>>Okay, >>listen, we're gearing up for the start of the snowflake Data Cloud Summit, and we wanna go back to the early roots of Snowflake. We've got some of the founding engineers here. Abdul Monir, Ashish Motive, Allah and Alison Lee There three individuals that were at snowflake in the early years and participated in many of the technical decisions that led to the platform and is making snowflake famous today. Folks, great to see you. Thanks so much for taking some time out of your busy schedules. Hey, it's gotta be really gratifying. Thio, See this platform that you've built, you know, taking off and changing businesses. So I'm sure it was always smooth sailing. Right? There were. There were no debates. Wherever. >>I've never seen an engineer get into the bed. >>Alright, So seriously so take us back to the early days. You guys, you know, choose whoever wants to start. But what was it like early on? We're talking 2013 here, right? >>When I think back to the early days of Snowflake, I just think of all of us sitting in one room at the time. You know, we just had an office that was one room with, you know, 12 or 13 engineers sitting there clacking away on our keyboards, uh, working really hard, turning out code, uh, punctuated by you know, somebody asking a question about Hey, what should we do about this, or what should we do about that? And then everyone kind of looking up from their keyboards and getting into discussions and debates about the work that we're doing. >>So so Abdul it was just kind of heads down headphones on, just coating or e think there was >>a lot of talking and followed by a lot of typing. Andi, I think there were periods of time where where you know, anyone could just walk in into the office and probably out of the office and all the here is probably people, uh, typing away at their keyboards. And one of my member vivid, most vivid memories is actually I used to sit right across from Alison, and there's these huge to two huge monitor monitors between us and I would just here typing away in our keyboard, and sometimes I was thinking and and and, uh and all that type and got me nervous because it seemed like Alison knew exactly what what, what she needed to do, and I was just still thinking about it. >>So she she was just like bliss for for you as a developer engineer was it was a stressful time. What was the mood? So when you don't have >>a whole lot of customers, there's a lot of bliss. But at the same time, there was a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we build the product. There was a time line ahead of us. We knew we had to build this in a certain time frame. Um, so one thing I'll add to what Alison and Abdulle said is we did a lot of white boarding as well. There are a lot of discussions, and those discussions were a lot of fun. They actually cemented what we wanted to build. They made sure everyone was in tune, and and there we have it. >>Yes, so I mean, it is a really exciting time doing any start up. But when you know when you have to make decisions and development, invariably you come to a fork in the road. So I'm curious as to what some of those forks might have been. How you guys decided You know which fork to take. Was there a Yoda in the room that served as the Jedi master? I mean, how are those decisions made? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I think one of a Zai think back. One of the memories that that sticks out in my mind is is this, uh, epic meeting and one of our conference rooms called Northstar. Many of our conference rooms are named after ski resorts because the founders, they're really into skiing. And that's why that's where the snowflake name comes from. So there was this epic meeting and I'm not even sure exactly what topic we were discussing. I think it was It was the sign up flow and and there were a few different options on the table and and and one of the options that that people were gravitating Teoh, one of the founders, didn't like it and and on, and they said a few times that there's this makes no sense. There's no other system in the world that does it this way, and and I think one of the other founders said, uh, that's exactly why we should do it this way. And or at least seriously, consider this option. So I think there was always this, um, this this, uh, this tendency and and and this impulse that that we needed to think big and think differently and and not see the world the way it is but the way we wanted it to be and then work our way backwards and try to make it happen. >>Alison, Any fork in the road moments that you remember. >>Well, I'm just thinking back to a really early meeting with sheesh! And and a few of our founders where we're debating something probably not super exciting to a lot of people outside of hardcore database people, which was how to represent our our column metadata. Andi, I think it's funny that you that you mentioned Yoda because we often make jokes about one of our founders. Teary Bond refer to him as Yoda because he hasn't its tendency to say very concise things that kind of make you scratch your head and say, Wow, why didn't I think of that? Or you know, what exactly does that mean? I never thought about it that way. So I think when I think of the Yoda in the room, it was definitely Terry, >>uh, excuse you. Anything you can add to this, this conversation >>I'll agree with Alison on the you're a comment for short. Another big fork in the road, I recall, was when we changed. What are meta store where we store our own internal metadata? We used >>to use >>a tool called my sequel and we changed it. Thio another database called Foundation TV. I think that was a big game changer for us. And, you know, it was a tough decision. It took us a long time. For the longest time, we even had our own little branch. It was called Foundation DB, and everybody was developing on that branch. It's a little embarrassing, but, you know, those are the kind of decisions that have altered altered the shape of snowflake. >>Yeah. I mean, these air, really, you know, down in the weeds, hardcore stuff that a lot of people that might not be exposed to What would you say was the least obvious technical decision that you had to make it the time. And I wanna ask you about the most obvious to. But what was the what was the one that was so out of the box? I mean, you kind of maybe mentioned it a little bit before, but what if we could double click on that? >>Well, I think one of the core decisions in our architectures the separation of compute and storage on Do you know that is really court architecture. And there's so many features that we have today, um, for instance, data sharing zero copy cloning that that we couldn't have without that architecture. Er, um and I think it was both not obvious. And when we told people about it in the early days, there was definitely skepticism about being able to make that work on being able Thio have that architecture and still get great performance. >>Anything? Yeah, anything that was, like, clearly obvious, that is, Maybe that maybe that was the least and the most that that separation from computing story because it allowed you toe actually take advantage of cloud native. But But was there an obvious one that, you know, it's sort of dogma that you, you know, philosophically lived behind. You know, to this day, >>I think one really obvious thing, um is the sort of no tuning, no knobs, ease of use story behind snowflake. Andi and I say it's really obvious because everybody wants their system to be easy to use. But then I would say there are tons of decisions behind that, that it's not always obvious three implications of of such a choice, right, and really sticking to that. And I think that that's really like a core principle behind Snowflake that that led to a lot of non obvious decisions as a result of sticking to that principle. So, yeah, I >>think to add to that now, now you've gotten us thinking I think another really interesting one was was really, um, should we start from scratch or or should we use something that already exists and and build on top of that? And I think that was one of these, um, almost philosophical kind of stances that we took that that a lot of the systems that were out there were the way they were because because they weren't built for the for the platforms that they were running on, and the big thing that we were targeting was the cloud. And so one of the big stances we took was that we were gonna build it from scratch, and we weren't gonna borrow a single line of code from many other database out there. And this was something that really shocked a lot of people and and many times that this was pretty crazy and it waas. But this is how you build great products. >>That's awesome. All right. She should give you the last word. We got, like, just like 30 seconds left to bring us home >>Your till date. Actually, one of those said shocks people when you talk to them and they say, Wow, you're not You're not really using any other database and you build this entirely yourself. The number of people who actually can build a database from scratch are fairly limited. The group is fairly small, and so it was really a humongous task. And as you mentioned, you know, it really changed the direction off how we design the database. What we what does the database really mean? Tow us right the way Snowflake has built a database. It's really a number of organs that come together and form the body and That's also a concept that's novel to the database industry. >>Guys, congratulations. You must be so proud. And, uh, there's gonna be awesome watching the next next decade, so thank you so much for sharing your stories. >>Thanks, dude. >>Thank you.

>> Okay, listen, we're gearing up for the start of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit and we want to go back to the early roots of Snowflake. We got some of the founding engineers here, Abdul Muneer, Ashish Modivala, and Alison Lee. They're three individuals that were at Snowflake in the early years and participated in many of the technical decisions that led to the platform that is making Snowflake famous today. Folks, great to see you. Thanks so much for taking some time out of your busy schedules. >> Than you for having us. >> Same. >> Hey, it's got to be really gratifying to see this platform that you've built, you know, taking off and changing businesses. So, I'm sure it was always smooth sailing, right? There were no debates, were there ever? >> Never. >> Now, I've never seen an engineer get into a debate. (laughter) >> All right, so seriously though, so take us back to the early days, you guys, you know, choose whoever wants to start but, what was it like early on? We're talking 2013 here, right? >> That's right. >> When I think back to the early days of Snowflake, I just think of all of us sitting in one room at the time you know, we just had an office that was one room with you know, 12 or 13 engineers sitting there, clacking away at our keyboards, working really hard, churning out code, punctuated by, you know, somebody asking a question about, "Hey, what should we do about this? Or what should we do about that?" And then everyone kind of looking up from their keyboards and getting into discussions and debates about, about the work that we were doing. >> So Abdul, it was just kind of heads down, headphones on, just coding, or >> I think there was a lot of talking and followed by a lot of typing. And, and I think there were periods of time where, you know, anyone could just walk in into the office and probably out of the office and all they'd hear is probably people typing away at their keyboards. And one of my vivid, most vivid memories is is actually I used to sit right across from Alison and there's these huge two, two huge monitors monitors between us. And I would just hear her typing away at our keyboard. And sometimes I was thinking and and all that typing got me nervous because it seemed like Alison knew exactly what, what she needed to do, and I was just still thinking about it. >> So Ashish was this like bliss for you as a developer, an engineer, or was it, was it a stressful time? What was the mood? >> When you don't have a whole lot of customers there's a lot of bliss, but at the same time, there's a lot of pressure on us to make sure that we build the product. There was a timeline ahead of us, we knew we had to build this in a certain timeframe. So one thing I'll add to what Alison and Abdul said is we did a lot of white boarding as well. There were a lot of discussions and those discussions were a lot of fun. They actually cemented what we wanted to build. They made sure that everyone was in tune and there we have it. >> (Dave) Yeah, so, I mean, it is a really exciting time doing any startup. When you have to make decisions in development and variably you come to a fork in the road. So I'm curious as to what some of those forks might've been, how you guys decided, you know, which fork to take. Was there a Yoda in the room that served as the Jedi master? I mean, how are those decisions made? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah. That's an interesting question. And I think one of, as I think back, one of the memories that, that sticks out in my mind is this epic meeting in one of our conference rooms called North star. And many of our conference rooms are named after ski resorts because the founders are really into skiing and that's why, that's where the Snowflake names comes from. So there was this epic meeting and and I'm not even sure exactly what topic we were discussing. I think it was, it was the signup flow and there were a few different options on the table. and one of the options that, that people were gravitating to one of the founders didn't like it. And they said a few times that there's this makes no sense, there's no other system in the world that does it this way. And I think one of the other founders said that's exactly why we should do it this way. And, or at least seriously considered this option. So I think there was always this this tendency and this impulse that that we needed to think big and think differently and not see the world the way it is but the, the way we wanted it to be and then work our way backwards and try to make it happen. >> Alison, any fork in the road moments that you remember? >> Well, I'm just thinking back to a really early meeting with Ashish and a few of our founders where we were debating something, probably not super exciting to a lot of people outside of hardcore database people which was how to represent our column metadata. And I think it's funny that you, that you mentioned Yoda because we often make jokes about one of our founders Terry and referred to him as Yoda, because he has this tendency to say very concise things that kind of make you scratch your head and say, "Wow why didn't I think of that?" Or, you know, what exactly does that mean? I never thought about it that way. So I think when I think of the Yoda in the room, it was definitely Terry. >> Ashish, anything you can add to this conversation? >> I'll agree with Alison on the Yoda comment, for sure. Another big fork in the road I recall was when we changed one of our meta store where we store our on internal metadata. We used to use a tool called MySQL and we changed it to another database called FoundationDB, I think that was a big game changer for us. And, you know, it was a tough decision, it took us a long time. For the longest time we even had our own little branch it was called FoundationDB and everybody who was developing on that branch. It's a little embarrassing, but, you know, those are the kinds of decisions that alter the shape of Snowflake. >> Yeah, I mean, these are really, you know, down in the weeds hardcore stuff that a lot of people might not be exposed to. What would you say was the least obvious technical decision that you had to make at the time? And I want to ask you about the most obvious too, but what was the one that was so out of the box? I mean, you kind of maybe mentioned it a little bit before but I wonder if we could double click on that? >> Well, I think one of the core decisions in our architecture is the separation of compute and storage. And, you know, that is really core to our architecture, and there are so many features that we have today for instance, data sharing, zero copy cloning, that we couldn't have without that architecture. And I think it was both not obvious, and when we told people about it in the early days there was definitely skepticism about being able to make that work and being able to have that architecture and still get great performance. >> Exactly. >> Yeah. Anything that was like clearly obvious that maybe that, maybe that was the least and the most that, that separation from compute and store, because it allowed you to actually take advantage of Cloud native. But was there an obvious one that you know, is it sort of dogma that you, you know philosophically live by, you know, to this day? >> I think one really obvious thing is the sort of no tuning, no knobs, ease of use story behind Snowflake. And I say, it's really obvious because everybody wants their system to be easy to use. But then I would say there were tons of decisions behind that, that it's not always obvious, the implications, of such a choice, right? And really sticking to that. And I think that that's really like a core principle behind Snowflake, that led to a lot of non-obvious decisions as a result of sticking to that principle. >> So >> I think, to add to that, now you've grabbed us thinking. I think another really interesting one was really, should we start from scratch or should we use something that already exists and build on top of that? And I think that was one of these almost philosophical kind of stances that we took, that a lot of the systems that were out there were the way they were, because, because they weren't built for the, for the platforms that they were running on. And the big thing that we were targeting was the Cloud. And so one of the big stances we took was that we were going to build from scratch. And we weren't going to borrow a single line of code from many other database out there. And this was something that really shocked a lot of people and many times that this was pretty crazy, and it was, but this is how you build great products. >> That's awesome. All right Ashish, I should give you the last word. We got like just like 30 seconds left, bring us home. >> Till date, actually one of those said shocks people when you talk to them and they say, "Wow, you are naturally using any other database, and you build this entirely yourself." The number of people who actually can build a database from scratch are fairly limited, the group is fairly small. And so it was really a humongous task, and as you've mentioned, you know, it really changed the direction of how we designed a database. What we, what does the database really mean to us, right? The way Snowflake has built a database, it's really a number of organs that come together and form the body. And that's also a concept that's novel to the database industry. >> Guys, congratulations, you must be so proud and it's going to be awesome watching the next decade. So thank you so much for sharing your stories. >> Thanks too. >> Thank you. >> Thank you.

>> Hello everyone, we're here at the Data Cloud Summit, and we have a real treat for you. I call it the CMO Power Panel. And we're going to explore how data is transforming marketing, branding and promotion. And with me are three phenomenal marketing pros and chief marketing officers. Denise Persson is the CMO of Snowflake, Scott Holden of ThoughtSpot and Laura Langdon of Wipro. Folks, great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." >> Great to be here with you David. >> Awesome, Denise, let's start with you. I want to talk about the role and the changing role of the CMOs, has changed a lot, you know, I suppose of course with all this data, but I wonder what you're experiencing and can you share with us why marketing especially is being impacted by data. >> Well data's really what has helped turn us marketers into revenue drivers, into call centers. And it's clearly a much better place to be. What I'm personally most excited about is the real time access we have to data today. In the past, I used to get a stale report a few weeks after a marketing program was over and at that time we couldn't make any changes to the investments we'd already made. Today, we get data in the midst of running a program. So it can reallocate investments at the time a program is up and running and that's really profound. Today as well, I would say that adaptability has truly become the true superpowers of marketing today and data is really what enables us to adapt to scale. We can adapt to customer's behavior and preferences at scale and that's truly a profound new way of working as well. >> That's interesting what you say cause you know, in tough times used to be okay, sales and engineering, put a brick wall around those and you know, you name it marketing, say, "Okay, cut." But now it's like, you go to marketing and say, "Okay, what's the data say, "how do we have to pivot?" And Scott, I wonder what have data and cloud really brought to the modern marketer that you might not have had before through to this modern era? >> Well, this era, I don't think there's ever been a better time to be a marketer than there is right now. And the primary reason is that we have access to data and insights like we've never had before and I'm not exaggerating when I say that I have a hundred times more access to data than I had a decade ago. It's just phenomenal. When you look at the power of cloud, search, AI, these new consumer experiences for analytics, we can do things in seconds that used to take days. And so it's become in us, as Denise said a super power for us to have access to so much data. And it's, you know, COVID has been hard. A lot of our marketing teams who never worked harder making this pivot from the physical world to the virtual world but they're, you know, at least we're working. And the other part of it is that digital has just created this phenomenal opportunity for us because the beauty of digital and digital transformation is that everything now is trackable, which makes it measurable and means that we can actually get insights that we can act on in a smarter way. And you know, it's worth giving an example. If you just look at this show, right? Like this event that we're viewing. In a physical world, all of you watching at home you'd be in front of us in a room and we'd be able to know if you're in the room, right? We'd track to the scanners when you walked in but that's basically it. At that point, we don't really get a good sense for how much you like, what we're saying. You know, maybe you filled out a survey, but only five to 10% of people ever do that. In a digital world, we know how long you stick around. And as a result, like it's easy, people can just with a click, you know, change the channel. And so the bar for content has gone way up as we do these events but we know how long people are sticking around. And that's, what's so special about it. You know, Denise and her team, as the host of this show they're going to know how long people watch this segment. And that knowing is powerful. I mean, it's simple as you know, using a product like ThoughtSpot, you could just ask a question, you know, how many, you know, what's the average view time by session and Bloomer chart pops up. You're going to know what's working and what's not. And that's something that you can take and act on in the future. And that's what our customers are doing. So, you know, Snowflake and ThoughtSpot, we share our customer with Hulu and they're tracking programs. So, what people are watching at home, how long they're watching, what they're watching next. And they're able to do that in a super granular way and improve their content as a result. And that's the power of this new world we live in that's made the cloud and data so accessible to folks like us. >> Well, thank you for that. And I want to come back to that notion and understand how you're bringing data into your marketing ops, but I want to bring Laura in. Laura, Wipro, you guys partner with a lot of brands, a lot of companies around the world. I mean, thousands of partners, obviously Snowflake in ThoughtSpot or two. How are you using data to optimize these co-marketing relationships? You know, specifically, what what are the trends that you're seeing around things like customer experience? >> So, you know, we use data for all of our marketing decisions, our own, as well as with our partners. And I think what's really been interesting about partner marketing data is we can feed that back to our sales team, right? So, it's very directional for them as well and their efforts moving forward. So, I think that's a place where specifically to partners, it's really powerful. We can also use our collected data to go out to customers to better effect. And then you know, regarding these trends, we just did a survey on the state of the intelligent enterprise. We interviewed 300 companies, US and UK, and there were three interesting I thought statistics relevant to this. Only 22% of the companies that we interviewed felt that their marketing was where it needed to be from an automation standpoint. So lots of room for us to grow, right? Lots of space for us to play. And 61% of them believe that it was critical that they implement this technology to become a more intelligent enterprise. But when they ranked on readiness by function, marketing came in six, right? So HR, RND, finance were all ahead of marketing followed by sales. You know, and then the final data point that I think was interesting was 40% of those agreed that the technology was the most important thing, that thought leadership was critical. You know, and I think that's where marketers really can bring our tried and true experience to bear and merge it with this technology. >> Great, thank you. So, Denise, I've been getting the Kool-Aid injection this week around Data Cloud. I've been pushing people but now that I have the CMO in front of me, I want to ask about the Data Cloud and what it means specifically for the customers and what are some of the learnings maybe that you've experienced that can support some of the things that that Laura and Scott were just discussing. >> Yeah, as Scott said before, idea of a hundred times more data than he ever has before. And that's again, if you look at all the companies we talked to around the world it's not about the amount of data that they have that is the problem, it's the ability to access that data. That data for most companies is trapped across silos, across the organization. It sits in data applications, systems or records. Some of that data sits with your partners that you want to access. And that's really what the data cloud comes in. Data cloud is really mobilizing that data for you. It brings all that data together for you in one place. So you can finally access that data and really provide ubiquitous access to that data to everyone in your organization that needs it and can truly unlock the value of that data. And from a marketing perspective, I mean, we are responsible for the customer experience you know, we provide to our customers and if you have access to all the data on your customers, that's when you have that to customer 360, that we've all been talking about for so many years. And if you have all that data, you can truly, you know, look at their, you know, buying behaviors, put all those dots together and create those exceptional customer experiences. You can do things such as the retailers do in terms of personal decision, for instance, right? And those are the types of experiences, you know, our customers are expecting today. They are expecting a 100% personalized experience for them you know, all the time. And if you don't have all the data, you can't really put those experiences together at scale. And that is really where the data cloud comes in. Again, the data cloud is not only about mobilizing your own data within your enterprise. It's also about having access to data from your partners or extending access to your own data in a secure way to your partners within your ecosystems. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned a couple of things. I've been writing about this a lot and in particularly the 360 that we were dying for, but haven't really been able to tap. I didn't call it the data cloud, I don't have a marketing gene. I had another sort of boring name for it, but I think there's similar vectors there. So I appreciate that. Scott, I want to come back to this notion of building data DNA in your marketing, you know, fluency and how you put data at the core of your marketing ops. I've been working with a lot of folks in banking and manufacturing and other industries that are that are struggling to do this. How are you doing it? What are some of the challenges that you can share and maybe some advice for your peers out there? >> Yeah, sure, you brought up this concept of data fluency and it's an important one. And there's been a lot of talk in the industry about data literacy and being able to read data. But I think it's more important to be able to speak data, to be fluent and as marketers, we're all storytellers. And when you combine data with storytelling, magic happens. And so, getting a data fluency is a great goal for us to have for all of the people in our companies. And to get to that end, I think one of the things that's happening is that people are hiring wrong and they're thinking about it, they're making some mistakes. And so a couple of things come to mind especially when I look at marketing teams that I'm familiar with. They're hiring a lot of data analysts and data scientists and those folks are amazing and every team needs them. But if you go too big on that, you do yourself a disservice. The second key thing is that you're basically giving your frontline folks, your marketing managers or people on the front lines, an excuse not to get involved with data. And then that's a big mistake because it used to be really hard. But with the technologies available to us now, these new consumer like experiences for data analytics, anybody can do it. And so we as leaders have to encourage them to do it. And I'll give you just a you know, an example, you know, I've got about 32 people on my marketing team and I don't have any data analysts on my team. Across our entire company, we have a couple of analysts and a couple of data engineers. And what's happening is the world is changing where those folks, they're enablers, they architect the system. They bring in the different data sources. They use technologies like Snowflake as being so great at making it easier for people to pull spectrum technology together and to get access to data out of it quickly, but they're pulling it together and then simple things like, "Hey I just want to see this "weekly instead of monthly." You don't need to waste your expensive data science talent. You know, Gardener puts a stat out there that 50% of data scientists are doing basic visualization work. That's not a good use of their time. The products are easy enough now that everyday marketing managers can do that. And when you have a marketing manager come to you and say, you know, "I just figured out "this campaign which looks great on the surface "is doing poorly from an ROI perspective. That's a magic moment. And so we all need to coach our teams to get there. And I would say, you know, lead by example, give them an opportunity to access data and turn it into a story, that's really powerful. And then lastly, praise people who do it, like, use it as something to celebrate inside our companies is a great way to kind of get this initiative. >> I love it. And talking about democratizing data and making it self service, people feel ownership. You know, Laura, Denise was talking about the ecosystem and you're kind of the ecosystem pro here. How does the ecosystem help marketers succeed? Maybe you can talk about the power of many versus the resource of one. >> Sure, you know, I think it's a game changer and it will continue to be. And I think it's really the next level for marketers to harness this power that's out there and use it, you know, and it's something that's important to us, but it's also something we're starting to see our customers demand. You know, we went from a one size fits all solution to they want to bring the best in class to their organization. We all need to be really agile and flexible right now. And I think this ecosystem allows that, you know, you think about the power of Snowflake, Snowflake mining data for you and then a ThoughtSpot really giving you the dashboard to have what you want. And then an implementation partner like a Wipro coming in, and really being able to plug in whatever else you need to deliver. And I think it's really super powerful and I think it gives us you know, it just gives us so much to play with and so much room to grow as marketers. >> Thank you, Denise, why don't you bring us home. We're almost out of time here, but marketing, art, science, both? What are your thoughts? >> Definitely both, I think that's the exciting part about marketing. It is a balancing act between art and science. Clearly, it's probably more science today than it used to be but the art part is really about inspiring change. It's about changing people's behavior and challenging the status quo, right? That's the art part. The science part, that's about making the right decisions all the time, right? It's making sure we are truly investing in what's going to drive revenue for us. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on "theCUBE." Great discussion, I really appreciate it. Okay, and thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Wall-to-wall coverage of the Snowflake Data Cloud Summit on "theCUBE."

>> Hello everyone, and welcome back to our wall-to-wall coverage of the Datacloud summit, this is Dave Vellante, and we're seeing the emergence of a next generation workload in the cloud, more facile access, and governed sharing of data is accelerating time to insights and action. Alright, allow me to introduce our next guest. Aimee Irwin is here, she's the vice president of strategy for Experian, and Matt Glickman is VP of customer product strategy at Snowflake, with an emphasis on financial services, folks, welcome to theCUBE, thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, nice to be here. >> Hey so Aimee, obviously 2020's been pretty unique and crazy and challenging time for a lot of people, I don't know why, I've been checking my credit score a lot more for some reason on the app, I love the app, I had to lock it the other day, I locked my credit, somebody tried to do, and it worked, I was so happy, so thank you for that. So, we know Experian, but there's a ton of data behind what you do, I wonder if you could share kind of where you sit in the data space, and how you've seen organizations leverage data up to this point, and really if you could address some of the changes you're seeing as a result of the pandemic, that would be great. >> Sure, sure. Well, as you mentioned, Experian is best known as a credit bureau. I work in our marketing services business unit, and what we do is we really help brands leverage the power of data and technology to make the right marketing decisions, and better understand and connect with consumers. So we offer marketers products around data, identity, activation, measurement, we have a consumer-view data file that's based on offline PII and contains demographic interest, transaction data, and other attributes on about 300 million people in the US. And on the identity side we've always been known for our safe haven, or privacy-friendly matching, that allows marketers to connect their first party data to Experian or other third parties, but in today's world, with the growth in importance of digital advertising, and consumer behavior shifting to digital, Experian also is working to connect that offline data to the digital world, for a complete view of the customer. You mentioned COVID, we actually, we serve many different verticals, and what we're seeing from our clients during COVID is that there's a varying impact of the pandemic. The common theme is that those who have successfully pivoted their businesses to digital are doing much better, as we all know, COVID accelerated very strong trends to digital, both in e-commerce and in media-viewing habits. We work with a lot of retailers, retail is a tale of two cities, with big box and grocery growing, and apparel retail really struggling. We've helped our clients, leveraging our data to better understand the shifts in these consumer behaviors, and better psych-map their customers during this really challenging time. So think about, there's a group of customers that is still staying home, that is sheltered in place, there's a group of customers starting to significantly vary their consumer behavior, but is starting to venture out a little, and then there's a group of customers that's doing largely what they did before, in a somewhat modified fashion, so we're helping our clients segment those customers into groups to try and understand the right messaging and right offers for each of those groups, and we're also helping them with at-risk audiences. So that's more on the financial side, which of your customers are really struggling due to the pandemic, and how do you respond. >> That's awesome, thank you. You know, it's funny, I saw a twitter poll today asking if we measure our screen time, and I said, "oh my, no." So, Matt, let me ask you, you spent a ton of time in financial services, you really kind of cut your teeth there, and it's always been very data-oriented, you're seeing a lot of changes, tell us about how your customers are bringing it together, data, the skills, the people, obviously a big part of the equation, and applications to really put data at the center of the universe, what's new and different that these companies are getting out of the investments in data and skills? >> That's a great question, the acceleration that Aimee mentioned is real. We're seeing, particularly this year, but I think even in the past few years, the reluctance of customers to embrace the cloud is behind us, and now there's this massive acceleration to be able to go faster, and in some ways, the new entrants into this category have an advantage versus the companies that have been in this space, whether it's financial services or beyond, and in a lot of ways, they all are seeing the cloud and services like Snowflake as a way to not only catch up, but leapfrog your competitors, and really deliver a differentiated experience to your customers, to your business, internally or externally. And this past, however long this crisis has been going on, has really only accelerated that, because now there's a new demand to understand your customer better, your business better, with your traditional data sources, and also new, alternative data sources, and also being able to take a pulse. One of the things that we learned, which was an eye-opening experience, was as the crisis unfolded, one of our data partners decided to take the datasets about where the cases were happening from the Johns Hopkins, and World Health Organization, and put that on our platform, and it became a runaway hit. Thousands of our customers overnight were using this data to understand how their business was doing, versus how the crisis was unfolding in real time. And this has been a game-changer, and it's only scratching the surface of what now the world will be able to do when data is really at their fingertips, and you're not hindered by your legacy platforms. >> I wrote about that back in the early days of the pandemic when you guys did that, and talked about some of the changes that you guys enabled, and you know, you're right about cloud, in financial services cloud used to be an evil word, and now it's almost, it's become a mandate. Aimee, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about what your customers are having to work through in order to achieve some of these outcomes. I mean, you know, I'm interested in the starting point, I've been talking a lot, and writing a lot, and talking to practitioners about what I call the data life cycle, sometimes people call it the data pipeline, it's a complicated matter, but those customers and companies that can put data at the center and really treat that pipeline as the heart of their organization, if you will, are really succeeding. What are you seeing, and what really is the starting point, there? >> Yes, yeah, that's a good question, and as you mentioned, first party, I mean we start with first party data, right? First party data is critical to understanding consumers. And different verticals, different companies, different brands have varying levels of first party data. So a retailers going to have a lot more first party data, a financial services company, than say, an auto manufacturer. And while many marketers have that first party data, to really have a 360 view of the customer, they need third party data as well, and that's where Experian comes in, we help brands connect those disparate datasets, both first and third party data to better understand consumers, and create a single customer view, which has a number of applications. I think the last stat I heard was that there's about eight devices, on average, per person. I always joke that we're going to have these enormous, and that number's growing, we're going to have these enormous charging stations in our house, and I think we already do, because of all the different devices. And we seamlessly move from device to device, along our customer journey, and, if the brand doesn't understand who we are, it's much harder for the brand to connect with consumers and create a positive customer experience. And we cite that about 95 percent of companies, they are looking to achieve that single customer view, they recognize that they need that, and they've aligned various teams from e-commerce, to marketing, to sales, to at a minimum adjust their first party data, and then connect that data to better understand consumers. So, consumers can interact with a brand through a website, a mobile app, in-store visits, you know, by the phone, TV ads, et cetera, and a brand needs to use all of those touchpoints, often collected by different parts of the organization, and then add in that third party data to really understand the consumers. In terms of specific use cases, there's about three that come to mind. So first there's relevant advertising, and reaching the right customer, there's measurement, so being able to evaluate your advertising efforts, if you see an ad on, if I see an ad on my mobile, and then I buy by visiting a desktop website, understanding, or I get a direct mail piece, understanding that those interactions are all connected to the same person is critical for measurement. And then there's personalization, which includes improved customer experience amongst your own touchpoints with that consumer, personalized marketing communication, and then of course analytics, so those are the use cases we're seeing. >> Great, thank you Aimee. Now Matt, you can't really talk about data without talking about governance and compliance, and I remember back in 2006, when the federal rules of civil procedure went in, it was easy, the lawyers just said, "no, nobody can have access," but that's changed, and one of the things I like about what Snowflake's doing with the data cloud is it's really about democratizing access, but doing so in a way that gives people confidence that they only have access to the right data. So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you're thinking about this topic, what you're doing to help customers navigate, which has traditionally been such a really challenging problem. >> Another great question, this is where I think the major disruption is happening. And what Aimee described, being able to join together first and third party datasets, being able to do this was always a challenge, because data had to be moved around, I had to ship my first party data to the other side, and the third party data had to be shipped to me, and being able to join those datasets together was problematic at best, and now with the focus on privacy and protecting PII, this is something that has to change, and the good news is, with the data cloud, data does not have to move. Data can stay where it belongs, Experian can keep its data, Experian's customers can hold onto their data, yet the data can be joined together on this universal, global platform that we call the data cloud. On top of that, and particularly with the regulations that are coming out that are going to prevent data from being collected on either a mobile device or as cookies on web browsers, new approaches, and we're seeing this a lot in our space, both in financials and media, is to set up these data clean rooms, where both sides can give access to one another, but not have to reveal any PII to do that join. This is going to be huge, now you actually can protect your customers' and your consumers' private identities, but still accomplish that join that Aimee mentioned, to be able to relate the cause and effect of these campaigns, and really understand the signals that these datasets are trying to say about one another, again without having to move data, without having to reveal PII, we're seeing this happening now, this is the next big thing, that we're going to see explode over the months and years to come. >> I totally agree, massive changes coming in public policy in this area, and we only have a few minutes left, and I wonder if for our audience members that are looking for some advice, what's the, Aimee, what's the one thing you'd recommend they start doing differently, or consider putting in place that's going to set them up for success over the next decade? >> Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I think, I always say, first, harness all of your first party data across all touchpoints, get that first party data in one place and working together, second, connect that data with trusted third parties, and Matt suggested some ways to do that, and then third, always put the customer first, speak their language, where and when they want to be reached out to, and use the information you have to really create a better customer experience for your customers. >> Matt, what would you add to that? Bring us home, if you would. >> Applications. The idea that data, your data can now be pulled into your own business applications the same way that Netflix and Spotify are pulled into your consumer and lifestyle applications, again, without data moving, these personalized application experiences is what I encourage everyone to be thinking about from first principles. What would you do in your next app that you're going to build, if you had all your consumers, if the consumers had access to their data in the app, and not having to think about things from scratch, leverage the data cloud, leverage these service providers like Experian, and build the applications of tomorrow. >> I'm super excited when I talk to practitioners like yourselves, about the future of data, guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, it was a really a pleasure having you, and I hope we can continue this conversation in the future. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> Alright, thank you for watching, keep it right there, we got great content, and tons of content coming at the Snowflake data cloud summit, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, keep it right there.

>> My name is Dave Vellante. And with me are two world-class technologists, visionaries and entrepreneurs. Benoit Dageville, he co-founded Snowflake and he's now the President of the Product Division, and Florian Douetteau is the Co-founder and CEO of Dataiku. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube to first timers, love it. >> Yup, great to be here. >> Now Florian you and Benoit, you have a number of customers in common, and I've said many times on theCUBE, that the first era of cloud was really about infrastructure, making it more agile, taking out costs. And the next generation of innovation, is really coming from the application of machine intelligence to data with the cloud, is really the scale platform. So is that premise relevant to you, do you buy that? And why do you think Snowflake, and Dataiku make a good match for customers? >> I think that because it's our values that aligned, when it gets all about actually today, and knowing complexity of our customers, so you close the gap. Where we need to commoditize the access to data, the access to technology, it's not only about data. Data is important, but it's also about the impacts of data. How can you make the best out of data as fast as possible, as easily as possible, within an organization. And another value is about just the openness of the platform, building a future together. Having a platform that is not just about the platform, but also for the ecosystem of partners around it, bringing the level of accessibility, and flexibility you need for the 10 years of that. >> Yeah, so that's key, that it's not just data. It's turning data into insights. Now Benoit, you came out of the world of very powerful, but highly complex databases. And we know we all know that you and the Snowflake team, you get very high marks for really radically simplifying customers' lives. But can you talk specifically about the types of challenges that your customers are using Snowflake to solve? >> Yeah, so the challenge before snowflake, I would say, was really to put all the data in one place, and run all the computes, all the workloads that you wanted to run against that data. And of course existing legacy platforms were not able to support that level of concurrency, many workload, we talk about machine learning, data science, data engineering, data warehouse, big data workloads, all running in one place didn't make sense at all. And therefore be what customers did this to create silos, silos of data everywhere, with different system, having a subset of the data. And of course now, you cannot analyze this data in one place. So Snowflake, we really solved that problem by creating a single architecture where you can put all the data into cloud. So it's a really cloud native. We really thought about how solve that problem, how to create, leverage cloud, and the elasticity of cloud to really put all the data in one place. But at the same time, not run all workload at the same place. So each workload that runs in Snowflake, at its dedicated compute resources to run. And that makes it agile, right? Florian talked about data scientist having to run analysis, so they need a lot of compute resources, but only for a few hours. And with Snowflake, they can run these new workload, add this workload to the system, get the compute resources that they need to run this workload. And then when it's over, they can shut down their system, it will automatically shut down. Therefore they would not pay for the resources that they don't use. So it's a very agile system, where you can do this analysis when you need, and you have all the power to run all these workload at the same time. >> Well, it's profound what you guys built. I mean to me, I mean of course everybody's trying to copy it now, it was like, I remember that bringing the notion of bringing compute to the data, in the Hadoop days. And I think that, as I say, everybody is sort of following your suit now or trying to. Florian, I got to say the first data scientist I ever interviewed on theCUBE, it was the amazing Hillary Mason, right after she started at Bitly, and she made data sciences sounds so compelling, but data science is a hard. So same question for you, what do you see as the biggest challenges for customers that they're facing with data science? >> The biggest challenge from my perspective, is that once you solve the issue of the data silo, with Snowflake, you don't want to bring another silo, which will be a silo of skills. And essentially, thanks to the talent gap, between the talent available to the markets, or are released to actually find recruits, train data scientists, and what needs to be done. And so you need actually to simplify the access to technologies such as, every organization can make it, whatever the talent, by bridging that gap. And to get there, there's a need of actually backing up the silos. Having a collaborative approach, where technologies and business work together, and actually all puts up their ends into those data projects together. >> It makes sense, Florain let's stay with you for a minute, if I can. Your observation space, it's pretty, pretty global. And so you have a unique perspective on how can companies around the world might be using data, and data science. Are you seeing any trends, maybe differences between regions, or maybe within different industries? What are you seeing? >> Yeah, definitely I do see trends that are not geographic, that much, but much more in terms of maturity of certain industries and certain sectors. Which are, that certain industries invested a lot, in terms of data, data access, ability to store data. As well as experience, and know region level of maturity, where they can invest more, and get to the next steps. And it's really relying on the ability of certain leaders, certain organizations, actually, to have built these long-term data strategy, a few years ago when no stats reaping of the benefits. >> A decade ago, Florian, Hal Varian famously said that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians. And then everybody sort of changed that to data scientist. And then everybody, all the statisticians became data scientists, and they got a raise. But data science requires more than just statistics acumen. What skills do you see as critical for the next generation of data science? >> Yeah, it's a great question because I think the first generation of data scientists, became data scientists because they could have done some Python quickly, and be flexible. And I think that the skills of the next generation of data scientists will definitely be different. It will be, first of all, being able to speak the language of the business, meaning how you translates data insight, predictive modeling, all of this into actionable insights of business impact. And it would be about how you collaborate with the rest of the business. It's not just how fast you can build something, how fast you can do a notebook in Python, or do predictive models of some sorts. It's about how you actually build this bridge with the business, and obviously those things are important, but we also must be cognizant of the fact that technology will evolve in the future. There will be new tools, new technologies, and they will still need to keep this level of flexibility to understand quickly what are the next tools they need to use a new languages, or whatever to get there. >> As you look back on 2020, what are you thinking? What are you telling people as we head into next year? >> Yeah, I think it's very interesting, right? This crises has told us that the world really can change from one day to the next. And this has dramatic and perform the aspects. For example companies all of a sudden, show their revenue line dropping, and they had to do less with data. And some other companies was the reverse, right? All of a sudden, they were online like Instacart, for example, and their business completely changed from one day to the other. So this agility of adjusting the resources that you have to do the task, and need that can change, using solution like Snowflake really helps that. Then we saw both in our customers. Some customers from one day to the next, were growing like big time, because they benefited from COVID, and their business benefited. But others had to drop. And what is nice with cloud, it allows you to adjust compute resources to your business needs, and really address it in house. The other aspect is understanding what happening, right? You need to analyze. We saw all our customers basically, wanted to understand what is the going to be the impact on my business? How can I adapt? How can I adjust? And for that, they needed to analyze data. And of course, a lot of data which are not necessarily data about their business, but also they are from the outside. For example, COVID data, where is the States, what is the impact, geographic impact on COVID, the time. And access to this data is critical. So this is the premise of the data cloud, right? Having one single place, where you can put all the data of the world. So our customer obviously then, started to consume the COVID data from that our data marketplace. And we had delete already thousand customers looking at this data, analyzing these data, and to make good decisions. So this agility and this, adapting from one hour to the next is really critical. And that goes with data, with cloud, with interesting resources, and that doesn't exist on premise. So indeed I think the lesson learned is we are living in a world, which is changing all the time, and we have to understand it. We have to adjust, and that's why cloud some ways is great. >> Excellent thank you. In theCUBE we like to talk about disruption, of course, who doesn't? And also, I mean, you look at AI, and the impact that it's beginning to have, and kind of pre-COVID. You look at some of the industries that were getting disrupted by, everyone talks about digital transformation. And you had on the one end of the spectrum, industries like publishing, which are highly disrupted, or taxis. And you can say, okay, well that's Bits versus Adam, the old Negroponte thing. But then the flip side of, you say look at financial services that hadn't been dramatically disrupted, certainly healthcare, which is ripe for disruption, defense. So there a number of industries that really hadn't leaned into digital transformation, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Not on my watch. There was this complacency. And then of course COVID broke everything. So Florian I wonder if you could comment, what industry or industries do you think are going to be most impacted by data science, and what I call machine intelligence, or AI, in the coming years and decade? >> Honestly, I think it's all of them, or at least most of them, because for some industries, the impact is very visible, because we have talking about brand new products, drones, flying cars, or whatever that are very visible for us. But for others, we are talking about a part from changes in the way you operate as an organization. Even if financial industry itself doesn't seem to be so impacted, when you look at it from the consumer side, or the outside insights in Germany, it's probably impacted just because the way you use data (mumbles) for flexibility you need. Is there kind of the cost gain you can get by leveraging the latest technologies, is just the numbers. And so it's will actually comes from the industry that also. And overall, I think that 2020, is a year where, from the perspective of AI and analytics, we understood this idea of maturity and resilience, maturity meaning that when you've got to crisis you actually need data and AI more than before, you need to actually call the people from data in the room to take better decisions, and look for one and a backlog. And I think that's a very important learning from 2020, that will tell things about 2021. And the resilience, it's like, data analytics today is a function transforming every industries, and is so important that it's something that needs to work. So the infrastructure needs to work, the infrastructure needs to be super resilient, so probably not on prem or not fully on prem, at some point. And the kind of resilience where you need to be able to blend for literally anything, like no hypothesis in terms of BLOs, can be taken for granted. And that's something that is new, and which is just signaling that we are just getting to a next step for data analytics. >> I wonder Benoir if you have anything to add to that. I mean, I often wonder, when are machines going to be able to make better diagnoses than doctors, some people say already. Will the financial services, traditional banks lose control of payment systems? What's going to happen to big retail stores? I mean, maybe bring us home with maybe some of your finals thoughts. >> Yeah, I would say I don't see that as a negative, right? The human being will always be involved very closely, but then the machine, and the data can really help, see correlation in the data that would be impossible for human being alone to discover. So I think it's going to be a compliment not a replacement. And everything that has made us faster, doesn't mean that we have less work to do. It means that we can do more. And we have so much to do, that I will not be worried about the effect of being more efficient, and bare at our work. And indeed, I fundamentally think that data, processing of images, and doing AI on these images, and discovering patterns, and potentially flagging disease way earlier than it was possible. It is going to have a huge impact in health care. And as Florian was saying, every industry is going to be impacted by that technology. So, yeah, I'm very optimistic. >> Great, guys, I wish we had more time. I've got to leave it there, but so thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was really a pleasure having you.

>> Hi and welcome to Data Cloud catalyst Women in Tech Round Table Panel discussion. I am so excited to have three fantastic female executives with me today, who have been driving transformations through data throughout their entire career. With me today is Lisa Davis, SVP and CIO OF Blue shield of California. We also have Nishita Henry who is the Chief Innovation Officer at Deloitte and Teresa Briggs who is on a variety of board of directors including our very own Snowflake. Welcome ladies. >> Thank you. >> So I am just going to dive right in, you all have really amazing careers and resumes behind you, am really curious throughout your career, how have you seen the use of data evolve throughout your career and Lisa am going to start with you. >> Thank you, having been in technology my entire career, technology and data has really evolved from being the province of a few in an organization to frankly being critical to everyone's business outcomes. Now every business leader really needs to embrace data analytics and technology. We've been talking about digital transformation, probably the last five, seven years, we've all talked about, disrupt or be disrupted, At the core of that digital transformation is the use of data. Data and analytics that we derive insights from and actually improve our decision making by driving a differentiated experience and capability into market. So data has involved as being I would say almost tactical, in some sense over my technology career to really being a strategic asset of what we leverage personally in our own careers, but also what we must leverage as companies to drive a differentiated capability to experience and remain relative in the market today. >> Nishita curious your take on, how you have seen data evolve? >> Yeah, I agree with Lisa, it has definitely become a the lifeblood of every business, right? It used to be that there were a few companies in the business of technology, every business is now a technology business. Every business is a data business, it is the way that they go to market, shape the market and serve their clients. Whether you're in construction, whether you're in retail, whether you're in healthcare doesn't matter, right? Data is necessary for every business to survive and thrive. And I remember at the beginning of my career, data was always important, but it was about storing data, it was about giving people individual reports, it was about supplying that data to one person or one business unit in silos. And it then evolved right over the course of time into integrating data into saying, alright, how does one piece of data correlate to the other and how can I get insights out of that data? Now, its gone to the point of how do I use that data to predict the future? How do I use that data to automate the future? How do I use that data not just for humans to make decisions, but for other machines to make decisions, right? Which is a big leap and a big change in how we use data, how we analyze data and how we use it for insights and involving our businesses. >> Yeah its really changed so tremendously just in the past five years, its amazing. So Teresa we've talked a lot about the Data Cloud, where do you think we are heading with that and also how can future leaders really guide their careers in data especially in those jobs where we don't traditionally think of them in the data science space? Teresa your thoughts on that. >> Yeah, well since I'm on the Snowflake Board, I'll talk a little bit about the Snowflake Data Cloud, we're getting your company's data out of the silos that exist all over your organization. We're bringing third party data in to combine with your own data and we're wrapping a governance structure around it and feeding it out to your employees so they can get their jobs done, as simple as that. I think we've all seen the pandemic accelerate the digitization of our work. And if you ever doubted that the future of work is here, it is here and companies are scrambling to catch up by providing the right amount of data, collaboration tools, workflow tools for their workers to get their jobs done. Now, it used to be as prior people have mentioned that in order to work with data you had to be a data scientist, but I was an auditor back in the day we used to work on 16 column spreadsheets. And now if you're an accounting major coming out of college joining an auditing firm, you have to be tech and data savvy because you're going to be extracting, manipulating, analyzing and auditing data, that massive amounts of data that sit in your clients IT systems. I'm on the board of Warby Parker, and you might think that their most valuable asset is their amazing frame collection, but it's actually their data, their 360 degree view of the customer. And so if you're a merchant, or you're in strategy, or marketing or talent or the Co-CEO, you're using data every day in your work. And so I think it's going to become a ubiquitous skill that any anyone who's a knowledge worker has to be able to work with data. >> Yeah I think its just going to be organic to every role going forward in the industry. So, Lisa curious about your thoughts about Data Cloud, the future of it and how people can really leverage it in their jobs for future leaders. >> Yeah, absolutely most enterprises today are, I would say, hybrid multicloud enterprises. What does that mean? That means that we have data sitting on-prem, we have data sitting in public clouds through software as a service applications. We have a data everywhere. Most enterprises have data everywhere, certainly those that have owned infrastructure or weren't born on the web. One of the areas that I love that Data Cloud is addressing is area around data portability and mobility. Because I have data sitting in various locations through my enterprise, how do I aggregate that data to really drive meaningful insights out of that data to drive better business outcomes? And at Blue Shield of California, one of our key initiatives is what we call an Experienced Cube. What does that mean? That means how do I drive transparency of data between providers, members and payers? So that not only do I reduce overhead on providers and provide them a better experience, our hospital systems are doctors, but ultimately, how do we have the member have it their power of their fingertips the value of their data holistically, so that we're making better decisions about their health care. One of the things Teresa was talking about, was the use of this data and I would drive to data democratization. We got to put the power of data into the hands of everyone, not just data scientists, yes we need those data scientists to help us build AI models to really drive and tackle these tough old, tougher challenges and business problems that we may have in our environments. But everybody in the company both on the IT side, both on the business side, really need to understand of how do we become a data insights driven enterprise, put the power of the data into everyone's hands so that we can accelerate capabilities, right? And leverage that data to ultimately drive better business results. So as a leader, as a technology leader, part of our responsibility, our leadership is to help our companies do that. And that's really one of the exciting things that I'm doing in my role now at Blue Shield of California. >> Yeah its really, really exciting time. I want to shift gears a little bit and focus on women in Tech. So I think in the past five to ten years there has been a lot of headway in this space but the truth is women are still under represented in the tech space. So what can we do to attract more women into technology quite honestly. So Nishita curious what your thoughts are on that? >> Great question and I am so passionate about this for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is I have two daughters of my own and I know how important it is for women and young girls to actually start early in their love for technology and data and all things digital, right? So I think it's one very important to start early started early education, building confidence of young girls that they can do this, showing them role models. We at Deloitte just partnered with LV Engineer to actually make comic books centered around young girls and boys in the early elementary age to talk about how heroes in tech solve everyday problems. And so really helping to get people's minds around tech is not just in the back office coding on a computer, tech is about solving problems together that help us as citizens, as customers, right? And as humanity, so I think that's important. I also think we have to expand that definition of tech, as we just said it's not just about right, database design, It's not just about Java and Python coding, it's about design, it's about the human machine interfaces, it's about how do you use it to solve real problems and getting people to think in that kind of mindset makes it more attractive and exciting. And lastly, I'd say look we have a absolute imperative to get a diverse population of people, not just women, but minorities, those with other types of backgrounds, disabilities, et cetera involved because this data is being used to drive decision making in all involved, right, and how that data makes decisions, it can lead to unnatural biases that no one intended but can happen just 'cause we haven't involved a diverse enough group of people around it. >> Absolutely, lisa curious about your thoughts on this. >> I agree with everything Nishita said, I've been passionate about this area, I think it starts with first we need more role models, we need more role models as women in these leadership roles throughout various sectors. And it really is it starts with us and helping to pull other women forward. So I think certainly it's part of my responsibility, I think all of us as female executives that if you have a seat at the table to leverage that seat at the table to drive change, to bring more women forward more diversity forward into the boardroom and into our executive suites. I also want to touch on a point Nishita made about women we're the largest consumer group in the company yet we're consumers but we're not builders. This is why it's so important that we start changing that perception of what tech is and I agree that it starts with our young girls, we know the data shows that we lose our like young girls by middle school, very heavy peer pressure, it's not so cool to be smart, or do robotics, or be good at math and science, we start losing our girls in middle school. So they're not prepared when they go to high school, and they're not taking those classes in order to major in these STEM fields in college. So we have to start the pipeline early with our girls. And then I also think it's a measure of what your boards are doing, what is the executive leadership in your goals around diversity and inclusion? How do we invite more diverse population to the decision making table? So it's really a combination of efforts. One of the things that certainly is concerning to me is during this pandemic, I think we're losing one in four women in the workforce now because of all the demands that our families are having to navigate through this pandemic. The last statistic I saw in the last four months is we've lost 850,000 women in the workforce. This pipeline is critical to making that change in these leadership positions. >> Yeah its really a critical time and now we are coming to the end of this conversation I want to ask you Teresa what would be a call to action to everyone listening both men and women since its to be solved by everyone to address the gender gap in the industry? >> I'd encourage each of you to become an active sponsor. Research shows that women and minorities are less likely to be sponsored than white men. Sponsorship is a much more active form than mentorship. Sponsorship involves helping someone identify career opportunities and actively advocating for them and those roles opening your network, giving very candid feedback. And we need men to participate too, there are not enough women in tech to pull forward and sponsor the high potential women that are in our pipelines. And so we need you to be part of the solution. >> Nishita real quickly what would be your call to action to everyone? >> I'd say look around your teams, see who's on them and make deliberate decisions about diversifying those teams, as positions open up, make sure that you have a diverse set of candidates, make sure that there are women that are part to that team and make sure that you are actually hiring and putting people into positions based on potential not just experience. >> And real quickly Lisa, we'll close it out with you what would your call to action be? >> Wow, it's hard to what Nishita and what Tricia shared I think we're very powerful actions. I think it starts with us. Taking action at our own table, making sure you're driving diverse panels and hiring setting goals for the company, having your board engaged and holding us accountable and driving to those goals will help us all see a better outcome with more women at the executive table and diverse populations. >> Great advice and great action for all of us to take. Thank you all so much for spending time with me today and talking about this really important issue, I really appreciate it. Stay with us.

(upbeat music) >> From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi everyone, this is Dave Vellante from the CUBE. And we're getting ready for the Snowflake Data cloud summit four geographies, eight tracks more than 40 sessions for this global event. Starts on November 17th, where we're tracking the rise of the Data cloud. You're going to hear a lot about that, now, by now, you know, the story of Snowflake or you know, what maybe you don't but a new type of cloud native database was introduced in the middle part of last decade. And a new set of analytics workloads has emerged that is powering a transformation within organizations. And it's doing this by putting data at the core of businesses and organizations. You know, for years we marched to the cadence of Moore's law. That was the innovation engine of our industry, but now that's changed it's data plus machine intelligence plus cloud. That's the new innovation cocktail for the technology industry and industries overall. And at the Data cloud summit we'll hear from Snowflake executives, founders, technologists, customers, and ecosystems partners. And of course, you going to hear from interviews on the CUBE. So, let's dig in a little bit more and help me are two Snowflake experts. Felipe Hoffa is a data cloud advocate and Kent Graziano is a chief technical evangelist post at Snowflake. Gents, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us on, this is great. >> Thank you. >> So guys first, I got to congratulate you on getting to this point. You've achieved beyond escape velocity and obviously one of the most important IPOs of the year, but you got a lot of work to do. I know that what, what are the substantive aspects behind the Data cloud? >> I mean, it's a new concept right? We've been talking about infrastructure clouds and SaaS applications living in application clouds and Data cloud is the ability to really share all that data that we've been collected. You know, we've spent what how many a decade or more with big data now but have we been able to use it effectively? And that's really where the Data cloud is coming in and Snowflake and making that a more seamless, friendly, easy experience to get access to the data. I've been in data warehousing for nearly 30 years now. And our dream has always been to be able to augment an organization's analytics with data from outside their organization. And that's just been a massive pain in the neck with having to move files around and replicate the data and maybe losing track of where it came from or where it went. And the Data cloud is really giving our customers the ability to do that in a much more governed way, a much more seamless way and really make it push button to give anyone access to the data they need and have the performance to do the analytics in near real time. It's total game changer is as you already know and just it's crazy what we're able to do today compared it to what we could do when I started out in my career. >> Well, I'm going to come back to that 'cause I want to tap your historical perspective, but Felipe let me ask you, So, why did you join Snowflake? You're you're the newbie here? What attracted you? >> Exactly? I'm the newbie, I used to work at Google until August. I was there for 10 years. I was a developer advocate there also for data you might have heard about the BigQuery. I was doing a lot of that. And then as time went by Snowflake started showing up more and more in my feeds within my customers in my community. And it came the time, well, I felt that like, you know, when wherever you're working, once in a while you think I should leave this place I should try something new, I should move my career forward. While at Google, I thought that so many times, as anyone would do, and it was only when Snowflake showed up, like where Snowflake is going now, why Snowflake is being received by all the customers that I saw this opportunity. And I decided that moving to Snowflake would be a step forward for me. And so far I'm pretty happy, like the timing has been incredible, but more than the timing and everything, it's really, really a great place for data. What I love first is data, sharing data, analyzing data and how Snowflake is doing it's for me to mean phenomenal. >> So, Kent, I want to come back to you and I say tap maybe your historical perspective here. And you said it's always been a dream that you could do these other things bringing in external data. I would say this, that I don't want to push a little bit on this because I have often said that the EDW marketplace really never lived up to its promises of 360 degree views of the customer real time or near real time analytics. And, and it really has been as you kind of described are a real challenge for a lot of organizations. When Hadoop came in we got excited that it was going to actually finally live up to that vision and, and duped it a lot and don't get me wrong, I mean, the whole concept of bring that compute to data and lowering the cost and so forth. But it certainly didn't minimize complexity. And, and it seems like, feels like Snowflake is on the cusp of actually delivering on that promise that we've been talking about for 30 years. I wonder, if you could share your perspective is it, are we going to get there this time? >> Yeah. And as far as I can tell working with all of our customers some of them are there. I mean, they thought through those struggles that you were talking about that I saw throughout my career and now with getting on Snowflake they're delivering customer 360 they're integrating weblogs and IOT data with structured data from their ERP systems or CRM systems, their supply chain systems. And it really is coming to fruition. I mean, the industry leaders, you know, Bill Inman and Claudia Imhoff, they've had this vision the whole time but the technology just wasn't able to support it. And the cloud, as we said about the internet, changed everything. And then Ben wine teary, and they're in their vision and building the system, taking the best concepts from the Hadoop world and the data Lake world and the enterprise data warehouse world and putting it all together into this, this architecture that's now Snowflake and the Data cloud solve it. I mean, it's the classic benefit of hindsight is 2020 after years in the industry, they'd seen these problems and said like, how can we solve them? Does the Cloud let us solve these problems? And the answer was yes, but it did require writing everything from scratch and starting over with, because the architecture of the Cloud just allows you to do things that you just couldn't do before. >> Yeah. I'm glad you brought up you know, some of the originators of the data warehouse because it really wasn't their fault. They were trying to solve a problem. It was the marketers that took it and really kind of made promises that they couldn't keep. But, the reality is when you talk to customers in the so old EDW days and this is the other thing I want to tap you guys' brains on. It was very challenging. I mean, one customer one time referred to it as a snake, swallowing a basketball. And what he meant by that is every time there's a change Sarbanes Oxley comes and we have to ingest all this new data. It's like, Oh, it's to say everything slows down to a grinding halt. Every time Intel came out with a new microprocessor, they would go out and grab a new server as fast as they possibly could. He called it chasing the chips and it was this endless cycle of pain. And so, you know, the originators of the data whereas they didn't have the compute power they didn't have the Cloud. And so, and of course they didn't have the 30, 40 years of pain to draw upon. But I wonder if you could, could maybe talk a little bit about the kinds of things that can be done now that we haven't been able to do here to form. >> Well, yeah. I remember early on having a conversation with Bill about this idea of near real time data warehousing and saying, is this real, is this something really people need? And at the time he was a couple of decades ago, he said now to them they just want to load their data sooner than once a month. That was the goal. And that was going to be near real time for them. And, but now I'm seeing it with our customers. It's like, now we can do it, you know, with things like the Kafka technology and snow pipe in Snowflake that people are able to get that refresh way faster and have near real time analytics access to that data in a much more timely manner. And so it really is coming true. And the, the compute power that's there, as you said, we've now got this compute power in the Cloud that we never dreamed of. I mean, you would think of only certain, very large, massive global companies or governments could afford super computers. And that's what it would have taken. And now we've got nearly the power of a super computer in our mobile device that we all carry around with us. So being able to harness all that now in the Cloud is really opening up opportunities to do things with data and access data in a way that, again really, we just kind of dreamed of before as like we can democratize data when we get to this point. And I think that's where we are. We're at that inflection point where now it's possible to do it. So the challenge on organizations is going to be how do we do it effectively? How do we do it with agility? And how do we do it in a governed manner? You mentioned Sarbanes Oxley, GDPR, CCPA, all of those are out there. And so we have all of that as well. And so that's where we're going to get into it, right into the governance and being able to do that in a very quick, flexible, extensible manner and Snowflakes really letting people do it now. >> Well, yeah. And you know, again, we've been talking about Hadoop and I, again, for all my fond thoughts of that era, and it's not like Hadoop is gone but it was a lot of excitement around it, but governance was a huge problem. And it was kind of a bolt on. Now, Felipe I going to ask you, like, when you think about a company like Google, your former employer, you know, data is at the core of their business. And so many companies the data is not at the core of their business. Something else is, it's a process or a manufacturing facility or whatever it is. And the data is sort of on the outskirts. You know, we often talk about in, in stove pipes. And so we're now seeing organizations really put data at the core of their, it becomes central to their DNA. I'm curious as to your thoughts on that. And also, if you've got a lot of experience with developers, is there a developer angle here in this new data world? >> For sure, I mean, I love seeing everything like throughout my career at Google and my two months here and talking to so many companies, you never thought before like these are database companies but they are the ones that keep rowing. The ones that keep moving to the next stage of their development is because they are focusing on data. They are adapting the processes, they are learning from it. Me, I focus a lot on developers. So, I met when I started this career as an advocate of first, I was a software engineer and my work so far, has we worked, I really loved talking to the engineers on the other companies. Like, maybe I'm not the one solving the business problem, but at the end of the day, when these companies have a business problem that they want to grow, they want to have data. There are other engineers that are scientists like me that want to work for the company and bring the best technology to solve the problems. And Yeah, there's so much where data can help, yes, as we evolved the system for the company, and also for us, for understanding the systems things like of survivability, and recently there was a big company a big launch on survivability (indistinct) whether they are running all of their data warehousing needs. And all of that needs on snowflake, just because running these massive systems and being able to see how they're working generates a lot of data. And then how do you manage it? How do you analyze it? Or Snowflake is really there to help cover the two areas. >> It's interesting my business partner, John farrier cohost of the CUBE, he said, gosh I would say middle of the last decade, maybe even around the time 2013, when Snowflake was just coming out, he said, he predicted the data would be the new development kit. And it's really at the center of a lot of the data life cycle the what I call the data pipelines. I know people use that term differently but I'm very excited about the Data cloud summit and what we're going to learn there. And I get to interview a lot of really cool people. So, I appreciate you guys coming up, but, Kent who should attend the Data cloud summit, I mean, what should they expect to learn? >> Well, as you said earlier, Dave, there's so many tracks and there's really kind of something for everyone. So, we've got a track on unlocking the value of the Data cloud, which is really going to speak to the business leaders, you know, as to what that vision is, what can we do from an organizational perspective with the Data cloud to get that value from the data to move our businesses forward. But we've also done for the technicians migrating to snowflake. Sessions on how to do the migration, modernizing your data Lake, data science, how to do analytics with the, and data science in Snowflake and in the Data cloud, and even down to building apps. So the developers and building data products. So, you know, we've got stuff for developers, we've got stuff for data scientists. We've got stuff for the data architects like myself and the data engineers on how to build all of this out. And then there's going to be some industry solution spotlights as well. So we can talk about different verticals folks in FinTech and healthcare, there's going to be stuff for them. And then for our data superheroes we have a hallway track where we're going to get talks from the folks that are in our data superheroes which is really our community advocacy program. So these are folks who are out there in the trenches using Snowflake delivering value at their organizations. And they're going to talk down and dirty. How did they make this stuff happen? So it's going to be to some hope, really something for everyone, fireside chats with our executives. Of course something I'm really looking forward to myself. So was fun to hear from Frank and Christian and Benoit about what's the next big thing, what are we doing now? Where are we going with all of this? And then there is going to be a some awards we'll be giving out our data driver awards for our most innovative customers. So this is going to be a lot, a lot for everybody to consume and enjoy and learn about this, this new space of, of the Data cloud. >> Well, thank you for that Kent. And I'll second that, at least there's going to be a lot for everybody. If you're an existing Snowflake customer there's going to be plenty of two or one content, we can get in to the how to use and the best practice, if you're really not that familiar with Snowflake, or you're not a customer, there's a lot of one-on-one content going on. So, Felipe, I'd love to hear from you what people can expect at the Data cloud summit. >> Totally, so I would like to plus one to everyone that can say we have a phenomenal schedule that they, the executive will be there. I really wanted to especially highlight the session I'm preparing with Trevor Noah. I'm sure you might have heard of him. And we are having him at the Data cloud summit and we are going to have a session. We are going to talk about data. We are preparing a session. That's all about how people that love data that people that want to make that actionable. How can they bring storytelling and make it more, have more impact as he has well learn to do through his life? >> That's awesome, So, we have Trevor Noah, we're not just going to totally geek out here. we're going to have some great entertainment as well. So, I want you to go to snowflake.com and click on Data cloud summit 2020 there's four geos. It starts on November 17th and then runs through the week and in the following week in Japan. So, so check that out. We'll see you there. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> (Instructor)From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi everyone. This is Dave Volante, the cube, and we're getting ready for the snowflake data cloud summit four geographies eight tracks, more than 40 sessions for this global event starts on November 17th, where we're tracking the rise of the data cloud. You're going to hear a lot about that now by now, you know the story of Snowflake or you know, what maybe you don't, but a new type of cloud native database was introduced in the middle part of last decade. And a new set of analytics workloads has emerged that is powering a transformation within organizations. And it's doing this by putting data at the core of businesses and organizations. You know for years, we marched to the cadence of Moore's law. That was the innovation engine of our industry, but now that's changed it's data plus machine intelligence plus cloud. That's the new innovation cocktail for the technology industry and industries overall. And at the data cloud summit, we'll hear from snowflake executives, founders, technologists, customers, and ecosystems partners. And of course, you're going to hear from interviews on the cube. So let's dig in a little bit more and to help me, are two snowflake experts, Filipe Hoffa is a data cloud advocate and Kent Graziano is a chief technical evangelists post at Snowflake. Gents great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah thanks for having us on this is great. >> Thank you. >> So guys, first, I got to congratulate you on getting to this point. You've achieved beyond escape velocity, and obviously one of the most important IPOs of the year, but you got a lot of work to do I know that Filipe, let me start with you data cloud. What's a data cloud and what are we going to learn about it at the data cloud summit? >> Oh, that's an excellent question. And let me tell you a little bit about our story here. And I really, really, really admire what Kent has done. I joined the snowflake like less than two months ago, and for me it's been a huge learning experience. And I look up to Kent a lot on how we deliver the message and how do we deliver all of that. So I would love to hear his answer first. >> Okay, that's cool. Okay Kent later on. So talk of data cloud, that's a catchy phrase, right? But it vectors into at least two of the components of my innovation, innovation cocktail. What, what are the substantive substantive aspects behind the data cloud? >> I mean, it's a, it's a new concept, right? We've been talking about infrastructure clouds and SAS applications living in an application clouds so data cloud is the ability to really share all that data that we've been collecting. You know, we've, we've spent what, how many days a decade or more with big data now, but have we been able to use it effectively? And that's, that's really where the data cloud is coming in and snowflake in making that a more seamless, friendly, easy experience to get access to the data. I've been in data warehousing for nearly 30 years now. And our dream has always been to be able to augment an organization's analytics with data from outside their organization. And that's just been a massive pain in the neck with having to move files around and replicate the data and maybe losing track of where it came from or where it went. And the data cloud is really giving our customers the ability to do that in a much more governed way, a much more seamless way, and really make it push button to give anyone access to the data they need and have the performance to do the analytics in near real time. It's it's total game changer as, as you already know, and just it's crazy what we're able to do today, compared to what we could do when I started out in my career. >> Well, I'm going to come back to that cause I want to tap your historical perspective, but Filipe, let me ask you. So why did you join snowflake? You're you're the newbie here. What attracted you? >> Exactly, I'm the newbie. I used to work at Google until August. I was there for 10 years. I was a developer advocate there also for data, you might have heard about a big query. I was doing a lot of that and then as time went by, Snowflake started showing up more and more in my feeds, within my customers, in my community. And it came the time. When, I felt that like, you know, when wherever you're working, once in a while you think I should leave this place, I should try something new. I should move my career forward. While at Google, I thought that so many times as anyone would do, and it was only when snowflake showed up, like where snowflake is going now, how snowflake is, is being received by all the customers that I saw this opportunity. And I decided that moving to Snowflake would be a step forward for me. And so far I'm pretty happy. Like the timing has been incredible, but more than the timing and everything, it's really, really a great place for data. What I love first is data sharing data, analyzing data and how Snowflake is doing it it promotes me in phenomena. >> So Ken, I want to come back to you and I say, tap, maybe your historical perspective here. And you said, you know, it's always been a dream that you could do these other things bring in external data. I would say this, that I don't want to push a little bit on this because I have often said that the EDW marketplace really never lived up to its promises of 360 degree views of the customer in real time or near real time analytics. And, and it really has been, as you kind of described are a real challenge for a lot of organizations when Hadoop came in you know, we had, we we we got excited that it was kind of going to actually finally live up to that vision and and and we duped it a lot. And it don't get me wrong. I mean, the whole concept of, you know, bring the compute to data and the lowering the cost and so forth, but it certainly didn't minimize complexity. And, and it seems like, feels like Snowflake is on the cusp of actually delivering that promise that we've been talking about for 30 years. I wonder if you could share your perspective, is it, are we going to get there this time? >> Yeah. And as far as I can tell working with all of our customers, some of them are there. I mean, they're, they Fought through those struggles that you were talking about that I saw throughout my career and now with getting on Snowflake they're, they're delivering customer 360, they're integrating weblogs and IOT data with structured data from their ERP systems or CRM systems, their supply chain systems. And it really is coming to fruition. I mean, the, you know, the industry leaders, you know, Bill Inman and Claudia M Hoff, they've had this vision the whole time, but the technology just wasn't able to support it. And the cloud, as we said about the internet, changed everything and then Ben Y and Terry, in their vision and building the system, taking the best concepts from the Hadoop world and the data Lake world and the enterprise data warehouse world, and putting it all together into this, this architecture, that's now, you know Snowflake and the data cloud solved it. I mean, it's the, you know, the, the classic benefit of her insight is 2020 after years in the industry, they had seen these problems and said like, how can we solve them? Does the cloud let us solve these problems? And the answer was yes, but it did require writing everything from scratch and starting over with because the architecture the cloud just allows you to do things that you just couldn't do before. Yeah I'm glad you brought up, you know, some of the originators of the data warehouse, because it really wasn't their fault. They were trying to solve a problem. That was the marketers that took it and really kind of made promises that they couldn't keep. But the reality is when you talk to customers in the, in the, so the old EDW days, and this is the other thing I want to, I want to tap your guys' brains on. It was very challenging. I mean, one, one customer, one time referred to it as a snake, swallowing a basketball. And what he meant by that is you know, every time there's a change, you know, Sarbanes Oxley comes and we have to ingest all this new data. It's like, Oh, it's just everything slows down to a grinding halt. Every time Intel came out with a new microprocessor, they would go out and grab a new server as fast as they possibly could. He called it chasing the chips, and it was this endless cycle of pain. And so, you know, the originators of the data whereas they didn't, they didn't have you know the compute power, they didn't have the cloud. >> Yeah. >> And so, and of course they didn't have the 30- 40 years of pain to draw upon. But, but I wonder if you could, could maybe talk a little bit about the kinds of things that can be done now that we haven't been able to do here before. >> Well, yeah I remember early on having a conversation with, with Bill about this idea of near real time data warehousing and saying, is this real? Is this something really need people need? And at the time it was, was a couple of decades ago, he said no to them they just want to load their data sooner than once a month. >> Yeah. >> That was the goal. And that was going to be near real time for them. And, but now I'm seeing it with our customers. It's like, now we can do it, you know, with things like the Kafka technology and snow pipe in, in Snowflake, that people are able to get that refresh way faster and have near real time analytics access to that data in a much more timely manner. And so it really is coming true. And the, the compute power that's there, as you said, you know we, we've now got this compute power in the cloud that we never dreamed of. I mean, you would think of only certain very large, massive global companies or governments could afford supercomputers. And that's what it would have taken. And now we've got nearly the power of a supercomputer in our mobile device that we all carry around with us. So being able to harness all that now in the cloud is really opening up opportunities to do things with data and access data in a way that again really we just kind of dreamed of before. It's like, we can, we can democratize data when we get to this point. And I think that's the, that's where we are, we're at that inflection point where now it's, it's possible to do it. So the challenge on organizations is going to be, how do we do it effectively? How do we do it with agility? And how do we do it in a governed manner? You mentioned Sarbanes Oxley, GDPR, CCPA, all of those are out there. And so we have all of that as well. And so that's where, that's where we're going to get into it, right. Is into the governance and being able to do that in a very quick, flexible, extensible manner and you know, Snowflakes really letting people do it now. >> Well, yeah and you know, again, we've been talking about Hadoop and again, for all my, my fond thoughts of that era, and it's not like hadoop is gone, but, but it was a lot of excitement around it but but governance was a huge problem and it was kind of a ball tough enough. Felipe I got to ask you, like when you think about a company like Google your former employer, you know, data is at the core of their business. And so many companies, the data is not at the core of their business. Something else is it's a process or a manufacturing facility or you know whatever it is. And the data is sort of on the outskirts. You know, we often talk about in, in stove pipes. And so we're now seeing organizations really put data at the core of their it becomes, you know, central to their, to their DNA. I'm curious as to your thoughts on that. And also if you've got a lot of experience with developers, is there, is there a developer angle here in this new data world? >> Oh, for sure. I mean, I love seeing every, like throughout my career at Google and my two months here and talking to so many companies, you never thought before, like these are database companies, but the the ones that keep rowing. The ones that keep moving to the next stage of their development is because they are focusing on data. They are adapting the processes they learning from it. And me, I focus a lot on developers. So I mean when I started This career as an advocate. First I was a software engineer and my work so far, has been work, I really loved talking to the engineers on the other companies. Like maybe I'm not the one solving the business problem, but at the end of the day, when these companies have a business problem that they want to row, they want to have data. There are other engineers that are scientists likes me that are, that, that want to work for work for the company and bring the best technology to solve the problems. Yeah, there's so much where data can help as we evolve the system for the company. And also for us for understanding the systems, things like observability and recently, there was a big company, a big launch on observability the company name is observable, where they are running all of their data warehousing needs. And all of their data needs on Snowflake, just because running these massive systems and being able to see how they're working generates a lot of data. And then how do you manage it? How do you analyze it? Or snowflake is already there to help. >> Well you know >> I covered the two areas. >> It's interesting my, my business partner, John farrier, cohost of the cube, he said, gosh, I would say middle of the last decade, maybe even around the time, you know, 2013, when Snowflake was just coming out, he said, he predicted the data would be the new development kit. And you know, it's really at the center of a lot of, you know, the data life cycle, the, the, what I call the data pipelines. I know people use that term differently, but, but I'm, I'm very excited about the data cloud summit and what we're going to learn there. And I get to interview a lot of really cool people. And so I appreciate you guys coming on, but Kent, who, who should attend the data cloud summit, I mean, what, what are the, what should they expect to learn? >> Well, as you said earlier, Dave, there's, there's so many tracks and there's really kind of something for everyone. So we've got a track on unlocking the value of the data cloud, which is really going to speak to, you know, the business leaders, you know, as to what that vision is, what can we do from an organizational perspective, with the data cloud to get that value from the data to, to move our businesses forward. But we've also got, you know, for the technicians migrating to Snowflake training sessions on how to do the migration, modernizing your data like data science, you know how to do analytics with the, and data science in Snowflake and in the data cloud and even down to building apps. So the developers and building data products. So, you know, we've got stuff for developers, we've got stuff for data scientists. We've got stuff for the, the data architects like myself and the data engineers on how to, how to build all of this out. And then there's going to be some industry solutions spotlights as well. So we can talk about different verticals of folks in FinTech and, and in healthcare. There's going to be stuff for them. And then for our, our data superheroes, we have a hallway track where we're going to get talks from the folks that are in our data superheroes, which is really our community advocacy program. So these are folks who are out there in the trenches using Snowflake, delivering value at, at their organizations. And they're going to talk you know down and dirty. How did they make this stuff happen? So there's going to be just really something for everyone, fireside chats with our executives, of course, something I'm really looking forward to in myself. It's always fun to, to hear from Frank and Christian. And Benwah about, you know, what's the next big thing, you know, what are we doing now? Where are we going with all of this? And then there is going to be some awards. We'll be giving out our data driver awards for our most innovative customers. So this is going to be a lot, a lot for everybody to consume and enjoy and learn about this, this new space of, of the data cloud. >> Well, thank you for that Kent. And I'll second that, I mean, there's going to be a lot for everybody. If you're an existing Snowflake customer, there's going to be plenty of two on one content we can get in to the how to's and the best practice. If you're really not that familiar with Snowflake, or you're not a customer, there's a lot of one-on-one content going on. If you're an investor and you want to figure out, okay, what is this vision? And can, you know, will this company grow into its massive valuation and how are they going to do that? I think you're going to, you're going to hear about the data cloud and really try get a perspective. And you can make your own judgment as to, to, you know, whether or not you think that it's going to be as large a market as many people think. So Felipe, I'd love to hear from you what people can expect at the data cloud summit. >> Totally, so I would love to plus one to everyone that Kent said. We have a phenomenal schedule that the the executive will be there. And I really wanted to specially highlight the session I'm preparing with Trevor Noah. I'm sure you might have heard of him. And we are having him at the data cloud summit, and we are going to have a session. We're going to talk about data. We are preparing a session, That's all about how people that love data, that people that want to make data actionable. How can they bring storytelling and make it more, have more impact as he has well learned to do through his life. >> That's awesome, So yeah, Trevor Noah, we're not just going to totally geek out here. We're going to, we're going to have some great entertainment as well. So I want you to go to snowflake.com and click on data cloud summit, 2020 there's four geos. It starts on November 17th and then runs through the week and then the following week in Japan. So, so check that out. We'll see you there. This is Dave Volante for the cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music)

>> Woman: From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCube coming to you from our Palo Alto studios to have a Cube conversation with a real leader in the industry he's been publishing for a long, long time. I've been following him in social media. First time I've ever get the met in person and kind of a virtual COVID 20, 20 way. And we're excited to welcome into the studio. Bob Evans. He's a founder and principal analyst, the Cloud Wars Media coming to us. Bob where are you coming to us from today? >> In Pittsburgh today. Jeff. Good to see you. >> Awesome. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. There's a lot of Fricks in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania cause Henry Clay was there many moons ago so that's a good town. So welcome. >> Thank you, Jeff. Thanks. Great to be here. And I look forward to our conversation. >> Absolutely. So let's, let's jump into it. So I know you attended today, the Citrix Cloud Summit you know, we've covered Citrix energy in the past this year, they decided to go we'll obviously virtual like everybody did but they, you know, they did something a little creative I think as, and they broke it into pieces, which, which I think is the way of the future. There's no reason to necessarily aggregate all of your news, all of your customer stuff, all your customer appreciation, the party the partners, all for three days in Vegas. Cause that's the only time you could get the Science Convention Center. So today was the Cloud Summit all day long. First off, just, you know, your general impressions of the event, >> Jeff, you know, I just thought that the guys had hit a really good note about what's going on in the outside world. You know, sometimes I think it's a little awkward when tech companies come in and the first thing they want to talk about is themselves, which I guess in some ways fine but I think the Citrix guys did a really good job at coming outside in here's what's going on in the outside world. Here's how we as a technology player trying to adapt to that and deliver the maximum value to our customers in this time of unprecedented change. So I thought they really nailed that with cloud and some of the other big topics that they laid out >> Great. And you've been covering cloud for a long time and, and you know, COVID is, we're still in it. There's a lot of really bad things that are happening. There's hundreds of thousands of people that are dying and a lot of businesses are getting crushed especially hospitality, travel you know, anything that relies on an aggregation of people. Conversely though we're, we're fortunate to be in the IT industry and in the information industry. And for a lot of industries, it's actually been kind of an accelerant. And one of the main accelerants is this, you know kind of digital transformation and new way to work. And some of these things that were initiatives in play but on March 15th, approximately it was go, right? It was Light switch no more planning, no more talking, it's here now. Ready, set, go. And it's in, you know, Citrix is in a pretty good position in terms of the products that they offer, the services that they offer, the customer base that they have to take advantage of that opportunity and, and you know, go to this, we've all seen the social media memes right? Who's driving your digital transformation the CEO, the CIO, or COVID. And we all know what the answer to the question is. They're pretty well positioned and it seems like, you know, they're doing a good job kind of doubling down on the opportunity. >> Jeff. Yeah. And I'd sure echo your, your initial point there about the nightmare that everybody's experienced over the last six or seven months. There's, there's no way around that yet. It has forced in these categories like, you know, that we've all heard hundreds of thousand time digital transformation to the point where the term almost becomes a cliche but in fact right? You know, it has become something that's really you know, one of the driving forces, touching everybody in the planet, right? There's, and I think digital transformation. Isn't so much about the technology, of course but it's because, you know, there's a couple billion people around the world who want to live digitally enhanced digitally driven lifestyles. And the pandemic only accelerated that as you said. So it triggered things you know, in our personal lives and our new set of requirements and expectations sort of rippled up to the B2C companies and from them back up to the B2B companies So every company on earth, every industry has had to do this. And like you said, if they were, deluding themselves maybe telling themselves these different companies that yeah, we're going fast, we're aggressive. Well, when this thing hit earlier this year as you said, they just had to really slam their foot down. I think that David Henshall from Citrix said that they had some companies that had, they were compressing three years into five months or he said in some cases even weeks. So it's really been extraordinary. And cloud has been the vehicle for these companies to get over into their digital future. >> Right. And let's talk about that for a minute because you know, Moore's law is my favorite law that nobody knows which was, you know, we tend to underestimate, excuse me we tend to overestimate the impact of technology in the short term of specific technology and underestimate the longterm impact. You know, Gardener kind of uses a similar thing with the hype cycle. And then you know, the thing goes at the end, you know, had COVID hit five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago you know, the ease in which the information workers were able to basically just not show up and turn on their computer at home and have access to most of their tools and most of the security and most of their applications that wasn't even possible. So it's a really interesting, you know, just validation on the enabler that we are actually able to not go to work on Tuesday the 16th or whatever the day was. And for the most part, you know, get most of our work done. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I've thought about it a lot over the last several months. Remember the big consultant companies used to try to do these measures of technology and they'd always come out and say, well, we've done all these studies. And despite the billions of dollars of investment we can't show that IT has actually boosted productivity or, you know, delivered an ROI that customers should be happy with. I was always puzzled by some of the things that went into those. But I would say that today over these last six or seven months to your point, we have seen extraordinary validation of these investments in technology broadly. But specifically I think some of these things that are happening with the cloud, you know, as you've said how fast some companies have been able to do this and then not remarkable thing, Jeff right. About human nature. And we hear a lot about in, in when companies change that relative to changing human behavior changing technology is somewhat easy but you try to change human behavior and it's wicked. Well, we had this highly motivating force behind it, of the pandemic. So you had a desire on the part of people to change. And as you pointed out, there's also this corresponding thing of, you know, the technology was here. It was right. You've got a fast number of companies delivering some extraordinary solutions. And, you know, I thought it was interesting. I think it was a Kirsten Kliphouse from Google cloud. One of Citrix's partners who said that we're two best of breed companies, Citrix and Google cloud. So I thought that, that coming from Google you know, that is very high praise. So again, I think the guys at Citrix are sort of coming into this at the right time with the right set of outside in-approaches and having that flexibility to say that we're moving into territory nobody's ever been both been in before. So we better be able to move as fast as possible. >> Right. Right. And, and just to keep going down the quote line, you know once everyone is taken care of and you, you deal with the health and safety of your people which is a number one, right? The other thing is the great Winston Churchill quote which has never let a good crisis go to waste. And I think you know, David talked about in that, in his keynote that this is an opportunity, He said to challenge assumptions, challenge the models of the past. So, you know get beyond the technology discussion and use this really as a catalyst to rethink the way that you do things. And, you know, I think it's a really interesting moment because there is no model right? There is no, there is no formula for how do you reopen, there was no playbook for how do you shut down? You know, it was, everybody's figuring it out. And you've got kind of all these concurrent processes happening at the same time as everyone tries to figure it out and come to solutions. But clearly, you know, the path to, to leverage as much as you can, is the cloud and the flexibility of the cloud and, you know the ability to, to expand, add more applications. And so, you know, Citrix again, right place, right time right. Solution, but also you know, taking an aggressive tact to take advantage of this opportunity, both in taking care of their customers, but really it's a real great opportunity for them to change a little bit. >> It is. And Jeff, you know, I think if I could just piggyback on you know, your, your guy there Winston Churchill, one of his other quotes, I love it too. And he said, if find yourself crawling through hell, keep going. And I think so many companies have really had to do that now. It's, it's not ideal. It's not maybe the way they plan it but this is the reality we're facing here in 2020 and a couple of things right? I think it requires a new type of leadership within the customer companies right? What, how the CEO gets engaged in saying, I, I'm not going to relegate this to the CIO for this to happen and something else to the CMO. They've got to be front and center on this because people are pretty smart. And then the heightened sensitivity that everybody in every business has around the world today if you think your CEO is just paying lip service to this stuff about digital transformation and all these changes that everybody's going to make, the people aren't going to buy into it. So you've got the leadership thing happening on the one side and into that it's not a vacuum, but into that void or that opportunity of this unprecedented space that you mentioned come the smart, capable forward-looking technology companies that are less concerned with the stuff that they've dragged along with them for years or decade or more. But instead of trying to say, what is the new stuff that people are going to be desperately in need of and how can I help these customers do things that they never did before? It's going to require me as a tech company to do stuff that I've never done before. So I, I've just been really inspired by seeing a lot of the tech companies doing what they are helping their customers to do which is take a product development cycle, look at all the new stuff that came out around COVID and back to work, workspaces. And so on what Citrix, you know others are doing like this, the product development cycles Jeff, you study this stuff closely. It's, it's almost unimaginable. If you had said that somebody within three months within two months, we're going to have a new suite of product available we would have said it just, it's not possible the nice idea but it can't work, but that's happening now, right? >> Yeah. Isn't it interesting that had you asked them on March 10th, they would have told you it's not possible. And by March 20th, they were doing it. >> Yeah. >> At scale, huge companies. And to your point, I think that the good news is they had kind of their own companies to eat their own dog food and get their own employees you know, working from home and then, you know, bake that into the way that they had their go to market. But let's talk a little bit more specifically about work from home or work from anywhere or the new way to work. And it's funny cause that's been bantered about for, for way too long, but now, now it's here. And most indications are that for many people, many companies are saying you're not going to go back for a while. And even when you do go back it's going to be a lot different. So, you know, the new way to work is really important. And there's so much that goes into that. And one of the big pieces that I'm encouraged to hear is how do you measure work? And, you know, there's a great line I heard where, you know work is an output. It's not a place to go. And, you know, I had Martin Michaelson early on in this thing, and he had the great line, you know it's so easy to fake it at work, you know, just look busy and walk around and go to all the meetings where with a work from home or work from anywhere. What the leadership needs to do is, is a couple of things. One, is measure output right? Not activity. And you know, it's great. People can have dinner with their family or go see the kid's baseball game. Or I guess they don't have a baseball games right now but, you know, measure output, not activity which is, doesn't seem to be that revolutionary. But I think it kind of is. And, and then the other thing is really be an enabler and be a, an unblocker for people in terms of a leadership role right? Get out, help get stuff out of the way. And, but unfortunately, the counter is, you know how many apps does a normal person have to interact with every day? And how many notifications do those apps fire off every day between Slack and Asana and Salesforce and, and texts and tweets and everything else. You know, I think there's a real opportunity to take a whole nother level of productivity improvement by removing these, these silly distractions automating, you know, as much of the crap away as we can to enable people to use their brains and have some quiet time and think about things and deliver much better value than this constant reaction to nonstop notifications. >> Yeah. Yeah. Jeff, you know, I loved your point there about the difference between people's outlook on March 10th versus on March 20th. And I believe that, you know, all limitations are self-imposed, right? We tend to form constructs around how we think and allow those then to shape and often restrict or confine our behavior. And here's an example of the CEO of Novartis Pharmaceutical Company. He said, we have been brought up in the pharmaceutical industry to believe that it is immutable law of physics that it's going to take 12 and a half years and two and a half billion dollars to get a new drug approved. And he said in the past with the technology and the processes and the capabilities that that was true it is not true today yet too often, the pharmaceutical industries behave like those external limitations are put in there. So flip that over to one of the customers that, that was at the Citrix Cloud Summit today Jim Noga, who's the CIO at Mass General Brigham. I thought it was remarkable what he said when you asked about how are things going with this work from home? Well, Jim Noga the CIO there said that we had been averaging before COVID 9,000 virtual visits a month. And he said since then that number has gone up to a quarter of a million virtual visits a month or it's 8,000 a day. So they're doing an a day what they used to do in a month. Like, you said it, you tell them that on March 10th, they're not going to believe it but March 20th, it started to become reality. So I think for the customers, they're going to be more drawn to companies that are willing to say, I see your need. I see how fast you want to move. I see where you need to go and do things you never did before. I'm willing to lock elbows with you, and go in on that. And the tech number is that sort of sit back and say, ah well, I'd like to help you there, but that's not what I do. They're going to get destroyed. They're going to get blown out. And I think over the next year or two, we're going to see this massive forcing function in the tech industry. That's going to separate the companies that are able to move at the pace of market and keep up with their customers versus those that are trapped by their past or by their legacy. And it is, going to be a fascinating talk. >> So I throw on a follow up to make sure I understand that number. Those are patient visits per unit time. >> Yeah. At Mass Brigham. So he said 9,000 virtual visits a month is what they're averaging before COVID. He said, now we're up to 250,000 virtual visits per month. >> Wow. >> So it's 8,000 a day. >> Wow. I mean the thing that highlights to me, Bob, and the fact that we're doing this right now, and none of us had to get on an airplane is, you know, I think when people think back or sit back and look at what does this enable? right? What does digital enable? Instead of saying instead of focusing what we can't do, like we can't go out and get a cup of coffee after this is over and we can't and that would be great and we'd have a good time but conversely, there's so many new things that you can do right? And you can reach so many more people than you could physically. And, and for like, you know, events like the one today. And, you know, we cover events all the time. So many more people can attend if they don't have the expense, of flying to Vegas and they don't have to leave the shop or, you know, whatever the limitations are. And we're seeing massive increases in registrants for virtual events, massive increase in new registrants. Who've never attended the, the events before. So I think he really brings up a good point, which is, you know, focus on what you can do and which is a whole new opportunity a whole new space, if you will, as opposed to continuing to whine about the things that we can't do because we can't do anything about those anyway >> No, and you know, that old line of a wish in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first (laughs) you know, one of the other guests that that was on the Cloud Summit today Jeff, I don't know if you got to see 'em, but Steve Shute from SAP who heads up their entire 40,000 person customer success organization he said this about Citrix. "Citrix workspace is the foundation to provide secure cloud based access for this new generation of remote workers." So you get companies like SAP, and, you know, you want to talk about somebody that has earned its way into the, you know the biggest companies in the world and how they go along. You know, it's pretty powerful. They end up, your point Jeff, about how things have changed, focus on what we can do. The former CEO of SAP, Bill McDermott. He recently said, we think of phones as, you know, devices that help us be more productive. We think of computers as devices that help us be more productive. He said, now the world's going to start thinking of the office or the headquarters. It's a productivity tool. That's all it is. It's not the place that measures Hey, he was only at work, four days today. So, you know, he didn't really contribute. It's going to be a productivity tool. So we're going to look at a lot of concepts and just flip them upside down what they meant in February. Isn't going to to mean that much after this incredible change that we've all been through. >> Right. Right. Another big theme I wanted to touch base with you on it was very evident at the at the show today was multicloud right and hybrid cloud. And, you know, I used to work for Oracle in, in the day. And you know Amazon really changed the game in, in public cloud. The greatest line, one of Jeff's best lines is you know, we had seven year headstart. Nobody even was paying attention to the small book seller in Seattle and they completely changed enterprise technology. But what came across today pretty clearly right? As horses for courses, and really focusing at the application first right? The workload first and where that thing runs and how that thing runs, can be any place in that in a large organization you know, this is pick an airline or, or a big bank right? They're going to have stuff running at Oracle. They're going to have stuff running at AWS. They're going to have stuff running on Google. They're going to to have stuff running in Azure. They're going to have stuff running in their data center. IBM cloud, Ali Baba. I mean there's restrictions for location and, and data sovereigncy and all these things that are driving it. And really, you know, kind of drives this concept where the concept of cloud is kind of simple but the actual execution day to day at the enterprise level and managing and keeping track of this stuff, it is definitely a multicloud hybrid cloud. Pick your, pick your, your adjective but it's definitely not a single cloud world. That's for sure. >> Yeah. Yeah. And Jeff, you know, the Citrix customer that I mentioned earlier, Jim Noga is that the CIO at mass General Brigham, one of the other points he made about this was he said he's been very pleased about some of the contributions that cloud has made in, in, in his hospital organizations, you know transformation, what they've been able today and all the new things that they're capable of doing now that they were not people poor. But he said, you know, cloud is a tool. He said, it's not Nirvana. It's not a place for everything. He said, we have some on-premises systems. He said, they're more valuable now than they were a couple of years ago. And then we've got edge devices and we have something else over here. He said, so I think his point was it's important to put the proper value on cloud for all the things it can do for a specific organization, but not the thing that it's a panacea for everything though, big fan, but also a realist about it. >> Great. >> And so from that to the hybrid stuff and multicloud and I know all the big tech vendors would love it and say Oh no, it's not a multicloud, but just be my cloud. Just, just use my stuff. Everything will be easy, but that's not true. So I think Citrix position itself really well big emphasis on security, big emphasis on the experience that employees need to have. It isn't just sort of like a road war you loose five or seven years ago, as long as he, or she can connect through email and, you know, sending a sales data back and forth, they're all set. Now. It's very different. You've got people sitting in a wildly different environments for, you know, six, eight, 10 hours a day and chunk of an hour or two or three here or there. But that, that seamless experience always dependable, always reliable is just, you know, it can't be compromised. And I just thought you have one you know, high level thought about what happened. It was impressive for me to see that Citrix certainly a fine company put it. It's not one of the biggest tech companies in the world but look at the companies we have, the Microsoft, SAP talking about Google Cloud, AWS, you know, up and down the line. So I just thought it was really impressive how they showed their might as sort of a part of a network effect that is undeniable right now. >> Right. Right. And I think it's driven, you know, we hear over and over right? I mean, co-opertition is a very Silicon Valley thing. And ultimately it's about customer choice and the customer's going to choose you know, kind of by workload, even if you will or by budget as to what they're going to do where so you have to be able to operate in that world or you're going to be you're going to get, you're going to get left out unless you're just super dominant and it's a single application and they built it on you and that's it. But that's not realistic. I want to shift gears a little bit Bob, since I'm so happy to be talking to you on another topic, that's, that's a big mega trend and we're slowly seeing more and more applications. That's machine learning and artificial intelligence and you know, and, and the generic conversations about these remind me of the old big data conversations. It's like okay. So what you know, who cares? It doesn't really matter until you apply it. And with all these new applications and even just around the work from home that we discussed earlier, you know, there's so many opportunities to apply machine learning and AI, to very specific functions and tasks to, again, help people prioritize what they're going to do help people not have to deal with the crap that they shouldn't have to do. And really, you know at a whole another level of, of productivity really, based on a smarter way to help them figure out what am I going to do in my next, my next marginal minute? You know, cause ultimately that's the decision that people make when they're sitting down getting work, done it, how do they do the best work? And I think the AI and machine learning opportunities are gargantuan. >> Jeff. The point you made a few minutes ago about, you know, we tend to overestimate the impact of a new technology in the short term and underestimate it, what it'll be overtime well, we've been doing that with AI for the last 40 years but this is going to be sort of the golden age of it. And one of the reasons why I have been so bullish on cloud is it presents like the perfect delivery system for it. This is we see in medicine, there's sometimes breakthroughs at the laboratory level where they've got the new breakthrough medication but they don't have the bullet. They don't have the delivery system to get it in there, cloud's going to be an accelerator for that. And it gives the tech companies, which and this is going to be very good for customers, every big tech company. Now as a data company, every company says, it's an analytics. Everybody says I'm into AI. Every company says I'm into ML. And in a way that's real good for customers cause the competitive level is going to soar. It's going to bring more choice. As you said, the more customers more types of solutions, more sorts of innovation. And it's also going to be incumbent on those tech vendors. You've got to make it as easy as possible, as fast as possible for these customers to get the benefit of it. I think it was Thomas Kurian, the CEO of Google cloud said, Hey, you know, if, if a shoe company or a retailer or a bank had fantastic expertise in data science, they could go out and hire 200 data scientists do this all themselves. He said, but that's not what they do. And they don't want to do that. >> Right. >> So he said, come to the companies who can do it. And I think that we will see changes in how business works driven by ML and AI, unlike anything that we've ever seen. >> Yeah. >> And that's going to happen over the next 12, 18 months. >> Yeah. Baked into everything. Well, Bob, I really am excited that we finally got to catch up in, in person COVID style. Like I said, I've been following you for a long time. So I just gave you the last word before we sign off. You know, you've been in this business for a long time. You've seen lots and lots of waves. You know, this is just another wave with this, with this, you know, gasoline thrown on the fire with, with COVID in terms of the rate of change. And the, you know there's no more talking, the time to move is now, share kind of your perspective as to kind of where we are. And, you know, we're, we're not that far from flipping the calendar to 2021, which is a good thing you know, as you, as you look forward a little bit you know, what's in your mind, what's getting you excited. What's getting you up in the morning. >> Yeah. Jeff, I guess it comes down to this thing of, we, I think here late in 2020, everybody's got a reason to be pretty proud of what we have done, not only in the last six months but over the last several years, if you look at the improvements that have been made in health care and making it available to more people, in education the things that teenagers or young teenagers or even pre-teenagers can do now to learn and explore the world and communicate with people from all over the globe, there's a lot of great things going on, but I think we're going to look back on this point and say, this was, this was a pivot point here in mid and late 2020, when we stopped letting in some ways, as you described it earlier worrying so much about the things we can't do. And instead put more time into what we can do, what breakthroughs can we make. And I think these things we've talked about with AI and ML are going to be a big part of that, the computer industry or the tech industry, maturing and understanding they're not in charge. It's the customers who are in charge here. And the tech companies have to reorient themselves and reimagine themselves to meet the demands of this new fast changing world. And so I think those are some of the mega trends and more and more Jeff, I think these tech companies are going to say that the customers are demanding that the tech companies give them the gift of speed, give them the gift of engaging with customers in new ways, give them the gift of seeing the world as other people see it rather than just through the narrow lens of, you know sometimes the tech bubble that can percolate somewhere out sometimes out in the Palo Alto area. So I, I'm incredibly optimistic about what the future is going to bring. >> Well, Thank you. Thanks for Bob for sharing your insight. You can follow Bob on Twitter. He's got podcasts, he's very prolific writer and again, really, really a great to meet you in person. And thanks for sharing your thoughts >> Jeff, thanks so much. You guys do a fantastic job and it's been a pleasure to be with you. >> Thank you. Allright. He's Bob Evans. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCube from our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by Acronis. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, it's theCUBE's coverage of Acronis Global Cyber Summit 2019 here in Miami Beach, Florida, at the Fontainebleau hotel. I'm John Furrier hosting theCUBE. We're here with Craig Weir, Director of Cloud Portfolio at Ingram Micro. Welcome to theCUBE. Director of Cloud Portfolio at Ingram Micro Cloud, so you guys have a cloud and you guys have sales, technicals out there? >> We got everything, so we have the platform itself, so we have our own platform that is used by one-third of the world telcos. We have large VAR's, DVAR's, SP's using our platform. We're also a cloud aggregator, so we offer pretty much any vendor solution on there, so today, we have over 200 solutions on our platform. We offer services to help partners grow and expand because jumping from where they are today to where they want to go tomorrow is very difficult, so we offer those services, so it's a full package. >> You know, I'm really impressed with Ingram. I got to tell you, Ingram Micro, you guys have essentially reinvented you guys' self in plain sight, so it's like changing the airplane out of 35,000 feet, it's really hard to do. You guys have done it, you've essentially taken a distribution model to the cloud, maintained that stickiness with your clients and partners, and now have automation built in. >> Yeah, we always talk about: we're building a plane while we fly it. And we've been doing that for 10 years. We were the first to get into cloud, we're the world's largest distributor, we know that, but times are changing and you need to adapt with it. So we want to get ahead of the curve, being that we want to own the platform, so we made large acquisitions to be the number-one platform provider. We also want to do the value-added service because partners today want to make that change. They're starting to make that change, but they're not sure exactly how to do it or how to monetize it correctly. So we realized, earlier on, we need to make a massive investment and DNA change in what we do. The old word of pick, pack, and ship is gone, right? Distributing now means a million things that we do. We're more of a service provider than we are anything else. >> Yeah, it's so funny, and also, gross margin used to be higher in the old days. When they started to get hit, started getting out of that direct distribution, there was margin pressure, and again, channel businesses are very efficient. The weak don't survive very long and the ones that are smart actually evolve. This is a great case where you can wrap services around it and, with the cloud, you get operating leverage. So you have an investment, now you have a business model for the next 10, 20 years. >> Yeah, if you think about distributions' basis points, it's a term that doesn't really exist outside distribution where you're razor-thin on those margins, but to your point on cloud, it's much heavier lift, it's much more cooperative selling, so obviously, we want to focus there where we can have growth at a higher profitable rate. And, if you can wrap around platform services around that and make you more money and give more value to the channel, why not? >> Well, that's what the channel wants. They want profitability, want to keep their customers, and increase their gross profit, and that's from services. Now, with software economic margins coming in, the revenue is higher. Software economics are great. >> Yeah, and I think a lot of partners today, NSP's, LAR's, VAR's, DVAR's, they don't really know what is their company actually worth? What's the multiple, right? And they're trying to do that assessment of how much your businesses are actually services and how much is that just reoccurring on an annuity basis, not managed service in some respect. So, for us, we look at that and say, well, how do we actually help you migrate that business? We want to get you to 60, 50, 70% services-led where you're making an average of 10, 20, 30 points. >> And a lot of your partners too have long-standing relationships with customers. And so, by you innovating, that just trickles down to them. That makes it sticky for you guys, great business model. Craig, talk about your relationship with Acronis. We're here at their Global Cyber Summit 2019. Talk about what you guys are doing with them. >> So we've been with Acronis for six years now. We're their largest distributor worldwide. We operate from pretty much every country we operate. They're one of our leading, actually, they are our leading backup disaster recovery and cybersecurity solution. We've an amazing partnership at every single level. When it comes to how we go to market, how we back its position, how we recruit enable partners, it's really next to none. We've very, very aggressive timelines and goals for next year for where we want to go, and where that means it's actually growth, expansion, service offering, no matter what head count we have towards this initiative. Acronis is our number-one provider. >> They have a similar DNA and they're thinking like you guys do with the cloud, thinking about how that transformation business model evolved for Ingram Micro. They're seeing it now with their unique integrated... Well, it won't be unique for long 'cause I think everyone is going to copy it. This integrated holistic view having a platform that's an enable, not just hardware, the infrastructure, where they got a platform layer which is enabling capabilities for sets of services on top. Theirs and their ISV's and developers, I mean that's just a proven platform formula. What's your feedback on that? Do you see that translating well in the field, in the partner networks? >> Yeah, very well, I think today, you think of backup disaster recovery as legacy backup disaster recovery. Where am I backing up to, why am I backing? It's for that disaster. Not remediation of issues, security risks. You're seeing them go into a completely security play which someone argues and says it makes no sense, your backup disaster recovery, your BDR. But, if you think of the ransomware attacks today, the fact that I can have a safe copy hooked up in minutes, the ransomware is no longer an issue. And how they position that is really a security end-to-end solution. It doesn't mean you don't need any other security. Obviously, you still do. But it comes at a very different angle and I think it provides a bit of clarity to customers who are confused. They said that earlier, they mentioned: how many different security providers are becoming open every single day? >> No one wants to buy another tool. >> No, and there's no more large mega offer. There's no one solution. >> You know, solving the ransomware problem certainly is a great way to get breached in any account. Hey, I get the mousetrap for solving ransomware. In that case, that's when a better mousetrap works. You're right to the front of the line. Then, once you're in there, then you got to figure it out. This is what's interesting to me is that it's a data solution. I think you cracked that nut, it's a winning formula. >> If you think of a really basic, what are we trying to do or who are we trying to protect? Either people or information, right? We're not worrying about protecting people today. We're talking about information, so at the end of the day, what's most vital for a company's organization? You're looking at their customer data, their personal data, financial data, and if you think about would you want them to have access to, how do you want to mediate that? So the ability of end-to-end and how that story, which was really, really important to the customer, to have the clarity on why, is critical. >> Well, you guys do a great job on security. I read your reports every year that go out at VMworld and Reinvent, all the different events you guys go to. You guys have great security groups, props to those guys. I want to get back to this data backup thing that you mentioned earlier 'cause we had some insight from our conversation. I was just on with a Forrester analyst where, if you look at backup and recovery, it was basically because it was some operational disruption. That had nothing to do with security. I was like, lights go out, hurricane, Hurricane Sandy, whatever happens, something's happening. And that was all built around the continuity of its down rollback. But now the disruption is security. So no one's actually thought about it that way. So I think these guys have a great angle. I'm thinking of it like, well, if the disruption's security, that eliminates almost all the current solutions because they're just rolling back bad code. >> I don't think it eliminates all of them, but it's a great point. >> Well, the majority of them. >> You sit there and go, well, why is Acronis a security provider? It makes no sense. And you sit back and start thinking about the approach 'cause, again, we're thinking old BD and R. The new world of backup and disaster recovery is not the disaster being a natural occurrence or something with this were to happen. It's the every-single-day cyberattack and ransomware that's happening on a regular basis. That's the new norm. New norm isn't the hurricane, it isn't the cyclone, it's security attacks every day. >> And, happening weekly, two towns are being taken out. Craig, observations from your standpoint being an industry participant. Got experience out there in the field, talked to a lot of customers. You guys have your own cloud. Just in general, the top story of this whole cyber protection, security, data world, what's the top story in your mind? What's the most important story that needs to be continually covered and talked about? >> I think what we're missing today is a lot of partners aren't protecting their own house. At the end of the day, when an MSP is looking after their end user's data, do they really understand what they're responsible for? Do they have the right system in place, right? It's back to the constant security attacks. We're seeing, time and time again, MSP's, medium to small, are having massive breaches and going out of businesses in no time. You see MSP's who want to go to MSSP, but that requires-- >> John: What's that mean? >> Managed security service provider. >> John: Okay, all right. >> So you're an MSP specializing, dedicated on... And security, you have a SOC, which means you have a security operational center, meaning that you have to either buy that or go and invest on it or maybe partner with somebody. It's incredibly expensive. So MSP's today-- >> John: The compliance and the insurance alone. >> The compliance, insurance, the expertise. There's a massive shortage of people. So we see the MSP's today may be fine. Maybe 10% could go make that leap to MSP so that everyone else is figuring out: how do I manage the security space? I have all these different offers I have and solutions I have. A lot of them are homegrown, they're not very good. So, at the end of the day, when we look at what's missing is, hey, if you're an MSP, is your own house protected? Before you try to put everyone else's. Because, if you're managing all that data from that partner, you better make sure your house is protected. >> Protect your own house and I think that's interesting, what just came out of Acronis is that, it's a little bit of a flashy announcement, but the blockchain notary, they say, hey, we'll protect the data in all forms and we'll encrypt it on a blockchain. So that speaks to this blockchain problem. Well, data's a supply chain. >> It is, and you sit there... Again, let's talk old backup disaster recovery. You have data somewhere, it's a copy of your file. Do you know it's a clean copy, an authentic file? Do you know that something hasn't happened to it? And before, we never would've known that. Now we do. >> Yeah, well, I've always said in theCUBE, Dave Vellante and I talk about storages, not about the storage, CPU's and the hardware, but the data that's being stored. Take care of your own house first before you take on other people's data. I love that analogy. >> Yeah and customers are getting smart these days. Customers are looking, they're doing reading. Most customers look each at a time. They're looking at word-of-mouth, a trusted advisor, and they're doing research online. So they're demanding this. >> Craig, I really appreciate your insights. Thanks for taking time to share. Take a minute to give a plug for what you guys do in the cloud, how does someone get involved and work with you, what's a customer for you? Take a minute to give a plug out for what you guys do. >> So Ingram Micro, so we're the largest cloud organization in the world. We'll talk U.S. specifically. >> John: Cloud? >> U.S. cloud. >> John: Amazon's bigger. >> As a distributor. >> John: Okay, distributor cloud, that's what I thought. Just to make sure, you keep an eye on them. >> Yeah, no, it's a good point. So we actually are, we do distribute AWS, we do distribute Azure. They're largest for both of them in the channel perspective. But partners today, what I would say the opportunity to them is there's those who play very heavily in the space, then those that do not. Everyone is somewhere in the middle. Working with Ingram Micro, the ability to really, what we said, the Cloud Awesomeness Roadmap which we presented earlier, we're taking a partner from infancy maybe doing a handful of SaaS offers today to going 10, 20 offers on a regular basis. We really enable and train them to make that jump both financially and from a skillset perspective. >> Can anyone get involved? You guys have a vetting process? They have a cloud SaaS app? >> Yeah, so cloud marketplace, if you're an Ingram Micro account today, you have a free account into our cloud marketplace, which is our e-commerce buying engine which is built on CloudBlue, which is our platform. Free access to it, online purchasing of any SaaS offer you want, depending on what the authorizations are by the SaaS offer. Free access to our team when it comes to how to enable support them, whether it's security, UCA's, backup disaster recovery, public cloud, Microsoft, you name it. And it's really a team dedicated to help the problem solvers, which is everyone here today, solve the current problem of how to get more of an annuity subscription basis. >> Awesome, well, congratulations. Cloud marketplaces are hot, you guys are number-one channel, distributor, cloud, whatever it's called. Is there a category? >> For making new-- >> Channel cloud. >> Yeah, you could say-- >> Distributor cloud. >> We're a distribution service provider. >> Congratulations Ingram Micro trends. Building the plane while they're flying it, I love that one too. It's theCUBE, we're a-flying here in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau hotel for Acronis' Global Cyber Summit 2019. We're back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live coverage here in Toronto for the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit here put on as prior to the big event this week called the Futurist Conference. TheCUBE will be here all week with live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante as we expand our coverage with theCUBE into the blockchain and crypto token economics world. We're here on the ground. We're covering the best events. We started in 2018 initiating CUBE coverage on the sector. Of course we've been covering Bitcoin and blockchain going back to 2011 on SiliconANGLE.com. Dave, we're here to kick off what is the first inaugural event of its kind, combining cloud computing coverage with blockchain, and as we had on our fireside chat last night, we discussed this in detail. Cloud computing and blockchain, either going to be a collision course or it's going to be a nice integration. And we discussed that. This is what this show is all about, is it's really about connecting the dots to the future. The role that cloud computing will play with blockchain and token economics, a variety of different perspectives, but again, this is the first time we in the industry are starting to unpack the mega-trend of cloud computing, which we know is like a freight train powering and disrupting, and we cover it in detail. But blockchain is certainly transforming and reimagining business and process coming together. >> Well, we're here in Toronto, which of course is the birthplace of Ethereum, and it's interesting to see how Toronto has attracted so many developers in the software and engineering space, and there's a huge crypto community here. I'll give you my take on the cloud and blockchain. I don't see them on a collision course. I see blockchain, and we've talked about this, and crypto as a part of this other layer that's emerging. You had the internet, you had the web. On top of that you had cloud, mobile, social, big data, and it was essentially a cloud of remote services. What we're seeing now is this ubiquitous set of digital services of which blockchain is one. And to me it's all about automation, machine intelligence, blockchain being able to do things without middle man. You made that point last night on the fireside chat. And I think it's complementary. You need cloud for scale. Everything's digital, which means data. And you need machine intelligence for automation. And that is the new era that we're entering, and blockchain is playing a big part of that because of its inherent encryption, its immutability, and its ability to show proof of work. So it's a key component of a number of different digital services that are going to transform virtually every industry. >> Certainly, then, that's a tailwind for the industry, and certainly we see that. All the alpha entrepreneurs, alpha geeks, and a lot of the business pros see blockchain and token economics as a dynamic that will certainly change things. Today in Toronto this week, certainly not a good week for pricing of currencies. The crypto market is down, Ethereum and Ripple are at yearly lows. And communities are kind of getting scared. We talked with Matt Roszak, an early investor and founder of BloQ, last night about the price declines, and he said, "I've seen this pattern before. "These price selloffs also kick off "the next wave of growth." So there's a kind of a weeding out, was his perspective. But you can't deny that over the past 24 hours, 30 billion has been erased from the crypto market caps, and the greatest decline is happening under Bitcoin's dominance, and still increased over, still 56% over the year. So Bitcoin seems to be holding more value than, say, Ethereum. Ethereum and Ripple really under a lot of pressure. So the insiders, some are scared, some are like, hey, we've seen this movie before. Waves are a little bit rough right now, but they're in for the long game. So this is a long game going on and then there's also money being lost. >> Well, Matt was saying bet the farm now. He said he's seen this before. Take everything, the mortgage, the house. I'm not sure I would advise doing that, but this is the time, buy low. So just for the numbers, Bitcoin's high last November/December was 19,000, it's down at 6,000 now. So as you say, it's still up almost 50% for the year, but if you compress that timeframe to nine months, it's down 60%, so very, very volatile. Ethereum, on the other hand, last September was trading at around 240, 250, and today it's in the 260s. So back to where it was last September. The curve on Ethereum sort of looks like it did end of last summer, whereas Bitcoin is still almost 70% up from where it was last September. So quite a bit of difference between the two cryptocurrencies. And you mentioned Ripple, IOTA, many of the cryptocurrencies-- >> Ripple's dropping 90% from its 2018 highs. 90%. (both laugh) Some money was made and lost on that one, so again, we always say when the music stops you better be sitting in a chair. Otherwise this is bubble behavior, but you know Matt and others and the insiders are saying they're still bullish because of the pattern. Even though it's a selloff, it's a weeding out process and they see still good deals going on. And again, this is going to come fundamentally down to whose technology's going to be adopted, what kind of application can be written on blockchain, which is seeing some promise in the enterprise. Just yesterday Microsoft announced a blockchain as a service kind of thing with proof of authority and new concepts. IBM, we've been covering IBM with blockchain, their work with the Hyperledger standards. You've got the enterprises. Amazon has kind of telegraphed, they actually put a professional service note out where they are doing some blockchain. The big clouds are getting into the game, so the question is, will the clouds suck all the oxygen out of the blockchain room, and will there be room for other blockchains? Again, this is the big debate. Is it going to be a fragmentation of a series of blockchains, or will there be some sort of set of standards? Again, we don't know what the stack's going to look like because the best thing about blockchain is you could roll it out and implement a portion of the stack and still coexist with whatever standards emerge. So again, these are the questions. >> Well, one of the conversations that of course is going on is actually, the number of transactions that's occurring with Bitcoin is way down, it's probably down 20% year to date. The other conversation is we all know that Bitcoin and Ethereum, the transaction volumes can't really support what we do with Visa or even Amazon. There's a discussion in the industry going around about what if Amazon shows some other coin? Like Ripple, for example, which has much higher transaction volumes. Or what if Amazon tokenized its own business, came up its own cryptocurrency? What would that do to the price of Bitcoin, if all of a sudden you could transact in Prime using AmazonCoin or something like that? And we know that Amazon understands how to scale, it obviously understands cloud. That's why I do see cloud and blockchain as complementary. It's very difficult to predict the future. There are those who say Bitcoin is the standard, it's got the brand. There are those who say that Ethereum, because it's much more flexible and you can program distributed apps with it, have a great future. And then everybody points to the transaction volumes and says, this is just a Petri dish for the future where new technologies will emerge that scale better and can produce. >> What's interesting last night on the, we had a fireside chat with Al Burgio, serial entrepreneur, founder of DigitalBits, and Matt Roszak, obviously founder of BloQ and investor, he's on the Forbes billionaire list, super active, very engaged on a lot of advisors, Binance is one and many other deals he's done, it's interesting, you got two perspectives. Al is the networking guy who knows plumbing, knows how networks work, and Matt's a token economics genius. So the two have interesting perspectives and the battle royal going on right now, in my opinion, is two things. I think token economics is a wonderful thing that's going to happen no matter what the standards are, 'cause token economics really is the value to me of the cryptocurrency that can be applied to new business models and efficiencies. The blockchain is a land grab, and here's why. I think whoever can nail the plumbing and the pipes of the infrastructure reminds me of the early days of the dial-up web, when you had points of presence and you had the infrastructure had to be laid down. Although slow, people can dial up and get the internet, then obviously the internet got faster and faster. Blockchain's struggling from that scalability performance issues, and so the question is, on a public blockchain, you got to have the supernodes, you got to have the core infrastructure plumbing nailed. I think Al Burgio takes that perspective. Then everything else just will flourish from there. So the question is, what do those hurdles look like? And this is where the cloud guys could either be an enabler or they could be a foe against the core community. Like you said, Amazon could just snap their fingers tomorrow and take out the entire industry with one move. Just, we're going to do our own blockchain as a service. Everyone uses it, here's our token, and then a set of sub-tokens would have to be coexisting with that. And that could be a good thing, we don't know. This is the discussion. >> And governments around the world could do the same. US government could do Fedcoin, the Chinese government could do Chinacoin. I mean, what would that do to the prices of cryptocurrencies? I mean, it would send it into a tailspin, you would presume. And it was interesting. Matt Roszak on your panel last night, I asked the question, well, traditional banks lose control of the payment systems. And granted, he's biased, and he was definitive. Yes, absolutely. But the counterargument to that, John, and I'd love your thoughts on this, is the US government and the banks have a lot to lose. And they're kind in bed together and always have been. So one would think, with the backing of the US, its might, its military, et cetera, that they're not just going to let the banks lose control. Now, to his point is, why do you need to pay transaction fees to a bank? But you're paying transaction fees to somebody, even in crypto. >> I think our government in the United States is really asleep at the wheel on this one. And here's why. One of the beautiful things about the internet was it was started through collaboration in the universities in the United States. The United States enabled the internet to happen, and the Department of Commerce managed it. The Domain Name System was managed in a very community-oriented way. Again, community, keyword. As opposed to all this, that history is well-documented. If people aren't familiar with the history of the Domain Name System, DNS, go check out the Wikipedia, research it. It was run by a bunch of people who managed the database of website names. And that became sacred and was distributed. >> And funded by the US government. >> Funded by the US government, but the community managed it. The problem with the US government today is that they are meddling in areas that they actually shouldn't be even playing in. You got the SEC, it's shutting down everything right now just by the threat of subpoenas in the ICO market, which puts the overall country into a handicapped position, because now the innovation of blockchain and the entrepreneurial innovation that's happening is stunted, and it's just shifting outside the United States. So what's happening is the money flow and the energy and the activity is so high that incubation's not happening in the United States, although a lot of people are working on it. There's no funding mechanism. The capital formation of blockchain's different than venture. It's not super different, but somewhat different, but it's happening outside the United States. Certainly the Chinese will be in benefit of this. And if the Chinese wanted to shut down blockchain they would have done it by now. They're actually fostering it, and it's an opportunity for someone on the international stage to get a lever in the United States. So that's one. The second thing is they can enable crypto if they wanted to and I think they really should look at that and I think the banks are central organizations, the World Bank, they're under a lot of pressure. They don't know what to do. So when I talk to people, that's the same answer in so many words, is the government and the regulators really just don't know what to do. >> Well, and Matt made the point last night, Matt Roszak, that when he talks to these banks they're talking about using blockchain and they're very excited because they're going to take hundreds of millions of dollars of cost out of their, you know, infrastructure and their processes that are just not very efficient, and that's going to drop right to the bottom line. And of course they're in the money business, so that gets them very excited. His point was that's really not what it's about. Yeah, that's nice, but it's really about transforming the businesses, and that's why I asked the question about banks losing control of the payment systems. Opens up a whole new opportunities, whether it's financial services, healthcare, automotive. And again, to me, it comes back to digital, which is data, plus machine intelligence plus cloud for scale. You called it. I think at IBM Think, you coined it the innovation sandwich. Data plus machine intelligence plus cloud for scale. Put that together, that is the innovation engine for the next decade plus. >> The innovation sandwich, unlike a wish sandwich, where you wish you had some meat in the middle. You know, this is a good point. Let's end this kickoff and get into some of the interviews here with these really early thought leaders in this new conference. This is the first of its kind, cloud and blockchain, and we're going to certainly continue this in Silicon Valley with theCUBE summit coming up and our events that we do. But let's get some predictions out, because remember, this is theCUBE. Everything's going to be out there, it's going to be on the record, so we can look back and say, hey Dave, remember in 2018 when I asked you what's going to happen? So let's get into a prediction. What do you think's going to happen? I'll start and you can think up an answer. So here's my prediction on this whole blockchain world. Not so much crypto or token economics. It's really two predictions. With respect to blockchain, I think you're going to see an exact movement that the cloud market took, and I think it's going to happen in three phases. Phase one is all the energy's going to go into public blockchain, and public blockchain will be figured out first, and people are going to get excited by the new operation models of blockchain, specifically the decentralization of how that works and the benefits of decentralized blockchain, immutability, no central authority, and all the benefits of blockchain. I think it's going to be very rapid growth in the fixing of blockchain. Speed, scale, that's going to happen very quickly. And it's going to happen publicly. Then you're going to see private blockchains. You're going to see on premises kind of like blockchain. Kind of like the cloud, people have onsite, private. And then you're going to see a hybrid. The hybrid will look like multi-chain solutions. This is almost an exact trajectory that cloud computing took, because blockchain feels like a cousin of cloud or a brother or a sister. So it's related, but not exactly, but I think it's kind of the same trajectory. Public, private, hybrid, which is a multi-chain model, and I think that's going to be the standards. That's going to be the market track. On the token side, I think you're going to see a couple key tokens, like certainly Bitcoin's not going away. I'd be doubling down on Bitcoin under 6,000, like everything on that. That should hit 20,000, in my opinion, over the next timeframe. But there's going to be a lot of token integrations. My token integrates with your token and almost natives and secondary tokens kind of blending together where people with coexist tokens on one platform. So it's just too powerful not to have that happen. So that's my prediction. What do you think? >> I think as it relates to blockchain, I think blockchain becomes, in the enterprise I think it becomes an invisible component of virtually every industry. 'Cause every industry has waste, can improve efficiencies, and blockchain becomes a way to, whether it's supply chain or settlements or shared ledgers, I mean, there's dozens of applications for them and I think blockchain becomes a fundamental component of a digital infrastructure, and it's starting now and I think it's here to stay for many decades and beyond. And you won't even see it. It's just going to be there. It's going to become a fundamental part of how we do business. On the token side, very interesting, obviously, hard to predict. I think that you're going to see continued volatility, of course, I think that's a safe bet. But I also think it's potentially going to get worse before it gets better. I think there's going to be a shakeout. I think you're going to see, there continues to be pump and dump scams going on, the US government's getting more aggressive, a bunch of subpoenas went out, and people are still trying to understand what that all means. So I think it's going to be rocky roads for a while. I think you're going to see a big shakeout, like a big dip, and then I think it's going to power back. I think the crypto is here to stay. And it's very, very hard to time these markets, so my advice is just buy, trickle buys on the way down and hold. HODL, as they say in this world. And I think 10 years from now it's going to be worth a lot. >> Alright, you got it here, theCUBE. We are in Toronto for the first inaugural Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit. Of course, part of the big event here in Toronto, Futurist Conference, which we'll be there live. Wednesday and Thursday, the kickoff is Tuesday night for the opening reception. It's theCUBE coverage continuing for blockchain and crypto markets. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more live coverage here in Toronto.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in Toronto for the Blockchain Cloud Summit, part of the Blockchain Futurist event happening tomorrow and Thursday here in Toronto. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here with Gabriel Abed who's the founder of Bitt and also the Digital Asset Fund. Great story he's been there from the beginning. President at creation in the movement that's now changing the world. Blockchain and cryptocurrency certainly. Infrastructure and token economics, changing how things are doing. And rolling out, reimagining everything from infrastructure to value exchanges. Gabriel welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you it's great to be here. >> So we were just talking on camera, you like to go after the big changes. You're an entrepreneur, you have that fire in your belly. You've been very successful. Where are we? I mean, you've been part of the movement, we're now on the cusp of mainstream adoption, there's still work to do. >> Oh, plenty of work. Lots of infrastructure still to build, many regulators and legislators still to educate, lots of laws still to be amended and changed. And, at the end of the day, it's happening and it's happening quickly and beautifully right now. The entire industry is changing. >> One of the things that you've done, you've taken on some big projects and you've made change happen. Regulation is one of the hottest topics we're hearing certainly in the United States, it affects innovation and there's so much entrepreneurial activity happening right now. There's so many entrepreneurs, alpha entrepreneurs really want to do great things, and regulation is just a blocker. It's an antibody for innovation. And you've busted through that. And it's probably going to continue. The old guard is either going to be replaced or adapting to the technology. You've done that, and a lot of people want to do what you've done. What's the secret? What's the secret of your success? How have you taken on these big, incumbent positions and taken them over >> But you're not running from regulators, you're embracing them. >> No, no, I think regulators are important to a responsible and sophisticated market. When my partner and I started Bitt in 2013, 2014, we immediately realized that if we wanted to build a product for the monetary authorities around the world, we needed to have the buy-in from the regulators. So from day one we were regulator-friendly. And it's not to say that we don't believe in a decentralized future, I'm as big of an advocate for decentralization and the freedom of information as anyone else, but I'm also a big believer in if you're a product for a market in the traditional world you have to involve the regulators in order to ensure that product does its job, keeps the consumers safe, and ensures that the economy around it doesn't collapse. So regulators are critical in this field. >> Talk about what you guys have done. Take a minute to explain the project you did, how it worked out, the tenacity, but also, what was the outcome? What were you trying to do in the project and where is it right now? >> It depends on the project you're referring to >> Maybe start at the beginning >> The Caribbean >> Let's start at the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, so, Gabriel Abed, born, raised, educated in Barbados, around the age of 19, I decided I was going to take my computer science education a bit further. I went to Canada, I did a Bachelor of IT, where I majored in network security. In Ontario, the University of Ontario. And, unlike the rest of of my peers, who usually stay in Canada, I decided to go back to my little nation with the education that I had just received. And I took that education home, and started one of the world's first blockchain companies, but at the time I didn't understand blockchain per se, I understood it as a commodity, as a cool investment, I didn't understand the true nature behind the protocol itself. It was only until 2013 that my partner and I ran one of the larger mining operations in the world, that we realized a commodity was actually a protocol. A network tool. A system that you could build on top of. So in 2014, we actually created one of the world's first blockchain assets, on Bitcoin's blockchain. And that a representation of a digital dollar for a central bank. And the notion behind Bitt.com in 2014 was, let's compete with cash, because it's inefficient, it's costly, and it slows down the movement of society. So what we wanted to do is create a digital version of that, that would save economies hundreds of millions of dollars. Cash is expensive to to create, that linen, plastic, paper money, it's easily forged, it can be counterfeited, it's hard to transport, it has an expense to transport, it has an expense to count, it has an expense to secure, and then it has overheads around the entire ecosystem of accountability. Whereas, a blockchain-based digital dollar eliminates all of those efficiencies, and increases the ability for a monetary authority to trace, track, and have a better form of anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing and a better overview of their entire society. So that all, we took that notion, went to the central bank of Barbados, who at the time was being led by Dr. DeLisle Worrell, and our very first meeting he had asked me to excuse his office. And 13 meetings later, and a whole two years, lots of development, building out infrastructure around compliance, around finance, around security, and around regulation, we finally got the nod of approval from Dr. DeLisle Worrell to operate a fiat example of a digital dollar in Barbados. And since then, we have been working with several central banks around the world, bitt.com today is the leading central bank provider for digital dollars. A lot has changed, I've developed other tools since, and other businesses, but bitt.com continues to be the best friend for central banks looking to move and transition into the digital arena. >> Why, I mean other than a closed mindset, why wouldn't every government around the world want to move in this direction? Initiate some kind of FedCoin, for example. >> Education, education, it's the fear that the system may not be scalable, it's the fear that the system could be hacked, it's the fear that they could be cut out, their control, at the end of the day, monetary authorities, like the Federal Reserve, they have a control on the money supply. Whereas, something like decentralized cryptographic currencies, there is nobody in control of the money supply. Hence, inflation versus deflation systems. Then there's the issue of hacking and the threat of digital and cybersecurity. Typically, the head of these monetary authorities are older gentlemen who are traditionally conservative. And who are not (mumbles) with cybersecurity. So the fear of hacking is very real for someone like them, whereas someone like me who is trained as a network security expert, those fears can be mitigated with good policy and procedure, cold wallets, and the right process, to ensuring the environment can run without the risk or the fear of malicious attacks. So it really boils down to education. The educated governors of central banks, like there's one, for example, Timothy Antoine. Dr. Antoine is the governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. And they govern and mandate the currency union of eight islands below them. St. Lucia, Grenada, Antigua, et cetera. Now, he's a governor that gets this and has wrapped his head around it, and understands that this is the future. He gets it so much that he signed an agreement with bitt.com to begin exploring a pilot for his currency union to have a digital dollar implemented in it. You also have governors and presidents like that of Curacao. Or the central bank of Curacao, where we've just signed an agreement to move forward with a phase of looking at the implications of rolling out a digital dollar in a society like Curacao and St. Maarten. What is the ramifications? What is the feasibility study behind that? So, to answer your question, it's not every single regulator, governor, and central bank manager is going to head toward this technology tomorrow. But with more education, and more lobbying, you will see more and more central bank governors moving in this direction, because it's better, cheaper, faster, makes their job easier, gives them more control, gives them more oversight, and provides all the things that they would want as a central bank to continue to do their job for their society. Which is to protect their dollar from alien threats. And to ensure that the dollar remains stable, and to just generally ensure that the society is functioning the way it should. >> Gabriel, what's your vision on what this will enable for the citizens? What's the impact that you see happening? If this continues down the trajectory, what is the adoption look like, impact to people's lives on a everyday basis. >> Well, for a very starting point, you democratize payment. Right now, if I want to make a payment, I have to go through a utility company called a bank. And this bank typically has frictional costs, and frictional overheads and time. That's one of the biggest problems, is that these monopolistic infrastructures hinder the ability for the average participation of a free-flowing payment system. So what you end up having is rather than me being able to make a digital payment in seconds, with no cost, I have to wait days, I have to use manual-based systems whether it's check, cash or the bank's Visa Mastercard system. And then it has frictional costs. So right off the bat, you democratize payment. What does that do for a society in a developing nation? It empowers people. And you're empowered because now as a developer, I can build on this payment system. As an entrepreneur, I can tap in to this payment system. As a merchant, I can utilize this low-cost payment system. As a society, I now have GDP growth because of financial inclusion. The underbanked, who do not have access to banking facilities for one reason or another, maybe they don't like the bank, maybe the banks don't like them. Maybe they don't have two proofs of ID. Maybe they don't have a fixed place of abode. Maybe they don't have the minimum deposit amount. All of these features keep the poor and the underbanked out of the system. Whereas, in developed nations, we have mobile penetration rates that are through the roof. In some cases, like Barbados, over 100 percent. So if you have 100 percent penetration rate of this mobile platform, this thing in my pocket, but I cannot access the banking system, well flip that around, democratize the payment system, allow payments to exist on this mobile phone, and watch how quickly society becomes banked. So what you end up having is full adoption. Why would we not have full adoption when it's cheaper, it's faster, it's more inclusive. >> And the data from that collective intelligence only creates a digital nation >> A more responsible environment. >> Wealth creation environment. >> It creates a more traced, tracked, and accountable society so that the monetary authorities in the government can now start making educated decisions on data. They now know who's buying milk, who's gambling, who's paying their taxes and who's not. >> The downstream benefits of this are massive. >> The downstream benefits are massive, enormous. They're disruptive. This is a brand new fiscal tool, a monetary tool, being given to central banks to start eroding the field of private e-money systems, and to start bringing about a uniform standard towards payments. Plain and simple. We're going to the central banks and introducing a new monetary instrument, that they're in control of. That now the commercial banks, the financial institutions, the corporatocracies, the citizens, and the merchants can all fall under one roof issued by their monetary authority. And this is not a cell phone company or a bank building their own private system that I have to jump through some hoops and some red tape and sign away my first born and give away my left arm to enter. This is a free and open source standard system. >> And it's networked, as you said, penetration is 100 percent on mobile or roughly that, it's a network society that now has digital fabric built into it. This is the future. >> But I played this out in terms of, when you talked about this in your panel, now every device, every thing, every physical asset will be instrumented. >> Yes. >> And as a result, theory can be coconuts. >> You're building the deep infrastructure. I remember we met with World Bank back in 2014 and they coined this term for me. Because they were saying we want to help entrepreneurs and it's important to help entrepreneurs in developing nations because they're the lifeblood of it. But what we are building is the deep infrastructure. And that's exactly what it is. It's the infrastructure that would allow the entrepreneur and the developer to now have a framework that they can build against to provide more uplift. So in essence, it's really going to be exponential growth once systems like this are implemented. The stock market can move digital, and people could buy stocks using digital dollars. E-commerce can occur because I can now buy things online or sell things online with digital dollars. I can now be part of a global, financial ecosystem, with my smartphone and my wallet. >> That's a great use case, congratulations on amazing success, so much is on your plate, you've had great success in this new era, what's on your plate now, what are you working on, what's happening in your world now? >> So in 2017, we realized Bitt was entering a new growth phase. It was no longer a battle of trying to convince regulators and central banks, our product had been proven. Our reputation had been proven. It was time now to scale the company into a professional level of dealing with these regulators around the world. At the end of the day, we would like to digitize cash, wherever cash exists. And to provide those tools for central banks around the world. That would require professional management, and that is not I. >> (laughs) >> So, our investors and shareholders were quite comfortable with our proposal of bringing on that professional management, so in 2017 I resigned as CEO, retained a board position and still single largest shareholder, but with the idea of what other types of infrastructure can I build, now that a deep infrastructure had been put in place. So I've been attacking three major markets, the banking sector, an actual commercial banking enterprise working with a group from the United States towards looking at deploying the future of where we think commercial banking is going. I think that the community, the crypto community in general, there's a lot of noise happening in the chats. And therefore we built a machine learning chat bot to start looking at market sentiments and aggregating market information and of course building common tools for community members. So we've launched a agent called Gabby, the form to gab. My name's Gabriel and my mom calls me Gabby, so it works out quite well. >> You have the gift of gab that's for sure. >> And then I launched a mutual fund with a very sophisticated former managing director of JPMorgan. A guy named Richard Galvin. And we launched the world's first protocol-only fund. We focus only on protocols. And that's called Digital Asset Fund. And we launched that in late 2017 and got full regulatory approval to become a professional fund, that handles 100 percent, solely crypto. And that's basically been my ride, and then outside of that, just your standard consulting, because everybody from World Bank, to IADB, to some government agency to some private organization wants to know about blockchain they want advice, and they need a team of people to give them that advice. So it's just been, all around, looking at how I can be an entrepreneur in this space, while finding great leaders, and partnering with those leaders to build out great companies. While still focusing on ensuring bitt.com becomes the solution for dollars, digital dollars, worldwide. >> Got a great mission, entrepreneur, builder, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Industry's lucky to have you, congratulations. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you guys. >> CUBE coverage here, live in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in concert with the Blockchain Futures Conference happening in the next two days after today. More coverage from theCUBE we're live here, stay with us for more great coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's the theCUBE, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to CUBE's coverage in Toronto for the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit, part of the big event also happening for two days, Wednesday and Thursday, the Blockchain Futurist Conference, here in Canada. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante here. Next guest is the founder and CEO of DigitalBits.io as well as Fusechain and serial entrepreneur and also the mastermind behind this inaugural event. First time a cloud blockchain conference has come together, bringing the two communities together. Al, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming to Toronto, Canada. >> It's our pleasure. Certainly as you know, we love cloud. We cover all the big cloud shows. We're dominating that market in terms of coverage and access. And we just started covering blockchain in 2018 with theCUBE, although on SiliconANGLE since 2011 with the written word in journalism. But this is interesting. You are the brainchild behind this event, and I want you to explain why you came up with this event idea because this is the first time that you got two worlds coming together. You're bringing in the cloud DNA, and that can go back to like, classic networking and think big hosting providers, the Exodus and the Equinox of the world. These guys are the same guys who built YouTube's back end and Facebook. Large scale network guys with this new emerging blockchain world because there's some connections points, and it's super important, and no one's ever done that before. What's the motivation behind a cloud and blockchain summit? >> Well, if you think of the internet, all that data, all that traffic, substantial majority of it is flowing through data centers, infrastructure providers globally. And within many of those data centers you have cloud providers, whether it's cloud computing, SaaS, Software as a Service, cloud providers, you name it. And now we have upon us this emerging blockchain technology. Many are referring to it as Web3.0. And I'm obviously a big believer in that this is the next evolution of the internet. We got Internet1.0 in the 90's. We had Web2.0 with social sharing economy and so forth, and along the way, each step you had your first movers, your willing followers, and then the unwilling followed. It's been that powerful the last two occurrences that we saw with the evolution of the internet. Web3.0 is that next thing. First movers, willing followers, the unwilling. Every time you have this something very innovative, obviously there's a big engineering initially starts amongst, you know, a community of engineers, and then it starts to go mainstream. Obviously a lot happens in between conception and going mainstream. And if we look at the 90's, Linux played a substantial role in the acceleration of innovation. It really extracted, you know, it took a different approach to software, really leading open-source. >> It took down some proprietary incumbents - Unix. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And free and open-source software, but it still needed to be supported. Which version of Linux should enterprises embrace? And at that time, it was very important with what we saw emerge with things like Intel, IBM, Dell, HP, and so forth getting behind organizations like Red Hat and their version of Linux, now known as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. >> IBM put in a billion dollars into it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Steve Woz, yeah. >> So with regard to that, you know, it was all about the hardware validating, right? These trusted vendors to the enterprise. And them kind of validating a company, or endorsing a company, in effect, like Red Hat, really helped provide a guiding light to the enterprise. Now it's not about hardware, it's about the cloud, right? Cloud computing providers and so forth. And in that ecosystem, it's not just AWS. It's not just Microsoft. There are many data center providers that have built a cloud computing offering that are supporting substantial financial institutions, substantial organizations within healthcare space insurance, and many, many other industries. So they play a very important role in supporting an enterprise, whether implementation, integration, and consumption of technologies, including new and emerging technologies. And so as we have, sort of, before us, this emergence of blockchain, obviously having lived in the cloud and infrastructure community for a number of years with that last company I had founded, know a lot of the key stakeholders. And even though I'm all in on blockchain, you know, I pop in every now and then in that world. What I found was two different extremes. You have CTO's and even CEO's of cloud computing organizations, and others within those organizations, totally high "Get It" factor. And you had the other extreme, multi-billion dollar cloud computing organizations, you know, data center organizations, where again, the leadership is still trying to figure it out, in some respects, not fully paying attention yet. And I saw that this is definitely emerging. Again, you'll have first movers, willing followers, and the unwilling. They're all going to get there. But it hadn't gotten there yet. And so with regards to this event, I saw a huge opportunity to really put something out there, allow it to ultimately take a life of it's own. There's a new organizer that's going to be coming forward and driving the ship with this event. But ultimately, there needed to be a forum, not just here in North America, but in every corner of the world, the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit, providing this opportunity for that convergence, and for both communities to really share knowledge and accelerate, fill that gap. And I saw it's there. It is there. There's amazing things being spoken on stage as we sort of are sitting here, with leading innovators, and so forth, from both sides. There was an amazing keynote today by Anthony Di Iorio, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and founder and CEO of Decentral and Jaxx, really helping support the event today and making a contribution. His talk was phenomenal. That's kind of the thought behind it, and it's, you know, here we are. >> I want to pick up on something you said, for our audience, you know. I mean, for guys like you, Al, that are deep into it, you understand this very well. But you talked about Linux, and how, essentially, the Web was built on Linux. So if you were a Linux developer back in the day, and you wanted to "invest" in Linux, you didn't have a vehicle to do that. You could put your time in, you know? You could maybe join a company and maybe get some stock. But there was no way to directly invest in Linux. Well today, there is. With blockchain and cryptoeconomics, you actually can, whether it's tokenize your business or participate, you can buy tokens. And so it's a whole different incentive structure. And many in our audience are sort of new to this, kind of the unwilling, if you will. >> Yeah. >> And that's an amazing new way to create capital structures. >> And very powerful. I mean, prior to this tokenized revolution we're seeing here, it was a cool open-source project that as an engineer you wanted to be part of this, contribute your time, and quite often you would ask your employer to permit you to have 10%, 20% of your time to commit to these projects. Maybe you would even ask for that in your job interview. And you'd maybe get the thumbs up, you know? And so, your employer's, in effect, subsidizing your time to really contribute to projects and code that you're very passionate about. But if they got busy, economic cycles and what have you, and it's like, "You know what? We need you at 100% focus on your day job." All of a sudden, that community, that open-source community is losing perhaps a very valuable contributor, right? And there's really no way for that direct incentive from that project. And that's really what that is now. Projects can be created. You think of, you know, some blockchain's like an operating system, you now have an, you know, to use the Linux comparison, now let's say an operating system can have it's own incentive, a reward or compensation structure to really help attract engineers and other valuable contributors to not just give birth to a project, but help make it sustainable. >> Yeah. >> And, you know, eventually maybe you're quitting the day job because it's able to be free, open-source, and providing an enlightening self-interest. >> I'm getting some messages here, direct messages, listening to you talk. So I want to share them with you. One guy says, "Hey, Al. What's the deal with the different blockchains? How do I tell?" So I'm not an unwilling. I'm a wanna-believe. I'm not the front-end, but what do I pay attention to? And there's so many different chains. You got people promoting certain things. I don't know whose stats are real. You got two kids in a garage, >> Yeah. >> who just did an ICS. So the question is essentially what's the difference between all these chains? What do I have to look for? Is it latency? Who's solving these problems? What's the big deal, and how do I determine better chain from another chain? Are they all going to work together? >> Yeah. >> What's your thoughts? >> Things are moving incredibly fast right now. And it is difficult to keep up to speed. You know, maybe it was just bitcoin at one time and one chain to focus on. Then there was Ethereum and all these others. Now there's many, many more. So ultimately, it is about information, staying current with that information, doing your due diligence. But you really need to have a community that you're a part of, that you can, kind of, share in your evaluation and monitoring of what's new and emerging. >> So community's important. >> Very important, very important. Just say trusted advisors, trusted peers, and you kind of take a collective approach at this. Nonetheless, we're in this pioneering era, mass innovation happening. What's winning today, you know, may not necessarily be continuing to win tomorrow. But you really need to maintain a discipline, and take a peer approach to staying current. In terms of public chain, private chain, they're all going to play a role, and they are playing a role, in different use cases. There's clearly a use case for private chain within enterprise, within say, you know, trusted circle of supply chain participants. Maybe you want to bring some efficiencies to all that. >> So use case drives the chain. >> Yeah, absolutely. But public chain is a phenomenal phenomenon. Among other things that we hear a lot about it, it's given birth to the ICO. The new way of capital formation that is unbelievably awesome. The world has never seen anything like this, where. >> Explain that. Capital formation dynamic that you're referring to. >> Yeah, so the traditional way, whether it's in Silicon Valley or any other part of the world, you have an entrepreneur that maybe they haven't had a big exit where they can fund their own next venture on their own. You know. Smart intelligent people with a brilliant idea, and they're doing that friends and family route, right? The due diligence checklist isn't that long. It's like, you know what? Love my son. He's the smartest kid on the planet. You know, you give him a few dollars and a few other friends and family, this new emerging entrepreneur. And if there's evolution there, things are picking up traction and so forth, then maybe you're doing an angel round. And there's this sort of structured process that history's sort of define for us. And then from an angel round, you know, you have this early stage company emerging, and new milestones being reached, and then maybe there's a Series A venture capital round, and what have you. And then you have the, you know, the Series A, Series B, and so forth, right? The typical approach to things. A very regimented Silicon Valley has been a dominating force of the venture capital community, and that form of competition >> But the dynamics are different than the venture capital. >> Yeah, so that's the way that we've always, sort of, known, right? Many early stage companies, the process they go through. Many, many meetings behind closed doors, and so forth. >> Cloak and dagger, black box. >> Yeah, so concept of crowdsourcing, still beholden to the financial systems that're up there. How do you really foster community up there? And raise maybe a few million dollars? >> So what you're saying is is that it's easier to raise money now? Easier? >> It absolutely is. You have this new meeting of exchange where you have cryptocurrencies like Ether. And you're basically sharing your idea with the world, and all of a sudden, saying, "Hey, here's our token economics. We'd like to reach some capital." And then whether it's minutes, hours, or even weeks, you have capital coming to you from different corners of the world, and it's coming to you in seconds. Highly efficient. You have these universal currencies now emerging, and it's an amazing sensation, and it's a new form of capital formation, and with capital formation, you have innovation. So I believe that, you know, we're just going to continue to see an acceleration of innovation, globally happening, and not just in certain pockets of the world now, in many, many corners of the world. I mean what's happening in Asia's absolutely phenomenal in the blockchain space as well. It's not just interesting here in North America. In fact, in some respects even more interesting, depending on how you look at it. >> Describe what's happening in Asia. You guys talked about this last night in the fireside chat. >> Well, I mean some of the publicly available information is that you can just simply see, on many of the cryptocurrency exchanges out there, an insane amount of volume, more so than in any other corner of the world. And so you have a very active investor community up there, a trading community, token-buyer community, what have you. >> And where are the pockets? >> Very healthy. >> So it was China, and then things sort of shifted to Japan. >> Well, >> Where do you see the action? >> maybe where the centralized exchange in happening, but I think it's still a lot of the same people. It's not like it got shut down in a country, and those people just lost their desire. They just found an alternative means to continue to participate. >> Right. >> You know, South Korea, it's phenomenal. You have Hong Kong. You have Japan. You have Singapore, among many of the pockets. But then it's everywhere. I mean, you're meeting people from Vietnam, Thailand, India. They're all very active investor communities and utility token buyer communities. And it's very healthy. Yes, you have, you know, a correction every now and then in this market. But you have that with any sort of new, exciting innovation. But it continues to thrive up there. It's phenomenal. >> Yeah, you're seeing one of the main uses of bitcoin to buy alternative currencies. >> Yep. >> That's sucking huge amounts of volume. >> It's an easier currency. I mean, in a matter of seconds or minutes, you can have a currency go from a bedroom in Florida, you know, here in Toronto, to a project in Singapore, or vice versa, without going through bank. >> So again some more couple questions from the crowd. If you want to reach us, tweet us, either direct message or tweet @Furrier @DVellante. Happy to take your questions for the guest. But one says, "Do we buy now?" >> (laughs) >> Second was, "Do this side step the tariffs of the China, Japan, U.S. thing?" Obviously outside of the United States, we're the world power in the United States. But now that power is shifting. You see China and here in Canada, a lot of crypto-DNA here. So interesting. Your thoughts on buying? (chuckles) On the dip? Or crash? Or however you look at it? And then the international dynamic with China and Japan and others? >> So many are seeing it as a dip. I mean, the reality is, if this is new form of capital formation, it does share similar characteristics, nonetheless still to traditional or early-stage investing and venture capital, in many respects. Not every start-up succeeds. In fact, you know, over 90% traditionally don't make it. Even if they make it to a Series A round, they may not make it to a B round, right? And so, the fact that you have, some people kind of are referring to the Wild Wild West. I don't necessarily see it that way. It's just finding it's way, right? And it's going to get to a mature state. >> Well I think people look at the bubble, and they think Wild Wild West, but the interesting thing about it, you know, we talked about it off camera last night, around international is, and no one really knows what the STEEMs will be. This is going to be a completely different landscape than anything we've seen before, whether it's standards or execution. And I hear the argument all the time of "Oh, it's unregulated!" It's really the United States that's taking a more regulatory approach, you know, the SEC is essentially scaring straight everybody and saying, >> Well they're trying to figure it out. >> Well they're trying to figure it out, but also they've kind of slows things down, the process. But that being said, it might not have to be formally regulated. Because you mentioned Linux. The role of self-governing communities is a very interesting dynamic. No one's actually said and analyzed what a regulatory regime, globally, would look like, if you factor in, kind of, the open source concepts, with self governance because communities are very efficient, and we got money involved. >> Yeah. >> It can be even more efficient. That's called a marketplace. >> You know, people have disposable income, and they decide what they want to do with that disposable income. You go to a restaurant, you go buy some groceries, you invest, you maybe buy some commodities, right? And where we put that money, the value we had that we wish we could exchange for something else, some of it goes into some regulatory worlds and some doesn't. I want to go buy some you commodities at the grocery store. I mean, it's a free and open transaction. There's no KYC or AML per se and that happens. >> But food has to get to the supermart. My point is. >> Marketplaces don't require regulation. >> Exactly my point. That's my point. >> Or additional red tape, right? But where we put other capital deaths. So whether you're buying share certificate, early stage investing. There's SEC filings, perhaps. >> Who regulated Linux? >> Who regulated Linux? I mean-- >> (laughs) >> It was self governing. >> Benevolent dictatorship with Torvalds. >> But the capital formation was different in the Linux industry. >> Yeah. >> It was the more traditional path that you just described, and so those were-- >> But I guess what I'm saying is that, you know, have a token. Some token could represent a commodity. Some token could represent a security. So there needs to be that distinction and a framework of clarity so that we understand what needs to be regulated and going on that path. And so I think that's, kind of, part of finding it's way over the past 12 months or so is this distinction. Some countries were very quick to say, "Here's a framework.", like Switzerland. That clarity here is taking some time here in Canada and the U.S. >> Yeah, and I think they should let things foster and incubate a bit because you don't know the gestation period of real technology, and I think I'm cool with community-oriented governance Because people will lose a boatload of case; some will gain. But that'll all sort itself out. And with good community involvement, it'll happen faster. I just find that a better path. I mean, some people can't stay with that tension. They overreact. Some people can't handle the risk. But you got to see how it plays out at some level. >> You definitely do. But there's also an opportunity for self-governance. You know, you have-- There's the regional internet registries, right? So you have ARIN RIPE in Europe and so forth. You know, if you want an IP address and so forth, there's a self-governing body that defines policy and how these things are going to be deseminated here in North America. The government, kind of, sets off with that. >> The DNS system. >> You know, absolutely. This is valuable-- >> Yeah. You know, you have national security with internet, but how IP's are deseminated, it's self-regulated. So at the end of the day, if the community doesn't decide to say, "Hey, some of these things, well let's define self-governing bodies." And if they can play a great role in it all, fanastic. Otherwise, then maybe the government steps in" If that's the type of country it is where they like to engage. >> Al, everyone's reimagining new opportunities with blockchain and crypto. You've certainly got good venture with DigitalBits. We'll certainly have a conversation later here this week about that. I know you got to get back for a panel that you're going to go on now. So thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the inaugural Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit. Looking forward to talking more about it. So theCUBE live in Toronto for coverage of the Global Blockchain event here with cloud. And then tomorrow kicks off the big show here, the Blockchain Futurist, about 2,000 attendees. That's really going to be connecting the dots of the future. TheCube will be there as well. Stay with us for more live coverage after this break.

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Global Cloud and Block Chain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE live coverage in Toronto for the Block Chain-Cloud Convergence Show. This is the Global Cloud Block Chain Summit part of the Futurist Event that's going on the next two days after this. Our next guest is Kesem Frank, AION co-founder and CEO of MavenNet. Doing a lot of work in the enterprise and also block chain space around the infrastructure, making it really interoperable. Of course, Jenna Pilgrim, co-founder and COO of a new opportunity called Network Effects. Welcome to the cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks, thanks for having us. >> Thanks, John. >> You guys were just on a panel, The Real World Applications of Block Chain. IBM was on it, which, been doing a lot of work there. This is real world, low hanging fruit, block chain, everyone's pretty excited about. A lot of people get it, and some don't. Some are learning. So you've got the believers, the I want to believe, and then the nonbelievers. Let's talk about the I want to believe and the believers in block chain. Some real world applications going on. As it's evolving, so there's evolution of the standards, technology, but people are putting it to use. What's going on in the sector around some of the real world cases you guys talked about? >> I think we're seeing a lot of collaboration as far as real world applications go, because I think people are sort of starting to understand that if a distributed network is going to work or is going to be secure, it needs diversity and it needs mass scale. If lots of different parties can work together, then they can actually form a community that's really working. As far as real world applications, there's some really interesting one as far as supply chain. Kathryn Harrison at IBM talked about their pilot about shipping, bringing together the global supply chain of distribution. There's a bunch of interesting ones about food providence and bringing together different parties just to make sure that people know what they're eating and that they are able to keep themselves safe, so I think those are two definitely interesting ones. >> Kesem, block chain, supply chain, value chains, these are kind of key words that mean something together. >> Right. >> Making things work in a new way, making things more efficient, seems to be a trend. You're kind of in that world. Is it efficient? (laughing) How's the tech working? What are some of the core threshold issues that people have to get over? >> So you know, John, that's exactly the question to ask. A lot of folks out there are looking at block chain and the promise it represents, and the one big question that keeps echoing over and over is when is this going mainstream? When are we going to see something, a domain, a use case, that is actually natively on a block chain? I think that, essentially, we kind of owe it to ourselves and to everyone that cares about this stuff to ask what's working today, August 2018 and what is still kind of pending? I co-founded a project called AION. For us, interoperability is really one of the key facets that you need to be able to solve for to make block chains real. And again, here's the 60 second argument. If you're going to grow all these solutions that are centric around the use case, they solve for different pinpoints and different stakeholders care about them. They don't really create the cohesive kind of ecosystem until they can all talk to each other, and then you have to ask yourself is the original hypothesis where it's going to be one main net, one chain that's going to rule them all, and everybody gets to play on it and everybody deploys their Dapps on stuff like Fabric or R3 or Ethereum, or whatever it might be. That is absolutely not the way we're seeing enterprise actually shaping into this domain of block chain. What we're seeing is big consortiums that already have value, tangible today, out of doing stuff on chain, and the biggest thing to solve is how do I take, to Jenna's point around supply chain or food providence, whatever it is, how do I actually open it so I can now start writing insurance events, payment events, banking, underwriting, auditing, regulation? There's this gigantic ecosystem that needs to be enabled, and again we are actively saying it's not going to be by an organic model where you and I do everything on top of a single solution. There will be a multitude of solutions, and what we need to solve for is how do we convert them from disparate islands that don't talk to each other into a cohesive ecosystem? >> This is a great point. We were talking on our intro, and we talked last night on our panel, about standards. If you look at all the major inflection points where wealth was created and value was created around innovation and entrepreneurship and industry inflection points, there's always some sort of standard thing that happened. >> Right. >> Whether it's the OSI model during the early days of the internet to certain protocols that made things happen with the internet. Here, it's interesting because if you have one chain and rule the world, it's got to be up and running. >> Yeah. >> It's not. There's no one thing yet, so I see that trend the cloud has, private cloud, public cloud, but public cloud was first but people had data centers. >> Right. >> Both not compatible, now the trend is multi-cloud. You can almost connect the dots of saying multi-chain >> Right. >> Might be a big trend. >> Right. >> This is kind of what you're teasing out here. >> That's exactly what we're about, and I think it's very interesting, the point you're making about dissimilarities between the two domains. We are in a cloud convention, and to me it means two things. One, we absolutely see the mainstream people, the mainstream players in industry, starting to take this seriously. It used to be a completely disparate world where you guys are a bunch of crazies with your Bitcoin and ether and what not. They're definitely taking this seriously now. The second thing, when you think of cloud as a model, how cloud evolved, we used to have these conversations around are you crazy, you're telling me that my data is not going to be on premise? >> It's not secure, now it's the most secure. >> Oh my God! It's in the cloud, what's a cloud? (laughing) You think of the progression model that was applicable back then, right? 10 years, 15 years back, where we started privately and we tell them OK, we'll take this side step of hybrid and then fully public. Took them a while, took them almost 20 years to get their heads around it. >> There's no one trajectory. What's interesting about block chain and crypto with token economics, there's no one trend you can map an analog to, you can't say this is going to be like this trend of the past. It's almost developing it's own kind of trajectory. A lot of organic community involvement. Different tech involvement. >> Totally. >> Different engineering mindsets coming together. You're seeing an engineering-led culture big time going on. That's propelling it up to the conversations of let's lay down the pipes, let's start running apps, but I'll do it within a two year window (laughing). >> I think the big thing to understand about that is yes, you need a whole host of developer talent to build distributed systems, but at the end of the day those systems still have to be used by people. They still have to be used by society, you still have to understand how to talk to your chief executives about what's happening within your company or what your tech teams are doing. There's a growing need for marketers, for PR people, for people who speak, I don't want to say plain English, but people who understand how-- >> Translate it to the real world. >> Yeah, they need to translate it, and how to bridge the gap between legacy systems and how do you take what you were doing before and transform it to a distributed ledger system? How do you do that without just paving the cow path? >> It's interesting, it's almost intoxicating, 'cause you got two elements that get people excited. You got the token economics, which gets people to go, "Whoa," the economics and the liquidity of money and/or value creation capture equations completely changing some of the business model stuff, which could be translated to software and Dapps and software general stuff or SaaS, et cetera. Then you got the plumbing or the networking side of it where things like latency, interoperability, absolutely matter, so with all that going on in real time, it's kind of happening at 30,000 feet and trying to change the airplane engine out. People are failing, and so there's some false promises, there's also false hopes that have not been achieved, so this clouds up the real big picture which is this is an innovative environment. We're seeing that trend. But when you get to the end of the day, what are people working on, to me, is the tell sign. Kesem, what's your project, talk about AION and the work you're doing, specifically give some examples of some of the things that you're doing in the trenches. >> Sure. >> What are you trying to solve, what are some examples you're running into and how does that relate to how things might evolve going forward? >> Sure, so there is a multitude of different problems that we work on but if you want to stick just to the fundamentals? Let's take one gigantic issue that everyone's kind of tackling from different perspectives, let's talk about scale. Scale is, especially in block chains especially challenging just because of how the technology works. How decentralized can you get before you're faced with gigantic latencies and before transaction cost are kind of through the roof? When you think about it, that is all a result of how we kind of contemplate these early stage networks. It was always the one network that is going to scale to infinity. Absolutely not the way it's going to work out. So from my perspective, again, sticking to this one issue, if you could actually give me a decentralized rail that maintains consensus throughout two networks, I can now actually have two trusted kind of go-tos instead of always putting the full brunt of the throughput on one single network. For us, that's kind of a no brainer application to interoperability. If you could actually give me all these trusted networks that work in tandem, I could now start splicing throughputs across many different parallel kind of rails. Not to similar than how we can solve for super computing. We understood there is a limit on how fast can a single CPU go and we started going wide. >> That's an interesting point, I want to just double click on that for a second because if you think about it, why would I have multiple rails and multiple systems? Maybe the use cases are different for them. >> Correct. >> You don't want to have to pick one cloud or one chain to rule them all because it's not optimized. We saw that with monolithic systems and cloud is all about levels of granularity and micro service and micro everything, right? >> Correct. >> And I would also say that gets into a security issue as well, right? You're talking about multiple layers but you also will have multiple layers of permission. You'll have multiple layers of how much information someone can see and what I think is emerging, if data is the new oil, then what's emerging is for the first time we're now able to trust data that we do not own. For corporations who say, "I don't know to market to you "if I don't know everything about you." But at the end of the day, they want to be able to leverage your data but they don't need to secure it and I think that cybersecurity issue is a huge, huge thing that's definitely coming. >> I want to get both of your thoughts on this, because we were talking about this last night. We were riffing on the notion that with cloud compute and data really drove scale. So Amazon is a great example and their value now is things like Kinesis and Aurora, some of their fastest growing services. You got SageMaker, probably will be announced at re:Invent coming up as the fastest growing service, right now it's Aurora. All data concepts. So the dataization really made cloud, great. >> True. >> Okay what's the analog for crypto and block chain? Tokenization is an interesting concept. There's almost an extension of cloud where you're saying, hey, with tokenization, the tokenization phase, how do you explain that to a common person? You say, is token going to be the token and the money aspect of and the economics the killer app? How's it transverse the infrastructures, plural? >> Yeah, or is the wallet going to be the browser? Or how are all of these things happening? >> How do you make sense of this? What's your reaction to that trend? >> So I actually get excited when I think about what token, on the most profound level, actually means. When you kind of think of where value happens in the context of these gigantic enterprises, right? You think of Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, any of them, and you kind of think of what the product is, it's all about the data and it's all about how do you convince people to give up data so they can monetize on it. And then you have two distinct, like literally gigantic groups of stakeholders at play. You have the users, that essentially get something free, right? I get to post on Facebook or I get to write an e-mail on Gmail. Then you have the stakeholders that actually extract all that value from my activities. A token, I think most profoundly represents, how do we actually get to a unified group where the user himself is the stakeholder that gets to extract the data? And again, the proposition is pretty straightforward. The more you use a network and the more the network becomes valuable and grows, the more value the token that drives at it. >> So it changes the value capture equation? >> Correct, different model altogether. >> The value creators get to capture the value and obviously network effects plays a big part in this? >> Yes. >> Which is your wheelhouse. (laughing) >> Yeah, definitely. I think it really comes down to core principles. Now you're able to really get down, to what Kesem was talking about, about when you're designing a token or if you're designing an incentive mechanism, you're really going down to the sort of deep game theory of why people do specific things and if we can financially incentivize people to do good rather than punish them or fine them for doing bad then we can actually create value for everyone. We're designing a new economy that now has the ability to propel itself in a fair and prosperous way, if done correctly, obviously that's the disclaimer afterwards, but. >> I love what you're saying there because if you look at collective intelligence a lot of the AI concepts came around from collective intelligence, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics all came around using data to create value. I always talk about fake news because we have a cloud of media business that's kind of tokenized now but fake news it two things, it's payload, fake news, the fake content and then the infrastructure dynamics that they arbitraged, with network effects. They targeted specific people, fake payload, but the distribution was a network effect. Again, this was the perverse incentive that no one was monitoring, there was no- >> Well and I think in that case, yes there is news that is inherently false information but then there's also a whole spectrum of trueness, if you want to call it that so now we have this technology that allows us to overlay on top of that and say, "Well what is the providence of my information?" And with different layers of block chain systems you're actually able to prove the providence of your information without exposing the user's privacy and without exposing the whole supply chain of the media because there's like media buyers, go through all kinds of hands. >> And we believe the answer to fake news, frankly, is data access, collective intelligence and something like a block chain where you have incentive systems to filter out the fake news. >> Totally. >> Exactly. >> Reputation systems, these things are not new concepts. >> It's all about stake at the end of the day, right? It's how do you keep a stakeholder accountable for their action? You need backing so I think we're definitely on the same page. >> I love, I could talk about fake news all day because we think we can solve that with our CUBEcoin token coming out soon. I want to shift gears and talk about some of the examples we've seen with cloud. >> Sure. >> And try to map that to some navigation for people in how to get through the block chain token world. One of the key things about the cloud was something they called shadow IT. Shadow IT was people who said, hey, you know what? I could just put my credit card down and move this non core thing out in this cloud and prove to my boss, show them, not pitch 'em on the Power Point deck, to say look it, I just did this for that cost in this timeframe, and that started around 2009/2010 timeframe, the early digerati or the clouderati kind of did that but around 2012 it became, wow, this shadow IT is actually R and D practice. >> Mm-hmm. >> Right. >> You started to see that now, so the question that we see for people evaluating in the enterprise is how do you judge what's a good project? Certainly people are kicking the tires and doing a little bit, I won't call it shadow IT, but they're taking on some projects as you were talking about on the panel. How should they, the enterprises in general, the large companies, start thinking about how to enable a shadow IT-like dynamic and how should they evaluate the kind of projects? I think that's an area people just don't know what to look for. Your thoughts? >> I want to add a premise to that, because I think that's absolutely the right question to ask. We also need to add the why. Why should we, as people that do native crypto currency, even care about enterprises? A lot of people kind of theorized when Bitcoin was created to say it was anti institutional is an understatement, right? Aren't we meant to kill enterprise? The thing is, I don't think it's going to be a big bang. I don't think it's going be we wake up and nobody's using banking anymore or nobody's using the traditional healthcare or government and you know whatever insurance policies. We care about block chain in the context of enterprise because we think block chain is a fundamentally better model of doing things. It kind of does away with the black box where I need to be in business, I need to blindly trust you and it introduces a much more transparent and democratic model of doing things. We absolutely want to introduce and make block chain mainstream because that's important for us. When you think of how we do it, to your question, AION is all about interoperability, right? We create a solution that helps scale and helps different networks, decentralized networks, communicate to each other. What we also do with MavenNet, the company I run, is essentially make that enterprise friendly. It's extremely hard to do adoption and implementation within an enterprise, they're very immune to change. >> Antibodies as they say. >> Oh. >> The antibodies to innovation, they kill innovation. >> Totally, so going back to your original question, it all starts with a P and L. If somebody is going to authorize, you know, an actual production system in enterprise for block chain, it needs to create a tangible value, a tangible return, quickly and that's the key. The model that actually scales is you start by flushing out inefficiency plate. You show the enterprise how you could actually achieve, I don't know 20%/30%, that's the order of magnitude that they care about, efficiency by moving some part of your value chain on top of a block chain. >> It has to have an order of magnitude difference or so. I mean cloud was a great example, too, it changes the operating model. >> Yeah. >> They achieve what they wanted to achieve faster and more efficiently and operated it differently. >> Correct. >> And people were starting at it like a three headed monster like what is this thing, right? The cloud thing. And throwing all kinds of fud out there, but ultimately at the end of the day, it's a new operating model for the same thing that they're trying to do with the old stuff. >> Mm-hmm. >> I mean, it's almost that simple. >> Yeah, I think in some cases you need to really, in my previous life at the Block Chain Research Institute, we encouraged a lot of our clients to really take a step back and say, well will I actually, A, will I have this problem in eight years or seven years or 20 years or 50 years, if we're really fundamentally building a new financial system or a new way of doing things that is fundamentally different? Are we building it on old technology? We need to make sure that, and that's why you've seen banks were the first in the door to say, "Yeah, payments, that sounds great, that sounds great." But the real applications that we're seeing from banks are in loyalty, they're in AMLKYC, they're in the sort of fringe operations. Something like payments is going to take a really long time to push through because of those legacy systems because payments is the fundamentals of what banks do. >> This is an interesting point, I want to get your thoughts to end the segment because I think one of the things that we've certainly seen with cloud that over the generational shifts that have happened, the timeframe for innovation is getting shorter and shorter, so timeframe is critical so if the communities are fumbling around hitting that time to value, it seems to be trending to faster and we don't want to hear slower because these systems are inadequate, they're antiquated. >> Mm-hmm. >> These are the systems that are disrupted so the timing of, whether it's standards, or interoperability or business models, operating models, they got to be faster. >> Yeah. >> That's the table stakes. >> I think it all comes down to collaborative governance. >> People have to figure out block chain faster. >> Yeah. >> What's holding us back? Or what's accelerating us? What's the key for the community at large from the engineering community and the business community to make it go faster? Your thoughts? >> Right, so I think we're still searching for the next killer app. If Bitcoin is the reason we're all sitting here today and I profoundly believe that. >> Yeah. >> What is the next thing that drives change on a global scale? That's kind of what we're trying, collectively as an industry, to figure out. Sure, many kind of roadblocks on the way. Some of them educational, perceptional, regulation, technology, but the next big wave that's going to accelerate us to the next ten years of block chain is that next killer app. Organizations such as myself, Jenna, that's our day job, we wake up and that's what we do. >> I mean I've always said, and Dr. Wong, who's the founder of Alibaba Cloud agreed with me, I've been saying that the TCPIP protocol, that standard really enabled a lot of interoperability and created lots of diverse value up the stacks of the OSI model, Open Systems Interconnect, seven layer model, actually never got standardized. It's kind of stopped at TCPIP and that was good, everyone snapped at the line, that created massive value. >> But that's a collaborative governance thing. That's people coming together and saying that these are the standards that we wish to adhere to. >> We need the moment right now. >> Yeah, so you see organizations like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance coming out with a prospective list of standards that they think the community should adhere here. You know you have the ERC20 standard, you have all these different organizations, the World Economic Forum is playing a role in that and the UN is playing a role, especially when it comes to identity and those kind of really big, societal issues but I think that it comes down to that everyone plays a role that I'm doing my best, I think it's going to be somewhere in the realm of data so that's where I've chosen to sort of make my course. >> I think this is a good conversation to have, and I think we could continue it. I mean, I read on Medium, everyone's reading these fat protocols, thin protocols but at the end of the day what does that matter if there's no like scale? >> Yeah. >> You can have all the fat protocols you want, more of a land grab I would say but there's certainly models but is that subordinate or is that the cart before the horse? This is the conversation I think is in the hallways. >> Totally agree, totally agreed. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate it. Breaking down real world applications of block chain we're at the Global Cloud and Block Chain Summit. It's an inaugural event and think it's going to be the kind of format we're going to see more of, cloud and block chain coming together. Collision course or is it going to come in nicely and land together and work together? We'll see, of course theCUBE's covering it. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for more all day coverage. Part of the Futurist Conference coming up the next two days. We're in Toronto, we'll be back with more after this short break. (theCUBE theme music)

>> Live from Toronto Canada, it's The Cube, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello, everyone welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in conjunction with the Blockchain futurist happening this week it's run. I'm John Fourier, my cohost Dave Vellante, we're here with Cube alumni, Bradley Rotter, pioneer Blockchain investor, seasoned pro was there in the early days as an investor in hedge funds, continuing to understand the impacts of cryptocurrency, and its impact for investors, and long on many of the crypto. Made some great predictions on The Cube last time at Polycon in the Bahamas. Bradley, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thank you, good to see both of you. >> Good to have you back. >> So I want to just get this out there because you have an interesting background, you're in the cutting edge, on the front lines, but you also have a history. You were early before the hedge fund craze, as a pioneer than. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that and than how it connects to today, and see if you see some similarities, talk about that. >> I actually had begun trading commodity futures contracts when I was 15. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is a small state in the Midwest. >> I've heard of it. >> And I was in charge of >> Was it a test market? (laughing) >> I was in charge of hedging our one corn contract so I learned learned the mechanisms of the market. It was great experience. I traded commodities all the way through college. I got to go to West Point as undergrad. And I raced back to Chicago as soon as I could to go to the University of Chicago because that's where commodities were trading. So I'd go to night school at night at the University of Chicago and listen to Nobel laureates talk about the official market theory and during the day I was trading on the floor of the the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Grown men yelling, kicking, screaming, shoving and spitting, it was fabulous. (laughing) >> Sounds like Blockchain today. (laughing) >> So is that what the dynamic is, obviously we've seen the revolution, certainly of capital formation, capital deployment, efficiency, liquidity all those things are happening, how does that connect today? What's your vision of today's market? Obviously lost thirty billion dollars in value over the past 24 hours as of today and we've taken a little bit of a haircut, significant haircut, since you came on The Cube, and you actually were first to predict around February, was a February? >> February, yeah. >> You kind of called the market at that time, so props to that, >> Yup. >> Hope you're on the right >> Thank you. >> side of those shorts >> Thank you. >> But what's going on? What is happening in the capital markets, liquidity, why are the prices dropping? What's the shift? So just a recap, at the time in February, you said look I'm on short term bear, on Bitcoin, and may be other crypto because all the money that's been made. the people who made it didn't think they had to pay taxes. And now they're realizing, and you were right on. You said up and up through sort of tax season it's going to be soft and then it's going to come back and it's exactly what happened. Now it's flipped again, so your thoughts? >> So my epiphany was I woke up in the middle of the night and said oh my God, I've been to this rodeo before. I was trading utility tokens twenty years ago when they were called something else, IRUs, do you remember that term? IRU was the indefeasible right to use a strand of fiber, and as the internet started kicking off people were crazy about laying bandwidth. Firms like Global Crossing we're laying cable all over the ocean floors and they laid too much cable and the cable became dark, the fiber became dark, and firms like Global Crossing, Enron, Enron went under really as a result of that miss allocation. And so it occurred to me these utility tokens now are very similar in characteristic except to produce a utility token you don't have to rent a boat and lay cable on the ocean floor in order to produce one of these utility tokens, that everybody's buying, I mean it takes literally minutes to produce a token. So in a nutshell it's too many damn tokens. It was like the peak of the internet, which we were all involved in. It occurred to me then in January of 2000 the market was demanding internet shares and the market was really good at producing internet shares, too many of them, and it went down. So I think we're in a similar situation with cryptocurrency, the Wall Street did come in, there were a hundred plus hedge funds of all shapes and sizes scrambling and buying crypto in the fall of last year. It's kind of like Napoleon's reason for attacking Russia, seemed like a good idea at the time. (laughing) And so we're now in a corrective phase but literally there's been too many tokens. There are so many tokens that we as humans can't even deal with that. >> And the outlook, what's the outlook for you? I mean, I'll see there's some systemic things going to be flushed out, but you long on certain areas? What do you what do you see as a bright light at the end of the tunnel or sort right in front of you? What's happening from a market that you're excited about? >> At a macro scale I think it's apparent that the internet deserves its own currency, of course it does and there will be an internet currency. The trick is which currency shall that be? Bitcoin was was a brilliant construct, the the inventor of Bitcoin should get a Nobel Prize, and I hope she does. (laughing) >> 'Cause Satoshi is female, everyone knows that. (laughing) >> I got that from you actually. (laughing) But it may not be Bitcoin and that's why we have to be a little sanguine here. You know, people got a little bit too optimistic, Bitcoin's going to a hundred grand, no it's going to five hundred grand. I mean, those are all red flags based on my experience of trading on the floor and investing in hedge funds. Bitcoin, I think I'm disappointed in Bitcoins adoption, you know it's still very difficult to use Bitcoin and I was hoping by now that that would be a different scenario but it really isn't. Very few people use Bitcoin in their daily lives. I do, I've been paying my son his allowance for years in Bitcoin. Son of a bitch is rich now. (laughing) >> Damn, so on terms of like the long game, you seeing the developers adopted a theory and that was classic, you know the decentralized applications. We're here at a Cloud Blockchain kind of convergence conference where developers mattered on the Cloud. You saw a great developer, stakeholders with Amazon, Cloud native, certainly there's a lot of developers trying to make things easier, faster, smarter, with crypto. >> Yup. >> So, but all at the same time it's hard for developers. Hearing things like EOS coming on, trying to get developers. So there's a race for developer adoption, this is a major factor in some of the success and price drops too. Your thoughts on, you know the impact, has that changed anything? I mean, the Ethereum at the lowest it's been all year. >> Yup. Yeah well, that was that was fairly predictable and I've talked about that at number of talks I've given. There's only one thing that all of these ICOs have had in common, they're long Ethereum. They own Ethereum, and many of those projects, even out the the few ICO projects that I've selectively been advising I begged them to do once they raised their money in Ethereum is to convert it into cash. I said you're not in the Ethereum business, you're in whatever business that you're in. Many of them ported on to that stake, again caught up in the excitement about the the potential price appreciation but they lost track of what business they were really in. They were speculating in Ethereum. Yeah, I said they might as well been speculating in Apple stock. >> They could have done better then Ethereum. >> Much better. >> Too much supply, too many damn tokens, and they're easy to make. That's the issue. >> Yeah. >> And you've got lots of people making them. When one of the first guys I met in this space was Vitalik Buterin, he was 18 at the time and I remember meeting him I thought, this is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. It was a really fun meeting. I remember when the meeting ended and I walked away I was about 35 feet away and he LinkedIn with me. Which I thought was cute. >> That's awesome, talk about what you're investing-- >> But, now there's probably a thousand Vitalik Buterin's in the space. Many of them are at this conference. >> And a lot of people have plans. >> Super smart, great ideas, and boom, token. >> And they're producing new tokens. They're all better improved, they're borrowing the best attributes of each but we've got too many damn tokens. It's hard for us humans to be able to keep track of that. It's almost like requiring a complicated new browser download for every website you went to. We just can't do that. >> Is the analog, you remember the dot com days, you referred to it earlier, there was quality, and the quality lasted, sustained, you know, the Amazon's, the eBay's, the PayPal's, etc, are there analogs in this market, in your view, can you sniff out the sort of quality? >> There are definitely analogs, I think, but I think one of the greatest metrics that we can we can look at is that utility token being utilized? Not many of them are being utilized. I was giving a talk last month, 350 people in the audience, and I said show of hands, how many people have used a utility token this year? One hand went up. I go, Ethereum? Ethereum. Will we be using utility tokens in the future? Of course we will but it's going to have to get a whole lot easier for us humans to be able to deal with them, and understand them, and not lose them, that's the big issue. This is just as much a cybersecurity play as it is a digital currency play. >> Elaborate on that, that thought, why is more cyber security playing? >> Well, I've had an extensive background in cyber security as an investor, my mantra since 9/11 has been to invest in catalyze companies that impact the security of the homeland. A wide variety of security plays but primarily, cyber security. It occurred to me that the most valuable data in the world used to be in the Pentagon. That's no longer the case. Two reasons basically, one, the data has already been stolen. (laughing) Not funny. Two, if you steal the plans for the next generation F39 Joint Strike Force fighter, good for you, there's only two buyers. (laughing) The most valuable data in the world today, as we sit here, is a Bitcoin private key, and they're coming for them. Prominent Bitcoin holders are being hunted, kidnapped, extorted, I mean it's a rather extraordinary thing. So the cybersecurity aspect of if all of our assets are going to be digitized you better damn well keep those keys secure and so that's why I've been focused on the cybersecurity aspect. Rivets, one of the ICOs that I invested in is developing software that turns on the power of the hardware TPM, trusted execution environment, that's already on your phone. It's a place to hold keys in hardware. So that becomes fundamentally important in holding your keys. >> I mean certainly we heard stories about kidnapping that private key, I mean still how do you protect that? That's a good question, that's a really interesting question. Is it like consensus, do you have multiple people involved, do you get beaten up until you hand over your private key? >> It's been happening. It's been happening. >> What about the security token versus utility tokens? A lot of tokens now, so there's yeah, too many tokens on the utility side, but now there's a surge towards security tokens, and Greg Bettinger wrote this morning that the market has changed over and the investor side's looking more and more like traditional in structures and companies, raising money. So security token has been a, I think relief for some people in the US for sure around investing in structures they understand. Is that a real dynamic or is that going to sustain itself? How do you see security tokens? >> And we heard in the panel this morning, you were in there, where they were predicting the future of the valuation of the security tokens by the end of the year doubling, tripling, what ever it was, but what are your thoughts? >> I think security tokens are going to be the next big thing, they have so many advantages to what we now regard as share certificates. My most exciting project is that I'm heavily involved in is a project called the Entanglement Institute. That's going to, in the process of issuing security infrastructure tokens, so our idea is a public-private partnership with the US government to build the first mega quantum computing center in Newport, Rhode Island. Now the private part of the public-private partnership by the issuance of tokens you have tremendous advantages to the way securities are issued now, transparency, liquidity. Infrastructure investments are not very liquid, and if they were made more liquid more people would buy them. It occurred to me it would have been a really good idea if grandpa would have invested in the Hoover Dam. Didn't have the chance. We think that there's a substantial demand of US citizens that would love to invest in our own country and would do so if it were more liquid, if it was more transparent, if the costs were less of issuing those tokens. >> More efficient, yeah. >> So you see that as a potential way to fund public infrastructure build-outs? >> It will be helpful if infrastructure is financed in the future. >> How do you see the structure on the streets, this comes up all the time, there's different answers to this. There's not like there's one, we've seen multiple but I'm putting a security token, what am i securing against, cash flow, equity, right to convert to utility tokens? So we're starting to see a variety of mechanisms, 'cause you have to investor a security outcome. >> Yeah, so as an investor, what do you look for? >> Well, I think it's almost limitless of what these smart securities, you know can be capable of, for example one of the things that were that we're talking with various parts of the government is thinking about the tax credit. The tax credit that have been talked about at the Trump administration, that could be really changed on its head if you were able to use smart securities, if you will. Who says that the tax credit for a certain project has to be the same as all other projects? The president has promised a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure investment program and so far he's only 1.5 trillion away from the goal. It hasn't started yet. Wilbur Ross when, in the transition team, I had seen the white paper that he had written, was suggesting an 82% tax credit for infrastructure investment. I'm going 82%, oh my God, I've never. It's an unfathomable number. If it were 82% it would be the strongest fiscal stimulus of your lifetime and it's a crazy number, it's too big. And then I started thinking about it, maybe an 82% tax credit is warranted for a critical infrastructure as important as quantum computing or cyber security. >> Cyber security. >> Exactly, very good point, and maybe the tax credit is 15% for another bridge over the Mississippi River. We already got those. So a smart infrastructure token would allow the Larry Kudlow to turn the dial and allow economic incentive to differ based on the importance of the project. >> The value of the project. >> That is a big idea. >> That is a big idea. >> That is what we're working on. >> That is a big idea, that is a smart contract, smart securities that have allocations, and efficiencies, and incentives that aren't perverse or generic. >> It aligns with the value of the society he needs, right. Talk about quantum computing more, the potential, why quantum, what attracted you to quantum? What do you see as the future of quantum computing? >> You know, you don't you don't have to own very much Bitcoin before what wakes you up in the middle of the night is quantum computing. It's a hundred million times faster than computing as we know it today. The reason that I'm involved in this project, I believe it's a matter of national security that we form a national initiative to gain quantum supremacy, or I call it data supremacy. And right now we're lagging, the Chinese have focused on this acutely and are actually ahead, I believe of the United States. And it's going to take a national initiative, it's going to take a Manhattan Project, and that's that's really what Entanglement Institute is, is a current day Manhattan Project partnering with government and three-letter agencies, private industry, we have to hunt as a pack and focus on this or we're going to be left behind. >> And that's where that's based out of. >> Newport, Rhode Island. >> And so you got some DC presence in there too? >> Yes lots of DC presence, this is being called Quantum summer in Washington DC. Many are crediting the Entanglement Institute for that because they've been up and down the halls of Congress and DOD and other-- >> Love to introduce you to Bob Picciano, Cube alumni who heads up quantum computing for IBM, would be a great connection. They're doing trying to work their, great chips to building, open that up. Bradley thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Always great to see you, impeccable vision, you've got a great vision. I love the big ideas, smart securities, it's coming, that is, I think very clear. >> Thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. The Cube coverage here live in Toronto. The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, more live coverage, day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Blockchain futurist conference. This is the first global Cloud Blockchain Summit here kicking off the whole week. Stay with us for more after this short break.