>>Good morning friends. Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube Day four of our coverage of AWS. Reinvent continues. Lisa Martin here with Dave Valante. You >>Can tell it's day four. Yeah. >>You can tell, you >>Get punchy. >>Did you? Yes. Did you know that the Vegas rodeo is coming into town? I'm kind of bummed down, leaving tonight. >>Really? You rodeo >>Fan this weekend? No, but to see a bunch of cowboys in Vegas, >>I'd like to see the Raiders. I'd like to see the Raiders get tickets. >>Yeah. And the hockey team. Yeah. We have had an amazing event, Dave. The cubes. 10th year covering reinvent 11th. Reinvent >>Our 10th year here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. I mean we covered remotely in during Covid, but >>Yes, yes, yes. Awesome content. Anything jump out at you that we really, we, we love talking to aws, the ecosystem. We got a customer next. Anything jump out at you that's really a kind of a key takeaway? >>Big story. The majority of aws, you know, I mean people ask me what's different under a Adam than under Andy. And I'm like, really? It's the maturity of AWS is what's different, you know, ecosystem, connecting the dots, moving towards solutions, you know, that's, that's the big thing. And it's, you know, in a way it's kind of boring relative to other reinvents, which are like, oh wow, oh my god, they announced outposts. So you don't see anything like that. It's more taking the platform to the next level, which is a good >>Thing. The next level it is a good thing. Speaking of next level, we have a couple of next level guests from T-Mobile joining us. We're gonna be talking through their customers story, their business transformation with aws. Glenn Curing joins us, the director product and technology. And Nick Chris, senior manager, product and technology guys. Welcome. Great to have you on brand. You're on T-Mobile brand. I love it. >>Yeah, >>I mean we are always T-Mobile. >>I love it. So, so everyone knows T-Mobile Blend, you guys are in the digital commerce domain. Talk to us about what that is, what functions that delivers for T-Mobile. Yeah, >>So the digital commerce domain operates and runs a platform called the Digital commerce platform. What this essentially does, it's a set of APIs that are headless that power the shopping experiences. When you talk about shopping experiences at T-Mobile, a customer comes to either a T-Mobile website or goes to a store. And what they do is they start with the discovery process of a phone. They take it through the process, they decide to purchase the phone day at, at the phone to cart, and then eventually they decide to, you know, basically pull the trigger and, and buy the phone at, at which point they submit the order. So that whole experience, essentially from start to finish is powered by the digital commerce platform. Just this year we have processed well over three and a half million orders amounting to a billion and a half dollars worth of business for T-Mobile. >>Wow. Big outcomes. Nick, talk about the before stage, obviously the, the customer experience is absolutely critical because if, if it goes awry, people churn. We know that and nobody wants, you know, brand reputation is is at stake. Yep. Talk about some of the challenges before that you guys faced and how did you work with AWS and part its partner ecosystem to address those challenges? >>Sure. Yeah. So actually before I started working with Glen on the commerce domain, I was part of T-Mobile's cloud team. So we were the team that kind of brought in AWS and commerce platform was really the first tier one system to go a hundred percent cloud native. And so for us it was very much a learning experience and a journey to learn how to operate on the cloud and which was fundamentally different from how we were doing things in the old on-prem days. When >>You talk about headless APIs, you talk, I dunno if you saw Warren a Vogel's keynote this morning, but you're talking about loosely coupled, a loosely coupled system that you can evolve without ripping out the whole system or without bringing the whole system down. Can you explain that in a little bit more >>Detail? Absolutely. So the concept of headless API exactly opens up that possibility. What it allows us to do is to build and operator platform that runs sort of loosely coupled from the user experiences. So when you think about this from a simplistic standpoint, you have a set of APIs that are headless and you've got the website that connects to it, the retail store applications that connect to it, as well as the customer care applications that connect to it. And essentially what that does is it allows us to basically operate all these platforms without being sort of tightly coupled to >>Each other. Yeah, he was talking about this morning when, when AWS announced s3, you know, there was just a handful of services maybe at just two or three. I think now there's 200 and you know, it's never gone down, it's never been, you know, replaced essentially. And so, you know, the whole thing was it's an asynchronous system that's loosely coupled and then you create that illusion of synchronicity for the customer. >>Exactly. >>Which was, I thought, you know, really well described, but maybe you guys could talk about what the genesis was for this system. Take us kind of to the, from the before or after, you know, the classic as as was and the, and as is. Did you talk about that? >>Yeah, I can start and then hand it off to Nick for some more details. So we started this journey back in 2016 and at that point T-Mobile had seven or eight different commerce platforms. Obviously you can think about the complexity involved in running and operating platforms. We've all talked about T-Mobile being the uncarrier. It's a brand that we have basically popularized in the telco industry. We would come out with these massive uncarrier moves and every time that announcement was made, teams have to scramble because you've got seven systems, seven teams, every single system needs to be updated, right? So that's where we started when we kicked off this transformational journey over time, essentially we have brought it down to one platform that supports all these experiences and what that allows us to do is not only time to market gets reduced immensely, but it also allows us to basically reduce our operational cost. Cuz we don't have to have teams running seven, eight systems. It's just one system with one team that can focus on making it a world class, you know, platform. >>Yeah, I think one of the strategies that definitely paid off for us, cuz going all the way back to the beginning, our little platform was powering just a tiny little corner of the, of the webspace, right? But even in those days we approached it from we're gonna build functions in a way that is sort of agnostic to what the experience is gonna be. So over time as we would build a capability that one particular channel needed primary, we were still thinking about all the other channels that needed it. So now over a few years that investment pays off and you have basically the same capabilities working in the same way across all the channels. >>When did the journey start? >>2016. >>2016, yeah. It's been, it's been six years. >>What are some of the game changers in, in this business transformation that you would say these are some of the things that really ignited our transformation? >>Yeah, there's particularly one thing that we feel pretty proud about, which is the fact that we now operate what we call active active stacks. And what that means is you've got a single stack of the eCommerce platform start to finish that can run in an independent manner, but we can also start adding additional stacks that are basically loosely coupled from each other but can, but can run to support the business. What that basically enables is it allows us to run in active active mode, which itself is a big deal from a system uptime perspective. It really changes the game. It allows us to push releases without worrying about any kind of downtime. We've done canary releases, we are in the middle of retail season and we can introduce changes without worrying about it. And more importantly, I think what it has also allowed us to do is essentially practice disaster recovery while doing a release. Cuz that's exactly what we do is every time we do a release we are switching between these separate stacks and essentially are practicing our DR strategy. >>So you do this, it's, it's you separate across regions I presume? Yes. Is that right? Yes. This was really interesting conversation because as you well know in the on-prem world, you never tested that disaster recovery was too risky because you're afraid you're gonna take your whole business down and you're essentially saying that the testing is fundamental to the implementation. >>Absolutely. >>It, it is the thing that you do for every release. So you know, at least every week or so you are doing this and you know, in the old world, the active passive world on paper you had a bunch of capabilities and in in incidents that are even less than say a full disaster recovery scenario, you would end up making the choice not to use that capability because there was too much complexity or risk or problem. When we put this in place. Now if I, I tell people everything we do got easier after that. >>Is it a challenge for you or how do you deal with the challenge? Correct me if it's not a, a challenge that sometimes Amazon services are not available in both regions. I think for instance, the observability thing that they just announced this week is it's not cross region or maybe I'm getting that wrong, but there are services where, you know, you might not be able to do data sharing across region. How do you manage that? Or maybe there's different, you know, levels of certifications. How do you manage that discontinuity or is that not an issue for you? >>Yeah, I mean it, it is certainly a concern and so the stacks, like Glen said, they are largely decoupled and that what that means is practically every component and there's a lot of lot of components in there. I have redundancy from an availability zone point of view. But then where the real magic happens is when you come in as a user to the stack, we're gonna initially kind of lock you on one stack. And then the key thing that we do is we, we understand the difference between what, what we would call the critical data. So think of like your shopping carts and then contextual data that we can relatively easily reload if we need to. And so that critical data is constantly in an async fashion. So it's not interrupting your performance, being broadcast out to a place where we can recover it if we need to, if we need to send you to another stack and then we call that dehydration. And if you end up getting bumped to a new stack, we rehydrate you on that stack and reload that, that contextual data. So to make that whole thing happen, we rely on something we call the global cart store and that's basically powered by Dynamo. So Dynamo is highly, highly reliable and multi >>Reason. So, and, and presume you're doing some form of server list for the stateless stuff and, and maybe taking control of the run time for the stateful things you, are you leaning into to servers and lambda or Not yet cuz you want control over the, the, the EC two and the memory configs. What, what's, I mean, I know we're going inside the plumbing a little bit, but it's kind of fun. >>That's always fun. You >>Went Yeah, and, and it has been a journey. Back in 2016 when we started, we were all on EC twos and across, you know, over the last three or four years we have kind of gone through that journey where we went from easy two to, to containers and we are at some point we'll get to where we will be serverless, we've got a few functions running. But you know, in that journey, I think when you look at the full end of the spectrum, we are somewhere towards the, the process of sort of going from, you know, containers to, to serverless. >>Yeah. So today your team is setting up the containers, they're fencing 'em off, fencing off the app and doing all that sort of sort of semi heavy lifting. Yeah. How do you deal with the, you know, this is one of the things Lisa, you and I were talking about is the skill sets. We always talk about this. What's that? What's your team look like and what are the skill sets that you've got that you're deploying? >>Yeah, I mean, as you can imagine, it's a challenge and it's a, a highly specialized skill set that you need. And you talk about cloud, you know, I, I tell developers when we bring new folks in, in the old days, you could just be like really good at Java and study that for and be good at that for decades. But in the cloud world, you have to be wide in, in your breadth. And so you have to understand those 200 services, right? And so one of the things that really has helped us is we've had a partner. So UST Global is a digital services company and they've really kind of been on the journey up the same timeline that we were. And I had worked with them on the cloud team, you know, before I came to commerce. And when I came to, to the commerce team, we were really struggling, especially from that operational perspective. >>The, the team was just not adapting to that new cloud reality. They were used to the on-prem world, but we brought these folks in because not only were they really able to understand the stuff, but they had built a lot of the platforms that we were gonna be leveraging for commerce with us on the cloud team. So for example, we have built, T-Mobile operates our own customized Kubernetes platform. We've done some stuff for serverless development, C I C D, cloud security. And so not only did these folks have the right skill sets, but they knew how we were approaching it from a T-mobile cloud perspective. And so it's kind of kind of fun to see, you know, when they came on board with this journey with us, we were both, both companies were relatively new and, and learning. Now I look and, you know, I I think that they're like a, a platinum sponsor these days here of aws and so it's kind of cool to see how we've all grown together, >>A lot of evolution, a lot of maturation. Glen, I wanna know from you when we're almost out of time here, but tell me the what the digital commerce domain, you kind of talked about this in the beginning, but I wanna know what's the value in it for me as a customer? All of this under the hood plumbing? Yeah, the maturation, the transformation. How does it benefit mean? >>Great question. So as a customer, all they care about is coming into, going to the website, walking into a store, and without spending too much time completed that transaction and walkout, they don't care about what's under the hood, right? So this transformational journey from, you know, like I talked about, we started with easy twos back in the day. It was what we call the wild west in the, on a cloud native platform to where we have reached today. You know, the journey we have collectively traversed with the USD has allowed us to basically build a system that allows a customer to walk into a store and not spend a whole hour dealing with a sales rep that's trying to sell them things. They can walk in and out quickly, they go to the website, literally within a couple minutes they can complete the transaction and leave. That's what customers want. It is. And that has really sort of helped us when you think about T-Mobile and the fact that we are now poised to be a leader in the US in telco at this whole concept of systems that really empower the customers to quickly complete their transaction has been one of the key components of allowing us to kind of make that growth. Right. So >>Right. And a big driver of revenue. >>Exactly. >>I have one final question for each of you. We're making a Instagram reel, so think about if you had 30 seconds to describe T-Mobile as a technology company that sells phones or a technology company that delights people, what, what would you say if you had a billboard, what would it say about that? Glen, what do you think? >>So T-Mobile, from a technology company perspective, the, the whole purpose of setting up T-mobile's, you know, shopping experience is about bringing customers in, surprising and delighting them with the frictionless shopping experiences that basically allow them to come in and complete the transaction and move on with their lives. It's not about keeping them in the store for too long when they don't want to do it. And essentially the idea is to just basically surprise and delight our customers. >>Perfect. Nick, what would you say, what's your billboard about T-Mobile as a technology company that's delivering great services to its customers? >>Yeah, I think, you know, Glen really covered it well. What I would just add to that is I think the way that we are approaching it these days, really starting from that 2016 period is we like to say we don't think of ourselves as a telco company anymore. We think of ourselves as a technology company that happens to do telco among other things, right? And so we've approached this from a point of view of we're here to provide the best possible experience we can to our customers and we take it personally when, when we don't reach that high bar. And so what we've done in the last few years as a transformation is really given us the toolbox that we need to be able to meet that promise. >>Awesome. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on the program, talking about the transformation of T-Mobile. Great to hear what you're doing with aws, the maturation, and we look forward to having you back on to see what's next. Thank you. >>Awesome. Thank you so much. >>All right, for our guests and Dave Ante, I'm Lisa Martin, you watching The Cube, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's special showcase with Unstoppable Domains. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. And Matt Gould who's the founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >> Well, thank you, happy to be here. >> So first of all, love the story you've got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big Web3 wave, which we know that leads into, metaverse unlimited new ways, people are consuming information, content, applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with Web3. So this is kind of what's happening in the market. So give us your take. What's your reaction? You're in the middle of it. You're on this wave. >> Yeah, well, I would say it's a torrent of change that got unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing. And people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items and you see it from, you know Gaming and Fortnite and Skins and Warcraft and all these other places. But this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend to a whole lot more applications, from money, which everyone's familiar with, to NFT projects like Board Apes or CryptoBucks. >> You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pod. I think you're on 117 episodes now and growing. You guys do a deep dive, so people watching check out the Unstoppable Podcast. But on the last podcast, Matt, you mentioned some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses and before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet, but IP was generated by the United States Department of Commerce and R&D, that became the internet, the internet became the web. Back then it was just get some web pages up and find what you're looking for. Very analog compared to what's now today, now you mentioned gaming. You mentioned how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about the queue for many, many years now, but it's at actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding in groups, whether it's gaming or communities are expecting new behaviors, new applications, and it's a forcing function. This shift is having now, what's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? >> Yeah, well, I think it just goes back to the shift of people's where are they spending their time? And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much of their assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset compared to literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen. And simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, ways for you to track digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with Web3 is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application and then I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now as we transition from a model in Web2, where you are on a hosted service like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? To a system where it's much more open. You can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you and you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an end-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game, and you can spend it somewhere else. So the user is now enable to bring their data to the party. Whereas before now, you couldn't really do that. And that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot in how applications serve up to users. It's going to change their user experiences for instance. >> I think the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying, "I'm done with being mined "and being manipulated by the big Facebook "and the LinkedIns of the world who are using the user." Now, the contract was a free product and you gave up your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game, or maybe do some commerce in an application or marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does a digital identity architecture work with Unstoppable? How would you guys enabling that? Can you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique, you had an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together, can you explain? >> Yeah, so we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network, like when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle, when you log on Instagram, you have an Instagram handle. It's your name, right? You have that name that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a 100% of their followers, right? And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers, who are today's small businesses, who build up these large, you know profitable, small businesses online, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. And then they could be deplatformed, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform if that platform raises their fees. You've seen several platforms increase their take rates. You have 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed, right? So we just said, "You know what, "the first thing you're going to want to own "that this is going to be your piece of digital property "is going to be your name across these applications." If you look at every computing network in the history of computing networks, they end up with a naming system. And when we looked back at DNS, you know which came out in the 90s, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier instead of mapping these IP addresses. And then we said to ourselves, "What's going to happen in the future?" Is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their Web2 world in order to identify themselves as they log into all these applications. They're going to have an NFT domain in the Web3 world in order to authenticate and bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. And the bigger breakthrough here is that NFT domain systems all of these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users. They're built on these open systems so that multiple applications could read data off of them and that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging Web3 metaverse. And we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're going to need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of these long IP addresses or hex addresses in the case of crypto. >> Yeah, and also people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name verification, you see the link tree is everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app. I mean, doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people trying to figure it out. I got a github handle. I got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >> Yeah, and then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app and you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency, and then the first time you try to send it, there's this field where you want to send it and it's this very long hex address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's like a bank number and no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names and the D apps system replace IP addresses, NFT domains on blockchain systems replace hex addresses for sending and receiving cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use case is it really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you could have an error, or you could send it to the wrong place, it's pretty scary. You could send it to johnfurrier.nft. And so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing it worked with .com domains. And this is the same thing for Bitcoin and other crypto. >> It's interesting, look at the Web2 or trend one to two, Web1 went to two, it was all about use, ease of use, right? And making things simpler, clutter, more pages can't find things that was search, that was Google. Since then, has there actually been an advancement? >> Hmm. >> Facebook certainly is not an advancement, they're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of a free search to all the resources in the world, to which by the way, they're mining a lot of data too, with the Toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that Web3 crossover? So take us through your vision on digital identity on Web2, Google searching, Facebook's broken, democracy's broken, users aren't in charge to Web3? >> Got it. Well, we can start at Web1. So the way that I think about it is if you go to Web1, it was very simple, just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's a piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it, right? And then what happened with Web2, was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about Web2, these are all websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or a search engine or whatever. And then as we move to Web3, the new thing that's happening here, is the user is coming onto that experience and they're able to connect in their wallet or their Web3 identity to that app and they can bring their data to the party. So it's kind of like Web1, you just have a static web page, Web2, you have a static webpage with a service, like a server back here, and then Web3, the user can come in and bring their database with them in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that you want data to be portable across apps. So we touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an in-game item for one game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. It also impacts money. Money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. But then another thing that happens is I can bring unlimited amount of additional information about myself when I plug in my wallet. And as an example, when I plug into Google search, for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enable that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites and I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy, especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. >> You know, I've always thought about this and always debated it with Dave a lot and my co-host, does top down governance privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation? So what you're getting at here is, "Hey, if you can actually have that solved "(laughing) before it even starts." It was almost as if those services were built for the problem of Web2. >> Yes. >> Not three. >> Right. >> What's your reaction to that? >> I think that is right on the money. And if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots and there have been huge breaches. Like Equifax, you know a few years back is a big one and this all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies silo your data, they create a giant database, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions, to be attack. And then someone eventually is going to hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at Web3. So for those in the audience who have used, a Web3 application, one of these D app, to trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that stored, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on apps or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these defi exchanges, for instance, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the user is actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, "Wow, that's a much better or data model." And that gives so much more control of user 'cause the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. And so I think you're right and like we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see it like if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR and then all the companies are going, "We can't comply with that." They keep postponing it or like changing it a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're going to be in a much better spot. >> And GDPR is again a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. I always said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored and nevermind how they delete someone's entry in a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level they become so complicated. So right on the money there good, good call out. There question for you. Is this then? Okay, so do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together and is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is important on the identity side, wallet is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? >> Well, I think so. The way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online. And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term and actually work together. So, if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to mattgloud.crypto. And that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing defi trades or whatever. And that doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think we're going to... Still early, so figuring out exactly how the industry is going to shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon and maybe a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging... What you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. And I also think that your financial applications of defi are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. And just a note on this, when you have a wallet that usually has multiple cryptocurrency addresses, so you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. You're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those, because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate and we collaborate with several large wallets as well, like blockchain.com and another 30 plus of these to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >> So the wallet basically is a D app, the way you look at it, the integrated. >> Yeah. >> Whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized application with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay. I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm an my own NFT. I mean, how this video's going to be an NFT soon. We get on board with the program here, but how do I log into my app? I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit is there benchmarking? Is there approval process? Is there APIs and SDK kind of thinking around it? How are you thinking about dealing with the apps? >> Yeah, so all of the above. And what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution, but it's consumer based. So what we've done is adapted some SSO protocols that other people have used, the standard ones, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you GET the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are, you know, standard Web2 APIs, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user-controlled NFT. So they're assigning it that with their private public key pair in order to make those updates. So that allows you to connect into both of these systems. We think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. You have an integration of these technologies over time. And we really see these Web3 components and net two domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google off, Facebook off, or you can type in an email address, you could see NFT, Unstoppable Domains or NFT authorization. And you can SSO in to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself, 'cause you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, "Yes, I am a unique individual. "I do live in New York and I just bought a new house." And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. And we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts online for e-commerce specifically in the future because that opens up a whole new market. 'Cause they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information directly to the app. >> I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency, in game end engagement, in game data. And now bringing that to kind of a horizontally scalable like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think that's a huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is you getting any pushback from, ICANN, the International Corporation of Naming and Numbers, they got dot everything now.club, 'cause the clubhouse, they got dot, party.live. I mean the real domain name people are over here, Web2, you guys are coming out with the Web3. Where is that connect for people who are not following along the Web3 trend? How do you rationalize the domain angle here? >> Yeah, well, so I would say that NFT domains are what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago. And they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the nineties when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, 20 to 50 million small businesses who own the majority of these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus. NFT domains, because all of a sudden you have the wallet, you have them in your wallet and your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses is actually end users. So instead of being for 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to four billion people who have an internet connection. And so we actually think that the market size for NFT domains is somewhere 50 to a hundred X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for individuals on a day to day basis. So it's like people are going to want you on a use them for receiving cryptocurrency or receiving dollars or payments or USCC coin, where they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, where they're going to want to use them for SSO. And they're not going to want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what Web2 is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are going to want to work with and adopt this new NFT technology, 'cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain names. So like in short, I think NFT domain names are domain names with superpowers. This is the next generation of naming systems. And naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >> Yeah, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean they just can't, they're not built for that. And having people, having their own names, is essentially what decentralization is all about. 'Cause we, what is a company? It's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place, they're decentralized. So then you decentralize the identity and everything's been changed. So completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. You pretty much laid out what's next for Web3, but you guys are in this state of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common use case for folks who are putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see, what's the progression? >> Yeah, so the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately, is we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to 100% year over year. So first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket and that's going to happen over the next three to five years. Let's call it, if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. And then we want to make it easier for all those people to send crypto back and forth. And I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like... I would say utility focused tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. And that's the really the first step for NFT domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFT domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps. It starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that it's going to build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network top down where you're like a government or corporation, you say, oh, you have to have ID, here's your password, you have to have it. We're going to do it, bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet and up to you domain name, it's going to give them some utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. And we're going to say, "Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile?" Yes. Okay, great. You just attach that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes, Instagram? Yes, TikTok, yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay, yeah, we can attach that back. And then what happens is you end up building up organically digital identifiers for people using these blockchain naming systems. And once they have that, they're going to just... They're going to be able to share that information and that's going to lead to better experiences online for both commerce, but also just better user experiences in general. >> Every company when they web came along first, everyone pro proved the web once. Oh, it's terrible. A bad idea. Oh, it's so, unreliable, so slow. Hard to find things. Web2, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these premalinks became so long, the webpage address fully qualified, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit ceiling. Here, everyone gets their NFT, they start doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. So we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink, permanent. >> Yeah. >> Excellent. >> Yes indeed. I mean, if we're lucky it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. >> And the gas prices thing that's always come out always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain's perfect for this 'cause it's, imitable, it's written on the chain. All good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? >> Well, so a couple comments on efficiency. First of all, we picked domains as first product to market. 'Cause you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple times per year. So, the usage for that to set this up and configure it, most people set it up and configure it and then they only have a few changes per year. First of all, the overall you, it's not like a game. >> An IO problem. >> Right, right, right. So that part's good. So we picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking, are computer systems going to get more efficient over time? And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. And I remember the 90s, I had a modem and it was 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56 and then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. And I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time and there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. And you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you would try to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would've had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah, some applications are going to be wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle, but I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. >> Yeah, the motivated parties for innovations here, I mean a point cast failed miserably that was like, they tried to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds, double, triple in homes right now. Matt, congratulations, great stuff. Final, TikTok moment here. How would you summarize in a short clip, the difference between digital identity and Web2 and Web3. >> In Web2, you don't get to own your own online presidence, and in Web3 you do get to own it. So I think if you were going to simplify it, really Web3 is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. >> So now users are in charge. >> Exactly, you got it. >> They're not the product anymore. If you got to be the product you might as well monetize the product, and that's the data. Real quick thoughts just to close out the roll of data and all this, your view. >> We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet. And we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with their users. >> Awesome stuff, Matt, take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What are you guys looking for for hiring, fundraising? Give a quick commercial for what's going on Unstoppable Domains. >> Yeah, so if you haven't already, check us out at unstoppabledomains.com, we're also on Twitter at Unstoppable web. And we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And we are just crossed a hundred people. We're growing, three to five hundred percent year over year. We're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into Web3, even if you're coming from a traditional to background, please reach out. We love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >> And you're a virtual company. You have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >> Yeah, I actually just assumed we are 100% remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet in mostly concentrated in the US and the EU areas. >> I heard a rumor too. Maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >> This is true. And that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. But we also know that recovery is an important part of any organization. So if you push too hard, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. And so we want people to be with us long term, and we do think that this is a 10 year move. And so yeah, do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you- >> That's what I was going to ask you. So what's the consequence of, I don't take vacation. >> Yeah, we literally unplug you. (both laughing) >> You won't be able to get into slack. Right, and that's (indistinct). >> Well, when people start having their avatars be their bought and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFT saying that that's not the real person, it's not the real human. >> Yeah, exactly. We'll be able to check. >> NFT is great innovation, great use case, Matt congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with theCUBE. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, John had a wonderful time. >> All right, this is theCUBE Unstoppable Domains showcasing. We've got 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE, "Unstoppable Domains Showcase." I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We got a great discussion here called the influencers around what's going on Web 3.0. And also this new sea change, cultural change around this next generation, internet, web, cloud, all happening, Jeremiah Owyang, Industry Analyst and Founding Part of Kaleido Insights. Jeremiah, great to see you thanks for coming on I appreciate it. Ren Besnard, Vice President of Marketing and Unstoppable Domains in the middle of all the action. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on on theCUBE for this showcase. >> Wow, my pleasure. >> Thanks for having us, John. >> Jeremiah, I want to start with you. You've seen many ways refer in all of your work for over a decade now. You've seen the Web 2.0 wave now the Web 3.0 is here. And it's not, I wouldn't say hyped up it's really just ramping up. And you're seeing real practical examples. You're in the middle of all the action. What is this Web 3.0, can you frame for us? I mean, you've seen many webs. What is Web 3.0 mean, what is it all about? >> Well John, you and I worked in the Web 2.0 space and essentially that enabled peer-to-peer media where people could upload their thoughts and ideas and videos without having to rely on centralized media. Unfortunately, that distributed and decentralized movement actually became centralized on the platform which are the big social networks and big tech companies. And this has caused an uproar because the people who are creating the content did not have control, could not control their identities, and could not really monetize or make decisions. So Web 3.0 which is a moniker of a lot of different trends, including crypto, blockchain and sometimes the metaverse. Is to undo the controlling that has become centralized. And the power is now shifting back into the hands of the participants again. And in this movement, they want to have more control over their identities, their governance, the content that they're creating, how they're actually building it, and then how they're monetizing it. So in many ways it's changing the power and it's a new economic model. So that's Web 3.0. Without really even mentioning the technologies. Is that helpful? >> Yeah, it's great. And Ren, we're talking about on theCUBE many times and one notable stat I don't think it's been reported, but it's been more kind of a rumor. I hear that 30% of the Berkeley computer science students are dropping out and going into to crypto or blockchain or decentralized startups. Which means that there's a big wave coming in of talent. You're seeing startups, you're seeing a lot more formation, you're seeing a lot more, I would say it's kind of ramping up of real people, not just people with dream is actual builders out here doing stuff. What's your take on the Web 3.0 movement with all this kind of change happening from people and also the new ideas being refactored? >> I think that the competition for talent is extremely real. And we start looking at the stats, we see that there is an enormous draft of people that are moving into this space. People that are fascinated by technology and are embracing the ethos of Web 3.0. And at this stage I think it's not only engineers and developers, but we have moved into a second phase where we see that a lot of supporting functions, you know, marketing being one of them, sales, business development are being built up quite rapidly. It's not without actually reminding me of the mid 2000s, you know. When I started working with Google, at that point in time the walled gardens rightly absorbing vast, vast cohorts of young graduates and more experienced professionals that were passionate and moving into the web environment. And I think we are seeing a movement right now, which is not entirely similar except faster. >> Yeah, Jeremiah, you've seen the conversations of the cloud, I call the cloud kind of revolution. You had mobile in 2007. But you got Amazon Web Services changed the application space on how people developed in the cloud. And again, that created a lot of value. Now you're seeing the role of data as a huge part of how people are scaling and the decentralized movements. So you've got cloud which is kind of classic today, state of the art enterprise and or app developers. And you've got now decentralized wave coming, okay. You're seeing apps being developed on that architecture. Data is central in all this, right. So how, how do you view this as someone who's watching the landscape, you know, these walled gardens are hoarding all the data I mean, LinkedIn, Facebook. They're not sharing that data with anyone they're using it for themselves. So as- >> That's right. >> They can control back comes to the forefront. How do you see this market with the applications and what comes out of that? >> So the thing that we seen out of the five things that I had mentioned that are decentralizing. (Jeremiah coughing) Are the ones that have been easier to move across. Have been the ability to monetize and to build. But the data aspect has actually stayed pretty much central, frankly. What has decentralized is that the contracts, the blockchain ledgers, those have decentralized. But the funny thing is often a big portion of these blockchain networks are on Amazon 63 to 70%, same thing with (indistinct). So they're still using the Web 2.0 architectures. However, we're also seeing other forms like IPFS where the data could be spread across a wider range of folks. But right now we're still dependent on what Web 2.0. So the vision and the promise Web 3.0 when it to full decentralization is not here by any means. I'd say we're at a Web 2.25. >> Pre-Web 3.0 no, but actions there. How do you guys see the dangers, 'cause there's a lot of negative press but also there's a lot of positive press. You're seeing a lot of fraud, we've seen a lot of the crypto fraud over the past years. You've seen a lot of now positive. It's almost a self-governance thing and environment, the way the culture is. But what are the dangers, how do you guys educate people, what should people pay attention to, what should people look for to understand, you know, where to position themselves? >> Yes, so we've learned a lot from Web 1.0, Web 2.0, the sharing economy. And we are walking into Web 3.0 with eyes wide open. So people have rightfully put forth a number of challenges, the sustainability issues with excess using of computing and mining the excessive amount of scams that are happening in part due to unknown identities. Also the architecture breaks DAOn in some periods and there's a lack of regulation. This is something different though. In the last periods that we've gone through, we didn't really know what was going to happen. And we walked and think this is going to be great. The sharing economy, the gig economy, the social media's going to change the world around. It's very different now. People are a little bit jaded. So I think that's a change. And so I think we're going to see that sorted out in suss out just like we've seen with other trends. It's still very much in the early years. >> Ren, I got to get your take on this whole should influencers and should people be anonymous or should they be docs out there? You saw the board, eight guys that did that were kind of docs a little bit there. And that went viral. This is an issue, right? Because we just had a problem of fake news, fake people, fake information. And now you have a much more secure environment imutability is a wonderful thing. It's a feature, not a bug, right? So how is this all coming down? And I know you guys are in the middle of it with NFTs as authentication. Take us, what's your take on this because this is a big issue. >> Look, I think first I am extremely optimistic about technology in general. So I'm super, super bullish about this. And yet, you know, I think that while crypto has so many upsides, it's important to be super conscious and aware of the downsides that come with it to, you know. If you think about every Fortune 500 company there is always training required by all employees on internet safety, reporting of potential attacks and so on. In Web 3.0, we don't have that kind of standard reporting mechanisms yet for bad actors in that space. And so when you think about influencers in particular, they do have a responsibility to educate people about the potential, but also the dangers of the technology of Web 3.0 of crypto basically. Whether you're talking about hacks or online safety, the need for hardware, wallet, impersonators on discord, you know, security storing your seed phrase. So every actor influencer or else has got a role to play. I think that in that context to your point, it's very hard to tell whether influencers should be anonymous, oxydemous or fully docked. The decentralized nature of Web 3.0 will probably lead us to see a combination of those anonymity levels so to speak. And the movements that we've seen around some influencers identities become public are particularly interesting. I think there's probably a convergence of Web 2.O and Web 3.0 at play here, you know. Maybe occurring on the notion of 2.5. But for now I think in Web 2.0, all business founders and employees are known and they held accountable for their public comments and their actions. If Web 3.0 enables us to be anonymous, if DAOs have voting control, you know. What happens if people make comments and there is no way to know who they are, basically. What if the DAO doesn't take appropriate action? I think eventually there will be an element of community self-regulation where influencers will be acting in the best interest of their reputation. And I believe that the communities will self-regulate themselves and will create natural boundaries around what can be said or not said. >> I think that's a really good point about influencers and reputation because. Jeremiah, does it matter that you're anonymous have an icon that could be a NFT or a picture. But if I have an ongoing reputation I have trust, to this trust there. It's not like just a bot that was created just to spam someone. You know I'm starting to getting into this new way. >> You're right, and that word you said trust, that's what really this is about. But we've seen that public docs, people with their full identities have made mistakes. They have pulled the hood over people's faces and really scammed them out of a lot of money. We've seen that in the, that doesn't change anything in human behavior. So I think over time that we will see a new form of a reputation system emerge even for pseudonym and perhaps for people that are just anonymous that only show their potential wallet, address a series of numbers and letters. That form might take a new form of a Web 3.0 FICO Score. And you could look at their behaviors. Did they transact, you know, how did they behave? Were they involved in projects that were not healthy? And because all of that information is public on the chain and you can go back in time and see that. We might see a new form of a scoring emerge, of course. Who controls that scoring? That's a whole nother topic gone on controling and trust. So right now, John we do see that there's a number of projects, new NFT projects, where the founders will claim and use this as a point of differentiation that they are fully docs. So you know who they are and in their names. Secondly, we're seeing a number of products or platforms that require KYC, you know, your customers. So that's self-identification often with a government ID or credit card in order to bridge out your coins and turn that into fiat. In some cases that's required in some of these marketplaces. So we're seeing a collision here between our full names and pseudonyms and being anonymous. >> That's awesome. And I think this is the new, again, a whole new form of governance. Ren, you mentioned some comments about DAO. I want to get your thoughts again. You know, Jeremiah we've become historians over the years. We're getting old I'm a little bit older than you. (Jeremiah laughs) But we've seen the- >> You're young men. You know, I remember breaking in the business when the computer standards bodies were built to be more organic and then they became much more of a, kind of an anti-innovation environment where people, the companies would get involved, the standards organization just to slow things DAO and mark things up a little bit. So, you know, you look at DAOs like, hmm, is DAO a good thing or a bad thing. The answer is from people I talk to is, it depends. So I'd love to get your thoughts on getting momentum and becoming defacto with value, a value proposition, vis-a-vis just a DAO for the sake of having a DAO. This has been a conversation that's been kind of in the inside the baseball here, inside the ropes of the industry, but there's trade offs. Can you guys share your thoughts on when to do a DAO and when not to do a DAO and the benefits and trade offs of that? >> Sure, maybe I'll start off with a definition and then we'll go to, Ren. So a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, the best way to think about this It's a digital cooperative. and we've heard of worker cooperatives before. The difference is that they're using blockchain technologies in order to do three things, identity, governance, and rewards and mechanisms. They're relying on Web 2.0 tools and technologies like discord and Telegram and social networks to communicate. And as a cooperative they're trying to come up with a common goal. Ren, what's your take, that's the setup. >> So, you know for me when I started my journey into crypto and Web 3.0, I had no idea about what DAO actually meant. And an easy way for me to think of it and to grasp the nature of it was about the comparison between a DAO and perhaps a more traditional company structure, you know. In the traditional company structure, you have (indistinct), the company's led by a CEO and other executives. The DAO is a flat structure, and it's very much led by a group of core contributors. So to Jeremiah's point, you know, you get that notion of a cooperative type of structure. The decision making is very different, you know. We're talking about a super high level of transparency proposals getting submitted and voting systems using (indistinct) as opposed to, you know, management, making decisions behind closed doors. I think that speaks to a totally new form of governance. And I think we have hardly, hardly scratched the surface. We have seen recently very interesting moments in Web 3.0 culture. And we have seen how DAO suddenly have to make certain decisions and come to moments of claiming responsibility in order to police behavior of some of the members. I think that's important. I think it's going to redefine how we're thinking about that particularly new governance models. And I think it's going to pave the way for a lot of super interesting structure in the near future. >> Yeah and that's a great point. >> Go ahead, Jeremiah. >> That's a great point, Ren. Around the transparency for governance. So, John you post the question, does this make things faster or slower? And right now in the most doubts are actually pretty slow because they're set up as a flat organization. So as a response to that they're actually shifting to become representative democracies. Does that sound familiar? Or you can appoint delegates and use tokens to vote for them and they have a decision power. Almost like a committee and they can function. And so we've seen actually there sometimes are hierarchy except the person at the top is voted by those that have the tokens. In some cases, the people at the top had the most tokens. But that's a whole nother topic. So we're seeing a wide variety of governance structures. >> You know, Ren I was talking with Matt G, the Founder of Unstoppable. And I was telling him about the Domain Name System. And one little trivia note that many people don't know about is that the US government 'cause the internet was started by the US. The Department of Commerce kept that on tight leash because the international telecommunications wanted to get their hands on it because of ccTLDs and other things. So at that time, 'cause the innovation yet was isn't yet baked out. It was organically growing the governance, the rules of the road, keeping it very stable versus melding with it. So there's certain technologies that require, Jeremiah that let's keep an eye on as a community let's not formalize anything. Like the government did with the Domain Name System. Let's keep it tight and then finally released it. I think multiple years after 2004, I think it went over to the ITU. But this is a big point. I mean, if you get too structured, organic innovation can't go. What's you guys reaction to that? >> So I think, you know to take the stab at it. We have as a business, you know, thinking of Unstoppable Domains, a strong incentive to innovate. And this is what is going to be determining long-term value growth for the organization, for partners, for users, for customers. So you know the degree of formalization actually gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of action. And if you compare that to DAO, for instance, you can see how some of the upsides and downsides can pan out either way. It's not to say that there is a perfect solution. I think one of the advantages of the DAO is that you can let more people contribute. You can probably remove buyers quite effectively and you can have a high level of participation and involvement in decisions and own the upside in many ways. You know as a company, it's a slightly different setup. We have the opportunity to coordinate a very diverse and part-time workforce in a very you a different way. And we do not have to deal with the inefficiencies that might be inherent to some form of extreme decentralization. So there is a balance from an organizational structure that comes either side. >> Awesome. Jeremiah, I want to get your thoughts on a trend that you've been involved in, we've both been involved in. And you're seeing it now with the kind of social media world, the world of the role of an influencer. It's kind of moved from what was open source and influencer was a connect to someone who shared, created content enabled things to much more of a vanity. You update the photo on Instagram and having a large audience. So is there a new influencer model with Web 3.0 or is it, I control the audience I'm making money that way. Is there a shift in the influencer role or ideas that you see that should be in place for what is the role of an influencer? 'Cause as Web 3.0 comes you're going to see that role become instrumental. We've seen it in open source projects. Influencers, you know, the people who write code or ship code. So what's your take on that? Because this has been a conversation. People have been having the word influencer and redefining and reframing it. >> Sure, the influence model really hasn't changed that much, but the way that they're behaving has when it comes to Web 3.0. In this market, I mean there's a couple of things. Some of the influencers are investors. And so when you see their name on a project or a new startup, that's an indicator there's a higher level of success. You might want to pay more attention to it or not. Secondly, influencers themselves are launching their own NFT projects. So, Gary Vaynerchuk, a number of celebrities, Paris Hilton is involved. They are also doing theirs as well. Steve Aok, famous DJ launched his as well. So they're going head first and participating in building in this model. And their communities are coming around them and they're building economy. Now the difference is it's not I speak as an influencer to the fans. The difference is that the fans are now part of the community and they literally hold and own some of the economic value, whether it's tokens or the NFTs. So it's a collaborative economy, if you will, where they're all benefiting together. And that's a big difference as well. >> Can you see- >> Lastly, there's one little tactic we're seeing where marketers are air dropping NFTs, branded NFTs influencers wallet. So you can see it in there. So there's new tactics that are forming as well. Back to you. >> That's super exciting. Ren, what's your reaction to that? Because he just hit on a whole new way of how engagement's happening, how people are closed looping their votes, their votes of confidence or votes with their wallet. And the brands which are artists now influencers. I mean, this is a whole game changing instrumentation level. >> I think that what we are seeing right now is super reinvigorating as a marketeer who's been around for a few years, basically. I think that the shift in the way brands are going to communicate and engage with their audiences is profound. It's probably as revolutionary and even more revolutionary than the movement for brands in getting into digital. And you have that sentiment of a gold rush right now with a lot of brands that are trying to understand NFTs and how to actually engage with those communities and those audiences. There are many levels in which brands and influencers are going to engage. There are many influencers that actually advance the message and the mission because the explosion of content on Web 3.0 has been crazy. Part of that is due to the network effect nature of crypto. Because as Jaremiah mentioned, people are incentivized to promote projects. Holders of an NFT are also incentivized to promote it. So you end up with a fly wheel which is pretty unique of people that are hyping their project and that are educating other people about it and commenting on the ecosystem with IP right being given to NFT holders. You're going to see people promote brands instead of the brands actually having to. And so the notion of brands are gaining and delivering elements of the value to their fans is something that's super attractive, extremely interesting. And I think again, we have hardly scratched the surface of all that is possible in that particular space. >> That's interesting. You guys are bringing some great insight here. Jeremiah, the old days the word authentic was a kind of a cliche and brands like tried to be authentic. And they didn't really know what to do they called it organic, right? And now you have the trust concept with authenticity and environment like Web 3.0 where you can actually measure it and monetize it and capture it if you're actually authentic and trustworthy. >> That's right, and be because it's on blockchain, you can see how somebody's behaved with their economic behavior in the past. Of course, big corporations aren't going to have that type of trail on blockchain just yet. But individuals and executives who participate in this market might be. And we'll also see new types of affinity. Do executives do they participate in these NFT communities, do they purchase them or numerous brands like Adidas to acquire, you know, different NFT projects to participate. And of course the big brands are grabbing their domains. Of course you could talk to, Ren about that because it's owning your own name is a part of this trust and being found. >> That's awesome. Great insight guys. Closing comments, takeaways for the audience here. Each of you take a minute to share your thoughts on what you think is happening now where it goes, all right, where's it going to go? Jeremiah, we'll start with you. >> Sure, I think the vision of Web 3.0 where full decentralization happens, where the power is completely shifted to the edges. I don't think it's going to happen. I think we will reach Web 2.5. And I've been through so many tech trends where we said that the power's going to shift completely to of the end, it just doesn't. In part there's two reasons. One is the venture capital are the ones who tend to own the programs in the first place. And secondly, the startups themselves end up becoming the one-percenter. We see Airbnb and Uber are one-percenter now. So that trend happens over and over and over. Now with that said, the world will be in a better place. We will have more transparency. We will see economic power shifted to the people, the participants. And so they will have more control over the internet that they are building. >> Awesome, Ren final comments. >> I'm fully aligned with Jeremiah on the notion of control being returned to users, the notion of ownership and the notion of redistribution of the economic value that is created across all the different chains that we are going to see and all those ecosystems. I believe that we are going to witness two parallel movements of expansion. One that is going to be very lateral. When you think of crypto and Web 3.0 essentially you think of a few 100 tribes. And I think that more projects are going to be a more coalitions of individuals and entities, and those are going to exist around those projects. So you're going to see, you know, an increase in the number of tribes that one might join. And I also think that we're going to progress rapidly from the low 100 millions of crypto and NFT holders into the big hands basically. And that's going to be extreme interesting. I think that the next waves of crypto users, NFT fans are going to look very different from the early adopters that we had witnessed in the very early days. So it's not going to be your traditional model of technology adoption curves. I think the demographics are going to shift and the motivations are going to be different as well, which is going to be a wonderful time to educate and engage with new community members. >> All right, Ren and Jeremiah, thank you both for that great insight great segment breaking down Web 3.0 or Web 2.5 as Jeremiah says but we're in a better place. This is a segment with the influencers. As part of theCUBE and the Unstoppable Domain Showcase. I'm John Furrie, your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to the cubes. Special showcase with unstoppable domains. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California and Matt Gould, who is the founder and CEO of unstoppable domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company on stumbled domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >>Thank you. Happy to be here. So >>Love, first of all, love the story you got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big web three wave, which we know where that leads into. Metaverse unlimited new ways. People are consuming information, content applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with web three. So this is kind of the what's happening in the market. So give us your take. What's your reaction? You're in the middle of it. You're on this wave. >>Yeah. Well, I would say it's a torrent of change and the get unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have a digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing. And people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items. Do you see it from, you know, gaming and Fortnite and skins and Warcraft and all these other places, but this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend a whole lot more, uh, applications for money, which everyone's familiar with, uh, to, uh, NFT projects, uh, like boarding school. >>You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pot. I think you're on a 117 episodes now and growing, you guys do a deep dive. So people watching check out the unstoppable podcast, but in the last podcast, man, you mentioned, you know, some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses and before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet. Um, but IP was, was generated by the United States department of commerce and R and D that became the internet. The internet became the web back then it was just get some webpages up and find what you're looking for. Right. Very analog compared to what's. Now, today, now you mentioned gaming, you mentioned, uh, how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about in the queue for many, many years now, but it's actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding and groups, whether it's gaming or communities are expecting new behaviors, new applications, and it's a forcing function. >>This shift is having now, what's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? >>Yeah, well, I think, uh, it just goes back to the shift of peoples, where are they spending their time? And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much, how much of assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset, uh, compared to, you know, literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen and simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around, uh, cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, uh, ways for you to track the digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into, uh, your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with web three is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application. >>And I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now. As we transitioned from a model in web to where you're on a hosted service, like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, you know, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? So to assist them where it's much more open, you can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you, uh, and you can, you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an in-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game and you can spend it somewhere else. Uh, so the user is now enabled to bring their data to the party. Whereas before now you couldn't really do that. And that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot and how applications, uh, serve up to user. So it's going to change their user experiences. For instance, >>The flip, the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying I'm done with being mined and being manipulated by the big Facebooks and the LinkedIns of the world who were using the user. Now, the contract was a free product and you gave it your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game, or maybe do some commerce in an application or a marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does the digital identity architecture work with unstoppable? How are you guys enabling that? Could you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique in an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together? Can you explain? >>Yeah. So, uh, we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, uh, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network, like when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle. When you log on, uh, you know, Instagram, you have an Instagram handle, it's your name, right? You have that name that's that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a hundred percent of their followers, right? And theirs. And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers who are, today's small businesses who build up these large, you know, profitable, small businesses online, uh, you know, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. >>Uh, and then they could be D platform, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform. If that platform raised their fees, you've seen several platforms, increase their take rates. You have 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed. Right. Uh, so we just said, you know what, the first thing you're going to want to own that this is going to be your piece of digital property. It's going to be your name across these applications. And if you look at every computer network in the history of computing networks, the end up with a naming system, and when we've looked back at DDA desk, which came out in the nineties, uh, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier, you know, instead of mapping these IP addresses. Uh, and then we said to ourselves, you know, uh, what's going to happen in the future is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their web two world in order to, uh, identify themselves as they log into all these applications. >>They're going to have an NFT domain in the web three world in order to authenticate and, and, uh, bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. Um, and the bigger breakthrough here is at NMT domain systems or these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users to build on these open systems so that multiple applications could read data off of them. And that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging web three metaverse. Uh, and we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people, you know, with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're gonna need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of, you know, these long IP addresses or a hex addresses in the case of Porto. >>So people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name, verification, you see link trees everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app and it doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people kind of trying to figure it out. I mean, you've got to get up, Angela got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >>Yeah. And, and then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app, you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency. And then the first time you try to send it, there's this, there's this field where you want to send it. And it's this very long text address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's, it's like a bank number and no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names and the DNS system replace IP addresses in Ft domains, uh, on blockchain systems, replace hex addresses for sending and receiving, you know, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use case is it really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just, instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you can have an error or you can send it to the wrong place. It's pretty scary. You could send it to John furrier dot, uh, NFT. And uh, so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing. It worked with the.com domains. And this is the same thing for the coin and other >>Crypto. It's interesting to look at the web two or trend one to two web one went to two. It was all about user ease of use, right? And making things simpler. Clutter, you have more pages. You can't find things that was search that was Google since then. Has there actually been an advancement? Facebook certainly is not an advancement. They're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of, you know, a free search to all the resources in the world, to which, by the way, they're mining a lot of data too, with the toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that web three crossover. So take us through your vision on digital identity on web to Google searching, Facebook's broken democracy is broken users. Aren't in charge to web three. >>Got it. Well, we can start at web one. So the way that I think about it is if you go to web one, it was very simple, just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's a piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it. Right. Uh, and then what happened with web two was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about web two, these are all, you know, these are websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or search engine or whatever. And then as we moved to web three, the new thing that's happening here is the user is coming on to that experience. And they're able to connect in their wallet or their web three identity, uh, to that app and they can bring their data to the party. >>So it's kind of like web one, you just have a static web page whip, two, you have a static web page with a service, like a server back here. And then with three, the user can come in and bring their database with them, uh, in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that the, you want data to be portable across apps. So we've touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an end game item for one, a game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. Uh, it also impacts money. Money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. >>Uh, but then another thing that happens is I can bring in from, you know, an unlimited amount of additional information about myself. When I plug in my wallet, uh, as an example, when I plug in to Google search, for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enabled that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites. And I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy, especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. >>I always thought about this and I always debated it with David laundry. My cohost does top down governance, privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation. So what you're getting at here is, Hey, if you can actually have that solved before it even starts, it was almost as if those services were built for the problem of web two. Yes, not three. Write your reaction to that. >>I think that is, uh, right on the money. And, uh, if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots. And there have been huge, uh, breaches like Equifax, you know, a few years back is a big one and just all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your, uh, credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies silo your data. They create a giant database, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not, billions, to be attacked. And then someone eventually is going to hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at web three. >>So for those of the audience who have used the web three application, one of these depths, um, you know, trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect to your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you, you know, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that storage, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on depths or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these DFI exchanges, for instance, uh, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the users actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, wow, that's a much better data model. And that give so much more control of user because the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. Um, and so I think you're right. And like, we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see, like, if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR. And then all the companies are going, we can't comply with that and they keep postponing it or like changing a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're gonna be in a much better spot. >>The GDPR is again, a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. Oh, I said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored. Nevermind how they delete someone's entering a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level it becomes so complicated. So right on the money are good. Good call out there. Question for you. Is this then? Okay. So do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together? Uh, and is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is super important on the identity side while it, is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? >>Well, I think so. The way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online. Right. And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term, uh, and they actually work together. So, you know, like if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to, you know, method, rules dot crypto. And that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing defy trades or whatever. And doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to, uh, you know, sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. >>And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think there's, we're gonna still early. So figuring out exactly how the industry is gonna shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon. And it may be a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging, uh, what you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. Uh, and I also think that your financial applications of defy are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. Um, and just to, you know, a note on this, when you have a wallet, it usually has multiple cryptocurrency address. So you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. Uh, you're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those, because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate. And we collaborate with several large wallets as well, uh, like blockchain.com, uh, and you know, another 30 plus of these, uh, to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >>So the wallet, basically as a D app, the way you look at it, you integrate whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized applications with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay, I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm in my own NFT. I mean, hell, this video is going to be an NFT. Soon. We get on board with the program here. Uh, but I do, I log into my app, I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit, is there benchmarking, is there approval process? Is there API APIs and a SDK kind of thinking around it? How do you thinking about dealing with the apps? >>Yeah, so all of the above and what we're trying to, what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution. Uh, but that it's consumer based. So, uh, what we've done is adapted some SSL protocols that other people have used the standard ones, uh, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you keep the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are standard web to API APIs. Uh, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user controlled in FTE. So they're assigning that with their private public key pair order to make those updates. Um, so that, that allows you to connect into both of these systems. Uh, we think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. >>You have an integration of these technologies over time. Uh, and we really see these three components in MTU domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google or Facebook, or you can type in an email address, you can see not ensemble domains or NFT, uh, authorization, and you can SSO in with that, to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself because you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, yes, I am a unique individual. I do live in New York, uh, and I just bought a new house. Right. And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. Um, and we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts, um, online for e-commerce specifically, uh, in the future, because that opens up a whole new market because they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information. >>Yeah. I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency in game to engagement in game data. And now bringing that, so kind of a horizontally scalable, like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think you're, that's huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is, um, you getting any pushback from ICANN, the international corporates have name and numbers. They got dot everything now.club, cause the clubhouse, they got dot, you know, party.live. I mean, so the real domain name people are over here, web too. You guys are coming out with the web three where's that connect for people who are not following along the web three trend. How do they, how do you rationalize the, the domain angle here? >>Yeah, well, uh, so I would say that NFTE domains or what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago and they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the nineties when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being the business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, uh, who, uh, own the majority of these, uh, these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus NFTE domains because all of a sudden you have the, uh, the Walton, if you have them in your wallet and your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses is actually end-users. So, and instead of being for, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to 4 billion people who have an internet connection. >>Uh, and so we actually think that the market size we're in a few domains and somewhere 50 to 100 X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for, uh, individuals on a day-to-day basis. So it's like people are gonna want you on to use them for receiving cryptocurrency versus receiving dollars or payments or USCC point where they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, where they're going to want to use them for SSO. Uh, and they're not gonna want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what web is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are gonna want to work with and adopt this new NFC technology. Cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain next. So like in short, I think NMT domain names or domain names with superpowers, this is the next generation of, uh, naming systems and naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >>Yeah. They hit a car, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean, they just can't, they're not built for that. Right. So I mean, and, and having people, having their own names is essentially what decentralization is all about. Cause what does a company, it's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place they're decentralized. So, and then you decentralize the identity and everything's can been changed so completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. Um, you pretty much laid out what's next for web three, but you guys are in this state of, of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the, what are the, um, best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common, uh, use case for folks we're putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see what's the progression? >>Yeah. So the, the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately is, uh, we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I, and I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to a hundred percent year over year. So, uh, first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket and that's going to happen over the next three to five years. Let's call it if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. Uh, and then we want to make it easier for all those people to sit encrypted back and forth. And I, and I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like, you know, I would say utility focused, uh, tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for, you know, transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. >>Uh, and that's the really the first step freight FTE domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFTE domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, um, and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps. It starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that it's going to build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network, top-down where you're like a government or a corporation say, oh, you have to have ID. Here's your password. You have to have it. We're going to do a bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet, NFTE domain name, it's going to give them to the utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. They're going to say, Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile? Yes. Okay, great. You test that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes. Instagram. Yes. Tik TOK. Yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay. Yeah, we can attach that back. Uh, and then what happens is you end up building up organically, uh, digital identifiers for people using these blockchain, uh, naming systems. And once they have that, they're gonna just, they're going to be able to share that information. Uh, and that's gonna lead to better experiences online for, uh, both commerce, but also just better user experiences. >>You know, every company when they web came along, first of all, everyone, poo-pooed the web ones. That was terrible, bad idea. Oh. And so unreliable. So slow, hard to find things. Web two, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these permalinks became so long. The web page address fully qualified, you know, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit a ceiling here. Everyone gets their NFT. They, they started doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. Um, so we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink permanent. Yeah. >>Yes. I mean, if we're lucky, it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity, uh, that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. >>And the gas prices thing that's always coming. That's always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain is perfect for this because it's immutable, it's written on the chain. All good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? >>Well, so a couple of comments on efficiency. Uh, first of all, we picked domains as a first product to market because, you know, as you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do, uh, and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. Right? So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple of times per year. So, so the usage for that to set this up and configure it, you know, most people set up and configure it and then it'll have a few changes for years. First of all, the overall it's not like a game problem. Right, right, right. So, so that, that part's good. We picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking our computer, system's going to get more efficient over time. >>And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. Uh, and you know, I remember the nineties, I had a modem and it was, you know, whatever, 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56, then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. Uh, and I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time. And you know, there's, there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. Uh, and you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you had tried to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would have had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah. Some applications are going to wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle, but I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. >>Yeah. The motivated parties for innovations here, I mean, a point cast failed miserably that was like the, they try to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds double, triple on homes right now, Matt. Congratulations. Great stuff. Final tick, tock moment here. How would you summarize short in a short clip? The difference between digital identity in web two and web three, >>Uh, in, in web too, you don't get to own your own online presidents and in web three, you do get to own it. So I think if you were gonna simplify it really web three is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. >>So now users are in charge. >>Exactly. >>They're not the product anymore. Going to be the product might as well monetize the product. And that's the data. Um, real quick thoughts just to close out the role of data in all this, your view. >>We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet. And we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with >>Awesome stuff, man, I take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What do you guys looking for for hiring, um, fundraising, give a quick, a quick commercial for what's going on, on unstoppable domains. Yeah. >>So if you haven't already check us out@ensembledomains.com, we're also on Twitter at unstoppable web, and we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And, uh, we are just crossed a hundred people. We've, we're growing, you know, three to five, a hundred percent year over year. Uh, we're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into web three, even if you're coming from a traditional web two background, please reach out. Uh, we love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >>And you're a virtual company. Do you have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >>Yeah, I actually just assumed we were a hundred percent remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet. Uh, mostly concentrated in the U S and EU areas, >>Rumor to maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >>Uh, this is true. Uh, and that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. And, but we also know that recovery is an important part of any organizations. So if you push too hard, uh, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. Uh, and so we want people to be with us term. Uh, we do think that this is a ten-year move. And so yeah. Do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you have >>To ask me, so what's the consequence of, I don't think vacation. >>Yeah. We literally unplug it. You won't be able to get it. You won't be able to get into slack. Right. And that's a, that's how we regulate. >>Well, when people start having their avatars be their bot and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFD saying that that's not the real person. It's not the real human And FTS. Great innovation, great use case, Matt. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with the cube. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >>John had a wonderful time. All right. Just the >>Cube unstoppable domains showcasing. We got great 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage on John furrier with cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: It's theCUBE covering the virtual Vertica Big Data Conference 2020 brought to you by Vertica. >> Welcome back to the Vertica Virtual Big Data Conference, BDC 2020. You know, it was supposed to be a physical event in Boston at the Encore. Vertica pivoted to a digital event, and we're pleased that The Cube could participate because we've participated in every BDC since the inception. Rich Gaston this year is the global solutions architect for security risk and governance at Micro Focus. Rich, thanks for coming on, good to see you. >> Hey, thank you very much for having me. >> So you got a chewy title, man. You got a lot of stuff, a lot of hairy things in there. But maybe you can talk about your role as an architect in those spaces. >> Sure, absolutely. We handle a lot of different requests from the global 2000 type of organization that will try to move various business processes, various application systems, databases, into new realms. Whether they're looking at opening up new business opportunities, whether they're looking at sharing data with partners securely, they might be migrating it to cloud applications, and doing migration into a Hybrid IT architecture. So we will take those large organizations and their existing installed base of technical platforms and data, users, and try to chart a course to the future, using Micro Focus technologies, but also partnering with other third parties out there in the ecosystem. So we have large, solid relationships with the big cloud vendors, with also a lot of the big database spenders. Vertica's our in-house solution for big data and analytics, and we are one of the first integrated data security solutions with Vertica. We've had great success out in the customer base with Vertica as organizations have tried to add another layer of security around their data. So what we will try to emphasize is an enterprise wide data security approach, where you're taking a look at data as it flows throughout the enterprise from its inception, where it's created, where it's ingested, all the way through the utilization of that data. And then to the other uses where we might be doing shared analytics with third parties. How do we do that in a secure way that maintains regulatory compliance, and that also keeps our company safe against data breach. >> A lot has changed since the early days of big data, certainly since the inception of Vertica. You know, it used to be big data, everyone was rushing to figure it out. You had a lot of skunkworks going on, and it was just like, figure out data. And then as organizations began to figure it out, they realized, wow, who's governing this stuff? A lot of shadow IT was going on, and then the CIO was called to sort of reign that back in. As well, you know, with all kinds of whatever, fake news, the hacking of elections, and so forth, the sense of heightened security has gone up dramatically. So I wonder if you can talk about the changes that have occurred in the last several years, and how you guys are responding. >> You know, it's a great question, and it's been an amazing journey because I was walking down the street here in my hometown of San Francisco at Christmastime years ago and I got a call from my bank, and they said, we want to inform you your card has been breached by Target, a hack at Target Corporation and they got your card, and they also got your pin. And so you're going to need to get a new card, we're going to cancel this. Do you need some cash? I said, yeah, it's Christmastime so I need to do some shopping. And so they worked with me to make sure that I could get that cash, and then get the new card and the new pin. And being a professional in the inside of the industry, I really questioned, how did they get the pin? Tell me more about this. And they said, well, we don't know the details, but you know, I'm sure you'll find out. And in fact, we did find out a lot about that breach and what it did to Target. The impact that $250 million immediate impact, CIO gone, CEO gone. This was a big one in the industry, and it really woke a lot of people up to the different types of threats on the data that we're facing with our largest organizations. Not just financial data; medical data, personal data of all kinds. Flash forward to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that occurred where Facebook is handing off data, they're making a partnership agreement --think they can trust, and then that is misused. And who's going to end up paying the cost of that? Well, it's going to be Facebook at a tune of about five billion on that, plus some other finds that'll come along, and other costs that they're facing. So what we've seen over the course of the past several years has been an evolution from data breach making the headlines, and how do my customers come to us and say, help us neutralize the threat of this breach. Help us mitigate this risk, and manage this risk. What do we need to be doing, what are the best practices in the industry? Clearly what we're doing on the perimeter security, the application security and the platform security is not enough. We continue to have breaches, and we are the experts at that answer. The follow on fascinating piece has been the regulators jumping in now. First in Europe, but now we see California enacting a law just this year. They came into a place that is very stringent, and has a lot of deep protections that are really far-reaching around personal data of consumers. Look at jurisdictions like Australia, where fiduciary responsibility now goes to the Board of Directors. That's getting attention. For a regulated entity in Australia, if you're on the Board of Directors, you better have a plan for data security. And if there is a breach, you need to follow protocols, or you personally will be liable. And that is a sea change that we're seeing out in the industry. So we're getting a lot of attention on both, how do we neutralize the risk of breach, but also how can we use software tools to maintain and support our regulatory compliance efforts as we work with, say, the largest money center bank out of New York. I've watched their audit year after year, and it's gotten more and more stringent, more and more specific, tell me more about this aspect of data security, tell me more about encryption, tell me more about money management. The auditors are getting better. And we're supporting our customers in that journey to provide better security for the data, to provide a better operational environment for them to be able to roll new services out with confidence that they're not going to get breached. With that confidence, they're not going to have a regulatory compliance fine or a nightmare in the press. And these are the major drivers that help us with Vertica sell together into large organizations to say, let's add some defense in depth to your data. And that's really a key concept in the security field, this concept of defense in depth. We apply that to the data itself by changing the actual data element of Rich Gaston, I will change that name into Ciphertext, and that then yields a whole bunch of benefits throughout the organization as we deal with the lifecycle of that data. >> Okay, so a couple things I want to mention there. So first of all, totally board level topic, every board of directors should really have cyber and security as part of its agenda, and it does for the reasons that you mentioned. The other is, GDPR got it all started. I guess it was May 2018 that the penalties went into effect, and that just created a whole Domino effect. You mentioned California enacting its own laws, which, you know, in some cases are even more stringent. And you're seeing this all over the world. So I think one of the questions I have is, how do you approach all this variability? It seems to me, you can't just take a narrow approach. You have to have an end to end perspective on governance and risk and security, and the like. So are you able to do that? And if so, how so? >> Absolutely, I think one of the key areas in big data in particular, has been the concern that we have a schema, we have database tables, we have CALMS, and we have data, but we're not exactly sure what's in there. We have application developers that have been given sandbox space in our clusters, and what are they putting in there? So can we discover that data? We have those tools within Micro Focus to discover sensitive data within in your data stores, but we can also protect that data, and then we'll track it. And what we really find is that when you protect, let's say, five billion rows of a customer database, we can now know what is being done with that data on a very fine grain and granular basis, to say that this business process has a justified need to see the data in the clear, we're going to give them that authorization, they can decrypt the data. Secure data, my product, knows about that and tracks that, and can report on that and say at this date and time, Rich Gaston did the following thing to be able to pull data in the clear. And that could be then used to support the regulatory compliance responses and then audit to say, who really has access to this, and what really is that data? Then in GDPR, we're getting down into much more fine grained decisions around who can get access to the data, and who cannot. And organizations are scrambling. One of the funny conversations that I had a couple years ago as GDPR came into place was, it seemed a couple of customers were taking these sort of brute force approach of, we're going to move our analytics and all of our data to Europe, to European data centers because we believe that if we do this in the U.S., we're going to violate their law. But if we do it all in Europe, we'll be okay. And that simply was a short-term way of thinking about it. You really can't be moving your data around the globe to try to satisfy a particular jurisdiction. You have to apply the controls and the policies and put the software layers in place to make sure that anywhere that someone wants to get that data, that we have the ability to look at that transaction and say it is or is not authorized, and that we have a rock solid way of approaching that for audit and for compliance and risk management. And once you do that, then you really open up the organization to go back and use those tools the way they were meant to be used. We can use Vertica for AI, we can use Vertica for machine learning, and for all kinds of really cool use cases that are being done with IOT, with other kinds of cases that we're seeing that require data being managed at scale, but with security. And that's the challenge, I think, in the current era, is how do we do this in an elegant way? How do we do it in a way that's future proof when CCPA comes in? How can I lay this on as another layer of audit responsibility and control around my data so that I can satisfy those regulators as well as the folks over in Europe and Singapore and China and Turkey and Australia. It goes on and on. Each jurisdiction out there is now requiring audit. And like I mentioned, the audits are getting tougher. And if you read the news, the GDPR example I think is classic. They told us in 2016, it's coming. They told us in 2018, it's here. They're telling us in 2020, we're serious about this, and here's the finds, and you better be aware that we're coming to audit you. And when we audit you, we're going to be asking some tough questions. If you can't answer those in a timely manner, then you're going to be facing some serious consequences, and I think that's what's getting attention. >> Yeah, so the whole big data thing started with Hadoop, and Hadoop is open, it's distributed, and it just created a real governance challenge. I want to talk about your solutions in this space. Can you tell us more about Micro Focus voltage? I want to understand what it is, and then get into sort of how it works, and then I really want to understand how it's applied to Vertica. >> Yeah, absolutely, that's a great question. First of all, we were the originators of format preserving encryption, we developed some of the core basic research out of Stanford University that then became the company of Voltage; that build-a-brand name that we apply even though we're part of Micro Focus. So the lineage still goes back to Dr. Benet down at Stanford, one of my buddies there, and he's still at it doing amazing work in cryptography and keeping moving the industry forward, and the science forward of cryptography. It's a very deep science, and we all want to have it peer-reviewed, we all want to be attacked, we all want it to be proved secure, that we're not selling something to a major money center bank that is potentially risky because it's obscure and we're private. So we have an open standard. For six years, we worked with the Department of Commerce to get our standard approved by NIST; The National Institute of Science and Technology. They initially said, well, AES256 is going to be fine. And we said, well, it's fine for certain use cases, but for your database, you don't want to change your schema, you don't want to have this increase in storage costs. What we want is format preserving encryption. And what that does is turns my name, Rich, into a four-letter ciphertext. It can be reversed. The mathematics of that are fascinating, and really deep and amazing. But we really make that very simple for the end customer because we produce APIs. So these application programming interfaces can be accessed by applications in C or Java, C sharp, other languages. But they can also be accessed in Microservice Manor via rest and web service APIs. And that's the core of our technical platform. We have an appliance-based approach, so we take a secure data appliance, we'll put it on Prim, we'll make 50 of them if you're a big company like Verizon and you need to have these co-located around the globe, no problem; we can scale to the largest enterprise needs. But our typical customer will install several appliances and get going with a couple of environments like QA and Prod to be able to start getting encryption going inside their organization. Once the appliances are set up and installed, it takes just a couple of days of work for a typical technical staff to get done. Then you're up and running to be able to plug in the clients. Now what are the clients? Vertica's a huge one. Vertica's one of our most powerful client endpoints because you're able to now take that API, put it inside Vertica, it's all open on the internet. We can go and look at Vertica.com/secure data. You get all of our documentation on it. You understand how to use it very quickly. The APIs are super simple; they require three parameter inputs. It's a really basic approach to being able to protect and access data. And then it gets very deep from there because you have data like credit card numbers. Very different from a street address and we want to take a different approach to that. We have data like birthdate, and we want to be able to do analytics on dates. We have deep approaches on managing analytics on protected data like Date without having to put it in the clear. So we've maintained a lead in the industry in terms of being an innovator of the FF1 standard, what we call FF1 is format preserving encryption. We license that to others in the industry, per our NIST agreement. So we're the owner, we're the operator of it, and others use our technology. And we're the original founders of that, and so we continue to sort of lead the industry by adding additional capabilities on top of FF1 that really differentiate us from our competitors. Then you look at our API presence. We can definitely run as a dup, but we also run in open systems. We run on main frame, we run on mobile. So anywhere in the enterprise or one in the cloud, anywhere you want to be able to put secure data, and be able to access the protect data, we're going to be there and be able to support you there. >> Okay so, let's say I've talked to a lot of customers this week, and let's say I'm running in Eon mode. And I got some workload running in AWS, I've got some on Prim. I'm going to take an appliance or multiple appliances, I'm going to put it on Prim, but that will also secure my cloud workloads as part of a sort of shared responsibility model, for example? Or how does that work? >> No, that's absolutely correct. We're really flexible that we can run on Prim or in the cloud as far as our crypto engine, the key management is really hard stuff. Cryptography is really hard stuff, and we take care of all that, so we've all baked that in, and we can run that for you as a service either in the cloud or on Prim on your small Vms. So really the lightweight footprint for me running my infrastructure. When I look at the organization like you just described, it's a classic example of where we fit because we will be able to protect that data. Let's say you're ingesting it from a third party, or from an operational system, you have a website that collects customer data. Someone has now registered as a new customer, and they're going to do E-commerce with you. We'll take that data, and we'll protect it right at the point of capture. And we can now flow that through the organization and decrypt it at will on any platform that you have that you need us to be able to operate on. So let's say you wanted to pick that customer data from the operational transaction system, let's throw it into Eon, let's throw it into the cloud, let's do analytics there on that data, and we may need some decryption. We can place secure data wherever you want to be able to service that use case. In most cases, what you're doing is a simple, tiny little atomic efetch across a protected tunnel, your typical TLS pipe tunnel. And once that key is then cashed within our client, we maintain all that technology for you. You don't have to know about key management or dashing. We're good at that; that's our job. And then you'll be able to make those API calls to access or protect the data, and apply the authorization authentication controls that you need to be able to service your security requirements. So you might have third parties having access to your Vertica clusters. That is a special need, and we can have that ability to say employees can get X, and the third party can get Y, and that's a really interesting use case we're seeing for shared analytics in the internet now. >> Yeah for sure, so you can set the policy how we want. You know, I have to ask you, in a perfect world, I would encrypt everything. But part of the reason why people don't is because of performance concerns. Can you talk about, and you touched upon it I think recently with your sort of atomic access, but can you talk about, and I know it's Vertica, it's Ferrari, etc, but anything that slows it down, I'm going to be a concern. Are customers concerned about that? What are the performance implications of running encryption on Vertica? >> Great question there as well, and what we see is that we want to be able to apply scale where it's needed. And so if you look at ingest platforms that we find, Vertica is commonly connected up to something like Kafka. Maybe streamsets, maybe NiFi, there are a variety of different technologies that can route that data, pipe that data into Vertica at scale. Secured data is architected to go along with that architecture at the node or at the executor or at the lowest level operator level. And what I mean by that is that we don't have a bottleneck that everything has to go through one process or one box or one channel to be able to operate. We don't put an interceptor in between your data and coming and going. That's not our approach because those approaches are fragile and they're slow. So we typically want to focus on integrating our APIs natively within those pipeline processes that come into Vertica within the Vertica ingestion process itself, you can simply apply our protection when you do the copy command in Vertica. So really basic simple use case that everybody is typically familiar with in Vertica land; be able to copy the data and put it into Vertica, and you simply say protect as part of the data. So my first name is coming in as part of this ingestion. I'll simply put the protect keyword in the Syntax right in SQL; it's nothing other than just an extension SQL. Very very simple, the developer, easy to read, easy to write. And then you're going to provide the parameters that you need to say, oh the name is protected with this kind of a format. To differentiate it between a credit card number and an alphanumeric stream, for example. So once you do that, you then have the ability to decrypt. Now, on decrypt, let's look at a couple different use cases. First within Vertica, we might be doing select statements within Vertica, we might be doing all kinds of jobs within Vertica that just operate at the SQL layer. Again, just insert the word "access" into the Vertica select string and provide us with the data that you want to access, that's our word for decryption, that's our lingo. And we will then, at the Vertica level, harness the power of its CPU, its RAM, its horsepower at the node to be able to operate on that operator, the decryption request, if you will. So that gives us the speed and the ability to scale out. So if you start with two nodes of Vertica, we're going to operate at X number of hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, depending on what you're doing. Long strings are a little bit more intensive in terms of performance, but short strings like social security number are our sweet spot. So we operate very very high speed on that, and you won't notice the overhead with Vertica, perse, at the node level. When you scale Vertica up and you have 50 nodes, and you have large clusters of Vertica resources, then we scale with you. And we're not a bottleneck and at any particular point. Everybody's operating independently, but they're all copies of each other, all doing the same operation. Fetch a key, do the work, go to sleep. >> Yeah, you know, I think this is, a lot of the customers have said to us this week that one of the reasons why they like Vertica is it's very mature, it's been around, it's got a lot of functionality, and of course, you know, look, security, I understand is it's kind of table sticks, but it's also can be a differentiator. You know, big enterprises that you sell to, they're asking for security assessments, SOC 2 reports, penetration testing, and I think I'm hearing, with the partnership here, you're sort of passing those with flying colors. Are you able to make security a differentiator, or is it just sort of everybody's kind of got to have good security? What are your thoughts on that? >> Well, there's good security, and then there's great security. And what I found with one of my money center bank customers here in San Francisco was based here, was the concern around the insider access, when they had a large data store. And the concern that a DBA, a database administrator who has privilege to everything, could potentially exfil data out of the organization, and in one fell swoop, create havoc for them because of the amount of data that was present in that data store, and the sensitivity of that data in the data store. So when you put voltage encryption on top of Vertica, what you're doing now is that you're putting a layer in place that would prevent that kind of a breach. So you're looking at insider threats, you're looking at external threats, you're looking at also being able to pass your audit with flying colors. The audits are getting tougher. And when they say, tell me about your encryption, tell me about your authentication scheme, show me the access control list that says that this person can or cannot get access to something. They're asking tougher questions. That's where secure data can come in and give you that quick answer of it's encrypted at rest. It's encrypted and protected while it's in use, and we can show you exactly who's had access to that data because it's tracked via a different layer, a different appliance. And I would even draw the analogy, many of our customers use a device called a hardware security module, an HSM. Now, these are fairly expensive devices that are invented for military applications and adopted by banks. And now they're really spreading out, and people say, do I need an HSM? Well, with secure data, we certainly protect your crypto very very well. We have very very solid engineering. I'll stand on that any day of the week, but your auditor is going to want to ask a checkbox question. Do you have HSM? Yes or no. Because the auditor understands, it's another layer of protection. And it provides me another tamper evident layer of protection around your key management and your crypto. And we, as professionals in the industry, nod and say, that is worth it. That's an expensive option that you're going to add on, but your auditor's going to want it. If you're in financial services, you're dealing with PCI data, you're going to enjoy the checkbox that says, yes, I have HSMs and not get into some arcane conversation around, well no, but it's good enough. That's kind of the argument then conversation we get into when folks want to say, Vertica has great security, Vertica's fantastic on security. Why would I want secure data as well? It's another layer of protection, and it's defense in depth for you data. When you believe in that, when you take security really seriously, and you're really paranoid, like a person like myself, then you're going to invest in those kinds of solutions that get you best in-class results. >> So I'm hearing a data-centric approach to security. Security experts will tell you, you got to layer it. I often say, we live in a new world. The green used to just build a moat around the queen, but the queen, she's leaving her castle in this world of distributed data. Rich, incredibly knowlegable guest, and really appreciate you being on the front lines and sharing with us your knowledge about this important topic. So thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Hey, thank you very much. >> You're welcome, and thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, we're covering wall-to-wall coverage of the Virtual Vertica BDC, Big Data Conference. Remotely, digitally, thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. 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>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to AWS Public Sector Summit here in our nation's capital, Washington DC. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, John Furrier. We are joined by Daniel Castro. He is the Vice President Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank based here in town. Welcome, Daniel. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, the theme of this conference is all about modernizing government IT. I want to just start by asking a think tank analyst, how do you define IT modernization, particularly as it relates to the public sector? >> Yeah, I mean, I think a lot about how we've had this evolution, and how we do egovernment, right? And we've talked about the stages of egovernment before, for a long time, and it used to be that you had this very basic model. You put some information online, and then you had the transactional model, so you have some communication. Then you'd have something that was a little more interactive. So, maybe you get some more back and forth there. And now I think we're getting into this new model of egovernment. This next stage where we can possibly start automating a lot of more. We can start using AI. We can use IoT, and I think that's where there's a lot of excitement now because there's so much possibility with what we can do with government that didn't exist before, even five years ago. And so, to me, it's exciting to see things like where you can ask Alexa to do something with government, and you can start seeing this next wave that didn't exist even a few years ago. >> What kind of efficiencies do you see, because that seems to be a theme, using data, undifferienciated heavy-lifting tasks, where do you see the use cases in government for being more efficient with cloud and data? >> Well, I have a little bit of experience in government. I used to work in government, and one thing that a lot of people will tell you is that there's a lot of really boring things that you have to do when you're in government. There's a lot of really exciting things, really great things you can do when you're in government that's what attracts, I think, great people. But what I see is the possibility to take a lot of those boring activities out of government. The paperwork associated with your leave, and filing a claim, or all these things that people don't like, to me, that's the possibility. Can we get rid of the boring part of government and just have the really value-added part. And with data, I think that's where we're moving 'cause it's not about moving papers around and tracking. Government has a big information problem, it's can we really get to the core problem, which is the analytics, the decision-making, the problem solving. And that to me, you see so many companies on the floor that are saying, we'll take care of the security problem for you. We'll take care of the storage problem for you. we'll take care of the applications, and leave you to do that you actually wanted to do when you came to government. >> Get rid of the manual tasks, and leaving more room for the creative. And as you said, the analytical, the problem-solving. >> Right. >> Well the thing I want to ask you is that I'm old enough to see the original internet wave. And the US did a great job under the Department of Commerce when the internet came out, the domain name system. They worked internationally with ICANN, variety of other organizations, and so you had this nice growth of the internet. Now it just seems like it's highly accelerated, you got Facebook, you got YouTube. You got all these things going on. You have Amazon, these big whales of tech companies. There's a huge tech-lash going on. There's a lot of tech for good as well. So, we were just talking in our last segment, the pile for tech for good opportunities is a lot higher than the tech for bad, but everyone's focused on the bad actors right now. These are private companies. These aren't public entities, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon so they can't arrest anyone. They can't, they do what they do, right? >> Right. >> So where's the new way to get this under control? What's the think tank's perspectve? What's the community perspective in DC around this? >> What strikes me is the level of optism we see around technology has changed significantly, and part of that's driven by the tech-lash. If you go back to the '90s, people were excited about the potential of the internet, and what it could mean. We've done some analysis looking at even just the reporting in the media. We did sentiment anaylysis of how technology's being described, not just IT, but technology overall and innovation overall. You see a downward trend in the last 20 years. It's been steady, and it's been faster in the last 10 years. That affects, I think, the ability to get the public on board with new technology. It affects the ability of government to say, we're using technology for these new purposes. And it affects the policies. When you mentioned ICANN, the Departmemt of Commerce said We're going to do something fundamentally different with the internet, we're going to help create it, but keep our hands off it That idea was radical and new and exciting and innovative. Now we have all these new technologies like whether it's Jones or IoT or AI, but we don't have government necessarily saying, this is exciting and new and maybe we should do things different this time. We should think about a creative way of ensuring that we are not in the way of innovation. That we're putting in good guard rails to protect people, and instead they want to do kind of the old model, of let's regulate the technology, or focus on how it can go wrong instead of really focusing on how it might go right. >> Well, I got to say, we need more think tanks like what you guys are doing because my personal feeling, not being a very political person, and being from California, is you can't regulate what you don't understand. So if you don't understand it, then get out of the way, and a lot of people that I see in DC, certainly in elected official sides, they really don't know what they're talking about. They're mostly either lawyers or not tech savvy. And the ones that are tech savvy seem to be kind of oppressed, like where are they? Where's the revolution? >> So what's the answer then? I mean they... (laughs) >> Well, I think we have to educate more about what the potential is. When you see people start to understand, here's the technology, here's the benefits. But these are the 10 things we need to do to get there. They understand they need to do more. The problem is, some of the technology, it is kind of confusing to policy makers. Do you try to explain what machine learning is to a 70 year old elected official, and not all of them are familiar with it. Some of them are, but you look at the, Congress has an AI caucus. Congress also has a blockchain caucus, which do you think is bigger? >> Blockchain. >> Blockchain, of course, right? Because people think there's money there, it's immutable. But AI's going to be the one-- >> Infrastructure dynamic around supply chain. >> Yeah. >> Which is a data challenge because now you got encryption, and you have all kinds of immutability. So again, this is an exciting time but what do you do? Do you jump in? Nurture it? Regulate it? >> I think government, what traditionally people think about government is the lag around technology. What I like about this conference is, I think it'll show that government can be the leader in technology. When government's the leader in technology, it de-risks it for both the private sector and the rest of government. So it can say, we're going to be on the cutting edge. We're going to show how it can be done, and by being an early adopter, we can also help shape the technology. So when people are concerned about bias in AI or something, if government's an early adopter, they can help address some of those problems whether it's by making their own data sets available or showing-- >> When government is experimenting with the algorithms and then makes some mistakes, it builds more bias into it. It has more consequences, it feels like that at least. >> I think that's true, but I think the difference is nobody expects the private sector to necessarily put citizen's interest first, but that is government's role. Government's role is to say, how can we make our community better? So when it has a primary seat at the table, it can help shape the technology to get to those types of concerns. Now, of course you have to have a good government. So it's also important that we elect people who are excited about technology and protecting all people. The CIA, and now the DoD with Jedi, and a variety of other contracts going on, I think can be that leader again. If you look at the CIA is done, I think that is a great use case example, a leader gestating since 2013. DoD now on it. My friend, John Markoff, former New York Times columnist, wrote a book, What the Door Mouse Said. It's about how the hippy counter culture created the computer revolution, really from the build-up of technology around government funding to institutions and academic institutions. The counterculture developed, aka, the computer revolution. So I see a similar thing kind of happening now. It feels like you have all this tech out there. You've got this counterculture of people saying, why is there all this red tape? Why can't we use this data? Why is LinkedIn a site load of data? Why is Facebook doing what they're doing? So, I think the question should be asked, the question is, how should we take that position as the government to foster innovation, curb the bad, accelerate good, reward good. So the incentives could be digital I'd love to get your reaction to that. >> Yeah, I think that's a good point. What I see, we had a panel this morning on open data, and one of the big themes there was around the idea of collaboration. It's about partnerships between government and industry whether it's government providing the data, or industry providing the data, and also focusing on specific problems. I think that's how you get out of the siloed approach which is the concern that you have one federal agency, for example, focusing on, this is my problem. And I have the blinders on and not looking how it affects everyone else, and arguably that's the critique that a lot of people have about companies, that they're focused on one problem. They're not looking at the effects they have on the rest of the economy or society. I think you have collaberation on specific problems whether it's the opioid crisis or health care, or energy, then you start getting people from lots of different backgrounds saying, here's the resources we can bring to bear on these problems, and here's how we're going to fix it, and here's how we're going to do things differently. A lot of that gets to, do you have data that you can share? Do you have IT infrastructure that's interoperable? And do you have just kind of an organizational structure, that allows and encourages that type of collaboration? So I think when you keep kind of pushing it then, saying this is the future we want. These are the problems we're going to solve. Then it forces, even governments that are traditionally rigid to start re-orienting around new ways of solving problems. >> Well you know, open source software really could be an indicator of where this could go because you look at the generations of evolution in open source software. Collaberation that come out of that could be applied to data. >> Absolutely, and it forced second government agencies to rethink how they operate. It forced them to say, well maybe this traditional procurement model doesn't work. How else can we do things? How can we move to more service support? Those types of changes came about from a change in licensing the software. (laughs) >> Exactly. Well, Daniel, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's been a pleasure, and we look forward to having you on again soon. >> Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for coming on. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, we will have much more from AWS Public Sector Summit, here on theCUBE Teresa Carlson is coming up next. Stay tuned.

>> Announcer: Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE! Covering AWS Public Sector Summit. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of AWS Public Sector here in beautiful Washington D.C. Springtime in D.C., there's no better time to be here. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting along with John Furrier, always so much fun to work with you. >> Great to see you. >> And this is a very exciting event for you in particular 'cause you've been doing a lot of great reporting around the modernization of IT in government. I'd love to have you just start riffing, John. What's on your mind right now coming into this show? What are some of the questions that're burning? >> I mean clearly the most important story that needs to be told and is being talked about here in D.C. in the tech world is, for this show specifically, is the JEDI contract, the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative. It's a word that's not being kicked around at this show because-- >> Rebecca: Nothing to do with Star Wars. >> It's literally the elephant in the room because the contract's been waiting, Oracle's been dragging it on and Oracle's been part of apparently, my opinion from my reporting, is involved in some dirty under-handed tactics against Amazon. But it's being delayed because they're suing it. And Oracle's out. They have no chance of winning the deal, it's really Microsoft and Amazon are going to get a lion's share of the business. So you have, that's the biggest story in tech in D.C. in a long time, is the role of cloud computing is playing in reshaping how government, public sector operates. Combine that with the fact that a new generation of workers are coming in who have no dogma around IT technology, how it's bought or consumed and purchased, and the overcharging that's been going on for many many years, it's been called the Beltway Bandits for a reason because of the waste and sometimes corruption. So a new generation's upon us and Amazon is the leader in making the change happen. The deal they did with the CIA a few years ago really was the catalyst. And since then, public sector and the government has realized that there's advantages to cloud, not only for operating and serving society and its citizens but also competitiveness on a global scale. So a huge transformation, that's the story we're following. That's the story that we got into from the cloud side of the business here in D.C. and that is just raging and expanding and compounded by other factors like Facebook. Irresponsibility in how they managed the data there. Elections were tied in the balance. You're seeing Brexit in the UK. You're seeing counter-terrorism organizations using the dark web and other cyber security challenges at the United States. Literally digital war is happening so a lot of people, smart people, have recognized this and it's now for the first time coming out. >> Right, and I think the other thing that we're also starting to talk much more about is the regulation. I know that you're friendly with Kara Swisher and she bangs on about this all the time. But then she said in a column the other day the problem is is that they're now guns ablazing but do they really understand it? And also, is it too feeble, too little too late? >> I mean, Kara Swisher nailed her story in the New York Times and opinion piece. And I've had similar opinions. Look it. She's been around for a long time, I've been around for a long time. I remember when Bill Clinton was president, that's when the internet was upon us, the Department of Commerce did a good job with the domain name system, they shepherded the technology and they brought it out in a way that was responsible and let government and industry have a nice balancing act with each other and the government really didn't meddle too much. But there was responsibility back then and it wasn't moving as fast. So now you look at what's happening now, the government can't just not ignore the fact that YouTube is, in essence, its own state. And it's acting irresponsibly with how they're handling their situation. You got Facebook run by a 30-something-year-old, which essentially could be as large as a government. So there's no ethics, there's no thinking behind some of the consequences that they've become. So this begs the question, as a technology hock myself, I love tech, never seen tech I didn't like. I mean I love tech. But there's a point where you got to get in there and start shaping impact on ethics and society and we're seeing real examples of how this can wildfire out of control, how tech has just become uncontrollable in a way. >> Yes, no absolutely. And so who is going to be the one to do that? I know that on the show later you're going to be talking to Jay Carney who was obviously in the Obama administration, now here at AWS. It's a well-worn path from the public sector to technology. Susan Molinari, a couple of other, David Plouffe. That is the thing though, that these people really need to get it. Before they can lay down regulations and laws. >> Again, back to why we're here and stories we're trying to tell and uncover and extract is I think the big story that's emerging from this whole world is not just the impact of cloud, we talked about that, we're going to continue to cover that. It's the societal impact and this real there there, there's the intersection of public policy and technology and science where you don't have to be a programmer, you can be an architect of change and know how it works. Then being a coder and trying to codify a government or society. I think you're going to see a new kind of skillset emerge where there's some real critical thinking into how technology can be used for good. You're seeing the trends, Hackathon For Good here, you're seeing a lot of different events where you have inclusion and diversity, bringing more perspectives in. So you got the perfect storm right now for a sea change where it won't be led by the nerds, so to speak, but geeky digital generations will change it. I think that's going to be a big story. Not just workforce changeover but real disciplines around using machine-learning for ethics, societal impact. These are the storylines. I think this is going to be a big long 10-year, 20-year changeover. >> But what will it take though? For the best and the brightest of the nerds to want to go into public service rather than go work for the tech behemoths that are making these changes? I mean that's the thing, it's a war for talent and as we know and we've discussed a lot on theCUBE, there's a big skills gap. >> I think it's been talked about a lot on the web, the millennials want to work for a company that's mission-based. What more mission-based can you look for than so unto our public service right now? John F. Kennedy's famous line, "Ask not what your country can do for you, "what you can do for you country." That might have that appeal for the younger generation because we need it! So the evidence is there and you look at what's going on with our government. There's so many inefficiencies from healthcare to tax reform to policies. There's a huge opportunity to take that waste, and this is what cloud computing and AI and machine-learning can do, is create new capabilities and address those critical waste areas and again, healthcare is just one of many many many others in government where you can really reduce that slack with tech. So it's a great opportunity. >> And where would you say, and I know you've been reporting on this for a long time, where is the government in terms of all of this? I remember not very long ago when healthcare.gov was rolled out and it was revealed that many agencies were still using floppy disks. The government is, first of all is not this monolithic thing, it's many different agencies all with their own tech agendas and with their own processes and policies. So where do you place the government in terms of its modernization right now? >> On the elected officials side, it's weak. They're really not that smart when it comes to tech. Most of the people that are involved in the elected side of the Hill are either lawyers or some sort of major that's not technical. So you can see that with Sundar Pichai from Google and Mark Zuckerberg's testimony when the basic kind of questions they're asking, it's almost a joke. So I think one, the elected officials have to become more tech-savvy. You can't regulate and govern what you don't understand. I think that something that's pretty obvious to most digital natives. And then on the kind of working class, the Defense Department and these other agencies, there's real people in there that have a passion for change and I think there's change agents, Amazon's done really well there. I think that is a piece where you're going to see a movement, where you're going to see this digital native movement where people going to be like, "There's no excuse not to do this right." And I think there's new ways to do it, I think that's going to change. So that's that. On the business side, to how the government procures technology is literally like the '80s, it's like that movie "Hot Tub Time Machine" where you get thrown back. Everything is based on 1980s procurement, 1990s procurement. I mean, shipping manuals. So all these things have to change. How do you procure cloud? If you got to go through a six-month procurement process just to spit up some servers, that's not agility. So procurement's got to change. Competitiveness, what does that mean? This Oracle deal with JEDI highlights a lot of flaws in the government. Which is Oracle's using these rules around procurement to try to stall Amazon, it's kind of like a technicality but it's so irrelevant to the reality of the situation. So procurement has to change. >> Well one of the things you said about how there's a lot of pressure to get it right. And that is absolutely true because we are dealing with national security issues, people's lives, health, these really important topics. And yet the private sector doesn't always get it right the first time either. So how would you describe the government, the federal approach to how they start to implement these new technologies and experiment with other kinds of tools and techniques? >> Well I think there's obviously some agencies that have sensitive things. CIA's a poster child in my opinion of how to do it right. The JEDI, Department of Defense is emulating that and that's a good thing. The Department of Defense is also going multicloud as they put out in their statement. Amazon for the JEDI piece which is for troops in the field. I think that every agency's going to have its own workload and those workloads should decide which cloud to use based upon the architecture of the workload. 'Cause the data needs to be in the cloud, it needs to be real time. And to take the military example, you can't have lag in military, it's not a video game, it's real life, people die. Lag can literally kill people in the field. So technology can be a betterment there but technology to avoid fighting is another one. So you have all these things going on, I think the government's got to really design everything around the workload, their mission, their applications, rather than designing around here's your infrastructure, then decide. >> One of the things we talk about all the time, almost ad nauseam, on theCUBE is digital transformation. And so how do you think about those two, private sector versus public sector? What are the big differences in terms of these institutions on their own journeys of digital transformation? >> I think the government's slower. That's an easy one to talk about. I think there's a lot of moving parts involved, you mentioned some of the procurement things, so a lot of processes. It's the same kind of equation. People process technology, except the people that process is much more complicated on the public sector side than private sector, unless it's a big company. So imagine the biggest company in the private sector side, multiply that times a hundred, that's the government. So in each agency there's a lot of things going on there. But it's getting better. I think cloud has shown that you can actually do that, the people side of things going to be addressed by this new migration of new generation of people coming in saying, "I don't really care how you did it before, "this is how we're going to do it today." The processes are going to be optimized so there's some innovation around process improvement that's going to end on the wayside and the technology everyday is coming faster and faster. Recognition, facial recognition software. Look at that. AI. These are things that are just undeniable now, they have to be dealt with. What do you do to privacy? So again, back to process. So people process technology. >> AWS is a behemoth in cloud computing. What do you want to be hearing here at this conference? They're so far ahead of Google and Microsoft but we cannot count those two companies out, of course not. But what are you looking for for key messaging at this show? >> Well I'm looking forward to seeing Andy Jassy's Fireside Chat with Teresa Carlson tomorrow. I'm interested in some of the use cases coming out of Teresa Carlson's top customers in public sector, again it's global public sector so it's not just in North America here in the United States. I'm interested in also understanding what's real and what's not real around the fear, uncertainty and doubt that a lot of people have been putting on Amazon. Because I see Amazon posturing in a way that's saying go faster, make change and it's not so much that they want to monopolize the entire thing, they're just moving faster. And I think Andy Jassy yesterday saying that they welcome regulation is something that they're trying to push the regulators on. So I think they welcome change. So I want to understand if Amazon really wants to go faster or is there an agenda there. (laughs) What's going on? >> I know, methinks these tech titans are asking for a little too much regulation right now. I mean obviously Mark Zuckerberg has also said, "Please regulate us, I can't do this alone." And here we have Andy Jassy yesterday saying those same things. >> Andy Jassy said on stage yesterday with Kara Swisher, "We can't arrest people." So if their tech goes bad, they're only beholden to the consequences as a private entity. They're not the law so this is where again, back to top story here is that, what is the role of government? This change is here. It's not going away, it's only going to get faster. So the sooner the elected officials and all the agencies get out in front of the digital transformation, the sooner the better. Otherwise it's going to be a wrecking ball. >> Well I cannot wait to dig into more of this over the next two days with you, here at AWS Public Sector. >> All right. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier, you are watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Magento Imagine 2019. (fizzing) (upbeat music) Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hi, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick at Imagine 2019, the Wynn, Las Vegas, with about 3500 customers, lots of partners, lots of developers, a lot of energy here. And speaking of energy, we have Jason Woosley, VP of commerce at Adobe. Jason, you came onto the stage this morning from the clouds suspended. Talk about energy. >> It was a lot of energy, and there was a message behind it, right? (clears throat) I mean we really are talking about our Cloud penetration and how that is the future. So, you know, I got to do something really cool and check something off the bucket list where I actually did descend from the sky onto the stage. It was the best Imagine entrance I've ever done (Lisa laughing) and really does talk about, you know, how important our Cloud Strategy is. Thanks for having me on, by the way. >> Absolutely. >> Our pleasure. >> So, a lot of energy here, again, community, community, community. We go to so many shows, so many people are desperate to engage developers. And you guys have that in your core. It's been there from day one. Continues to be such an important part of who you are as well as the road forward. >> It's the reason for why we are where we are today. I mean bar none, right? Our community, this eco system. And it's not something you can buy. It's not something you can even intentionally build. You have to nurture, you have to create a platform that speaks to a large audience, and then you've just got to make sure that you're treating those developers and your partners really, really well, empowering them to really differentiate that experience at the last mile. And, you know, it's a flywheel effect. You end up with this incredible community that's anxious to contribute back into our code base and they have made, what you see at this conference is a result of that community. It's not anything that Magento could do. It's not anything that Adobe could do. It is just something that has to organically happen, and then you have to nurture the heck out of it. And that, that's really what we've done. >> And this is a community that you say has grown organically to several hundred thousand people who I feel like to say that they're influential to Magento, the technologies is actually an understatement with how much, how, again, I think influential's the wrong word. They're stronger than that. >> They're absolutely core to it, right? I mean they're an extension of our development methodology. You know, I like to think about, you know, I run engineering as part of my organization, and everybody in my group is customer-facing. Just like everybody in out community is customer-facing. And so we've tried to tear down the walls that separate our community members from our internal core engineers, because it creates this incredible diversity of perspective that you can't find anywhere else. I mean, no matter how much I invest in broadly diverse engineering teams across the globe, 300,000 engineers, they call themselves Magento developers, don't take a paycheck from Adobe but contribute back to our code base, influence our road map and really show us the way. It's an incredible phenomenon. >> In the last year since the announcement of the Adobe acquisition and the actual completion of that six, seven months ago, how has that community reacted, strengthened? What have been some of your surprising observations about the community's strength? >> It is surprising, and I'll tell you why. I think we came into the acquisition with a lot of apprehension, right. There was a concern that, you know, Adobe's too big. They're too corporate. They don't really love Open Source. All untrue, right? Adobe has incredible Open Source initiatives already inside, but you don't here a lot about it. And so, our community, I think, is it's a little bit concerned about, you know, does the level of investment go down? Does all of our ability to promote that product, does that, do we start to back off of that? And of course, we have not done that at all, and in fact, what we've seen is that our community loves the Adobe acquisition. They see opportunity just as clearly as we do. We have more than triple-digit growth in the number of community contributions coming in to us since the acquisition last year. It is a clear sign that the ecosystem is fully on board with where we're going. >> Right. Well clearly the Adobe Suite provides so much gunpowder to power the commerce that's been at the core of Magento from the beginning. I mean it almost begs the question, why didn't this happen a long, long time ago? >> I think there's something to be said about that, and, but you know what, it took Adobe a while. They picked the right platform. We're very confident of that, and, you know, their investment in community is actually paying off on the Adobe side, right. When you think about digital experience products, they (Adobe) are now more active than ever in open source projects. We've got, you know, folks from Adobe Experience Manager that are writing code and contributing to Magento, which is, it's absolutely terrific. And they're now talking about how do we get the ability to kind of create that contribution mechanism and at least create a platform concept where, you know, everybody plays. It's an equal playing field. You can serve us small, you can serve us large. And it just brings everybody together to solve these common, complex problems that are joint merchant's face. >> I don't know how many times you've been on stage in the last few days but, a couple. But one of the things you really, you know, (pounding) you didn't pound on the table but you basically pounded on the table, is that we are still, totally, 100% behind SMB. >> Jason: Absolutely. >> It's our core. We're not giving that up. >> We built this market together, right. This was what made Magento what it is. It's where we play the best. We know it better than anybody else in the industry, and we're not retreating. We're doubling down. We've got ground to take in the mid-market, and I can't wait to do it. >> Right, but what's wild is you're enabling the mid-market, to compete with the tools of the big guys. So, announcements are on the integration with Amazon, announcements are on integration with Google. So it's kind of an interesting place for small retailers, small merchants. They've got to compete in this world, so you're really giving 'em an aid, an opportunity to both play in what might be a big competitor as well as leverage that ecosystem and assets as well as doing it within their own brick and mortar or their own site . >> And that's a terrific point. I think one of the reasons we do that is we've seen consumer expectations rising through the roof, right. I mean, everything from, you know, fast shipping is now one-day. And it wasn't very long ago that fast shipping, if you could get it within a week, that was pretty darn quick. >> Jeff: Right. >> But now fast shipping is one day, and that's across the board. Consumers are expecting frictionless payment. They're expecting, you know, buy online, pick up in-store, omni-channel capabilities. Really all of these capabilities. And a consumer, a shopper, really doesn't care whether you're big or small. What they care about is the experience that the consume when they interact with your brand. And so, bringing the tools of the enterprise to the mid-market allows them to compete on a more level playing field, and that's really where you generate all those great innovation. And that's where you see, you know, these smaller merchants that are really able to, you know, drive into something that, you know, may not have been a core target for some of the larger enterprises, but they find an niche and are able to deliver, but they have the same personalization needs. They have the same logistics needs. All of that has not changed just because they're a smaller organization. And so it's really on us to be able to provide them the tooling and the access to the capabilities that let them compete with the larger merchants. >> No, 'cause you're right. As consumers, which we are every day, we don't care if they're a big or small company, or what technologies that, well, no we do care, to a degree, that we can start something from a mobile phone, have a great seamless experience >> Jason: Yep. >> that's not gonna cause me to churn, because I'm not going to be able to find what I want. I want it to be personalized. I want them to know enough about me in a non-creepy way, as you say. >> That's right. If it's good, it's magic. (Lisa laughing) If it's bad, it's creepy! >> Right, regardless of-- >> That's fair. >> That's for recommendation engines. >> Yeah, no, that's fair. >> And expect that they have what I want. But also what you're doing now is giving these SMBs, these smaller organizations, the ability to harness this sort of symbiotic data power between Adobe and Magento for advertising, analytics, marketing, commerce, to be able to have that wealth of knowledge to make that experience exactly what that consumer expects. >> Exactly right. I mean it's about bringing behavioral data and the transactional data together to really get a 360 degree view of individual customers. And guess what? There's too much raw data there for Excel to ever be able to tell you anything. You've got to rely on things like artificial intelligence and machine learning so that things like Adobe Sensei to really derive insight out of that mass set of data. But that's the way you create those personalized experiences. You have to employ those techniques to get there. >> Right, I just wanted to unpack the Sensei down-spin a little bit, 'cause I think that's really interesting. You know, AI's been a great buzzword. We see it in a lot of places. You know, our Google email now automatically figures out what we want to reply to our email. But it's the integration of AI in applications is where we're really starting to see it come to market early, and this is a great example of, you know, using the Adobe AI inside of Sensei, on specific parts of the application to deliver a better application, a better consumer experience. >> And we've got a great roadmap for rolling out Artificial Intelligence capabilities to Magento commerce. It's one of the largest value adds that we'll do over the next 12 months, is really bringing those capabilities around recommendations, around experience personalization and experience targeting. Around A/B testing. And then you think a little bit into the future, and suddenly you're looking at an AI that can give you pricing recommendations and campaign recommendations, and, you know, that is a, that's a world we cannot wait to really explore fully in the commerce world, because I think that those are the tools, you know Amazon applies a lot of dynamic pricing techniques right now. It's a really expensive process. I don't know a lot of small merchants that have access to the tools to do that. We're bringing those tools to small merchants, and that's gonna change the game fundamentally, I believe. >> And a way that they can do it, almost themselves, rather than having to have a team of resources, which a small business doesn't have. >> And that is the name of the game for small business. You can't require them to have a data science team. You can't require them to have an IT staff or a Web development team. You gotta give them everything they need so that they can focus on retail, what they know best, merchandising to their customers and, you know, managing their inventory, driving up the correct margins and then making sure that they're able to grow the lifetime value of their customers, right? That's the Holy Grail for retail is when you can actually optimize against lifetime value. Because it's the number one thing that all merchants are chasing. >> Yeah, 'cause you had the guy on the keynote yesterday. I'm not in the demographic. I'm trying to remember the name of the-- >> Oh, Troy, Troy Brown from Zumiez! >> From Zumiez, yeah. >> Yeah. >> I thought it was just really interesting, you know, kind of re-thinking retail, right? Retail is not dead, but it's different, and you have to be different. And really to see how they have kind of taken their concept I thought it was pretty interesting, especially around the fact that he has no more fulfillment centers, he said. But basically, they're fulfilling from the store. They want to engage you in the store. It's a convenient thing. Especially now we see Amazon packages are all gettin' stolen off of doorsteps. But, you know, enabling them to be creative around their customer engagement, not necessarily worry about how to run a bunch of A/B tests. They let you do that complicated stuff. >> Let us take on all of the complexity, and then they can actually benefit from the insights derived from that. And what Zumiez have done, it's a phenomenal story, right. I mean, you're going away from this centralized warehouse concept, to really turning all of their stores into distribution centers, right? 704 or so, brick and mortar-strong where, you know, they now have merchandise close to their consumers. They have, you know, the ability to do showcasing, buy online, pick-up in store, all of the omni-channel techniques that are grabbing so much traction right now. And Zumiez has really capitalized. >> Jeff: Right. >> They've done a terrific job, and it's great seeing it come from these really innovative retailers, right? I mean, that show last night with Zumiez was absolutely, you know, fantastic. Their culture is super unique, highly energetic, but they're driving technology forward in a way that you might not expect from a skateboard apparel shop. >> Right, well, they're making Champion cool again. It came out of the Champion, and it was in the demo. I'm like, I didn't know Champion was a cool brand. >> Apparently, it is cool now. >> Jeff: It's cool now. >> You and I are both out of that demographic, (Jeff laughing) but it is a very good story. >> One of the things that we're hearing and seeing is that we talked about personalization and that this expectation, that as consumers, we bring to everything we buy, whatever it happens to be, but also, this sort of, looking at Amazon as an example, of going to brick and mortar from purely online, the acquisition of Whole Foods, people still wanting to have that human interaction. We talk about it all the time when we talk about AI, is that pretty much the common thread is yes, AI, and maybe yes, online to a degree, and then there's still that need and that demand for that personal face-to-face or maybe voice-to-voice interaction. >> Yeah, well, you know, its really for me, it's about taking that brand, you know, experience and making sure that it's resonating across all of your digital properties as well as all of the physical properties, right. It is about really leveraging. My brand experience is consistent across every place that I come encounter my customers, and I'm ready to transact anytime my customers are ready to transact. And when, you know, talking about Amazon. we've announced some really cool stuff this Ad Imagine on Amazon, a partnership. where Amazon sellers can now have a branded storefront on Magento. This is allowing folks that have done a terrific job selling in the market place, where you don't have a lot of opportunity for experience differentiation on the amazon.com site. >> Lisa: Right. >> And it's a terrific marketplace. More than 50% of product searches are starting on Amazon now. So it's a reality that retailers need to find a way to come to grips with. >> Jeff: Right. >> And what I'm really excited about is that those merchants that are doing really well on Amazon now have a new channel where they can create these branded experiences and really start differentiating themselves from their competitors. It's going to be a terrific story. It's Branded Storefronts for Amazon Sellers is the name of the offering. And its going to change the game for folks that have been exclusively Amazon, maybe thinking its too hard to go get an online presence that actually represents my brand. Now its a piece of cake. They've got a clean path to get there, and the capabilities go both ways, right? We also announced Amazon sales channel for Magento commerce that allows you as a branded merchant, to go and participate on the Amazon Marketplace and have full control over your inventory, your orders and all of your catalog. >> It's so funny, you know, we talk about experience but so much of retail execution is actually inventory execution, right? >> [Jason} That's Right. >> It's inventory management. That's where all your money sits. You can get it real upside down really quickly if you're not managing your inventory. And if you don't have the right amount of inventory, especially as you say with same-day delivery now being an expected behavior. And so to add the sophisticated tools on the back and to manage that inventory across that broad, kind of distribution plane, if you will, with all these different points of engagement is so critical to these guys to have any type of chance of success. >> Yeah, it is. It's absolutely critical, and we've also got a Magento order management product that specializes in sort of global inventory control. We've made terrific investments there to bring new capabilities to make sure that those omni-channel aspirations are not something that a merchant has to go invest a whole lot of money and change in their systems. I think it is interesting to think about when you talk about how B2C is really bleeding into B2B, right. As supply chain management, you know, 70% of our B2C merchants, self-described, actually engaged in B2B workflows, and almost all of our B2B-only merchants are really looking at how do I go B2B to C? >> Jess: Right. >> So there's this really great platform play happening, and the fact that Magento commerce and Adobe commerce Cloud can serve us B2B and B2C and all the hybrids in-between really puts us in a differentiated position and helps merchants not have to go invest in multiple platform, multiple maintainability and then find some way to reconcile the inventory between the two. >> Right, and we had a quote earlier today. I can't remember who said it, but I thought it was great where, you know, no longer is the actual transaction the destination. Right, but now you're bringing the transaction to, you know, kind of the journey. It's a very different way to think about a traditional funnel. It isn't the traditional funnel that you work your way down to the end. Now you're inserting commerce opportunities, >> Jason: Yep. >> engagement opportunities all along kind of this content flow. >> We kind of teased ourselves, right, We kinda lied to ourselves and said that, you know, this is a linear journey. And we've all bought into it, right. You know all the steps, right. It's a discovery, awareness, I mean all the way to post-purchase. Its not linear. People move in and out of each of those sections, and so being able to transact where the customer is ready to transact is critically important >> Jeff: Right. >> and then understanding that the post-sale service is the key to lifetime value. That's the other major learning that we're trying to take away from this. And it's why it's important to be at every point your customer is. >> Yeah, it's interesting, 'cause especially with these things, because you don't sit down to work on your phone like we sat down to work at these things. >> Jason: That's right. >> And so your attention, >> Jason: works coming to you. >> it's coming to you, and its coming in little bits. Oh, and by the way, there's a whole bunch of notifications coming on that can pull you away. >> Jason: Yeah. >> So they're very different challenges in terms of actual engagement when this is the primary vehicle. >> And increasingly, it is the primary vehicle, right? >> Jess: Absolutely. >> More than 50% of traffic to retail, e-commerce site is generated from a mobile phone, and there are emerging markets where that is the only internet-connected device, and so it's the standard. You absolutely have to take mobile very seriously. There's a great set of technologies coming online to help us get there. It's called Progressive Web Application. It's going to change the game on how mobile is treated as a device, and in fact, it gets rid of the need for discrete native applications. So instead of having an IOS app, an Android app, a desktop storefront, a mobile storefront and maybe a tablet storefront, plus your online brick and mortar, now you can actually say, my digital properties are serviced by one set of technology. And that way, when I make a change to one, it shows up in everything. I don't have all these difference code bases to maintain. It's a total cost of ownership, and really, a time-to-market play >> Lisa: I was gonna say, >> across the board. >> faster time-to market for sure. >> Absolutely. Yeah. >> With far less resources. >> Well, and bringing it so that you really have to invest in allowing your merchandisers to merchandise on your digital properties, right? If there is an engineer sitting between your merchandiser and the customer, that time lag and even just trying to get it done, there's so much frustration there. So creating these self-service tools that really allow non-technical merchandisers to go in, make adjustments to how they're selling products across all those channels very, very easily and in one place, that's gonna return a ton of value to our merchants. So its another thing that we're super excited about. >> No, you deliver that consistent experience that the consumer is expecting, and then, we were talking to PayPal earlier, start to help companies close that revenue gap of getting them from mobile to, you know, wanting to transact and making that whole process seamless. >> There's a nine billion dollar opportunity in closing the mobile gap. When you think about abandoned cards and folks that begin the checkout process for whatever reason, likely they get frustrated and don't want to type in their credit card number or don't want to type in their address, and then they move to another device or another store that's doing checkout in a more frictionless way, the nine billion dollar opportunity if you close that. >> Wow, that's huge! >> So its incredibly important. >> It is incredibly important. Well Jason, we wish we had more time, but we thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and talking with Jeff and Me. Such an exciting time. Sounds like developers are feeling embraced. The community is happy. Customers are reacting well. So we can't wait to hear whats next, next year. >> This is the best place to be in the world in commerce. Thank you guys so much for having me on. It's always a pleasure, and I've enjoyed it a lot. >> Oh, our pleasure as well, Jason. >> Alright, thank you, guys. Thanks, Jason. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin at Imagine 2019 at the Wynn, Las Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Magento Imagine 2019, brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We're coming to you live from Magento Imagine 2019. Welcoming to theCUBE for the first time Gary Specter, the VP of Commerce, Sales and Customer Success at Adobe. Gary, welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you, I'm thrilled to be here. >> So there's about 3,500 people here, you guys have, from 60-plus countries. >> Gary: That's right. >> I think 100 sessions, 150 speakers. People coming down from ceilings, up from the floor. >> Gary: And we're streaming live. >> First ever live stream, yes. >> On the general set, first ever. That's right. Someone tweeted out that there are 35,000 people watching. >> Marketing probably loved that and then had a heart attack at the same time. >> Yeah, I'm sure they did. Not exactly accurate but I'll take what I can get. >> Tell us about the event, the spirit of the event. This is kind of, yesterday evening things kicked off. What of some of the things you've hearing from customers, partners, developers? >> So, I think the thing that's really unique about Imagine is that it does involve partners, the community, developers, along with Magento and our customers and our prospects. And it makes it really different because the developer community and our partners are so passionate about Magento. And I think everybody feels really good about the marriage of Adobe and Magento. You had technologies that were very well aligned, not overlapping. It enables us to extend the capabilities of what we can do from both the Adobe side or the Magento side. I like to say that the color palette got a lot bigger, and I think there's a lot of excitement around that and what that means to all of these people, developers, partners, the ecosystem, customers, prospects. So the energy is really high. I think obviously people are, what's next? And what does this mean for Magento? And I think it means investment, I think it means a higher rate of agility and an expansion of what we do. Acceleration of our roadmap. So I think people are very, very positive. And this is my fourth Imagine, and it's really, I've never felt the energy higher than at this Imagine. So it's exciting for me. >> Gary, one of the interesting ways that you talked about community and everybody wants developer communities, right? And you guys also have open source as a passion. But you phrased it in a way I've never heard before, is that you like going to sleep at night knowing that there's a whole bunch of other CEOs betting their business-- >> That's right. >> On this platform. >> Yeah. >> And it's not just you guys, so it's a really different way to think about open source. We often think of the developers and there's smart people outside your four walls contributing code. But it's not often couched in terms of the business terms. >> No. >> If there's are other people betting their business, thinking about how are they gonna help grow your business by building their business on top of Magento. >> That's what drives the passion of the community. These people realize that there's a symbiotic relationship here. If Magento successful, the ability for them to be successful is very broad. And if Magento's not successful, then you have to ask yourselves did I make the right bet? So a lot of our tech partners have build these great solutions on top of Magento, and it's a partnership. And you don't have that anywhere else, and again, I sleep better at night, to your point. I don't know where you got that quote, but it's actually mine, it's phenomenal. >> No, no, I think I got it from your Argentina 2017 talk perhaps. >> Actually, it's true. I know that all of these tech partners, these CEOs, they have my back. I'd like them to know I have theirs. And I don't think Adobe has any, there's no reason or rhyme why that would ever change. I think Adobe will enhance it. And I think that's why there so much excitement here. >> Well, and it's really a validation and what we talked about before, the prior segment, was now to bring the marketing tools, and the AI and all the power that's in that big building in San Jose, free the commerce transaction, really, to your point, adds so much more horse power to the total solution. >> Like I said, color palette just got a lot bigger. There's so many more things that we can do and so many more colors we can use to create these great experience for our brands and our customers, that we could've done before but it was a lot of work, but now we've got all of the makings of a platform that will enable that and we're already pretty far along in taking the Adobe experience cloud and making that work. And I'm just really excited about the future and what this offers for our customers and our brands. >> We've heard a number of guests that talk about just what you were referring to a minute ago, and that was really this symbiosis of Adobe, the power that Adobe brings, the data that Adobe brings, along with Magento, So a new Adobe commerce buy was just launched a couple of months ago, at Adobe Summit powered by Magento Commerce, but you look at it as analytics, advertising, marketing, commerce, fundamentals for managing what is a changing and highly demand customer experience, 'cause we want more and more things accessible from right here. So some of the feedback from customers, partners, developers since that announcement and now going "Ahh, okay now I can actually touch and see and play with this two symbiosis machines coming together." >> Yeah, I think it's not a hard thing to get. I think when the acquisition first happened, there's a little let's wait and see and make sure they get it right. And I think what I feel today, or what people have given to me today is the feedback that they're believers. They know that we're gonna execute on this strategy, and this strategy is gonna allow us to extend our lead on our competitors, which in return, allows these brands and these commerce players to extend their lead on their competitors. >> Let's talk about the small/medium business folks for a minute. When the announcement was made last year, the intention, right after Imagine 2018 I believe, for Adobe to acquire Magento, and then right after they acquired Marketo, there was some concern for is Adobe gonna kind of shift what Magento has been doing, so successfully for so long, away from focusing on those smaller merchants to the enterprise folks. Yesterday and today, we heard some great, exciting announcements with what you guys are doing with Amazon Sales Channel, with Google Shopping, and it sounded like the small and medium business size folks were going "Yes, this is what we need." Talk to us a little bit about that. >> I mean, you mentioned two, along with PWA and some of the other things that we're doing. While these can be leveraged in the enterprise, they were built for the mid-market in the SMB space. And there is no doubt that Adobe and Magento both understand how important SMB and the mid-market is. And in fact, we've seen acceleration in the SMB space since the acquisition, from the Magento side of the house. And Adobe is fully committed and knows that there's market share there to be had. And the application or the business problems that we solve at the enterprise, are still applicable for the mid-market and the SMB space. They're handled in a little bit different of a manner, but they have same aspirations. And the solution's gonna be able, when you look across everything that you're gonna be able to do, it plays for both markets. And Adobe has an incredible opportunity to really drive market share in this mid-market. They don't have a big footprint there today. Even if you capture just a small portion of it, and its our plans to capture a large portion of it, but even a small portion of it is gonna make a big impact on Adobe. So I think that we will see acceleration in the mid-market and in the SMB space with what we're doing, what we're developing together, and the different types of products that we can offer to those markets that Adobe has in its broader portfolio. >> And of course on the enterprise side, what we don't see here that we saw at Adobe Summit a couple weeks back are some of the really big integrators who have huge practices built around and on top of the Adobe tool set that now you get to leverage. I'm sure you're pretty excited about as running field. There's, again, a whole nother group of people, not necessarily CEOs, but managing partners, who have bet their jobs, bet their livelihood, bet their practices on this, and now you getta take advantage of those resources as well. >> Absolutely, and I think that a lot of the large integrators and partners, I think everybody's starting to understand that commerce is very different now than it was five or 10 years ago, right? I call it bite small, chew fast. And HP is a great example, where they started in some of the smaller APAC countries and then went to Brazil, and they're looking at the US last, but they're taking it a step at a time. One country, one country, one country. And a lot of our big retailers or brands that wanna expand globally are doing the same things, or companies that have portfolios of brands, one at a time. Bite small, chew fast. Launch, be successful, launch, be successful. And I think the SIs, including the large partners, understand that and they're changing the way that they look at businesses holistically. So I think right time, right place. >> Yeah, we had Gillian Campbell from HP on right after her keynote this morning, and it was an interesting kinda POC program. And I said what was some of the market dynamics that identified APAC as the right market to start in. And part of that, I think, was that from a historical legacy perspective of using Magento on the HP Inc. side. But some of the things I found interesting to them was that leveraging the data to understand the cultural e-commerce differences snd how different cultures interact with different social media platforms or purchasing platforms differently, and how important it is to really understand those commerce patterns and start to drive conversions from there there and then go success, roll it out, rinse and repeat. >> And she nailed it right? I mean, buy online, pick up in store versus having it delivered to your home, if you live in the middle of India, what's the reality of you getting that delivered in an hour? And if you look at country like Russia, which is very spread out, right, so there's not a high density outside of a lot of their major cities and you have a lot of the same issues. If you're gonna have it ship to your home, how long is it gonna take? It might be easier just to go pick it up in the store. And I think it's different in every region. And it's good to be able to have access to that data to get a good read on what are the things our customers want specifically to drive the experience they need within that region. >> Right, key for a company whether it's something the size of an HP Inc. or not, to be able to scale globally, but also have that sort of local market adaptation where you're able to react, understand the preferences in your markets, and deliver exactly what those consumers want. So having a tool like Magento as the power to enable that global scale regional adaptation, it's a driver. >> And I think you start to add complexity when you look at do they use their phone, do they use their computer? Do they use social networks and buy buttons? I have an interesting dynamic in my own house where I've got a 13-year-old, and the way that she would shop online is different than the way that my wife would shop online, which is very different from how I would shop online. I browse and go to the store. My wife uses her computer. My daughter shops on Pinterest, or Instagram, or Facebook. Very different journeys for the three of us, and we could be buying the same thing, and we're all gonna do it differently. So it crosses generations as well. >> So, Gary, it feels like kinda the dust has settled post-Adobe acquisition where everybody feels kinda comfortable, and it's been a year and everything didn't go bananas. So as you look forward now, after things have kinda settled, what are some of your priorities over the next year, If we sit down a year from now, what are you working on? >> I can tell you that for me, the biggest priority for me is to make sure that the mid-market and the SMB flywheel is effective, the way that we go to market, the way that we target that segment. And it's not that I'm not interested in the enterprise. I'm extremely interested in the enterprise. But we have a lot of people that are working on the enterprise. And Adobe doesn't have deep domain expertise around the mid-market. But with Marketo and Magento, you now do. So for me personally, I wanna make sure that that flywheel is well-run, it's well-oiled, it's set up for success, that operationally, the things that we do to drive market share in that segment run as effectively as the rest of Adobe on the enterprise side. It's a new sales motion for Adobe. But the good news is I think Adobe understands that. We understand that as a company, and I think over the next year, for me, that's where my focus is gonna be. >> So if we keep looking out to the next year, this is your fourth Magento Imagine. >> It is. >> Is there gonna be a Magento Imagine 2020? >> So I will tell you that there will be an Imagine 2020, and I will share details around that Wednesday. I've been asked to help close Imagine out, and when I do, I will be thrilled to announce our plans for Imagine 2020. >> So can folks watch that on the livestream tomorrow, Wednesday, that 15th? >> They can. >> Are you gonna be coming up from the floor, the ceiling? >> I think I'm probably just gonna dance on out. I have been invigorated, I love being here. Imagine is the one opportunity every year where I come out of this thing just feeling really good about the opportunities that we had ahead of us. And by Wednesday, although tired, I'm usually really happy to be going back and getting in the field with my teams and just driving opportunity. And I think we had an amazing one. >> Well, we'll be all watching. Is it imagine.magento.com to watch the livestream ? Or magento.imagine.com. go to to the Magento.com site, Wednesday tomorrow in the afternoon, you're gonna be able to hear more about what's to come next year. Gary, thank you so much for giving us time today. >> Thanks for having me, enjoy it. >> Our pleasure. >> It's great to meet you all. >> Excellent >> Thank you. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin. Tou're watching theCUBE live from Magento Imagine 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by Adobe. >> Everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage. Adobe summat twenty nineteen here for two days. I'm John for a jefe. Rick. Our next guest is Mark Lenhard. SVP of Growth. Part of the big news is the adobe commerce cloud mark for me with magenta Now Adobe, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. It's real pleasure to be here. So very impressive. Adobe with there the creative products at their end user applications Really great stuff. People know it. It's a cloud service. The transformations happened. But what's really happening to is this platform continues to get billed. You guys with Magenta, one of the big pieces of the puzzle Marquette O's got. They got a big piece over there. You guys are a big part of commerce Cloud big news here. What's the Commerce cloud about? You guys announced the hear of the show. When is going to be available? What's the features? What's the dude? So give us the overview. No, >> great And again, Thanks for having me. It's really been It's been a wild year with the Magenta acquisition coming in really folding into a suite of products on the experience side that really are designed to really help companies transform themselves right and really own the entire customer experience all the way from Discovery through to Buy to through Renew. >As we saw this morning.  And Commerce really fits in there nicely in the Buy section and what was announced today is with Adobe Commerce. Cloud is the opportunity which available now for for our larger merchants and enterprises to get the core magenta platform, which are our customers know in love. But get that in a way that's managed by adobe eyes more fully integrated into the other products and services. So you can deliver that full customer on tow n journey on which hand features which will will happen over time, particularly as we get two more data driven data driven insights and over time sense A and air power tools. >> You know, I love looking at slides because you can tell a lot by a slide right when the lame out these chinos kind of architecture slides. But I think it's interesting about the adobe experience. Cloud is, it lays out nicely because you have cloud modules. If you will are building blocks, you got the add cloud, the analytics cloud, the market cloud and the commerce cloud. Then you got platform underneath, enabling. That's a lot of nice decouple but cohesive elements to it. Which really is a testament to that kind of how they're laying out that experience, cloud and experience. What is the commerce clouds roll in that? Because you guys have to be highly cohesive to do the kind of levels of commerce that's demanded and B to B. Now it's changing them. We'LL direct a consumer business model, so it's a consumer like marketing function in a B t B context. How is that changing? What magenta wass and what's it turning into as commerce cloud specifically? Well, >> you know, a lot of it is just really leveraging a lot of the features of functionality that Magenta had really just fit in really, really nicely into that, that user journey, right? And so where magenta is really slotting in nicely is in that by section, right? If you've got discovery by to renew by all the way to through her new magenta and the corps platform, there really helps deliver that so that our customs, whether there be to be or or B to C or they're trying to go direct to consumer. They're able to develop that content, that rich content market to those customers, drive them Teo to magenta, enable them to transact and then actually renew induced. You know, everything from diddle products to consumers for two physical goods. >> It's interesting you look at the slides to it. It feels like an operating environment, right? Because you have cloud you guys air on cloud. There's a lot of touch points with other pieces of the system means an operating system basically almost not technically, but a platform. You could put the platform, you're gonna talk the things so data I could imagine is critical. If you want to do that journey and you're a big part of the by piece, you've got to talk to others. Other pieces of the platform. How important is the data architecture? Can you explain how you guys look at that? Because now you come into the adobe >> fold, >> their data centric data super important. We heard that in the keynote. What's the role of data and all this, and how do you see >> that? So it's it's absolutely critical. Azi mentioned on being able to harmonize that across the platform and be able to have all of those pieces talk to each other so that you can get everything from behavioral data front. I know what you're doing on a website. I know what you're doing on instagram other platforms two I know whatyou're transacting. I know what you're buying two. I know what you're renewing on and what you're coming back to be able to pull that all together and not just pull it together in a data cluster. But to be able to actually take those insights and are sorry, take that data and develop insights out of it and then, most importantly, take action on. So one of the announcements we made really was around analytics. And as we pull that into adobe Commerce Cloud enabling our adobe analytics to have some dashboards that roll out, you know, we know we commerce really well. Whether it be to be or be to see, we know what those customers those merchants need to look at, be able to spin up those dashboards right away, so they can not only gather all the data but start seeing the insights immediately so they could take action. >> But what I thought was kind of interesting is is everyone used to think that the transaction was the goal, right? It's all feeding the funnels, all feed to try to get that transaction. What we heard today was so important that a transaction is just one piece of ah, of a much broader experience. Right is the word, but really oven engagement and an ongoing relationship with that individual, whether it be a company or a single person. So I'm interested from your point of view. You guys were all about The transaction is funny. It's weird. It didn't happen earlier. Job is all about, you know, the creative in the marketing and getting it up to that point of transaction. But it's really you guys just want to get in kind of a virtuous cycle where it continues that multiple transactions and multiple experiences that support each other as being really stand alone. >> No, that's I think I agree with that. I mean transactions obviously really important >> to our customers that definitely wanted and that it's necessary. I can't remember the word they used in the keynote, but it's it's definitely important But it's not the animal you know, kind >> of. It's part of the entire experience, right? So when customers are buying today, they're buying experiences. And those experiences include the actual purchase they're making right, the product digital or physical that they're making. But it includes all the way up to that to that experience, all the content they see before then the experience, how they experience the brand before, then on. Then you know, likewise after the transaction, right? How? How? How does the brand follow up and interact with the customer afterwards? Most of our merchants, all of our merch, all of our brands were looking, have lifelong relationships with customers. And so that entire and and experience is >> important. Mark Talk about the community. Expect we covered your show, Magenta. Before the acquisition last year, the key was there. We were. I was very impressed. I had no idea that depth the community that you had in that company when you guys came over. What was the feedback? What's the result? What's the plan when you share some update impact of the community and the role of the community for the commerce cloud? >> Absolutely. I mean the community for us is is near and dear. I mean, it is It is the core of who magenta is and wass on is transferred over now to Adobe. You probably heard this morning shots and you're talking about how important as soon as he got out on stage. How important community wass magenta community. But the broader now adobe community. We've got about three hundred seventy five thousand community members. These include developers, partners that are really court of the functionality. About fifty percent of our code is developed by by the community and developers in the community. That's omit that code back to us on DH. They're the life blood of how we grow and support the business going for >> a fifth between Adobe Magenta cause you mentioned that that might be kind of a nuanced point. You were very community. Lot of open source got a co creation on the product side adobes a creative, absolute density time. But the fit between your culture at Magenta and the Bilby culture and where they are today and where they're going >> now there's that absolutely some overlap in our community and in a lot of our partners are out helping our merchants create content right, create that brand experience. And they leverage the creative side right in the products in the suite of services that the creative side of the House provides. And then that feeds in directly into into driving awareness and marketing and sales. So a lot of overlap. Their >> growth question for you are kind of more of an operational question, you know, in any major shifts. Certainly, Cloud. We've seen that it's here. Been for a long time. But as you start to see, new APS and new kinds of business models emerge that are continue to transform operationalize ng new things is very difficult for an enterprise, our business and sometimes culture. Sometimes it's tech, tech, um, something just don't know what the new environments like tools and technology. So you know, getting something operationalized that's a game changer his heart. How do you look at that? How do you guys approached that market on the go to market on how you guys do with the marketing mix? What some of the things that you do take something that's new and new capability and operationalized for a customer? Yeah, there's a couple >> things. One is the culture which you developed, right? So the people and really working Teo to train and developed a culture and hire the right talent, that is is, quite frankly, just open to change, right? You've got to be agile because I could come in here and tell you five things you've got to do today. Tomorrow will be totally different, right? And so you've got to be You've got to be agile. Build that build that culture of agility. Thie. Other thing I'd say is, you know, find partners who will help you simplify the problem, right? It's very easy to create a lot of complexity when you've got change. But, you know, Chantal did a great job this morning, kind of showing the dashboards that we use internally on. That was through a lot of work and a lot of process to get that. But way had to simplify it down into what are the key metrics that you really need to watch on? I'd say that's the third thing is, you've gotta follow data. You've got to be data driven and develop insights out of that data because things are too fat moving too quickly to have years to develop a gut reaction to it. Right, You've got it. You've got to see the date and you've got to see it when it happens in real time >> and moving fast cuts good. But you apply that to data as well. So that's right. This is what we've got the right >> platform. And we were trying to develop very real time relevant rich platform that you could get that data out in a way that's digestible so you could take action. >> How does a company take advantage of the data that they have? What some approaches that you guys see is low hanging fruit use cases, something overwhelmed with data. Either Number day. We heard from your customer at the Dollar Shave Club talking about There's so many dates, so many data points coming in from multiple directions and going out multiple directions to on the channel that I'm gonna call it. >> How do you get >> a hottie? How'd you get your hands on that data? It's overwhelming. What's what's, um approached? People could take >> eso couple things there. One is, you know, decide before we even start looking at data. What do you think is important, right? So really simplified, clarified down what? What you need to be tracking. And then it's very easy to have twenty different systems that you bring in all separately and try to stitch them together. It's more important. One of things you tried to do with Dobie Commerce Cloud is bring together something that's already kind of pre pre pre integrated together to make it easier to kind of get up and running and get going. Because it is it is very difficult. Teo, pull all that together unless you've got you've got a framework of things working together and then having the dashboards rebuilt. So you, Khun, you can get up and running and then over time you can tweak it and customize it. But But getting those core inside >> we're talking on came before we started about operational versus our operational data verses trying to boil the ocean over. And that's it. That's the best practices are distracted or approach, you see? >> Yeah, Wait, I called a little bit of more operationally I, which is so many different use cases for for making data driven decisions on things that are really top of mind for merchants. Today. We hear a lot about one on one personalization, which you know super important. Particularly you move from being our computer based e commerce to mobile to voice right. Getting that. Getting that personalization right is critical, but there's a lot of things on the back end to that can happen, right? How do you tag pictures? How do tag merchandise? How do you really streamline the filming process? So you're getting the product from the right place at the right person as quickly and cheaply a sponsor. >> One of the questions. One of the comments on the Keen I thought was great from engineering talk part talk track was open day to open a P. I's very critical. We're big believers of that. But as customers or challenged with first party data, they're relying on these platforms like Facebook instagram of the things that are not actually being more open. The stricter access to the data Twitter's all got days out. They get that data hard to get linked in date. It's hard to get Facebook data. Um, how how do you look at those those silos? How should customers be thinking about their data strategy, knowing that some of it might only be able to get through scraping or other techniques. It's can't maybe reliable. So how do you guys look at that? What's, uh, what's the approach that they have more first partied on their site? Or is it there is a methodology or mechanism that they could deploy >> eso no silver, no silver bullet. But I think first and foremost always have to keep the customer first. Right, And so trust and transparency is of the utmost importance on. So it's important and we do this. And everything we built today is to be able to build that trust and transparency, both with our own direct customers, the merchants we may have. But also it's equally important that trust, though, that we're building for that merchant with those with those end customers that that that has to be paramount to everything else. So you know, when in doubt, err on the side of creating real deep trust and transparency with >> customs. Also, talk about the culture and adobe you're now part of the company from Magenta is a good culture. They're good fit, as you mentioned absolutely for the folks watching here and seeing the keynote, the company's transformed and continues to transform with cloud with data on the right way. From our our estimation for the folks that might not be comfortable or not. Might not know Adobe. I should say, What is it about? What's it, what's going on at a Toby? What's what's the magic here? There's a top story >> there. There is, There's a lot. There's there's a lot going on and, you know, the integration with gentle of the last guest. Nine months now, when went by Fast has been It's been phenomenal, I think is, you said not only has there been a strategic fit between the product's set on DH, what were what adobes trying do overall, but a cultural fit is well. They're really dedicated to creating a new environment where people can thrive on being respectful of individuals and really driving in helping transform the world. And so when you've got a mission of really, how do you help digitally transform, whether it be two C or B to B B to be customers? It's amazing. There's just a lot a lot going on. >> Final question. What's your plans for this year? What's your goals? Grow the commerce piece get a chip didn't get available. What's the Your objectives, >> you know, continue to scale up a platform which is just phenomenal. The only one in the industry that really delivers great B to C and B to B experience is on really scale that up and helped deliver, particularly for our larger midmarket enterprise customers help them deliver on the promise that is, that is, that is the digital age >> and for customers. What should they be thinking about? Now? >> You know, it goes back to How do you really develop that? That customer journey that built a brand write The most important thing is your brand and what you're doing there. And how do you customers have? Higher in the end, user customers have higher and higher expectations these days. And how do you really follow them through? The entire customer joined in >> the Holy Grail that we've been chasing for a long time. Now we get some visibility. Yeah, absolutely. It's really coming. Markman hard here on the Q. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. Thank you. Coverage here. I'm John with Jeff with Mark. Stay with us for more after this short break.

(upbeat music) >> Live from San Francisco it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by IBM >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier and we are on a rainy San Francisco day. Day three of theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2019 here to talk shopping. One of my favorite topics. We have Katie Dunlap VP of Global Unified rather Commerce and Marketing for Bluewolf part of IBM. Katie welcome to theCUBE. >> Welcome, thank you. >> And from Salesforce we have Ben Cesare Senior Director of Global Industry Retail Solutions. Ben it's great to have you on our program. >> How are you? >> Excellent. >> Good. >> Even though we are at the rejuvenated Moscone Center which is fantastic and I think all of the hybrid multi cloud have opened upon San Francisco. >> Right. >> It's a very soggy day. So Katie IBM announced a partnership with Salesforce a couple of years ago. >> Right. >> Just yesterday John and I were chatting. We heard Ginni Rometty your CEO talk about IBM is number one implementer of Salesforce. Talk to us a little bit about the partnership before we get into some specific examples with that. >> So we know that part of that partnership it's really to leverage the best of the technology from Salesforce as well as IBM and ways that we together married together create opportunities for the industry and specifically here today we're talking about retail. >> So on the retail side Salesforce as a great SAS company they keep on blowing the records on the numbers performance wise. SAS business has proven it's a cloud business but retails is a data business. >> Yes. >> So how does IBM look at that? What's the relationship with retail? What's the solution? >> Yeah. >> And what are people looking at Salesforce for retail. >> Yeah, I think it's really important to understand where our strengths are and I think when you talk about Salesforce you talk about Marketing Cloud and Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud. We call that the engagement layer. That's how we can really interact with our consumers with our shoppers. But at the same time to really have a great connection with consumers you need to have great data. You need have great insights. You need to understand what's happening with all the information that drives choices for retailers and that's why the relationship with IBM is absolutely so strong and it is a data driven relationship. Together I guess you can see the customers in the middle. So we have our engagement layer and a data layer. Together we satisfy the customer. >> Lisa what's the solution specifically because obviously you guys going to market together to explain the tactical relationship. You guys join sale, is it an integration? >> Sure. So what we have done given the disruption that's happening right now in the retail space and with the customer at the center of that conversation we've been looking at ways that what the native functionality for Salesforce is Einstein as an intelligent layer and for IBM it's Watson. So where do they complement one another? And so looking at retail with commerce and marketing and service as the center of that conversation and engagement layer. How are we activating and working with a customer from a collection of data information standpoint and activating that data all through supply chain. So the experience is not just the front experience that you and I have when we go to a site it's actually how and when is that delivered to me. If I have an issue how am I going to return that. So we've looked at the entire customer journey and looked at ways that we can support and engage along the way. So for us, we're looking at as you see retail and the way it's evolving is that we're no longer just talking about that one experience where you're actually adding to your cart and your buying. It goes all the way through servicing that customer returning and making sure that information that's specific to me. And if I can choose how I'm going to have that inventory sent to me and those products sent to me. That's exactly what we're looking to do. >> So then the retailer like a big clothing store is much more empowered than they've ever been. Probably really demanded by us consumers who want to be able to do any transaction anywhere started on my phone finish on a tablet, etc. So I can imagine maybe Ben is this like a Watson and Einstein working together to say take external data. Maybe it's weather data for example and combine those external data sources with what a retailer has within their customer database and Salesforce to create very personalized experiences for us shoppers as consumers. >> Right, and where retailers really can grow in terms of the future is really accessing all that data. I think if you look at some of the statistics retailers have up to 29 different systems of records and that's why some of our experiences are very good some of our experiences are not very good. So together if we can collapse that data in a uniform way that really drives personalization, contextual selling so you can actually see what you're buying why you're buying it, why it's just for me. That's the next level and I must say with all the changes in the industry there's some things that will never change and that is consumers want the right product, the right price, the right place and the right time. All enveloped in a great customer experience. That will never change but today we have data that can inform that strategy and when I was a senior merchant at Macy's years ago, I had no data. I had to do a lot of guessing and when mistakes are made that's when retailers have a problem. So if retailers are using data to it's benefit it just make sure that the customer experiences exceptional. And that's what we strive to do together. >> And I can build on that if we're thinking like specifically how we're engaged from a technology perspective. If I'm a merchandiser and I decide I want to run a promotion for New York and I want to make sure before I run that promotion that I have the right inventory and that I not only I'm I creating the right message but I have the information that I need in order to make that successful. One of the things that we partner with Salesforce on is the engagement layer being Salesforce. But in the back end we have access to something called Watson Embedded Business Agent and that business agent actually goes out and talks to all the disparate systems. So it doesn't have to be solutions that are necessarily a homegrown by IBM or Salesforce Watson could actually integrate directly with them and sits on top. So as a merchandiser I can ask the question and receive information back from supply chain. Yes there's enough product in New York for you to run this promotion. It can go out and check to see if there's any disruption that's expected and check in with weather so that as on the back end from an operation standpoint I'm empowered or the right data in order to run those promotions and be successful. >> It's interesting one of the things that comes up with her this expression from IBM. There's no AI without IA information architecture. You talk about systems of record all this silo databases. There's low latency you need to be real time in retail. So this is a data problem, right? So this is where AI really could fit in. I see that happening. The question that I have as a consumer is what's in it for me? Right? So Ben, tell us about the changes in retail because certainly online buying mobile is happening. But what are some of the new experiences that end users and consumers are seeing that are becoming new expectations? What's the big trend in retail? >> Well there's two paths they're your expectations as a consumer, then there's the retailer path and how they can meet your expectations. So let's talk about you first. So what you always want is a great customer experience. That's what you want. And what defines that is are they serving me the products I want when I want them? Are they delivering them on time? Do the products work? If I have a problem, how am I treated? How am I served? And these are all the things that we address with the Salesforce solutions. Now let's talk about the retailer. What's important to the retailer is next retailer myself. It was important that I understood what is my right assortment? And that's hard because you have a broad audience of consumers, you have regional or local requirements. So you want to understand what's the right assortment and working with IBM with their (mumbles) optimizer that helps us out in terms how we promote through our engagement later. That's number one. Number two, how about managing markdowns. This year there were over $300 billion in markdown through retailers. Half of those markdowns 150 billion were unplanned markdowns and that goes right to your P&L. So we want to make sure that the things we do satisfy the consumer but not at the expense of the retailer. The retailer has to succeed. So by using IBM supply chain data information we can properly service you. >> It's interesting we see the trend in retail I mean financial services for early on. >> Yeah. >> High-frequency trading, use of data. That kind of mindset is coming to retail where if you're not a data driven or data architecturally thinking about it. >> Yeah. >> The profit will drop. >> Yeah. >> Unplanned markdowns and other things and inventory variety of things. This is a critical new way to really reimagine retail. >> Yeah retail has become such a ubiquitous term there's retail banking, there's retail in every parts of our life. It's not just the store or online but it's retail everywhere and someone is selling their services to you. So I think the holy grail is really understanding you specifically. And it's not just about historical transact which you bought but behavioral data. What interests you. What are the trends and data has become a much broader term. It's just not numbers. Data is what are your trends? What are you saying on social media? What are you tweeting out? What are you reading.? What videos are you viewing? All that together really gives a retailer information to better serve you. So data is really become exponential in it's use and in it's form. >> So I'm curious what you guys see this retails it's very robust retail use case as driving in the future. We just heard yesterday one of the announcements Watson anywhere. I'm curious leveraging retail as an example and the consumerization of almost any industry because we expect to have things so readily and as you both point out data is commerce. Where do you think this will go from here with Watson Einstein and some of the other technologies? What's the next prime industry that really can benefit from what you're doing in retail? >> I think that I'll start and probably you can add that in as well. But I think that it's going to bleed into everything. So health and life sciences, consumer goods, product goods. We've talked about retail being all different kinds of things right now. Well CPG organizations are actually looking at ways to engage the customer directly and so having access utilizing Watson as a way of engaging and activating data to create insights that you've never thought of before. And so being able to stay a step ahead anticipate the needs stay on the bleeding edge of that interaction so that you're engaging customers in a whole new way is what we see and it's going to be proliferated into all kinds of different industries. >> Yes, every merchant every buyer wants to be able to predict. I mean won't that be incredible be able to see around the corner a bit and and while technologies don't give you the entire answer they can sure get you along the way to make better decisions. And I think with Watson and Einstein it does exactly that. It allows you to really predict what the customers want and that's very powerful. >> I want to get you guys perspective on some trend that we're seeing. We hear Ginni Rometty talk about chapter two of the cloud, you almost say there's a chapter two in retail, if you look at the certainly progressive way out front, doing all the new things. People doing the basics, getting an online presence, doing some basic things with mobile kind of setting the table a foundations, but they stare at the data problem. They almost like so it's a big problem. I know all this systems of record. How do I integrate it all in? So take us through a use case of how someone would attack that problem. Talking about an example a customer or a situation or use case that says okay guys help me. I'm staring at this data problem, I got the foundation set, I want to be a retail have to be efficient and innovative in retail, what do I do? Do I call IBM up, do I call Salesforce? How does that work? Take us through an example. >> So I think the first example that comes to mind is I think about Sally Beauty and how they're trying to approach the market and looking at who they are and many retailers right now because there's such a desire to understand data. Make sure that your cap. Everyone has enough data. But what is the right data to activate and use in that experience. So they came to us to kind of look at are we in the right space because right now everyone's trying to be everything to all people. So how do I pick the right place that I should be and am I in the right place with hair care and hair color? And the answer came back yes. You are in the right space. You need to just dive deeper into that and make sure that that experience online so they used a lot of information from their research on users to understand who their customers are, what they're expecting. And since they sell haircare product that is professional grade. How do I make sure that the customers are getting using it in the proper way. So they've actually created an entire infused way of deciding what exactly hair color you need and for me as a consumer, am I actually buying the right grade level from me and am I using that appropriately. And that data all came from doing the research because they are about to expand out and add in all kinds of things like (mumbles) where you're going into the makeup area but really helping them stay laser focused on what they need to do in order to be successful. >> Because you guys come and do like an audit engage with them on a professional service level. >> Yes, we went end-to-end >> And the buying SAS AI and then they plug in Salesforce. >> Yes, so they actually already had Salesforce. So they had the commerce solution marketing and service. They were fairly siloed so we go back to that whole conversation around data being held individually but not leveraging that as a unit in order to activate that experience for the consumer. What they have decided as a result of our work with them. So we came in and did a digital strategy. We're been involved as an agency of record to support them and how that entire brand strategy should be from an omnichannel perspective in the store, as well as that digital experience and then they actually just decided to go with IBM (mumbles) and use that as a way of activating from an omnichannel order orchestration standpoint. So all the way through that lifecycle we've been engaging them and supporting them and Watson obviously native to Salesforce's Einstein and they're leveraging that but they will be infusing Watson as part of their experience. >> So another benefit that Sally Beauty and imagine other retailers and other companies and other industries, we get is optimizing the use of Salesforce. It's a very ubiquitous tool but you mentioned, I think you mentioned Ben that in the previous days of many, many, many systems of records. So I imagine for Sally Beauty also not just to be able to deliver that personalized customer experience, track inventory but it's also optimizing their internal workforce productivity. But I'm curious-- >> Yes. >> For an organization of that size. What's the time to impact? They come in you guys do the joint implementation, go to market, the consulting, identify the phases of the project, how quickly did Sally Beauty start to see a positive impact on their business? >> I think they... Well there's immediate benefits, right? Because they are already Salesforce clients and so our team our IBM team was able to come in and infuse some best practices and their current existing site. So they've been able to leverage that and see that benefit through all the way through Black Friday and last holiday season. And now what they're seeing is they're on the verge of launching and relaunching their site in the next month and then implementing (mumbles) is a part of that. So they're still on the path in the journey to that success but they've already seen success based on the support that we've provided them. >> And what are some of the learnings you guys have seen with this? Obviously you got existing accounts. They take advantage of this, what are some of the learnings around this new engagement layer and with the data intelligence around AI? What's the learnings have you guys seen? >> Yeah I think the leading thing that I've learned is the power of personalization. It's incredibly powerful. And a good example is one of my favorite grocers and that's Kroger. If we really understand what Kroger has done, I'll talk about their business a bit. I'll talk about what they've been able to do. If you look at someone's shopper basket there's an amazing amount of things you can learn about that. You can learn if they're trying to be fit if they're on a diet. You can learn if their birthdays coming. You can learn if they just had a baby. You can learn so many different things. So with shopper basket analysis, you can understand exactly what coupons you send them. So when I get coupons digital or in my home they're all exactly what I buy. But to do that for 25-30 million top customers is a very difficult thing to do. So the ability to analyze the data, segment it and personalize it to you is extremely powerful and I think that's something that retailers and CPG organizations how they continue to try to do. We're not all the way there. Were probably 30% there I would say but personalization it's going to drive customer for life. That's what it's going to do and that's a massive learning for us. >> And the other thing too Ginni mentioned it in her keynote is the reasoning around the data. So it's knowing that the interest and around the personas, etc. But it's also those surprises. Knowing kind of in advance, maybe what someone might like given their situation-- >> Anticipating. >> And we were talking about this morning. Actually, we're talking about behavioral data and data has taken a different term. >> Data is again what are you doing online what are you talking about, what did you view. What video did you look at. For organizations that have access to that data tells me so much more about your interest right now today. And it's not just about a product but it's about a lifestyle. And if retails could understand your lifestyle that opens the door to so many products and services. So I think that's really what retailers are really into. >> My final question for you guys both of you get the answer. Answer will be great is what's the biggest thing that is going to happen in retail that people may not see coming that's going to be empowering and changing people's lives? What do you guys see as a trend that's knocking on the door or soon to be here and changing lives and empowering people and making them better in life. >> Yeah, I'll jump in on one real quick and I think it's already started but it's really phenomenon of commerce anywhere. Commerce used to be a very linear thing. You'd see an ad some would reach out to you and you buy something. The commerce now is happening wherever you are. You could be tweeting something on Instagram, you could be walking in an airport. You could be anywhere and you can actually execute a transaction. So I think the distance between media and commerce has totally collapsed. It's become real time and traditional media TV, print and radio is still a big part of media. A big part but there's distance. So I think it's the immediacy of media and a transaction. That's really going to take retailers and CPG customers by surprise. >> It changes the direct-to-consumer equation. >> It changes it. It does. >> And I think I would just build on that to say that people have relationships with their brands and the way that you can extend that in this and commerce anywhere is that people don't necessarily need to know they're in that commerce experience. They're actually having a relationship with that individual brand. They're seen for who they are as an individual not a segment. I don't fall into a segment that I'm kind of like this but I'm actually who I am and they're engaging. So the way that I think we're going to see things go as people thinking at more and more out of the box about how to make it more convenient for me and to not hide that it's a commerce experience but to make that more of an engagement conversation that-- >> People centric not person in a database. >> Exactly. >> That's right. >> Moving away from marketing from segmentation and more to individual conversations. >> Yeah I think you said it Ben it's the power of personalization. >> Power of personalization. >> Katie, Ben thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you. >> Talking about what you guys IBM and Salesforce are doing together and we're excited to see where that continues to go. >> Great. >> Thanks so much. >> Our pleasure, thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE live from IBM Think 19 I'm Lisa Martin for John Furrier stick around on Express. We'll be joining us shortly. (upbeat music)

>> (Announcer) Live, from Las Vegas it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2018. Brought to you by VM Ware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube's continuing coverage of VM World 2018, I'm Lisa Marin, with Dave Vellante >> Hey, Lisa. >> Dave, day three, we have had tremendous guests the last couple of days. And we're- a lot of alumni, a lot of new guests, another alumni joining us, Calline Sanchez, vice president of IMB Enterprise System Storage. Welcome back, Calline, it's great to have you here. >> No, thank you very much for letting me be here. >> And I want to congratulate Calline, because she was just named for the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, 2018 Businesswoman of the Year. Just a few weeks ago. Amazing. >> Lovin' Tucson, by the way. >> Thank you. >> U of A. >> Yes. >> Bear Down. >> I appreciate the Wildcats reference, so, >> Haha. >> No doubt. And so, this Saturday, oh, I'm sorry. This Saturday, the first game, so- >> My daughter is a freshman at U of A, Hi, Pilar, I love you, baby. Good luck. You're going to crush it, I know you are. >> Haha. >> Dad of the year going on here. So, just before we get into all the storage stuff- >> Yeah. >> They're doing a, they're honoring you, just in about a month and a half or so, with this- >> Yeah. Yes, and I'm very excited about that. Just like you were saying with the community aspect, it's a high-touch award, and I was very thankful for it, because they gave me specific examples of, what I've done in Southern Arizona, in Tucson in particular, that they'll name. For instance, Excite for Girls, and things like that. >> That's awesome. >> Girls in STEM, right? >> Congratulations, that's fantastic. >> We need more inspiration, so, it's great that we, >> Ah, thank you. >> Now count you as one of our distinguished alumni. So, let's talk about what going on at IMB. Here we are at VM World 2018, we're hearing Dave, numbers of upwards of 21,000 people that have been here the last few days. 100,000 more engaging with, expecting to engage with the live streaming and the on demand experiences. What's going on with IBM, you know, from a revenue perspective, a growth perspective? What is exciting you about where you are today? >> So, I will talk in particular about storage. I'm really, really proud about this, being that we work in partnership with, like, Ed Walsh, and then also Eric Herzog. They've inspired me to get closer to building solutions with our end users. So we meet and work with our clients to build up cloud deployment solutions, in partnership with VM Ware, and we enable things like, okay, so there's tape, and then there's cloud-to-tier, so there's fundamental solutions out there in the marketplace that we as developers want to go and play with. It's almost like a great big sandbox. So to speak. >> So, I've got to ask you, because, I mean, everybody in storage says, well, Tape, tape is dead. And every time I see you we talk about tape. We talk about FLAPE. We talk about innovations that are coming to tape. You're a technologist. Right, you just said, as a developer we love to- dot-dot-dot. So, what is it about things like tape, things like mainframe, DS8000, these technologies that have, tried, true, running businesses, what is about those that excite you as a developer? >> Everything old is new again, >> Yeah, right. >> If we just go back to the basics of like, table stakes, right? Security is table stakes, right? Delivering on-time quality releases with optimizers like, tier-to-cloud, things like that. That's fundamental for us. Now, as it relates to tape, so, everything old is new again, like I mentioned a moment ago. Tape was the first device to fully encrypt. So every drive, if it fell off the truck, it was fully encrypted. So, tape is actually training the rest of our portfolio in similar skills, on how we do the end-to-end encryption elements. So, right now with DS8000, we're working in partnership with system Z, to deliver pervasive encryption. >> I got to ask you, so as a development executive, I see you at a lot of these shows. You like coming here? A lot of times, development execs want to, sort of, stay in the lab. But you're out and about, talking to customers. What are you learning? What is that about you that draws you to these shows? >> I was afraid that WE as a lab team would not be relevant unless we have conversations with end users, partners. You know, to really substantiate what's possible from being innovative. So, I would say, number one is relevance, and I felt like, I wanted to more social, because, I'm definitely in some cases, an introvert, though I'm looking above my shoes. That's I'm wearing- >> That's the definition, of an introvert and an extrovert in the tech world. You know that the difference is, right? >> I don't. >> An introvert looks at his or her own shoes, an extrovert looks at your shoes. >> Well, there you go. I've been looking at some shoes- >> Alright, so you're, you're extrovert oriented out here, what are you learning at VM World? what are the customers saying? What are they asking you for? What are you going to take back to the lab? >> A single pane of glass associated with what we intend with like, v-stream, or some of the aspects of automation, with regards to cloud deployment, to make it, like, completely- connected. If that, so to speak. And what I think is really great about all of that is I hate to put it this way, it's very iTunes like. Where it's like, sticky, and it's easy to use, or and, by the way, it's not so expensive, at least to start up. So, a lot of the discussions we've been having are with the various vendors on the expo floor, that they want to build solutions. IBM solutions associate with the cloud, and then the AWS guys, we meet with them. And they're like, well, how are, how can we ensure that we live in an interconnected data-centric world? And so that's what I think is very exciting is that, it's this idea of coopetition. Let's all be well connected, and do it well. >> Let's talk about the customer collaboration, as you mentioned, everything old is new again, we see that, in every aspect of life. Tape, mainframe, but you talked about we need to be relevant, but also need to developing solutions that you end user customers need to solve their business problems. How are you collaborating with customers to stay relevant, and to ensure that their businesses are able to take advantage of the super powers that Pat Gelsinger talked about on Monday, AI, machine learning, emerging technologies, what's that collaboration like? >> I would say the biggest collaborations that I've been participating recently is with cloud servers providers. And they appreciate the economics of physical media, or tape. And so, they think to themselves or they know the data, it's like, okay, less than a half-cent per gig, that's a big deal, right? So, and then we have discussions about total cost of ownership, aspects like that. So the partnership is also, how do we serve the data? And really having discussions about the data. And then, if evaluating the various work streams where, we would want to serve appropriately based on whatever specific cloud infrastructure. And then, also, taking a step back, we have to be interconnected. There's no question. So, I would say the number one set of skills our end users are working with right now happen to be the cloud service providers. >> What are some of the big business benefits that they're achieving, we think, new business models, new revenue streams, market expansion. What are some of the things that you're proud of that IBM storage solutions are helping your customers to deliver? >> Going to tape, it's the economics, yes. It's the security based on encryption, yes. And then also, the other aspect of, is, we're serving big data. I mean, it's like we're having discussions about they're going to grow to, zettabytes by 2020, things like that. I never thought in my life, especially as an engineering student, or in computer science, I would ever be talking about this big of data. And now we're here. And so, we're learning how to enable in partnership with clients, what would be the right, or appropriate solution. >> So, I'm searching our video library, because somebody said this week something that was really interesting to me and I wanted to get your perspective from a development mind, someone who's technical. We're hearing a lot about migrating to the cloud. And how easy that is. And then, I think it was Pat Gelsinger said, there's three laws. There's the law of physics, the laws of a company, and the law of the land. And, those are immutable, generally. But I want to ask you about the laws of physics. So, in terms of just moving data into the cloud, we talk about petabyte, exabytes, there's so much data. How feasible is it for a customer to move data, and just stuff it all into the cloud, and what are you doing to either help them do that, or bring the cloud experience to their data? >> Depending on the client interests of on-prem, off-prem, or hybrid, right? We work to evaluate APIs in collaborations, so we enable a streamline, so it's not only just understanding the components of the cloud deployment, but it's also partnering with all elements of the entire ecosystem's stack. So, it depends but we really start with the client's end use case. What do you want? What kind of security do you want? Are you okay with off-prem, public clouds? Or, maybe it's specific data, how do we go about managing the data so we secure it, like, we bucket-ize it. So those are some of the discussions we've been having on the floor, here, at VM world, but also, within our labs, and also with the clients directly. >> You know what I love about that answer? I'll translate it. It's not a biz- it's not a technical problem, Dave, it's a business problem, >> Yes. >> Is really what you're tell me. >> And that's a fundament- you asked the question before. That's fundamentally why I am here. >> Right. >> I don't believe we can live in this world anymore, where it's like, we build it, and then they come. >> Field of Dreams does not exist anymore. >> Yeah. And so, now we've got to have conversations with our end users, to develop, what we've going to put on the roadmap. And so I always felt like, okay, well, when I'd see the roadmap in the lab, I'm like, okay, well, who wants this? Who asked for this, right? And those ended up becoming some of my fundamental questions. So then, I started to come here, or conferences like this, because I could have those conversations with the end users and partners. >> That's interesting, who wants this? Who needs this? What problems does it solve? Why us, why now? Those are the kinds of things you're asking. >> Let's talk about why us? IBM has been around for a very long time. What do you think, again, in this got to be relevant, we need it to be really defined by customer needs and uses. Everything old is new again. What, in your opinion, makes, why should a customer go, in my VM environment, IBM. >> I'm going to start with why I even personally want to remain with IBM. It's a great big candy store. >> Haha. >> And what I have to remind myself is, just don't eat too much, right? And, by the way, I still eat way too much. But what's great about it is, it's a sandbox, so, I can talk to you software engineers one day, who are telling me about certain APIs they're building in Python. Then, oh, by the way, I meet with a mechanical set of engineers, cuz they want to enable robot arms. Oh, and by the way, should we have a discussion on microcode and firmware for the entire stack. So I take a step back, and I'm thinking, Wow- the only set of conversation I really prior was not having, is about services. And to me, services is like the wrapping paper, for a present that you're about to receive. And really understanding the overall, end-to-end stack infrastructure. So, I believe from an IBM perspective, it's the ecosystem. It's a great big candy store. Just don't eat too much. >> Haha. So, how do you spend your time? Do you spend your time thinking, collaborating with team on, architecture, on, vision, on, northstar, writing code. How do you spend your time day-to-day? >> Can I say, all of the above? And, the vast majority, right now, really just making sure we're relevant in the marketplace, so that we re-fresh the right amount of cycles. So, right now, what we're going to be doing in 2019, we're going to be talking about it right now. Architecting what the future looks like. And that's part of the reason why I'm here at VM World 2018, is I'm wanting to verify my roadmap. Am I taking the right approach with the extended team? Cuz it is team, and I work with them. These engineers and scientists are so right, and have great ideas. Let's just make sure they're great ideas that will keep us relevant and keep us paid. >> So, have you gotten that validation, in the last few days at VM World? >> Give me one more day. >> Haha. Well, Calline, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing. Not only what IBM is doing to continue to innovate and stay relevant, but also what's exciting to you- >> Yeah. >> About working for IBM, and again, Congrats on getting the award. >> Yes, and thank you very much for highlighting that, cuz it's, I'm very excited as just an individual, it's like, it was unexpected. >> Well, you're representing women in tech, women in STEM, it's awesome, congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> We're really happy. >> And, by the way, I'll definitely reach out to your daughter at some point. >> Oh, great. >> Say, hey, let's go to a tailgate. >> Love it. >> I won't corrupt. >> Haha. Fantastic, Calline, thank you so much for your time. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We want to thank you for watching the Cube, we are in day three of our continue coverage from VM World 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.

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

>> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCube, covering the AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back everyone it's theCube's exclusive coverage here, day two of the Amazon Web Sources public sector summit. This is the public sector across the globe. This is their reinvent, this is their big event. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, and also David Vellante's been here doing interviews. Our next guest is, we got Doug Van Dyke, he's the director of U.S. Federal Civilian and Non Profit Sectors of the group, welcome to theCube, good to see you. >> John, thank you very much for having me. >> So you've been in the federal, kind of game, and public sector for a while. You've known, worked with Theresa, at Microsoft before she came to Reinvent. >> 15 years now. >> How is she doing? >> She's doing great, we saw her on main stage yesterday. Force of nature, love working with her, love working for her. This is, like you were saying, this is our re-invent here in D.C. and 14,000 plus, 15,000 registrations, she's on the top of her game. >> What I'm really impressed with her and your team as well, is the focus on growth, but innovation, right? it's not just about, knock down the numbers and compete. Certainly you're competing against people who are playing all kinds of tricks. You got Oracle out there, you got IBM, we've beaten at the CIA. It's a street battle out there in this area in D.C. You guys are innovative, in that you're doing stuff with non-profits, you got mission driven, you're doing the educate stuff, so it's not just a one trick pony here. Take us through some of the where you guys heads are at now, because you're successful, everyone's watching you, you're not small anymore. What's the story? >> So, I think the differentiator for us is our focus on the customers. You know, we've got a great innovation story at the Department of Veterans Affairs with vets.gov. So five years ago if a veteran went out to get the services that the government was going to provide them, they've have to pick from 200 websites. It just wasn't to navigate through 200 websites. So, the innovation group at Veteran's Affairs, the digital services team, figured out, let's pull this all together under a single portal with vets.gov. It's running on AWS, and now veterans have a single interface into all the services they want. >> Doug, one of the things I've been impressed, my first year coming to this. I've been to many other AWS shows, but you've got all these kind of overlapping communities. Of course, the federal government, plus state and local, education. You've got this civilian agencies, so give us a little bit of flavor about that experience here at the show. What trends your hearing from those customers. >> So what's great for me is I've been here almost six and a half years, and I've seen the evolution. And you know, there were the early customers who were just the pioneers like Tom Soderstrom, from JPL, who was on main stage. And then we saw the next wave where there were programs that needed a course correction, like Center for Medicare Medicaid with Healthcare.gov. Where Amazon Web Services came in, took over, helped them with the MarketPlace, you know, get that going. And now we're doing some great innovative things at CMS, aggregating data from all 50 states, about 75 terabytes, so they can do research on fraud, waste, and abuse that they couldn't do before. So we're helping our customers innovate on the cloud, and in the cloud, and it's been a great opportunity. >> Oh my God, I had the pleasure of interviewing Tom Soderstrom two years ago. >> Okay. >> Everybody gets real excited when you talk about space. It's easy to talk about innovation there, but you know, talk about innovation throughout the customers, because some people will look at it, and be like, oh come on, government and their bureaucracy, and they're behind. What kind of innovation are you hearing from your customers? >> So there's an exciting with Department of Energy. They, you know there's a limited amount of resources that you have on premise. Well, they're doing research on the large Hadron Collider in Cern, Switzerland. And they needed to double the amount of capacity that they had on premise. So, went to the AWS cloud, fired up 50,000 cores, brought the data down, and they could do research on it. And so, we're making things possible that couldn't be done previously. >> What are some of the examples that government entities and organizations are doing to create innovation in the private sector? Cause the private sector's been the leader to the public sector, and know you're seeing people starting to integrate it. I mean, half the people behind us, that are exhibiting here, are from the commercial side doing business in the public sector. And public sector doing, enabling action in the private sector. Talk about that dynamic, cause it's not just public sector. >> Right. >> Can you just share your? >> These public, private. Great example with NOAA, the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration. They have a new program called NEXRAD. It's the next generation of doppler radar. They have 160 stations across the world, collecting moisture, air pressure, all of the indicators that help predict the weather. They partner with us at AWS to put this data out, and through our open data program. And then organizations like the Weather Bug can grab that information, government information, and use it to build the application that you have on your I-Phone that predicts the weather. So you know whether to bring an umbrella to work tomorrow. >> So you're enabling the data from, or stuff from the public, for private, entrepreneurial activity? >> Absolutely. >> Talk about the non-profits. What's going on there? Obviously, we heard som stuff on stage with Teresa. The work she's showcasing, a lot of the non-profit. A lot of mission driven entrepreneurships happening. Here in D.C, it's almost a Silicon Valley like dynamic, where stuff that was never funded before is getting funded because they can do Cloud. They can stand it up pretty quickly and get it going. So, you're seeing kind of a resurgence of mission driven entrepreneurships. What is the nonprofit piece of it look now for AWS? How do you talk about that? >> Sure. Well again, one of the areas that I'm really passionate about being here, and being one of the people who helped start our nonprofit vertical inside of AWS, we now have over 12, I'm sorry, 22,000 nonprofits using AWS to keep going. And the mission of our nonprofit vertical is just to make sure that no nonprofit would ever fail for lack of infrastructure. So we partnered with Tech Soup, which is an organization that helps vet and coordinate our Cloud credits. So nonprofits, small nonprofit organizations can go out through Tech Soup, get access to credits, so they don't have to worry about their infrastructure. And you know we.. >> Free credits? >> Those credits, with the Tech Soup membership, they get those, yeah, and using the word credit, it's more like a grant of AWS cloud. >> You guys are enabling almost grants. >> Yes, cloud grants. Not cash grants, but cloud grants. >> Yeah, yeah great. So, how is that converting for you, in your mind? Can you share some examples of some nonprofits that are successful? >> Sure. A great presentation, and I think it was your last interview. A game changer. Where these smaller nonprofits can have a really large impact. And, but then we're also working with some of the larger nonprofits too. The American Heart Association, that built their precision medicine platform to match genotype, phenotype information, so we can further cardiovascular research. They have this great mission statement, they want to reduce cardiovascular disease by 20 percent by 2020. And we're going to help them do that. >> You guys are doing a great job, I got to say. It's been fun to watch, and now, we've been covering you guys for the past two years now, here at the event. A lot more coming on, in D.C. The CIA went in a few years ago. Certainly a shot heard around the cloud. That's been well documented. The Department of Defense looking good off these certain indicators. But, what's going on in the trends in the civilian agencies? Can you take a minute to give an update on that? >> Yeah, so I started earlier saying I've seen the full spectrum. I saw the very beginning, and then I've seen all the way to the end. Where, I think it was three years ago at this event, I talked to Joe Piva, who is the former CIO for the Department of Commerce ITA, the International Trade Association. He had data center contracts coming up for renewal. And he made a really brave decision to cancel those contracts. So he had 18 months to migrate the entire infrastructure for ITA over on to AWS. And you know, there's nothing like an impending date to move. So, we've got agencies that are going all in on AWS, and I think that's just a sign of the times. >> Data centers, I mean anyone who were startup nine years into it, we've never had a data center. I think most startups don't.. >> Born in the cloud. >> Born in the cloud. Thanks so much Dave, for coming on. Appreciate the time. Congratulations on your success. AWS public sector doing great, global public sector. You guys are doing great. Building nations, we had Baharain on as well. Good luck, and the ecosystems looks good. You guys did a good job. So, congratulations. >> John, Stu, thank you very much for having me here today. >> Live coverage here, we are in Washington D.C. For Cube. Coverage of AWS Public Sector Summit. We'll be back with more. Stay with us, we've got some more interviews after this short break. (techno music)