>>And welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We have a great guest coming in remotely from LA Christian Hernandez developer experienced lead at code fresh code fresh IO. Recently they were on our feature at a startup showcase series, season two episode one cloud data innovations, open source innovations, all good stuff, Christian. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation. >>Thank you. Thank you, John. Thank you for having me on, >>You know, I'm I was really impressed with code fresh. My met with the founders on here on the cube because GI ops AI, everything's something ops devs dev sec ops. You've got AI ops. You've got now GI ops, essentially operationalizing the software future is here and software's eating the world is, was written many years ago, but it's open source is now all. So all things software's open source and that's kind of a done deal. It's only getting better and better. Mainstream companies are contributing. You guys are on this wave of, of this open source tsunami and you got cloud scale. Automation's right there, machine learning, all this stuff is now the next gen of, of, of code, right? So you, your code fresh and your title is developer experience lead. What does that mean right now? What does it mean to be a developer experience lead? Like you make sure people having a good experience. Are you developing you figuring out the product? What does that mean? >>Yeah. That's and it's also part of the, the whole Debre explosion that's happening right now. I believe it's, you know, everyone's always asking, well, what, you know, what is developer advocate? What does that mean developer experience? What does that mean? So, so you, you kind of hit the nail on the head a little bit up there in, in the beginning, is that the, the experience of the developer when using a particular platform, right? Especially the code flash platform. That is my responsibility there at code fresh to enable, to enable end users, to enable partners, to enable, you know, anyone that wants to use the code fresh platform for their C I C D and get ops square flows. So that's, that's really my, my corner of the world is to make sure their experience is great. So that's, it's really what, what I'm here to do >>At food fresh. You know, one of the things I can say of my career, you've been kind of become a historian over time. When I was a developer back in the old days, it was simply you compiled stuff, you did QA on it. You packaged it out. You wanted out the door and you know, that was a workflow right now with the cloud. I was talking with your founders, you got new abstraction layers. Cloud has changed again again, open source. So newer things are coming, right? Like, like, like Kubernetes for instance is a great example that came out of the open source kind of the innovations. But that, and Hadoop, we were mentioning before he came on camera from a storage standpoint, kind of didn't make it because it was just too hard. Right. And it made the developer's job harder. And then it made the developer's requirements to be specialized. >>So you had kind of two problems. You had hard to use a lot of friction and then it required certain expertise when the developers just want to code. Right. So, so you have now the motion of, with GI ops, you guys are in the middle of kinda this idea of frictionless based software delivery with the cloud. So what's different now, can you talk about that specific point because no one wants to be, do hard work and have to redo things. Yeah. Shift left and all that good stuff. What's hard now, what do you guys solve? What's the, what's the friction that you're taking out what's to become frictionless. >>Yeah. Yeah. And you, you, you mentioned a very interesting point about how, you know, things that are coming out almost makes it seem harder nowadays to develop an application. You used to have it to where, you know, kind of a, sort of a waterfall sort of workflow where, you know, you develop your code, you know, you compile it. Right. You know, I guess back in the day, Java was king. I think Java still is, has a, is a large footprint out there where you would just compile it, deploy it. If it works, it works. Alright cool. And you have it and you kind of just move it along in its process. Whereas I think the, the whole idea of, I think Netflix came out with like the, the fail often fail fast release often, you know, the whole Atlassian C I C D thing, agile thing came into play. >>Where now it's, it's a little bit more complex to get your code out there delivered to get your code from one environment to the other environment, especially with the, the Avan of Kubernetes and cloud native architecture, where you can deploy and have this imutable infrastructure where you can just deploy and automate so quickly. So often that there needs to be some sort of new process now into place where to have a new process, like GI ops to where it'll, it it's frictionless, meaning that it's, it, it makes it that process a little easier makes that little, that comp that complex process of deploying onto like a cloud native architecture easier. So that way, as you said before, returning the developers to back to what they care about, mot, the most is just code. I just want to code. >>Yeah. You know, the other thing, cool thing, Christian, I wanna bring up and we'll get into some of the specifics around Argo specifically CD is that the community is responding as a kind of, it takes a village kind of mindset. People are getting into this just saying, Hey, if we can get our act together around some de facto workflows and de facto capabilities, everyone wins. It's a rising tide, floats all boats, kind of concept. CNCF certainly has been a big part of that. Even seen some of the big hyper scales getting behind it. But you guys are part of the founding members of the open get ups working group, Amazon Azure, GitHub, red hat Weaveworks and then a ton of contributors. Okay. So this is kind of cool. This means that there's like people behind this thing. Look, we gotta get here faster. What happened at co con this year? You guys had some news around Argo and you had some news around the hosted solution. Can you take a minute to explain two things, one the open community vibe, and then two, what you guys announced at Coon in Spain. >>Yeah. Yeah. So as far as open get ups, that was, you know, as you said before, code fresh was part of that, that founding committee. Right. Of, of group of people trying to figure out, define what get ups is. Right. We're trying to bring it beyond the, you know, the, the hype word, right beyond just like a marketing term to where we actually define what it actually is, because it is actually something that's out there that people are doing. Right. A lot of people, you know, remember that the, the Chick-fil-A story where it's like, they, they are completely doing, you know, this get ops thing, we're just now wanting, putting definition around it. So that was just amazing to see out at there in, in Cuban. And, but like you said, in QAN, we, you know, we're, we're, we're taking some of that, that acceleration that we see in the community to, and we, we announce our, our hosted get ops offering. >>Right. So hosted get ops is something that our customers have been asking for for a while. Many times when, you know, someone wants to use something like Argo CD, the, in, they install it on their cluster, they get up and running. And, but with, with all that comes like the feed and care of that platform, and, you know, not only just keeping the lights on, but also management security, you know, general maintenance, you know, all the things that, that come along with managing a system. And on top of that comes like the scale aspect of it. Right. And so with scale, so a lot of people go with like a hub and spoke others, go with like a fleet design in, in either case, right. There's, there's a challenge for the feet and care of it. Right. And so with code fresh coast of get ups, we take that management headache away. >>Right? So we, we take the, the, the management of, of Argo CD, the management of, of all of that, and kind of just offer Argo CD as a surface, right. Which offers, you know, allows users to, you know, let us take care of all the, of the get offs, runtime. And so they can concentrate on, you know, their application deployments. Right. And you also get things like Dora metrics, right. Integrated with the platform, you have the ability to integrate multiple CI providers, you know, like get hub actions or whatever, existing Jenkins pipelines. And really that, that code fresh platform becomes like your get ops platform becomes like, you know, your, your central view of the world of, of your, you know, get ups processes. >>Yeah. I mean, that whole single source of truth concept is really kind of needed. I gotta ask you though, with the popularity of the Argo CD on get ups internally, right. That's been clear, right. Kubernetes, the way that's going, it's accelerating fast. People want simple it's scaling, you got automation built in all that good stuff. What was the driver behind the hosted get up solution? Was it customer needs? Was it efficiency all the above? What was specifically and, and why would someone want to have the hosted versus say internal? >>Yeah. So it's, it was really driven by, you know, customer need been something that the customers have been asking for. And it's also been something that, you know, you, you, you have a process of developing an application to, you know, you know, a fleet of clusters in a traditional, you know, I keep saying traditional, get outs practice as if get outs are so old. And, you know, in, you know, when, when, when people first start out, they'll start, you know, installing Argo city on all these clusters and trying to manage that at scale it's, it's, it, it seemed like there was, you know, it it'd be nice if we can just like, be able to consume this as a service. So we don't have to like, worry about, you know, you know, best practices. We don't have to worry about security. We don't just, all of that is taken care of and managed by us at code fresh. So this is like something that, you know, has been asked for and, and something that, you know, we believe will accelerate, you know, developers into actually developing their, their applications. They don't have to worry about managing >>The platform. So just getting this right. Hosted, managed service by you guys on this one, >>Correct? Yes. >>Okay. Got it. All right. So let me, let me get in the Argo real quick, just to kind of just level set for the folks that are, are leaning into this and then kicking the tires. Where are we with Argo? What, why was it so popular? What did it do specifically? Did it just make it easier for developers to manage and monitor Kubernetes, keep 'em updated? What was the specific value behind Argo? Where, where, where did it come from and why is it so popular? >>Yeah, so Argo the Argo project, which is made up of, of a few tools, usually when people say Argo, they meet, they they're talking about Argo CD, but there's also Argo workflows, Argo events, Argo notifications. And, and like I said before, CD with that, and that is something that was developed internally at Intuit. Right? So for those of who don't know, Intuit is the company behind turbo tax. So for those, those of us in the us, we, we know, you know, we know that season all too well, the tax season. And so that was a tool that was developed internally. >>And by the way, Intuit we've done many years. They're very huge cloud adopters. They've been on that train from the day one. They've been, they've been driving a lot of cloud scale too. Sorry >>To interrupt. Yeah. And, and, and yeah, no, and, and, and also, you know, they, they were always open source first, right. So they've always had, you know, they developed something internally. They always had the, the intention of opensourcing it. And so it was really a tool that was born internally, and it was a tool that helped them, you know, get stuff done with Kubernetes. And that's kind of like the tagline they use for, for the Argo project is you need to get stuff done. They wanted their developers to focus less on deploying the application and more right. More than on writing the application itself. And so the, and so the Argo project is a suite of tools essentially that helps deploy onto Kubernetes, you know, using get ups as that, you know, that cornerstone in design, right in the design philosophy, it's so popular because of the ease of use and developer friendliness aspect of it. It's, it's, it's, it's meant to be simple right. In and simple in a, in a good sense of getting up and running, which attracted, you know, developers from, you know, all around the world. You know, other companies like red hat got into it as well. BlackRock also is, is a, is a big contributor, thousands of other independent contributors as well to the Argo project. >>Yeah. Christian, if you bring up a good point and I'm gonna go on a little tangent here, but I wanna get your reaction to something that Dave ante and I, and our cube team has been kind of riffing on lately. You mentioned, you know, Netflix earlier, you mentioned Intuit. There's a kind of a story that's been developing and, and with traction and momentum and trajectory over the past, say 10 years, the companies that went on the cloud, like Netflix into it, snowflake, snowflake, not so much now, but in terms of open source, they're all contributing lift. They're all contributing back to open source, but they're not cloud providers. Right. So you're seeing that kind of first generation, I's a massive contribution to open source. So open source been around for a while, remember the early days, and we'd all participate on projects, but now you have real companies building IP going open source first because they're on a hyperscale cloud, but they're not the cloud themselves. They took advantage of that. So there's kind of this cycle of flywheel of cloud to open source, not from the vendors themselves like Amazon, which services or Azure, but the people who rode their CapEx and built on that scale, feeding into the open source. And then coming back, this is kind of an interesting dynamic. What's your reaction to that? Do you see that? Yeah. Super cloud kind of vibe there. >>Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and also it, it, I think it's, it's a, it's indicative that, you know, open source is not only, you know, a way to develop, you know, applications, a way to engineer, you know, your project, but also kind of like a strategic advantage in, in, in such a way. Right. You know, you, you see, you see companies like, like, like even like Microsoft has been going into, you know, open source, right. They they've been going to open source first. They made a, a huge pivot to, you know, using open source as, you know, like, like a, like a strategic direction for, for the company. And I think that goes back to, you know, a little bit for my roots, you know, I, I, I always, I always talk about, you know, I always talk about red hat, right. I always talk about, you know, I was, I was, I was in red hat previously and, you know, you know, red hat being, you know, the first billion dollar open source company. >>Right. I, we always joke is like, well, you know, internally, like we know you were a billion dollar company that sold free software. How, you know, how, how does that happen? But it's, it's, it's really, you know, built into the, built into being able to tap into those expert resources. Yeah. You know, people love using software. People love the software they love using, and they wanna improve it. Companies are now just getting out of their way. Yeah. You know, companies now, essentially, it's just like, let's just get out of the way. Let's let people work on, you know, what they wanna work on. They love the software. They wanna improve it. Let's let them, >>It's interesting. A lot of people love the clouds have all this power. If you think about what we are just riffing on and what you just said, the economics and the organic self-governing has always been the open source way where commercial value is enabled. If you play ball, right. Like, oh, red hat, for instance. And now you're seeing the community kind of be that arbiter of the cloud. So, Hey, if everyone can create value on say AWS or Azure, bring it to open source, everyone benefits across all clouds hope eventually. So the choice aspect comes in. So this community angle is huge. And I think it's changing a lot for the better. And I think this is where we're seeing a lot of that growth. And you guys have been the middle level with the Argo project and get ups specifically in that, in that sector. How have you seen that growth? What some dynamics have you seen power dynamics, organic? Is it governed well, whats some of the, the successes, what are some of the challenges? Can you share your thoughts on the community's growth around get ops and Argo project? >>Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I've been, you know, part of some of these communities, right? Like the, the open, get, get ops community, the Argos community pretty much from the beginning and, and seeing it developed from an idea to, you know, having all these contributors, having, you know, the, the, the buzzword come out of it, you know, the get ups and it be that being the, you know, having it, you know, all over the, you know, social media, all over LinkedIn, all over all, all these, all these different channels, you know, I I've seen things like get ops con, right. So, you know, being part of the, get ops open, get ops community, you know, one of the things we did was we did get ops con it started as a meetup, you know, couple years ago. And now, you know, it was a, you know, we had an actual event at Cuan in Los Angeles. >>You know, we had like, you know, about 50 people there, but then, you know, Cuan in Valencia this past Cuan we had over 200 people, it was a second largest co-located events in, at Cuan. So that just, just seeing that community and, you know, from a personal standpoint, you know, be being part of that, that the, the community being the, the event chair, right. Yeah. Being, being one of the co-chairs was a, was a moment of pride for me being able to stand up there and just seeing a sea of people was like, wow, we just started with a handful of people at a meetup. And now, you know, we're actually having conferences and, and, and speaking of conference, like the Argo community as well, we put in, you know, we put on a virtual only event on Argo con last year. We're gonna do it in person today. You know, this year. >>Do you have a date on that? Do you have a date on that Argo con 22? >>Two? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Argo con September 19th, 2022. So, you know, mark your calendars, it it's, you know, it's a multi-day event, you know, it's, it's part of something else that I've seen in the community where, you know, first we're talk talking about these meetups. Now we're doing multi-day events. We're, you know, in talks of the open, get ups, you know, get ups can also make that a multi-day event. There's just so many talks in so many people that want to be involved in network that, you know, we're saying, well, we're gonna need more days because there's just so many people coming to these events, you know, in, in, you know, seeing these communities grow, not just from like the engineering standpoint, but also from the end user standpoint, but also from the people that are actually doing these things. And, you know, seeing some of these use cases, seeing some of the success, seeing some of the failures, right? Like people love listening to those talks about postmortems, I think are part of my favorite talks as well. So seeing that community grow is, is, you know, on a personal level, it's, it's a point >>It's like CSI for software developers. You want to curious about >>Exactly >>What happened. You know, you know, it's interesting, you mentioned about the, the multiple events at Coon. You know, the vibe that's going on is a very festival vibe, right? You have organic groups coming together. I remember when they had just started doing the day zero programs. Now you have like, almost like multiple stages of content at these events. It feels like, like a Coachella vibe or some sort of like festival vibe, like a lot of things going on and you, and if you pick your kind of area, but you can move around, I find that the kind of the format de Azure I think is going well these days. What do you think about that? >>Yeah, yeah. No, for sure. It's and, and, and I love that that analogy of Coachella, it does feel like, you know, it's, there's something for everyone and you can find what you like, and you'll find a little, you know, a little group, right. A little click of, of, of people that's probably the wrong term to use, but you know, you, you find, you know, you, you know, like-minded people and, you know, passionate about the same thing, right? Like the security guys, they, you know, you see them all clump together, right? Like you see like the, the developer C I CD get ops guys, we all kind of clump together and start talking, you know, about everything that we're doing. And it's, that's, that's, I think that's really something special that coupon, you know, some, you know, it's gotten so big that it's almost impossible to fit everything in a, in a week, because unless there's just so much to do. And there's so much that that interests, you know, someone, but it's >>A code, a code party is what we call it. It's a code party. Yeah. >>It's, it's a code party for sure. For >>Sure. Nerd nerd Fest on, on steroids. Hey, I gotta get, I wanna wrap this up and give you the final word, Christian. Thanks for coming on. Great insight, great conversation. There's a huge, you guys are in the middle of a hot area, obviously large scale data growth. Kubernetes is scaling beautifully and making it easier at managed services. What people want machine learning's kicking in and, and you get automation building in all favoring, the developer and C I CD pipeline and all that good stuff. People want to learn more. Can you take a minute to put the plug in for code fresh on the certification? How do I get involved? Where are you? Is there levels if I want to jump in and get trained and get fluent on code fresh, can you share commentary and, and, and what the status is? >>Yeah, yeah, for sure. So code fresh is offering a free certification, right? For get ups or Argo CD and get ops. The first of it's kind for Argo CD, first of it's kind for get ops is you can actually go get certified with Argo CD and get ops. You know, we there level one is out right now. You can go take that code, fresh.io/certification. It's out there, sign up, you know, you, you don't, you don't need to pay anything, right. It's, it's something it's a, of a free course. You could take level two is coming soon. Right? So level two is coming soon in the next few months, I believe I don't wanna quote a specific day, but soon because I, but soon I, it it's soon, soon as in, as in months. Right? So, you know, we're, we're counting that down where you can not only level one cert level certification, but a level, two more advanced certification for those who have been using Argo for a while, they can still, you know, take that and be, you know, be able to get, you know, another level of certification for that. So also, you know, Argo con will be there. We're, we're part of the programming committee for Argo con, right? This is a community driven event, but, you know, code fresh is a proud diamond sponsor. So we'll be there. >>Where's it located up to us except for eptember 19th multiday or one day >>It's a, it's a multi-day event. So Argo con from 19, 19 20 and 21 in a mountain view. So it'll be in mountain view in the bay area. So for those of you who are local, you can just drive in. Great. >>I'm write that down. I'll plug it. I'll put in the show notes. >>Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And you will be there so you can talk to me, you can talk to anyone else at code, fresh talking about Argo CD, you know, find, find out more about hosted, get ups code, fresh.io. You know, you can find us in the Argo project, open, get ups community, you know, we're, we're, we're deep in the community for both Argo and get ups. So, you know, you can find us there as well. >>Well, let's do a follow up in when you're in town, so's only a couple months away and getting through the summer, it's already, I can't believe events are back. So it's really great to see face to face in the community. And there was responding. I mean, co con in October, I think that was kind of on the, that was a tough call and then get to see your own in Spain. I couldn't make it. Unfortunately, I had got COVID came down with it, but our team was there. Open sources, booming continues to go. The next level, new power dynamics are developing in a great way. Christian. Thanks for coming on, sharing your insights as the developer experience lead at code fresh. Thanks so much. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is a cube conversation. I'm John feer, host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Well, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your host. Got a great conversation with two great guests, going to explore the edge, what it means in terms of commercial, but also national security. And as the world goes digital, we're going to have that deep dive conversation around how it's all transforming. We've got Ki Lee, Vice President of Booz Allen's Digital Business. Ki, great to have you. John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen's Digital Cloud Solutions. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. >> And thanks for having us, John. >> So one of the most hottest topics, obviously besides cloud computing having the most refactoring impact on business and government and public sector has been the next phase of cloud growth and cloud scale, and that's really modern applications and consumer, and then here for national security and for governments here in the U.S. is military impact. And as digital transformation starts to go to the next level, you're starting to see the architectures emerge where the edge, the IoT edge, the industrial IoT edge, or any kind of edge concept, 5G is exploding, making that much more of a dense, more throughput for connectivity with wireless. You got Amazon with Snowball, Snowmobile, all kinds of ways to deploy technology, that's IT like and operational technologies. It's causing quite a cloud operational opportunity and disruption, so I want to get into it. Ki, let's start with you. I mean, we're looking at an architecture that's changing both commercial and public sector with the edge. What are the key considerations that you guys see as people have to really move fast in this new architecture of digital? >> Yeah, John, I think it's a great question. And if I could just share our observation on why we even started investing in edge. You mentioned the cloud, but as we've reflected upon kind of the history of IT, then you take a look from mainframes to desktops to servers to cloud to mobile and now IoT, what we observed was that industry investing in infrastructure led to kind of an evolution of IT, right? So as you mentioned, with industry spending billions on IoT and edge, we just feel that that's going to be the next evolution. If you take a look at, you mentioned 5G, I think 5G will be certainly an accelerator to edge because of the resilience, the lower latency and so forth. But taking a look at what's happening in space, you mentioned space earlier as well, right, and what Starlink is doing by putting satellites to actually provide transport into the space, we're thinking that that actually is going to be the next ubiquitous thing. Once transport becomes ubiquitous, just like cloud allows storage to be ubiquitous. We think that the next generation internet will be space-based. So when you think about it, connected, it won't be connected servers per se, it will be connected devices. >> John: Yeah, yeah. >> That's kind of some of the observations and why we've been really focusing on investing in edge. >> I want to come back to that piece around space and edge and bring it from a commercial and then also tactical architecture in a minute 'cause there's a lot to unpack there, role of open source, modern application development, software and hardware supply chains, all are core issues that are going to emerge. But I want to get with John real quick on cloud impact, because you think about 5G and the future of work or future of play, you've got people, right? So whether you're at a large concert like Coachella or a 49ers or Patriots game or Redskins game if you're in the D.C. area, you got people there, of congestion, and now you got devices now serving those people. And that's their play, people at work, whether it's a military operation, and you've got work, play, tactical edge things. How is cloud connecting? 'Cause this is like the edge has never been kind of an IT thing. It's been more of a bandwidth or either telco or something else operationally. What's the cloud at scale, cloud operations impact? >> Yeah, so if you think about how these systems are architected and you think about those considerations that Ki kind of touched on, a lot of what you have to think about now is what aspects of the application reside in the cloud, where you tend to be less constrained. And then how do you architect that application to move out towards the edge, right? So how do I tier my application? Ultimately, how do I move data and applications around the ecosystem? How do I need to evolve where my application stages things and how that data and those apps are moved to each of those different tiers? So when we build a lot of applications, especially if they're in the cloud, they're built with some of those common considerations of elasticity, scalability, all those things; whereas when you talk about congestion and disconnected operations, you lose a lot of those characteristics, and you have to kind of rethink that. >> Ki, let's get into the aspect you brought up, which is space. And then I was mentioning the tactical edge from a military standpoint. These are use cases of deployments, and in fact, this is how people have to work now. So you've got the future of work or play, and now you've got the situational deployments, whether it's a new tower of next to a stadium. We've all been at a game or somewhere or a concert where we only got five bars and no connectivity. So we know what that means. So now you have people congregating in work or play, and now you have a tactical deployment. What's the key things that you're seeing that it's going to help make that better? Are there any breakthroughs that you see that are possible? What's going on in your view? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what's enabling all of this, again, one is transport, right? So whether it's 5G to increase the speed and decrease the latency, whether it's things like Starlink with making transport and comms ubiquitous, that tied with the fact that ships continue to get smaller and faster, right? And when you're thinking about tactical edge, those devices have limited size, weight, power conditions and constraints. And so the software that goes on them has to be just as lightweight. And that's why we've actually partnered with SUSE and what they've done with K3s to do that. So I think those are some of the enabling technologies out there. John, as you've kind of alluded to it, there are additional challenges as we think about it. We're not, it's not a simple transition and monetization here, but again, we think that this will be the next major disruption. >> What do you guys think, John, if you don't mind weighing in too on this as modern application development happens, we just were covering CloudNativeCon and KubeCon, DockerCon, containers are very popular. Kubernetes is becoming super great. As you look at the telco landscape where we're kind of converging this edge, it has to be commercially enterprise grade. It has to have that transit and transport that's intelligent and all these new things. How does open source fit into all this? Because we're seeing open source becoming very reliable, more people are contributing to open source. How does that impact the edge in your opinion? >> So from my perspective, I think it's helping accelerate things that traditionally maybe may have been stuck in the traditional proprietary software confines. So within our mindset at Booz Allen, we were very focused on open architecture, open based systems, which open source obviously is an aspect of that. So how do you create systems that can easily interface with each other to exchange data, and how do you leverage tools that are available in the open source community to do that? So containerization is a big drive that is really going throughout the open source community. And there's just a number of other tools, whether it's tools that are used to provide basic services like how do I move code through a pipeline all the way through? How do I do just basic hardening and security checking of my capabilities? Historically, those have tend to be closed source type apps, whereas today you've got a very broad community that's able to very quickly provide and develop capabilities and push it out to a community that then continues to adapt and add to it or grow that library of stuff. >> Yeah, and then we've got trends like Open RAN. I saw some Ground Station for the AWS. You're starting to see Starlink, you mentioned. You're bringing connectivity to the masses. What is that going to do for operators? Because remember, security is a huge issue. We talk about security all the time. Where does that kind of come in? Because now you're really OT, which has been very purpose-built kind devices in the old IoT world. As the new IoT and the edge develop, you're going to need to have intelligence. You're going to be data-driven. There is an open source impact key. So, how, if I'm a senior executive, how do I get my arms around this? I really need to think this through because the security risks alone could be more penetration areas, more surface area. >> Right. That's a great question. And let me just address kind of the value to the clients and the end users in the digital battlefield as our warriors to increase survivability and lethality. At the end of the day from a mission perspective, we know we believe that time's a weapon. So reducing any latency in that kind of observe, orient, decide, act OODA loop is value to the war fighter. In terms of your question on how to think about this, John, you're spot on. I mean, as I've mentioned before, there are various different challenges, one, being the cyber aspect of it. We are absolutely going to be increasing our attack surface when you think about putting processing on edge devices. There are other factors too, non-technical that we've been thinking about s we've tried to kind of engender and kind of move to this kind of edge open ecosystem where we can kind of plug and play, reuse, all kind of taking the same concepts of the open-source community and open architectures. But other things that we've considered, one, workforce. As you mentioned before, when you think about these embedded systems and so forth, there aren't that many embedded engineers out there. But there is a workforce that are digital and software engineers that are trained. So how do we actually create an abstraction layer that we can leverage that workforce and not be limited by some of the constraints of the embedded engineers out there? The other thing is what we've, in talking with several colleagues, clients, partners, what people aren't thinking about is actually when you start putting software on these edge devices in the billions, the total cost of ownership. How do you maintain an enterprise that potentially consists of billions of devices? So extending the standard kind of DevSecOps that we move to automate CI/CD to a cloud, how do we move it from cloud to jet? That's kind of what we say. How do we move DevSecOps to automate secure containers all the way to the edge devices to mitigate some of those total cost of ownership challenges. >> It's interesting, as you have software defined, this embedded system discussion is hugely relevant and important because when you have software defined, you've got to be faster in the deployment of these devices. You need security, 'cause remember, supply chain on the hardware side and software in that too. >> Absolutely. >> So if you're going to have a serviceability model where you have to shift left, as they say, you got to be at the point of CI/CD flows, you need to be having security at the time of coding. So all these paradigms are new in Day-2 operations. I call it Day-0 operations 'cause it should be in everyday too. >> Yep. Absolutely. >> But you've got to service these things. So software supply chain becomes a very interesting conversation. It's a new one that we're having on theCUBE and in the industry Software supply chain is a superly relevant important topic because now you've got to interface it, not just with other software, but hardware. How do you service devices in space? You can't send a break/fix person in space. (chuckles) Maybe you will soon, but again, this brings up a whole set of issues. >> No, so I think it's certainly, I don't think anyone has the answers. We sure don't have all the answers but we're very optimistic. If you take a look at what's going on within the U.S. Air Force and what the Chief Software Officer Nic Chaillan and his team, and we're a supporter of this and a plankowner of Platform One. They were ahead of the curve in kind of commoditizing some of these DevSecOps principles in partnership with the DoD CIO and that shift left concept. They've got a certified and accredited platform that provides that DevSecOps. They have an entire repository in the Iron Bank that allows for hardened containers and reciprocity. All those things are value to the mission and around the edge because those are all accelerators. I think there's an opportunity to leverage industry kind of best practices as well and patterns there. You kind of touched upon this, John, but these devices honestly just become firmware. The software is just, if the devices themselves just become firmware , you can just put over the wire updates onto them. So I'm optimistic. I think all the piece parts are taking place across industry and in the government. And I think we're primed to kind of move into this next evolution. >> Yeah. And it's also some collaboration. What I like about, why I'm bringing up the open source angle and I think this is where I think the major focus will shift to, and I want to get your reaction to it is because open source is seeing a lot more collaboration. You mentioned some of the embedded devices. Some people are saying, this is the weakest link in the supply chain, and it can be shored up pretty quickly. But there's other data, other collective intelligence that you can get from sharing data, for instance, which hasn't really been a best practice in the cybersecurity industry. So now open source, it's all been about sharing, right? So you got the confluence of these worlds colliding, all aspects of culture and Dev and Sec and Ops and engineering all coming together. John, what's your reaction to that? Because this is a big topic. >> Yeah, so it's providing a level of transparency that historically we've not seen, right? So in that community, having those pipelines, the results of what's coming out of it, it's allowing anyone in that life cycle or that supply chain to look at it, see the state of it, and make a decision on, is this a risk I'm willing to take or not? Or am I willing to invest and personally contribute back to the community to address that because it's important to me and it's likely going to be important to some of the others that are using it? So I think it's critical, and it's enabling that acceleration and shift that I talked about, that now that everybody can see it, look inside of it, understand the state of it, contribute to it, it's allowing us to break down some of the barriers that Ki talked about. And it reinforces that excitement that we're seeing now. That community is enabling us to move faster and do things that maybe historically we've not been able to do. >> Ki, I'd love to get your thoughts. You mentioned battlefield, and I've been covering a lot of the tactical edge around the DOD's work. You mentioned about the military on the Air Force side, Platform One, I believe, was from the Air Force work that they've done, all cloud native kind of directions. But when you talk about a war field, you talk about connectivity. I mean, who controls the DNS in Taiwan, or who controls the DNS in Korea? I mean, we have to deploy, you've got to stand up infrastructure. How about agility? I mean, tactical command and control operations, this has got to be really well done. So this is not a trivial thing. >> No. >> How are you seeing this translate into the edge innovation area? (laughs) >> It's certainly not a trivial thing, but I think, again, I'm encouraged by how government and industry are partnering up. There's a vision set around this joint all domain command control, JADC2. And then all the services are getting behind that, are looking into that, and this vision of this military, internet of military things. And I think the key thing there, John, as you mentioned, it's not just the connected of the sensors, which requires the transport again, but also they have to be interoperable. So you can have a bunch of sensors and platforms out there, they may be connected, but if they can't speak to one another in a common language, that kind of defeats the purpose and the mission value of that sensor or shooter kind of paradigm that we've been striving for for ages. So you're right on. I mean, this is not a trivial thing, but I think over history we've learned quite a bit. Technology and innovation is happening at just an amazing rate where things are coming out in months as opposed to decades as before. I agree, not trivial, but again, I think there are all the piece parts in place and being put into place. >> I think you mentioned earlier that the personnel, the people, the engineers that are out there, not enough, more of them coming in. I think now the appetite and the provocative nature of this shift in tech is going to attract a lot of people because the old adage is these are hard problems attracts great people. You got in new engineering, SRE like scale engineering. You have software development, that's changing, becoming much more robust and more science-driven. You don't have to be just a coder as a software engineer. You could be coming at it from any angle. So there's a lot more opportunities from a personnel standpoint now to attract great people, and there's real hard problems to solve, not just security. >> Absolutely. Definitely. I agree with that 100%. I would also contest that it's an opportunity for innovators. We've been thinking about this for some time, and we think there's absolute value from various different use cases that we've identified, digital battlefield, force protection, disaster recovery, and so forth. But there are use cases that we probably haven't even thought about, even from a commercial perspective. So I think there's going to be an opportunity just like the internet back in the mid '90s for us to kind of innovate based on this new kind of edge environment. >> It's a revolution. New leadership, new brands are going to emerge, new paradigms, new workflows, new operations, clearly great stuff. I want to thank you guys for coming on. I also want to thank Rancher Labs for sponsoring this conversation. Without their support, we wouldn't be here. And now they were acquired by SUSE. We've covered their event with theCUBE virtual last year. What's the connection with those guys? Can you guys take a minute to explain the relationship with SUSE and Rancher? >> Yeah. So it's actually it's fortuitous. And I think we just, we got lucky. There's two overall aspects of it. First of all, we are both, we partner on the Platform One basic ordering agreement. So just there we had a common mentality of DevSecOps. And so there was a good partnership there, but then when we thought about we're engaging it from an edge perspective, the K3s, right? I mean, they're a leader from a container perspective obviously, but the fact that they are innovators around K3s to reduce that software footprint, which is required on these edge devices, we kind of got a twofer there in that partnership. >> John, any comment on your end? >> Yeah, I would just amplify, the K3s aspects in leveraging the containers, a lot of what we've seen success in when you look at what's going on, especially on that tactical edge around enabling capabilities, containers, and the portability it provides makes it very easy for us to interface and integrate a lot of different sensors to close the OODA loop to whoever is wearing or operating that a piece of equipment that the software is running on. >> Awesome, I'd love to continue the conversation on space and the edge and super great conversation to have you guys on. Really appreciate it. I do want to ask you guys about the innovation and the opportunities of this new shift that's happening as the next big thing is coming quickly. And it's here on us and that's cloud, I call it cloud 2.0, the cloud scale, modern software development environment, edge with 5G changing the game. Ki, I completely agree with you. And I think this is where people are focusing their attention from startups to companies that are transforming and re-pivoting or refactoring their existing assets to be positioned. And you're starting to see clear winners and losers. There's a pattern emerging. You got to be in the cloud, you got to be leveraging data, you got to be horizontally scalable, but you got to have AI machine learning in there with modern software practices that are secure. That's the playbook. Some people are making it. Some people are not getting there. So I'd ask you guys, as telcos become super important and the ability to be a telco now, we just mentioned standing up a tactical edge, for instance. Launching a satellite, a couple of hundred K, you can launch a CubeSat. That could be good and bad. So the telco business is changing radically. Cloud, telco cloud is emerging as an edge phenomenon with 5G, certainly business commercial benefits more than consumer. How do you guys see the innovation and disruption happening with telco? >> As we think through cloud to edge, one thing that we realize, because our definition of edge, John, was actually at the point of data collection on the sensor themselves. Others' definition of edge is we're a little bit further back, what we call it the edge of the IT enterprise. But as we look at this, we realize that you needed this kind of multi echelon environment from your cloud to your tactical clouds where you can do some processing and then at the edge of themselves. Really at the end of the day, it's all about, I think, data, right? I mean, everything we're talking about, it's still all about the data, right? The AI needs the data, the telco is transporting the data. And so I think if you think about it from a data perspective in relationship to the telcos, one, edge will actually enable a very different paradigm and a distributed paradigm for data processing. So, hey, instead of bringing the data to some central cloud which takes bandwidth off your telcos, push the products to the data. So mitigate what's actually being sent over those telco lines to increase the efficiencies of them. So I think at the end of the day, the telcos are going to have a pretty big component to this, even from space down to ground station, how that works. So the network of these telcos, I think, are just going to expand. >> John, what's your perspective? I mean, startups are coming out. The scalability, speed of innovation is a big factor. The old telco days had, I mean, months and years, new towers go up and now you got a backbone. It's kind of a slow glacier pace. Now it's under siege with rapid innovation. >> Yeah, so I definitely echo the sentiments that Ki would have, but I would also, if we go back and think about the digital battle space and what we've talked about, faster speeds being available in places it's not been before is great. However, when you think about facing an adversary that's a near-peer threat, the first thing they're going to do is make it contested, congested, and you have to be able to survive. While yes, the pace of innovation is absolutely pushing comms to places we've not had it before, we have to be mindful to not get complacent and over-rely on it, assuming it'll always be there. 'Cause I know in my experience wearing the uniform, and even if I'm up against an adversary, that's the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do whatever I can to disrupt your ability to communicate. So how do you take it down to that lowest level and still make that squad, the platoon, whatever that structure is, continue survivable and lethal. So that's something I think, as we look at the innovations, we need to be mindful of that. So when I talk about how do you architect it? What services do you use? Those are all those things that you have to think about. What if I lose it at this echelon? How do I continue the mission? >> Yeah, it's interesting. And if you look at how companies have been procuring and consuming technology, Ki, it's been like siloed. "Okay, we've got a workplace workforce project, and we have the tactical edge, and we have the siloed IT solution," when really work and play, whether it's work here in John's example, is the war fighter. And so his concern is safety, his life and protection. >> Yeah. >> The other department has to manage the comms, (laughs) and so they have to have countermeasures and contingencies ready to go. So all this is, they all integrate it now. It's not like one department. It's like it's together. >> Yeah. John, I love what you just said. I mean, we have to get away from this siloed thinking not only within a single organization, but across the enterprise. From a digital battlefield perspective, it's a joint fight, so even across these enterprise of enterprises, So I think you're spot on. We have to look horizontally. We have to integrate, we have to inter-operate, and by doing that, that's where the innovation is also going to be accelerated too, not reinventing the wheel. >> Yeah, and I think the infrastructure edge is so key. It's going to be very interesting to see how the existing incumbents can handle themselves. Obviously the towers are important. 5G obviously, that's more deployments, not as centralized in terms of the spectrum. It's more dense. It's going to create more connectivity options. How do you guys see that impacting? Because certainly more gear, like obviously not the centralized tower, from a backhaul standpoint but now the edge, the radios themselves, the wireless transit is key. That's the real edge here. How do you guys see that evolving? >> We're seeing a lot of innovations actually through small companies who are really focused on very specific niche problems. I think it's a great starting point because what they're doing is showing the art of the possible. Because again, we're in a different environment now. There's different rules. There's different capabilities. But then we're also seeing, you mentioned earlier on, some of the larger companies, the Amazons, the Microsofts, also investing as well. So I think the merge of the, you know, or the unconstrained or the possible by these small companies that are just kind of driving innovations supported by the maturity and the heft of these large companies who are building out these hardened kind of capabilities, they're going to converge at some point. And that's where I think we're going to get further innovation. >> Well, I really appreciate you guys taking the time. Final question for you guys, as people are watching this, a lot of smart executives and teams are coming together to kind of put the battle plans together for their companies as they transition from old to this new way, which is clearly cloud-scale, role of data. We hit out all the key points I think here. As they start to think about architecture and how they deploy their resources, this becomes now the new boardroom conversation that trickles down and includes everyone, including the developers. The developers are now going to be on the front lines. Mid-level managers are going to be integrated in as well. It's a group conversation. What are some of the advice that you would give to folks who are in this mode of planning architecture, trying to be positioned to come out of this pandemic with a massive growth opportunity and to be on the right side of history? What's your advice? >> It's such a great question. So I think you touched upon it. One is take the holistic approach. You mentioned architectures a couple of times, and I think that's critical. Understanding how your edge architectures will let you connect with your cloud architecture so that they're not disjointed, they're not siloed. They're interoperable, they integrate. So you're taking that enterprise approach. I think the second thing is be patient. It took us some time to really kind of, and we've been looking at this for about three years now. And we were very intentional in assessing the landscape, how people were discussing around edge and kind of pulling that all together. But it took us some time to even figure it out, hey, what are the use cases? How can we actually apply this and get some ROI and value out for our clients? So being a little bit patient in thinking through kind of how we can leverage this and potentially be a disruptor. >> John, your thoughts on advice to people watching as they try to put the right plans together to be positioned and not foreclose any future value. >> Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to the points that Ki raised, I would, number one, amplify the fact of recognize that you're going to have a hybrid environment of legacy and modern capabilities. And in addition to thinking open architectures and whatnot, think about your culture, the people, your processes, your techniques and whatnot, and your governance. How do you make decisions when it needs to be closed versus open? Where do you invest in the workforce? What decisions are you going to make in your architecture that drive that hybrid world that you're going to live in? All those recipes, patience, open, all that, that I think we often overlook the cultural people aspect of upskilling. This is a very different way of thinking on modern software delivery. How do you go through this lifecycle? How's security embedded? So making sure that's part of that boardroom conversation I think is key. >> John Pisano, Principal at Booz Allen Digital Cloud Solutions, thanks for sharing that great insight. Ki Lee, Vice President at Booz Allen Digital Business. Gentlemen, great conversation. Thanks for that insight. And I think people watching are going to probably learn a lot on how to evaluate startups to how they put their architecture together. So I really appreciate the insight and commentary. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, John. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier. This is theCUBE Conversation. Thanks for watching. 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(vibrant music) >> Everyone, welcome to our Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here for a digital conversation. Part of our new digital events, part of our new structure of bringing people into the studio and also doing remotes. We'd love to do that in the era of the travel bans, but it's always great to have local Silicon Valley executives and startups here. Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry IO is here with me. Former VM-ware industry executive, CEO of Sentry IO hot startup. Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you can drive in. You don't have to fly anywhere. It's all good. No wearing masks. The coronavirus is crazy. I'm so glad we have you at this studio and get this content acquisition. Thanks for coming in. I want to get your take on your company before we get into the industry thing. I think you look at some of the most successful categories that just came out of nowhere. You know, you look at AIOps for instance in driving, you know, observability. But what is observability? That beginning, that comes with public page or do the list just goes on and on. The cloud has created this agile market where real time and then a lot of automation is going on so whether it's error logs like a Splunk does and that's scaled up. You get to doing something variation with software code that's not just something breaks, a phone rings. There's a lot a going on. You're this really kind of the tailwind here for you with cloud scale. What does Sentry doing? What's their secret sauce? >> So, the simplest way I would put it is we help you measure and monitor your code in production in close to real time. So what does that mean? You look at all, all of the companies that we talk about, whether it's a John Deere on one end or a Spotify on the other. They're all getting more digital in nature, which means they all trying to interact with their customers more often, building apps with an interface with an API. And as we all know, through our own personal experiences, if you don't get a great experience, you simply move on. So, you pull up your app, you pull up Uber, it's not working, let me look at Lyft. Right? That's the kind of consumer behavior that's starting to take in. >> So-- >> Meaning you don't really know as the owner of the app if they're abandoning or not, it's just down sales or? >> Correct. And so, what we do is we help developers monitor how the usages of their code in production. So, as users hit editors, a checkout button is not working or a user is having a bad experience on a mobile phone, whereas the same application on a browser looks fine. We in real time giving notification saying X number of users on this type of device, on this type of interface are having issues. And not just that, it's an alert, it's an alert that says this is the issue, this is the line of code where the issue's taking place, this is the potential commit that you did in your getRepository, which is causing it. So, it's the full kind of metadata around the issue. Which typically would be, what, two days? I take it as filed. Support me, look at it. Hey, customer has an issue, let's reproduce it. Well the customer is gone. So this is all done in real-- >> Or it could be a complete blindspot too. You don't know, right? This is the thing. This is why I love this whole digital transformation role where instrumentation is re-imagining how everything's being done. So for instance, you could see a code push and you go, okay, it's in production. And then why are sales down? Why is usage down? And then you've got to do a postmortem. >> Correct. >> No one called, just going what the hell happened? Fingers are blaming. He did it! Here you're trying to get to the point where you can see that error earlier or before or after, during as it work. >> It's almost in real time. Close to real time. As the user has the error immediately through either PagerDuty, Slack, email, whichever your communication medium is. You get to know a user or a set of users are having an issue. You click it, you go to this portal. All the metadata is right there. So, it's in real time. And so to exactly your point, it's not after the fact. >> Yeah. >> Right, it's happening. And so, the CTO of tackled.io, said it best, it's a startup that helps companies get on to marketplaces. He said, "Hey, we found issues before our customers even filed a issue against us." So, you know, this helps us deliver true customer experience, as a development team. >> So, on the developers that target profile get that and they're coding away. They don't have time to do research. They'll be like, "Oh, I better bolt on some instrumentation here." That's been the successful move. Look at like what Datadog has done in DevOps. Just the easy onboarding, free use it. Is that the same model you guys are taking this free land, adopt then expand. So, is it a freemium, could you explain the business model? >> Yeah, so, a Sentry is a open source. And so customers can take the piece of software that we have as is, fully functional and run it themselves on their data center on their cloud, or they can choose a SaaS version from us and we offer kind of like a free version and then you pay for the plan. So, what we typically see is customers turn it on, developers turn it on and they like it. And then, the best score I got recently was, one CEO who said, "Hey, you know, I don't send you that many events, but I see the value of what you do, so I decided to pay you." Right, so, they went from free to paid. And that's kind of typical pattern that we see. And the best thing about this is, it takes you approximately four lines of code to get started. Four lines of code in your code and you get started getting the benefits of Sentry. >> What's good sign for monetization when you got the paying it forward literally with cash. I want to ask you the difference between the open source version because I saw in the origination story it's really interesting. They were at jobs and they saw this side project grow into a real opportunity. And it's always good to see the open source not die, right. So, this been maintain the project. When would someone use the open sources? Is that the hardcore folks or, so SaaS, obviously makes sense. It's easier if you're doing a lot of the extra support and whatnot on top of it. But what's the use case for the folks who are going to bring it in house loaded on their cloud? >> I think we'll leave it to our customers to decide that. And we've seen, folks who say, "Hey, you know, we have, we're going to try it out, it's a small, we have got a good DevOps practice. We're going to get it up and running." Here's what happened with one of my teams at VMware. The engineer in charge looked at it and said, "It's not worth my time given what the price on SaaS is." Right, so, like our smallest plan is $29, which satisfies most startups or small software projects. And his point was like, "Hey, you know, it's almost better for me to start and using that versus--" >> Well they weren't using NSX. I'm sure Pat Gels would be like, "Get shipped the next product." Well this is the trade off, right? I mean, so that's what's beautiful of open source. You want to bring it in and make it work for yourself. That trade off has to be economically there. >> Correct. >> So you have a nice balance of if you're hardcore, no problem. >> Please use-- >> Use it, contribute, be part of the team. But if you want ease of use and all the bells and whistles and the speed. >> I think it comes down to what we are starting to see, which is, how much do you care about getting to value faster and where is your value? Is it in kind of running and operating all these pieces of software or is it in, you know, getting value to your end customer? So, if you are focused on building your business, we are this value add that kind of gets you there faster. So, stop focusing on kind of building the infrastructure. Start delivering kind of the value to the business. >> So I'm going to ask you, so, are you the CEO? So the founders who I've not met. I look forward to interviewing them. They seem pretty cool. I'm sure they probably say, "Oh this guy from VMware, he's probably the big company guy." 'Cause they were like, we're going to Dropbox now. Engineers, I could almost imagine their, what they're like. Probably skeptical, this is VMware guy. How did you get through the interview process? Obviously, you're the CEO, you made it. Were they skeptical ? What worked? Why you, why'd you go there? >> You know, the best thing about this transition is Chris and David. So, David was the CEO. He is now the CTO. He's the founder creator along with Chris. And it was his decision, to bring someone into the company, given that we are seeing this, you know, we are now at 20000 plus customers and he felt like he wanted to kind of go back to building and creating and bring a partner in crime. So, that was the good part. I would say like, we started talking and we are at the same energy level, you know? So, I think it just worked out in the way we communicated. And you've known me for a bit. I'm kind of hands on. I like, you know, to kind of get into things and build businesses. So, I think the profile matched out and both of us took our time. So it was, a long dating process, where we got to know each other. Not just as, you know, what we do for work. But, you know, how we operate and had coffee and lunch and dinner and--- >> Well, it is a dating, dating and marriage is always thinking, but the founders are, it's a tough move to make. I mean, for founders to be self-aware, to bring in someone else. But also the fit has to be there. And a lot of entrepreneurs just check the box and try to hire someone too fast that could fail or gets jammed down by the VCs, you know. So, the founders are pretty kind of reluctant. So, that's interesting that you did that. >> Yeah, he's been thinking. You know, the thing about David is he's super thoughtful and hopefully you'll get to see him soon. He's been thinking about this for a bit. And he took his time. And he worked through the process and that's why I said it felt like we were not just talking about, me joining as a CEO, as much as us getting to know each other and building this for the long run. And so we really took our time on both ends--- >> And he want to to get back on the engine of the business? He's a developer, right? He's like the code. >> Just don't want to, >> It was-- >> 20000 customers, you going to get hiring people. It's HR issues. This probably, I don't want to do that. >> That and you know it was kind of the personality thing, right? Grit and grind, you know. We kind of, can somebody come in and have the passion, the same that he believes in what we do. And he saw that and I saw that in him and I'm like, this is a great opportunity that I cannot forego. >> So talk about the, I say love modern, the modern startups because, you know, you're on the right side of history when you got cloud at your tailwind and kind of DevOps, like vibe you get going on with, I know it's not DevOps, but it's common like cloud scale and the agility. How are you guys organized? You guys have virtual teams. You have a central office. Is there a physical place? Do people come in? What's the, how is the company's philosophy on work environment? >> So, we actually have three locations. One in San Francisco, which is the headquarters, where we are located. And then in Vienna, Austria, where one of the early engineers and pioneers live. And so we built around that person and that location. >> No one's complaining about that. >> No. >> Vienna's not a bad place there-- >> Not a bad place. I haven't visited yet. (laughs) I am looking forward to it. I was supposed to be there in April, but, given the circumstances, I'm postponing it. And we recently started this past year in Toronto. And so, we are--- >> So three strong areas for tech talent for sure. >> And then we do have some employees working from home. So, we try and hire the best, and then we accommodate. But we do try to kind of cluster around these three locations. >> So, I got to get your take as the CEO, obviously we're all grappling with this, work at home, Covid 19, the coronavirus, is impacting. Everything's being canceled here in Silicon Valley. I would say Seattle has more of a hotspot than our area. Mostly China as China. What's the view that you guys are taking right now? You're telling people who work at home. Obviously, events are being canceled. Places where people doing Biz Dev, KubeCon was canceled, Dell Technology World is can-- I mean everything's being canceled. How's that affecting your business and what's your philosophy? How are you guys are executing through this tough time? >> I think as a company we've kind of taken the step for having people work from home and we did it on a location by location basis. So, for folks in San Francisco, especially because folks who are commuting on public transportation and other things. We wanted to make our team feel comfortable. And so we've instituted a work from home policy, for, I think we said two weeks, but I think it's going to keep going until we get a clear signal from the government, both locally and at the federal level. So that's kind of where we are as a team. And then what we noticed was the Austrian government kind of had similar regulations of everyone's working from home. Slack, you know, Google Hangouts. We spending a lot of time on video, making sure we are connected as a team. And you know, just that spirit of how we operate and talk to each other continues. As a business, we are a bottoms up business. So, what I mean by that is folks sign up, they use the product. And developers are right now globally still fully functional. The only difference being they're now working from home. So we feel like as a business, we'll be fine. And we are ensuring that our customers through this transition and through this period of kind of unknowns are able to continue to be successful for their customers. >> It's funny, I was talking with someone, it's like there's going to be some, obviously, sectors, like events are going to take a big hit. South by got canceled, Coachella's being canceled. All the tech events are being canceled. That's why we're going to be doing our stuff at the studio with virtual events, for theCUBE. But certain things are going to be different. You going to see pregnancy, boom. You know, nine months later, people are going to be having kids cause they're home alone or divorces depending on how you look at it. But productivity, developer wise has been talked about as actually developers want to just crank out some code. They don't have to come into the office. You can be more, I mean you can still be productive. Developers have been doing this for decades. >> I think-- >> At least if they are more. >> You know, I think you, you know, I think there might be a scenarios of adjustment, a period of adjustment. And then folks will get comfortable. So, it's super important to create that engagement model. Whether, do you have the tooling to keep the team engaged. And there companies that are completely remote. And so we're making sure we learn from their best practices around that. But I do believe that, for tech companies or even for manufacturing companies focused on building software, developers are going to be productive. >> Okay, so a baby boom's coming, divorce rate's going to go up and productivity is skyrocketing. (both laugh) >> For developers. >> For developers. Well, I mean it's a good time. Okay, can I get your take on the industry now. Honestly, putting all the coronavirus aside, we saw a surge in public cloud check. Done. And ask you when your VMware with NSX coming in and becoming the engine with software defined networking as part of the Series piece. You're starting to see hybrid clear as day. It's going to happen. Multi clouds on the horizon. So, you now have a three wave cloud game going on. Wave one, done. Wave two is hybrid. Wave three maybe bigger than them all with multicloud. Do you agree with that trend analysis and what's your take on that? >> So, this is where I'll probably kind of look back at my time at VMware. I think, you know, definitely see the multicloud wave catching on. But I would use the word multicloud as in, not a app spread across three clouds as much as, you know, a company choosing to have a certain assets in AWS, certain assets in Azure, certain in Google. So, I don't see yet this idea of an app being stretched across the three clouds but definitely, while I was-- >> VMware tried that. (both laugh) >> While I was at VMware and in talking to customers, we definitely saw adoption of multiple clouds. And that's where when I was working with the cloud health team, this idea of managing cost and security across three clouds became very common as a pattern that came up. You definitely see that as a kind of directional thing that a lot of organizations are doing. >> Yeah, the idea of just rapidly shifting up workloads based on pricing, all that stuff. I think it's aspirational at best because development teams are now just getting their groove on with hybrid and operation, cloud operations. So, I can see a day where if you can manage the latency network issues, maybe some day, but I mean, come on, really? I think about how hard that is, just latency alone. >> And the issue is like, architecturally you have to make really good choices to get there. So, I think you might see that in like kind of tech software firms. We're thinking about, how do I stay cloud neutral? But for the most part, if you want to take the full value of AWS or full value of GCP, you want to go deeper in there. And use all their services. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight. Let's riff on that a little bit because one of the things I was talking to Dave Alante and Stu Miniman about was, if you look at the multicloud, I don't think it's going to come from a vendor. I think if you look at the success of the Facebooks of the world, even Dropbox where your founders came from, early on, they had to just basically build it from cloud native, from ground up. And all the hyper scalers use open source. They built all their stuff. No one was selling them anything. They just did it. So, I think you'll see smart architectural moves, but that'll be the unicorn. That'll not be the standard. That'll be the exception, not the rule. I don't think you can sell multicloud, in my opinion, yet, or I don't think that'll even be possible. But I think someone will come out and say, make those architectural decisions saying, "I have an architecture that works multicloud because we architect it that way." >> Yup, yup. And I think that's kind of the more, kind of from an engineering standpoint, I think you'll see more of that. I think from a, you know, from a kind of solution standpoint, you will see folks saying, "I will help you manage or secure or build into each of the clouds and give you kind of common pattern versus the latter of it." And engineering team says, "Here's a way to architect for multicloud." >> You know, we pay a lot of attention to the next gen kind of psychologies. Obviously, we do a lot of coding on with our cube cloud that's coming out now. But, how do you see the founders you're working with and that in this new peer group that's developing. I call it, the next gen entrepreneur, technical entrepreneur. As they look at the vast resources of cloud and all of the data opportunities there and mobility, internet things and all this stuff going on. What is the general mindset right now of these kinds of entrepreneurs from a technology perspective? How are they looking at the problem space? What's your take on this new landscape as an entrepreneur? >> Yeah, I'll give you kind of what got me super excited about Sentry. Like how, why did I think about that? Which is if you look at 2000 to 2010, we did software defined infrastructure. Things started moving into software. 2010 to 2020 was, as you correctly wanted a cloud, hybrid, everything became kind of as a service. I think this next decade will be about data. So, companies using the data to get a competitive advantage or figuring out, you know, how to stay ahead, whether it's competitively or even to win a market. And the other aspect of this is because everything is so, as a service, API centric, I think it's going to explode how we develop things. And I think this is going to be truly now the decade for the developer, who's going to make deeper choices, greater choices, buying decisions. And so, with data kind of exploding, and the management of it and getting insights out of it is one aspect of it. And, you know, as somebody who's looking at Sentry, we do a lot of that, right? Which is how are customers using it? What are they using? What languages? And everything else that goes with that. But on the other end, developers are going to start kind of using things and create a whole new set of use cases that's going to change the way we think about it. So I think there's a whole set of elements around how to use this infrastructure to build new applications, creative products, that is going to be a massive boom. >> I think that's a great point. I think that's great insight. Because you think about observability, which I was just joking earlier on about, but I think the relevance observability is network management applied to value real time, right? Because if you can instrument everything, the smart people are going to saying, "Hey, I can just instrument this and get the data I need rather than dealing with this hassle process we had before." So, it brings up that kind of philosophy of kill the old to bring in the new or something new that kills the old. So, it's an interesting phenomenon. I think it's very relevant. But I want to get your, question as a CEO now, you've got, you're at the helm, helm of a company is technical. And talking about architecture, what's your architecture for the venture? What's your plans? How do you see the, you said you're going to come and build this next level growth. What's your architecture look like? Are you going to, do more of the same? Any new things that we see? What are you going to... What's your plan? >> Fundamentally, you know, we as a kind of set of users in the world today, have spent a lot of time monitoring, as I told you earlier, machines, systems and applications, right? And so there's a lot of successful companies doing that. But if you fundamentally believe that this is the decade where you're going to write more code than we've ever before or refresh more applications than we've ever before. Our focus is code and how it does whether it's in a staging environment, in a canary deployment, or in production. How do we measure code and monitor code in production. And the impact of that code to the end users. So it could be errors and now increasingly code performance. So you will see us kind of venture into this idea of helping developers. Not only find issues that they run into production like we talked about before, but also be able to say, looks like over the past three releases, our logins per second have gone down progressively by 10%. Why is that happening? Where is that happening? Which team made that change? So, you will see us kind of really double down on this idea of measuring and monitoring code going forward, complimenting how we measure monitor systems, machines and applications today. >> Yeah, I mean, code has got to be managed, as people more, people contribute. It's like a compiler for the compiler. (laughs) >> It's like if code fails, your business-- >> Code for the code. >> Yeah. >> Meta three meta meta as they say, but code for the code. But that's, it's basically code management in a way, right? It's the code data. You're leveraging that code relationship to the application. >> And so we talk about applications a lot. And so we write code, we store code, you know, in a getRepository. Now there's a whole set of elements around securing it. We deploy it. What about measuring and monitoring it? That is the element where we focus and kind of bring that whole cycle together. Helping that application developer be successful. >> What's it like for you going from VMware to the startup? What's the biggest, coolest thing that's happened? >> It's been a great transition. You know, and I always say this to folks who ask me for career advice. They say, always choose the people you work with and the people you work for. And I've been fortunate enough to do that and I think this transition has been great for that reason alone. Which is I've had the time to get to know the team at Sentry. They got to know me and it's just been, it's been fantastic. I think the velocity of and the pace at which I can make changes, has been the most fun part of it. >> And you've got like 25, 20000 paying customers 50000 total customers roughly in that range. Pretty sizeable. Employee count, how many employees do you have? >> 100 plus employees and-- >> Still small, still small. >> Yeah, still small. And we're going to probably double this year, give or take. And you know, it's 20000 customers from every startup. I've spoken to a startups, over 100 startups in two months. And it's amazing to see their reaction and their love for Sentry. >> And funding, how many rounds of funding have you guys done? >> We just finished Series C, in September of last year. 40 million, any Accel growth. So, we feel really good about where we are. With the revenue ramp that we've seen, we're in great shape. >> And pretty good numbers in terms of a head count too, very leveraged SaaS model. Get the developers. >> Yes. >> Great. Well, we're going to be entertaining a lot of developers at DockerCon this year. DockerCon used to be an event for Docker. Now they sold half the business to Mirantis. They're focusing on Docker developers. We have an event here. We're doing a virtual event. So, a lot more developer action coming. We'll talk more about that. Love to meet your founders, have them come in too. We want to thank you for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Milin Desai, CEO of sentry.io, former VMware executive with a great hot startup, Series C funded, growing here in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and in Austria. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (vibrant music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios today. And obviously, what's top of the news is the coronavirus and COVID-19, and it's having a direct impact on anything where people get together. We're obviously really tied into the convention space. But we're excited to have an expert in the field coming at it from a different kind of point of view, more from the entertainment side. We'd like to welcome, calling in from Tennessee, Lauren Spahn. She is a partner for Shackelford, Bowen, McKinley, or excuse me, but yeah, McKinley & Norton. Lauren, great to see you. >> Hey there, how are ya? >> Jeff Frick: Good. So we were introduced through kind of the process of the South by Southwest cancellation. Before we get into it, tell us a little bit about kind of what you do, what type of clients do you have, who do you guys kind of represent? >> Yeah, sure, so I practice primarily in entertainment law here in Nashville. But I work with a variety of people in the music industry, whether it be artists or music festivals, record labels, publishing companies, you name it, across the US. So I do a lot of work in L.A. and New York as well. And our firm specializes in a little bit of everything, but our national hub is kind of the spearhead for the entertainment and music practice. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause we're not so directly involved in entertainment, but we do go to a lot of conferences. And, I think, for us, the watershed moment this year was Mobile World Congress earlier this year in February, 100,000 people in Barcelona, Spain. That's a little unique because most of the main vendors are Asian in terms of all the mobile carriers and the handset tech carriers. But, you were saying before we turned the cameras on, that now the South By Southwest event cancellation is kind of sending the same shock waves if you will through the entertainment industry. >> Yeah, I mean South By Southwest obviously is a big coming together of multiple industries. You know, music, film, TV, technology, but it really was one of the first events that were canceled that impacted the music industry. And so, such a large conference to completely cancel, really just started, it was the tip of the iceberg, or I think what we are going to continue to see across the sphere in music whether its tours being canceled or music festivals that are being canceled, everything is kind of starting to ramp up, and were starting to see the effects from South By Southwest line. >> Jeff Frick: Right. So, one of the things that really is just kind of a splash of cold water, is these things are going down it just really highlights the interconnectedness of all these different parts of these events, right? whether it is the primary promoter or the primary bands in the case of South By Southwest or even the tech companies, but then there are tons and tons of secondary, third and other vendors that are involved from food and transportation and the list goes on and on. So, you're quoted quite often in the press about talking about force majeure and that this is something that kind of comes up in contract law when these types of events happen. So, I wonder if you can kind of explain the dictionary definition of force majeure and how do you see it kind of executed traditionally in a contract where maybe one person just can't uphold their part of the deal and how that contrasts with something like this, which is hitting kind of both sides of the agreement, if you will. >> Completely. So, I think it's important to step back and look at if we are going to use a music festival as an example. You have a contract, the music festival itself will have a contract with the artist, but they will also have contracts with their vendors, with the production team that comes in and sets up the staging and the sound and the light. There are a myriad of contracts and so, the language in each contract tends to govern the relationship between the festival and that third party. So, in this situation of let's use an artist, for example. There is different things in the contract that point to how you can cancel and what happens when you cancel. A force majeure is an example of that. And force majeure is something that is outside of the control of both parties. So, again, the festival and the artist. If something like the Coronavirus is coming, neither one of those parties can control that from happening. And so it typically relieves both parties of any obligation to move forward with the contract. What is important, though, is the language that's in that force majeure provision. So, you sometimes will see language like sickness or an epidemic. But then, you may not have that, and you may have language that says, a local or national state of emergency. So, depending upon the state you're in, depending upon the exact situation in the city that you are holding the event, all of those things can be looked or looked to to interpret whether or not the language that's in that force majeure contract will impact you or will give you the rights to cancel that event without having to pay additional money. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> And so, you know, not only that but you're then seeing it carried out through the insurance policies, as well. So, even if you have force majeure language whether or not the insurance company will help cover the losses for you again depends upon the exact language that's in your insurance policy. >> Jeff Frick: Right. >> So, across the board, it really is a contractual right, that can differ for the different people that are involved. >> Right. But, there's the contractual, the language in the contract, but then there is kind of this random stuff that comes up. And, we hear kind of act of God kind of thrown up by insurance companies when it's something they haven't defined in all the fine language. And then, the other piece that we're hearing about a lot in the news here on Palo Alto, right is the specific descriptive terms used by the authorities. Is it a pandemic? Is it an outbreak? Is it a natural disaster? Is it a state of emergency called by the government? >> Or other. So, how does that figure in on something like we're experiencing? I don't know that we've seen anything quite like this before. >> You know, I was looking back through some contracts earlier this morning because I had a potential cancellation that was going to happen, and I mean some contracts go as far as to even describe the Swine Flu and similar things like that but we really are looking to the authorities to see what decision they are making on everything. And whether or not they are calling it a local state of emergency because a lot of times that exact definition or that exact cause is defined in the agreement . But, yeah, I mean really it comes down to small print wording in this situation, if you are looking at the contract itself to see what rights that you have. What I found is that people aren't going to the nitty gritty of at least the contracts, you're probably going to get into the nitty gritty of the insurance policy, if you have a chance of getting any kind of protection. But, at the end of the day, the artist doesn't want to go play a festival that could potentially cause their fans to have some outbreak of the Coronavirus. An event doesn't want to be liable for holding an event that could be connected with that, as well, because across the board, that creates a PR nightmare for whoever's making that decision. So, you're seeing people that are trying to work together to figure out exactly how we're going to handle things, and what we're going to do moving forward, because no one is going to win in this situation. >> [Jeff Frick} Right. Right. >> It's really just figuring out a way that we can all be in the best position possible across the board. >> Yeah. And I think that's what we're kind of seeing a lot too, where, you know, I think everyone is again instead of just one party that's not upholding their part of the deal and the other party getting screwed on that, this is really, you know, we're kind of in it together, this has kind of come down on both of our houses so how do we work together to minimize the pain and at least, kind of get through this window that we assume will pass at some point or at least the current heightened state will go. But, I just wonder if you have an opinion on, from a legal point of view, and it's not your space, so if you say no that's an okay answer, but, you know, if you look at kind of market forces is determining what is the appropriate action, right? Because we don't really know what's the right action. But, clearly, the market is defined based on activity and the University of Washington shutting down and Stanford shutting down >> Vanderbilt >> Almost is a self-imposed kind of semi-quarantine state, which is just, you know the latest now I think they get the local high school basketball game is they can only have 100 people in the stands in the biggest building they can find and everybody needs to spread out. So, it's just been very interesting to see you know kind of what is the appropriate response. What's the right response? Because ultimately it seems like it's driven by nobody wants to be the one that didn't take the max precautions and something bad happens. >> To be honest, I don't think that anyone really knows. You know, it really is the conversations right now are not the artist's agent calling the festival and saying we're absolutely not doing this The conversation is more so, hey what are you guys seeing? What are you guys thinking? What's the best way to handle this? You know, no one wants to put the consumers and the fans at risk. And, you know, until we have a better handle on exactly how we handle this type of situation, it's really going to be people doing their best to try to not create a situation that's going to, you know, cause some kind of massive outbreak. >> Right. Right. >> If you look at, you know, something like South By, no one wants to cancel, you know. It really impacts, not only the company and the event itself, but really everyone that's associated to it, has a financial hardship because of that decision, but the decision isn't made because someone wants to do it, it's made because collectively, you know, people are feeling like it needs to be done in order to keep people safe. >> Right. >> And if they didn't think that, they'd probably go ahead and try to hold the event and, you know, risk the liability. But, I think people truly want what's in the best interest of everyone. And that's why they are working together to try to figure this out. >> Yeah. Yeah. It really is driven home what social creatures we are when you start to kind of disconnecting crowds and groups of people from so many events and it just continues to ripple through whether it's our business, a convention business, the entertainment business, you know March Madness is coming up here in a very short order. What's going to happen there all the way down to you know, the local talent show for the local middle schoolers that they used to have before graduation, which is now canceled. So, it's interesting times. >> And I think for us, the biggest indicator in terms of just music festivals is going to be what happens with Coachella. And, you know, Billboard and Variety have reported that they're looking to potentially reschedule the event to October, if artists are able. And if not, they're going to have to completely cancel it for this year. And, you know, Coachella is such a massive festival that attracts people from all over the world. And if Coachella is canceled then I think there is a good chance that so long as this is continuing at the speed it is, that we're going to see a lot more music festivals canceled. >> When is Coachella scheduled? >> It starts in about a month. >> In about a month. >> So it's the second weekend in April, but they have to start production and really building out the grounds now. >> Wow. Wow. >> And so the decision kind of has to be made before then. And then, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a decision there in the next few days. >> Yeah. I think I would take the short if I was in Vegas, because there's just not enough data, I don't think, to go forward based on the current situation. I'm glad I'm not the one sitting in that chair. >> Yeah. It'd be a tough position. >> All right, well Lauren, well thank you for sharing your insight and, you know, it's great to get the perspective of another you know kind of industry that's all built around bring people together. And, I think we probably both would agree that this time will pass and we'll get a vaccine out, we'll get the growth curves to start to flatten out and go down which is where they need to go. And then you know I think it will be a different time, but hopefully things will get approximate a little bit more to normal in the not too distant future. >> Yeah, fingers crossed. I hope it gets figured out sooner rather than later and we can all have our summers full of conferences and festivals and the gathering of people. >> Yep. All right Lauren. Well thanks again for your time >> Thank you >> And have a great Tuesday. >> Awesome. You too. >> Alrighty. She's Lauren. I'm Jeff. Thanks for checking in on this Cube Conversation. We'll catch you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from Mountain View, California. It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back to the cave. Lisa Martin with John Barrier on our first day of two days of coverage of Cisco Definite Create twenty nineteen at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. John Eyre. Please welcome to iniquitous and directors solutions, architecture and Devil Box from Liberty Technology. Tony, Welcome. >> How are you? >> Good, thanks for Thanks for having us tell our audience a little bit about liberty technology before we get into the community. What you doing your breakout session? >> Not a problem. The re technology is a company. Where? MSP company down in Griffin, Georgia. And so we handle a lot of a lot of clients are either public sector cities, all different types of all the different verticals. So well. And so do you have a client? A customer out there that needs needs an extra arm into it. We're there for them. >> So your basement of Georgia, Which means that how warm it is in here today Outside should be nothing for you right >> now. Tell me about >> well outside >> now, since there is no humanity I like it back home in few minutes, >> Californians were babies. >> Yeah, Joni, Public Sector. We've done a lot of interviews of public sector folks with their towns and cities, air, ground rules, municipalities, cities, their I t light. And then they don't have the Dev ops expertise, but clouds a perfect fit for them. But they have a lot of certain characters. Whether it's email is very ephemeral. People come and go, So getting people collaborating in these distinct user groups that have different roles and responsibilities is a challenge. How are you guys solving that? Because there's something I know you guys have worked on. There's a challenge that's only Republicans for enterprises do. How do you bring people that are distinct user populations that have an application or roll or use case into a collaborative, horizontally scaleable >> system? We show Be honest way. Go in there and we go in there and we discover as to what they're doing now, what are their pain points? What do they want? Change where they want to go and then we show them the collaboration started. We shone like what makes team's way? Show him all of the, uh, meetings room devices, things like that. And then not just on the collaboration side, but also if there helping with three, six, five their security than Rocky. That's how we bring. That's how we bring collaboration intothe public >> about the Cisco dynamic we've been covering definite create since it started. Definite. Now it's just go live couple years, seeing kind of a new vibe and new mojo going on with that within the Cisco ecosystem of actually coding stuff up, whether it's slinging AP eyes together or creating new ones. New capabilities. How is it changed the delivery in performance of the customers? Because this is not just your old school Cisco networking company. Yeah, they got APS. Things are connected. Date is moving from Point A to point B. All right, but he's kind of integration challenges. Kind of seamless program ability is the core theme here. What's your reaction? Thoughts on all this? >> No. >> Well, first off, this is my first definite create. I've been to other Siskel lives have not been too. Don't think great yet so so far, I'm enjoying this a lot. It's I like the tight niche, the community style of this of this event I'm sorry. Go back, >> Tio. Go live a little creations that are going on here. Very community already. Kind of be open source projects. Yeah, people talking to each other, a lot of hallway conversations. But it's a kind of a new kind of collaborative model that customers are now getting exposed to write. This is something >> new. I mean, it is. It's new, and I'm finding a lot times where a lot of customers and clients they've heard about it, but they don't know yet. So it's our job to actually get them to adopt to it and and also adapt to it as well. So it's almost like how we have our own like community here. For definite. It's almost how can we take that structure and show it to our clients >> and translation involved Kind of kind of taper down the excitement, maybe, or keeping up questions for you people watching that aren't here. A definite what's that? What's the vibe here? Like, what's some of the cools? Things you've seen and heard are something Well, the keynote was >> great either. Was amazing Kino how they actually showed how, especially with the Iraqi had when Mandy went while I was out there talking about from the small campus to the festival and to an actual >> there's a radio >> that was a great use of incredible, especially with like big Stadium and how John McDonough came out and showed about how there was a fight on the field with you. Yet no one saw it, but yet then, when they went through the actual demonstrate, the actual video were like, Oh, yeah, this's amazing how it's almost like it was like the minority report way. You're already >> exactly Dan. Yes, the data out there, >> all that data and they just machine learning A I just watching people, seeing what they're doing, kind of almost like predicting what they're going to do >> and every little bit, actually, a little bit. I agree with you. I thought they did a great job with that, Especially coming off the heels of Coachella and showing how they can enable Cisco enable developers for social folks to set up secure networks of different sizes and also be able to use in real time machine learning a eye to evaluate what's going on the offensive. And that was a very cool, real world example of what they showed. Leveraging machine learning, identifying. There's there's an issue here. There's an altercation. They surprised at a sports event, right? And deploying those. It has a lot security, many sports events, though I thought it was all that the security was just casually walking up to fight. That's another thing >> that you would slow >> down. But you don't know what >> you're right. >> And it is so many more etiquette rules now at events, whether it's, you know, hate crimes or just, you know, just violent language fights. Also, everyone sees those that write that events. But this actual now, surveillance tech out there. You know, you could tell the guys that how many beers he's had kicks in, You know, >> we're gonna have something where they can actually check out someone like Heat signature. They can't tell how >> much he's going to explode. Is the Red Sox going to blow the lead again? A. Having a good year? Well, you know, they wanted last year Yankee fans, so you would be off the charts now. Philly fans, a whole other story. I don't. Okay. My digress. You've >> got a breakout session. Sorry, John. A lightning session that's tomorrow Any time tomorrow. Tell us the title and what you're going to be talking about. >> Keisha, my title is orchestrate forty five percent. So >> we'LL just read the forty five percent correct Alright, Digging >> again tonight a little >> bit. I have a sly where we was actually Suzy. We actually did a presentation awhile back where she put up a slider, says where she talked about how fifty five percent of partners are creating APS and developing their own naps. So, way of liberty we saw that we were like, OK, what about the other forty five percent? So that's where that the idea came out too. Okay, let's I'll do a talk about how we orchestrate forty, forty five, forty five percent. So entails What I'm doing with that is that we actually have a platform called Consulate. Where there were that platform has the ability to integrate with multiple business processes. So we're connecting. We're integrating with connect allies with Iraqi doing eight about and so that I have it where that there'll be a trigger or Web hook from one my rocky cameras like emotion which will trigger which will create a ticket and connect allies so they can help out some help tasks service desk and then that which will also they get thrown into teams and click on the ticket and then also run commands and grab a snapshot from the camera. The right of the team's six teams >> fell by the Iraqi for a minute because we get a lot of hearing a lot of buzz about Muraki. It's not just wireless. It's not just what you might think it is, it seems to be connected tissue you meant. There's a great demo that added to she's showing around. They are with looking at network configuration. We're obviously to be connecting all of this together. What's your view on this? What's that? >> I for one, I love muraki. I run Rocky at home, so five the viol. Although the wireless is switching cameras and just that, it's it's one. Really. They have, like their own room platform that connects has all their devices connecting into the dashboard, and you could do so much with it that they're actually they're open up Now. The eyes, the web hooks this so much things that you can actually integrate with it. It's it's great, and it's the analytics that you get from it. >> And this is what you're talking about really about bringing these teams together through Webb Hooks for AP, eyes in through Morocco, the connected to direct and then allow the APS to be valuable, cross different groups >> very valuable, but then so that then you don't have it on. Engineer doesn't have have to touch different applications or devices. They get it all from one and from that one application, click and go to where you need to get got. >> So we're only on halfway through Day one of your first up that crate. But it sounds like you've already been exposed to so many things that I could see the wheels turning us without anticipating that you're going to be able to bring back to liberty. And that will really help drive. What you guys doing driving forward toward that customer engagement only, eh? Educate >> well, since it is, you know, it's like half day already on day one. There's still so much to see here. There's so much to see about Coyote. There's a bunch of workshops here about form Iraqi and the AP ice, which I want to join in and see what I can take out of that and bring it back. Um, you know, there's a bunch of stuff get on. So I want to gather all that and just be a sponge and then bring it back to liberty and say, Hey, this is what we can do. How can they fit into our business model? >> Awesome. Well, Tony, thank you so much for stopping by and talking with Jonah me on the program this afternoon. We appreciate it. Best of luck in your lightning session tomorrow as well. >> Thank you so much >> for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on the Cube. Live from Cisco. Definite great. Twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching. >> No.

>> live from Mountain View, California It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to You by Cisco >> Welcome back to the Cube. Elisa Martin with Set Cisco Definite Create twenty nineteen at the Computer History Museum, but here all day, talking with some really great innovative folks excited to welcome to the Cube. Marty Jane, senior director of this Cisco Global Partnership and Video. Marty, It's great to have you here. >> Thank you. Good to be here. >> So I always love talking about partnerships Where what Day One of Dev. Net. Tomorrow's day to. There's been a lot of a lot of community spirit is here, so I just kind of in the spirit of partnerships, lot of collaboration that community is is really strong. Uh, before we get into kind of the details of this Cisco in video partnership first kind of thing, I wonder is all right. This is the developer community. Why the developer community within video? >> That's a great question. So if you think about way, make GP use, which is a piece of silicon graphics processing unit, and it is really only a piece of silicon until a developer comes along and develops a cool app on it. So if you think about how we go to market our large conferences called GTC, it's really developer. Focus. We have a little over a million developers in our ecosystem, and I find it very synergistic with Cisco. If you think about Suzy, we's vision. I think it's the same idea. You look at over half a million developers in their ecosystem and they want to develop collapse, and that's how your platform becomes relevant. So if you think of all the modern innovation that's coming from developers, so these are the folks that we should be talking to on a daily basis. I see a lot of commonality, a lot of synergies. In fact, we had Sisko definite come over to our conference GTC, and they they appeal to our developers. And now we're here talking to their developers and also developing some joint platforms which the the folks can use for. Like I said, the more modern *** with all the new data that's coming, whether the coyote with a machine learning automotive, smart cities, you name it, we need to be able to provide the platform to the developers >> and a number of those topics came up today, even during the keynote, Smart cities being able to utilize and accelerate work leads with a I and machine learning. They gave some great examples during the keynote of how developers can build networks. They give this cool example of I think it right off the hills of Coachella of designing a secure network for an indoor concert, designing it for an outdoor festival, Coachella and then designing it for a massive stadium like a big football game like the Super Bowl, for example. And they showed it that higher end. They showed how they're using machine, learning to zoom in on. For example, they had this little red box and you see people and what's actually in there than the machines detected was a fight and in real time, analysing this data and thence, dispatching the appropriate security to come and obviously probably take the drinks out of their hands first. But it was a really interesting, great real world example. So you guys have been partners a long time. Our you've been actually working at various companies with Cisco for a long time, but I think of Cisco and video coming together. How are you great? Something to accelerate these? Aye. Aye. And machine weren't were machine learning workloads that we're starting to see in every industry. >> You bet. Great question. So let me first comment on what you said about smart cities. I like to think of it as smart and safe cities. So actually, the first set of application will be around public safety. What the example you were giving his spot on? If you have large crowds gathering, it makes sense for us to be able to look at those clouds. Crowds? We call it intelligent video analytics or idea. In fact, we have a platform here. The Sisko i R eleven o one with a GPU added to it. So now I can wash the crowds. And if there's a fight breaking out or somebody's carrying in a weapon, you want to know somebody walks in carrying a backpack and drops it and moves on. You want to know one? Inform somebody. So what is happening is way of these millions and millions of bites of video data, >> and >> that data is not being really used today. So what we're doing is saying you know what? Let's find those pieces of intelligence and the video data and do something with it. And public safety is absolutely the highest priority. So smartest, safe city makes a lot of sense. So what we're doing is we're going to market with partners at Cisco. So what we're doing is we're saying Okay, let's design these GPS into the servers, which are connected to cameras and think about how many cameras are deployed today, probably a billion. And a lot of the video data can now be used for public safety purposes, and we basically go out and talk to large companies. We talked to governments. We talked to cities along with Sisko to go even open their eyes to what is possible today. >> Right? Because of that data is dark for so long, they don't know what they don't know. >> While most cases, what happens is you record four days of video and until something happens, nobody goes back and takes a look at it. But now we have the ability to look at the real time and cities and government's desire that very much so, >> sir example, that's such a relevant topic. I mean, they know. There's also the issue of privacy. But to your point about not just a smart city but a smart, safe city. I like that. I think it's absolutely imperative. How do you have this conversations with cities with governments about All right, this is what we want. Do we want to actually apply machine learning? So the machines are taught What that line is with privacy with those boundaries are so that a person, I'd say a lay person not in technology. Maybe is a city government official who doesn't understand the technology or need Teo will go. I get it. >> Yes. So our conversations are really about what we call you cases. So think of enterprise. A good use case would be. In fact, we work with Cisco on developing use case. You know, you always badge in into an enterprise. You have your badge, you walk in. But you also have some cases. People follow you, following you in what stops you from following me into a building. And usually people are too polite to say no, you can walk in, but we've >> all had the video training or read the manual. We know we're not >> we're not supposed to bite, but >> then you're like, I >> don't just cultural, exactly. We just can't you know that. So now we have the ability. So we trained a in a network to say, Look, if Marty's badging in, only he's allowed to walk in. And if there's a second person walks in, I want to take put Little Red Square on that face and inform security that we have had more than one person walking. So these are some of the ways. So we talk about use cases. This is one use case crowd behavior. Analytics is another use case. You know, people were walking in the backpack, dropping it. Other use case would be something like Bar to Bart loses millions of dollars year because people jumped the turnstiles and Bart didn't really have a good way of of monitoring, measuring the losses until we put a camera and captured the number of people that were jumping. The turnstiles are going in through the handicap access, okay? They were losing ten times the dollar value of what we had thought. Wow. So this is how we start the conversation with use cases, you know? And what would you like to do? Being able to count the number of cars in intersection begin with counter number of pedestrians, so you could do traffic management better. That's the language we would use with cities and governments. And then we go deeper as you go through the implementation process. >> Well, that makes perfect sense going in the use case route, because you can clearly see in that example that you mentioned with Bart a massive business outcome and an opportunity to regain a tremendous amount of resource is that they could redeploy for whether it it's new trains, new trucks, etcetera than them, not realizing we're losing how much money. I think anybody when you could put the useless in that context of this is what you can expect as an outcome. They get it >> Absolutely. That's the really the only way to start the conversation than starting from bits and bytes. And this is the This is usually the case across industries. If you think about retail, for example, you know you go to a safe way to start talking about GPS and servers. That's not the great way to start, but they do have issues with shoplifting, for example. So how do you know a person is walking in, you know, through the checkout. And they have one item. Then there's a small item right here and they walk out with this. How do you monitor that? So now you can do that with the right kind of cameras that can capture. Look there Two items, not one. How do you know where shop are stopping Which aisle is the most popular? I'Ll How do you know that? Well, now you can have cameras would say, Look, we have red zones and Green Zone so you could do those kinds of things with modern ways of doing. I >> so interesting because it's so. I mean, the examples that you gave are so disparate, but yet they make so much sense was how how you're describing it rather than going into, you know, a grocery store in talking about GPS, which they might fall over with their eyes. Doing this >> right. >> You're actually putting in the context of a real world problem they've been experiencing since the beginning of time. Don't you understand? Only goodness and this is how we can use technology. It's the safe way becomes a technology company. They don't know it. What actually started packing their bottom line. >> That's right, And so even now, you know. So I have to take that and you extend that into How do you go to market? And it's something you wanted Teo Touch on. How do you go to market with Cisco's? How does ingredients is? Could do it together, right? So think of Cisco's sales teams who are talking to all these customers every day where their retailers, financial services, federal government, health care, you name it. So what we've done is we basically sort of taking all these industries and created the top three or four use cases we know are relevant to that industry, either for safety or for saving money's. For variety of their operational reason, we have narrowed it down to three or four five use cases and each of those target industries. So what we do now with Cisco teams that we would bring them into our facility or go to them and really talkto all those use cases and train them on Hey, look, this is what we do jointly, and that makes the conversation much easier. Then they will go and present to the customer and what's the customer gets an idea far this all possible. Now that starts a deeper level technology and server and GPU engagement. So this is one way we go up and talk to different customers. What's the school's >> second? About a bit. Marcus. Cisco is so enormous, they have a billion different. I'm slightly exaggerating products with but a lot of different technologies that form many different solutions. So I imagine your Cisco expertise over many years of working with Cisco's a partner for other companies. How do you once you get to that deeper level conversation, how do you bring this different groups within Cisco together? So that that solution conversation is one that really aligns to that use case and the customer doesn't get it? >> Yeah, that's a difficult question to answer. That's like, you know your work. It's just cause a large company. But I think I also think they're also very cells driven, and that's what drives the different groups to come together. In fact, some people called me the Connector because I've been working. Cisco's so long. I know people and definite I know people in sales. I know people in the server. BU, in fact, if you think about the The platform was talking about the i r eleven o one with the jets and GPU that came as a result. I was talking to the i o t bu result talking to Dev net our situation the definite he said. You know what? This is cool are gonna do this. Then we take that to the IOC Guys is Oh, this is cool. We can take that. Put it in this platform, and then I'm next. Actually, next week I'm talking to a sale. Seaman Cisco. They cover utilities. And this platform was profit for utilities. Even think about fire monitoring in a forest. How do you do, boy thousand? The people to just watch what happens. We can take a platform like that now and really deploy it in hundreds of places which could monitor fires or the starting off a fire. But yes, bringing them together. It is no easy task. It's fun >> where you are smiling. I like that. Marty the connector. Jane, thank you >> so much for >> joining me on the kid this afternoon. Fun conversation. I enjoyed it. >> Ofcourse. Thank you. Likewise. Thank >> you, Lisa Martin for the Cube. you're watching us live, Francisco Definite. Create twenty nineteen. This is the end of day one. Stick around, John. Failure on I will be back tomorrow to cover day too. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from the Wynn Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2018. Brought to you by Magento. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, live at the Wynn, Las Vegas at Magento Imagine 2018. We've had a really cool day here talking about lots of facets of commerce, e-commerce, and really talking about commerce as a center of gravity around digital transformation. If you drink Coke like I do, you're going to be pretty excited to hear our next guest. We've got Todd Skidmore, the manager of eCommerce from Coca-Cola. Todd, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I'm super thirsty now, there's probably some Coke bottles behind us. >> (laughs) Yeah, exactly. >> So everybody knows the iconic Coca-Cola brand and the Share A Coke branding that you guys have been using a long time. As retail, and really as consumers, as we've really started to change the way, not just that we buy, but the experience that we want to have, I'd love to hear the journey that you guys are on at Coca-Cola to make a product that's been around for how long, really personal. So talk to us about what the Share A Coke journey is, and let's start with why you even started it. >> Perfect. Yeah, so the campaign actually started really as an opportunity to connect with consumers in a more personal way, and it was an in-store campaign. It started in Australia, actually, in 2011, and was hugely successful, so it moved its way across the world and made it to the U.S. in 2014 and of course, you can imagine the U.S. as big as it is, and we have the distribution, and complexities, and manufacturing, took a few years to bring it, but it was hugely successful in 2014, but of course, success breeds opportunities, and with that, people started going, "Well, I can't find my name on a bottle "in the store, how can I get my name?" Posting on social media, et cetera, which is great exposure, but we had an opportunity, so when we brought the program back for the next summer, the campaign in-store as well, we also brought in our first foray into direct-to-consumer e-commerce where you are able to go onto the site, personalize a bottle yourself, and get any name on a bottle. You weren't restricted to what was in the store, or even if it was in the store and you couldn't find it, now you had an opportunity to bring that to life. So that's kind of been the journey, and that was three years ago when we launched the site, and now we've gone from just basically selling one skew, which was a Coke bottle, infinitely customizable one skew, but one skew, to now we have over 6,000 skews on the site, including licensed merchandise, lots of different bottle options, all kinds of stuff, so. Really, the whole thing has been about connecting with consumers, listening to what consumers want, and then bringing those experiences and the brand in a really special and unique way. >> I love that you're listening and taking that consumer feedback and identifying by doing so, I imagine, using big data and analytics, to then identify additional business models and revenue streams for Coca-Cola. >> Yeah, so, the crazy thing is we started it and the big thing was you can get your name on a bottle. Well, then we started realizing by looking at the data that people were using it for weddings, and events, and all kinds of things, and reunions, and graduation parties, and so being able to customize it and have it for an event like that brings really a special, you know, the Coca-Cola to those occasions, which is exactly what we want as a company, is to be a part of the communing and occasions like that, so being able to use that data to drive our products and also drive our marketing. So now we don't just talk about getting your name on a bottle, we talk about these occasions and marketing. We have a whole wedding page, talking about weddings, et cetera, so. >> Wow! That's cool. So you guys are a award finalist here at Magento Imagine 2018 for the Imagine Excellence Awards in the Customer Insights category, and it's kind of (mumbles) with what you were just saying in terms of listening to customers, but also from a data-driven standpoint, you mentioned marketing, and I'm a marketer, and marketing is now a science because there is so much data available, but as consumers we want that. We want an experience, whether its Coca-Cola or some other retailer, we want them to know enough about us, to not steal our data, but to be able to deliver a seamless experience regardless of channel, that's relevant to me as a person, as a human. And that's something that you guys will find out, I guess tonight at the awards ceremony. >> Yeah we'll see what happens tonight, but yeah. So we definitely try to use as much data as we can to inform where we're going to take the next program, marketing campaign, et cetera. So it's listening to what people are buying or even saying in the reviews, et cetera, so. >> So in terms of the genesis done in Australia, and then brought it to the states as an in-store program seasonal, a few years ago you've launched the online direct-to-consumer, I imagine, mobile, tablet, any way that they want to consume it. >> Yep. >> Talk to us about opening up this channel, direct-to-consumer and what that is helping achieve from a business perspective. >> Well, I think it's another way to sort of certainly learn more about what our consumer wants, and we certainly get probably the best data that you can get on an eCommerce site than you get even compared to almost any other type of platform or way we've had in the past. We've had rewards programs in the past which was also another way to get great consumer data, but this is one where you absolutely know if someone makes a purchase they're making an investment in your brand, which means you know that's a valuable customer, and that's a valuable consumer that you can then understand that's the type of people that we want to be associated with, market to, and have them be a part and connected to our brand. >> So the responsiveness to your consumers is quite clear. If we take a look at, you said 6,000 skews now? >> Todd: Yeah. >> So it's expanded beyond the actual Coca-Cola bottle. So many different opportunities. How are you using technology to help manage and track all these different skews and ensure that supply and demand is in sync. >> So, we do the best that we can while-- we are, I will be honest with you, we're a pretty scrappy bunch within Coca-Cola, and we have an analytics team, or person I should say, a 'team', person, and we rely on that to pull that data down and analyze it and take a look at what's happening. We're of course reviewing that and reacting to it as quickly as can. I talked about an example in my speaking session earlier today where, at Coachella, TeenVogue picked up one of our outfits and took a picture of a model there. It started trending on Instagram, and it was only offered in-store, in our brick and mortar stores. We were able to get it up online within 24 hours so we could start reacting, so of course that just happened days ago. >> Right. >> So, we're really trying to be progressive and fast and agile about reacting to what consumers are interested, because they were on Instagram going, "Hey, where can I buy this?" et cetera, and so being able to sort of react and do those things is exciting. >> Absolutely. One of the things that I find interesting, and we've talked a lot about this today with out guests, is the conveniences that we expect as consumers, right? We want to be able to go to any device wherever we are and buy whatever we want, and expect that it's going to show up in a little brown box on the doorstep two days later. How are you seeing trends in the consumer space spill into the corporate space? >> Maybe reword that again so I... >> So you're selling to consumers, and you're doing a lot of pivoting, "Hey, they want this, they want that." >> Todd: Oh, okay, so like corporate orders? >> Exactly, exactly. >> Yeah, I mean, I think really we all know that the whole business world and everybody's lives are coming together. It used to be traditional, it was like work was my work and personal was my personal. That's not the case anymore, and also with e-commerce sites, b to b sites now are becoming more like d to c sites. People are expecting much more of it, expectations are much higher from what you're going to deliver on a b to b site. So I think all these worlds are sort of merging, and I think from a corporate perspective, they see an opportunity with a Coca-Cola brand, and we want to be able to deliver that on the corporate side as well, so. >> So is that business growing then, in terms of companies coming to the website to, like you see with, you said weddings and other occasions, is corporate buyers now kind of at that level? >> Yeah, so we even have hotels buying for events on our site now, so we have some relationships there that we've tapped in to, which is the great thing about Coca-Cola is we have all these partnerships with properties, entertainment, et cetera, and we try and bring all those things. That's been a big focus of mine, is taking advantage of the things that Coke already has in place, and bringing them to a new way, and a new way to sort of participate in those partnerships via the bottles basically. >> So the website is by... >> Well, you can go to cokestore.com, that's the easiest way, or shareacoke.com. The reason we've sort of moved to the cokestore.com, think about it, it was kind of a program to begin with, now Share A Coke is just a piece of sort of an overall direct-to-consumer offering that we have. >> So, exciting opportunity tonight with being a finalist with this award, what are some of the things that you're looking forward to as 2018 continues in terms of, maybe some of the next iterations of products or opportunities based on what you're hearing from your consumers? >> Yeah, I think the next year or so is really going to be interesting and where we go in terms of direct-to-consumer and what things we can push into further, I mean we know we've got a really good, solid, we know that we need to to be able to offer something that is special and unique so we will continue to follow that path of, we're not going to try and compete in selling something that you can get everywhere else. It just doesn't make sense. But we want to be able to offer things that we can truly offer that are unique from what you can get elsewhere. >> And continue that personalization, and relationship. >> Yeah, that'll be driving our roadmap forward will we always be unique, special, personal, exactly. >> Awesome, well Todd, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing about Share A Coke. >> Yeah. >> Now I know where to go to order a bottle since you didn't bring me bottles that say Lisa on them. >> I should've brought you a bottle, yes. >> That's okay, next time. >> Yeah, alright, perfect, thanks. >> Thanks so much again for your insight, really interesting conversation. >> Alright, thanks for having me. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, live at Magento Imagine 2018. I'm going to go get myself a Coke. I'll be right back with my next guest, see you then.

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's the Cube, covering blockchain unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (upbeat Cuban music) >> Hello there, and welcome back to our exclusive coverage. This is the Cube's coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. We start week of variety of activities here on the island around blockchain, cryptocurrency, the decentralized internet, the future of work, the future of play, the future of society, all here, happening. My next guest is an entrepreneur. Steve Steward is the CEO and co-founder of that's V-E-Z-T. Really changing the game around music, relationship to fans, and using blockchain and tokens to enable that. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you so much John, it's great to be here. >> Thanks for coming on, so first talk a little bit about what your value proposition, what you guys are doing. Obviously, people who ever downloaded iTunes, and then said, "This sucks, let's go to Spotify." Now are going, "Hey, I'm on Instagram. "I have access to my artist directly." The internet is a response vehicle; one on one. Tell them about your opportunity. >> There's two value props. One for the consumer, right? So, if you're an artist fan, and you love a song. You love an artist. You want to be involved with that artist on a one to one basis, there's no way to do that right now. You can follow somebody on Twitter, you can like their YouTube, that doesn't connect you with them. Our platform let's you buy in, and by buy in I mean ownership. You own a piece of the IP with that artist in their song, so it's on a song by song basis. But if Ariana Grande's my favorite artist, I want to buy a little slice of her song for $10 or $100, I now have the opportunity to put that out there, and I can share in that royalty stream with her. And she and I will connect on a level. If she wants to take my information and send other things to me like concert tickets or backstage passes, that's possible now. So the value prop for the fan, is connection with the artist and ability to say, "I own a piece of that royalty stream. "I own a piece of that song." And on the artist side the value prop is, "I now get to actually share directly with my fans, "build that community directly. "There's no gate keeper like a label "or publishing company in the middle, "and I have the ability to reach out "and monetize directly based on demand and merit. "Then take that and do whatever I want "and build up my brand." >> So this is a great example where artists that have direct relationships, might be undervalued. Also, in a way there doing their own mini ICO, so to speak, with their fans by sharing in the future value of the success with the people that got 'em there. >> They are, we call it an ISO, Initial Song Offering. So just like a ticket on sale, it allows an artist to pick a time and date and say, "At noon on Thursday, I'm putting out 5% of my song "to raise $10,000." They pick the pricing, they pick the amount they want to put up, we admin the actual royalty stream for those people that put money into it, and the artist keeps the rest of it. >> I've seen a lot of pitches, I've seen a lot of stuff online, "Oh yeah, we're going to revolutionize "the new music industry, were going to use tokens." I've seen I feel pitches, but again, if you look at the smart money investors, they're looking at deals and saying, "Is there a network effect? "Is there a protocol of some sort in there?" Obviously you've identified a relationship that has tokenization or token economics built into the business model. Take a minute to explain that key tokenization. Why you're business is set for token economics? Why you, over someone else? >> So my backgrounds in the music business, I used to manage a band called Stone Temple Pilots for 20 years. Actually for 10 years, from 1990 to 2000. I had 20 other artist in that meantime. I understand the pain points from an artists perspective. I also know where the value is in the industry. It's in the publishing. Most of these entertainment businesses, the IP is where the real value is. Film, books, T.V., music, it's all in the underlying content. Not the distribution, not how many times I've downloaded it, but the actual ownership of the content. What we want to do, is put that in a basis so the artist can now take that on a fractional basis. We can use a tokenized product to let the fans buy in. The blockchain helps us track those rights, keep them secure, make them transparent, and allow the ownership to be shared between thousands or hundreds of thousands of people. >> And this also helps build community. I want to get your thoughts on something. I held a panel on Sundance this year, Sundance Film Festival, called The New Creative. What you're seeing emerging is a new artist. The new artists are digital native, their fan base is direct. Things we just talked about. But they're undervalued, because the gatekeepers, either the studios and or labels in your instance, are controlling distribution and they're also controlling the activities. So we all know what Apple's done with some of their artists, and artists have to go on the road and do all this work. Well digital changes all that, so from your perspective as a industry guru in music, how has digital changed that dynamic? And talk about this new artist breed, this new young upcoming digital generation of artists. >> There's two things. First, internet really hasn't delivered what it said it was going to the music community, right? When you had Napster come out, it's great for the fan base. The artist and the creators actually lost out. Music got valued from here to here. It went almost to zero. People were sharing files for free, so at some point we thought-- >> Regulatory tried to solve that legal-- >> Tried and tried, but once you build a generation on free, it's hard to change that. On the fan side it was great. There was a lot more distribution. On the artist and creator side, it wasn't so great. What we're trying to do is bring value back to that. We're going to use digital in a way that lets people share what they believe in, without these gatekeepers like you said; fully demand based. If I'm the small artist who plays banjo in Kentucky, but I've got a 100,000 fans who really love me, and they can show that by buying in, forget the labels. Forget the publishers. Forget the brands. I now have a direct connection. I'm earning a living directly from my fan base, which is how it should be. >> Kind of like we do open source content. We were talking about our business, you are enabling people to self-identify with the artist, letting the artist be open to that, make that handshake or if you will, digital handshake, and have a relationship beyond just being a fan. >> Most of the labels, in fact all the labels: Spotify, YouTube, Pandora. None of those platforms let the artist share directly with the consumer, right? If I say, "Look, I've got 20,000 streams today, "can you tell me who they were, no. "Can you show me where the downloads are, no." Why aren't they letting those people connect. The artist has a natural connection with their fans. >> That's because the tech platforms are optimized for a different business model. Look at Facebook, they're living in their own problem. Their success is almost killing them. They have this centralized data optimization for the wrong incentive. They're optimizing data for advertising, not user experience. In this case, you're saying, "Hey, lets use the infrastructure and crypto "to optimize the fan relationship and expand it." >> The reason artists get on stage, the reason they write a song, is to connect with people, right? We've disembodied that connection to the point where they're out there in the ether and the fans are over here. They're like, "How do we get together?" If we can bring that back, there's a very powerful connection there that we can take advantage of and let people actually make money from their craft. >> Well Steve, great to have you on The Cube because one, you have domain expertise, you're business model solid, and we've been saying yesterday and on The Cube that it's a reverse of the old stack model. The top of the stack is the business model. You nail the business model, the underlying plumbing will sort itself out. With that in mind, how are you guys looking at the plumbing? What are you doing here in Puerto Rico? Are you raising money? Are you doing an ICO? Take a little bit to explain your relationship to the plumbing under the hood, in the blockchain, crypto world. And then what you guys are doing here in Puerto Rico. >> We started building our platform the traditional way. We took traditional VC funding about a year ago. As we were building the platform, we understood the importance of a blockchain, some type of decentralized ledger that allows people to look transparently under the ownership stack. As we were building that, one of our engineers said, "hey, have you guys heard of an ICO?" we had no idea what this was. It was about a year ago. Got educated very quickly, dove deep on it, and realized there's an opportunity, not really for the fact that it's crypto, but to actually capitalize the company in a meaningful way. We want to scale this very quickly. We've got strategic partners in Asia, other parts of the world, that we need to grow very quickly into. We realized it was an opportunity to have. We did a raise close of December 1st; oron exchanges. >> An equity raise or a token raise? >> The token raise. We did a U.S. based PPM SAFT. >> So a security token. >> It's a utility token, but we followed a process that our legal advisors advised us. In the U.S., keep it as a PPM SAFT. If it's offshore, it's offshore. >> So accredited investors? >> Accredited investors only, small cap, try to keep it reasonable, because we don't need 100 billion dollars to build this platform right now. We're looking to get this in a traditional business sense, so we're building a real platform with a real team. We took advantage of that. We got listed on an exchange January 12th. At this point, we're head down in product. We're looking to launch this in 45 days at Coachella. We had an event two nights ago at South by Southwest. We came up here from Austin, so we're going back to California tomorrow. >> John: You're on a plane. >> Yeah, we're on a roadshow. We've got artist brand partners now. We're signing people, two or three artists a week that come in. We've got publishing catalogs that are coming on board realizing that there's a B to be played, because publishers only monetize the top two or 3% of their catalogs. The other 98% get no love. If they can put that on a retail platform like us, and allow consumers to buy directly into it, it's a whole windfall for them. >> Everyone's a media company these days. We've been saying it, and that's the new media model. You got a great formula, good luck. We'd love to keep in touch. >> Absolutely. >> What are you guys looking to do next six months as you get the product out the door? Ecosystem, you got to recruit more artists? What's the plan? >> My goal is 100,000 songs in the platform by the end of summer. Like I said, we're doing a lot of brand activations at music festivals. We see people, you know, exponential growth. Each song comes with an artist fan base. This builds into it. We're also supporting producers, co-writers, performers, the other guys that aren't on the stage. We realize this platforms for them, because the own live ownership in these songs, but have never had a way to monetize it. We're growing this very quickly. >> Steve Steward, CEO/co-founder of that's V-E-Z-T. Check 'em out. If you like music, this is a great way to actually take part in being a fan and owner of the actual property; great business model. We'll keep in touch. Thanks for sharing on The Cube. More live coverage here on The Cube, bringing you all the action, and extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. We'll be right back with more coverage after this break. >> Thanks guys, thanks John. (electronic instrumental music)