(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios. Got a great guest here, Rachel Obstler, Vice President, Head of Product at heap.io or Heap is the company name, heap.io is URL. Rachel, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. Great to be here. >> So you guys are as a company is heavily backed with some big time VCs and funders. The momentum is pretty significant. You see the accolades in the industry. It's a hot market for anyone who can collect data easily and make sense of it relative to everything being measured, which is the Nirvana. You can measure everything, but then what do you do with it? So you're at the center of it. You're heading up product for heap. This is what you guys do. And there's a lot of solutions, so let's get into it. Describe the company. What's your mission and what you guys do? >> Yeah, so let me start maybe with how Heap was even started and where the idea came from. So Heap was started by Matin Movassate, someone who was working at Facebook. And this is important 'cause it gets right at the problem that we are trying to solve, which is that he was a product manager at Facebook and he was spending a lot of money on pizza. The reason why he was spending a lot of money on pizza is because he wanted to be able to measure what the users were doing in the product that he was responsible for, and he couldn't get the data. And in order to get the data, he would have to go beg his engineers to put in all sorts of tracking code to collect data. And every time he did so, he had to bribe him with pizza because it's no one's favorite work, number one, and then people want to build new things. They don't want to just constantly be adding tracking code. And then the other thing he found is that even when he did that then it took a couple weeks to get it done. And then he had to wait to collect the data to see what data is. It takes a while to build up the data, and he just thought there must be a better way. And so he founded, he with a couple other co-founders, and the idea was that we could automatically collect data all the time. So it didn't matter if you launched something new, you didn't have to do anything. The data would be automatically collected. And so Heap's mission is really to make it easy to create amazing digital experiences. And we do that by firstly, just making sure you have all the data of what your users are doing because you would think you want to create a new digital experience. You could just do that and it would be perfect the first time, but that's not how it works and users are not predictable. >> Yeah, remember back in the day, big data, Hadoop and that kind of fell flap, but the idea of a data lake started there. You saw the rise of Databricks, the Snowflakes. So this idea that you can collect is there. It's here now, state of the art. Now I see that market. Now the business model comes in. Okay, I can collect everything. How fast can I turn around the insights becomes the next question. So what is the business model of the company? What does the product do? Is it SaaS? Is it a as a package software? How do you guys deploy? How do your customers consume and pay for the service? >> Yeah, so we are a SaaS company and we sell largely to, it could be a product manager. It could be someone in marketing, but it's someone who is responsible for a digital service or a digital product. So they're responsible for making sure that that they're hitting whatever targets they have. It could be revenue, it could be just usage, getting more users adopted, making sure they stay in the product. So that's who we sell to. And so basically our model is just around sessions. So how many sessions do you have? How much data are you collecting? How much traffic do you have? And that's how we charge. I think you were getting at something else though that was really interesting, which is this proliferation of data and then how do you get to an insight. And so one of the things that we've done is first of all, okay, collecting all the data and making sure that you have everything that you need, but then you have a lot of data. So that is indeed an issue. And so we've also built on top of Heap a data science layer that will automatically surface interesting points. So for instance, let's say that you have a very common user flow. Maybe it's your checkout flow. Maybe it's a signup flow and you know exactly what the major milestones are. Like you first fill out a form, you sign up, like maybe you get to do the first thing in the trial. You configure it, you get some value. So we're collecting not only those major milestones, we're collecting every single thing that happens in between. And then we'll automatically surface when there is an important drop off point, for instance, between two milestones so that you know exactly where things are going wrong. >> So you have these indicators. So it's a data driven business. I can see that clearly. And the value proposition in the pitch to the customer is ease of use. Is it accelerated time to value for insights? Is it eliminating IT? Is it the 10X marketer? Or all of those things? What is the core contract with the customer, the brand promise? >> That's exactly. So it's the ability to get to insight. First of all, that you may never have found on your own, or that would take you a long time to keep trialing an error of collecting data until you found something interesting. So getting to that insight faster and being able to understand very quickly, how you can drive impact with your business. And the other thing that we've done recently that adds a lot to this is we recently joined forces with a company named Auryc so we just announced this on Monday. So now on top of having all the data and automatically surfacing points of interest, like this is where you're having drop off, this is where you have an opportunity, we now allow you to watch it. So not only just see it analytically, see it in the numbers, but immediately click a show me button, and then just watch examples of users getting stuck in that place. And it really gives you a much better or clearer context for exactly what's happening. And it gives you a much better way to come up with ideas as to how to fix it as one of those digital builders or digital owners. >> You know, kind of dating myself when I mention this movie "Contact" where Jodie foster finds that one little nugget that opens up so much more insight. This is what you're getting at where if you can find that one piece that you didn't see before and bring it in and open it up and bring in that new data, it could change the landscape and lens of the entire data. >> Yeah. I can give you an example. So we have a customer, Casper. Most are familiar with that they sell mattresses online. So they're really a digital innovator for selling something online that previously you had to like go into a store to do. And they have a whole checkout flow. And what they discovered was that users that at the very end of the flow chose same day delivery were much more likely to convert and ultimately buy a mattress. They would not necessarily have looked at this. They wouldn't necessarily have looked at or decided to track like delivery mechanism. Like that's just not the most front and center thing, but because he collects all the data, they could look at it and say, oh, people who are choosing this converted a much higher rate. And so then they thought, well, okay, this is happening at the very end of the process. Like they've already gone through choosing what they want and putting it in their card and then it's like the very last thing they do. What if we made the fact that you could get same day delivery obvious at the beginning of the whole funnel. And so they tried that and it improved their conversion rate considerably. And so these are the types of things that you wouldn't necessarily anticipate. >> I got to have a mattress to sleep on. I want it today. Come on. >> Yeah, exactly. Like there's a whole market of people who are like, oh no, I need a mattress right now. >> This is exactly the point. I think this is why I love this opportunity that you guys are in. Every company now is digitalizing their business, aka digital transformation. But now they're going to have applications, they're going to have cloud native developers, they're going to be building modern applications. And they have to think like an eCommerce company, but it's not about brick and mortars anymore. It's just digital. So this is the new normal. This is an imperative. This is a fact. And so a lot of them don't know what to do. So like, wait a minute, who do we call? This is like a new problem for the mainstream. >> Yeah, and think about it too. Actually e-commerce has been doing this for quite a while, but think about all the B2B companies and B2B SaaS, like all the things that today, you do online. And that they're really having to start thinking more like e-commerce companies and really think about how do we drive conversion, even if conversion isn't the same thing or doesn't mean the same thing, but it means like a successful retained user. It's still important to understand what their journey is and where you going to help them. >> Recently, the pandemic has pulled forward this digital gap that every company's seeing, especially the B2B, which is virtual events, which is just an indicator of the convergence of physical and online. But it brings up billions of signals and I know we have an event software that people do as well. But when you're measuring everything, someone's in a chat, someone hit a web page, I mean there are billions of signals that need to get stored, and this is what you guys do. So I want to ask you, you run the product team. What's under the covers? What's the secret sauce for you guys at Heap? Because you got to store everything. That's one challenge. That's one problem you got to solve. Then you got to make it fast because most of the databases can't actually roll up data fast enough. So you're waiting for the graph forever when some people say. What's under the covers? What's the secret sauce? >> Well, it's a couple different things. So one is we designed the system from the very beginning for that purpose. For the purpose of bringing in all those different signals and then being able to cut the data lots of different ways. And then also to be able to apply data science to it in real time to be able to surface these important points that you should be looking at. So a lot of it is just about designing the system for the very beginning for that purpose. It was also designed to be easy for everyone to use. So what was a really important principle for us is a democratization of data. So in the past, you have these central data teams. You still have them today. Central data teams that are responsible for doing complex analysis. Well, we want to bring as much of that functionality to the digital builders, the product managers, the marketers, the ones that are making decisions about how to drive impact for their digital products and make it super easy for them to find these insights without having to go through a central team that could again take weeks and months to get an answer back from. >> Well, that's what brings up a good point. I want to dig into, if you don't mind, Rachel, this data engineering challenge. There's not enough talent out there. When I call data engineer, I'm talking about like the specialist person. She could be a unique engineer, but not a data scientist. We're talking about like hardcore data engineering, pipelining, streaming data, hardcore. There's not many people that fit that bill. So how do you scale that? Is that what you guys help do? >> We can help with that. Because, again, like if you put the power in the hands of the product people or the marketers or the people that are making those decisions, they can do their own analysis. Then you can really offload some of those central teams and they can do some of the much more complex work, but they don't have to spend their time constantly serving maybe the easier questions to answer. You have data that's self-service for everyone. >> Okay, before I get into the quick customer side of it, quickly while I have you on the product side. What are some of your priorities? You look at the roadmap, probably got tons of people calling. I can only imagine the customer base is diverse in its feature requests. Everyone has the same need, but they all have different businesses. So they want a feature here. They want a feature there. What's the priorities? How do you prioritize? What are some of your priorities for how you're going to build out and keep continuing the momentum? >> Yeah, so I mentioned earlier that we just joined forces with a company name Auryc that has session replay capabilities, as well as voice of customer. So one of our priorities is that we've noticed in this market, there's a real, it's very broken up in a strange way. I shouldn't say it's strange. It's probably because this is the way markets form, startups start, and they pick a technology and they build on top of it. So as a result, the way the market has formed is that you have analytics tools like Heap, and they look at very quantitative data, collecting all sorts of data and doing all sorts of quantitative cuts on it. And then you have tools that do things like session replay. So I just want to record sessions and watch and see exactly what the user's doing and follow their path through one at a time. And so one is aggregating data and the other one is looking at individual user journeys, but they're solving similar jobs and they're used by the same people. So a product manager, for example, wants to find a point of friction, wants to find an opportunity in their product that is significant, that is happening to a lot of people, that if they make a change will drive impact like a large impact for the business. So they'll identify that using the quant, but then to figure out how to fix it, they need the qual. They need to be able to watch it and really understand where people are getting stuck. They know where, but what does that really look like? Like, let me visualize this. And so our priority is really to bring these things together to have one platform where someone can just, in seconds, find this point of opportunity and then really understand it with a show me button so that they can watch examples of it and be like, I see exactly what's happening here and I have ideas of how to fix this. >> Yeah, something's happening at that intersection. Let's put some cameras on. Let's get some eyes on that. Let's look at it. >> Exactly. >> Oh, hey, let's put something. Let's fix that. So it makes a lot of sense. Now, customer attraction has been strong. I know it's been a lot of press and accolades online with when you guys are getting review wise. I mean, I can see DevOps and app people just using this easily, like signing up and I can collect all the data and seeing value, so I get that. What are some of the customer value propositions that are coming out of that, that you can share? And for the folks watching that don't know Heap, what's their problem that they're facing that you can solve, and what pain are they in or what problem do they solve? So example of some success that's coming out of the platform, enablement, the disruptive enablement, and then what's the problem, what's the customer's pain point, and when they know to call you guys or sign up. >> Yeah, so there's a couple different ways to look at it. When I was talking about is really for the user. There's this individual person who owns an outcome and this is where the market is going that the product managers, the marketers, they're not just there to build new features, they're there to drive outcomes for the business. And so in order to drive these outcomes, they need to figure out what are the most impactful things to do? Where are the investments that they need to make? And so Heap really helps them narrow down on those high impact areas and then be able to understand quickly as I was mentioning how to fix them. So that's one way to look at it. Another use case is coming from the other side. So talking in about session replay, you may have a singular problem. You may have a single support ticket. You may have someone complaining about something and you want to really understand, not only what is the problem, like what were they experiencing that caused them to file this ticket, but is this a singular problem, or is this something that is happening to many different people? And therefore, like we should prioritize fixing it very quickly. And so that's the other use case is let's start, not with the group, like the biggest impact and go to like exactly some examples, let's start with the singular and figure out if that gives you a path to the group. But the other use case that I think is really interesting is if you think about it from a macro point of view or from a product leader or a marketing leader's point of view, they're not just trying to drive impact. They're trying to make it easy for their team to drive that impact. So they're thinking about how do they make their whole organization a lot more data driven or insights driven? How do they change the culture, the process, not just the tool, but all of those things together so that they can have a bigger business impact and enable their team to be able to do this on their own? >> You guys are like a data department for developers and product managers. >> Essentially, like we are the complete dataset and the easy analysis that really helps you figure out, where do I invest? How do I justify my investments? And how do I measure how well my investments are doing? >> And this is where the iteration comes in. This is the model everyone's doing. You see a problem, you keep iterating. Got to look at the data, get some insight and keep looking back and making that product, get that flywheel going. Rachel, great stuff. Coming out here, real quick question for you to end the segment. What's the culture like over at Heap? If people are interested in joining the company or working with you guys. Every company has their own kind of DNA. What's the Heap culture like? >> That's a great question. So Heap is definitely a unique company that I've worked at and in a really good way. We find it really important to be respectful to each other. So one of our values is respectful candor. So you may be familiar with radical candor. We've kind of softened it a bit and said, look, it's good to be truthful and have candor, but let's do it in a respectful way. We really find important that everyone has a growth mindset. So we're always thinking about how do we improve? How do we get better? How do we grow faster? How do we learn? And then the other thing that I'll mention, another one of our values that I love, we call it, "taste the soup". Some people use to call it dogfooding, but we are in Heap all the time. We call it Heap on Heap. We really want to experience what our customers experience and constantly use our product to also get better and make our product better. >> A little more salt on the sauce, keep the soup, taste it a little bit. Good stuff. Rachel, thanks for coming on. Great insights and congratulations on a great product opportunity. Again, as world goes digital transformation, developers, product, all people want to instrument everything to then start figuring out how to improve their offering. So really hot market and hot company. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. Thanks for having me. >> This is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(radio calls) >> Announcer: From around the globe, its theCUBE covering Space & Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, hosted by Cal poly. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE virtual coverage with Cal Poly for the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium, a day four and the wrap up session, keynote session with the Lieutenant Governor of California, Eleni Kounalakis. She's here to deliver her keynote speech on the topic of California's role in supporting America's Cybersecurity future. Eleni, take it away. >> Thank you, John, for the introduction. I am Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis. It is an honor to be part of Cal Poly Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. As I speak kind of Pierre with the governor's office of business and economic development is available on the chat, too ready to answer any questions you might have. California and indeed the world are facing significant challenges right now. Every day we are faced with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn that is ensued. We have flattened the curve in California and are moving in the right direction but it is clear that we're not out of the woods yet. It is also impossible right now to escape the reality of climate change from the fire sparked by exceptionally rare, dry lightening events to extreme heat waves threatening public health and putting a strain on our electricity grid. We see that climate change is here now. And of course we've been recently confronted with a series of brutal examples of institutionalized racism that have created an awakening among people of all walks of life and compelled us into the streets to march and protest. In the context of all this, we cannot forget that we continue to be faced with other less visible but still very serious challenges. Cybersecurity threats are one of these. We have seen cities, companies and individuals paralyzed by attacks costing time and money and creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and insecurity. Our state agencies, local governments, police departments, utilities, news outlets and private companies from all industries are target. The threats around cybersecurity are serious but not unlike all the challenges we face in California. We have the tools and fortitude to address them. That is why this symposium is so important. Thank you, Cal Poly and all the participants for being here and for the important contributions you bring to this conference. I'd like to also say a few words about California's role in America's future in space. California has been at the forefront of the aerospace industry for more than a century through all the major innovations in aerospace from wooden aircraft, to World War II Bombers, to rockets and Mars rovers. California has played a pivotal role. Today, California is the number one state in total defense spending, defense contract spending and total number of personnel. It is estimated the Aerospace and Defense Industry, provides $168 billion in economic impact to our state. And America's best trained and most experienced aerospace and technology workforce lives here in California. The fact that the aerospace and defense sector, has had a strong history in California is no accident. California has always had strong innovation ecosystem and robust infrastructure that puts many sectors in a position to thrive. Of course, a big part of that infrastructure is a skilled workforce. And at the foundation of a skilled workforce is education. California has the strongest system of public higher education in the world. We're home to 10 university of California campuses, 23 California State university campuses and 116 California Community Colleges. All told nearly 3 million students are enrolled in public higher education. We also have world renowned private universities including the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University numbers one and three in the country for aerospace engineering. California also has four national laboratories and several NASA facilities. California possesses a strong spirit of innovation, risk taking and entrepreneurship. Half of all venture capital funding in the United States, goes to companies here in California. Lastly, but certainly no less critical to our success, California is a diverse state. 27% of all Californians are foreign born, 27% more than one in four of our population of 40 million people are immigrants from another country, Europe central and South America, India, Asia, everywhere. Our rich cultural diversity is our strength and helps drive our economy. As I look to the future of industries like cybersecurity and the growing commercial space industry, I know our state will need to work with those industries to make sure we continue to train our workforce for the demands of an evolving industry. The office of the lieutenant governor has a unique perspective on higher education and workforce development. I'm on the UC Board of Regents, the CSU Board of Trustees. And as of about two weeks ago, the Community Colleges Board of Governors. The office of the lieutenant governor is now the only office that is a member of every governing board, overseeing our public higher education system. Earlier in the symposium, we heard a rich discussion with Undersecretary Stewart Knox from the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency about what the state is doing to meet the needs of space and cybersecurity industries. As he mentioned, there are over 37,000 job vacancies in cybersecurity in our state. We need to address that gap. To do so, I see an important role for public private partnerships. We need input from industry and curriculum development. Some companies like Lockheed Martin, have very productive partnerships with universities and community colleges that train students with skills they need to enter aerospace and cyber industries. That type of collaboration will be key. We also need help from the industry to make sure students know that fields like cybersecurity even exist. People's early career interests are so often shaped by the jobs that members of their family have or what they see in popular culture. With such a young and evolving field like cybersecurity, many students are unaware of the job opportunities. I know for my visits to university campuses that students are hungry for STEM career paths where they see opportunities for good paying jobs. When I spoke with students at UC Merced, many of them were first generation college students who went through community college system before enrolling in a UC and they gravitated to STEM majors. With so many job opportunities available to STEM students, cybersecurity ought to be one that they are aware of and consider. Since this symposium is being hosted by Cal Poly, I wanted to highlight the tremendous work they're doing as leaders in the space and cybersecurity industry. Cal Poly California Cybersecurity Institute, does incredible work bringing together academia, industry and government training the next generation of cyber experts and researching emerging cybersecurity issues. As we heard from the President of Cal Poly, Jeff Armstrong the university is in the perfect location to contribute to a thriving space industry. It's close to Vandenberg Air Force Base and UC Santa Barbara and could be home to the future permanent headquarters of US Space Command. The state is also committed to supporting this space industry in the Central Coast. In July, the State of California, Cal poly US-based force and the others signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a commercial space port at Vandenberg Air Force Base and to develop a master plan to grow the commercial space industry in the region. Governor Newsom has made a commitment to lift up all regions of the state. And this strategy will position the Central Coast to be a global leader in the future of the space industry. I'd like to leave you with a few final thoughts, with everything we're facing. Fires, climate change, pandemic. It is easy to feel overwhelmed but I remain optimistic because I know that the people of the State of California are resilient, persistent, and determined to address our challenges and show a path toward a better future for ourselves and our families. The growth of the space industry and the economic development potential of projects like the Spaceport at Vandenberg Air Force Base, our great example of what we can look forward to. The potential for the commercial space industry to become a $3 trillion industry by mid century, as many experts predict is another. There are so many opportunities, new companies are going to emerge doing things we never could have dreamed of today. As Lieutenant General John Thompson said in the first session, the next few years of space and cyber innovation are not going to be a pony ride at the state fair, they're going to be a rodeo. We should all saddle up. Thank you. >> Okay, thank you very much, Eleni. I really appreciate it. Thank you for your participation and all your support to you and your staff. You guys doing a lot of work, a lot going on in California but cybersecurity and space as it comes together, California's playing a pivotal role in leading the world and the community. Thank you very much for your time. >> Okay, this session is going to continue with Bill Britton. Who's the vice president of technology and CIO at Cal Poly but more importantly, he's the director of the cyber institute located at Cal Poly. It's a global organization looking at the intersection of space and cybersecurity. Bill, let's wrap this up. Eleni had a great talk, talking about the future of cybersecurity in America and its future. The role California is playing, Cal Poly is right in the Central Coast. You're in the epicenter of it. We've had a great lineup here. Thanks for coming on. Let's put a capstone on this event. >> Thank you, John. But most importantly, thanks for being a great partner helping us get this to move forward and really changing the dynamic of this conversation. What an amazing time we're at, we had quite an unusual group but it's really kind of the focus and we've moved a lot of space around ourselves. And we've gone from Lieutenant General Thompson and the discussion of the opposition and space force and what things are going on in the future, the importance of cyber in space. And then we went on and moved on to the operations. And we had a private company who builds, we had the DOD, Department Of Defense and their context and NASA and theirs. And then we talked about public private partnerships from President Armstrong, Mr. Bhangu Mahad from the DOD and Mr. Steve Jacques from the National Security Space Association. It's been an amazing conference for one thing, I've heard repeatedly over and over and over, the reference to digital, the reference to cloud, the reference to the need for cybersecurity to be involved and really how important that is to start earlier than just at the employment level. To really go down into the system, the K through 12 and start there. And what an amazing time to be able to start there because we're returning to space in a larger capacity and it's now all around us. And the lieutenant governor really highlighted for us that California is intimately involved and we have to find a way to get our students involved at that same level. >> I want to ask you about this inflection point that was a big theme of this conference and symposium. It was throughout the interviews and throughout the conversations, both on the chat and also kind of on Twitter as well in the social web. Is that this new generation, it wasn't just space and government DOD, all the normal stuff you see, you saw JPL, the Hewlett Foundation, the Defense Innovation Unit, Amazon Web Services, NASA. Then you saw entrepreneurs come in, who were doing some stuff. And so you had this confluence of community. Of course, Cal Poly had participated in space. You guys does some great job, but it's not just the physical face-to-face show up, gets to hear some academic papers. This was a virtual event. We had over 300 organizations attend, different organizations around the world. Being a virtual event you had more range to get more people. This isn't digital. This symposium isn't about Central California anymore. It's global. >> No, it really has gone. >> What really happened to that? >> It's really kind of interesting because at first all of this was word of mouth for this symposium to take place. And it just started growing and growing and the more that we talk to organizations for support, the more we found how interconnected they were on an international scale. So much so that we've decided to take our cyber competition next year and take it globally as well. So if in fact as Major General Shaw said, this is about a multinational support force. Maybe it's time our students started interacting on that level to start with and not have to grow into it as they get older, but do it now and around space and around cybersecurity and around that digital environment and really kind of reduce the digital dividing space. >> Yeah, General Thompson mentioned this, 80 countries with programs. This is like the Olympics for space and we want to have these competitions. So I got great vision and I love that vision, but I know you have the number... Not number, the scores and from the competition this year that happened earlier in the week. Could you share the results of that challenge? >> Yeah, absolutely. We had 83 teams participate this year in the California Cyber Innovation Challenge. And again, it was based around a spacecraft scenario where a spacecraft, a commercial spacecraft was hacked and returned to earth. And the students had to do the forensics on the payload. And then they had to do downstream network analysis, using things like Wireshark and autopsy and other systems. It was a really tough competition. The students had to work hard and we had middle school and high school students participate. We had an intermediate league, new schools who had never done it before or even some who didn't even have STEM programs but were just signing up to really get involved in the experience. And we had our ultimate division which was those who had competed in several times before. And the winner of that competition was North Hollywood. They've been the winning team for four years in a row. Now it's a phenomenal program, they have their hats off to them for competing and winning again. Now what's really cool is not only did they have to show their technical prowess in the game but they also have to then brief and out-brief what they've learned to a panel of judges. And these are not pushovers. These are experts in the field of cybersecurity in space. We even had a couple of goons participating from DefCon and the teams present their findings. So not only are we talking technical, we're talking about presentation skills. The ability to speak and understand. And let me tell you, after reading all of their texts to each other over the weekend adds a whole new language they're using to interact with each other. It's amazing. And they are so more advanced and ready to understand space problems and virtual problems than we are. We have to challenge them even more. >> Well, it sounds like North Hollywood got the franchise. It's likethe Patriots, the Lakers, they've got a dynasty developing down there in North Hollywood. >> Well, what happens when there's a dynasty you have to look for other talent. So next year we're going global and we're going to have multiple states involved in the challenge and we're going to go international. So if North Hollywood pulls it off again next year, it's going to be because they've met the best in the world than defeated >> Okay, the gauntlet has been thrown down, got to take down North Hollywood from winning again next year. We'll be following that. Bill, great to get those results on the cyber challenge we'll keep track and we'll put a plug for it on our site. So we got to get some press on that. My question to you is now as we're going digital, other theme was that they want to hire digital natives into the space force. Okay, the DOD is looking at new skills. This was a big theme throughout the conference not just the commercial partnerships with government which I believe they had kind of put more research and personally, that's my personal opinion. They should be putting in way more research into academic and these environments to get more creative. But the skill sets was a big theme. What's your thoughts on how you saw some of the highlight moments there around skill sets? >> John, it's really interesting 'cause what we've noticed is in the past, everybody thinks skill sets for the engineering students. And it's way beyond that. It's all the students, it's all of them understanding what we call cyber cognizance. Understanding how cybersecurity works whatever career field they choose to be in. Space, there is no facet of supporting space that doesn't need that cyber cognizance. If you're in the back room doing the operations, you're doing the billing, you're doing the contracting. Those are still avenues by which cybersecurity attacks can be successful and disrupt your space mission. The fact that it's international, the connectivities, all of those things means that everyone in that system digitally has to be aware of what's going on around them. That's a whole new thought process. It's a whole new way of addressing a problem and dealing with space. And again it's virtual to everyone. >> That's awesome. Bill, great to have you on. Thank you for including theCUBE virtual, our CUBE event software platform that we're rolling out. We've been using it for the event and thank you for your partnership in this co-creation opening up your community, your symposium to the world, and we're so glad to be part of it. I want to thank you and Dustin and the team and the President of Cal Poly for including us. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, John. It's been an amazing partnership. We look forward to it in the future. >> Okay, that's it. That concludes the Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, your host with Cal Poly, who put on an amazing virtual presentation, brought all the guests together. And again, shout out to Bill Britton and Dustin DeBrum who did a great job as well as the President of Cal poly who endorsed and let them do it all. Great event. See you soon. (flash light sound)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2020. It is the digital experience online so rather than all gathering together in San Francisco we're getting to talk to everybody where they are and we're happy to bring back one of our CUBE alums, it's actually been a little while since we've had them on the program. Willie Tejada, who is the general manager and Chief Developer Advocate with IBM. Willie, so great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Hey Stu, thanks for having me, it's good to be back, it's been too long. >> So, first thing, obviously we're all together while we're apart, because of the global pandemic, developers, I've had so many interviews I've done over the years talking about dispersed development, around the clock development, I had a great interview with a head of remote work in the developer community at the beginning of the year before everything happened, so, how's the community doing overall and how are you seeing them react to what's happening? >> In the developer community, I think one of the interesting parts is one, developers feel oftentimes that they can actually make a difference. Two, their work oftentimes happens remotely. And so, one of the things that we've seen is a lot of the interaction that we have when we're doing our developer advocacy work has just converted to digital. And there's some interesting dynamics that come about, just even in that, where if you were doing something like a meetup in New York that was attracting something like 50 people, to maybe 100, maybe the venue was limiting the number of people that you would actually have there if you had a popular topic or speaker. We've had meetups basically be as large as 500 plus people when we went to digital. So definitely some different dynamics as we actually talk about this new normal that we're in, and everybody utilizing digital vehicles to reach the people that they want to talk to. >> All right. So I know last time we talked with you a big topic we talked about was Call for Code, and something that IBM has done different initiatives there, and you've got a very relevant one so bring our audience up to speed, this year's Call for Code, what that would involve. >> Yeah Stu, thanks very much. The Call for Code initiative inside of IBM is now in its third year. We did it in 2018, the concept was fairly simple, developers always love to solve problems and we said what if we challenge the 24 million developers to come and take a crack at society's most pressing issues? And in the first two years we focused on natural disasters, all you had to do was take a look at the coverage prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and you had wildfires in Australia and in Northern California where my home actually is based, and you had tsunamis and hurricanes and floodings. And so the ability for us to actually bring the developer community to bear on some of society's most pressing issues was really kind of the concept upfront, and IBM would help by bringing subject matter experts together, making available tools, because we're thinking let's solve the problem exactly how we solve it when we apply business. You get an expert on supply chain, you get a user of supply chain, you bring them together, developer builds these things. Well, not all the time can you get an expert in disaster, a first responder, so we actually created a lot of that fusion from there. Then, over the course of the first two years, we've had over 210,000 developers participate over across 168 nations with over 8,000 applications submitted. So, wildly successful. Now this year, Stu to your point, we had something that we could really bear down on very heavily. We announced that we were taking on climate change kind of laddering up natural disasters was let's look at the root, climate change, and then the COVID pandemic came about. We said let's tilt people towards that and it's been a tremendous outcoming for it. We've asked the developers to focus on three areas: crisis communications, you may have been one of those folks that's on a conference call or emails that haven't been responded to, on wait times forever, so those communications systems how do we fortify them get them to scale? The second area is remote learning, really look at where all the students are actually these days and what they're doing there, not just teaching but basically how do you give them entertainment, how do you actually provide them some level of social interaction. And the third area with the COVID focus is community collaboration. We really want to try to make sure people's spirits are up and that really does require everybody leaning in, and again you look at the news and tremendous examples of community collaboration and where technology can help scale or broaden that, that's really where Call for Code actually comes into play. >> Yeah, maybe it would be helpful, tell us a little bit about some of the previous winners, what have been some of the outcomes, more than just rallying the community, what resources is IBM putting into this? >> So one of the things that makes it different is rather than it just being a regular hack, this is really a processing side of IBM that we've developed over the course of this last three years. Where the challenge is one piece, the Call for Code challenge, we also developed and rolled out and committed another 25 million, with Call for Code we committed 30 million over that five years and in the following year we recognized the need to see the solutions actually get deployed. And so we committed another $25 million for the fortification, testing, scaling and deployment. So when you win a Call for Code Global Challenge, you also get IBM's support around deployment, fortification, some counseling and relation basically from development, to architecture, to even the business side of it. In our first year, we had a team called Project Owl actually come out and win, and one of the first things that happens especially in hurricanes or these natural disasters, communication grids go down. So they developed a solution that could quickly establish an ad hoc communication grid, and anybody that had a typical cell phone could connect up to that Wi-Fi grid or that grid very similar to the way they actually connect into a Starbucks Wi-Fi system. And it would allow both the first responders to understand where folks were at, and then establish communications. So that was in the first year. The second year was a team called Prometeo, and in October we selected them as the Global Challenge winner, and they were a solution that was built by a firefighter, a nurse and a developer with this concept roughly of how do they monitor essentially a firefighter's situation when they're actually in the heat of battle to best allocate the resources to the people who need them most. Understanding a little bit about their environment, understanding a little bit about the health that's actually happening with the firefighter, and again it's one of those scenarios where you couldn't just build it from the firefighter's side, you couldn't just build it from the nurse's side, and a developer would have a difficult time building it just by themselves. So bringing those people together, a nurse, a firefighter and a developer, and creating a system like this is really really what we're aspiring to do. Now, they won in October, and in February, they're in a field deployment actually doing real testing in the field in some of the fields at Catalonia, Spain. So, we've seen it first-hand exactly what happens when they win, the Project Owl team actually did some hurricane deployment testing in Puerto Rico, that of course IBM helped fortify and build connections between the Puerto Rico government so that we're really seeing essentially the challenge winner see this type of deployment. >> Willie, I love it, it's even better than a punch line I could do, what do you get when you combine a firefighter, a nurse and a developer? The answer is you can positively impact the world so phenomenal there. >> Absolutely. >> I'm curious, where does open source play into this activity? We were just covering Red Hat Summit last week, of course, lots of open source, lots of community engagement in hearing how they are helping communities engage and of course open source has been a big rallying point, everything from 3D printing to other projects in the community. So where does open source fit into this initiative? >> 100%. The amazing part about activating developers these days is just the broad availability of the technologies. And it's certainly stimulated by the community aspect of open source, this idea that they democratize access to technology, and it's really community-centric, and folks can start building very quickly on open source technologies that are material. So number one, all the things that is part of Call for Code and what we actually deployed are based on open source technologies. Now, again one of the differences is how do we actually make those winners and those technology sets become real? And becoming real requires this idea of how do you actually build durable sustainable solutions. So each five of the winners every year have the opportunity essentially to go through the Linux Foundation and have their solutions established as a project with the idea of roughly that people can download it and fork it, people can actually fortify it, but it's available to the whole globe, everybody in the world, to help build upon and fortify and continue to innovate on. So open source is right at the root of it, not just from the technology side, but from the ecosystem and community side that open source was for. And so we've seen as an example the formal establishment of Project Owl's software being open sourced by the Linux Foundation. And it's been fantastic to see both the participation actually there and see how people are basically deriving it and using it exactly what we intended to see in the vision of Call for Code, and Code and Response. >> Well, that's phenomenal. We're huge fans of the community activity, of course open source is a great driver of everything you were talking about. So I'm curious, one of the things we're all looking at is where people are spending their time, how this global pandemic is impacting what people are doing. There's plenty of memes out there on social media, it doesn't mean that you all of a sudden are going to learn a new language, or learn to play an instrument because you have lots of time at home, but I'm curious from what you've seen so far, compared to previous years, how's the engagement? What's the numbers? What can you share? Is there a significant difference or change from previous years? >> Yeah, there's so much good will, I would say, that's been brought about around the world in what we're seeing around the COVID-19 pandemic. That the way I would describe it is the rate of submissions and interest that we've seen is 3x above what we've seen in the prior years. Now keep in mind, we're not even actually at the area where we see the most. So keep in mind, right now we tried to accelerate the time to highlight some of these solutions. So April 27th will be the first deadline for COVID-19 challenge, and we'll highlight some of the solutions on May 5th. Now, when we think about it basically from that standpoint we typically actually see people waiting until that submission timeframe. And so when you think of it from that standpoint you really oftentimes see this acceleration, right? At that submission deadline. But we're already seeing 3x what we've seen in the past in terms of participation just because of the amount of good will that's actually out there, and what people are trying to do in solving these problems. And developers, they're problem solvers overall, and putting out those three areas, community crisis communications, remote learning, and community collaboration, they'll see examples of what they see on the news and think they can actually do something better, and then express that in software. >> That's excellent. So, Willie, one of the things, we've been talking to leaders across the industry and one of things we don't know is how much of what we are going through is temporary, and how much will actually be long term. I'm curious if there's any patterns you're seeing out there, discussions you're having with developers, you talk about remote work, you talk about communication. Are there anything that you've seen so far that you think that this will fundamentally just alter the way things might've been in the past going forward? >> Developers are always actually looking for this idea of how they actually sharpen their skills, their craft, new languages that they actually know, new platforms, whatever it actually might be. And I think in the past there was probably, even from our perspective, this balance of face-to-face versus digital, and a mix of both, but I think what we'll find going forward is a more robust mix of that. Because you can't deny the power of reach that actually happens when you actually move something digital. And then I would say that think about how you at theCUBE have refined your studios in dealing with an interview like mine, it gets better and better, you refine it. How you do an online workshop and how you do a workshop on a steel service mesh, you get better and better about how you engage from real time, hands-on keyboard experience in what information, what chat, what community pieces do you put on the screen to stimulate these pieces, I think in general the industry and our company and our teams have gotten better even in this short amount of time. I think those things will be long-lasting. I think we're all humans, so I think they still want the physical face-to-face and community interaction and camaraderie that comes from being in that physical energy, but I do think it'll be complemented by the things that we refined through the digital delivery that's been refined during this situation. >> All right, so Willie, final thing of course, this week, the winners are all being announced, how about people that are watching this and say this sounds phenomenal, how do I learn more, if I didn't get to participate in some of the initial pieces what should I be looking for? And how can I contribute and participate even after Think? >> Well, number one keep in mind that the challenge for the year will still actually go all the way to October, and submissions for that whole Challenger Watch will go to February first. So that's number one. But number two, going to developer.ibm.com/callforcode you'll find all the resources, we have these things called starter kits that help developers actually get up and going very quickly, finding out more information about both the competition structure, and really how you become part of the movement, go there basically and answer the call. >> Awesome. Love it, Willie, thanks so much, pleasure to catch up with you and definitely looking forward to seeing all the outcome that the community is putting forth to focus on this really important challenge. >> Hey Stu, thanks for having me, I really appreciate it. >> All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage from IBM Think, all the backlog we had to see Willie a couple years ago when he was on the program, and check out where we will be later in the year. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Now, here's your host. Day Volonte. >> Hi, >> everybody. Welcome to this cute conversation. I'm Dave Volonte and Stew Minuteman is here with me. We're gonna break down a w s kind of give you Ah, midyear What's happened so far this year with all the events that we've been covering and what to look forward to? Uh, the N Y C Summit is coming up stew. It's been a big year. Obviously. What we came off a re invent. Amazon's got $30,000,000,000 run rate business growing at 40 plus percent per year. That means they're putting 9,000,000,000 of incremental revenue every year into the cloud business. The marketplace, That growth that's roughly as large is tthe e entire Microsoft cloud business, which is astounding >> day that that that's that's the point Amazon definitely has been making for a couple of years. And you're absolutely right. Microsoft is definitely growing at a faster pace than Amazon, and they're running about 75 87 but off a much smaller number. So the incremental add that Amazon has been throwing off the last couple years. Every year they're adding more than an azure every year. So absolutely Amazon, you know, is the lead horse out there. And while you know, the horses on the track behind them are trying fast to catch up Amazon. If you talk about Infrastructures service, AWS is still the lead. >> Well, the big question is. Will that attenuate? And we were at Remember the Nutanix inaugural Nutanix Stop next? Do you rush Pandey, who's very smart guy, somebody we respect a lot. One of the fundamental assumptions they were making is eventually the law of large numbers will catch up to them and know it very well May. But it hasn't yet. I asked John Lovelock, can a company the size of Amazon $30,000,000,000 company grow it for 42% a year? Is that sustainable? And he said, Absolutely. There's nothing to stop them now. Who knows who has the crystal ball? What are your thoughts? >> Yeah, So, Dave, what we saw is Amazon's not sitting still. You know, they always like to say it's always Day one, and if you look at where they're going, the products that they keep throwing off the innovation that they keep moving on and the flywheel that they've had first of customer acquisition with all of the innovations that they're putting out there and the flight well. But I've been talking about the last couple of years the label of data, which is something we want to be a little concerned about. How much data Amazon actually does have both Amazon AWS and Amazon, with all those intelligent devices that are in your homes and connecting everything together. Some people are a little concerned about that. The government's a little bit concerned about that, but absolutely Amazon is going everywhere. We've seen Amazon going into sub segments of the market, going into verticals and going just really broad, really deep. So absolutely I don't see anything slowing a bit on down. It is a company that continues to impress one of >> the challenges. I think those do that that Amazon does have, and this came out of the reinforced >> conference a couple weeks ago in Boston, which was, Ah, conference for security practitioners, a lot of si SOS chief information security officers. The number one challenge that came out of that when you talk to practitioners was their ability to keep up with the innovations that Amazon is putting forth. So, you know, I wonder if we're gonna talk to some commercial customers. You'll see them down the summit probe to see if, in fact, that's part of their challenge. Just the pace at which Amazon brings out new features. But we've done Gosh, we've covered eight events or will have covered eight events this year. Eight productions. It started in the U. K. Where we covered a public sector health care. And then we did the AWS summit London really all about both public sector in the UK as well as the summit in the UK Innovations in the UK around cloud, etcetera, cloud adoption. 12,000 people at the AWS London summit. Now you covered re Mars, which was not the Cube wasn't there, but you were there. What was that show? >> Yes. So, first of all, it's an Amazon >> show, not a native US show, but absolutely showed underneath where eight of us fits into the fulfillment centers of Amazon. And it was about re Marceau Mars A play of course on space. But it was a machine learning automation, robotics in space. So you had the cool blue origin stuff that actually brought in. Robert Downey Jr talked about how he's going to save the planet with, you know, robotics and intelligence out there to help clean up pollution in the globe on and the like. But it was a phenomenal show, but what I said is actually going to show a little bit underneath the covers of Amazon similar what we've seen from eight of us at the reinvent shows over the years. Because, you know, we all know how many boxes air coming to our, you know, our place of home every day and how fast that's going. And so this is what's happening underneath the robotics and machine learning a lot of those Air AWS Service's that are powering that. So it was a fascinating show, Dave and absolutely showed other relationship between Amazon, the parent company. Eight of us, all those cloud service is that helped feed the bigger business. >> Now, June, the Cube covered the D. C. Public sector summit. This is Teresa Carlson's gig. She's the host. Actually, Andy Jassy was there this time. He wasn't there last year when you and I recovering it. And of course, that's all about bringing cloud to public sector, not just federal but all public sector. It includes AH, non profit and education, which talk about in a minute. The big story. There is a jet. I we're talking about tens of billions of dollars going to ah, contract. Oracle, of course, is fighting it. It's going into the courts. I guess they've been a number of reviews or could won't give up its oracle. Amazon clearly is the front runner. Last I read, it was down to AWS and Microsoft, with AWS being the lead contender there. We'll see what happens. I think the decision is coming down this month, July 2019. But it's really again about bringing cloud innovations to public sector. Public sector tends to take things a little bit later than the commercial like. For instance, last year they announced the the VM wear on AWS was available, so you'll see those kinds of things come maybe a year later. But its again. Another big show there 12. 13,000 people there at the D. C Convention center. >> Yeah, Davey, when you talked about the critique of what's happening in Amazon as Amazon goes deeper into all of these verticals How do they help get that information to the user in a way that they need to run their businesses? So my co host for New York City's Cory Quinn was listen to his podcast this morning and he said, That's where Amazon's got dozens of blog's. They've got so many announcements, they haven't done a really good job, something we've seen many companies do. How do I get to you know that business roll and put it in, you know, verbal that they understand, as opposed to just >> Hey, we had 1000 new features >> come out this year and they're awesome. Then you should use everything s o. You know, that's something that, you know the industry as a whole needs to do better at an Amazon. Just in the nature of how fast they're moving is something that they should be able to do a better job. >> And Jennifer is also gonna be in New York City. And one of things he was stressing at reinforce was the marketplace. We had Dave McCann on the just rocketing. I think it was 100,000 census of security subscriptions. I think it was 1,000,000 subscriptions in total so just an amazing ah momentum in the marketplace. But reinforce was all about security. Deep dives on security, chief information, security officers. What came out of that show the big takeaway was was head of AWS is, uh, security. The chief information security officer, Schmidt said. This narrative in the industry that the sky is falling doesn't do anybody any good. Um, it's not productive. We should be more positive. The state of the cloud union is good, like the president of states is State of the Union is strong. Um, having said that, Amazon talks about the shared security model. The practitioners that we talked to said, Yeah, shared model Amazon's going to secure the the infrastructure of the storage, the compute of the database. We are responsible for our end, and it really is on us to make sure that we are secure. So again, back to that point about the pace of innovation that Amazon is putting forth is a challenge for people. AWS imagine is also going down. I think this week what's that you're >> so it's in Seattle and it's you mentioned the public Sector one in D. C, which is government agencies, nonprofits and education. So imagine is a subset of that. My understanding is the education, a nonprofit piece of that from when you and I were in D. C. Last year for the Public sector summit. It's It is impressive how deep Amazon is going into these spaces, the affinity they have. And really, you know how happy the customers are to be able to move fast. So, you know, when you think about nonprofits and think about education, innovation is not the first thing that usually comes to mind because budgets are tight and I don't have enough people. And usually you've got, you know, whatever's left over. But imagine is them. How do we move these forward? How do we You know, we know we need to help transform education. It's so important to train the next generation. So, you know, imagine there are some great stories that come out of that. Jeffrey loves getting those stories, helping us tell those stories through the Cube platform. And so it's the second year we're doing >> Yes, it would be covering that. And then, of course, reinvent will have two sets again that reinvent this year. The Super >> Bowl of our industry, >> right? Sure. Um, something's going on. So unfortunate incidents in Southern California. Big earthquakes, actually. Multiple earthquakes, Right? You had the physical earthquake, and then you had CO I, leonard going to the Clippers. But so I'm interested in sort of poking at this notion of ground stations. So at reinvent last year, Amazon announced on his own ground station, which essentially was ground station is a service. So if I understand it, one of the challenges okay, You launched the satellites, but you still need a ground station to collect the data and then uploaded and analyze it. That's what AWS is is partnering to put in infrastructure that allows you to essentially rent ground station infrastructure. So, you know, they worry about building it in securing it yourself. Because you think about it. It's got to be a secure location. You gotta have fencing. You got a physical security. You got to get the data in. You gotta upload it to the toe. Where we gonna upload it? So Amazon is basically building this service out, saying Don't worry about the ground station piece. Rent that from us, you know, swipe your credit card. Your ground station as a service, and then we'll ingest that data uploaded to the cloud and then apply all of the tooling that we have to allow you to analyze that data. So if you think about the earthquake of devastation, if you don't have a ground station there, you can, in theory, go to AWS and actually spin up a ground station in jest. You know, on the ground, you know, the ground truth as we like to sometimes talk about and actually get satellite imaging and telemetry in that region, you know, this comes into play things like forest fires and all kinds of of natural disaster. >> Dave, even at the remarks show, I attended a session where one of the Amazon partners was talking about not only just getting the satellite data down, but Justus. They have the snowball edge today, which is, you know, for you know, I ot or some remote sites, but some of these satellites are gonna have the compute and storage at in satellite themselves. So if you think about I'm gonna have these geosynchronous satellites. I'm gonna have all this connectivity. And if I could get a gigabit of Ethernet, you know, traffic going to the satellites and I could do the processing at the edge, which is now up in space. I can process that. And you know, that edge that we talked about get to hold another dimension, you know, off off the terra firma to be able to do those kind of analysis. As you said, earthquakes, you know, all the all the climate discussion that's going on, we should be able to have tap into even more. Resource is, and we'll have to rename Cloud if it even goes beyond the Earth. >> And then, um, outpost is the other story that we've been tracking, attracting a lot of stories, but but outpost is starting to ship in beta form. We've seen instances of >> so, so seeing >> it. We just did a little quick right up. >> I mean, Dave, you know, just a ripple went through the >> industry when they showed Hey, here's Iraq and what they're like. This is the exact same rack that we have in the Amazon data centers and why it's a little surprising because we're allowed to see inside the Amazon Data Center. So it's like, Okay, this is what they're computed awaited to 24 in tracking, supposed to a 19 in track. But that line between the public cloud and my on premises environment absolutely is blurring. So everybody wants to see where Amazon's going. They have the big partnership with VM, where Veum, where is already shipping the solution? That is the same software for that Veum wear on AWS in my data center. So, you know, I can have you know, the Dell hardware with the Veum where code or I can have the Amazon hardware with the VM where code coming later this year without post. So that line between public in private is absolutely blurring. And where to my applications live, You know that that future of how fast is eight of us continue to grow? Absolutely. There are applications and data and things that will stay in my own data center and under my control. But that line is definitely blurring. And there's gonna be some re architectures. It's definitely still gonna take a couple of years to sort some of these things out. But we're at some of those inflection points where we'll see some of >> us. So I wrote a post its upon wicked bond kind of analyzing that video, and there's some interesting things that are unique. There's certainly a lot of goodness in there. Not some of the things they talk about are completely unique. Thio, aws. But things like Nitro and their special virtual ization engine and their special chip on Do you want to get a look at that? You take a look at that video and thence to New York City Summit this week. Um, we mentioned some of the innovations that we've seen up to date this year. A lot of talk I'm sure about the marketplace. >> Yeah, I'm wondering if there'll be any ripples, Dave, because the 1/2 of a chick you, too, was supposed to be in New York City. And now it's not, doesn't mean they don't have a strong presence in New York City like London and believe it's somewhere around 12 to 15,000 people. When I went to New York City two years ago was quite impressive. It is a free show, which means if your customer you get in for free. If you're a partner, of course, you're still paying for everything that goes there. But the regional summits are quite impressive and a great way to get in touch with Amazon and all that they're doing. If you don't want to go to the Super Bowl itself, which is, you know, 50,000 plus now in Las Vegas towards the end of the year. >> Yeah, these air, like many reinvents and they're actually quite good. A lot of a lot of practitioner focused on you're gonna you're gonna see that New York City >> did what I always love about every Amazon show I go to. There are customers that are interested learning new things. How can you do better with what I'm doing? But also, how can I change what I'm doing? How can I move forward? So even if it's not adopting the latest and greatest from AWS, the entire ecosystem is going there to meet with those customers and talk about digital transformation? Modern workforce? All of these hot trends definitely play out. Ground zero is the AWS. >> Yeah, and this is by design. As I said before, the pace of innovation is a challenge for people. It's an adoption blocker and so Amazon wants to educate and share the knowledge so that they can get more adoption. OK, stew. Thanks very much. Good luck. This week. Check out silicon angle dot com For all the news, the cube dot net is where the videos will live and watch. Do on John Ferrier and Corey Quinn. Live and check out the cuban dot com for all the research. Thanks for watching Everybody Day, Volonte and Stupid Event. We'll see you next time.

>> Live from Anaheim, California It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes Live coverage of Nutanix Next here in Anaheim, California I'm your host, Rebecca Night, >> along with my co host, John Furrier, and we're kicking off a two days show here in Anaheim. I'm so happy to be working with you, John. >> Awesome to see you. Great event, Nutanix Hot, innovative company under a lot of pressure from the M Where, But this marketplace is changing great transition opportunity for these guys. So it's gonna be fun. >> Exactly. And I wouldn't want to get into what we heard on the main stage. We had Dhiraj Pandey up there talking about nutanix. It is a very poignant moment for him because NUTANIX is turning ten this year. That is a milestone in and of itself. This company has really changed so much. It's always been about simplifying data management, but it's no longer a one product company. I wonder if you could just reflect a little bit on the changes you've seen. >> It's been a fun ride of known Dhiraj for ten years. When we first interviewed him when they were misunderstood. Later, no one really got what this h c I was going on. Student Min was early to see it and keep on, but it was for a few years. I was like, Yo, he's crazy entrepreneur But he ended up having the right formula. Very innovative company. They've great product leadership, great engineering, but ten years old, they went public. So they're out in the open. Dellal Technologies went private, reset everything, then went public, kind of forced to go public, and I was doing great. So you have interesting dynamic, the company's ten years old. They went public and how to make all these moves out in the open. So the interesting thing at ten years old for them is that they got a great business and the markets in transition. Hyper convergence, HC Eyes is called, is a solid foundation, but it's changing very radically with cloud technologies and multi cloud. And the enterprise is morphing into right into their wheelhouse, where this simplicity needed theirs, integration needed. All these new opportunities are emerging and they're still small, so they could be nimble. This is the challenge that they have. They have to get out in front this next wave. If they don't, there's going to be competitive pressure. And I think that's the big story that I'm seeing here is they're ten years old. They're not resting on their laurels, that CEOs aggressive. He's taken on VM wear a little bit, and so he's competitive. So we'LL see what happened. >> Well, I think and you said Dheeraj is is a friend of the Cube, So I let's talk about his leadership style. So here, here, here, here's this company that was a tech startup. It now has a market cap in the multiple billions of dollars recently gone public. How would you describe his leadership style and also how it's changed? What, what, since it was sort of a little tech startup? >> Well, D Roger's always been innovator. He's been a visionary again. He sees typical founder. He's got the twenty mile stare, as I call it, you can see around the corner, but that's not going to get him through this competitive battle. He's gotta balance the visionary competitiveness and and strategy with technical execution they need to execute right now because they are under a lot of pressure, competitive pressure they need to increase their sales inside the enterprise to get new logos and new customers. So I think what I'm seeing from his leadership style is it's a call to arms within the company saying We got to go take territory down. We gotta compete not necessarily on a on a head on with se viene where and others but they got They got to continue to be innovating, be competitive. That's Ray technical, and that's something that came out of the analyst meeting yesterday. I noticed was he's very tactical, usually is painting the picture, but he's got a great vision, and I think that's going to be the challenge. >> I want to talk about partners who are sort of the key partners that you think will help this company grow because it it does take a village >> well, the interesting strategy than Nutanix is looking at, in my opinion, this skin my opinion, but they have a partnering strategy. Del Technologies and GM was all part of a portfolio of end to end strategy. So really, the big competitors against for Nutanix is going to be Del del Technologies and their family. Cos Nutanix is going after more of a partner in a strategy they announced keep partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. HP was also competitors in the space, so they got it to create this ecosystem strategy, and it's going to be about partners. And new tennis can integrate with other players. They could be a supplier of technology for the broader market. This is something that's interesting. Everyone's trying to be a broker or they used terms, you know, Gateway to the multi cloud or cloud bro Carmel. These terms been kicked around. But Nutanix truly has an opportunity to take their product leadership and be a partner and tie things together more elegantly than, say, one company into him. >> Let's talk also about nutanix, the business as you. As you have said multiple times, This is Ah is hugely competitive industry. This company is under a lot of pressure. Technically, they've got to be tough, but yet they've also there till they're still small. They can be nimble and innovative. What what What is sort of on Dheeraj is to do list from you speaking as an analyst. >> Well, I think the number one thing I think he's got a really kind of shore up the sales and marketing effort of it because they have. When they compete in the marketplace, they need more competitive wins. These stock has taken a little bit hit lately on some basic fundamentals. Again, I still think they're misunderstood in the market that there's a big upside for Nutanix. But they gotta win Mork competitive deals where they compete with the proof of concept, also known as a POC. They win most of the time, they're gonna take their product leadership and they've gotta win in the field. This is a critical thing and lower their cost of acquisition for customers. That's Aki kind of financial analysis. The other thing that they got to do is continue to get the product leadership and get position for that next wave. That's going to be enterprised and multi cloud, and that's not yet clear. And the numbers don't look that strong. In my opinion, on the growth, it's no one's really got visibility into what those numbers going to look like in their core business. They're H C I business. They're solid, so they gotta build on that, extend out that base, and that's really the core strategy. >> How would you describe the customer mindset because, as you said, this is a company that's misunderstood. They get it and they're sort of waiting for the Cust stirs to catch up or waiting for the market really to catch up. >> The customer angle is interesting because, you know, a lot of people that, like Nutanix, are coming from VM. Where would they pay licenses? And VM where had some misfires in the couple of years ago On product, they kind of got caught back up on shore that up. But that opened up a door for Nutanix. You know, VM. Where's six point? Oh has been talked about as a one of those gaps where opened up the door to Nutanix. So the M, where customers are kind of looking at nutanix. I think the HB relationships interesting because I think that's going to be a whole new set of customer base. But the customer mindset right now is interesting. They want to not consolidate. They want to actually reduce the pain points around dealing with all this legacy hardware legacy software, and I think nutanix his position to come in and say we, Khun, provide integrated solution, Reduce your footprint give you more capabilities and free up the time it takes to manage it. And I think that's one of the consistent thing themes. The other notable thing I noticed another customer base is it's a lot younger and smarter technical people where they don't have that dogma this the way we used to do it. And I think that's going to be an interesting Dev ops opportunity where the younger generation on it would be like, Why we doing this versus this? I think that's going to be very interesting to see if that network effect for NUTANIX will work. >> Well, I'm interested to hear you talk about this younger generation in relation to the customers because Nutanix is also ah, younger Jenna. You know, it's ten years old. It's sort of on the verge of adolescents. Andi and we were just at a deli M C World. That company's turning thirty five next week. Obviously, Microsoft and Apple are well into their forties. Uh, how how would you talk about this company in terms of the of it as part of the new generation of tech companies, Tech powerhouses, Really Well, I >> mean, I think it's a contrast between two styles. Michael Dell is awesome, and what he's putting out there is an end to end strategy for Del. They want to automate. They wanted only infrastructure layer. They want to be the preferred supplier for it. Nutanix a little bit different. They're younger, they're faster, their nimble on. They're taking more integrated approach on a partnership ships centric approach. So I think the style is one of a cheetah who's running fast. That's nutanix. And then the big elephant, which is Del and that just pounding through the through the territory that Del Technologies and GM would have more muscle. So they're goingto they're gonna have some good wins. Their new Tanis has got to stay fast and nimble and kind of just, you know, Bob and weave off of what Dell's doing. So I think that's the opportunity for them is to go to the next level. And I think Dheeraj is sees that the question I see is that because they're a public company, they gotta balance it all out in the open, and they're very transparent companies, so I don't think it will be two hundred challenge, but this is what they have to do they got? Really? Take that revenue up in the cloud and enterprise beyond Hcea >> and Wall Street is watching >> you while she's watching. >> So we have a great show. We have. We're gonna be talking products. We're going to be talking women in tech word social impacts. It's research for our viewers at home. What do you think that they should be looking for in terms of terms of nutanix and in its journey? I think >> that what I would look for and what I'm going to be poking out on the interviews is what's next? Because I think this is a critical bet for the Russian. The team was. Are they on the right wave? Is this what the customers want? What kind of product leadership they have, And then what's the culture fit for what the customers want? And the customers are looking for simplicity. They do what they want to reduce the cost of ownership, and they want to supply. That's going to be around. So I think the key thing is, you know, look for where it goes next. That's where I think the number one thing to look for. >> Well, John, I'm looking forward to two days of coverage with you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, we will have much more of the cubes. Live coverage of Nutanix next here in Anaheim, California stay with us.

>> Live from Anaheim, California It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Nutanix >> Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes Live coverage of Nutanix Next here in Anaheim, California I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Furrier. We're joined by Pharma's Mahdavi. He is the senior group director Cadence Design Systems. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. So tell our viewers a little bit about Kate, based in San Jose. Can't tell our viewers a little bit about your company Cadence Design Systems. >> So Cajuns has been a A company in the very essence about thirty years ago. So we make software to enable semiconductor companies to design test than billed chips. So most technique, you know, technology that you bought, you see, and the fries Electronics has some cadence solution. >> So you guys had a lot of legacy and you're talking about the nutanix relationship. >> So our journey with Nutanix started about three years ago. I'd actually explored Nutanix at a previous company. I've been with Cadence three and a half years. Eso liked it, but there was really no opportunity Teo do much At that time, the company was very new at the time. But I cadence, we identified some opportunities Teo to explore nutanix. And it's been a great experience so far Way actually are running a lot of our critical of business applications on nutanix. So we're all in. >> What was the door opener for? What was the door opener for you? You guys there? That cadence. What? Goddammit! >> The overall architecture look good in a presentation level s so it was worth exploring. But, you know, it's a new company. New architecture. Er you have to kind of going to it carefully. So it was a matter of identifying opportunities that were maybe not production, not super business critical to start. But as time goes on, you build confidence and you do more and more. So today we're using Nutanix. As I said for business applications were using your for VD I AA lot of ours End that stop. You know, instances are running on nutanix today. We use that as well because here zero so a lot of art shared services. You know, the n s active directory. Those sorts of services are running on his hands. So, you know, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. >> So I always like to know how this actually helps you and your company. Do people do their jobs better, more quickly, more efficiently, more productively? Can you sort of walk us through what life was like before nutanix and what life is like now in terms of the staffing and the overhead and the >> star? So I would say there's a couple of different, you know, big benefits. One is we're in a cloud, uh, era, right? So a lot of companies are looking for work close to move to the public cloud, and we're no different. We're constantly looking for what? What makes sense and the public cloud. What makes sense on Prem? So from this support and skill sets, fan point is very important to be consistent. I basically have the same support model for both on Prima's well as public public cloud. So that's one big benefit that Nutanix offers because the same skill sets to support. Let's say eight lbs environment is the same as, you know, the nutanix support environment. Thie. Other critical thing is just like any ICTSI organization were challenged with limited resource is you know, doing more with less. So the ease of administration, ease of support, just inherent reliability of the technology allows our staff to, you know, sleep more at nights and, you know, work less often during the weekend. So the overalls support overhead has reduced significantly. So that's the those are the biggest things. I would say. >> Those are two very important things. >> Those are the two biggest things that way went into this, um, this engagement with But, you know, we're pleasantly surprised that performance is exceeded our expectations, you know? You know, I did expect reliability. I didn't quite expect this level of performance improvement, so that's been excellent. So again, we're looking for more and more opportunities to expand it. Just given that experience, he >> said, the staff sleeps well at night. How have they reacted? What if some other anecdotes from the staff freed more free time management playing? What's the most of what was some of the feedback from the from your team? >> Well, I mean, I don't want to give the wrong impression. It's not like they're not >> working. Yeah, I write >> the scenario, but, you know, I would say it's gone from, uh, crazy environments is something a little more humane, S O, I think not only with the staff just across the company. You have those who are who kind of buy in and go into it positively and others who are more reluctant. And that's no different the support staff. So I think just their own confidence level. And, you know, there, >> uh, a >> desire to do more with nutanix as increase as they had more experience with >> it. It's interesting. I did a panel yesterday with some customers from NUTANIX and was a mixed in a big bank, midsized company and and a good, big corporate kind of it. And it's very interesting. The legacy with was where there was more legacy. There was a lot of dependencies, and they were looking at time frames for pushing stuff out, like eight weeks to two months in two hours. So they went for eight weeks. Teo pushing any kind of rule propagation or any kind of new stuff. It weeks the two hours and that was a huge number. Are you Are you guys seeing anything around in terms of performance and group on the time side with Nutanix? What are some of the things that you're getting benefits wise operationally. >> Well, the more we do, the more cookie cutter it becomes. So you know, each migration is easier and faster and so on. And that also acid with confidence, right? The very first critical business application that we moved to Nutanix the level of testing we did was insane. Now it's less Oh, so for multiple reasons that migration experience is much more efficient much, much quicker today than it was early on. >> One of the things we hear to Rebecca was, you know, new channels. The new vendor you mentioned new company. They're ten years old, so still new relative to the bigger guys getting it pushed, getting it through, getting it approved by executive confidence from executive management around. Wait, was this new new company what's the benefits? All kinds of gyrations, of approvals and sometimes politics and, you know, legacy kind of factors in How does that work on your N? How did that go? Getting nutanix through was a struggle. That was The challenge was to take us through that. >> So as you mentioned the fact that it's new technology new company that has its own set of challenges from first, some application owners and executives. You know, why take the risk? Why not do the same thing we've done? You know, always, um so? So that that's one big big challenge. The other was There is a tendency, especially early on when NUTANIX was selling it as an appliance, as opposed to license on Lee. Um, there is a tendency to view it as a hardware solution, and it's exactly not that it's the exact opposite of that is purely a software solution. That's where the value is. So it's very easy to get chopped into that hardware discussion where people will kind of compare with servers and storage versus nutanix s. So you have to kind of change that mindset and show the real value that hyper convergence provides thes of administration, that high performance reliability and so on on DH. Then, as you make that argument and convince more people again, you have to, you know, start small and expand. But that that was some of the main challenges. I would say >> when you're talking about the migration experience and you said when we formed the first business critical application with it was a long time we tested it. We really worked at it. Now we have a bit more faith that it's that it's going to work out. But can you talk about some best practices that emerged in terms of how to migrate and my great well, that maybe other companies could learn from from Cadence Design System? >> Yeah, well, I would say the best practices aren't unique to unit nutanix. Any migration process has, you know, various phases in terms of planning, testing and so on. And I think just having that discipline well documented, consistent process so that you're not starting fresh every time there's a new migration initiative going on. But I think nutanix makes it easier just given the especially the prison management tool. But I would say it's not particularly unique to your tent. NUTANIX Torto organization just need to be well disciplined in immigration process. >> One of the things that you mentioned software, which is great point that cultural shifts, not a hardware box, and it's probably all the best practices around. Evaluating hardware software is becoming more and more central to it. How do you see it evolving because you got cloud right on the horizon. You got public cloud benefits. They are clear if you're greenfield yet legacy Stop. We have containers containing ization happening as a trend lift and shift versus, you know, evolved life cycle management of APS and workloads, or are now under a new kind of view with software that was changing and, you know, as a as a practitioner in the field. Now, do you look at the evolution of how it is going to change? >> So my side of the house is the infrastructure and operations side, and they tend to be historically kind of manual, you know, different network administrator, storage administrator, system administrations, the administrators that is all changing and all becoming more developer skill sets, scripting automation, things without sort. So I think that's the biggest changes going on in today is kind of changing the skill sets and kind of viewing it as a full stack as opposed to just stories. You're just network. So having that holistic view point having ability, too, develop automation that works across the stack. I think that those those are the changes that traditional infrastructure groups need. Thio adapted. >> While I was talking to a customer yesterday And he was a young young guy, was I think, in this late twenties I'm seeing myself. You know, ten years ago he was in high school or college. So you see a new generation coming up where they gravitate towards Dev ops, right? And so they get that so they don't have that dogma. What? We went with this vendor. So they kind of this new thinking, Any observations that you can share on this younger generation coming inside your new talent that's coming in. That's developer or what they like. What? What's the work style? What they gravitate to what some of the tools they like. That's the mindset. >> So I think they can teach us to be honest way have you know, the older folks like myself have a tendency to look at the way things have always been done. Right? So having the fresh viewpoint is great to kind of come into it with a dead body develops mentality, you know, off jump. But I think I which we should kind of welcome that and take advantage of that. Um you know, for cadence in General Wei are pretty mature company in terms of our personnel we don't have that rapid turnover person of, you know, our team members. So we're trying to actually, you know, we welcome that new talent, eh? So that we can kind of get that, uh, Dev officer mentality in house and kind of mature it ourselves. So we're in the beginning of that journey. >> How do you work together? Because, I mean, you're not that old first of all, but But this This is the time where we have multiple generations together working in the workforce, thes digital natives that we were talking about that and the people who get technology so innate Li grew up with it versus the Gen Xers. The boomers are still there. The gen y's that are emerging and graduating. Now, how is it a challenge at at Cadence to to get all these people working collaboratively productively together? >> Well, Katie, this is an extremely technical company. Uh, referred to our customers, you know, they're all double e, you know, Master's and doctorate engineers. So it's a very technical environment. We try not to really focus on the technology, actually, but to look at, you know, the business objectives, you know? What are we trying to achieve what problems that we're trying to solve. That supposed, Tio. Oh, here's a cool technology. How can we use it? You know, the mindset is a little bit different. We're looking at the business side first and then using technology to solve for those problems. So once you have that focus, regardless of your experience, your age, your background, you work together, you know, to to achieve that end goal. >> What you think about the show. We're here at NUTANIX next Anaheim. What's what's your verdict on so far? The content. Positioning your customer. What's next for you guys? Yeah, very loyal customer. Based on what we found. People love the product. What's next, Joe? >> I'm very impressed. I wasn't expecting it to be this large. You know, I went Teo Local smaller version that was in the area last year. That was pretty impressive, too. But this is amazing. I like it because, you know, I t leaders get sales calls all the time, and we kind of get bombarded. So Tennessee so ignore those. This kind of gives us a chance to at our own pace kind of see who the key partners are. Two new tenants look for opportunities and meet some of these other vendors s. So it's been both educational as well as kind of entertaining. >> Excellent. Well, thank you so much. Farmers for coming on the Q b really appreciated >> my pleasure to meet you. Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. We will have much more of nutanix next here in Anaheim, coming up in just a little bit.

from San Francisco it's the queue covering Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat hey welcome back everyone's two cubes live coverage here in San Francisco California at Moscone West I'm John for a co-host of the cube with my analyst this week co-host John Troy a co-founder of tech reckoning our next guest is Dave Abrams executive general manager of data at Insurance Australia group welcome to the cube thanks for having me we were just you know talking on an off-camera before we came on about the challenges of data as cloud scale you guys have been around for many many years yeah you're dealing with a lot of legacy yeah you guys out right on the front step what's going on with you take a minute to explain what you guys do in your role in your environment absolutely now it's you know so we're we're large insurance trying we we've got offices in New Zealand and across Southeast Asia so we're kind of expanding out in our in our reach but um we've been around for a hundred odd years and and we've really grown a lot through merger and acquisition over time and so what that's meant ah this is a bit of a byproduct of those kind of merge and acquisition process is that data has been siloed and fragmented in different brands and different products and so it's been hard to get for example just a holistic view of a customer what does the customer have all the products they hold you know are they a personal customer as well as a business caste and all that sort of stuff doesn't kind of line up so we've had that big challenge in we've been working over the last couple of years to even just kind of consolidate all that unify that data into one platform so that we can see across the group from from a holistic perspective and and build that single view of customer and that's now helped us sort of understand you know what our customers are doing in and what's important to them and how we can better support them and yeah and offer better services and what are you doing here at Red Hat this week what's what's the objective what are you doing what do you have you know I'm speaking you talking the folk what's the what's the solution with Red Hat well so yeah we're primarily here as a result of the Innovation Awards so we you know we were nominated and we're successful in our in our award for that category in our region which was wonderful we we're really honored with that so we're here because of that we sharing our customer story with the rest of the Red Hat team and the rest of the open-source community around really what it's meant for us to use open source within a big corporate that's kind of traditionally been based on a lot of vendor technology right a live Ben driven predominantly by the big tech vendors you know that have come in and sort of helped us build big solutions and platforms which which were great and wonderful in the fact that you know they they were there and they lasted like ten years plus and that was all good but now because things are changing so fast we need to be more adaptable and and unfortunately those platforms become so entrenched into the organization and and and sort of lock you in that it's a to adjust into it to be adaptable you can't you can't take it out very easily it doesn't even stack up sometimes from a business case so why would we take that technology out we'll just have to dig deeper and we'll just have to spend more right so we're trying to we're trying to re reverse-engineer some of that and the role open source for you guys have been part of new systems recruiting talent everything director what's been a benefit the impact of absolutely it's huge inand you're right I think one of the biggest benefits for us that that really plays out is there is in the talent side right for our people to say not only are we transitioning our organization as a whole and the way we the way we operate but we're really transitioning out people we're transition from kind of the work force that we that we had and they've got us to where we are today but we're now setting ourselves up for the workforce of the future and it is a different skill set it is a different way of approaching problems so you know bringing bring this new technology to the table and allowing people to experiment to learn and to update their skills and capabilities exactly what we what we need for our company so we're pushing that hard yeah that's great it's like a real cultural shift give me maybe transfer transfer over a little bit to the actual tech problem you had right so you multiple countries multiple data warehouses multiple systems yours so what were you looking at and then what was the solution that you kind of figured out and then when yeah when so when I first started the roll a couple of years back we had something like 23 different separate individual data warehouses there were all sort of interconnected and dependent on each other and had copies of each other in each other and it was just it was a little bit of a mess so so the first challenge was to really sort of rationalize and clean up a lot of that so so that's that's what we spent a fair bit of time upfront doing which was basically really acquiring the organization's data from a massive amount of call source systems so in the vicinity of I think we take data from roughly about 150 to 200 call systems and we want to take that data essentially in as close to real time as we possibly can and pump that into her into a and to a new clean unified data Lake right just to make that data all line up so that was the big challenge in the first instance and then the second instance was really a scale problem right so getting the right technology that would help us scale into you know because we've predominately been using our own data centers and keeping a lot of stuff you know in that sort of on-prem mode but we really wanted to be able you know self scale to not only to be able to you know take advantage of cloud infrastructure just to give us that extra computing that extra storage and processing but really also to be able to leverage the the commoditization that's happening in cloud right because you know all all cloud companies around the world commoditizing technology like machine learning and you know artificial intelligence so that it's it's it's available to lots of organizations and the way we see it is really that that we're not going to be able to compete or out engineer those those companies so we need to make it you know accessible and available for our people to be able to use and leverage that innovation on our work as well as is you know do some some smart stuff ourselves are using infrastructures of service OpenStack or what's your solution I mean what are you guys doing solution is yet to use I've been stack is is our first sort of real step into infrastructure-as-a-service so that's really helped us set up like I was showing this morning set up the capability for us to turn our scale in a really cost-efficient way and we've ported a lot of our traditional dedicated you know applications on infrastructure that you know was like appliance based and things like that on to OpenStack now so that we can it gives us a lot more portability and we can move that around and put that in the place where we think gets us the best value so so that's really helped I'm kind of curious you work with Red Hat consulting and was I was I was curious about that process did you was that the result of a kind of a bake-off or we were already Red Hat customers and said oh hey by the way can you give us some advice yeah it really came about I mean we've been working with Red Hat for many years you know and it started back just sort of in the support area of Linux and and rel and using that kind of capability and rit has been there for us for quite a long time now and I think we've sort of done some some Explorer exploratory type exercise with them around you know I've been shifting and The Container well but but what really started the stick was just getting their expertise in from our OpenStack perspective and when you that was a key platform that we really wanted to dive into an enable and so having them there is our partner and helping us provide that extra consulting knowledge and expertise was was what we really needed helped us deliver on that project and we delivered in a mazing ly tight timeframe so it was a fast delivery faster live what about the business impact why people look at OpenStack and some of these new technologies and certainly with the legacy stuff going on you have got all these things everywhere what was the actual business benefits can you highlight like did you get like faster time-to-market was it like a claims issue and what were the key things that you look back and saying well we kicked ass and we did these three things I mean really what it boils down to as faster time-to-market right and just the ability to move quicker so to give you an example the way we used to work is it would take you say probably weeks maybe even longer to to provision and get infrastructure stood up and ready to go for different projects so I meant that there was all this lead time that projects nearly go through before they could start to write code and even start to add value to to customer so we wanted to sort of take that away and and and and that was a that was a big hindrance to to be able to experiment and to be on a play we think so again we want to take that out of the picture in and really free people up to sort of say well the infrastructure is done and it spins up in a matter of seconds now on OpenStack and you can get on with the job of trying something out experimenting and actually delivering and writing code that will that will produce an outcome to launch new applications what was a specific outcome that came from standing up putting that over stack together I see you experimenting result not adding yeah not only in the app spice but more so the biggest the biggest sort of benefit with God is really in the data space where we've now been able to essentially stand up our entire data stack using open source technology and we've never been able to do that before and this is you know this is this is the environment it's allowed us to do that by just allowing for us to do that test and trial and say you know he's kafir you're gonna be the right tool for us is it you know is he gonna we're gonna use Post Chris whatever that is it's allowed us to sort of really do that in a rapid way and then figure that thing out and start to move forward so you know ask our kiss you guys have done a lot of work out there good work so I gotta ask you the question with kubernetes containers now part of the discussion as a real viable way to handle legacy but also new software development projects how do you look at that what it's what's the your your reaction to that as that practitioner yeah you guys excited yeah yeah things in motion what's your what's your color um absolutely it's in fact it's been something that we've kind of had on the radar for quite a while because we've we've we've been working with containers so dock in particular and and and one of the things that you know you come across this just management of containers and just ongoing maintenance of of those kind of things where they start to get a little bit unwieldy a little bit out of control so you know we've been trying to we try to start which started off trying to build our own you know in solution to that is there's a lot of corporates are doing quickly found out less that's it that's a huge engineering challenge so things like kubernetes that have now come along and the investment that's been put in that platform will really open up that avenue for and even seeing just the the new innovation that's been put into our OpenShift here that sort of takes a lot of that management and service you know administration out of the out of the equation few is wonderful for a company like us because at the end of the day we're an insurance company right we're not a we're not a technology engineering company while although we have some capability it's never going to be our our strengths right we're really here to service our customers and and to help them in the times when they need our help you guys are a data company data is critical for any trivet yeah how how is you how we've become more data-driven as a result of all this yeah so so now that we've got our data all in one place and we're able to get their single views of customers we're able to put that data now into the hands of people that can really add value to us so for example into our analytics teams and get them to look for optimization in price or in service claims processing all those kind of good things that that are helping our customers reduce the the time frames that they would normally go through in that part of that experience and I think one of the other things is not only that but also enrich our digital capability right and rich that digital channel so make it more convenient for customers you know where it used to be that customers would come along and it's literally like coming to the organization for the first time every time you know I say fill in that form again from blank you're like we don't know anything about you but now we're able to enrich your form exactly it's very painful I see your name and you know you wanted to show your house tell us all about that house you know what does it made of you know what what type of roof material what's the wall we know all that we've probably seen that house ten times already so why wouldn't we just be able to pre-populate that kind of information and make it more convenient forecasting personalization becomes critical absolutely absolutely I like the way you underscored and told the story just like with cloud you just can't take your broken old IT apps and just throw them up at the cloud you had to you had to do a data exercise and you had to do a consolidation and the cleaning strong and sure that involved open source but you didn't get the tech stack first first you have to picture picture data app and and that was a key part here yeah so that's difficult and that's you know that's one of the things that I think we really we really invested in it was because a lot of the time what we've seen is organizations have sort of attacked the low-hanging fruit like the the the kind of the external the digital data that they might be able to get but not that offline data that's been you know one and and generated by the branch and the call centers and all those kind of areas and we dug in deep and invested in that space and got that right first which really helped us a lot to accelerate and now we're I think we're in a better position we can definitely take advantage of that yeah thanks for sharing your insights here in the cube I gotta ask you a final question as the folks watching that they're looking at you say wow this guy he got down and dirty fixed some things he's gone forward innovative what advice would you give someone watching is pregnant practitioner what have you learned what's the learnings that you've that have been magnified out of this process for you and your view going forward yeah yeah there's a there's a lot of learnings we can share but I think some of the key ones is you know I think there's sometimes a bit of a bit of a sort of attempt to try and solve everything yourself right and and we definitely did that where I try and build it all yourself and do everything right but it's it's a challenge and and use partners and look for look for you know things that are kind of gonna help you accelerate and give you some of the foundational work you don't have to build yourself right you don't have to build everything yourself and I think that acknowledgement is really key so that was one of the big things for us the other thing is you know just just investing early and getting things right upfront life pulling your data and consolidating it into into a single platform even though that takes a lot of time and and it's and it's quite challenging to sort of go back and redo things that's actually a huge investment in a big winter to really help you accelerate at the end that investment upfront does does pay off so congratulations on your Innovation Award thank you Davis is general manager at I I AG insurance Australia group here inside the cube sharing the best practices it's it's a world you got to do the homework upfront open source is the way it's and it's an operating model for innovation the cube bringing you all the action here on day two of coverage stay with us for more live right after this short break

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. (jingle) >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. My name is Lauren Cooney, and I'm here today with Matt Johnson who is a technologist at Cisco, with Cisco DevNet. Hi Matt. >> Hi, how's it going? Good to see you again. >> Pretty good. Good to see you again too. So what's going on here? What's going on with the show and what are you working on? >> Oh, sure. So the show in general is just this ability for us, you know, Cisco DevNet have always had quite a large and a growing presence at Cisco Live, kind of Cisco's, Europe and US yearly conferences. But this is the second year we've done Create, and it's really an opportunity to kind of take the real developer angle, the makers, the API integrators, kind of the real, kind of developer ecosystem that's going around Cisco's products and our APIs, and just kind of focus on that audience. So, you know, all the content here is developer for developer. And so it's just really nice to be able to experiment in a bit more of an open format. >> Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of that DIY environment of developers that are coming in and really doing all this stuff and starting to innovate on their own. >> Yeah, absolutely. And what I'm really excited about here we have the, we had kind of a two-day hackathon running at the same time as the event, and so, instead of that just being a little bit of time spent between sessions, these are teams that have already kind of been working behind the scenes on the run-up to the event, so they've already kind of met each other virtually through collaboration, they've already worked out what kind of problem space they want to solve, they've already started working on kind of sample and PLC code, so the idea that at the end of a two-day conference we could actually see some working solutions to real problems that our partners and our customer ecosystem is seeing, I think that's quite-- >> That's great. >> An exciting idea. >> Yeah, Mandy Whalen was just on with us. >> Oh, fantastic. >> And she actually talked a little bit about that, and you know, so these guys will be up for 24 hours hacking on stuff. Hopefully we'll see some great solutions come the end and you know, we'll talk about it here on theCUBE. >> Yeah. >> So tell me about what you're doing today at Cisco DevNet. >> Sure, so from one style of hacking to another, we are actually running this demo called the Black Hat White Hat Challenge. And I went to, I've always been a bit of a kind of hobbyist pentester. >> Lauren: Never, no. >> I liked breaking things from a young age. And I got to attend my first Defcon in Las Vegas last year, and coming from an evangelism background, coming from kind of doing workshops and talks and demos, I was absolutely amazed at the interactivity of pretty much everything that goes on at the black hat hacking conference, sorry the Defcon hacking conference. My apologies. They have, you know, hands-on IoT villages where you can go and try hacking against all the hardware, there is kind of labs and tutorials for people that are maybe just getting into kind of that side of hacking and penetration testing. So I kind of brought that back and I've always had a passion for security, and IoT nowadays, we are in a situation where a lot of these devices we are starting to bring into our homes and our businesses and things, are built to a budget. They are built cheap, they're not security devices. People aren't thinking of security, they're thinking of functionality when they're building those, so someone that makes fridge freezers isn't going to be thinking about the 10 year security roadmap for that fridge freezer. They're going to be thinking about selling the latest smart freezer. >> Lauren: Exactly. >> And so I wanted to kind of bring some of that hands-on Defcon-style hacking into a real-world scenario. So at security conferences and at developer conferences, we always talk about things being insecure, and we talk about needing to think about security. But what we have is a booth here where we actually take off-the-shelf IoT devices, and in a curated path we are getting attendees with no background in kind of pen testing to use real-world hacking tools and real exploits against those devices, to build their access into that network and eventually get to the goal, which is getting into an electrical safe with like a price inside. And all of that is real off-the-shelf IoT. It's real security. And the aim of that is to kind of-- >> So they are actually cracking the safe. >> They are cracking the safe, they are cracking into Wi-Fi. They're getting onto the guest Wi-Fi and then finding a vulnerability in the router which gets them onto the wired network, so that'd be like a guest network in a corporate environment or a guest network in a hotel, getting you onto the hotel's infrastructure network and then to a camera. >> So this is like straight up hacker one. >> Straight up, yeah, exactly, right? Which is perfect. >> Lauren: This is great. >> Yeah, exactly. So that's what we're doing and the idea is to just to kind of stop talking about it and start showing. This is not stuff you need to be super good at. This is stuff you can Google. The tools are out there, the tools are getting more and more easy to use. And also vulnerabilities are becoming more and more common because of the growth of IoT. There were double the number of CVE, like known vulnerabilities in the wild in 2017 than there were in 2016. >> Okay. >> And that's because of this constant pace of new devices. So we're kind of showing that these are really crackable by anyone with a bit of time and research. And then also showing kind of what can be done about that. And, you know, even without kind of the proactive and firewalls and things like that, just getting a developer audience thinking about this stuff, getting them, you know, fresh in their mind, you know, these are the kind of places we should be focusing on IoT security because it's these developers that will be writing code and those products today-- >> I think that's great. And I think security is so important today with everything going on, and then there's Facebook and testimonies that are happening today, and you know, lots of different things. Now, what are you using to actually kind of fill these holes, fill these kind of security vulnerabilities that you're using with these off-the-shelf IoT devices? >> Sure, so what we are showing is how kind of, if you know if you have these devices on your network, obviously layering things like Cisco's net-gen firewalls in line with those devices, has signatures that will detect. It's not going to patch the device itself, 'cause that might be from another vendor or an IoT camera or a light switch or something, but it's going to detect the malicious traffic trying to attack that device and drop it. So you're kind of protecting your perimeter, you're stopping a vulnerable device becoming an actual hack. Alternatively from a personal perspective, as we start looking at how we consume hardware in our homes and businesses, I actually really like kind of the Meraki model and the Nest Cam model, and you know, all the other camera vendors which charge you with subscription, 'cause if you buy hardware one-off, you have no idea whether that price for that hardware allotted budget for the development team to keep thinking about security or whether that team doesn't exist anymore and they're off building their next product. >> Lauren: Yup. >> Whereas if you're buying something on kind of a subscription basis, even though the hardware is in your home, you know that their profit is based on them keeping your product up-to-date. >> Lauren: Definitely. >> So you expect, you know, real-time updates, you expect timely security updates. And so I think that kind of a software as a service style delivery of on-prem hardware is definitely a more secure approach. >> Yeah, and the Meraki model is definitely moving forward as one of the prevalent models that we, you know, Cisco has. >> Exactly. Yeah. >> And it's, you know, that plug and play, easy-to-use, get it up and running, et cetera. >> Exactly, and then on the back of that you know that there's people working on those security things, which isn't something that you think about when you buy it for its APIs and its plug-and-play in its ease-of-use, but just knowing that that is there and, you know, you're paying for that development, is a good thing. >> Where do you see most of these vulnerabilities, and I know you have a lot of background in cloud computing and you know, in these arenas, but where do you see most of these vulnerabilities? >> Matt: So-- >> It's a big question. >> Yeah. I mean a lot of the, hackers are going to wherever, you know, is easiest for the amount of time and effort. Certainly when we see kind of malicious actors kind of looking for a large footprints, large, building botnets et cetera. There could be a very, very clever attack that requires a lot of time and effort, or there could be an IoT device that you know there's going to be 4 million of them sold online, they're going to go for those. And like I said, these devices are low-power, built to a budget. You can get them into your hands and like SaaS service online. So people can take them apart, they can have a look at the code inside of them. They can have a look at the operating system. So it's quite easy to find vulnerabilities on these IOT devices. >> Lauren: Oh yeah. >> So that is definitely a growing area. Also the level for harm on those kind of vulnerabilities, if we are talking about Internet-connected healthcare, Internet-connected hospital equipment, you know, control valves for factories that may or may not be dealing with certain kind of materials. That is definitely a focus both from a security industry perspective, and also kind of where we are seeing hackers targeting. >> That's great. So tell me a little bit about what else you're working on right now. I think, I always find it interesting to hear from you what you're kind of hacking with and-- >> Yeah, sure. So that's my, that's my kind of security hobby-cum-part time role I guess within DevNet. >> Lauren: Love it. >> I quite like that kind of hands-on security evangelism. A lot of other stuff I'm doing is all around kind of open source and micro services and containers. So we're doing lots of work internally with Kubernetes Right now. Proof of concepting, some new user space networking code. >> Lauren: Oh great. >> Which would allow basically the network your traffic takes from your application in the container, write out to the network card, to be a user space app. So, you know, you're not stuck with the networking that a cloud provider gives you. If you want to test your application fully like packet to app back to the wire, and know that that network is also going to go with you when you deploy anywhere, we're going to be able to do that. >> That's fabulous. >> And there's also some real performance benefits to kind of not going in and out of the Linux kernel, so we can kind of saturate 40 gigabits a second from a container, straight down to the wire on kind of commodity compute like UCS what like any x86 service. So really excited about that. It's in development at the moment. That's all open source. >> Lauren: It will be all open source. >> It's all open source already under the FD.io project, FD dot io. >> Oh. >> The integration into Kubernetes is ongoing. And obviously will be open sourced as it gets developed. But that's super exciting. Also just the whole Merakifi, Merakification if I can say that. This idea of turning on-prem devices into kind of black box, you know, cloud managed, cloud updated. You have an IT team. They're just remote and kind of paid for in a SaaS model rather than having to manage and patch those devices on-prem. >> Lauren: Oh yeah. >> You know, we currently do that with switches and routers and cameras as I'm sure you know that the Meraki product portfolio, I don't see why we don't do that with on-prem compute. Why don't we do that with on-prem, you know, Kubernetes clusters. Why should a Kubernetes cluster, just because it sat in your data center, be any different in terms of usability, billing, management, than the one you get from Google Cloud platform or Azure or AWS? It should have the same user experience. So across those two areas, yeah, that's where I'm spending most of my time at the moment. >> Great, well, we're kind of wrapping up here. Tell me, what is the most exciting thing for you that's coming down the path in the next six months or so? >> Um. >> Can you tell us? >> I cannot tell you the most exciting thing, I'm afraid. It has to do with everything I'm talking about, kind of the networking, the as a service, super excited about user space networking. We have customers that looking to do kind of real-time video pipelines for a broadcast in containers. And being able to do that on-prem or in cloud or wherever, and this FD.io VPP technology, I think will really unlock that. >> Lauren: That's great. >> So real use cases, and yeah, super excited. >> Great. Matt, thank you so much for coming on today. >> It's been pleasure. >> Yeah, my pleasure as well. This is Lauren Clooney and we'll be right back from the show here at Cisco DevNet Create. (jingle)

(digital music) >> Welcome, everyone. Donald Klein here with CUBE Conversations, coming to you from our studios at theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. And today I'm fortunate enough to be joined by Paul Makowski, CTO of PolySwarm. PolySwarm is a fascinating company that plays in the security space, but is also part of this emerging block chain and token economy. Welcome, Paul. >> Thank you, thank you for having me. >> Great, so why don't we just start and give everybody an understanding of what PolySwarm does and how you guys do it? >> Sure, so PolySwarm is a new effort (audio fading in and out) to try to fix the economics around how threat (missing audio) >> Donald: Okay. >> So, we see a lot of shortcomings with (audio fading in and out) I think it's more of a economic concern rather than (missing audio) (laughs) Rather than a concern regarding (missing audio) >> Donald: Okay. >> So, what PolySwarm is (missing audio) and change how (missing audio) >> Okay. >> So, it is a blockchain project (missing audio) will govern tomorrow's threat-intelligence base and perhaps, ideally, generate better incentives (missing audio) >> Okay, so, generally if I'm understanding right, you're playing in this threat-intelligence area, which is commonly know as bug-bounties. Correct, yeah? But you guys have kind of taken this in a new direction. Why don't you just explain to me kind of where this threat-intelligence distributed economy has been and where where you see it going in the future. >> Sure, so bug bounties are, we had spoke earlier about HackerOne, for example. Bug bounties are an effort to identify vulnerabilities, and open vulnerability reports to arbitrary people across the internet. And incentivize people to secure products on behalf of the product owner. >> So, I can be an independent developer, and I find a vulnerability in something, and I submit it to one of these platforms, and then I get paid or rewarded for this. >> Yeah, and so the likes of HackerOne is a player in the space that conducts these bug bounties on behalf of other enterprises. >> Donald: Got it. >> Large enterprises such as Google and Microsoft and Apple, even, run their own bug bounties directly. >> Donald: Interesting. >> But, there's also these centralized middle men, the likes of HackerOne. Now, PolySwarm is a little bit different. We've discussed perhaps distributing the bug bounty space, but what we're focusing on right now at PolySwarm 1.0 is really just determining whether or not files, URLs, network graphics are either malicious or benign. >> Donald: Interesting. >> There's this boolean determination to start with, and then we're going to expand from there to metadata concerning, perhaps, the malware family of an identified malicious file. And then from there we'd also like to get into the bug bounty space. >> Okay. >> So, by PolySwarm being a fully decentralized market, us, as Swarm Technologies, will not be the middle man. We will not be in the middle of these transactions. We think that is going to make everything a bit more efficient for all the players on the market. And will best offer precision reward to be both accurate and timely in threat-intelligence. >> Interesting, okay, alright so I want to talk to you just a little bit more, because not everybody out there may be fully familiar with how a kind of decentralized app works. Talk to us a little bit about how blockchain fits in, how smart contracts fit in, and maybe just a little about, like, if I were to work on the PolySwarm platform, would I set up my own smart contract? Would somebody set it up for me? How would that work? >> Great question. So, in general, we see smart contracts as a new way to literally program a market. And I think this concept is applicable to a lot of different spaces. My background and the PolySwarm team background is in information (missing audio). >> Donald: Okay. >> So, we're applying smart contracts and market design specifically to a problem area that we are experts in. >> Okay, and what kind of smart contracts are these? What platform are you running on? >> We're running on Ethereum. We had previously discussed possibly expanding to Bezos, although there are perhaps some reasons not to do that anymore right now. But yeah, on Ethereum, we've been publishing our proof of concept code for our smart contracts right now which is available on github.com/polyswarm. More directly to your question concerning developing applications that plug into our platform or plug in to any platform, we've also released a opensource framework called Perigord. Which is a framework for developing Ethereum distributed applications using Go, which is a language developed by Google. So, I hope that answers a little bit, but >> So, you're really pioneering this whole world of moving to a decentralized, distributed app framework. >> Yeah, so, we're not the first people in this space, but we are expanding the ease of development to the Go language space, away from strictly programming in JavaScript. A lot distributed applications today are programmed in JavaScript. And there's pros and cons to each language, but we're hoping to get the Go language engaged a little more. >> So, let's go back now around to the people that are going to be participating in this marketplace, right. You were talking about unlocking the economic potential that's latent out there. Talk a little bit more about that. >> Exactly, so we had a spoken a little bit ago about HackerOne, and one of the things that I think is really cool about HackerOne is the fact that it's offered globally. What makes that really cool is that HackerOne gets a lot of great submissions from people in locales that may not indigenously offer sufficient jobs for the amount of talent that the local economies are producing. So, that's a sort of latent talent. HackerOne is particularly popular in India, China, Eastern European countries, we'd like to also direct that talent toward solving the threatened intelligence problem, namely accurately and timely identifying threats in files or graphic files. So, we'd like to-- We are operating in a eight and a half billion dollar per year space, the antivirus space, and we'd like to unlock this latent talent to broaden what threats are detected and how effectively enterprises defend themselves through a crowdsourced contributed manner that will cover more of the threats. >> Interesting, and so why don't you just talk a little about URLs and why those are important. We've seen a lot of hacks in the news recently, people going to sign up for a token sale and then being rerouted to the wrong place, et cetera. So, talk about malicious URLs. I think that might be an interest for people. >> Sure, everyone is trying to determine what URLs are malicious. Google has built into Chrome their safe browsing program that's also present in Firefox, Microsoft in some equivalent. Everyone's trying to determine and prevent people from being phished. You mentioned there were a few ICOs in this space that unfortunately had their websites hacked and their Ethereum contribution address changed, the hackers made off with some money. What PolySwarm does at a base level is it creates a market for security experts, again, around the world, to effectively put their money where their mouth is and say I think to the tune of 10 Nectar, for example, Nectar is the name of the PolySwarm note, that this URL or this file is malicious or benign. And those funds are escrowed directly into the smart contracts that constitute PolySwarm. And at a later time, the security experts who are right, receive the escrowed rewards from the security experts who were wrong. So, it's this feedback loop. >> It sounds like participants are kind of betting on both sides of whether something's malicious or not? >> Yeah, in effect. Legally, I definitely wouldn't say betting. (laughs) But it's >> Donald: Fair enough. >> The correct answer is there, right? The way that PolySwarm works is and enterprise has a suspect file or URL and decides to swarm it and what they do on the backend for that is they can either directly post this file or URL to the network, the network being the Ethereum blockchain. Everyone that's watching it and is cognizant of PolySwarm will be aware that there's a suspect file that perhaps I want to decide whether or not it's malicious as a security expert. Again, around the world, security experts will make that decision. If this is a particular file that I think I have insight into, as a security expert, then I might put up a certain amount of Nectar because I believe it is one way or the other. The reason why I say it's more of a-- The correct answer is in the file, right? It is in fact either malicious or benign. But what PolySwarm's economic reward is both timeliness and accuracy in determining that mal intent, whether or not that file is (missing audio). >> Interesting. And so the use of the smart contract is pretty novel here, right? Because the smart contracts then execute and distribute the bounties directly to the participants based on answer, is that right? >> That's correct. And that's the real key part. That eliminates the middle man in this space. A lot of the talk around blockchain in general is about restlessness, about not having middle men. In PolySwarm the core smart contract, again which are on github.com/polyswarm, they are able to actually hold escrowed upon. Though we're not in the middle and those escrowed funds are release to people who effectively get it right through the cost of people who got it wrong. So, we think >> And this is all automated through the system? >> This is all automated through the system. If I could take a step back real quick here, some of the shortcomings we're trying to address in today's market are if you imagine a Venn diagram, there's a rectangle that has all of the different threats in this space and you have large circles that cover portions of the Venn diagram and those large circles are today's large antivirus companies. Those circles overlap substantially. And the reason for that is pretty straight forward. Did you hear about perhaps WannaCry? It was a ransomware-- >> Absolutely, absolutely. >> If you're an antivirus company and you're not cognizant, you're not detecting WannaCry, then it's real easy to write you off. But the difficulty there is on the backend what that incentivizes is a lot of security companies doing duplicated work trying to detect the same threat. So there's a little bit of a clumpiness, there's a little bit of overlap, in what they detect and further it's very difficult although we've been speaking with people at those companies. They're always interested in the latest threat and uniquely detecting things, but it's sometimes very difficult to make Dell's argument that hey I detect this esoteric family of power >> Donald: Malicious URL, or et cetera. >> Exactly and by the way you're also going to get hit with it. That's a very difficult argument. >> So, you're sort of addressing the under served areas, then, within security. >> Precisely, so the way that PolySwarm will look in that Venn diagram, is instead of large, mostly overlapping ovals, we'll have thousands of micro-engines written by security experts that each find their specialty. And that together this crowdsourced intelligence will cover more. >> Interesting, very good, very good, okay. So, just last question here. Talk around a little bit of the background. How did PolySwarm come together? I know you talked about Narf Industries, et cetera. Why don't you just give us a little of the background here? 'Cause it's impressive. >> Sure, so again my background, and the entire PolySwarm technical team's background, is information security. We also run and work for a computer security consultancy called Narf Industries. Our more public work has been for DARPA, as of late. There was a large competition that DARPA ran called the "Cyber Grand Challenge" that was the-- they were trying to create the autonomous equivalent of a human capture the flag competition, which is a hacking competition. Anyway, we helped develop the challenges for that program and otherwise helped in that phase. So that's a public-facing project. >> And you won part of that competition, is that correct? >> Yeah, so we weren't competing in DARPA's Cyber Grand Challenge, but in the human capture the flags, we have won those. All the members of the core PolySwarm, and also Narf Industries, technical team have won DEF CON's capture the flag competition at least once. And some of us have helped run that competition. That's considered the world series of hacking (laughs). So, that's our background, and we're also all we've all previously worked directly for the U.S. government, so we're very much embedded in the cutting edge of cyber security. And, finally, the last thing I'll say, is Narf was recently awarded a contract with the Department of Homeland Security for investigating how to build confidentiality controls into a blockchain environment. The Department of Homeland Security was concerned about identity management. They wanted to apply a blockchain phase. But part of that, is obviously, you want to protect people's private information. So, how do you do that phase that, by default, is purely public. >> Got it, okay look we're going to have to end there, but let me just say, we would be remiss without mentioning the fact that your ICO's starting. When's that going to happen? >> So, we have an ICO that's going to go live February 6. Right now, we're just trying to generate buzz, talking to great people like yourself. After that lead up to the ICO, we'd like to encourage people to check out our website at polyswarm.io, we have a Telegram group that's growing everyday. And, again, a large part of what we would be funded by this ICO to accomplish is building the community around using PolySwarm. Fortunately, again, this is our space. So, we know a lot of people in this space, but we're always happy to be meeting people, so we'd love for all your viewers to join the conversation and engage with us. Our DMs on Twitter are open, et cetera. >> Okay, we hope they do. Probably just want to make one final point is that you guys are actually publishing all your code on GitHub ahead of the ICO, right? That kind of makes you unique in a very difficult space. >> It, unfortunately, does make us unique. I wish more projects did do that. But, yes, we are publishing our code in advance of the token sale. PolySwarm, if you're familiar with the conversation between securities and utility tokens, PolySwarm is very much a utility token. People will grade Nectar, which is the name of our Token, for threat intelligence. And part of that is we want to have a usable ecosystem on day one when people buy tokens. We want to make sure that you're not investing in some future thing. Obviously we're going to improve on it, but it will be usable from day one (missing audio). >> Alright, fantastic, so thank you, Paul. I appreciate you coming in. Alright, well thanks, everyone. Thank you for watching. This is Donald Klein with CUBE Conversations coming to you from Palo Alto, California. Thank you for watching. (digital music)