>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back at UI path forward to five. This is Dave Ante with Dave Nicholson. Derek Mu is here. He's automation product line lead for Merck. Thank you, by the way, for, you know, all you guys do, and thank you Dave for having in the, in the, in the vaccine area, saving our butts. And Bill Engel is back on the cube. He's the director at cgi. Guys, good to see you again. >>Good to see you. Thank >>You. So Merrick, Wow, it's been quite a few years for you guys. Take us through Derek, what's happening in sort of your world that's informing your automation strategy? >>Well, Dave, I mean as you know, we just came out of the pandemic. We actually have quite a few products like Gabriel Antiviral Pill. Obviously we worked, you know, continue to drive our products through a difficult time. But, you know, is during these can last few years that, you know, we've accelerated our journey in automation. We're about four years plus in our journey, you know, so just like the theme of this conference we're we're trying to move towards, you know, bigger automations, transformational change, continue to drive digital transformation in our company. >>Now Bill, you've been on before, but CGI tell people about the firm. It's not computer graphics imaging. >>Sure. No, it's, it's definitely not. So cgi, we're a global consultancy about 90,000 folks across the world. We're a, we're both a product company and a services company. So we have a lot of different, you know, software products that we deliver to our clients, such as CGI Advantage, which is a state local government EER P platform. And so outside of that, we, my team does automation and so we wrap automation around R IP and deliver that to our clients. >>So you guys are automation pros, implementation partners, right? So, so let's go back. Yep. Derek said four years I think. Yep. Right, You're in. So take us through what was the catalyst, how did you get started? Obviously it was pre pandemic, so it's interesting, a lot of companies pre pandemic gave lip service to digital transformation. Sounds like you guys already started your journey, but I'll come back to that. But take us back to the Catalyst four years ago. Why automation? We'll get into why UI path, >>Right. So I, I would say it started pretty niche in our company. Started first in our finance area. Of course, you know, we were looking in technology evaluating different companies, Blue Prism, ui P. Ultimately we chose UI p did it on-prem to start to use automation in sort of our invoice processing, sort of our financial processes, right? And then from there, after it was really when the pandemic hit, that's when sort of we all went to remote work. That's when the team, the COE continued to scale up, especially during pandemic. We were trying to automate more and more processes given the fact that more and more of our workers are remote, they reprocesses. How, how do you do events? You know, part of our livelihood is, is meeting with engaging with customers. Customers in this case is, are doctors and physicians, right? How do you engage with them digitally? How do you, you know, you know, a lot of the face to face contact now have to kind of shift to more digital, digital way. And so automation was a way to kind of help accelerate that, help facilitate that. >>You, you, I think you mentioned COE as in center of excellence. Yep. So, so describe your approach to implementing automation. It's, that sounds like when you say center, it sounds like something is centralized as, as opposed to a bunch of what we've been hearing a lot about citizen developers. What does that interaction >>Look like? We do have both. I would say in the beginning was more decentralized, but over time we, over the few years as, as we built more and more bots, we're now at maybe somewhere between four to 500 bots. We now have sort of internal to the company functional verticals, right? So there's an animal health, we have an animal health function. So there's, there's a team building engaging with the animal health business to build animal health box. There's human health, which is what I work on as well as hr, finance, manufacturing, research. And so internally there's engagement leads, one of the engagement leads that interact with the business. Then when there's an engineering squads that help build and design, develop and support and maintain those as well as sort of a DevOps team that supports the platform and maintains all the bot infrastructure. >>So you started in finance common story, right? I'm sure you hear this a lot Belt, How did you decide what to target? Was it, was it process driven decision? Was it, was it data oriented? Like some kind of combination? How did you decide, Do you remember? Or do you, could you take >>Us back to Oh yeah. So for, for cgi how we started to engage with MER is, you know, we, we do a lot of other business with Merck. We work on all their different business lines and we, we understand the business process. So we, we knew where there was potential for automation. So we brought those ideas to Merck and, and really kind of landed there and helped them realize the value from automation from that standpoint. And then from there the journey just continued to expand, you know, looking for those use cases that, that, you know, fit the mold for, for, for RPA to start. And now the evolution is to go to broader hyper automation. >>And, and was it CFO led into the finance department and then, or was it sort of more bottoms >>Up? Yeah, so, so I think it started in, in finance and, and, but we actually really started out in the business line. So out in regulatory clinical, that's, that's where we, we have the life science expertise that are embedded. And so I partnered with them to come up with, hey, here's a real solution we could do to help streamline, say submission archiving. So when, when submissions come back from the fda, they need to be archived into, you know, the, their system of record. So that's, those are the types of use cases that, that we helped automate. >>Okay. Cause you're saying a human had to sort physically archive that and you were able to sort of replicate that. Okay. And you started with software robots, obviously rpa and now you're expanding into, we we're hearing from UI this the platform message. How does that coincide Derek, with what you guys are doing? Are you sort of adding platform? What aspects of the platform are, are you adding? >>Yeah, no, I mean we are, we are on-premise, right? So we have the platform, but some of the cool things we just had, another colleague of mine presented earlier today. Some of the cool things we're, we're doing ephemeral infrastructure. So infrastructure as code, which essentially means instead of having all these dedicated bot machines, that that, you know, cuz these bots only in some cases run 10 minutes and they're done. So we're, we're soon of doing all on demand, you know, start up a server, run the bot when it's finished, you know, kill the server. So we only pay for the servers that we use, which allows us to save a whole >>Lot of money. Serverless bots. So you, but you're doing that OnPrem, so you >>No, >>No, but >>That's >>Cloud. We, >>We, we we're doing it OnPrem, but our, our bot machines that actually run the, let's say SAP process, right? We spin that machine up, it's on the cloud, it runs it finish, Let's say it's processed in one hour and then when it's done, we kill that machine. So we only play for that one hour usage of that bot machine. >>Okay. So you mentioned SAP earlier you mentioned Blue Prism when you probably looked at other competitors too. You pull the Gartner Magic quadrant, blah, blah, you know, with the way people, you know, evaluate technology, but SAP's got a product. Why UI path mean? Is it that a company like SAP two narrow for their only sap you wanted to apply it other ways? Maybe they weren't even in the business that back then four years ago they probably weren't. Right? But I'm curious as to how the decision was made for UiPath. >>Well, I think you hit it right on the nail. You know, SAP sort of came on a little later and they're specific to sort of their function, right? So UiPath for us is the most flexible tool can interact by UI to our sales and marketing systems, to, to workday, to service Now. It's, it cuts across every function that we have in the company as well as you're the most mature. I mean, you're the market leader, right? So Right. Definitely you, you continue to build upon those capabilities and we are exploring the new capabilities, especially being announced today. >>And what do you see Bill in the marketplace? Are you, are you kind of automation tool agnostic? Are you more sort of all in on? I >>Would say we are, we are agnostic as a company, but obviously as part of a, as an automation practice lead, you know, I want to deliver solutions to my clients that are gonna benefit them as a whole. So looking at UI path, you know, that this platform is, it covers the end to end spectrum of, of automation. So I can go really into any use case and be able to provide a solution that, that delivers value. And so that's, that's where I see the value in UI path and that's why CGI is, is a customer as well. We automate our internal processes. We actually have, we just launched probably SALT in the, in the market last week, expanded partnership with UiPath. We launched CGI, Excel 360. That's our fully managed service around automation. We host our clients whole UI path infrastructure and bots. It's completely hands off to them and they just get the value outta >>Automation. Nice, nice. Love >>It. Derek, you mentioned, you mentioned this ephemeral infrastructure. Yeah. Sounds like it's also ethereal possibility possibly you're saying, you, you're saying you have processes that are running on premises, right? But then you reach out to have an automation process run that's happening off pre and you're, and you're sort of, >>It's on the cloud, so, so yeah, so we have a in-house orchestrator, so we don't, we're not using your sort of on the cloud orchestrator. So, so we brought it in-house for security reasons. Okay. But we use, you know, so inside the vpn, you know, we have these cloud machines that run these automations. So, so that's, that's the ephemeral side of the, of the >>Infrastructure. But is there a financial angle to that in terms of when you're spinning these things up, are you, is it a, is it a pay by the drink or by the, by the CPU >>Hours, if you can imagine like we, you know, like I mentioned where somewhere between four to 500 bots and every bot has a time slot to run and takes a certain amount of time. And so that's hundreds and hundreds of bot machines that we in the old days have to have to buy and procure and, you know, staff and support and maintain. So in this new model, and we're just beginning to kind of move from pilot into implementation, we're moving all, all of bots this in ephemeral infrastructure, right? So these, okay, these machines, these bot machines are, you know, spun up. They run the, they, they run their automation and then they spin >>Down. But just to be clear, they're being spun up on physical infrastructure that is in your >>Purview and they spun up on aws. Yeah. Okay. And then they spin down. Okay, got >>It. Got it. Interesting. Four >>To 500 bots. You know, Daniel one point play out this vision of a bot chicken in every pot, I called it a bot for every employee. Is that where you're headed or is that kind of in this new ephemeral world, not necessary, it's like maybe every employee has access to an ephemeral bot. How, how are you thinking about that? >>That's a good question. So obviously the, the four to 500 is a mix of unattended bonds versus attended bonds, right? That, that we also have a citizen developer, sort of a group team. We support that as well from a coe. So, you know, we see the future as a mix. There's, there's a spectrum of, we are the professional development team. There's also, we support and nurture the personal automation and we provide the resources to help them build smaller scale automations that help, you know, reduce the, you know, the mundaneness and the hours of their own tasks. But you know, for us, we want to focus more and more on building bigger and bigger transfer transformational automations that really drive process efficiencies and, and savings. >>And what's the, what's the business impact been? You mentioned savings and maybe there's other sort of productivity. How do you measure the benefit, the ROI and, and >>Quantify that we, you know, I, I don't, I don't profess I don't think we have all the right answers, but yeah, simple metrics like number of hours saved or other sort of excitement sort of in like an nps, internal NPS between the different groups that we engage. But we definitely see automation demand coming from our, our functional teams going up, driving up. So it's, it's continued to be a hot area and hopefully we, we can, you know, like, like what the key message and theme of this, of this conference. Essentially we want to take and build upon the, the good work that we've done in terms of rpa and we want to drive it more towards digital transformation. >>So Bill, what are you seeing across the, your customer base in terms of, of, of roi? I'm not looking for percentages there. I'm sure they're off the charts, but in terms of, you know, you can optimize for fast payback, you know, maybe lower the denominator, you know, or you can optimize for, you know, net benefit over time, right? You know, what are you seeing? What are customers after they want fast payback and little quick hits? Or are they looking for sort of a bigger enterprise wide impact? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's the latter. It's that larger impact, right? Obviously they, you know, they want an roi and just depending upon the use case, that's gonna vary in terms of the, the benefits delivered. And a lot of our clients, depending on the industry, so in in life sciences it may be around, you know, compliance like GXP compliance is huge. And so that may may not be much of a time saver, but it ensures that they're, they're running their processes and they're being compliant with, you know, federal standards. So that's, that's one aspect to it. But you know, to, you know, a bank, they're looking to reduce their overall costs and and so on. But yeah, I think, I think the other, the other part of it is, you know, impacting broader business processes. So taking that top down approach versus kind of bottom up, you know, doing ta you know, the ones you choose the tasks is not as impactful as looking at broader across the entire business process and seeing how we can impact >>It. Now, Derek, when you guys support a citizen developer, how does that work? So, hey, I got this task I want to automate, I'm gonna go write a, you know, software robot. I'm gonna go do an automation. Do I just do it and then throw her to the defense? You guys, you guys send me a video on how to do it. Hold my hand. How's that work? >>Yeah, I mean, good question. So, so we obviously direct them to the UI path Academy, get some training. We also have some internal training materials to how to build a bot sort of internal inside Merck. We, we go through, we have writeups and SOPs on using the right framework for automations, using the right documentation, PDD kind of materials, and then ultimately how do we deploy bot inside the MER ecosystem. But I, I, maybe I'll just add, I think you asked the point about ROI before. Yeah. I'll also say because we're, we're a pharmaceutical company. I think one of the other key metrics is actually time saved, right? So if, if, if we have a bot that helps us get through the clinical process or even the getting a, a label approved faster, even if it's eight days saved, that's eight days of a product that can get out to the market faster to, to our patients and, and healthcare professionals. And that's, that, that's immeasurable benefit. >>Yeah, I bet if you compress that ELAP time of, of getting approval and so forth. All right guys, we've gotta go. Thanks so much. Congratulations on all the success and appreciate you sharing your story. Thank >>You so much. Appreciate it. You're welcome. >>Appreciate it. All right. Thank you for watching this Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson, The cubes coverage, two day coverage. We're here in day one, UI path forward, five. We'll be right back right after the short break. Awesome. >>Great.

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

(bright music) >> Welcome back to the CUBE presents the AWS Startup Showcase The Next Big Thing in cloud startups with AI security and life science tracks, 15 hottest growing startups are presented. And we had a great opening keynote with luminaries in the industry. And now our closing keynote is to get a deeper dive on cracking the code in the enterprise, how startups are changing the game and helping companies change. And they're also changing the game of open source. We have a great guest, Katie Drucker, Head of Business Development, Madrona Venture Group. Katie, thank you for coming on the CUBE for this special closing keynote. >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate it. >> So one of the topics we talked about with Soma from Madrona on the opening keynote, as well as Ali from Databricks is how startups are seeing success faster. So that's the theme of the Cloud speed, agility, but the game has changed in the enterprise. And I want to really discuss with you how growth changes and growth strategy specifically. They talk, go to market. We hear things like good sales to enterprise sales, organic, freemium, there's all kinds of different approaches, but at the end of the day, the most successful companies, the ones that might not be known that just come out of nowhere. So the economics are changing and the buyers are thinking differently. So let's explore that topic. So take us through your view 'cause you have a lot of experience. But first talk about your role at Madrona, what you do. >> Absolutely all great points. So my role at Madrona, I think I have personally one of the more enviable jobs and that my job is to... I get the privilege of working with all of these fantastic entrepreneurs in our portfolio and doing whatever we can as a firm to harness resources, knowledge, expertise, connections, to accelerate their growth. So my role in setting up business development is taking a look at all of those tools in the tool chest and partnering with the portfolio to make it so. And in our portfolio, we have a wide range of companies, some rely on enterprise sales, some have other go to markets. Some are direct to consumer, a wide range. >> Talk about the growth strategies that you see evolving because what's clear with the pandemic. And as we come out of it is that there are growth plays happening that don't look a little bit differently, more obvious now because of the Cloud scale, we're seeing companies like Databricks, like Snowflake, like other companies that have been built on the cloud or standalone. What are some of the new growth techniques, or I don't want to say growth hacking, that is a pejorative term, but like just a way for companies to quickly describe their value to an enterprise buyer who's moving away from the old RFP days of vendor selection. The game has changed. So take us through how you see secret key and unlocking that new equation of how to present value to an enterprise and how you see enterprises evaluating startups. >> Yes, absolutely. Well, and that's got a question, that's got a few components nestled in what I think are some bigger trends going on. AWS of course brought us the Cloud first. I think now the Cloud is more and more a utility. And so it's incumbent upon thinking about how an enterprise 'cause using the Cloud is going to go up the value stack and partner with its cloud provider and other service providers. I think also with that agility of operations, you have thinning, if you will, the systems of record and a lot of new entrance into this space that are saying things like, how can we harness AIML and other emerging trends to provide more value directly around work streams that were historically locked into those systems of record? And then I think you also have some price plans that are far more flexible around usage based as opposed to just flat subscription or even these big clunky annual or multi-year RFP type stuff. So all of those trends are really designed in ways that favor the emerging startup. And I think if done well, and in partnership with those underlying cloud providers, there can be some amazing benefits that the enterprise realizes an opportunity for those startups to grow. And I think that's what you're seeing. I think there's also this emergence of a buyer that's different than the CIO or the site the CISO. You have things with low code, no code. You've got other buyers in the organization, other line of business executives that are coming to the table, making software purchase decisions. And then you also have empowered developers that are these citizen builders and developer buyers and personas that really matter. So lots of inroads in places for a startup to reach in the enterprise to make a connection and to bring value. That's a great insight. I want to ask that just if you don't mind follow up on that, you mentioned personas. And what we're seeing is the shift happens. There's new roles that are emerging and new things that are being reconfigured or refactored if you will, whether it's human resources or AI, and you mentioned ML playing a role in automation. These are big parts of the new value proposition. How should companies posture to the customer? Because I don't want to say pivot 'cause that means it's not working but mostly extending our iterating around their positioning because as new things have not yet been realized, it might not be operationalized in a company or maybe new things need to be operationalized, it's a new solution for that. Positioning the value is super important and a lot of companies often struggle with that, but also if they get it right, that's the key. What's your feeling on startups in their positioning? So people will dismiss it like, "Oh, that's marketing." But maybe that's important. What's your thoughts on the great positioning question? >> I've been in this industry a long time. And I think there are some things that are just tried and true, and it is not unique to tech, which is, look, you have to tell a story and you have to reach the customer and you have to speak to the customer's need. And what that means is, AWS is a great example. They're famous for the whole concept of working back from the customer and thinking about what that customer's need is. I think any startup that is looking to partner or work alongside of AWS really has to embody that very, very customer centric way of thinking about things, even though, as we just talked about those personas are changing who that customer really is in the enterprise. And then speaking to that value proposition and meeting that customer and creating a dialogue with them that really helps to understand not only what their pain points are, but how you were offering solves those pain points. And sometimes the customer doesn't realize that that is their pain point and that's part of the education and part of the way in which you engage that dialogue. That doesn't change a lot, just generation to generation. I think the modality of how we have that dialogue, the methods in which we choose to convey that change, but that basic discussion is what makes us human. >> What's your... Great, great, great insight. I want to ask you on the value proposition question again, the question I often get, and it's hard to answer is am I competing on value or am I competing on commodity? And depending on where you're in the stack, there could be different things like, for example, land is getting faster, smaller, cheaper, as an example on Amazon. That's driving down to low cost high value, but it shifts up the stack. You start to see in companies this changing the criteria for how to evaluate. So an enterprise might be struggling. And I often hear enterprises say, "I don't know how to pick who I need. I buy tools, I don't buy many platforms." So they're constantly trying to look for that answer key, if you will, what's your thoughts on the changing requirements of an enterprise? And how to do vendor selection. >> Yeah, so obviously I don't think there's a single magic bullet. I always liked just philosophically to think about, I think it's always easier and frankly more exciting as a buyer to want to buy stuff that's going to help me make more revenue and build and grow as opposed to do things that save me money. And just in a binary way, I like to think which side of the fence are you sitting on as a product offering? And the best ways that you can articulate that, what opportunities are you unlocking for your customer? The problems that you're solving, what kind of growth and what impact is that going to lead to, even if you're one or two removed from that? And again, that's not a new concept. And I think that the companies that have that squarely in mind when they think about their go-to market strategy, when they think about the dialogue they're having, when they think about the problems that they're solving, find a much faster path. And I think that also speaks to why we're seeing so many explosion in the line of business, SAS apps that are out there. Again, that thinning of the systems of record, really thinking about what are the scenarios and work streams that we can have happened that are going to help with that revenue growth and unlocking those opportunities. >> What's the common startup challenge that you see when they're trying to do business development? Usually they build the product first, product led value, you hear that a lot. And then they go, "Okay, we're ready to sell, hire a sales guy." That seems to be shifting away because of the go to markets are changing. What are some of the challenges that startups have? What are some that you're seeing? >> Well, and I think the point that you're making about the changes are really almost a result of the trends that we're talking about. The sales organization itself is becoming... These work streams are becoming instrumented. Data is being collected, insights are being derived off of those things. So you see companies like Clary or Highspot or two examples or tutorial that are in our portfolio that are looking at that action and making the art of sales and marketing far more sophisticated overall, which then leads to the different growth hacking and the different insights that are driven. I think the common mistakes that I see across the board, especially with earlier stage startups, look you got to find product market fit. I think that's always... You start with a thesis or a belief and a passion that you're building something that you think the market needs. And it's a lot of dialogue you have to have to make sure that you do find that. I think once you find that another common problem that I see is leading with an explanation of technology. And again, not focusing on the buyer or the... Sorry, the buyer about solving a problem and focusing on that problem as opposed to focusing on how cool your technology is. Those are basic and really, really simple. And then I think setting a set of expectations, especially as it comes to business development and partnering with companies like AWS. The researching that you need to adequately meet the demand that can be turned on. And then I'm sure you heard about from Databricks, from an organization like AWS, you have to be pragmatic. >> Yeah, Databricks gone from zero a software sales a few years ago to over a billion. Now it looks like a Snowflake which came out of nowhere and they had a great product, but built on Amazon, they became the data cloud on top of Amazon. And now they're growing just whole new business models and new business development techniques. Katie, thank you for sharing your insight here. The CUBE's closing keynote. Thanks for coming on. >> Appreciate it, thank you. >> Okay, Katie Drucker, Head of Business Development at Madrona Venture Group. Premier VC in the Seattle area and beyond they're doing a lot of cloud action. And of course they know AWS very well and investing in the ecosystem. So great, great stuff there. Next up is Peter Wagner partner at Wing.VX. Love this URL first of all 'cause of the VC domain extension. But Peter is a long time venture capitalist. I've been following his career. He goes back to the old networking days, back when the internet was being connected during the OSI days, when the TCP IP open systems interconnect was really happening and created so much. Well, Peter, great to see you on the CUBE here and congratulations with success at Wing VC. >> Yeah, thanks, John. It's great to be here. I really appreciate you having me. >> Reason why I wanted to have you come on. First of all, you had a great track record in investing over many decades. You've seen many waves of innovation, startups. You've seen all the stories. You've seen the movie a few times, as I say. But now more than ever, enterprise wise it's probably the hottest I've ever seen. And you've got a confluence of many things on the stack. You were also an early seed investor in Snowflake, well-regarded as a huge success. So you've got your eye on some of these awesome deals. Got a great partner over there has got a network experience as well. What is the big aha moment here for the industry? Because it's not your classic enterprise startups anymore. They have multiple things going on and some of the winners are not even known. They come out of nowhere and they connect to enterprise and get the lucrative positions and can create a moat and value. Like out of nowhere, it's not the old way of like going to the airport and doing an RFP and going through the stringent requirements, and then you're in, you get to win the lucrative contract and you're in. Not anymore, that seems to have changed. What's your take on this 'cause people are trying to crack the code here and sometimes you don't have to be well-known. >> Yeah, well, thank goodness the game has changed 'cause that old thing was (indistinct) So I for one don't miss it. There was some modernization movement in the enterprise and the modern enterprise is built on data powered by AI infrastructure. That's an agile workplace. All three of those things are really transformational. There's big investments being made by enterprises, a lot of receptivity and openness to technology to enable all those agendas, and that translates to good prospects for startups. So I think as far as my career goes, I've never seen a more positive or fertile ground for startups in terms of penetrating enterprise, it doesn't mean it's easy to do, but you have a receptive audience on the other side and that hasn't necessarily always been the case. >> Yeah, I got to ask you, I know that you're a big sailor and your family and Franks Lubens also has a boat and sailing metaphor is always good to have 'cause you got to have a race that's being run and they have tactics. And this game that we're in now, you see the successes, there's investment thesises, and then there's also actually bets. And I want to get your thoughts on this because a lot of enterprises are trying to figure out how to evaluate startups and starts also can make the wrong bet. They could sail to the wrong continent and be in the wrong spot. So how do you pick the winners and how should enterprises understand how to pick winners too? >> Yeah, well, one of the real important things right now that enterprise is facing startups are learning how to do and so learning how to leverage product led growth dynamics in selling to the enterprise. And so product led growth has certainly always been important consumer facing companies. And then there's a few enterprise facing companies, early ones that cracked the code, as you said. And some of these examples are so old, if you think about, like the ones that people will want to talk about them and talk about Classy and want to talk about Twilio and these were of course are iconic companies that showed the way for others. But even before that, folks like Solar Winds, they'd go to market model, clearly product red, bottom stuff. Back then we didn't even have those words to talk about it. And then some of the examples are so enormous if think about them like the one right in front of your face, like AWS. (laughing) Pretty good PLG, (indistinct) but it targeted builders, it targeted developers and flipped over the way you think about enterprise infrastructure, as a result some how every company, even if they're harnessing relatively conventional sales and marketing motion, and you think about product led growth as a way to kick that motion off. And so it's not really an either word even more We might think OPLJ, that means there's no sales keep one company not true, but here's a way to set the table so that you can very efficiently use your sales and marketing resources, only have the most attractive targets and ones that are really (indistinct) >> I love the product led growth. I got to ask you because in the networking days, I remember the term inevitability was used being nested in a solution that they're just going to Cisco off router and a firewall is one you can unplug and replace with another vendor. Cisco you'd have to go through no switching costs were huge. So when you get it to the Cloud, how do you see the competitiveness? Because we were riffing on this with Ali, from Databricks where the lock-in might be value. The more value provider is the lock-in. Is their nestedness? Is their intimate ability as a competitive advantage for some of these starts? How do you look at that? Because startups, they're using open source. They want to have a land position in an enterprise, but how do they create that sustainable competitive advantage going forward? Because again, this is what you do. You bet on ones that you can see that could establish a model whatever we want to call it, but a competitive advantage and ongoing nested position. >> Sometimes it has to do with data, John, and so you mentioned Snowflake a couple of times here, a big part of Snowflake's strategy is what they now call the data cloud. And one of the reasons you go there is not to just be able to process data, to actually get access to it, exchange with the partners. And then that of course is a great reason for the customers to come to the Snowflake platform. And so the more data it gets more customers, it gets more data, the whole thing start spinning in the right direction. That's a really big example, but all of these startups that are using ML in a fundamental way, applying it in a novel way, the data modes are really important. So getting to the right data sources and training on it, and then putting it to work so that you can see that in this process better and doing this earlier on that scale. That's a big part of success. Another company that I work with is a good example that I call (indistinct) which works in sales technology space, really crushing it in terms of building better sales organizations both at performance level, in terms of the intelligence level, and just overall revenue attainment using ML, and using novel data sources, like the previously lost data or phone calls or Zoom calls as you already know. So I think the data advantages are really big. And smart startups are thinking through it early. >> It's interest-- >> And they're planning by the way, not to ramble on too much, but they're betting that PLG strategy. So their land option is designed not just to be an interesting way to gain usage, but it's also a way to gain access to data that then enables the expand in a component. >> That is a huge call-out point there, I was going to ask another question, but I think that is the key I see. It's a new go to market in a way. product led with that kind of approach gets you a beachhead and you get a little position, you get some data that is a cloud model, it means variable, whatever you want to call it variable value proposition, value proof, or whatever, getting that data and reiterating it. So it brings up the whole philosophical question of okay, product led growth, I love that with product led growth of data, I get that. Remember the old platform versus a tool? That's the way buyers used to think. How has that changed? 'Cause now almost, this conversation throws out the whole platform thing, but isn't like a platform. >> It looks like it's all. (laughs) you can if it is a platform, though to do that you can reveal that later, but you're looking for adoption, so if it's down stock product, you're looking for adoption by like developers or DevOps people or SOEs, and they're trying to solve a problem, and they want rapid gratification. So they don't want to have an architectural boomimg, placed in front of them. And if it's up stock product and application, then it's a user or the business or whatever that is, is adopting the application. And again, they're trying to solve a very specific problem. You need instant and immediate obvious time and value. And now you have a ticket to the dance and build on that and maybe a platform strategy can gradually take shape. But you know who's not in this conversation is the CIO, it's like, "I'm always the last to know." >> That's the CISO though. And they got him there on the firing lines. CISOs are buying tools like it's nobody's business. They need everything. They'll buy anything or you go meet with sand, they'll buy it. >> And you make it sound so easy. (laughing) We do a lot of security investment if only (indistinct) (laughing) >> I'm a little bit over the top, but CISOs are under a lot of pressure. I would talk to the CISO at Capital One and he was saying that he's on Amazon, now he's going to another cloud, not as a hedge, but he doesn't want to focus development teams. So he's making human resource decisions as well. Again, back to what IT used to be back in the old days where you made a vendor decision, you built around it. So again, clouds play that way. I see that happening. But the question is that I think you nailed this whole idea of cross hairs on the target persona, because you got to know who you are and then go to the market. So if you know you're a problem solving and the lower in the stack, do it and get a beachhead. That's a strategy, you can do that. You can't try to be the platform and then solve a problem at the same time. So you got to be careful. Is that what you were getting at? >> Well, I think you just understand what you're trying to achieve in that line of notion. And how those dynamics work and you just can't drag it out. And they could make it too difficult. Another company I work with is a very strategic cloud data platform. It's a (indistinct) on systems. We're not trying to foist that vision though (laughs) or not adopters today. We're solving some thorny problems with them in the short term, rapid time to value operational needs in scale. And then yeah, once they found success with (indistinct) there's would be an opportunity to be increasing the platform, and an obstacle for those customers. But we're not talking about that. >> Well, Peter, I appreciate you taking the time and coming out of a board meeting, I know that you're super busy and I really appreciate you making time for us. I know you've got an impressive partner in (indistinct) who's a former Sequoia, but Redback Networks part of that company over the years, you guys are doing extremely well, even a unique investment thesis. I'd like you to put the plug in for the firm. I think you guys have a good approach. I like what you guys are doing. You're humble, you don't brag a lot, but you make a lot of great investments. So could you take them in to explain what your investment thesis is and then how that relates to how an enterprise is making their investment thesis? >> Yeah, yeah, for sure. Well, the concept that I described earlier that the modern enterprise movement as a workplace built on data powered by AI. That's what we're trying to work with founders to enable. And also we're investing in companies that build the products and services that enable that modern enterprise to exist. And we do it from very early stages, but with a longterm outlook. So we'll be leading series and series, rounds of investment but staying deeply involved, both operationally financially throughout the whole life cycle of the company. And then we've done that a bunch of times, our goal is always the big independent public company and they don't always make it but enough for them to have it all be worthwhile. An interesting special case of this, and by the way, I think it intersects with some of startup showcase here is in the life sciences. And I know you were highlighting a lot of healthcare websites and deals, and that's a vertical where to disrupt tremendous impact of data both new data availability and new ways to put it to use. I know several of my partners are very focused on that. They call it bio-X data. It's a transformation all on its own. >> That's awesome. And I think that the reason why we're focusing on these verticals is if you have a cloud horizontal scale view and vertically specialized with machine learning, every vertical is impacted by data. It's so interesting that I think, first start, I was probably best time to be a cloud startup right now. I really am bullish on it. So I appreciate you taking the time Peter to come in again from your board meeting, popping out. Thanks for-- (indistinct) Go back in and approve those stock options for all the employees. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> All right, thank you John, it's a pleasure. >> Okay, Peter Wagner, Premier VC, very humble Wing.VC is a great firm. Really respect them. They do a lot of great investing investments, Snowflake, and we have Dave Vellante back who knows a lot about Snowflake's been covering like a blanket and Sarbjeet Johal. Cloud Influencer friend of the CUBE. Cloud commentator and cloud experience built clouds, runs clouds now invests. So V. Dave, thanks for coming back on. You heard Peter Wagner at Wing VC. These guys have their roots in networking, which networking back in the day was, V. Dave. You remember the internet Cisco days, remember Cisco, Wellfleet routers. I think Peter invested in Arrow Point, remember Arrow Point, that was about in the 495 belt where you were. >> Lynch's company. >> That was Chris Lynch's company. I think, was he a sales guy there? (indistinct) >> That was his first big hit I think. >> All right, well guys, let's wrap this up. We've got a great program here. Sarbjeet, thank you for coming on. >> No worries. Glad to be here todays. >> Hey, Sarbjeet. >> First of all, really appreciate the Twitter activity lately on the commentary, the observability piece on Jeremy Burton's launch, Dave was phenomenal, but Peter was talking about this dynamic and I think ties this cracking the code thing together, which is there's a product led strategy that feels like a platform, but it's also a tool. In other words, it's not mutually exclusive, the old methods thrown out the window. Land in an account, know what problem you're solving. If you're below the stack, nail it, get data and go from there. If you're a process improvement up the stack, you have to much more of a platform longer-term sale, more business oriented, different motions, different mechanics. What do you think about that? What's your reaction? >> Yeah, I was thinking about this when I was listening to some of the startups pitching, if you will, or talking about what they bring to the table in this cloud scale or cloud era, if you will. And there are tools, there are applications and then they're big monolithic platforms, if you will. And then they're part of the ecosystem. So I think the companies need to know where they play. A startup cannot be platform from the get-go I believe. Now many aspire to be, but they have to start with tooling. I believe in, especially in B2B side of things, and then go into the applications, one way is to go into the application area, if you will, like a very precise use cases for certain verticals and stuff like that. And other parties that are going into the platform, which is like horizontal play, if you will, in technology. So I think they have to understand their age, like how old they are, how new they are, how small they are, because when their size matter when you are procuring as a big business, procuring your technology vendors size matters and the economic viability matters and their proximity to other windows matter as well. So I think we'll jump into that in other discussions later, but I think that's key, as you said. >> I would agree with that. I would phrase it in my mind, somewhat differently from Sarbjeet which is you have product led growth, and that's your early phase and you get product market fit, you get product led growth, and then you expand and there are many, many examples of this, and that's when you... As part of your team expansion strategy, you're going to get into the platform discussion. There's so many examples of that. You take a look at Ali Ghodsi today with what's happening at Databricks, Snowflake is another good example. They've started with product led growth. And then now they're like, "Okay, we've got to expand the team." Okta is another example that just acquired zero. That's about building out the platform, versus more of a point product. And there's just many, many examples of that, but you cannot to your point, very hard to start with a platform. Arm did it, but that was like a one in a million chance. >> It's just harder, especially if it's new and it's not operationalized yet. So one of the things Dave that we've observed the Cloud is some of the best known successes where nobody's not known at all, database we've been covering from the beginning 'cause we were close to that movement when they came out of Berkeley. But they still were misunderstood and they just started generating revenue in only last year. So again, only a few years ago, zero software revenue, now they're approaching a billion dollars. So it's not easy to make these vendor selections anymore. And if you're new and you don't have someone to operate it or your there's no department and the departments changing, that's another problem. These are all like enterprisey problems. What's your thoughts on that, Dave? >> Well, I think there's a big discussion right now when you've been talking all day about how should enterprise think about startups and think about most of these startups they're software companies and software is very capital efficient business. At the same time, these companies are raising hundreds of millions, sometimes over a billion dollars before they go to IPO. Why is that? A lot of it's going to promotion. I look at it as... And there's a big discussion going on but well, maybe sales can be more efficient and more direct and so forth. I really think it comes down to the golden rule. Two things really mattered in the early days in the startup it's sales and engineering. And writers should probably say engineering and sales and start with engineering. And then you got to figure out your go to market. Everything else is peripheral to those two and you don't get those two things right, you struggle. And I think that's what some of these successful startups are proving. >> Sarbjeet, what's your take on that point? >> Could you repeat the point again? Sorry, I lost-- >> As cloud scale comes in this whole idea of competing, the roles are changing. So look at IOT, look at the Edge, for instance, you got all kinds of new use cases that no one actually knows is a problem to solve. It's just pure opportunity. So there's no one's operational I could have a product, but it don't know we can buy it yet. It's a problem. >> Yeah, I think the solutions have to be point solutions and the startups need to focus on the practitioners, number one, not the big buyers, not the IT, if you will, but the line of business, even within that sphere, like just focus on the practitioners who are going to use that technology. I talked to, I think it wasn't Fiddler, no, it was CoreLogics. I think that story was great today earlier in how they kind of struggle in the beginning, they were trying to do a big bang approach as a startup, but then they almost stumbled. And then they found their mojo, if you will. They went to Don the market, actually, that's a very classic theory of disruption, like what we study from Harvard School of Business that you go down the market, go to the non-consumers, because if you're trying to compete head to head with big guys. Because most of the big guys have lot of feature and functionality, especially at the platform level. And if you're trying to innovate in that space, you have to go to the practitioners and solve their core problems and then learn and expand kind of thing. So I think you have to focus on practitioners a lot more than the traditional oracle buyers. >> Sarbjeet, we had a great thread last night in Twitter, on observability that you started. And there's a couple of examples there. Chaos searches and relatively small company right now, they just raised them though. And they're part of this star showcase. And they could've said, "Hey, we're going to go after Splunk." But they chose not to. They said, "Okay, let's kind of disrupt the elk stack and simplify that." Another example is a company observed, you've mentioned Jeremy Burton's company, John. They're focused really on SAS companies. They're not going after initially these complicated enterprise deals because they got to get it right or else they'll get churn, and churn is that silent killer of software companies. >> The interesting other company that was on the showcase was Tetra Science. I don't know if you noticed that one in the life science track, and again, Peter Wagner pointed out the life science. That's an under recognized in the press vertical that's exploding. Certainly during the pandemic you saw it, Tetra science is an R&D cloud, Dave, R&D data cloud. So pharmaceuticals, they need to do their research. So the pandemic has brought to life, this now notion of tapping into data resources, not just data lakes, but like real deal. >> Yeah, you and Natalie and I were talking about that this morning and that's one of the opportunities for R&D and you have all these different data sources and yeah, it's not just about the data lake. It's about the ecosystem that you're building around them. And I see, it's really interesting to juxtapose what Databricks is doing and what Snowflake is doing. They've got different strategies, but they play a part there. You can see how ecosystems can build that system. It's not one company is going to solve all these problems. It's going to really have to be connections across these various companies. And that's what the Cloud enables and ecosystems have all this data flowing that can really drive new insights. >> And I want to call your attention to a tweet Sarbjeet you wrote about Splunk's earnings and they're data companies as well. They got Teresa Carlson there now AWS as the president, working with Doug, that should change the game a little bit more. But there was a thread of the neath there. Andy Thry says to replies to Dave you or Sarbjeet, you, if you're on AWS, they're a fine solution. The world doesn't just revolve around AWS, smiley face. Well, a lot of it does actually. So (laughing) nice point, Andy. But he brings up this thing and Ali brought it up too, Hybrid now is a new operating system for what now Edge does. So we got Mobile World Congress happening this month in person. This whole Telco 5G brings up a whole nother piece of the Cloud puzzle. Jeff Barr pointed out in his keynote, Dave. Guys, I want to get your reaction. The Edge now is... I'm calling it the super Edge because it's not just Edge as we know it before. You're going to have these pops, these points of presence that are going to have wavelength as your spectrum or whatever they have. I think that's the solution for Azure. So you're going to have all this new cloud power for low latency applications. Self-driving delivery VR, AR, gaming, Telemetry data from Teslas, you name it, it's happening. This is huge, what's your thoughts? Sarbjeet, we'll start with you. >> Yeah, I think Edge is like bound to happen. And for many reasons, the volume of data is increasing. Our use cases are also expanding if you will, with the democratization of computer analysis. Specialization of computer, actually Dave wrote extensively about how Intel and other chip players are gearing up for that future if you will. Most of the inference in the AI world will happen in the field close to the workloads if you will, that can be mobility, the self-driving car that can be AR, VR. It can be healthcare. It can be gaming, you name it. Those are the few use cases, which are in the forefront and what alarm or use cases will come into the play I believe. I've said this many times, Edge, I think it will be dominated by the hyperscalers, mainly because they're building their Metro data centers now. And with a very low latency in the Metro areas where the population is, we're serving the people still, not the machines yet, or the empty areas where there is no population. So wherever the population is, all these big players are putting their data centers there. And I think they will dominate the Edge. And I know some Edge lovers. (indistinct) >> Edge huggers. >> Edge huggers, yeah. They don't like the hyperscalers story, but I think that's the way were' going. Why would we go backwards? >> I think you're right, first of all, I agree with the hyperscale dying you look at the top three clouds right now. They're all in the Edge, Hardcore it's a huge competitive battleground, Dave. And I think the missing piece, that's going to be uncovered at Mobile Congress. Maybe they'll miss it this year, but it's the developer traction, whoever wins the developer market or wins the loyalty, winning over the market or having adoption. The applications will drive the Edge. >> And I would add the fourth cloud is Alibaba. Alibaba is actually bigger than Google and they're crushing it as well. But I would say this, first of all, it's popular to say, "Oh not everything's going to move into the Cloud, John, Dave, Sarbjeet." But the fact is that AWS they're trend setter. They are crushing it in terms of features. And you'd look at what they're doing in the plumbing with Annapurna. Everybody's following suit. So you can't just ignore that, number one. Second thing is what is the Edge? Well, the edge is... Where's the logical place to process the data? That's what the Edge is. And I think to your point, both Sarbjeet and John, the Edge is going to be won by developers. It's going to be one by programmability and it's going to be low cost and really super efficient. And most of the data is going to stay at the Edge. And so who is in the best position to actually create that? Is it going to be somebody who was taking an x86 box and throw it over the fence and give it a fancy name with the Edge in it and saying, "Here's our Edge box." No, that's not what's going to win the Edge. And so I think first of all it's huge, it's wide open. And I think where's the innovation coming from? I agree with you it's the hyperscalers. >> I think the developers as John said, developers are the kingmakers. They build the solutions. And in that context, I always talk about the skills gravity, a lot of people are educated in certain technologies and they will keep using those technologies. Their proximity to that technology is huge and they don't want to learn something new. So as humans we just tend to go what we know how to use it. So from that front, I usually talk with consumption economics of cloud and Edge. It has to focus on the practitioners. And in this case, practitioners are developers because you're just cooking up those solutions right now. We're not serving that in huge quantity right now, but-- >> Well, let's unpack that Sarbjeet, let's unpack that 'cause I think you're right on the money on that. The consumption of the tech and also the consumption of the application, the end use and end user. And I think the reason why hyperscalers will continue to dominate besides the fact that they have all the resource and they're going to bring that to the Edge, is that the developers are going to be driving the applications at the Edge. So if you're low latency Edge, that's going to open up new applications, not just the obvious ones I did mention, gaming, VR, AR, metaverse and other things that are obvious. There's going to be non-obvious things that are going to be huge that are going to come out from the developers. But the Cloud native aspect of the hyperscalers, to me is where the scales are tipping, let me explain. IT was built to build a supply resource to the businesses who were writing business applications. Mostly driven by IBM in the mainframe in the old days, Dave, and then IT became IT. Telcos have been OT closed, "This is our thing, that's it." Now they have to open up. And the Cloud native technologies is the fastest way to value. And I think that paths, Sarbjeet is going to be defined by this new developer and this new super Edge concept. So I think it's going to be wide open. I don't know what to say. I can't guess, but it's going to be creative. >> Let me ask you a question. You said years ago, data's new development kit, does low code and no code to Sarbjeet's point, change the equation? In other words, putting data in the hands of those OT professionals, those practitioners who have the context. Does low-code and no-code enable, more of those protocols? I know it's a bromide, but the citizen developer, and what impact does that have? And who's in the best position? >> Well, I think that anything that reduces friction to getting stuff out there that can be automated, will increase the value. And then the question is, that's not even a debate. That's just fact that's going to be like rent, massive rise. Then the issue comes down to who has the best asset? The software asset that's eating the world or the tower and the physical infrastructure. So if the physical infrastructure aka the Telcos, can't generate value fast enough, in my opinion, the private equity will come in and take it over, and then refactor that business model to take advantage of the over the top software model. That to me is the big stare down competition between the Telco world and this new cloud native, whichever one yields in valley is going to blink first, if you say. And I think the Cloud native wins this one hands down because the assets are valuable, but only if they enable the new model. If the old model tries to hang on to the old hog, the old model as the Edge hugger, as Sarbjeet says, they'll just going to slowly milk that cow dry. So it's like, it's over. So to me, they have to move. And I think this Mobile World Congress day, we will see, we will be looking for that. >> Yeah, I think that in the Mobile World Congress context, I think Telcos should partner with the hyperscalers very closely like everybody else has. And they have to cave in. (laughs) I usually say that to them, like the people came in IBM tried to fight and they cave in. Other second tier vendors tried to fight the big cloud vendors like top three or four. And then they cave in. okay, we will serve our stuff through your cloud. And that's where all the buyers are congregating. They're going to buy stuff along with the skills gravity, the feature proximity. I've got another term I'll turn a coin. It matters a lot when you're doing one thing and you want to do another thing when you're doing all this transactional stuff and regular stuff, and now you want to do data science, where do you go? You go next to it, wherever you have been. Your skills are in that same bucket. And then also you don't have to write a new contract with a new vendor, you just go there. So in order to serve, this is a lesson for startups as well. You need to prepare yourself for being in the Cloud marketplaces. You cannot go alone independently to fight. >> Cloud marketplace is going to replace procurement, for sure, we know that. And this brings up the point, Dave, we talked about years ago, remember on the CUBE. We said, there's going to be Tier two clouds. I used that word in quotes cause nothing... What does it even mean Tier two. And we were talking about like Amazon, versus Microsoft and Google. We set at the time and Alibaba but they're in China, put that aside for a second, but the big three. They're going to win it all. And they're all going to be successful to a relative terms, but whoever can enable that second tier. And it ended up happening, Snowflake is that example. As is Databricks as is others. So Google and Microsoft as fast as they can replicate the success of AWS by enabling someone to build their business on their cloud in a way that allows the customer to refactor their business will win. They will win most of the lion's share my opinion. So I think that applies to the Edge as well. So whoever can come in and say... Whichever cloud says, "I'm going to enable the next Snowflake, the next enterprise solution." I think takes it. >> Well, I think that it comes back... Every conversation coming back to the data. And if you think about the prevailing way in which we treated data with the exceptions of the two data driven companies in their quotes is as we've shoved all the data into some single repository and tried to come up with a single version of the truth and it's adjudicated by a centralized team, with hyper specialized roles. And then guess what? The line of business, there's no context for the business in that data architecture or data Corpus, if you will. And then the time it takes to go from idea for a data product or data service commoditization is way too long. And that's changing. And the winners are going to be the ones who are able to exploit this notion of leaving data where it is, the point about data gravity or courting a new term. I liked that, I think you said skills gravity. And then enabling the business lines to have access to their own data teams. That's exactly what Ali Ghodsi, he was saying this morning. And really having the ability to create their own data products without having to go bow down to an ivory tower. That is an emerging model. All right, well guys, I really appreciate the wrap up here, Dave and Sarbjeet. I'd love to get your final thoughts. I'll just start by saying that one of the highlights for me was the luminary guests size of 15 great companies, the luminary guests we had from our community on our keynotes today, but Ali Ghodsi said, "Don't listen to what everyone's saying in the press." That was his position. He says, "You got to figure out where the puck's going." He didn't say that, but I'm saying, I'm paraphrasing what he said. And I love how he brought up Sky Cloud. I call it Sky net. That's an interesting philosophy. And then he also brought up that machine learning auto ML has got to be table stakes. So I think to me, that's the highlight walk away. And the second one is this idea that the enterprises have to have a new way to procure and not just the consumption, but some vendor selection. I think it's going to be very interesting as value can be proved with data. So maybe the procurement process becomes, here's a beachhead, here's a little bit of data. Let me see what it can do. >> I would say... Again, I said it was this morning, that the big four have given... Last year they spent a hundred billion dollars more on CapEx. To me, that's a gift. In so many companies, especially focusing on trying to hang onto the legacy business. They're saying, "Well not everything's going to move to the Cloud." Whatever, the narrative should change to, "Hey, thank you for that gift. We're now going to build value on top of the Cloud." Ali Ghodsi laid that out, how Databricks is doing it. And it's clearly what Snowflake's new with the data cloud. It basically a layer that abstracts all that underlying complexity and add value on top. Eventually going out to the Edge. That's a value added model that's enabled by the hyperscalers. And that to me, if I have to evaluate where I'm going to place my bets as a CIO or IT practitioner, I'm going to look at who are the ones that are actually embracing that investment that's been made and adding value on top in a way that can drive my data-driven, my digital business or whatever buzzword you want to throw on. >> Yeah, I think we were talking about the startups in today's sessions. I think for startups, my advice is to be as close as you can be to hyperscalers and anybody who awards them, they will cave in at the end of the day, because that's where the whole span of gravity is. That's what the innovation gravity is, everybody's gravitating towards that. And I would say quite a few times in the last couple of years that the rate of innovation happening in a non-cloud companies, when I talk about non-cloud means are not public companies. I think it's like diminishing, if you will, as compared to in cloud, there's a lot of innovation. The Cloud companies are not paying by power people anymore. They have all sophisticated platforms and leverage those, and also leverage the marketplaces and leverage their buyers. And the key will be how you highlight yourself in that cloud market place if you will. It's like in a grocery store where your product is placed and you have to market around it, and you have to have a good story telling team in place as well after you do the product market fit. I think that's a key. I think just being close to the Cloud providers, that's the way to go for startups. >> Real, real quick. Each of you talk about what it takes to crack the code for the enterprise in the modern era now. Dave, we'll start with you. What's it take? (indistinct) >> You got to have it be solving a problem that is 10X better at one 10th a cost of anybody else, if you're a small company, that rule number one. Number two is you obviously got to get product market fit. You got to then figure out. And I think, and again, you're in your early phases, you have to be almost processed builders, figure out... Your KPIs should all be built around retention. How do I define customer success? How do I keep customers and how do I make them loyal so that I know that my cost of acquisition is going to be at least one-third or lower than my lifetime value of that customer? So you've got to nail that. And then once you nail that, you've got to codify that process in the next phase, which really probably gets into your platform discussion. And that's really where you can start to standardize and scale and figure out your go to market and the relationship between marketing spend and sales productivity. And then when you get that, then you got to move on to figure out your Mot. Your Mot might just be a brand. It might be some secret sauce, but more often than not though, it's going to be the relationship that you build. And I think you've got to think about those phases and in today's world, you got to move really fast. Sarbjeet, real quick. What's the secret to crack the code? >> I think the secret to crack the code is partnership and alliances. As a small company selling to the bigger enterprises, the vendors size will be one of the big objections. Even if they don't say it, it's on the back of their mind, "What if these guys disappear tomorrow what would we do if we pick this technology?" And another thing is like, if you're building on the left side, which is the developer side, not on the right side, which is the operations or production side, if you will, you have to understand the sales cycles are longer on the right side and left side is easier to get to, but that's why we see a lot more startups. And on the left side of your DevOps space, if you will, because it's easier to sell to practitioners and market to them and then show the value correctly. And also understand that on the left side, the developers are very know how hungry, on the right side people are very cost-conscious. So understanding the traits of these different personas, if you will buyers, it will, I think set you apart. And as Dave said, you have to solve a problem, focus on practitioners first, because you're small. You have to solve political problems very well. And then you can expand. >> Well, guys, I really appreciate the time. Dave, we're going to do more of these, Sarbjeet we're going to do more of these. We're going to add more community to it. We're going to add our community rooms next time. We're going to do these quarterly and try to do them as more frequently, we learned a lot and we still got a lot more to learn. There's a lot more contribution out in the community that we're going to tap into. Certainly the CUBE Club as we call it, Dave. We're going to build this actively around Cloud. This is another 20 years. The Edge brings us more life with Cloud, it's really exciting. And again, enterprise is no longer an enterprise, it's just the world now. So great companies here, the next Databricks, the next IPO. The next big thing is in this list, Dave. >> Hey, John, we'll see you in Barcelona. Looking forward to that. Sarbjeet, I know in a second half, we're going to run into each other. So (indistinct) thank you John. >> Trouble has started. Great talking to you guys today and have fun in Barcelona and keep us informed. >> Thanks for coming. I want to thank Natalie Erlich who's in Rome right now. She's probably well past her bedtime, but she kicked it off and emceeing and hosting with Dave and I for this AW startup showcase. This is batch two episode two day. What do we call this? It's like a release so that the next 15 startups are coming. So we'll figure it out. (laughs) Thanks for watching everyone. Thanks. (bright music)

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

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

(upbeat music) >> From New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering "Welcome To The New Edge." Brought to you by Pensando Systems. >> Hey, welcome back here ready. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are high atop Goldman Sachs in downtown Manhattan, I think it's 43 floors, for a really special event. It's the Pensando launch. It's really called welcome to the new edge and we talked about technology. We had some of the founders on but, these type of opportunities are really special to talk to some really senior leaders and we're excited to have John Chambers back on, who as you know, historic CEO of Cisco for many, many years. Has left that, is doing his own ventures he's writing books, he's investing and he's, happens to be chairman of the board of Pensando. So John, thanks for taking a few minutes with us. >> Well, more than a few minutes, I think what we talked about today is a major industry change and so to focus on that and focus about the implications will be a lot of fun. >> So let's jump into it. So, one of the things you led with earlier today was kind of these 10 year cycles and they're not exactly 10 years, but you outlined a series of them from mainframe, mini client server everybody knows kind of the sequence. What do you think it is about the 10 year kind of cycle besides the fact that it's easy and convenient for us to remember, that, kind of paces these big disruptions? >> Well, I think it has to do with once a company takes off they tend to, dominate that segment of the industry for so long that even if a creative idea came up they were just overpowering. And then toward the end of a 10 year cycle they quit reinventing themselves. And we talked earlier about the innovator's dilemma and the implications for it. Or an architecture that was designed that suddenly can't go to the next level. So I think it's probably a combination of three or four different factors, including the original incumbent who broke the glass, disrupted others, not disrupting themselves. >> Right, but you also talked about a story where you had to shift focus based on some customer feedback and you ran Cisco for a lot longer than 10 years. So how do you as a leader kind of keep your ears open to something that's a disruptive change that's not your regular best customer and your regular best salesman asking for a little bit faster, a little bit cheaper, a little bit of more the same versus the significant disruptive transformational shift? >> Well this goes back to one of my most basic views in life is I think we learn more from our setbacks or setbacks we were part of, or even the missteps or mistakes than you ever do your successes. Everybody loves to talk about successes and I'm no different there. But when you watched a great state like West Virginia that was the chemical center of the world and the coal mining center of the world, the 125,000 coal mines, six miners very well paid, 6,000 of the top engineers in the world, it was the Silicon Valley of the chemical industry and those just disappear. And because our state did not reinvent itself, because the education system didn't change, because we didn't distract attract a new set of businesses in we just kept doing the right thing too long, we got left behind. Then I went to Boston, it was the Silicon Valley of the world. And Route 128 around Boston was symbolic with the Silicon Valley and I-101 and 280 around it. And we had the top university at that time. Much like Stanford today, but MIT generating new companies. We had great companies, DEC, Wang, Data General. Probably a million jobs in the area and because we got stuck in a segment of the market, quit listening to our customers and missed the transitions, not only did we lose probably 1.2 million jobs on it, 100,000 out of DEC, 32,000 out of Wang, etc, we did not catch the next generation of technology changes. So I understand the implications if you don't disrupt yourself. But I also learned, that if you're not regularly reinventing yourself, you get left behind as a leader. And one of my toughest competitors came up to me and said, "John, I love the way you're reinventing Cisco "and how you've done that multiple times." And then I turned and I said "That's why a CEO has got to be in the job "for more than four or five years" and he said, "Now we disagree again." Which we usually did and he said, "Most people can't reinvent themselves." And he said "I'm an example." "I'm a pretty good CEO" he's actually a very good CEO, but he said, "After I've been there three or four years "I've made the changes, that I know "I've got to go somewhere else." And he could see I didn't buy-in and then he said, "How many of your top 100 people "you've been happy with once they've been "in the job for more than five years?" I hesitated and I said "Only one." And he's right, you've got to move people around, you've got to get people comfortable with disruption on it and, the hardest one to disrupt are the companies or the leaders who've been most successful and yet, that's when you got to think about disruption. >> Right, so to pivot on that a little bit in terms of kind of the government's role in jobs, specifically. >> Yes. >> We're in this really strange period of time. We have record low unemployment, right, tiny, tiny unemployment, and yet, we see automation coming in aggressively with autonomous vehicles and this and that and just to pick truck drivers as a category, everyone can clearly see that autonomous vehicles are going to knock them out in the not too distant future. That said, there's more demand for truck drivers today than there's every been and they can't fill the positions So, with this weird thing where we're going to have a bunch of new jobs that are created by technology, we're going to have a bunch of old jobs that get displaced by technology, but those people aren't necessarily the same people that can leave the one and go to the other. So as you look at that challenge, and I know you work with a lot of government leaders, how should they be thinking about taking on this challenge? >> Well, I think you've got to take it on very squarely and let's use the U.S. as an example and then I'll parallel what France is doing and what India is doing that is actually much more creative that what we are, from countries you wouldn't have anticipated. In the U.S. we know that 50% of the Fortune 500 will probably not exist in 10 years, 12 at the most. We know that the large companies will not incrementally hire people over this next decade and they've often been one of the best sources of hiring because of AI and automation will change that. So, it's not just a question of being schooled in one area and move to another, those jobs will disappear within the companies. If we don't have new jobs in startups and if we don't have the startups running at about three to four times the current volumes, we've got a real problem looking out five to 10 years. And the startups where everyone thinks we're doing a good job, the app user, third to a half of what they were two decades ago. And so if you need 25 million jobs over this next decade and your startups are at a level more like they were in the 90s, that's going to be a challenge. And so I think we've got to think from the government perspective of how we become a startup nation again, how we think about long-term job creation, how we think about job creation not taking money out of one pocket and give it to another. People want a real job, they want to have a meaningful job. We got to change our K through 12 education system which is broken, we've got to change our university system to generate the jobs for where people are going and then we've got to retrain people. That is very doable, if you got at it with a total plan and approach it from a scale perspective. That was lacking. And one of the disappointing things in the debate last night, and while I'm a republican I really want who's going to really lead us well both at the presidential level, but also within the senate, the house. Is, there was a complete lack of any vision on what the country should look like 10 years from now, and how we're going to create 25 million jobs and how we're going to create 10 million more that are going to be displaced and how we're going to re-educate people for it. It was a lot of finger pointing and transactional, but no overall plan. Modi did the reverse in India, and actually Macron, in all places, in France. Where they looked at GDP growth, job creation, startups, education changes, etc, and they executed to an overall approach. So, I'm looking for our government really to change the approach and to really say how are we going to generate jobs and how are we going to deal with the issues that are coming at us. It's a combination of all the the above. >> Yep. Let's shift gears a little bit about the education system and you're very involved and you talked about MIT. Obviously, I think Stanford and Cal are such big drivers of innovation in the Bay area because smart people go there and they don't leave. And then there's a lot of good buzz now happening in Atlanta as an investment really piggy-backing on Georgia Tech, which also creates a lot of great engineers. As you look at education, I don't want to go through K through 12, but more higher education, how do you see that evolving in today's world? It's super expensive, there's tremendous debt for the kids coming out, it doesn't necessarily train them for the new jobs. >> Where the jobs are. >> How do you see, kind of the role of higher education and that evolving into kind of this new world in which we're headed? >> Well, the good news and bad news about when I look at successful startups around the world, they're always centered around a innovative university and it isn't just about the raw horse power of the kids, It starts with the CEO of the university, the president of the university, their curriculum, their entrepreneurial approach, do they knock down the barriers across the various groups from engineering to business to law, etc? And are they thinking out of box? And if you watch, there is a huge missing piece between, Georgia Tech more of an exception, but still not running at the level they need to. And the Northeast around Boston and New York and Silicon Valley, The rest of the country's being left behind. So I'm looking for universities to completely redo their curriculum. I'm looking for it really breaking down the silos within the groups and focus on the outcomes. And much like Steve Case has done a very good job on focusing, about the Rust Belt and how do you do startups? I'm going to learn from what I saw in France at Polytechnique and the ITs in India, and what occurred in Stanford and MIT used to occur is, you've got to get the universities to be the core and that's where they kids want to stay close to, and we've got to generate a whole different curriculum, if you will, in the universities, including, continuous learning for their graduates, to be able to come back virtually and say how do I learn about re-skilling myself? >> Yeah. >> The current model is just not >> the right model >> It's broken. >> For the, for going forward. >> K through 12 is >> hopelessly broken >> Yeah. >> and the universities, while were still better than anywhere else in the world, we're still teaching, and some of the teachers and some of the books are what I could have used in college. >> Right, right >> So, we got to rethink the whole curriculum >> darn papers on the inside >> disrupt, disrupt >> So, shifting gears a little bit, you, played with lots of companies in your CEO role you guys did a ton of M&A, you're very famous for the successful M&A that you did over a number of years, but in an investor role, J2 now, you're looking at a more early stage. And you said you made a number of investments which is exciting. So, as you evaluate opportunities A. In teams that come to pitch to you >> Yeah. >> B. What are the key things you look for? >> In the sequence you've raised them, first in my prior world, I was really happy to do 180 acquisitions, in my current world, I'm reversed, I want them to go IPO. Because you add 76% of your headcount after an IPO, or after you've become a unicorn. When companies are bought, including what I bought in my prior role, their headcount growth is pretty well done. We'd add engineers after that, but would blow them through our sales channel, services, finance, etc. So, I want to see many more of these companies go public, and this goes back to national agenda about getting IPO's, not back to where they were during the 90's when it was almost two to three times, what you've seen over the last decade. But probably double, even that number the 90's, to generate the jobs we want. So, I'm very interested now about companies going public in direction. To the second part of your question, on what do I look for in startups and why, if I can bridge it, to am I so faired up about Pensando? If I look for my startups and, it's like I do acquisitions, I develop a playbook, I run that playbook faster and faster, it's how I do digitization of countries, etc. And so for a area I'm going to invest in and bet on, first thing I look at, is their market, technology transition, and business model transition occurring at the same time. That was Amazon of 15 years ago as an example. The second thing I look at, is the CEO and ideally, the whole founding team but it's usually just the CEO. The third thing I look for, is what are the customers really say about them? There's only one Steve Jobs, and it took him seven years. So, I go to the customers and say "What do you really think of this company?" Fourth thing I look for, is how close to an inflection point are they. The fifth thing I look for, is what they have in their ecosystem. Are they partnering? Things of that type. So, if I were to look at Pensando, Which is really the topic about can they bring to the market the new edge in a way that will be a market leading force for a whole decade? Through a ecosystem of partners that will change business dramatically and perhaps become the next major tech icon. It's how well you do that. Their vision in terms of market transitions, and business transitions 100% right. We've talked about it, 5G, IOT, internet of things, going from 15 billion devices to 500 billion devices in probably seven years. And, with the movement to the edge the business models will also change. And this is where, democratization, the cloud, and people able to share that power, where every technology company becomes a business becomes a, every business company becomes a technology company. >> Right. >> The other thing I look at is, the team. This is a team of six people, myself being a part of it, that thinks like one. That is so unusual, If you're lucky, you get a CEO and maybe a founder, a co-founder. This team, you've got six people who've worked together for over 20 years who think alike. The customers, you heard the discussions today. >> Right. >> And we've not talked to a single cloud player, a single enterprise company, a single insurance provider, or major technology company who doesn't say "This is very unique, let's talk about "how we work together on it." The inflection point, it's now you saw that today. >> Nobody told them it's young mans game obviously, they got the twenty-something mixed up >> No, actually were redefining (laughs) twenty-something, (laughs) but it does say, age is more perspective on how you think. >> Right, right. >> And Shimone Peres, who, passed away unfortunately, two years ago, was a very good friend. He basically said "You've got all your life "to think like a teenager, "and to really think and dream out of box." And he did it remarkably well. So, I think leaders, whether their twenty-something, or twenty-some years of experience working you've got to think that way. >> Right. So I'm curious, your take on how this has evolved, because, there was data and there was compute. And networking brought those two thing together, and you were at the heart of that. >> Mm-hmm. Now, it's getting so much more complex with edge, to get your take on edge. But, also more importantly exponential growth. You've talked about going from, how ever many millions the devices that were connected, to the billions of devices that are connected now. How do you stay? How do you help yourself think along exponential curves? Because that is not easy, and it's not human. But you have to, if you're going to try to get ahead of that next wave. >> Completely agree. And this is not just for me, how do I do it? I'm sharing it more that other people can learn and think about it perhaps the same way. The first thing is, it's always good to think of the positive, You can change the world here, the positive things, But I've also seen the negatives we talked about earlier. If you don't think that way, if you don't think that way as a leader of your company, leader of your country, or the leader of a venture group you're going to get left behind. The implications for it are really bad. The second is, you've got to say how do you catch and get a replicable playbook? The neat thing about what were talking about, whether it's by country in France, or India or the U.S., we've got replicable playbooks we know what to run. The third element is, you've got to have the courage to get outside your comfort zone. And I love change when it happens to you, I don't like it when it happens to me And I know that, So, I've got to get people around me who push me outside my comfort zone on that. And then, you've got to be able to dream and think like that teenager we talked about before. But that's what we were just with a group of customers, who were at this event. And they were asking "How do we get "this innovation into our company?" "How do we get the ability to innovate, through not just strategic partnerships with other large companies or partnerships with startups?" But "How do we build that internally?" It's comes down to the leader has to create that image and that approach. Modi's done it for 1.3 billion people in India. A vision, of the future on GDP growth. A digital country, startups, etc. If they can do it for 1.3 billion, tell me why the U.S. can not do it? (laughs) And why even small states here, can't do it. >> Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit, >> All right. >> A lot of black eyes in Silicon Valley right now, a lot of negativity going on, a lot of problems with privacy and trading data for currency and, it's been a rough road. You're way into tech for good and as you said, you can use technology for good you can use technology for bad. What are some things you're doing on the tech for good side? Because I don't think it gets the spotlight that it probably should, because it doesn't sell papers. >> Well, actually the press has been pretty good we just need to do it more on scale. Going back to Cisco days, we never had any major issues with governments. Even though there was a Snowden issue, there were a lot of implications about the power of the internet. Because we work with governments and citizens to say "What are the legitimate needs so that everybody benefits from this?" And where the things that we might have considered doing that, governments felt strongly about or the citizens wouldn't prosper from we just didn't do it. And we work with democrats and republicans alike and 90% of our nation believed tech was for good. But we worked hard on that. And today, I think you got to have more companies doing this and then, what, were doing uniquely in JC2, is were literally partnering with France on tech is for good and I'm Macron's, global tech ambassador and we focus about job creation and inclusion. Not just in Paris, or around Station F but throughout all the various regions in the country. Same thing within India, across 26 different states with Modi on how do you drive it through? And then if we can do it in France or India why can't we do it in each state in the U.S.? Partnering with West Virginia, with a very creative, president of the university there West Virginia University. With the democrats and republicans in their national senate, but also within the governor and speaker of the house and the president and senate within West Virginia, and really saying were going to change it together. And getting a model that you can then cookie cut across the U.S. if you change the curriculum, to your earlier comments. If you begin to focus on outcomes, not being an expert in one area, which is liable not to have a job >> Right. >> Ten years later. So, I'm a dreamer within that, but I think you owe an obligation to giving back, and I think they're all within our grasps >> Right >> And I think you can do, the both together. I think at JC2 we can create a billion dollar company with less than 10 people. I think you can change the world and also make a very good profit. And I think technology companies have to get back to that, you got to create more jobs than you destroy. And you can't be destroying jobs, then telling other people how to live their lives and what their politics should be. >> Yeah. >> That just doesn't work in terms of the environment. >> Well John, again, thanks for your time. Give you the last word on >> Sure >> Account of what happened here today, I mean you're here, and Tony O'Neary was here or at the headquarters of Goldman. A flagship launch customer, for the people that weren't here today why should they be paying attention? >> Well, if we've got this market transition right, the technology and business model, the next transition will be everything goes to the edge. And as every company or every government, or every person has to be both good in their "Area of expertise." or their vertical their in, they've got to also be good in technology. What happened today was a leveling of the playing field as it relates to cloud. In terms of everyone should have choice, democratization there, but also in architecture that allows people to really change their business models, as everything moves to the edge where 75% of all transactions, all data will be had and it might even be higher than that. Secondly, you saw a historic first never has anybody ever emerged from stealth after only two and a half years of existing as a company, with this type of powerhouse behind them. And you saw the players where you have a customer, Goldman Sachs, in one of the most leading edge areas, of industry change which is obviously finance leading as the customer who's driven our direction from the very beginning. And a company like NetApp, that understood the implication on storage, from two and a half years ago and drove our direction from the very beginning. A company like HP Enterprise's, who understood this could go across their whole company in terms of the implications, and the unique opportunity to really change and focus on, how do they evolve their company to provide their customer experience in a very unique way? How do you really begin to think about Equinix in terms of how they changed entirely from a source matter prospective, what they have to do in terms of the direction and capabilities? And then Lightspeed, one of the most creative intra capital that really understands this transition saying "I want to be a part of this." Including being on the board and changing the world one more time. So, what happened today? If we're right, I think this was the beginning of a major inflection point as everything moves to the edge. And how ecosystem players, with Pensando at the heart of that ecosystem, can take on the giants but also really use this technology to give everybody choice, and how they really make a difference in the future. As well as, perhaps give back to society. >> Love it. Thank you John >> My pleasure, that was fun. >> Appreciate it. You're John, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two, we're sort of wrapping up the Chief Data Officer event. It's MIT CDOIQ, it started as an information quality event and with the ascendancy of big data the CDO emerged and really took center stage here. And it's interesting to know that it's kind of come full circle back to information quality. People are realizing all this data we have, you know the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. So the information quality worlds and this chief data officer world have really come colliding together. Robert Abate is here, he's the Vice President and CDO of Global IDS and also the co-chair of next year's, the 14th annual MIT CDOIQ. Robert, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, well thank you. >> Now you're a CDO by background, give us a little history of your career. >> Sure, sure. Well I started out with an Electrical Engineering degree and went into applications development. By 2000, I was leading the Ralph Lauren's IT, and I realized when Ralph Lauren hired me, he was getting ready to go public. And his problem was he had hired eight different accounting firms to do eight different divisions. And each of those eight divisions were reporting a number, but the big number didn't add up, so he couldn't go public. So he searched the industry to find somebody who could figure out the problem. Now I was, at the time, working in applications and had built this system called Service Oriented Architectures, a way of integrating applications. And I said, "Well I don't know if I could solve the problem, "but I'll give it a shot." And what I did was, just by taking each silo as it's own problem, which was what EID Accounting Firm had done, I was able to figure out that one of Ralph Lauren's policies was if you buy a garment, you can return it anytime, anywhere, forever, however long you own it. And he didn't think about that, but what that meant is somebody could go to a Bloomingdale's, buy a garment and then go to his outlet store and return it. Well, the cross channels were different systems. So the outlet stores were his own business, retail was a different business, there was a completely different, each one had their own AS/400, their own data. So what I quickly learned was, the problem wasn't the systems, the problem was the data. And it took me about two months to figure it out and he offered me a job, he said well, I was a consultant at the time, he says, "I'm offering you a job, you're going to run my IT." >> Great user experience but hard to count. >> (laughs) Hard to count. So that's when I, probably 1999 was when that happened. I went into data and started researching-- >> Sorry, so how long did it take you to figure that out? You said a couple of months? >> A couple of months, I think it was about two months. >> 'Cause jeez, it took Oracle what, 10 years to build Fusion with SOA? That's pretty good. (laughs) >> This was a little bit of luck. When we started integrating the applications we learned that the messages that we were sending back and forth didn't match, and we said, "Well that's impossible, it can't not match." But what didn't match was it was coming from one channel and being returned in another channel, and the returns showed here didn't balance with the returns on this side. So it was a data problem. >> So a forensics showdown. So what did you do after? >> After that I went into ICICI Bank which was a large bank in India who was trying to integrate their systems, and again, this was a data problem. But they heard me giving a talk at a conference on how SOA had solved the data challenge, and they said, "We're a bank with a wholesale, a retail, "and other divisions, "and we can't integrate the systems, can you?" I said, "Well yeah, I'd build a website "and make them web services and now what'll happen is "each of those'll kind of communicate." And I was at ICICI Bank for about six months in Mumbai, and finished that which was a success, came back and started consulting because now a lot of companies were really interested in this concept of Service Oriented Architectures. Back then when we first published on it, myself, Peter Aiken, and a gentleman named Joseph Burke published on it in 1996. The publisher didn't accept the book, it was a really interesting thing. We wrote the book called, "Services Based Architectures: A Way to Integrate Systems." And the way Wiley & Sons, or most publishers work is, they'll have three industry experts read your book and if they don't think what you're saying has any value, they, forget about it. So one guy said this is brilliant, one guy says, "These guys don't know what they're talking about," and the third guy says, "I don't even think what they're talking about is feasible." So they decided not to publish. Four years later it came back and said, "We want to publish the book," and Peter said, "You know what, they lost their chance." We were ahead of them by four years, they didn't understand the technology. So that was kind of cool. So from there I went into consulting, eventually took a position as the Head of Enterprise and Director of Enterprise Information Architecture with Walmart. And Walmart, as you know, is a huge entity, almost the size of the federal government. So to build an architecture that integrates Walmart would've been a challenge, a behemoth challenge, and I took it on with a phenomenal team. >> And when was this, like what timeframe? >> This was 2010, and by the end of 2010 we had presented an architecture to the CIO and the rest of the organization, and they came back to me about a week later and said, "Look, everybody agrees what you did was brilliant, "but nobody knows how to implement it. "So we're taking you away, "you're no longer Director of Information Architecture, "you're now Director of Enterprise Information Management. "Build it. "Prove that what you say you could do, you could do." So we built something called the Data CAFE, and CAFE was an acronym, it stood for: Collaborative Analytics Facility for the Enterprise. What we did was we took data from one of the divisions, because you didn't want to take on the whole beast, boil the ocean. We picked Sam's Club and we worked with their CFO, and because we had information about customers we were able to build a room with seven 80 inch monitors that surrounded anyone in the room. And in the center was the Cisco telecommunications so you could be a part of a meeting. >> The TelePresence. >> TelePresence. And we built one room in one facility, and one room in another facility, and we labeled the monitors, one red, one blue, one green, and we said, "There's got to be a way where we can build "data science so it's interactive, so somebody, "an executive could walk into the room, "touch the screen, and drill into features. "And in another room "the features would be changing simultaneously." And that's what we built. The room was brought up on Black Friday of 2013, and we were able to see the trends of sales on the East Coast that we quickly, the executives in the room, and these are the CEO of Walmart and the heads of Sam's Club and the like, they were able to change the distribution in the Mountain Time Zone and west time zones because of the sales on the East Coast gave them the idea, well these things are going to sell, and these things aren't. And they saw a tremendous increase in productivity. We received the 2014, my team received the 2014 Walmart Innovation Project of the Year. >> And that's no slouch. Walmart has always been heavily data-oriented. I don't know if it's urban legend or not, but the famous story in the '80s of the beer and the diapers, right? Walmart would position beer next to diapers, why would they do that? Well the father goes in to buy the diapers for the baby, picks up a six pack while he's on the way, so they just move those proximate to each other. (laughs) >> In terms of data, Walmart really learned that there's an advantage to understanding how to place items in places that, a path that you might take in a store, and knowing that path, they actually have a term for it, I believe it's called, I'm sorry, I forgot the name but it's-- >> Selling more stuff. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's selling more stuff. It's the way you position items on a shelf. And Walmart had the brilliance, or at least I thought it was brilliant, that they would make their vendors the data champion. So the vendor, let's say Procter & Gamble's a vendor, and they sell this one product the most. They would then be the champion for that aisle. Oh, it's called planogramming. So the planogramming, the way the shelves were organized, would be set up by Procter & Gamble for that entire area, working with all their other vendors. And so Walmart would give the data to them and say, "You do it." And what I was purporting was, well, we shouldn't just be giving the data away, we should be using that data. And that was the advent of that. From there I moved to Kimberly-Clark, I became Global Director of Enterprise Data Management and Analytics. Their challenge was they had different teams, there were four different instances of SAP around the globe. One for Latin America, one for North America called the Enterprise Edition, one for EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and one for Asia-Pacific. Well when you have four different instances of SAP, that means your master data doesn't exist because the same thing that happens in this facility is different here. And every company faces this challenge. If they implement more than one of a system the specialty fields get used by different companies in different ways. >> The gold standard, the gold version. >> The golden version. So I built a team by bringing together all the different international teams, and created one team that was able to integrate best practices and standards around data governance, data quality. Built BI teams for each of the regions, and then a data science and advanced analytics team. >> Wow, so okay, so that makes you uniquely qualified to coach here at the conference. >> Oh, I don't know about that. (laughs) There are some real, there are some geniuses here. >> No but, I say that because these are your peeps. >> Yes, they are, they are. >> And so, you're a practitioner, this conference is all about practitioners talking to practitioners, it's content-heavy, There's not a lot of fluff. Lunches aren't sponsored, there's no lanyard sponsor and it's not like, you know, there's very subtle sponsor desks, you have to have sponsors 'cause otherwise the conference's not enabled, and you've got costs associated with it. But it's a very intimate event and I think you guys want to keep it that way. >> And I really believe you're dead-on. When you go to most industry conferences, the industry conferences, the sponsors, you know, change the format or are heavily into the format. Here you have industry thought leaders from all over the globe. CDOs of major Fortune 500 companies who are working with their peers and exchanging ideas. I've had conversations with a number of CDOs and the thought leadership at this conference, I've never seen this type of thought leadership in any conference. >> Yeah, I mean the percentage of presentations by practitioners, even when there's a vendor name, they have a practitioner, you know, internal practitioner presenting so it's 99.9% which is why people attend. We're moving venues next year, I understand. Just did a little tour of the new venue, so, going to be able to accommodate more attendees, so that's great. >> Yeah it is. >> So what are your objectives in thinking ahead a year from now? >> Well, you know, I'm taking over from my current peer, Dr. Arka Mukherjee, who just did a phenomenal job of finding speakers. People who are in the industry, who are presenting challenges, and allowing others to interact. So I hope could do a similar thing which is, find with my peers people who have real world challenges, bring them to the forum so they can be debated. On top of that, there are some amazing, you know, technology change is just so fast. One of the areas like big data I remember only five years ago the chart of big data vendors maybe had 50 people on it, now you would need the table to put all the vendors. >> Who's not a data vendor, you know? >> Who's not a data vendor? (laughs) So I would think the best thing we could do is, is find, just get all the CDOs and CDO-types into a room, and let us debate and talk about these points and issues. I've seen just some tremendous interactions, great questions, people giving advice to others. I've learned a lot here. >> And how about long term, where do you see this going? How many CDOs are there in the world, do you know? Is that a number that's known? >> That's a really interesting point because, you know, only five years ago there weren't that many CDOs to be called. And then Gartner four years ago or so put out an article saying, "Every company really should have a CDO." Not just for the purpose of advancing your data, and to Doug Laney's point that data is being monetized, there's a need to have someone responsible for information 'cause we're in the Information Age. And a CIO really is focused on infrastructure, making sure I've got my PCs, making sure I've got a LAN, I've got websites. The focus on data has really, because of the Information Age, has turned data into an asset. So organizations realize, if you utilize that asset, let me reverse this, if you don't use data as an asset, you will be out of business. I heard a quote, I don't know if it's true, "Only 10 years ago, 250 of the Fortune 10 no longer exists." >> Yeah, something like that, the turnover's amazing. >> Many of those companies were companies that decided not to make the change to be data-enabled, to make data decision processing. Companies still use data warehouses, they're always going to use them, and a warehouse is a rear-view mirror, it tells you what happened last week, last month, last year. But today's businesses work forward-looking. And just like driving a car, it'd be really hard to drive your car through a rear-view mirror. So what companies are doing today are saying, "Okay, let's start looking at this as forward-looking, "a prescriptive and predictive analytics, "rather than just what happened in the past." I'll give you an example. In a major company that is a supplier of consumer products, they were leading in the industry and their sales started to drop, and they didn't know why. Well, with a data science team, we were able to determine by pulling in data from the CDC, now these are sources that only 20 years ago nobody ever used to bring in data in the enterprise, now 60% of your data is external. So we brought in data from the CDC, we brought in data on maternal births from the national government, we brought in data from the Census Bureau, we brought in data from sources of advertising and targeted marketing towards mothers. Pulled all that data together and said, "Why are diaper sales down?" Well they were targeting the large regions of the country and putting ads in TV stations in New York and California, big population centers. Birth rates in population centers have declined. Birth rates in certain other regions, like the south, and the Bible Belt, if I can call it that, have increased. So by changing the marketing, their product sales went up. >> Advertising to Texas. >> Well, you know, and that brings to one of the points, I heard a lecture today about ethics. We made it a point at Walmart that if you ran a query that reduced a result to less than five people, we wouldn't allow you to see the result. Because, think about it, I could say, "What is my neighbor buying? "What are you buying?" So there's an ethical component to this as well. But that, you know, data is not political. Data is not chauvinistic. It doesn't discriminate, it just gives you facts. It's the interpretation of that that is hard CDOs, because we have to say to someone, "Look, this is the fact, and your 25 years "of experience in the business, "granted, is tremendous and it's needed, "but the facts are saying this, "and that would mean that the business "would have to change its direction." And it's hard for people to do, so it requires that. >> So whether it's called the chief data officer, whatever the data czar rubric is, the head of analytics, there's obviously the data quality component there whatever that is, this is the conference for, as I called them, your peeps, for that role in the organization. People often ask, "Will that role be around?" I think it's clear, it's solidifying. Yes, you see the chief digital officer emerging and there's a lot of tailwinds there, but the information quality component, the data architecture component, it's here to stay. And this is the premiere conference, the premiere event, that I know of anyway. There are a couple of others, perhaps, but it's great to see all the success. When I first came here in 2013 there were probably about 130 folks here. Today, I think there were 500 people registered almost. Next year, I think 600 is kind of the target, and I think it's very reasonable with the new space. So congratulations on all the success, and thank you for stepping up to the co-chair role, I really appreciate it. >> Well, let me tell you I thank you guys. You provide a voice at these IT conferences that we really need, and that is the ability to get the message out. That people do think and care, the industry is not thoughtless and heartless. With all the data breaches and everything going on there's a lot of fear, fear, loathing, and anticipation. But having your voice, kind of like ESPN and a sports show, gives the technology community, which is getting larger and larger by the day, a voice and we need that so, thank you. >> Well thank you, Robert. We appreciate that, it was great to have you on. Appreciate the time. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We'll be right back with out next guest as we wrap up day two of MIT CDOIQ. You're watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

>> Live, from Toronto Canada, it's the CUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by the CUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is the CUBE's exclusive coverage here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference, we're here all week. Yesterday we were at the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit put on by DigitalBits and the community, here is the big show around thought leadership around the future of blockchain and where it's going. Certainly token economics is the hottest thing with blockchain, although the markets are down the market is not down when it comes to building things. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, here with CUBE alumni and special guest Hartej Sawhney who is the founder of Hosho doing a lot of work on security space and they have a conference coming up that the CUBE will be broadcasting live at, HoshoCon this coming fall, it's in October I believe, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Always great to see you man. >> What's the date of the event, real quick, what's the date on your event? >> It's October 9th to the 11th, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, we rented out the entire property, we want everyone only to bump into the people that we're inviting and they're coming. And the focus is blockchain security. We attend over 130 conferences a year, and there's never enough conversation about blockchain security, so we figured, y'know, Defcon is still pure cybersecurity, Devcon from Ethereum is more for Ethereum developers only, and every other conference is more of a traditional blockchain conference with ICO pitch competitions. We figured we're not going to do that, and we're going to try to combine the worlds, a Defcon meets Devcon vibe, and have hackers welcome, have white hat hackers host a bug bounty, invite bright minds in the space like Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, the founder of the Trezor wallet, RSA, y'know we've even invited everyone from our competitors to everyone in the media, to everyone that are leading the blockchain whole space. >> That's the way to run an event with community, congratulations. Mark your calendar we've got HoshoCon coming up in October. Hartej, I want to ask you, I know Dave wants to ask you your trip around the world kind of questions, but I want to get your take on something we're seeing emerging, and I know you've been talking about, I want to get your thoughts and reaction and vision on: we're starting to see the world, the losers go out of the market, and certainly prices are down on the coins, and the coins are a lot of tokens out there, >> Too many damn tokens! (laughing) >> The losers are the only ones who borrowed money to buy bitcoin. >> (laughs) Someone shorted bitcoin. >> That's it. >> But there's now an emphasis on builders and there's always been an entrepreneurial market here, alpha entrepreneurs are coming into the space you're starting to see engineers really building great stuff, there's an emphasis on builders, not just the quick hit ponies. >> Yep. >> So your thoughts on that trend. >> It's during the down-market that you can really focus on building real businesses that solve problems, that have some sort of foresight into how they're going to make real money with a product that's built and tested, and maybe even enterprise grade. And I also think that the future of fundraising is going to be security tokens, and we don't really have a viable security exchange available yet, but giving away actual equity in your business through a security token is something very exciting for sophisticated investors to participate in this future tokenized economy. >> But you're talking about real equity, not just percentage of coin. >> Yeah, y'know, actual equity in the business, but in the form of a security token. I think that's the future of fundraising to some extent. >> Is that a dual sort of vector, two vectors there, one is the value of the token itself and the equity that you get, right? >> Correct, I mean you're basically getting equity in the company, securitized in token form, and then maybe a platform like Securitize or Polymath, the security exchanges that are coming out, will list them. And so I think during the down-markets, when prices are down, again I said before the joke but it's also the truth: the only people losing in this market are the ones who borrowed to buy bitcoin. The people who believe in the technology remain to ignore the price more or less. And if you're focused on building a company this is the time to focus on building a real business. A lot of times in an up-market you think you see a business opportunity just because of the amount of money surely available to be thrown at any project, you can ICO just about any idea and get a couple a million dollars to work on it, not as easy during a down-market so you're starting to take a step back, and ask yourself questions like how do we hit $20,000 of monthly recurring revenue? And that shouldn't be such a crazy thing to ask. When you go to Silicon Valley, unless you're two-time exited, or went to Stanford, or you were an early employee at Facebook, you're not getting your first million dollar check for 15 or 20 percent of your business, even, until you make 20, 25K monthly recurring revenue. I say this on stage at a lot of my keynotes, and I feel like some people glaze their eyes over like, "obviously I know that", the majority are running an ICO where they are nowhere close to making 20K monthly recurring and when you say what's your project they go, "well, our latest traction is that we've closed about "1.5 million in our private pre-sale." That's not traction, you don't have a product built. You raised money. >> And that's a dotcom bubble dynamic where the milestone of fundraising was the traction and that really had nothing to do with building a viable business. And the benefit of blockchain is to do things differently, but achieve the same outcome, either more efficient or faster, in a new way, whether it's starting a company or achieving success. >> Yep, but at the same time, blockchain technology is relatively immature for some products to go, at least for the Fortune 500 today, for them to take a blockchain product out of R&D to the mainstream isn't going to happen right now. Right now the Fortune 500 is investing into blockchain tech but it's in R&D, and they're quickly training their employees to understand what is a smart contract?, who is Nick Szabo?, when did he come up with this word smart contracts? I was just privy to seeing some training information for multiple Fortune 500 companies training their employees on what are smart contracts. Stuff that we read four or five years ago from Nick Szabo's essays is now hitting what I would consider the mainstream, which is mid-level talent, VP-level talent at Fortune 500 companies, who know that this is the next wave. And so when we're thinking about fundraising it's the companies who raise enough money are going to be able to survive the storm, right? In this down-market, if you raised enough money in your ICO, for this vision that you have that's going to be revolutionary, a lot of times I read an ICO's white paper and all I can think is well I hope this happens, because if it does that's crazy. But the question is, did they raise enough money to survive? So that's kind of another reason why people are raising more money than they need. Do people need $100 million to do the project? I don't know. >> It's an arm's race. >> But they need to last 10 years to make this vision come true. >> Hey, so, I want to ask you about your whirlwind tour. And I want to ask in the context of something we've talked about before. You've mentioned on the CUBE that Solidity, very complex, there's a lot of bugs and a lot of security flaws as a result in some of the code. A lot of the code. You're seeing people now try to develop tooling to open up blockchain development to Java programmers, for example, which probably exacerbates the problem. So, in that context, what are you seeing around the world, what are you seeing in terms of the awareness of that problem, and how are you helping solve it? >> So, starting with Fortune 500 companies, they have floors on floors around the world full of Java engineers. Full Stack Engineers who, of course, know Java, they know C#, and they're prepared to build in this language. And so this is why I think IBM's Hyperledger went in that direction. This is why even some people have taken the Ethereum virtual machine and tried to completely rebuild it and rewrite it into functional programming languages like Clojure and Scala. Just so it's more accessible and you can do more with the functional programming language. Very few lines of code are equivalent to hundreds of lines of code in linear languages, and in functional programming languages things are concurrent and linear and you're able to build large-scale enterprise-grade solutions with very small lines of code. So I'm personally excited, I think, about seeing different types of blockchains cater more towards Fortune 500 companies being able to take advantage, right off the bat, of rooms full of Java engineers. The turn to teaching of Solidity, it's been difficult, at least from the cybersecurity perspective we're not looking for someone who's a software engineer who can teach themselves Solidity really fast. We're looking for a cybersecurity, QA-minded, quality-assurance mindset, someone who has an OPSEC mindset to learn Solidity and then audit code with the cybersecurity mindset. And we've found that to be easier than an engineer who knows Java to learn Solidity. Education is hard, we have a global shortage of qualified engineers in this space. >> So cybersecurity is a good cross-over bridge to Solidity. Skills matters. >> If you're in cybersecurity and you're a full sec engineer you can learn just about any language like anyone else. >> The key is to start at the core. >> The key is to have a QA mindset, to have the mindset of actually doing quality assurance, on code and finding vulnerabilities. >> Not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental component of the development process. >> I could be a good engineer and make an app like Angry Birds, upload it, and even before uploading it I'll get it audited by some third party professional, and once it's uploaded I can fix the bugs as we go and release another version. Most smart contracts that have money behind them are written to be irreversible. So if they get hacked, money gets stolen. >> Yeah, that's real. >> And so the mindset is shifting because of this space. >> Alright, so on your tour, paint a picture, what did you see? >> First of all, how many cities, how long? Give us the stats. >> I just did about 80 days and I hit 10 countries. Most of it was between Europe and Asia. I'll start with saying that, right now, there's a race amongst smaller nations, like Malta, Bermuda, Belarus, Panama, the island nations, where they're racing to say that "we have clarity on regulation when it comes to "the blockchain cryptocurrency industries," and this is a big deal, I'd say, mainly for cryptocurrency exchanges, that are fleeing and navigating global regulation. Like in India, Unocoin's bank has been shutdown by the RBI. And they're going up against the RBI and the central government of India because, as an exchange, their banks have been shut down. And they're being forced to navigate waters and unique waves around the world globally. You have people like the world's biggest exchange, at least by volume today is Binance. Binance has relocated 100 people to the island of Malta. For a small island nation that's still technically a part of the European Union, they've made significant progress on bringing clarity on what is legal and what is not, eventually they're saying they want to have a crypto-bank, they want to help you go from IPO to ICO from the Maltese stock exchange. Similarly also Gibraltar, and there's a law firm out there, Hassans, which is like the best law firm in Gibraltar, and they have really led the way on helping the regulators in Gibraltar bring clarity. Both Gibraltar and Malta, what's similar between them is they've been home to online gambling companies. So a lot of online casinos have been in both of their markets. >> They understand. >> They've been very innovative, in many different ways. And so even conversations with the regulators in both Malta and Gibraltar, you can hear their maturity, they understand what a smart contract is. They understand how important it is to have a smart contract audited. They already understand that every exchange in their jurisdiction has to go through regular penetration testing. That if this exchange changes its code that the code opens it up to vulnerabilities, and is the exchange going through penetration testing? So the smaller nations are moving fast. >> But they're operationalizing it faster, and it's the opportunity for them is the upside. >> My only fear is that they're still small nations, and maybe not what they want to hear but it's the truth. Operating in larger nations like the United States, Canada, Germany, even Japan, Korea, we need to see clarity in much larger nations and I think that's something that's exciting that's going to happen possibly after we have the blueprint laid out by places like Malta and Gibraltar and Bermuda. >> And what's the Wild West look like, or Wild East if you will in Asia, a lot of activity, it's a free-for-all, but there's so much energy both on the money-making side and on the capital formation side and the entrepreneurial side. Lay that out, what's that look like? >> By far the most exciting thing in Asia was Korea, Seoul, out of all the Asian tiger countries today, in August 2018, Seoul, Korea has a lot of blockchain action going on right now. It feels like you're in the future, there's actually physical buildings that say Blockchain Academy, and Blockchain Building and Bitcoin Labs, you feel like you're in 2028! (laughs) And today it's 2018. You have a lot of syndication going on, some of it illegal, it's illegal if you give a guarantee to the investor you're going to see some sort of return, as a guarantee. It's not illegal if you're putting together accredited investors who are willing to do KYC and AML and be interested in investing a couple of hundred ETH in a project. So, I would say today a lot of ICOs are flocking to Korea to do a quick fundraising round because a lot of successful syndication is happening there. Second to Korea, I would say, is a battle between Singapore and Hong Kong. They're both very interesting, It's the one place where you can find people who speak English, but also all four of the languages of the tiger nations: Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, all in one place in Hong Kong and Singapore. But Singapore, you still can't get a bank account as an ICO. So they're bringing clarity on regulation and saying you can come here and you can get a lawyer and you can incorporate, but an ICO still has trouble getting a bank account. Hong Kong is simply closer in proximity to China, and China has a lot of ICOs that cannot raise money from Chinese citizens. So they can raise from anybody that's not Chinese, and they don't even have a white paper, a website, or even anybody in-house that can speak English. So they're lacking English materials, English websites, and people in their company that can communicate with the rest of the world in other languages other than Mandarin or Cantonese. And that's a problem that can be solved and bridges need to be built. People are looking in China for people to build that bridge, there's a lot of action going on in Hong Kong for that reason since even though technically it's a part of China it's still not a part of China, it's a tricky gray line. >> Right, in Japan a lot going on but it's still, it's Japan, it's kind of insulated. >> The Japanese government hasn't provided clarity on regulation yet. Just like in India we're waiting for September 11th for some clarity on regulation, same way in Japan, I don't know the exact date but we don't have enough clarity on regulation. I'm seeing good projects pop up in Korea, we're even doing some audits for some projects out of Japan, but we see them at other conferences outside of Japan as well. Coming up in Singapore is consensus, I'm hoping that Singapore will turn into a better place for quality conferences, but I'm not seeing a lot of quality action out of Singapore itself. Y'know, who's based in Singapore? Lots of family funds, lots of new exchanges, lots of big crypto advisory funds have offices there, but core ICOs, there was still a higher number of them in Korea, even in Japan, even. I'm not sure about the comparison between Japan and Singapore, but there is definitely a lot more in Korea. >> What about Switzerland, do you have any visibility there? Did you visit Switzerland? >> I was Zug, I was in Crypto Valley, visited Crypto Valley labs... >> What feels best for you? >> I don't know, Mother Earth! (laughs) >> All of the above. >> The point of bitcoin is for us to start being able to treat this earth as one, and as you navigate through the crypto circuit one thing as that is becoming more visible is the power of China partnering up with the Middle East and building a One Belt, One Road initiative. I feel like One Belt, One Road ties right into the future of crypto, and it's opening up the power of markets like the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore. >> What Gabriel's doing in the Caribbean with Barbados. >> Gabriel from Bit, yeah. >> Yeah, Bit, he's bringing them all together. >> Yeah, I mean the island nations are open arms to companies, and I think they will attract a lot of American companies for sure. >> So you're seeing certainly more, in some pockets, more advanced regulatory climates, outside of the United States, and the talent pool is substantial. >> So then, when it comes to talent pools, I believe it was in global commits for the language of Python, China is just on the verge of surpassing the United States, and there's a lot of just global breakthroughs happening, there's a large number of Full Stack engineers at a very high level in countries like China, India, Ukraine. These are three countries that I think are outliers in that a Full Stack Engineer, at the highest level in a country like India or Ukraine for example, would cost a company between $2,000 to $5,000 a month, to employ full time, in a country where they likely won't take stock to work for your company. >> Fifteen years ago those countries were outsource, "hey, outsource some cheap labor," no, now they're product teams or engineers, they're really building value. >> They're building their own things, in-house. >> And the power of new markets are opening up as you said, this is huge, huge. OK, Hartej, thanks so much for coming on, I know you got to go, you got your event October 9th to 11th in Las Vegas, Blockchain Security Conference. >> The CUBE will be there. >> I look forward to having you there. >> You guys are the leader in Blockchain security, congratulations, hosho.io, check it out. Hosho.io, October 9th, mark your calendars. The CUBE, we are live here in Toronto, for the Blockchain Futurist Conference, with our good friend, CUBE alumni Hartej. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, be right back with more live coverage from the Untraceable event here in Toronto, after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico It's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (latin music) >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound I'm John Furrier, your host, here covering all the action in Puerto Rico as the global society and industry come together. Our next guest is Marhall Taplits he's the Chief Strategy Officer and Co Founder of Nynja.biz, check out their site, Nynja.biz. Marshall, thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> So tell about what you guys do. You guys are doing some disruptive stuff, tell us about what you guys do, then it will jam into a conversation. >> Sure, so are you familiar with WeChat in China, for example? >> Yeah. >> Okay great. So I've personally been living in China 15 years, so we've watched kind of the birth of the Chinese internet, which as we know, is a little different than the regular internet. >> A lot of mobile users. >> A lot of mobile users, 800 million China mobile subscribers alone. WeChat, basically, is a platform that started off as just a messenger but basically what it's done is it's integrated into every facet of Chinese society. To give you an example, you go to a restaurant, you scan the QR code, the menu comes up, you pick the food, you pay for the food, it comes, you walk out. Everything like that is in China. Everything like that is in Wuzhen China. So what we've done is we've kind of taken this concept, and we're working on a global version of it, that's cryptocurrency based, and we are working specifically with Chinese companies in order to help them go global as part of the China One Belt One Road program and working with companies like Alibaba, what have you, in order to help Chinese companies go overseas and take what they've built in China but operate globally with cryptocurrency. >> Are you guys in China? Cause it's been hard for companies to start companies in China. So you're living in China or you're working in China? >> Yeah so because we live in Shenzhen, right next to it is Hong Kong. Hong Kong is where our company is based. Hong Kong, as you know, previous British colony, the legal system, and the financial system-- >> And you domicile in Hong Kong, that's where you're based? >> Me personally in Shenzhen, but the company is in Hong Kong. So we also have a Wyoming corporation in the US. >> That's where all the action is. >> That's right >> That's where WeChat is >> That's right >> Alibaba's got Alipay and then there's more business to business with their app. So I get that WeChat's been highly successful. In fact we have a huge following on WeChat, Sou Kanai, Niki Bond, free content. But that brings up the question of Chinese kind of showing the way with mobile expansion, so their users are heavily mobile savy. >> Marshall: That's right. >> This is pretty obvious when you think about it, but in America and around the world, that's going to translate to the new user experience. So in your opinion, how would you describe the expectations that users have? Because you're living on the front end of the wave of what mobile's doing, I mean there's a lot of gamification going on, some if it's kind of creepy, but what is your view of the expectations that users have and what's different about what's currently available in the webstac, and the 20 year old e-commerce stacks, that are out there? >> Sure, I think the most important thing is reducing friction, all right. You don't want to be using platforms where you can not do it wherever you are whenever you are, you don't want to have to go through payment processes, you don't want to have to re-authenticate yourself across whatever platforms you use. And interestingly, when I first went to China, it was all about copying what was in the west over to there, but actually it's kind of the opposite now, right, so we basically want to take this concept of the frictionless digital life, and make it a global opportunity. And especially with BlockChain and cryptocurrency you have that really as an opportunity, because if you look at all the apps that are out there, and the platforms that are out there, the only ones that have gone past a billion users, WhatsApp, Instagram, whatever are the free ones. But as soon as you layer in payment, it becomes very locked. And as big as WeChat is, and as big as LINE is, but ultimately it's locked into the Rem and B system or Reo in Korea, what have you, so the cryptocurrency is really the first opportunity that the world's had to create platforms that can get up to a billion, two billion, three billion users that are able to pay. And we just think that's a once in a lifetime opportunity and we want to be part of it. >> So I got to ask you about the impact that cloud computing has had on this, obviously we've seen cloud computing destroy the data center model, allow people to get time to value faster, mobile on top, big data analytics using data, all this stuff's awesome stuff. So the question is, is that, that's kind of a horizontally disruptive view, so these stacks that are built old way where I got to own the stack end to end, yeah there's some standardization on the lower end of the stack. But now you're thinking about more of a horizontal, I got jurisdictions, I got regions, I got countries, I got sovereignty, all these things are in the melting pot of the cryptocurrency BlockChain, de-centralized applications, are major impacts to all those things. How do you see that playing out because, that's kind of what developers worry about, oh shit will this work on that chain? I got Neo I got this I got that, so the plumbing is totally a moving train right now. >> Marshall: That's right. >> But the business models are pretty obvious. So there's like a business ops thing going on. What Dev opts did for Cloud, you got this new abstraction thing going on with this world. What's your view on that, do you agree? Or what's your take? >> Yeah well you pretty much nailed it. I mean basically what's happening is over the last 10 or 15 years people have finally accepted that having your own server is kind of silly, you know, and most people now will just spin up whatever they need in terms of resources on TheCloud. But over the last couple years, you're really going more toward Edge Cloud, where the way the clouds work, is that basically it's pushing to get the least amount of latency and store the data as close to the user as possible. And then there's also regulatory in some countries now in terms of, if your users are from this country, you have to legally store the data in this area. So this is all kind of evolving. And if you look at the BlockChain technology, I think it's the payment version of that. So for example, everyone's always concerned about getting in and out of Fiat Currency, and how am I going to get back to dollars, and this and that, but I think what's going to wind up happening, is this is going to get pushed towards the edges and there will be opportunities and ways with exchanges and what have you to get in and out. But more importantly, it's going to be like, just other currencies, so for example, I live in China but I come to the US a few times a year, I also travel to Europe, I have some dollars, I have some Euros, I have some Rem and B, when I leave China, I don't immediately sell all of my Rem and B, I just keep it because at some point I'm going to need it. And I think what's going to happen in the cryptocurrency space is, especially on the larger BlockChains, like Ethereum and Neo and what have you, is people are just going to get used to keeping some of it and they're going to stop worrying about what the exact exchange rate is and how am I going to get in and out, and this and that, and they're just going to start treating it as part of their currency stack that they keep. >> Yeah as long as there's some level of stability. It's just like, I remember when I was growing up, there was no Euro, every country had their own currency. You had the French Franc, the Swiss Francs, the Deutsche Mark, Lira, etc, etc. But you're seeing that the viability of the money aspect, cause at the end of the day there's two things that we've identified in analysis, and I was talking about it last night, talked about it this morning on theCUBE, is the killer apps for BlockChain cryptocurrency, these sorts of apps is two things, money and marketplaces. >> Marshall: That's right. >> Everything else is just kind of circling around those two. >> Well there's more but certainly that's the main part of it >> Money, moving around. So the UK just announced with coin based, the Financial Conduct Authority, reading the news yesterday, has essentially said we're going to allow for the fast payment system to convert to Fiat. This is a government, the UK is a nation. This is the beginning, to your point, that if they don't get up to speed, the edge of the network will democratize them and kind of circle the wagons, if you will, so it's already happening. >> Yeah and I think what governments are starting to realize is hey guys this is just a technology and not only do you don't really have jurisdiction to control it, but also that you don't even have the technical means. So Wyoming is a good example of regulation coming into play, that just kind of accepts the presence that this now exists, right. And they're not going to try to make it something and fit it into the old way. So, and in terms of the stability of these coins, I think it is important because people want stability, but in other ways, if you don't look at the exchange rate, it's actually way more stable than the current system, and I'll give an example. In the last month or two, the prices of cryptocurrency have dropped almost 40%. Now if the stock markets and the global affects markets drop 40%, you'd have blood in the streets. But the crypto market is asset based instead of debt based and because it's so structurally sound it's able to handle these wild swings without actually collapsing the system, so in may ways, it's way more stable, and then as the market gaps and the buy in of these currencies get bigger and bigger, of course it's going to be more stable over time. >> Well I mean its stable from a fail standpoint, but a lot of emotional instability. People losing money for the first time. >> But that's just because they're-- >> That's a lot of speculation, right? >> There's a lot of speculating and then if they're down they feel like they lost but, that's life. >> People that are into the game, like you, were long on this. So what would you explain to someone, cause I have two, a lot of friends that have two schools of thought, that's a total scam, don't associate with that, to oh my god, that's the next biggest wave, lets get our surfboards out there and lets get on this, there's a multiple set coming in, it's the biggest thing we've seen, and everything in between. How do you explain it to people for the first time? >> It's just your traditional curve, there's early adopters and what have you, and if you were one of the guys buying up domaine names in the early 90s, you know some people would say I can't believe you're spending $100,000 buying up domaine names, but some of them now are worth, you know, tens of millions of dollars. But again, this is the speculatory piece of it. And there's no shortage of opportunities for speculation and I encourage everybody to speculate a little bit because what it does is it gets you a taste of the technology. And usually, when you have some money on the line, you pay more attention, so if speculation is what gets people interested, and it gets them watching it and understanding the technology and using it, then I'm all for it, but people shouldn't be speculating with money they don't have. Anything could happen in the short term. Nobody knows what's going to happen with any specific currency. But in terms of the technology itself, this is a revolution way bigger than the internet itself. This is where you're getting, not only, communications like the internet, but financing governance and all as one. Programmable money, programmable contracts, that wipes out finance, it wipes out legal, it whites out governance in many ways. So this is a huge evolution in human society, and we've termed this Open Unity actually. And so we believe that society has to reach a state of open unity in order to go into the singularity as we would envision it wanting to be, as something that's under our control. >> Yeah and I think one of the things, first of all that's a great statement, well said. I'll just kind of put some reality on that, connect the dots, is that if you look at the trajectory of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services was laughed at years ago. S3 came out, compute storage building, basic building blocks and a slew more services. What Cloud did for software developers, and what they've disrupted from a business standpoint, dev ops, it's proven. What open source has done, even going back to the old red-hat days and linux, is that now a tier one global citizen in software, you look at those two trends, you can connect that dots to what you just said. And what made Cloud great was they made application developers have access to programmable infrastructure. >> Marshall: Exactly. >> You're talking about a whole nother level of software programmability, money, marketplace, society, >> Yeah you hit it on the head. >> We're there right? >> That's exactly right, so when a programmer wants to start a business, instead of going to create an LLC, and getting their EIN Tax ID or whatever, and when they want to go into Europe, and dealing with that and then trying to open a bank account, which is almost impossible, internationally now, instead of that, you just have your SDKs and your APIs or whatever and you've got access to money, program adding, you can take money, you can move money around, globally, frictionless, permissionless, with governancy, smart contracts-- >> They might not not need an SDK dashboard, its a console, click, click, click, smart contracts, governance, turn key. >> And one of the things we're working on with Nynja in particular, is this kind of on-demand marketplace and putting together a de-centralized teams for work. And this is all driven by smart contracts. So one of the issues with the economy is the huge booms and busts that people have in the economy. And if you look at the root cause of that, my personal opinion, is that it's because of payment terms. So for example, if I do work for you, and then there's an invoice, but it's not due for 30 days, now your business may be structurally sound, but the truth is your cashflow is all over the place. With BlockChain technology, we can actually do real time payments. You could be paid minute by minute, hour by hour. Real time, program, contract. So we're going to create very flat even money flows through the entire economy globally, and we're going to just completely remove these booms and busts that are really nothing more than just cashflow issues that are compounded and compounded at a global level. >> I mean I lived through the dot com bubble, I was actually part of it on the front end, on the euphoria side, as well as on the crash. Part of the whole search paradigm, google right there. Key words, all that stuff happening, growth, massive growth. So I saw that, the scammers in there, or the bubble people, that's what we called them. But the reality is, everything happened. It was pet foods online, you could get shopping delivered to your house. So again, to your point, it's a little euphoric right now, but what's different is, is you have now, community data. See what I see happening is, it's not a major bubble crash, because self government, self governing, self governance, is a community dynamic. So I think there's going to be a lot of self healing, inside the networks themselves. You're already seeing it here, a lot of people, bad act is being identified, investors flight to quality, looking at quality deals. Interesting times, your thoughts? >> Well I mean you know, we've been through many evolutions of society, we've had surf-dom, we've had monarchies, we've had representative democracies, we have all these things, and I just think the next evolution is decentralized governance. And we don't even know what that means yet, because it's just starting, but I think we can all, if we can close our eyes and really think about it. I think it's pretty obvious what the issues are with our current system and not just the US, but globally, and I think we have an opportunity here to build in organic program governance. And what's really special about BoxChain technology is if I program it to do X, it's going to do X. So we don't need to, I don't need to know who you are to trust you. I don't need to worry about where we're going to sue each other, or we're going to have arbitration if things go wrong. We're just going to make an agreement, and we're going to program it that way, and that's it. And now the next phase is, I could build on top of that trusting that that's just going to happen. So you can create these chains of trust, and that can happen anywhere in the world. So I think this is a whole nother-- >> Sounds like a bunch of web services. >> Well in many ways, in terms of the architecture, sure you could absolutely think of it like that. >> The reusability, the leverage is amazing. All right, so I want to just end the segment Marshall, take a minute to end the segment, to talk about what you're working on, Nynja coin, Nynja, N-Y-N-J-A .biz, you guys have a product, you got a BlockChain enabled platform, you got a coin, take a minute to explain what you're working on. >> Basically we want to provide the tools and services to help people live in this new reality. So in order to basically function in the world that we're entering into, we're going to need tools that far surpass what's currently available in terms of the messengers, the web sites, all these things. We need to be operating at a level that takes communication completely frictionless, payment completely frictionless, and governance completely frictionless. And we have to put this all together, and that's what we're doing with Nynja. We're staring with a global communicator, which is basically, if you want to take WeChat, telegram, whatever, but we have about 50 additional features that really take communications to the next level. And then on top of it, creating the baseline with cryptocurrency payment, and also smart contract wizards and helping people kind of get these teams going and get paid and organize their financial life in a de-centralized way. So we're just basically going to be the next generation of these messenger type platforms with BlockChain integrated. And what you're going to see is that over the next couple years you're going to get to the first companies that are achieving not just a billion or two billion or three billion users, but paying users, and we're going to be one of the probably three to five platforms that are offering tools at the global level like this. >> And have you got an IC already or not? >> We've just started our private ICO about two weeks ago. We're getting tremendous support in Asia. Quite frankly, the US is not seeing it as much-- >> Is it a utility token or security? >> Utility Token, and I think it's really telling, interesting, coming here. It's the first time I've been doing the presenting. We spoke yesterday at the d10e and we also spoke at d10e in Korea a week or two ago, and the response is incredible. And I think the reason is because-- >> The Asian market gets it. >> Well they're already living in this world within their own confines in terms of the messenger with their payment and governance built in, so when I tell them that we're going to do this globally with crypto, immediately they get it. I'm having trouble here, especially in these five minute pitches which is ridiculous, it's like a chop shop, I don't know how to communicate the idea within this short time frame, so, what I'm looking for while we're here this week is just to find people who really want to take an hour or two or even people like yourself who want to do interviews and just kind of really talk to people and really explain-- >> Well platform is complex, a lot of pieces to it. It's a system, but the value you offer is essentially offering developers, who are building products, for tools that you've built so they can scale faster. That sounds like your value. >> That's right and although I can't say specifically, we're also working on a deal that's going to get us started with about 15 million active users on day one, so that's very exciting and we're really really excited about that. >> And the coins will be utility of measures, what? >> Sorry? >> Well your utility coins going to be measuring what, what's the main token economics that drives the-- >> For the ICO economics? >> Your Nynja Coin. >> So basically we're releasing 5 billion tokens, 45% of them will be sold. There's five cents a token, so the hard cap, by definition is about 112 million, actually we're planning to do the public sale in April, but we may cancel it or postpone it just because the private sale is going really well, but we'll see how that goes. But in terms of once it's live, this will basically be the utility token of the entire eco-system, so anybody, not just within our Nynja App or platform, but even people, I don't know if you know XMPP federation, like back in the day-- >> Yeah you know about real messaging >> If you could think of us as the next version of XMPP federation, but using cryptocurrency in order to avoid bad actors by making it very expensive to do bad things, and very cheap to do good things and globally. >> So it's like Twitter you can create a bot instantly, but if there's coins involved, you'd have to spend to get it. >> That's right and also people could spin up nodes that are basically their own Twitters and decide if those Twitters of their own, their Nynja boxes of their own, are either just internally, or you could specify specifically context or group of context-- >> We agree, that's a great way to get bad actors out because it costs them money. And it's de-centralized, there's no single spot. >> That's right, if email came out today, when cryptocurrency existed, there would be no spam. Because it would be expensive as hell to send more than a few a second, but it would still be free and for everybody generally, and you wouldn't even have spam. So we think we can do that for messaging globally. >> Great. Marshall, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it, check out Nynja. Marshall Taplits is the Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of Nynja.biz, check them out online. Check out the website, it's in Asia, bringing that culture of mobile and fast moving, real time apps, to the rest of the developers. This is theCUBE coverage in Puerto Rico for BlockChain Unbound exclusive two days of coverage. We'll be right back with more, after this short break, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Informatica World 2017. Brought to you by Informatica. (light techno music) >> Welcome back to Informatica World 2017. I'm Peter Burris, and once again theCUBE is broadcasting morning to night two days in a row to bring you The Signal from the Noise, this very very important conference. There's a lot going on here as we talk about the increasing role that data's playing in the world. Now, to get a user perspective, and not just any user perspective, a leading user perspective, on some of these issues, we've asked Mel Kirk to come on board. Mel, welcome to theCUBE . >> Thank you sir. Glad to be here. >> Mel is the senior vice president chief information officer for Ryder Systems. For those of you who don't know Ryder, it's a trucking company, a trucking and leasing company. >> Mel: Absolutely. >> And my background is I used to actually do a lot of research around transportation-related things, and I always found the ability to use queuing theory, >> Mel: Ah. in both technology and in transportation, >> Yes. to be very fascinating. So again, Mel, welcome here, but tell us a little bit about what you're here at Informatica World for, and what's your interest in all this? >> You know it's interesting, this was one of the conferences that I set out this year that I wanted to come to because I wanted to learn more about where Informatica is going in terms of leveraging data. Transportation company, we generate a lot of data. We have three business units, we have a fleet management company, a 3PL traditional transportation, supply chain company, and a dedicated transportation company. All three of those businesses generate a lot of data, and we're on a journey to try to figure out how, what's the best way of using that data to improve business outcomes. So that's what I'm here for this week, is to learn more about the tools that are here, the applications that are here, that we can use to do just that. >> So one of the things that I'm fascinated, often the new branding of Informatica, which we think is good: enterprise, Cloud, data management, leader. We know what enterprise is, we know what Cloud is, we know what leader is. One of the dynamics is, what is the new data management? We've talked to a couple of people about it. From your perspective, all this data coming in, what is the new data management function at Ryder, or the new requirements and capabilities? >> I think the biggest thing for us, from a data management standpoint, is mastering our data. Like I said, we generate a lot of data. We've got two really important domains in which that data revolves around. It's a customer and it's a vehicle. And so our objective this year is to master both the customer and the vehicle, the information around those, so that our marketing team can create better solutions by understanding all of the ways that a particular customer may interact with our business. It's also our operating team is leveraging that same data to win at the local level on a day-to-day basis. When a driver comes to one of our facilities, and he wants work done on his truck, our account people and our service people at that location will be able to pull up specific information about that customer and perform the work that they need based on the contract they have with us. That's a win for the customer and a win for our local team. >> So key, handle the customers, handle the crucial assets. That seems to be a general trend in the industry, is you look across both the conversations that you're having here at Informatica World, but also beyond. Where do you think the industry is going, from a trend standpoint, with some of these questions around data? >> I think we're all on a journey to try to figure out the best ways to leverage the data, treat data as an enterprise asset, right? A real enterprise asset that may have more value to it than some of the physical assets that sit in our business. And as I've talked to people during the week here, it's really about that journey of trying to figure out how do you get better value out of the investment that you make, and understanding, cleansing, liberating your data. And for us, again that's creating products, new products, from the data that we have, and it's improving productivity and efficiency in our operations with that data. >> So you must be excited about some of the new capabilities Informatica's announcing about being able to discover, you know, inventory, and then use metadata in new and different ways. What do you think about some of the metadata issues that Informatica's talking about here? >> Yeah, I think, you know, both metadata and Cloud for me is very important. The metadata is important because, again, we've got multiple business units, right, that are operating with elements of data that are not associated across the enterprise. And so, you know, getting more deliberate about understanding the data at the metadata level will help us as we try to bridge everything together across our enterprise. The Cloud's important because more and more of our customers are moving from a batch world to a near real time world. And what's happening there is we need the ability to spin up operations in a very quick way, receive data in large swaths. So having burst capacity is what the Cloud is going to give us. The immediacy of capacity is important to us, so the Cloud-based applications that I've seen here, even the enterprise information catalog is important because as we go through and we cleanse and harness our data, having it in a structured, governed pattern is important to us as well. >> So you had been in the business. You're ex-GE before you came to Ryder, a couple iterations before, you know, Master Black Belt, Six Sigma, that kind of stuff. You're an operations guy. >> I'm an operations guy. >> So as you think about going from an operations guy, and great operations guys are very focused on data, into the CIO, how was that transition? >> It was more than what I thought. You know it's interesting, I've said that as an operator, I'm not sure that I would've been effective in this role five, ten years ago, because it was a different type of role. >> Peter: Right. >> Today I don't know how you'd not do this role, how you could do this type of role, the CIO role, without having an operational background because the technology is integral to everything we do now. So, you know, where before, companies differentiated themselves on, you know, operational rigor and process, which is what I live in, >> Yep. >> Now it's about data. Now it's about data and the technology tools that can free up capacity, create productivity, and again, generate products. And so, this has been a great exercise for me, a great learning experience for me getting involved in technology at a time when it's moving so fast, right? Every day is a different day from a technology standpoint, and bridging that with my operating background, I think it's been a great experiment for both me and Ryder. >> Well a lot of CIOs that have great job satisfaction at heart are operations people who have figured out how to be operations people as opposed to people who often, CIOs who often don't have that satisfaction are spending their days putting out fires, and they never get into that groove. But think about as the role of the CIO changes at Ryder, but just in general, how do you see yourself organizing your groups around data assets, because it used to be that the key assets were, you know, the hardware. >> Right. >> Or the network. How is that catalyzing a new way of thinking about getting your talent mobilized to do what Ryder needs your function to do? >> You know, the big shift is away from keeping the lights on and keeping the phones working to delivering outcomes for the business. So that's that operational view, right? It's really whether there's an application development team or a talent on our, employee on our infrastructure team, it's about delivering outcomes for the operating team, for the business team. And so an example of that is in our fleet management business, right, we run 850 shops around the US and Canada, repair centers, and our core application in that business, our technicians in those shops say, "Mel, if you can do one thing for us, "make the application faster." That's both an application problem and an infrastructure problem. >> Peter: Sure. >> Right? In terms of trying to find the right solve. What I've been able to do and what I've been focusing on is translating that ask, of give me more speed, to the infrastructure team and the application team in a way that they understand that that incremental speed means better customer service, better outcomes for the business as well as our customer. That driver that comes to that repair center, he or she is on the clock. >> Peter: Right. And they want to get out as fast as, they are more, of more value to the customer when they're on the road doing their job. >> And a truck is typically not a cheap thing. >> Mel: It's not a cheap thing. >> So a truck's on the clock too. >> Mel: Absolutely. >> So as you think about the new, these new disciplines, and then acculturating the application team to, at least in this case, speed, the infrastructure team to speed, are there any new skills or any new disciplines that you are finding need to be filled within your shop? >> You know, the thing that's been interesting, and I'm going to go back to my Six Sigma background, the thing that's really been interesting, and when I take into consideration the pace of change of technology, it's been change management, right? I mean, the application team can come up with the best, the absolute best solution. I'm going to add two, it's change management and the UI, the user interface is important to that journey, right? >> Peter: Absolutely. >> And so they can come up with the greatest application, it could be the best solution ever, but you've got to get people, like in our organization it's nothing to see employees that have been with the company for 20 years. And getting them to fundamentally change how they do work, that's a challenge. And so we, what we've been focusing on is educating both the IT organization as well as the business team on how to drive change, especially in an organization with such a long, rich heritage. >> So as these changes start to manifest themselves, your relationship with the executive staff, how's that evolving? >> Yes, so when I went over to, when I came over into this role, you know, I'd left the operating role as a peer, and I came over to the IT role, and I think they felt sorry for me because of all of the challenges. But what's evolved is that as I've learned more about the technology and how to deploy, I've been able to actually balance between communicating with the technology team on the needs of the operating side of the business, and then translating the technical challenges to the operating team so that they've got a better sense of if we're going to launch a new product, or if we're going to onboard a new account, right, there's some lead time, there's some pre-thinking that needs to happen to get the technology right for you to be successful when you deploy for that customer. So I think bridging the gap between the two sides of the company has been very important for us, especially now given that, again, the pace of change with technology. >> Peter: So does Ryder have a COO? >> Ryder actually doesn't have a COO at the corporate level. We have a COO in our fleet management business, but I'm playing kind of a hybrid role I'd say. >> Peter: Yes. >> You know, kind of a CIO/COO because I can blend the two. >> Excellent! And how's that, how's that going? >> It's actually good. When I first moved into the CIO role, I was very deliberate about not encroaching on the role of the operating teams, right, even though my heritage and all of the things I had done in the company was around operations, I didn't want to make operating decisions from the CIO role. What I'm realizing now is the best value, the best benefit for Ryder and the customers is for me to bring all of the skills that I have, right, plus the talents of the team, to bear on a problem for the company. So I've thought less about boundaries and more about delivering outcomes. And if that means I have to put a, you know, a little bit of an operating perspective on a technical challenge, so be it. >> Which is really quite frankly what any real great Chief anything does. >> Yes. >> How do I take shareholder capital and translate it into an outcome through my purview. >> Mel: Right. >> So, Mel, let's pretend we got five CIOs sitting here, >> Mel: Okay. >> All about ready to start the journey that you're quite a ways along. What is the one thing you want to say to them? Say, here's how you're going to get started, and here's the pothole that you have to look out for. >> You know, I think one of the most important things that I would advise is to divide, especially if you're like me coming from a different purview and even folks that have been in technology for a while, establish a board of directors, right, your own personal board of directors. For me that was, I had to identify, you know, a couple of folks that had been in this role before that I could call and reach out to and get unfiltered advice, right? It was also identifying, the second one was identifying a short list of vendor partners that I could go to for technical questions in their domain, plus beyond their domain where I felt comfortable with the autonomy of the answer. >> Good ideas. >> Right, just good ideas. No sale, just good ideas. Then I had to reach inside of my team and figure out who are the one or two people in the organization that I'd go bounce ideas across for the sake of the change management that I talked about, right? Some for technology but also from a change management standpoint. And then build a couple of key partners at the leadership level within the organization, again to help with some of the concepts and the ideas. A lot of what a CIO is going to bring to bear now is going to be disruptive to the way a business, a company does business today, and so they're going to need constituents or partners from the executive leadership team. >> Yeah, none of it happens if the CIO doesn't recognize the change management that they have to drive. >> Absolutely. >> About their role within the business. >> Absolutely. So I used my board of directors, this board of directors, as a way of getting smarter about the job, you know, secondly, to help facilitate the change that we need, and three, just to bounce ideas. For sanity. >> Awesome. Fantastic. Mel Kirk is senior vice president, chief information officer of Ryder Systems Inc. Mel, great conversation. Thank you very much for being here in theCUBE . >> Okay, thank you for your time. >> Once again, Peter Burris, Informatica World 2017, we'll be back with more in a moment. (light techno music)