transition to that sass model. >> So I think definitely, I think it's going to be a challenging one, but I think it's a much needed one in there in the environment that we are in. The key thing is to always because two more focus and I'm sure that you're already our customer focus. But the key is key thing is to make sure that any service is up all the time on make sure that you can provide that up time, which is going to be crucial for beating your customers. Elise. >> That's good. That's good guidance. >> You >> just wanted to cover that for you favor of keeping you date. >> So you gave us some of those really impressive stats In terms of performance. >> They're almost too good to be true. >> Well, what's customer feedback? Let's talk about the real world when you're talking to customers about those numbers. What's the reaction? >> So I don't wanna speak for Broth, so I will say in our engagements within their customer base, while we here, particularly from customers of scale. So the larger the environment, the more aggressive they are to say they will adopt smart store right and on a more aggressive scale than the smaller environments. And it's because the benefits of operating and maintaining the indexer cluster are are so great that they'll actually turn to the stores team and say, This is the new architecture I want. This is a new storage platform and again. So when we're talking about patch management, cluster expansion Harbor Refresh. I mean, you're talking for a large sum. Large installs weeks, not two or 3 10 weeks, 12 weeks on end so it can be. You can reduce that down to a couple of days. It changes your your operational paradigm, your staffing. And so it has got high impact. >> So one of the message that we're hearing from customers is that it's far so they get a significant reduction in the infrastructure spent it almost dropped by 2/3. That's really significant file off our large customers for spending a ton of money on infrastructure, so just dropping that by 2/3 is a significant driver to kind of move too smart. Store this in addition to all the other benefits that get smart store with operational simplicity and the ability that it provides. You >> also have customers because of smart store. They can now actually bursts on demand. And so >> you can think of this and kind of two paradigms, right. Instead of >> having to try to avoid some of the operational pain, right, pre purchase and pre provisional large infrastructure and hope you fill it up. They could do it more of a right sides and kind of grow in increments on demand, whether it's storage or compute. That's something that's net new with smart store um, they can also, if they have ah, significant event occur. They can fire up additional indexer notes and search clusters that can either be bare metal v ems or containers. Right Try to, you know, push the flash, too. It's Max. Once they found the answers that they need gotten through. Whatever the urgent issues, they just deep provisionals assets on demand and return back down to a steady state. So it's very flexible, you know, kind of cloud native, agile platform >> on several guys. I wish we had more time. But thank you so much fun. And Deron, for joining David me on the Cube today and sharing all of the innovation that continues to come from this partnership. >> Great to see you appreciate it >> for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the Cube?

(energetic electronic music) >> Narrator: Live, from Nassau, in the Bahamas it's theCUBE covering POLYCON18. Brought to you by, Polymath. (attendees chatting indistinctly) >> Crew Member: So, go, we're live. >> Okay, we're live, welcome back! This is day two of our exclusive CUBE coverage of the Bahamas' POLYCON18 It's a security token conference. It's where the world of cryptocurrency, Blockchain, Bitcoin and everything comes together around powering a new value economy. A new kind of decentralized internet. This is the biggest wave that I've seen in my lifetime. It's really bigger than all the other waves, combined. I'm here with Dave Vellante. We have two days of wall-to-wall coverage. And the bottom line is, Dave, we are seeing historic, massive, wealth creation. We're seeing crypto-billionaires here. I mean, people are new money, they're old money and a massive new landscape is emerging. And the tell-sign of this is, institutional money is coming in, real professionals are coming in. It's moving from a culture of Burning Man and cult of the personalities to real industry formation. You see that with companies coming out with real commercial opportunities. You're seeing ecosystems developing, and you're starting to see biz dev. And it's been probably at least a couple decades since I've gone to a conference where this kind of computer-industry movement is happening where the players are doing deals in the hallways. You're hearing people having substantive conversations around how they can work together to create tons of value. This is a dynamic that is absolutely happening. And we're seeing a lot of wealth involved, from people who have made tons of money, billions of dollars in Bitcoin, to kind of, new migration coming into the sector from Wall Street, from other global markets. We're seeing a sea change of democratizing, with an open-source ethos. To me, this is something that we've never seen before. It has all the elements of the modernization, business model modernizations, technology modernizations, real, disruptive, enabling, technology at the heart of it. And some people ask questions like, "How do we make money?" Bottom line is, there is money being made. How and with who, is the real question. So Dave, day one's over. We were out 'til one in the morning last night, working the hallways, having great conversations. I probably talked to at least six whales as they're called, billionaires in the business, and the vibe is the same. We're here to play the long game, we love this market. There's a culture of ethos, of partnership, and openness, and unwritten rules, and tons of activity. Sure there's bad actors! But there's a lot of great players here, and they are starting to crack down on behavior that's not right, because this is a funding dynamic. It's a funding growth companies dynamic. It's a liquidity dynamic. All these things, classic, business model modernization, happening with a massive wave, your take. >> So, let's share with our audience. Well, first of all, this is an investor conference. It's the first conference built around the topic of security tokens. And we can, maybe, explain that in a moment. But, I have, John, I have never seen at an investor conference, which I guess this is, but it's more than that, Blockchain, technology, etc. But, I've never seen such diversity. Like you said, there's new money, there's old money. There's tons of millennials. 100% of the people here are doing deals. >> Yeah. >> And the conversations in the hall, it's all about ICO's, security tokens, utility tokens, protocols, white papers, business models. So, a lot of diversity. Some super smart millennials. Developers that really understand this stuff, and a lot of money. >> And, more women in tech here than I had thought. >> Yeah, I think it's slightly higher proportion. But, you're also seeing, just really interesting, you're seeing VC's who aren't going to sit back and wait and get disintermediated. You're seeing developers who have made a ton of dough, that are now sprinkling the wealth. You're seeing private equity, you're seeing hedge funds. You're seeing, like I say, traditional VC's, new types of VC's. And, very importantly, you're seeing a major diversity in cultural impact, nationalities. And this is a heavily Canadian show, because the organizers of POLYCON, the folks who started Ethereum. But, a lot of diversity in terms of where people are coming from. It's not just U.S. based, you know, MBA's-- >> Silicon Valley. >> Yeah. >> I mean, the game's changing. The other thing I observed is, we're seeing validation of my premise, a couple weeks ago when I was in Washington D.C. with Theresa Carlson, the most powerful woman in D.C. She's also the chief, and head of, Amazon Web Services' global public sector. Is that the global national stage, the nation building, the digital nation transformation, is part of it. Two, the validation that societal change and entrepreneurship, that was used to be involved in non-profits that never went anywhere, you know, these philanthropy projects. Social entrepreneurship, or societal entrepreneurship, as I call it, is absolutely real. And, in this culture, you're seeing people with Bitcoin, and crypto-currencies funding mission based activities. Now, the younger demographics, I think, lean towards that. That's pretty clear in our reporting and our data. That the younger generation wants to work for companies and communities that have an ethos of mission base. But, mission base is not about changing the world, it's about saving the world. And, this is real, you're looking at Blockchain ventures that track water supply. You're looking at Blockchain ventures that track, you know, food supply. You're looking at solving world hunger kind of challenges. And I think the tell here is, Blockchain is used to identify markets and incumbents, or opportunities where there's idle resource. So, whether that's using compute in a P2P way or solving the world hunger problem, anywhere there's an opportunity to be efficient, Blockchain is being used to solve those problems. And, the creative talent is the technology providers. This is a completely new dynamic. One that Silicon Valley pays lip service to. 'Cause they don't actually do societal change. They say they do, but, they build apps and platforms. So, I think this is a nuanced, but an important game changer for the industry, and the global economy and global entrepreneurship, because you can do things now that can be global impact based investing, and technology investing, in one shot. So, you get a double down effect for change. This is not just cloud computing, have more power, faster, better apps, more monetization. Sure, but now you have over the top, impact to users. The community dynamic, and the societal change is very, very real. That's a big driver of this ecosystem in terms of market selection, human capital, technology, leverage, and now financial. So, it is pretty intoxicating here. People are geared up, they're energized, and it's just pretty phenomenal. >> So, many people in our audience are still probably saying, I just don't get it. So, let's go back to 2008 when Satoshi, whoever that person was, writes this, I think it was an eight page white paper. And, remember what 2008 was like, banks were blowing up, too big to fail, the economic system was melting down, and guess who paid for it? The taxpayers. So, some libertarian minded people said, screw that, we're going to change the world. We're going to create a virtual currency and we're going to take back what the government is taking from us. Essentially, okay. So, that started people like, what, I don't really get it. That has formed a whole new, and people often say, it's not about Bitcoin, it's about Blockchain. Blockchain is building out this whole new internet. And we've talked about that all week. But, what you're seeing now is this concept of a value store a virtual value store, and people leveraging that in so many different ways to build out this new internet. And, they're building protocols, they're building apps, they're building new capabilities that we haven't seen before. That brings state to the internet, a state of communications. Now, let's talk about the investor profiles that we see here. I want to start with developers. So, developers built the internet, and most of them didn't really get paid huge money. Here, many of the developers are like multi, multi-millionaires flying in on private jets. Okay, so why? Because they've developed a new token that they, basically, invested in with their sweat and their money, and the price has gone through the roof. Bitcoin, Ethereum, etc., VC's. VC's, you know, they elbowed out, well they're elbowing their way back in. Private equity, hedge funds, big money. And there's two paths there, one is, guys that read white papers, real hard core technical guys who say, I'm going to invest in just this infrastructure token, utility token. Other guys who say, You know what, I've got big money, I don't really understand the technology, but, I'm going to sprinkle my money around and try to get a big hit. You got angels, you got entrepreneurs, you got superstars that have become billionaires, that are mission based. All these, and here's the thing John, and I want you to sort of explain this to the audience. You have these investor ecosystems forming. It's like the PayPal Mafia, and they're basically buying up all the tokens early, elbowing other people out. You know, one investor told us, We're fighting steel with steel. Steel beats steel, you have to form, it's like Survivor Baha Mar, right? And they're forming groups, and they're eyeing each other, attacking opportunities, elbowing each out, and it's really interesting. >> I mean, it's happening, big time. And, this is healthy, I think, in my mind. Emerging ecosystems have this behavior. The early days of Silicon Valley was very much the same. And it became very much war, now in Silicon Valley. See, people don't syndicate deals as much as they used to. Some are and some aren't, but the notion of teamwork has always been part of Silicon Valley. The old saying is, venture capital is a team sport. That is very much what's going on here. Now, they team up because they have to, but, steel on steel implies art of war. You know, we're going to take more allocations down. That's because the new pro persona of the investor, Dave, is the billionaire developer who captured value from the technology that they built, not someone else, not some central organization, they're the players. Developers, and or the actors who were making money in the early days of Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and Blockchain actually are also starting funds themselves. So, that is a new dynamic. We've never seen that before, where you see a wealthy developer become rich and then also start investing at the same time. You have a smarter investor there, but they're doing it in packs and herds. You have a tribe mentality and people are starting to recognize that, okay, this group here loves Burning Man, this group here is more commercial oriented, this group here, like Polychain is much more technical, and BlockTower's much more Goldman Sachs like. So, you're starting to see the formation of categorical roles in the ecosystem. This is very healthy. Now, in the short term there's some jockeying, right? So, you're starting to see people syndicate together. You buy my coin, I'll buy your coin. So, there's a healthy, robust equilibrium going on where the market of insiders is very much the story. The insiders of this industry are the players. They are the ones, not just building the technology, they're funding technology, they're also recruiting, the talent issue, human capital role, mission based. These are all new dynamics. This is going to be a hard nut to crack if you're an incumbent, venture capitalist, or hedge fund, trying to walk into this ecosystem, throw your weight around and compete on a frontal basis, money for money, steel on steel, if you don't play by the rules of engagement that's emerging. Such as, open source communities, unwritten rules, certain kinds of syndications, eliminating bad behavior. This is a dynamic that's real, and you'll either win or lose if you're an investor, win or lose if you're an entrepreneur if you don't recognize that, kind of, big picture. So, you get down and dirty, you got to pull back and say, okay, what's going on, how do I engage? This is where the true money making is going on. >> That's great analysis, John. You mentioned the word dynamics several times. The other underpinning dynamic is, we are going to take control of our own destinies. I've heard things all week like, I might move out of the U.S. Ya know. (laughs) Do you have a bank account overseas? (laughs) >> Estonia's looking good right now. >> Right, because I'm going to move to a place that's more friendly to this kind of concept. And the U.S. is anti-competitive. And this is the ethos of this community, We are going to control our own destiny. And we're going to go live in places and work in places that are friendly. >> This, to me, is perfect capitalism at work. You know, some would criticize Barack Obama or other folks that might have more of a socialistic bent around having government do redistribution of wealth. This is actually an example where I see redistribution of wealth going on in a capitalistic way. Where the enabling technology, Blockchain, and or new business models with cryptocurrency, which is money, basically open sourced money, as Miko Matsumura would say, and that is the dynamic. That is actually creating real value and redistribution of wealth. And the premise of Blockchain and cryptocurrency, although Bill Tighe pointed out, investor, and leader in the area, money's a concept, right? A dollar's a dollar, it has money value because it's a concept. But, if you look at things like what we learned in business school, the value chain of a organization, value chain, Blockchain, cryptocurrency money, is that this redistribution of wealth is going on in context to redefining business, redefining how people work. And again, I said earlier, the human capital component is very much a real dynamic, it's not just machines taking over the world. Some poopoo AI, some poopoo all this technology, but, human capital, a big force in this market. And, it is a big issue, and you got to learn protocols. We're all developers. So, again, zoom out, opportunity is right there. I think I'm long on this sector. I'm long on this game because the actors are going to self organize, Steel on steel turns into handshakes, or, steel on steel in the right areas, eliminating bad actors. FCC makes some regulations, that's only in the U.S. What about the opportunities for digital nations to say, hey, we're going to be the Wall Street of crypto. There are country opportunities right now where whoever builds that system, taking in crypto, converting it to fiat, will win everything. It's like, I'm surprised no one's done that yet. >> Yeah >> This is coming. >> I can't tell you what the price of Bitcoin is in August, but I agree with you, longterm, there's no question in my mind that this is going to be a key contributor to the digital economy. The build out of the next internet. Remember the fundamentals, you got Bitcoin, it's essentially, you know, a virtual Fort Knox. You got Ethereum, which is a horizontal infrastructure that's much more easily programmed by developers. And then you've got a zillion other protocols and tokens. I want to talk about risk factors. Like what could blow this up, what have we heard? Tax exposure, all these people, all these Bitcoin millionaires and billionaires that think, I don't have to pay taxes, well, guess what? (laughs) You do have to pay taxes. And so, one theory is that's why the price has moderated lately, 'cause people are saying, Wow, it's like I exercised the option, but I don't have cash to pay my taxes. 'Cause we saw a pullback recently. Regulation's the other one we heard. Too much regulation could put some brakes on the momentum here, your thoughts. >> Talent, talent. >> Yep, skill sets, and developer talent, right? >> Yeah, well, the top talent, in the protocol area is going to be at a premium. This is a global issue, so, you know, the old days when cloud, old days, when cloud computing came around, full stack developers were all the rage. Now protocol developers are all the rage. So, if you're a full stack developer and a protocol developer, you can have a lot of leverage. So, the danger, in my opinion is the job hopping nature of some of these ICO's. Hey, I made a bunch of dough on this ICO, they paid me in Ether and or Bitcoin whatever, I'm off to the next one and make a couple million bucks there, and move on to the next one. And so the job hopping factor for top talent is an issue. We heard that loud and clear. The tax thing, I'm bullish on Bitcoin, post April 16th. I think, buy Bitcoin right now and look for it to pop in April. Because I think people are going to realize, Oh shit, I should have sold some and had a tax carry over. >> Well, be careful, be careful. They might have to sell more to meet their tax bill. They might be holding on for a little bit, but I don't know. >> File the extension. (laughs) But anyway, I love the opportun-- >> No, you owe your taxes on the date. Extension doesn't remove you from paying the taxes. >> Yeah, but the issue Dave, is, that what's a scam and what's not a scam? So, you know, if you ask Joe Six Pack on the street, throw crypto and Bitcoin, it's a scam. There's a lot of stuff going on. This industry is absolutely, acutely aware of that dynamic. The risk on the wealth creation opportunity. They know it, so they're creating mechanisms to kind of weed that out. You're seeing PR firms having internal, called, in baseball and in sports it's like, clubhouse issues. There's a clubhouse issue going on in this industry. And they're going to take it amongst themselves. And I think that is going to be the tell sign if this ecosystem succeeds or not. >> Do you think there's more scams, or less scams going on there? >> There'll be less scams because, obviously there's too much money to be made right now. >> Right, and in terms of the percentage of the activity that's going on, in my opinion, the smallest percentages is the scams. The challenge is, anyone could be a scam so you have to sort that out, you got to do-- >> Due diligence. >> As always, you got to do homework. >> Alright, well, day two Dave, we're going to drill into. We got a great line up of guests. We'll be talking to investors, entrepreneurs, some whales coming on, we're going to get their opinion on the future of this market. What's the liquidity, how do you get paid? Who's making the money? How is the value that's being created ultimately captured? And, who's going to get that value? It's theCUBE coverage, from the Bahamas, exclusive coverage of the cryptocurrency, tokenization, here at POLYCON18. We'll be right back. (electronic music)

>>Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's the queue covering IBM edge 2015 brought to you by IBM. >>Hello everyone. Welcome to the cube. I'm John furrier. We are here in Las Vegas for a special presentation inside the cube. A special announcement. We have mayor AC Borden, mayor of Memphis and Jen Crozer who's the vice president at IBM alliances and Alliance. Welcome to the cube. So mayor Memphis, I'll see renounced city, great culture. Um, smarter cities is a big thing right now. So talk about why Memphis, why IBM, why are you here? What's the big announcement? What's happening in Memphis? >>Well, it's a great day for Memphis in addition to the Grizzlies had slipped that in there, but uh, one, uh, of, of, of just the handful of cities that are receiving what are known as IBM smart cities challenge grants, we pick a challenge. We have, uh, they help us come up with a solution to it. And it's not some abstract idea. In our case, it's how do we weed out the non-emergency calls from the true emergency calls and our EMS service? 120,000, over 120,000 calls a year, about 25,000 of them are not truly emergency calls. So what that does is it takes valuable time and resources away from those true emergency, a true emergency calls. It should be attended to on a priority basis. >>So I know that you have a Twitter handle and you've got a lot of followers. Is the tech culture in Memphis emerging describes the folks that they, what's it like in Memphis from a tech perspective? Are there people who have moved over or there's rabbit. I know there's a lot of folks in town really talk about the tech community. >>Even in my generation, I'm on there just to do a little quality checking. Also on a double analysis. I'm still in this from Zinn. Uh, we're one of the three cities that will received the, uh, Twitter grants, which will allow us to access us and get that data there and use it as we make decisions. So that's really going to be unique for Memphis. So yes, Memphis is a up to date. >>Jen, I gotta ask you because one of the things that's near and dear to our heart in the cube is technology for the advancement of better signal, not noise, whether that's society, education, the Twitter data, and we've talked to in heat you saw about this is that it's the signal of the humans. Um, and this notion of smarter cities is bringing technology to impact the human lives, not just making people get an iWatch or what are, there's some real benefits. Talk about the grants, talk about what IBM is doing because this is real important stuff. I mean, smarter planets to marketing slogan, but the end of the day technology can help people and talk about how that's part of the grant and, and why Memphis and what are these guys doing that's unique. That could be a great case study for others. We started building a smarter planet at one of the things we had to think about was what was the acupressure >>points that would have the biggest ripple effects. And it's cities, right? More than half of the world's population lives in cities. And that's growing by a multiplier every day. And so that's where we wanted to start and we've been really gratified when we started smarter cities challenge, which is a pro bono program. Give us your toughest problem. We will send you a team of six IBM executives for three weeks to help you solve it for free. We've had over 600 mayors apply and we've delivered more than 115 teens >>and in Memphis. I got to ask the question about how you look at the, the governing process now with mobile computing, you can hear everything. They're talking back in real time and it might not be as organized. Certainly tweeting all over the place and kind of getting that data is really key. What's your vision >>that that's the key. We know Memphis, we know what information we have with that. We have what in the world do you do with it? So what better partner than IBM? We know Memphis, but IBM knows the world. We're not the only one who's faced this challenge. So with this team of experts, the IBM professionals who will be owned the ground there, they will then say, here's what you have. Here's the best way to use it. Here's what they did in Rome. Here's what they did in Berlin, London, New York or wherever. So the key is not how much information do you have but what in the world can you do with it in real day to day solutions to those everyday problems. And let me point this out. This is much more than just technology with the process we're going to employ in Memphis using nurses perhaps as dispatchers so that they can ask a few more questions when the call comes in are perhaps helping us set up a system in which nurses will go to the homes of the individuals who we call frequent flyers who often call when, it's not true any emergency but this is because life is on the line here and you really have to have the ability to analyze in real time and apply the right solution. >>And this is why IBM's expertise on a worldwide basis is so critical. >>We always talk about, we always talk about two aspects of real time near real time, which is people get today it's close enough, but when you're in a self driving car maybe or an emergency situation, you want real time. So that's really the key here. Yeah, >>that's the gay real time information being employed in a real real life situation. And that's what any emergency call that's. >>So I've got to get under the hood a little bit cause we like to go a little bit into the engine of, of the, of the local environment. I mean it, people who know life today, they got their cell phones, they think it's easy to call nine one one. It's not that easy. You have these old systems and the cell towers are connected to the municipal networks and you've got a lot of volume of calls coming in. That's a challenge for the local, the technology team and with this new system that's going to clear it up. So, so talk how you guys go from this clogged, you know, traffic calls to really segmenting the emergencies from the nonverbal. >>Again, that's another critical point. We're confident this is going to work and it will somewhat declaw if that's a word unclog because I experienced just without the grant shows us that we could weed out so many of the other calls. They will not be coming in to your nine one one. So that's, that's a big, big help right there is to make sure if we could weed out 25,000 calls, which is what we had last year. We're not truly emergency calls, you wouldn't speak in terms of a Claude nine one one system. >>I was talking to a friend, they're like, give me an example of some of this clog networks that I go, well imagine your phone going off a million times a night. The notifications, cause we're in a notification economy that you have to kind of weed through that. So how are you guys using the data? What's the technology? Can you give some specifics to what's being implemented, the team and how the local resources inter interact with IBM? >>Well I think, you know, the mayor's called out this one source of data that he's getting and mayors we know are getting multiple strings. So we have our intelligent operations center that IBM uses to create dashboards for mayors to see real time data about several different industries or sources or areas that are important to them. But I think that your point about the humans talking is a really critical one. And I want to come back to that because it's easy for us to fixate on the technology. And I think one of the things we've seen in this program is the technology enabling city leaders to hear their constituents in new ways, what they're saying and what they're not saying. And also for them to communicate back with them and close the loop on feedback as policies and programs are inactive. And the thing about the presence of IBM is kind of like a good housekeeping. It will open up Memphis to resources from other national groups. As a matter of fact, we're already using funds from another entity to set up our dashboards for performance in all areas, including of the nine one one calls. So IBM is like this huge magnet. But once folks see, Hey, IBM is in there, others who come in and say, we're going to help Memphis as it develops this system. So >>may I have to ask you a question. If as automation and technology helps abstract away a lot of the manual clogged data and understanding the signal from the noise, what's relevant, what's real time, you have a lot more contextual visibility into your environment and the people. How would you envision the future organization of the government and education and, and uh, police, fire, et cetera, working together? What's the preferred future in your mind's eye? As technology rolls out? The preferred future will be >>the, that when we come up with an innovation like this will be a non event. It would just be, it ought to be the order of the day. Uh, government sometimes kind of lags behind. No, we want to get to the point where we're leading. Uh, quite frankly, my vision is that this soon will become a non event. It will become the order of the day. Uh, humans are citizens will not be afraid of, Oh, I bet not call. I'm going to get a computer on the end of the line or they got a gadget down. They're just going to try to innovate me and see if I'm going to say it would be the order of the day. That's, that's what we're working forward and what we are emphasizing here is not what we are taking away but what we are bringing in. Additionally for this technology, we will actually be able to have a good diagnosis, a good case record built on what we call the frequent flyers. We know the people who call every two weeks, but they will feel so much better when two days before they usually call. A nurse will show up and say, came to check on you and that's what's coming out of this will be customers. This will be the new norm >>because is work. This is already that they're happy people, happy customers, happy voters. Hey, you nailed it. Barack Obama had put in for the first time a data scientist on the white house, DJ Patel, a former entrepreneur, former venture capitalist. Data science is a big deal. Now. Um, are you guys seeing that role coming into the local presence as well? Yes, >>and it's so critical to government and the private sector. If you come up with an item that's not reducing the profit margin, you just shut it down. We can't do that in government that week. Every service we provide, we're locked into that. I cannot say, well the police department where we are, we're not breaking even on that. Let's just shut that down. We won't run three shifts. We'll cut out that third shift. So we have a mandate. It's an imperative. What we're doing here is not an option. This is an absolutely essential. >>So you're excited for the grant. What's next after the announcement? What do you guys be doing together? We've got 16 cities around the world who will be getting these teams. So it's time to schedule them and get started and have the grant now, how many mayors applied and what was the numbers again? Over the life of the program, over 600 mayors have applied for this. This year it was just over a hundred and we are sending teams to 16 cities this year. Well, you guys can get that technology go and get some more music pumping through the world. That's a great place and I'll see the technology, help them. This is a citizen. Thanks for, for sharing the great story. Congratulations, mr mayor. Thanks for joining us on the cube. We right back here in Las Vegas. You watching the cube? I'm John. We'll be right back.