from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation LeBron's special conversation I'm John Tory here in the cube I'm not in the studio I'm at home we're sheltering in place the studio quarantine crew is there we've got a great guest here to break down and Alice in the tech industries for vallah who's this principle of zk research Aziz great to check in with you for our check-in last time we chatted you broke down entire industry a lot to talk about now we have the Cisco earnings just came out and a lot of other great things are happening thanks for joining me well what's your take on what's going on yeah I think so thanks John it's uh it's been heard about tumultuous last few months I think one of the takeaways I had from Cisco's earnings actually was that it's not as bad as you think I know if you read a lot of what's going on the media we get everything from doomsday and the world's ending or whatever but I think what Cisco's earnings showed and in Cisco I know they have a lot of enemies and a lot of competitors out there but they're really still a bellwether for the industry and so everyone should rejoice in the fact that they actually had a pretty good quarter I think what was was telling about that was security was up the services business was up the margins were good and what that shows me is that there's still room for innovation customers relax are still buying things and they're willing to pay for things that actually help drive their business forward and so Cisco's put a lot of energy into their services group to make sure that customers are able to adapt their technology and change their business right and so from an overall market perspective Cisco is you know they're the quarters are the court has shifted from almost everybody else's and so they're generally a leading indicator of where things are going so I think the fact that they showed some strength they guided up from where the street thought I think that's a good thing for the entire industry and I think I'm not saying we're out of this yet but I think businesses are starting to spend money where they need to in order to put themselves in a position to come on strong after well once we start going back to work whoever knows what that'll be I think the other sort of interesting pivot here is that I think the overall role the network has changed with income right we've covered networking technologies a long time it gets a little bit of interest sometimes from sea level certainly not as much as it should from CEOs and CIOs a lot of people think of it as the plumbing and the pipes it's hard to understand it's a very complicated technology sometimes but when you look at what's happened with digital transformation initiatives and now covent we've got more people at home or adopting cloud services we use video for connecting more things with IOT initiatives so the overall value of the network is increased that I think that was also reflected in Cisco's numbers I think this transition had started when you look at a lot of the building blocks and digital transformation IOT cloud mobility things like that they're all Network centric in nature and so for the first time in history I think business leaders actually need to look at their network strategies because if that's without a sound network strategy as we sort of come out of this and the companies that have a good one will be able to really step on the gas and do what they want with their business the ones that don't I think I'd a really struggle to survive because I'm not gonna be able to do a lot of these advanced things yeah great point one of the things Brazil the new cisco has a new leadership new c has been in place for a while positioning they're going after and you know with the cloven crisis it really puts more pressure knock the move of the network because it's a core staple of an organization yet the transformation journey is going to be accelerated this gives Cisco it's a lucky strike for Cisco because it'll move packets around and the multi cloud conversation comes in and the enablement of application development all being five to the network is what cisco has been preparing on and this has kind of been a nuance point then that everyone understands but coming out of Cova to have a growth strategy if you're not programming up and down the stack with DevOps and Nets a cops or whatever you want to call it people working at home a new perimeter is now emerged that's everything everything is the premise is this a tailwind for Cisco your thoughts on that your face oh yeah the big time tailwind francisco i think what's happened gentlemen you look at network evolution over the last five years we can do much more with our network that's coming to cost and that cost us complexity so trying to tie all these things together SP Winn Sassie datacenter Sdn right we've got Wi-Fi six coming we've got 5g coming so we've got all these great things that we're gonna let our networks be faster than ever before and run applications we can never run before right you look at some of the demos on 5g we're able to wear untethered Wi-Fi our virtual reality headsets complete creating completely new shopping experiences educational experiences but you need a lot of bandwidth that but not only you need bandwidth I think the one thing that Kovac has taught us is do you have any weakness in the network anywhere right from the user's hand all the way to the cloud that weak point at the time and so now you have to start thinking of your network not in pieces of having a campus network Wi-Fi network data center network and that a single network right and so cisco is really one of the few companies maybe the only company that can actually deliver that end and network that starts in the company extends to people's homes goes out to the cloud and with what they've done masterfully under Chuck Robbins is they've been able to pile those things together to create a much simpler way of operating this complicated network so you look at what they're doing you know with a CI and intent based networking what that is is you can think of it almost as a software overlay that masks the complexity of the network that's underneath it yeah talking about cisco over the past decade and a half and i'm with the stack guys you gotta move up the stack this has been this is now their opportunity and with multi cloud on the horizon or here this is going to give cisco a path but I got to ask you what is your take and advice to Cisco when you're out there talking to them you're talking to of the customers all the time and practitioners you're the analyst what do they need to do better because you can't just wish a multi cloud upon the marketplace it's coming but it's not clearly not the use case yet so that's a time lag between a CI intent based networking to true multi-cloud what if Cisco do in the meantime yeah well I think what's this go has to do is is think about what they're doing with a CI and multi cloud and actually help their customers implement it in in pieces and what the description I'd use is is the paths this goes on and the path customers are on actually in this world of you think if the end state is true hybrid multi-cloud right we have to get there in ship shots and not moon shots and what I mean by that is if you were to say to a customer this is your end state right the path to get there is so donkey and it's like a moon shot that it paralyzes the customer if you break this down into a set of chip shots right that gets much easier so so put the infrastructure in place to be able to just have the visibility across applause then maybe automate movement from hi private the public cloud right then automate some of the processes that give you the most headaches then move to a bigger Ottoman Ottoman automation framework right so yeah areas like security network configuration right things like that those are those are very difficult for customers to do manually those are the things they should be automating today so what they want to do is almost take through their intent-based network to almost as a lighthouse the road to a visionary state and then help customers get there in pieces because if they try and rush them along too fast I think they'll lose the customer because the complexity is too high the other area they should really be focused on is continuing to mature the services business I think that's something under Chuck Robbins that's night and day different than what it was the services business - Cisco prior to Chuck was a lot of break fix you know their TAC is well renowned as being a great pack but now they've gotten more of the pro services they've gotten more into adoption services and I think the more subscription they sell what Cisco needs to really understand is that customers tend not to renew things they don't use right so making sure that the services group helps customers and use the things that they're paying for and that'll pay dividends for them multiple dividends for them down the road I want to get the silken one on that opportunity to upsell and do a refresh because what refreshes are not gonna be on the docket early on unless discuss business value so let's hold that for a second John Chambers has been on the cube recently in his new role as a coach and investor and he says to us on the cube you know transitions versus transformation Cisco and the big companies are expected to win the transitions but now with coming out of this there's real transformation so you got to look at things like collaboration hey guys get better this is not just win the enterprise with a better web max zoom is they can ask Bob teams is out there so you know Cisco's that's a huge collaboration piece and a bunch of other business so where's their transition wins and where's their transformational opportunity in Europe in well I think the entire company is kind of going through transformations right even on the network side so it's right it's like you know the industry has been calling Francisco to get commoditized for years right and if you look the product gross margins are actually the strongest they've been in a decade right so I remember when I fell below 60% they everybody thought the world was falling this quarter I think was a little over 65 on the product side and so my belief is nothing is really a commodity if you can drive innovation that's what's this has been doing so from a transition standpoint I think they've done a lot of that they've transitioned the company to software and services they've transitioned the company more terrain model they've actually decoupled software from the hardware so customers can buy differently and you brought up the fact that we may not have a hardware refresh but that's okay as long as they keep the software a newa cycles forth where the transformations has to come is completely change the dynamics of how something works and so with intent-based networking you think of the old way that network engineers to work like the way I used to work when I was an engineer a lot of hunting pecking and at a CLI doing a lot of cutting and pasting and using homegrown tools that doesn't scale anymore my research shows that on average takes companies about four months the implemented change network-wide far too slow for digital company right so Francisco's done is they've accelerated that by letting customers automate more things and so Francisco the transformation comes in allowing customers to new new things I think you read in the collaboration side there's more work to do nobody's got a bigger collaboration portfolio than Cisco they got endpoints they got rooms just right they've got software they were a cloud on Prem but they got to take that and tie it together and I think the other area that's is gonna need improving is on they've they've got a lot of management tools that that look at different things they have at the ACI manager and a whole bunch of different security consoles in fact they funded them sometimes and said that the market leader in single panes of glass because they have more than anybody right I think eventually they got to be able to tie that information together and help customers understand what it means from a cross domain perspective because they still build a product's wireless campus data center but as I mentioned before we just have one network and so Cisco can aggregate this data up apply machine learning to it and help customers what that means they see insight across the entire network that would really be powerful because they they've got the footprint now they just have to be able to deliver the machine learning based insights some customers understand what that data means and they have a unique opportunity in the short term no one's going to be kidding Cisco out anytime soon there's a safety rating and using the big companies I think what what Cisco is able to bring is a there's a level of financial stability that other companies may not have and so they can weather the storm for a long time so you know I it's easy to say going to Cisco is the safe bet it has been for a long time but but i but I think it's also the smart bet I think they're they're able to continue to invest in things maybe smaller companies more people do yeah my question on Cisco a big fan of their strategy have been vocal about that for a while my question on Cisco want to be critical is to say how fast can you get that development going show the software value in market show customers a growth trajectory that they can execute on it can advantage the network policy intelligence if they could do that they're gonna be in good shape you agree yeah I think one of the challenges though is the transformation of their customer base do and that's where the work Suzy we've been doing in the dev that teams so important like if if they were to shift their whole strategy over at the developer folks talk word today I think that would largely put them in a position or trouble because the engineers that work with the stuff and the resellers that work with the stuff aren't they don't really have the skill sets they advantage that right so last year Suzy we she really talked a lot about the growth a definite this year they came out with in Barcelona this year they they came up with a bunch of certifications for dev net now there they were actually coming out with a number of a partner certifications as well so the resellers can get certified but I think it's important that they continue to push their engineer base into gaining these new skills I'll give you an interesting data point for my research and that's you know that only about a quarter of networking engineers has ever made an API call right and so you look at all Cisco's new gear it's all API driven and so if you want to do something as simple as say get all the IP addresses in your network you can just use an API call for that right the other way to do it is you do a show command and the CLI your screen scrape and you take a visual basic trip that you parse it you know and you get it that way right so the API map using those is a lot easier and so I think Cisco's got a good strategy with Deb net they've grown that face a lot it's still relatively small you know it's under a million people and you think of the overall size the Cisco customer user base point that's where they gonna put some effort right more and more out driving adoption to them now well I think you're smarter than I think you're researching them they must be listening to you because they haven't really tried to jam that down their throats they've been very humble about it and I think a million is pretty damn good number I think Cisco again to your point they're bringing people into the water the low end first before you you go to the deep end so swim with the bubble if you will with definite what they did was they assumed the engineer had no knowledge of software because I think at first when they put the lot of the programs a place they assumed people would have some knowledge of how to code right and and I also think the industry did them a bit of a disservice we used her there was a lot of stuff written in the media how every network engineer needs to become a software developer well they don't have to summer get make them software developers but they at least have to come software power ease right so do your job through software but you don't have to be a developer and that's where definite really when it really matured is that diverge down to past developer engineer who's your saw common software skills and then you break down a specialist after that and so they've they've actually helped with the maturity of that they've changed their certification programs for reflect that and I think Devin that really is a big be and if they can transition that engineer base then it helps the adoption of the new on these I want to get your final thoughts on this segment on multi-cloud obviously it would be a really great win for it creates of interoperability strictly with the network intelligence cisco could bring to the table and others you got startups out there like aviatrix and others and vmware with nsx trying to get that for the security fabric a lot of action going on with multi cloud and networking your thoughts what does your research tell you what's gonna transpire how do you see that market playing out in my research shows that little R ad percent of companies prior to Co vid had multi-cloud on the roadmap and I'm assuming that's that's gone up I haven't actually done a survey since then um one of the I think it's funny koban exposed a lot of things from a lot of vendors right and I think one of the things that is is shown cracks in the cloud yeah you look at some of the the data and how many outages Microsoft had Google had some strains AWS has held up pretty well under the strain of of a lot of the higher utilization when coated but they've been building a lot of capacity into theirs as well so I think from a customer perspective it makes sense you don't want to put all your eggs in one basket some cloud providers are stronger in some regions they each have different their own different cloud platforms other private cloud platforms and the problem is is if you decide if you decide to go multi-cloud you can't use the cloud providers tools right so if I use an AWS load balancer that works great in AWS but it's not gonna help me with Azure or GCE similarly if I use GCP tools I can't extend that out the azure so something needs to connect those and be able to five security and policy and that's where multi cloud comes from and you're right there's some good startups there I think um the difference with Cisco this time versus the Sdn world was when as the ends came about I think Cisco didn't want that to happen and I think they actually actively worked against us the end and I've talked to chuck Robbins about that he said you'll never ever see Cisco do that again if something is good for the customers they want to lead that transition and so Cisco's been very active in multi focking and given they've got the install base already I do think they will help bring this long but there are some good stir yeah it's interesting Sdn really wasn't ready for primetime even when VMware bought in this era hey when it was still there I didn't have a lot of revenue it had a future VMware claims that's the saves and NSX was saved by a Sdn some people say was completely rewritten final thoughts on outlook and you see coming out of Ovid obviously it's been well reported we've been reporting VPNs have been under provision that was a blind spot bought a blind spots and disruption that wasn't forecasted in the classic sense there was no there was no you know hurricane there was no flood it was a covin invisible disruption yeah and there's no impact right like even with when you think of what happened with the the floods in New York and 9/11 people knew that they'd eventually go back and so business continuity and disaster recovery was a temporary thing and I can I set up a data center to work for a couple months so I can go back to New York that's not the case with koban where we're trying to manage for an undefined endpoint which is extremely difficult for an IT perspective I do think that Kogan again has highlighted the value of the network I think we'll see a lot of transition from VPN to sd when I think that's that's certainly good I think the rise in video will also cause a Wi-Fi upgrade cycle we'll get back to the office and I think you'll see a lot of focus on programmability and agility because I don't believe we're gonna see everybody return to the office was like one big bang John I think we're more likely to see is the future work to be almost like when you and I were in college we do a bunch of stuff at home we go to the campus when we have classes and when we want to meet people similarly we'll go to work when we have meetings and then in between meetings we'll go find an open place to work but in general we'll do a lot of work a lot more work from home in fact my research shows 93 percent of the business leaders I interviewed said they expect to see at least a 30 percent increase in the work from home post Kovan right so we're gonna have a lot more people doing that but it's not gonna be everyone working for home everybody work in the office it's gonna be a hybrid of the two people are gonna come and go and that bribes the need for agility and today's networks really not that agile and so I need I want to go back to college if we do thirsty happy hours do I mean have the whole week or the stupid stuff it's the final point you mentioned SP when I was talking with Dave Volante SP Minutemen just last week and I said you know this SD win today is not your grandfather's sdn meaning SP where it's changed a lot it's basically the internet now so what was the modern update definition of SD grin I mean it used to be you connect the wide area network you can have some campus you'd do some networking what is it now what's the same name but it's yeah what is it your journey the technology if you look at the adoption of anything right the first wave of stuff is to make the new stuff look like the old stuff so we put VoIP in we made it look a lot like TDM when we had cloud we lifted and shift it and how did we didn't really enjoy wraps and then we eventually get smart and think what can I do with the new thing that I can't do the old thing and so a lot of early SD win deployments were simply just replacements for MPLS and they were put in to save a bit of money but now companies are getting smarter they're thinking about what can I do with my SD win that I couldn't do before so there's a lot more tighter integration with security I think as companies but SD win in and and think about what the win is today John it used to be corporate offices and data centers I think it's everybody's house right and so being able to extend your win at the single people out to planes trains and automobiles you remember that movie but those are all getting connected as well people's back acts fan kiosk those are all becoming way endpoints right so that's where you need to embed more security in the network and so I think that's a transition we've seen into that see you and I think the technology has matured to the point where it's getting easier to deploy faster to flow and you're right we can use the internet for transport in some cases some will still keep there still be a lot of MPLS out there but I do think we wind up in this hybrid world but clearly then the time has never been better for for SD win I will see a rule of curve for that because it's the only way to extend the win the people's homes the things the cars and really anything that's connected you know that's such a great point and I think this is a real new once in the industry it's a whole nother rebirth of the category because the aperture is brighter you got policy you've got reliability and get security built in this is key key Johnny H salt key yeah yeah whole concept the AI ops becomes real because we're collecting data and we're able to use AI to automate operations so Z's we call it s T win 2.0 that's what you got to do we got making an acronym out of this come on we can't just saw s T when it is SD win - righto because it's the next it's that it's it's the second wave of it we're actually thinking about how to transform our companies so the the John Chambers quote of transition for transversus transformation is apropos because the like I said a lot of the waves that that Cisco went through early on was we transition the market and then we transform right and so SD win so far has been transitional moving away from the old thing but now in strength and defense formed where our entire network operates these gradients that always a pleasure to talk to you get the straight scoop for the signal right there from all the noise in the industry now more than ever people are gonna be focused on critical project so thanks for your insight as DK now can research great stuff and we'll keep keep following you in great guest thank you come on thanks John first burger okay cute conversation here remote we're doing our part either at home and studio quarantine in this is the cube virtual virtualization has come to the cube will do will do whatever it takes to get the content out there Z's thanks so much for coming I appreciate thanks for watching on John Currier [Music]

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Toronto, for the Untraceable event. Here in the industry, it's called Blockchain Futurist. It's where all the industry elite are getting together here in Canada, to talk about the future of blockchain, crypto, and everything. It's theCUBE's specific coverage. As we continue 2018, kicking off event coverage with our CUBE brand. But right now we've got two great guests from Start-up, and they're called Quantum EXchange and Bank, QuantEXchange. Manie Eagar, Executive Chairman. And, John Willock, who's the CEO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So you guys got some hard news to talk about. >> We do. >> But, you guys are doing an exchange model, bringing something really cool to the market. >> Yep. >> Which, we need to kind of get this figured out. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, the problem you're solving, and then we'll get to the news. Absolutely. So, I think the lot of people are doing exchanges. You see them coming all the time, and most of them don't really have any specific differentiation or value add. We are not like that at all. We have spent our careers as part of most of the team, in traditional financial services. And, we're coming from the securities exchange business to bring the learnings from NASDAQ, the learnings from the like of that sort to the Crypto Exchange space. And, to be able to facilitate not only a regulated exchange venue, but also one that is institutional grade in terms of tools and the client experience, as well as the trust factor with the platform itself. So, that's really what we're trying to get done with the Quantum Exchange that we're building right now. >> And how old's the company? How long you been around? When do you guys start? How funded are you? What's happening there? >> So, I'll refrain from discussing funding at this point. But, I will say we've started this year. I left the Toronto Stock Exchange specifically to pursue this in conjunction with Manny. And, we've been batting this idea around for the last couple of years. And, the market reached the stage in maturity and size, that we said now is the time to get going and do it. And, so far, fanfare has been fantastic. Reactions from people in the Crypto Ecosystem, people in the Securities Ecosystem, has been equally positive. >> Yeah. >> There's a strong desire to see something like this come to market. And, we're very excited to be able to launch. >> Before we get to the news, Manie, I want to ask you a question. One of the things that we've seen is two types of behavior. The other guy's got to lose for me to win, and then, or both parties can win. We're seeing trends where people are taking a posture against regulations. Oh, they're evil, they're causing all the problems. They kind of don't know what they're doing, kind of, they're evolving. Maturity levels are different based on countries. But, where the success is happening, like Gabriel with Bit. Okay, there's collaboration. Because the regulars actually want to do a good job most cases. They just can't get there fast enough. This is the new model. This is what people are looking at. This is the kind of solution ... >> Absolutely. >> A bridge between industry, and the slow but, yet want to change regulators. Your thoughts? >> Very, very good point. The good news is we're all talking to each other. I think there's dialogue at the moment, but it's not maybe as open as it should be. Because it's all day one. What I bring to the community, and have for the ... since I got engaged in launching the first Bitcoin ATM in the world, in Vancouver, part of that team. And, I think Anthony Bold from Bit is for an alliance. And, blockchain association in the block forum, which we'll announce tomorrow. 'Cause I worked for Blockhouse. I worked for Vodafone. I was involved in the Empasa project. And, I can see and understand what does it take for people to start using technologies. I think what everybody is hoping for is this golden moment. Like when the first iPhone arrived on the scene. >> Yeah. >> People queued around the block through the night to get ahold of that first device. We haven't had that moment yet. For Blockchain and Crypto. We've had the wild enthusiasm, which is all speculation as far as most of us are concerned. But, maturity is coming, these technology if Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies want to succeed, there needs to be another converging technology with what's already out there. The internet, your financial ecosystem, and so forth. >> Yep. >> In my view, there'll be a coming together. There'll be new models altogether. Incumbents will have to pick up the pace in terms of how they go about it. >> Yeah. >> But, we see the opportunity for ourselves, for Quantex. And the industry as a whole is where the convergence takes place, the dialogue becomes more mature, and open, and transparent. Regulators become aligned. At the moment, we hear of a lot of jurisdictions announcing this, announcing that. But, when you start investigating or assessing, it's different flavors, different cultures, different economies. >> Yeah. >> There's the Commonwealth Block. There's the North American Block. There's the Asian Block. Europe is a whole different ball of wax. >> Yeah, I agree with you and I just want to ... >> So, this is where it gets interesting . That's where we come into the boat. >> Absolutely. >> Well, I agree with you, I just want to make a point. During the dotcom bubble, during that internet wave, there was some over-speculation. But at the end of the day, the forcing function of reality was the growth of the online users was growing every day. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And, the demand and the commerce dollars were still real. Now, certainly there was an exuberance. Irrational, in some cases. But, it all ended up happening. I think here in this market, the forcing function is the reality that there's demand, and there's money, and there's impact. >> There is now, we now know that. >> This is coming. It's not like Doomsday. Well, it was fake. No, not really. >> No, we are still in the first inning of seeing what is actually coming out of all of this. I think last year's price speculation runoff obviously was set to decline at some point. But, there has been a long series of momentum coming out of that, where people have realized that this is something much more important and significant than what it looked like three years ago, perhaps. And, a lot of that talent is now coming to this space. Bringing, the capital, bringing the know-how, us included, to deliver something for the next generation of platform, tools, and ecosystem to really grow this massively. And, bring it much more to the mainstream. >> And, I think the idea of aligning with regulars, help them move faster. You mentioned adopt technology, but, still in the phase of deploying operational infrastructure. You mentioned some of the things, the projects you've worked on. Vodafone, that's cellular, that's towers, that's infrastructure. So, I think we're still in this hybrid model of, in parallel, capital formation, building companies, and then, just, we got to get the roads built. >> Well, and understand the posture that a lot of people are taking on. We need to decentralize, we need to open this thing up. But, at the end of the day, the consumer votes. You and I know if we don't have viewers, we don't have a channel. If we don't have users, people actually using the technology, not only investing, but actually using it. It aint going to happen. Decentralize, centralize to a hybrid. And, that's the part that we need to open ourselves. >> Let me ask you guys a question before we get to the news. This exciting news you get to share. How do you standardize something? Because, one common thread of all these major deflection points, at least, with the major cycles I've lived through, has been standards. >> Absolutely. But, it's not going to be your grandfather's standards.So, TCPIP was different. The OSI model is a different generation. The internet was different. Web social is different. What may happen may be different. So, but, standards play an important role. But, no one has clear visibility yet what will be standardized, what should be standardized. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? >> Well last year John comes in, and he's learned the world of standards at NASDAQ, and TMX, and elsewhere. >> That's true. >> Now, we need to bring it to this world. >> How do we scale operational lead to get a cohesive exchange that can scale and demure value? Where do the standards focus need to be? What should the emphasis ... where does the light get shined on, and where's the energy go to? >> I think, you know, you want to look at standards, think about something like this ETF debate that's been going on. Huge speculation about whether or not that's coming. I think a lot of people who are looking at that ETF debate, specifically, don't actually understand some of the economics and the mechanisms behind the scenes. So, for example, what is a fork? When you think about traditional securities, you got corporate actions like a stock split or dividend. A fork is an entirely different concept with entirely different results. Those are the sorts of things that need to be discussed, standardized, and brought to an industry cohesion to be able to successfully deal with some of these events as the market progresses. And, to bring some normalcy to some of this as well, especially if you want to bring institutions to the plate. And, I think that comes to one of the other initiatives that we're working on ... Which is the industry body, called block forum, which we're going to be discussing in a moment. That can really help be that joining voice >> Hold on, hold on a second. This is the news. >> behind everything. >> This is the news. You guys are announcing, let's get to the news. >> Okay. >> You're announcing a couple things. Start with what you were just talking about. You guys are announcing a forum. Can you explain? >> Correct, correct. So, we're launching, officially, to the remainder of the crowd here tomorrow, block forum. Which is an industry association that will be especially behind driving adult thinking behind all this, putting regulation into place, discussing commonalities around policy, around how to standardize, and how to really make all of this interoperable. And, I think that's the key word. If you have individual pillars of, islands of activity, that's not going to be the same as having a cohesive global solution. And, that's what we really want to drive. >> An exchange solution? >> Well, in our case in Quantex, absolutely. But, an exchange in the services we can offer is one part of the whole puzzle. There's a whole series of inter-connected affairs that have to work together. And, that's what block forum is going to drive, is this assembly of different connected parties who are all working for the greater benefit of the Prio ecosystem. >> Who is going to be involved in the forum? Who is the stakeholders? Who can join? Is it a membership? Is it a consortium? >> It is a membership. There will actually be a token that will have very interesting membership related tokenomics attached that we can disclose at a later date. And, that economic alignment between the parties who are staking effectively their interests in the certain topics that they want back or the certain efforts will be a completely unique model compared to what we've seen in the industry today, where generally speaking, it is a committee who drives something on behalf of members. This is really fundamental for all members, democratically from individuals all the way up to institutions, to be able to participate and voice their interests. >> So you will see governments as members. >> Yes, yes, absolutely. >> You will see industry leading stakeholders and practitioners. The whole idea of the body is not to create new policy or reinvent the wheel. We're getting policy, we're receiving regulation. So, how do we put this in practice? Where are the success stories? How can we show the industry as a whole? Governments across jurisdictions to align around their spacing. >> So a melting pot of people to get a conversation going. >> Right. >> To start shaping an agenda or just start talking? >> So, we're talking to governments at premier and cabinet level. We're talking to boardrooms of banks. We're talking to think of your top 40 leaders in blockchain and crypto. We're talking to all of them and engaging with them. >> And, what's the vision of the outcome that you can envision in your mind? What is that outcome for this group? What do you hope to accomplish? What is the end result, if you can kind of assume things go in a good way, what happens? >> I think this is a unifying voice for leadership in the industry to discuss what the outside, outside of crypto world that is, and really bridge that gap between those who are within and understand natively and those who need to be brought in to be able to interact with this and really grow all of this industry. >> And, promote the role models. >> And, exactly that. Exactly that. To bring the best to the front. And, really show that there is actually serious opportunity, serious business. This is not just a series of hackers or whatever nefarious activity these people casually may think the block chain industry is. This is something very serious and very real. And, we want to be a voice for that. >> Awesome. And, you guys had some other news on the fundraising front. >> Industry first. >> You guys are raising some money, you're doing a private sale, and new gear as much as you can, it's pretty invested, so, I think you can promote it. >> I will say with a caveat as you say, it's pertinent to investors only, and we have not completed our discussions with our legal counsel. Having said that, we are taking the model of a traditional securities exchange membership, seats on an exchange, which can be purchased, which have rights attached, which are a titled asset separately from equity of the exchange, for example, separately from a utility token as you would have seen with many other exchanges. This is something that we feel is a very unique model. We are very excited to be able to launch this, and come to market first with this concept. Which again, is blending the best of the old and new. We're taking tokenization, we're taking a concept that have existed in the previous markets and previous worlds, and blending them together for something that is somewhat unique and wholly new in this application. >> Well, I hope you guys raise a lot of money. We need more harmony between regulating and government entities to bring the whole world together. And, certainly from the money-making standpoint, what the liquidity and exchanges can provide as the world starts to understand where the groove swing is and where those swim lanes are, especially with security tokens. >> You bet, you bet. And, the success is going to be measured in ability to scale sustainably. And, we want to demonstrate that with this model. >> We need some leadership there. So, good luck. Best of luck. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, thank you. >> We are here live in Toronto, Canada for the Blockchain Futurists Conference. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Describing the single millers, talking to the most important people, the hottest stories. Here are the most colorful people, people traveling around the world sharing that insights with you. Stay with us for more day coverage here. The first day of two day coverage of Blockchain Futurists. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Male: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Veritas Vision 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. (upbeat music) >> Welcome to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the Cube and we are here covering Veritas Vision 2017. It's the hashtag Vtas, V-T-A-S Vision, and this is Day one of two days of coverage here. I'm with Stu Miniman. My name is Dave Vellante. Jane Allen and Jay Cline are here from PwC. Jane is a partner and principal and Jay is a partner. Folks, welcome to the Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> So PwC leading global consultancy, I would say one of the top three, four, easily. Top 2. Maybe even top 1. >> Jane: Yes. >> I mean, you guys are gold standard for global. You solve problems that most people can't even begin to touch, except for a handful of companies. Jane, let's start with you. What's hot these days in your world? >> So I lead a practice, an information governance practice here at PwC, founded in a lot of folks with technology, legal support, regulatory backgrounds. And it pertains to all companies these days, right? How do you manage your data, to manage all the risks and reap the benefits of it. Certainly a hot topic and certainly with your privacy regulations on board, cyber risk, and just again all the benefits of data that companies are trying to take advantage of. It's been a growing consultancy practice and something that's very relevant to companies of all industries. >> Jay, we've heard a lot today about GDPR. I know it's something that you've been knee-deep in. What do people need to know about GDPR? >> I think GDPR boils down to one proposition, being able to prove that you have control over people's data. I think that summarizes the 72 different requirements of GDPR. >> Yeah, so GDPR, for those of you who don't know, General Data Protection Regulation, came out of the EU. One person on theCUBE called it a socialist agenda. (Jane laughs) But it's serious business, and if you can't ... I mean, actually, Jay, summarize, you know, what people should know about the exposure. I mean, essentially you have to be able to identify personal information and be able to delete that personal information on request, right, for any European Union citizen? >> Resident or citizen. >> Right, okay. >> That's right. >> So if somebody walks into Joe's pizza shop and says I want to sign up a bingo card to get, you know, mailings and your emailings, technically speaking, that person, if they wanted to do business in the EU, is responsible, is that right? >> You've got to know 360 degree view of all the personal data that you have of your employees, your consumers, your customers. You've got to be able to produce evidence on demand that you have this level of control. And whenever somebody comes in and asks for access to their data, to correct it, to export it, to their email, or to erase it, you've got to know whether you can deny that request or do you have to fulfill it, and you usually only have 30 days to fulfill it. >> So is this one of the hotter topics going on in your world these days? And what percent of your clients are actually prepared? >> I'll let Jay comment on how many are prepared, but you know, I think most companies, frankly, are trying to figure out how to be compliant and what is it they actually need to do. But it is a hot topic. I think even before GDPR, the landscape was already complex, right? People are trying to respond to litigation investigations, retention requirements from regulations, cyber risk, how do we manage it? And it's all about, what data do we have, where is it, and what are we doing with it, and how are we controlling it? And those questions are already there. GDPR highlights it. And with a May 2018 deadline, I mean, it's really putting the spotlight on this topic. >> Oh, yeah, that's one little, the fact that we forgot to mention, the clock is ticking. We're down under a year. So how about customer readiness? >> I think when we cross the one-year milestone in May, a lot of boards got exercised. The phone started ringing off the hooks, because they realized, we only have one more budget cycle to get this done. And so now I think, they're realizing that because GDPR hits the tech stack, and the IT budgets had already been planned for, the release cycles had already been put in place, they're now starting to ask, well, we can't get everything done by next May. What are the most important high-risk things that we do need to get done? And there's going to be more spillover work after May, I think. >> I think this highlights something that was already present in terms of the need for cross-functional senior leadership to pay attention to this, right? This isn't just a legal or privacy topic. It isn't just an IT topic. This really hits across organization and these folks need to work together. >> Jane, could you help us kind of uplevel a little bit. If I look at information governance, you mentioned it's super complex. You know, every company I talked to, they're deploying more and more sass. In the keynote this morning, Veritas said most of their customers have at least three clouds. We find, you know, absolutely it's, the strategy, especially if I start, oh, well, just different groups start using things, then how do I govern it? Do I even worry about security and backup and everything like that? How does this fit in the overall picture for most customers? >> Well, I guess that's what's interesting, right? There's no one right way of doing this right. And so it depends on your business, your industry, your customer base, your geographic location and outreach, and the data landscape. And you have to make smart decisions of what works within your corporate business culture even, of what is it that we need to keep and how we need to keep it and enable, you know, our engineers, our users, our customers, to leverage data, but also manage our risks. And there's just not one way to look at it. But again it goes down to really knowing what control you have, what you have, and where is it, right? But that's what's interesting, is for every company to figure out how is the best way for them to tackle it. >> So who's driving the information governance bus these days? I mean, with Sarbanes-Oxley it was the CFO. With the federal rules of civil procedure, it was kind of the general council. Who's really sort of in charge today? >> Well, I mean, depending on who owns it in an organization, looks a little different, usually legal and/or privacy, and oftentimes they are within the same group. >> Dave: So a chief privacy officer? >> Yeah. >> General counsel obviously involved, IT? >> Sometimes the compliance office again, depending how that's structured, but generally in that legal compliance privacy realm. >> Right. Okay, and when I think about some of those previous, you know, generations, Sox in particular, but also I guess FRO, CP. There was an effort within the company, because the ROI was just like, oh, we got to do this. It was like, okay, what does it cost to not comply, you know. >> Jane: Yeah. >> They would try to thread that needle. But there was always a faction that said, hey, we can... And consultancies were part of this. We can actually get value out of this. It's an opportunity to clean up your data, maybe to get rid of stuff, maybe you can reclaim some wasted space or, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Is that the way it is today with GDPR? And maybe we could unpack that a little bit. >> Yeah. One of the first steps that you have to take for GDPR, is to discover where all of your European personal data is, so data discovery effort. And in doing that, we've had a number of clients that for the first time, they've really put together a view of how they make money using data. And they're finding data, their chief marketing officer is finding data they didn't know they had. And so now they're able to monetize that data if they can use it responsibly within the privacy regulations of GDPR. So marketing is oftentimes funding, helping IT and Legal fund their GDPR efforts. >> And I think one of the other benefits is, if you have to go through this exercise to be compliant, but then you get additional insights in your data and you know where to invest more for those additional business opportunities, then at least hopefully you're reaping, again, more ROI off the effort. >> Well, I know the clock's ticking and there's a sort of virtual gun to organization's heads, but getting into that whole value notion, monetization, most organizations that we talked to, they don't really have an understanding of how data fuels monetization. Not necessarily monetizing the data, but how it contributes to monetization. What do you see in the customer base? >> This is the biggest area I think where GDPR is going to morph after May of 2018. I think the companies that can protect their exposure to this regulation, by going through the same processes to find out where their data is, they are positioned to monetize that data, to take advantage of new market opportunities, in Europe in particular. >> Okay. By the way, we should mention that this actually, the law is in effect, it's just the penalties aren't being-- >> Jay: Right. >> invoked at this point in time, right? >> Jay: That's right. >> So the recital is one-year grace period? And a lot of people are thinking, well, maybe we'll get another year of grace period. It's going to be really interesting to see how that goes down. And presumably the EU's going to go after the big pockets, right? I mean, those are the guys who have to be most concerned about this. But what about that midsize company? For your midsize clients, what are you advising them, that may not have the budgets of the big guys? >> We've been advising our clients that there are actually three ways that you can get hit by GDPR. The one that everybody's talking about is the famous 4% fine on your global revenues. That's what the regulators would impose on you if they discovered that you had an egregious violation of privacy. But there's another way that people aren't talking about that's going to be live on May 25th of 2018. And that's a new litigation risk for B2C. Anybody in the B2C space, even if you're midsize, if you violate the rights of a class of people, they can sue you on May 25th. And you can bet there are going to be law firms that are going to take advantage of this new situation. >> Dave: So they can sue you as individuals? >> As a class of individuals. There's also for people in the B2B space, we're seeing right away the contracting risk. And RFPs, they're saying as a condition to bid for this work, you've got to be able to sign that you are GDPR compliant. So you'll be locked out of the European market if you're B2B and you're not ready on May 2018. >> So we were talking off-camera. I was sort of struggling with trying to understand the direct fit with technology, Jay, and I thought you had a good answer. So what's technology's role in all of this? I mean, technology, can it help us get out of this problem? >> There's two parts where technology's very important. First is just discovering where your data is. That takes a lot of technology tools based on your tech stack, to be able to have an ongoing real-time data map. But the other one, the harder part, is responding to these individual rights requests, to ask for where their data is, to correct it, to delete it, to have that 360 view of individuals throughout your information environment. I think that takes IT to a new level. It hits all parts of the tech stack. >> All right. Because an individual can essentially say, I need to know what you know about me, right, that's part of it? >> Well, exactly. And a lot these companies that collect customer data and structured systems, they weren't really built for this type of exercise, to go through and search for something and actually dispose of it. And so companies are having to think very tactically. Okay, can I do this across all my different systems? And then certainly an unstructured data stores, again, what's there and how do we figure that out? >> So in the keynote this morning, we heard about GDPR. It looked like there was... I called it the doomsday clock, what was up on the wall. Can you bring back, how is Veritas doing? How are they helping customers with information governance and GDPR? >> Well, I think one of the really exciting things they demoed and talked about there is some of the data scanning or data profiling information, whether it be the classification or reporting out in terms of what is in this unstructured stores. Again, in order for companies to figure out what it is that they need to do process and technology wise is, what do we have out there again? And they're giving and enabling customers with some of their tools to be able to get some insights there, which I think is really transformative. I think people have been talking about these things from either a legal discovery standpoint, certainly a cyber risk. And I think this is just really adding on. So again, these tools help enable all of them, but certainly for GDPR. >> You have to get this first step right, the data discovery and classification, because if you scope GDPR too big, your compliance costs are through the roof. But if you scope it too small, your exposure's too big. So having a good discovery and classification approach, is critical to the success of your GDPR program. >> Has the industry solved the classification problem? I mean, for years, you really struggled to classify data. You could classify, you know, maybe data in an email archive, but data became so distributed by its very nature. Has that problem been solved? >> I would say no, but I've certainly seen a huge uptick in companies that actually finally just biting the bullet and getting themselves organized. But again, at least doing it because, hey, we need to figure it out for GDPR and privacy, we need to figure it out for cyber security controls, we need to figure it out for e-discovery, and just regular records management and how long we need to keep things. And so I think they recognize, wait, this satisfies a lot of different needs. But I don't know that there's an easy solution to it either. >> And the best practice organizations have automated that presumably, 'cause otherwise it's not going to scale, right? >> In the long-term that's what they're seeking, right, but you need to get the structure right, so you need to have file plans and organization of the information that makes sense to your employees and the way you do work, and then hopefully tie that back, knowing the data life cycle, to be able to classify things based on role, based on access, based on data type. So there's a lot of upfront work, but ultimately that's the-- >> So that's a taxonomical exercise, is that right? >> It is. That's a fancy word. >> Okay. But that's a heavy lift. And then it changes. >> It is, it is. But I think. Again, there's multiple benefits to that. >> Sure. >> And then going forward, you've got things in order for all those reasons. You can leverage the power of the technology, and then your functional groups and what work they do. People know what work they do, how long it generally it needs to be kept. And if you kind of can marry those two things from the business, the technology side, you can get set up and lauch. >> And then you can automate the policies around data retention. >> Exactly. >> What's your relationship specifically with Veritas? >> Well, you know, they're a client of ours, but we're also a client of theirs. >> Dave: Okay. >> I guess we're friends on a number of different angels and whatnot. But our practice tends to... Or we are technology agnostic in general, but we definitely want to stay on top of the different leaders in the industry. So that when we go to our clients, we can recommend, hey, these these are the top two or three that we believe could help you based on your situation, based on your data landscape, and be able to advise in that regard. So Veritas, between the backup tools, their e-discovery, and certainly some of the things they're doing on, you know, information governance and GDPR, is certainly one of the key providers that our clients should consider. >> So, I have sort of set up this discussion with a little background on PwC, clearly one of the leading consultancies out there. I would point to global, footprint, your deep industry expertise, you understand technology, you've been around, you know, you've got deep relationships. So other than those, what's the big difference, you know? Why PwC? And you can repeat some of those if you want. Probably be more articulate than I was. >> I think one thing that's different is what we call the end-to-end approach, where there might be other companies that have some of the qualities that you've talked about. But with GDPRs, it hits across five to ten different budgets in an enterprise. And we'll take a company through a transformational journey across all of them. We have auditors, and we have lawyers, and technologists, forensic scientists. GDPR really hits across all the functions of the enterprise. Because of our scale, we can hit all of these. Whereas other providers will take different slices of that. >> I would also add, PwC looks at our clients as forever clients. We're not looking for a one transaction and see you later. I mean, we look at them in terms of we want to be a firm that supports and partners them, whether it be on the consulting side, audit, tax, whatnot. And so we look at that that way in terms of trying to support them. And maybe that's just one point solution, maybe it's broader. But we'll bring the right experts to the table that fits for that client. And so we always want to think about it that way. While we might have ways and approaches that we leverage, hey, if they've got a specific need or a specific specialty, we'll bring the right expert to the firm. >> So that leads me to like my last question, which is, so it sounds like GDPR, and in chain of the context of that answer, is not just a tactical sort of pain relief project. Is it part of more strategic digital transformations? Are you able to make that connection? Or are people just in too much of a rush to fix the pain? >> No. Jay and I were talking about this earlier today. I mean, I'll use the example of some of the cloud transformation that companies are going through, right, if they haven't already, and thinking about their data and how they operate differently. And wait a minute, we don't need to forklift all of our data over. Let's think about it. And oh, by the way, let's make sure we're compliant with GDPR, right? So there's a number of different ways that you can kind of pull in different pieces that are helpful to clients. I think there were a number of different aspects to that, that we were talking about. So it's certainly something front and center, but it's not a one time, let's check the box and move on exercise either. >> Awesome. All right. We got to go. Thanks very much for coming the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> It's good to meet you guys. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guests. This is theCUBE. We're live from Veritas Vision 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (techno music)