foreign [Music] my name is Savannah Peterson and I am very excited to be coming to you today from the cube in Palo Alto we're going to be talking about kubecon giving a little preview of the hype and what you might be able to expect in Detroit with the one and only co-founder and CEO of the cube and siliconangle John ferriere John hello how are you today thanks for hosting and doing the preview with me my goodness a pleasure I we got acquainted this time last year how do you think the ecosystem has changed are you excited well first of all I missed kubecon Valencia because I had covid I was so excited to be there this big trip plan and then couldn't make it but so much has gone on I mean we've been at every kubecon the cube was there at the beginning when openstack was still going on kubernetes just started came out of Google we were there having beers with Lou Tucker and a bunch of The Luminaries when it all kind of came together and then watch it year by year progress through and how it's changed the industry and mainly how open source has been really the wave behind it combining with the Linux foundation and then cncf and then open source movement and good kubernetes has been amazing and under it all containers has been the real driver and all this so you know Docker containers Docker was a well-funded company they had to Pivot and were restructured now they're pure open source so containers have gone Supernova on top of that kubernetes and with that's a complete ecosystem of opportunity to create the next operating system in in software development so to me kubecon is at the center of software software 2030 what do you want to call it super cloud it's that it's really action it's not where the old school is it's where the new school is excellent so what has you most excited this year what's the biggest change from this time last year and now well two things I'm looking at this year uh carefully both from an editorial lens and also from a sponsorship lenses where is the funding going on the sponsorships because again a very diverse ecosystem of Builders but also vendors so I'm going to see how that Dynamics going on but also on the software side a lot of white space going on in the stack or in the map if you will you know the run times you've got observability you got a lot of competition maybe projects might be growing some Rising some falling maybe merge together I'm going to see how that but there's a lot of white spaces developing so I'm curious to see what's new on that area and then service meshes is a big deal this year so I'm looking for what's going on so it's been kind of a I won't say cold war but kind of like uh you know where is this going to go and because it's a super important part of of the of the orchestration and managing containers and so be very interested to see how service mesh does istio and other versions out there have been around for a while so that and also the other controversy is the number of stars on GitHub a project may have so sometimes that carries a lot of weight but we're going to look at which ones are rising which ones are falling again um which ones are getting the most votes by the developers vote with their code yeah absolutely well we did definitely miss you down in Los Angeles but it will be great to be in Detroit what has you most excited do you think that we're going to see the number of people in person that we have in the past I know you've seen it since the beginning so I think this year is going to be explosive from that psychology angle because I think it was really weird because La was on they were a bold to make that move we're all there is first conference back it was a lot a lot of like badges don't touch me only handshakes fist pumps but it was at the beginning of the covid second wave right so it was kind of still not yet released where everyone's was not worried about it so I think it's in the past year in the past eight months I mean I've been places with no masks people have no masks Vegas other places so I think it's going to be a year where it will be a lot more people in person because the growth and the opportunities are so big it's going to drive a lot of people in person just like Amazon reinvent those yeah absolutely and as the most important and prominent event in the kubernetes space I think everyone's very excited to to get back together when we think about this space do you think there that anyone's the clear winner yet or do you think it's still a bit of a open territory in terms of the companies and Partnerships I think Red Hat has done a great job and they're you know I think they're going to see how well they can turn this into gold for them because they've positioned themselves very well open shift years ago was kind of waffling I won't say it in a bad way but like but once they got view on containers and kubernetes red has done an exceptional job in how they position their company being bought by ibms can be very interesting to see how that influences change so if Red Hat can stay red hat I think IBM will win I think customers that's one company I like the startups we're seeing companies like platform nine Rafi systems young companies coming out in the kubernetes as a service space because I think whoever can make kubernetes easier because I think that's the hard part right now even though that the show is called kubecon is a lot more than kubernetes I think the container layer what docker's doing has been exceptional that's the real action the question is how does that impact the kubernetes layers so kubernetes is not a done deal yet I think it hasn't really crossed the chasm yet it's certainly popular but not every company is adopting it so we're starting to see that we need to see more adoption of kubernetes seeing that happen it's going to decide who the winners are totally agree with that if you look at the data a lot of companies are and people are excited about kubernetes but they haven't taken the plunge to shifting over their stack or fully embracing it because of that complexity so I'm very curious to see what we learn this week about who those players might be moving forward how does it feel to be in Detroit when was the last time you were here I was there in 2007 was the last time I was in that town so uh we'll see what's like wow yeah but things have changed yeah the lions are good this year they've got great hockey goalies there so you know all right you've heard that sports fans let John know what you're thinking your Sports predictions for this season I love that who do you hope to get to meet while we're at the show I want to meet more end user customers we're gonna have Envoy again on the cube I think Red Hat was going to be a big sponsor this year they've been great um we're looking for end user project most looking for some editorial super cloud like um commentary because the cncf is kind of the developer Tech Community that's powering in my opinion this next wave of software development Cloud native devops is now Cloud native developers devops is kind of going away that's killed I.T in my opinion data and security Ops is the new kind of Ops the new it so it's good to see how devops turns into more of a software engineering meet supercloud so I think you're going to start to see the infrastructure become more programmable it's infrastructure as code so I think if anything I'm more excited to hear more stories about how infrastructure as code is now the new standard so if when that truly happens the super cloud model be kicking into high gear I love that let's you touched on it a little bit right there but I want to dig in a bit since you've been around since the beginning what is it that you appreciate or enjoy so much about the kubernetes community and the people around this I think there are authentic people and I think they're they're building they're also Progressive they're very diverse um they're open and inclusive they try stuff and um they can be critical but they're not jerks about it so when people try something um they're open-minded of a failure so it's a classic startup mentality I think that is embodied throughout the Linux Foundation but CNC in particular has to bridge the entrepreneurial and corporate Vibe so they've done an exceptional job doing that and that's what I like about this money making involved but there's also a lot of development and Innovation that comes out of it so the next big name and startup could come out of this community and that's what I hope to see coming out here is that next brand that no one's heard of that just comes out of nowhere and just takes a big position in the marketplace so that's going to be interesting to see hopefully we have on our stage there yeah that's the goal we're going to interview them all a year from now when we're sitting here again what do you hope to be able to say about this space or this event that we might not be able to say today I think it's going to be more of clarity around um the new modern software development techniques software next gen using AI more faster silicon chips you see Amazon with what they're doing the custom silicon more processing but I think Hardware matters we've been talking a lot about that I think I think it's we're going to shift from what's been innovative and what's changed I think I think if you look at what's been going on in the industry outside of crypto the infrastructure hasn't really changed much except for AWS what they've done so I'm expecting to see more Innovations at the physics level way down in the chips and then that lower end of the stack is going to be dominated by either one of the three clouds probably AWS and then the middle layer is going to be this where the abstraction is around making infrastructure as code really happen I think that's going to be Clarity coming out of this year next year we should have some visibility into the vertical applications and of the AI and machine learning absolutely digging in on that actually even more because I like what you're saying a lot what verticals do you think that kubernetes is going to impact the most looking even further out than say a year I mean I think that hot ones Healthcare fintech are obvious to get the most money they're spending I think they're the ones who are already kind of creating these super cloud models where they're actually changed over their their spending from capex to Opex and they're driving top line revenue as part of that so you're seeing companies that wants customers of the I.T vendors are now becoming the providers that's a big super cloud Trend we see the other verticals are going to be served by a lot of men in Surprise oil and gas you know all the classic versus Healthcare I mentioned that one those are the classic verticals retail is going to I think be massively huge as you get more into the internet of things that's truly internet based you're going to start to see a lot more Edge use cases so Telecom I think it's going to be completely disrupted by new brands so I think once that you see see how that plays out but all verticals are going to be disrupted just a casual statement to say yeah yeah no doubt in my mind that's great I'm personally really excited about the edge applications that are possible here and can't wait to see can't wait to see what happens next I'm curious as to your thoughts how based given your history here and we don't have to say number of years that you've been participating in in Cape Cod but give them your history what's the evolution looked like from that Community perspective when you were all just starting out having that first drink did you anticipate that we would be here with thousands of people in Detroit you know I knew the moment was happening around um 2017-2018 Dan Coney no longer with us he passed away I ran into him randomly in China and it was like what are you doing here he was with a bunch of Docker guys so they were already investing in so I knew that the cncf was a great Steward for this community because they were already doing the work Dan led a great team at that time and then they were they were they were kicking ass and they were just really setting the foundation they dig in they set the architecture perfectly so I knew that that was a moment that was going to be pretty powerful at the early days when we were talking about kubernetes before it even started we were always always talking about if this this could be the tcpip of of cloud then we could have kind of a de facto interoperability and Lou Tucker was working for Cisco at the time and we were called it interclouding inter-networking what that did during the the revolution Cloud yeah the revolution of the client server and PC Revolution was about connectivity and so tcpip was the disruptive enable that created massive amounts of wealth created a lot of companies created a whole generation of companies so I think this next inflection point is kind of happening right now I think kubernetes is one step of this abstraction layer but you start to see companies like snowflake who's built on AWS and then moved to multiple clouds Goldman Sachs Capital One you're going to see insurance companies so we believe that the rise of the super cloud is here that's going to be Cloud 3.0 that's software 3.0 it's software three what do you want to call it it's not yesterday's Cloud lift and shift and run a SAS application it's a true Enterprise digital digital transformation so that's that's kind of the trend that we see riding in now and so you know if you're not on that side of the street you're going to get washed away from that wave so it's going to be interesting to see how how it all plays out so it's fun to watch who's on the wrong side it is very fun I hope you all are listening to this really powerful advice from John he's dropping some serious knowledge bombs on us well holding the back for kubecon because we've got we got all the great guests coming on and that's where all the content comes from I mean the best part of the community is that they're sharing yeah absolutely so just for old time's sake and it's because it's how I met your fabulous team last year Define kubernetes for the audience kubernetes is like what someone said it was a magical Christmas I heard that was a well good explanation with that when I heard that one um you mean the technical definition or like the business definition or maybe both you can give us an interpretive dance if you'd like I mean the simplest way to describe kubernetes is an orchestration layer that orchestrates containers that are containing applications and it's a way to keep things running and runtime assembly of like the of the data so if you've got you're running containers you can containerize applications kubernetes gives you that capability to run applications at scale which feeds into uh the development uh cycle of the pipelining of apps so if you're writing applications and you want to scale up it's a fast way to stand up massive amounts of scale using containers and kubernetes so a variety of other things that are in the in the in the system too so that was pretty good there's a lot more under the hood but that's the oversimplified version I think that's what we were going for I think it's actually I mean it's harder to oversimplify it sometimes in this case it connects it connects well it's the connective tissue between all the container applications yes last question for you John we are here at the cube we're very excited to be headed to Detroit very soon what can people expect from the cube at coupon this year so we'll be broadcasting Wednesday Thursday and Friday we'll be there early I'll be there Monday and Tuesday we'll do our normal kind of hanging around getting some scoop on the on the ground floor you'll see us there Monday and Tuesday probably in the in the lounge too um come up and say hi to us um again we're looking for more stories this year we believe this is the year that you're going to hear a lot more storytelling coming out of this community as people get more proof points so come up to us share your email your your handle give us yours give us your story we'll publish it we think we think this is going to be the year that cloud native developers start showing the signs of the of the rise of the supercloud that's going to come out of this this community so you know if you got something to say you know we're open to share stories so we're here all that speaking of John how can people say hi to you and the team on Twitter at Furrier at siliconangle at thecube thecube.net siliconangle.com LinkedIn Dave vellantis they were open on all channels all right signal Instagram WhatsApp perfect well pick your channel we really hope to hear from you John thank you so much for joining us for this preview session and thank you for tuning in my name is Savannah Peterson here in Palo Alto at thecube Studios looking forward to Detroit we can't wait to hear your thoughts do let us know in the comments and let us know if you're headed to Michigan cheers [Music] thank you

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022. We are at Moscone West. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. Excited, really excited, whereas they were saying in the VMware keynote, pumped and jacked and jazzed to be back in-person with a lot of folks here. Keynote with standing room only. We've just come from that. We've got a couple of guests here from Expedient, going to unpack their relationship with VMware. Please welcome Brian Smith, the Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Expedient. And Brent Meadows, the Vice President of Advanced Solution Architecture at Expedient. Guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Appreciate it bringing us on. >> Yep, welcome. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> It is phenomenal to be back. >> So let's talk about obviously three years since the last, what was called VMworld, so many dynamics in the market. Talk to us about what's going on at Expedient, we want to dig into Cloud Different, but kind of give us a lay of the land of what's going on and then we're going to uncrack the VMware partnership as well. >> Sure, so Expedient we're a full stack cloud service provider. So we have physical data centers that we run and then have VMware-based cloud and we've seen a huge shift from the client perspective during the pandemic in how they've really responded from everything pre-pandemic was very focused with Cloud First and trying to go that route only with hyper scaler. And there's been a big evolution with how people have to change how they think about their transformation to get the end result they're looking for. >> Talk about Cloud Different and what it's helping customers to achieve as everyone's in this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah. So, Cloud Different is something that Expedient branded. It's really about how the transformation works. And traditionally, companies thought about doing their transformation, at first they kept everything in house that they were doing and they started building their new applications out into a hyper scale cloud. And what that really is like is, a good analogy would be, it's like living in a house while you're renovating it. And I know what that's like from my relationship versus if you build a new house, or move to a new property that's completed already. And that's really the difference in that experience from a Cloud Different approach from transformation is you think of all the things that you have internally, and there's a lot of technical debt there, and that's a lot of weight that you're carrying when you're trying to do that transformation. So if you kind of flip that around and instead look to make that transformation and move all that technical debt into a cloud that's already built to run those same types of applications, a VMware-based cloud, now you can remove all of that noise, move into a curated stack of technology and everything just works. It has the security in place, your teams know how to run it, and then you can take that time you really reclaim and apply that towards new applications and new things that are strategic to the business. >> That's really critical, Brent, to get folks in the IT organization across the business, really focused on strategic initiatives rather than a lot of the mundane tasks that they just don't have time for. Brent, what are you hearing in the last couple of years with the dynamics we talked about, what are you hearing from the customer? >> Right. So, one of the big things and the challenges in the current dynamic is kind of that staffing part. So as people have built their infrastructure over the years, there's a lot of tribal knowledge that's been created during that process and every day more and more of that knowledge is walking out the door. So taking some of that technical debt that Brian mentioned and kind of removing that so you don't have to have all that tribal knowledge, really standardizing on the foundational infrastructure pieces, allows them to make that transition and not have to carry that technical debt along with them as they make their digital transformations. >> We heard a lot this morning in the keynote guys about customers going, most of them still being in cloud chaos, but VMware wanting them to get to cloud smart. What does that mean, Brian, from Expedient's perspective? What does cloud smart look like to Expedient and its customers? >> Yeah, we completely agree with that message. And it's something we've been preaching for a couple years in part of that Cloud Different story. And it's really about having a consistent wrapper across all of your environments. It doesn't matter if it's things that you're running on-premises that's legacy to things that are in a VMware-based cloud, like an Expedient cloud or things that are in a hyper scale, but having one consistent security, one consistent automation, one consistent cost management, really gives you the governance so that you can get the value out of cloud that you are hoping for and remove a lot of the noise and think less about the technology and more about what the business is getting out of the technology. >> So what does that look like as a practical matter? I imagine you have customers whose on-premises VMware environments look different than what you've created within Expedient data centers. I'm thinking of things like the level of adoption of NSX, how well a customer may embrace VSAN on-prem as an example. Is part of this transmogrification into your data center, kind of nudging people to adopt frameworks that are really necessary for success in the future? >> It's less of a nudge because a lot of times as a service provider, we don't talk about the technology, we talk more about the outcome. So the nice thing with VMware is we can move that same virtual machine or that container into the platform and the client doesn't always know exactly what's underneath because we have that standardized VMware stack and it just works. And that's part of the beauty of the process. I dunno if you want to talk about a specific client or... >> Yeah, so one of the ones we worked with is Bob Evans Foods. So they were in that transformation stage of refreshing, not only their office space and their data center, but also their VMware environment. So we helped them go through and first thing is looking at their existing environment, figuring out what they currently have, because you can't really make a good decision of what you need to change until you know where you're starting from. So we worked with them through that process, completely evacuated their data center. And from a business perspective, what that allowed them to do as well is have more flexibility in the choice of their next corporate office, because they didn't have to have a data center attached to it. So just from that data center perspective, we gave them some flexibility there. But then from an operations perspective, really standardize that process, offloaded some of those menial tasks that you mentioned earlier, and allow them to really look more towards business-driving projects, instead of just trying to keep those lights on, keeping the backups running, et cetera. >> Brian, question for you, here we are, the theme of the event is "The Center of the Multi-cloud Universe" which seems like a Marvel movie, I haven't seen any new superheroes yet, but I suspect there might be some here. But as customers end up and land in multi-cloud by default not by strategy, how does Expedient and VMware help them actually take the environment that they have and make it strategic so that the business can achieve the outcomes, improving revenue, finding new revenue streams, new products, new routes to market to delight those customers. How do you turn that kind of cloud chaos into a strategy? >> Yeah. I'd say there's a couple different components. One is really time. How can you give them time back for things that are creating noise and aren't really strategic to the business? And so if you can give that time back, that's the first way that you can really impact the business. And the second is through that standardization, but also a lot of times when people think of that new standard, they're only thinking if you're building from scratch. And what VMware has really helped is by taking those existing workloads and giving a standard that works for those applications and what you're building new and brings those together under a common platform and so had a really significant impact to the speed that somebody can get to that cloud operating model, that used to be a multi-year process and most of our clients can go from really everything or almost everything on-prem and a little bit in a cloud to a complete cloud operating model, on average, in four to six months. >> Wow! >> So if I have an on-premises environment and some of my workloads are running in a VMware context, VMware would make the pitch in an agnostic way that, "Well, you can go and deploy that "on top of a stack of infrastructure "and anybody and anywhere now." Why do customers come to you instead of saying, "Oh, we'll go to "pick your flavor of hyper scale cloud provider." What's kind of your superpower? You've mentioned a couple of things, but really hone it in on, why would someone want to go to Expedient? >> Yeah. In a single word, service. I mean, we have a 99% client retention rate and have for well over a decade. So it's really that expertise that wraps around all the different technology so that you're not worried about what's happening and you're not worried about trying to keep the lights on and doing the firefighting. You're really focused on the business. And the other way to, I guess another analogy is, if you think about a lot of the technology and the way people go to cloud, it's like if you got a set of Legos without the box or the instructions. So you can build stuff, it could be cool, but you're not going to get to that end state-- >> Hold on. That's how Legos used to work. Just maybe you're too young to remember a time-- >> You see their sales go up because now you buy a different set for this-- >> I build those sets with my son, but I do it grudgingly. >> Do you ever step on one? >> Of course I do. >> Yeah, there's some pain involved. Same thing happens in the transformation. So when they're buying services from an Expedient, you're buying that box set where you have a picture of what your outcome's going to be, the instructions are there. So you also have confidence that you're going to get to the end outcome much faster than you would if you're trying to assemble everything yourself. (David laughing) >> In my mind, I'm imagining the things that I built with Lego, before there were instructions. >> No death star? >> No. Nothing close with the death star. Definitely something that you would not want your information technology to depend upon. >> Got it. >> Brent, we've seen obviously, it seems like every customer these days, regardless of industry has a cloud first initiative. They have competitors in the rear view mirror who are, if they're able to be more agile and faster to market, are potential huge competitive threat. As we see the rise of multi-cloud in the last 12 months, there's also been a lot of increased analyst coverage for alternate specialty hybrid cloud. Talk to us about, Expedient was in the recent Gartner market guide for specialty cloud. How are these related? What's driving this constant change out in the customer marketplace? >> Sure. So a lot of that agility that clients are getting and trying to do that digital transformation or refactor their applications requires a lot of effort from the developers and the internal IT practitioners. So by moving to a model with an enterprise kind of like Expedient, that allows them to get a consistent foundational level for those technical debt, the 'traditional workloads' where they can start focusing their efforts more on that refactoring of their applications, to get that agility, to get the flexibility, to get the market advantage of time to market with their new refactored applications. That takes them much faster to market, allows them to get ahead of those competitors, if they're not already ahead of them, get further ahead of them or catch up the ones that may have already made that transition. >> And I would add that the analyst coverage you've seen in the last 9 to 12 months, really accelerate for our type of cloud because before everything was hyper scale, everything's going to be hyper scale and they realized that companies have been trying to go to the cloud really for over a decade, really 15 years, that digital transformation, but most companies, when you look at the analysts say they're about 30% there, they've hit a plateau. So they need to look at a different way to approach that. And they're realizing that a VMware-based cloud or the specialty cloud providers give a different mode of cloud. Because you had of a pendulum that everything was on-premises, everything swung to cloud first and then it swung to multi-cloud, which meant multiple hyper scale providers and now it's really landing at that equilibrium where you have different modes of cloud. So it's similar like if you want to travel the world, you don't use one mode of transportation to get from one continent to the other. You have to use different modes. Same thing to get all the way to that cloud transformation, you need to use different modes of cloud, an enterprise cloud, a hyper scale cloud, working them together with that common management plan. >> And with that said Brian, where have customer conversations gone in the last couple of years? Obviously this has got to be an executive level, maybe even a board level conversation. Talk to us about how your customer conversations have changed. Have the stakeholders changed? Has things gone up to stack? >> Yeah. The business is much more involved than what it's been in the past and some of the drivers, even through the pandemic, as people reevaluate office space, a lot of times data centers were part of the same building. Or they were added into a review that nobody ever asked, "Well, why are you only using 20% of your data center?" So now that conversation is very active and they're reevaluating that and then the conversation shifts to "Where's the best place?" And that's a lot of, the conference also talks about the best place for your application for the workload in the right location. >> My role here is to dive down into the weeds constantly to stay away from business outcomes and things like that. But somewhere in the middle there's this question of how what you provide is consumed. So fair to assume that often people are moving from CapEx model to an OPEX model where they're consuming by the glass, by the drink. What does that mean organizationally for your customers? And do you help them work through that journey, reorganizing their internal organization to take advantage of cloud? Is that something that Expedient is a part of, or do you have partners that help them through that? How does that work? >> Yeah. There's some unique things that an enterprise doesn't understand when they think about what they've done on-prem versus a service provider is. There's whole models that they can purchase with us in consumption, not just the physical hardware, but licensing as well. Do you want to talk about how clients actually step in and start to do that evaluation? >> Sure. So it really kind of starts on the front end of evaluating what they have. So going through an assessment process, because traditionally, if you have a big data center full of hardware, you've already paid for it. So as you're deploying new workloads, it's "free to deploy." But when you go to that cloud operating model, you're paying for each drink that you're taking. So we want to make sure that as they're going into that cloud operating model, that they are right sized on the front end. They're not over-provisioned on anything that they're going to just waste money and resources on after they make that transition. So it's really about giving them great data on the front end, doing all that collection from a foundational level, from a infrastructure level, but also from a business and IT operations perspective and figuring out where they're spending, not just their money, but also their time and effort and helping them streamline and simplify those IT operations. >> Let's talk about one of the other elephants in the room and that is the remote hybrid workforce. Obviously it's been two and a half years, which is hard to believe. I think I'm one of the only people that hates working from home. Most people, do you too? Okay, good. Thank you, we're normal. >> Absolutely. (Lisa laughing) But VMware was talking about desktop as a service, there was so much change and quick temporary platform set up to accommodate offsite workers during the pandemic. What are some of the experiences that your clients are having and how is Expedient plus VMware helping businesses adapt and really create them the right hybrid model for them going forward? >> Sure. So as part of being that full sack cloud service provider, desktop in that remote user has to be part of that consideration. And one of the biggest things we saw with the pandemic was people stood up what we call pandemic VDI, very temporary solutions. And you saw the news articles that they said, "We did it in 10 days." And how many big transformational events do people plan and execute in 10 days that transform their workforce? So now they're having to come back and say, "Okay, what's the right way to deploy it?" And do you want to talk about some of the specifics of what we're seeing in the adjustments that they're doing? >> Sure. So it is, when you look at it from the end user perspective, it's how they're operating, how they're getting their tools through their day to day job, but it's also the IT administrators that are having to provide that service to the end users. So it's really kind of across the board, it's affecting everyone. So it's really kind of going through and helping them figure out how they're going to support their users going forward. So we've spun up things like VMware desktop as a service providing that multi-tenant ability to consume on a per desktop basis, but then we've also wrapped around with a lot of security features. So one of the big things is as people are going and distributing where they're working from, that data and access to data is also opened up to those locations. So putting those protections in place to be able to protect the environment and then be able, if something does get in, to be able to detect what's going on. And then of course, with a lot of the other components, being able to recover those environments. So building the desktops, the end user access into the disaster recovery plans. >> And talk more, a little bit Brent, about the security aspect. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years, ransomware is a household word. I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that means, to some degree. Where is that in customer conversations? I can imagine in certain industries like financial services and healthcare with PII, it's absolutely critical to ensure that that data is, they know where it is. It's protected and it's recoverable, 'cause everyone's talking about cyber resilience these days. >> Right. And if it's not conversation 1, it's conversation 1A. So it's really kind of core to everything that we do when we're talking to clients. It's whether it's production DR or the desktops, is building that security in place to help them build their security practice up. So when you think about it, it's doing it at layers. So starting with things like more advanced antivirus to see what's actually going on the desktop and then kind of layering above there. So even up to micro-segmentation, where you can envelop each individual desktop in their own quasi network, so that they're only allowed kind of that zero trust model where, Hey, if you can get to a file share, that's the only place you should be going or do I need web apps to get my day to day job done, but really restricting that access and making sure that everything is more good traffic versus unknown traffic. >> Yeah. >> And also on the, you asked about the clouds smarter earlier. And you can really weave the desktop into that because when you're thinking of your production compute environment and your remote desktop environment, and now you can actually share storage together, you can share security together and you start to get economies of scale across those different environments as well. >> So as we are in August, I think still yeah, 2022, barely for a couple more days, lot of change going on at VMware. Expedient has been VMware America's partner of the year before. Talk to us about some of the things that you think from a strategic perspective are next for the partnership. >> That it's definitely the multi-cloud world is here. And it's how we can go deeper, how we're going to see that really mature. You know, one of the things that we've actually done together this year was we worked on a project and evaluated over 30 different companies of what they spend on IT. Everything from the physical data center to the entire stack, to people and actually build a cloud transformation calculator that allows you to compare strategies, so that if you look at Strategy A over a five year period, doing your current transformation, versus that Cloud Different approach, it can actually help quantify the number of hours difference that you can get, the total cost of ownership and the speed that you can get there. So it's things like that that help people make easier decisions and simplify information are going to be part of it. But without a doubt, it's going to be how you can have that wrapper across all of your different environments that really delivers that cloud-like environment that panacea people have been looking for. >> Yeah. That panacea, that seems like it's critical for every organization to achieve. Last question for you. When customers come to you, when they've hit that plateau. They come to Expedient saying, "Guys, with VMware, help us accelerate past this. "We don't have the time, we need to get this done quickly." How do you advise them to move forward? >> Sure. So it goes back to that, what's causing them to hit that plateau? Is it more on the development side of things? Is it the infrastructure teams, not being able to respond fast enough to the developers? And really putting a plan in place to really get rid of those plateaus. It could be getting rid of the technical debt. It could be changing the IT operations and kind of that, the way that they're looking at a cloud transformation model, to help them kind of get accelerated and get them back on the right path. >> Back on the right path. I think we all want to get back on the right path. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE today, talking about Expedient Cloud Different, what you're seeing in the marketplace, and how Expedient and VMware are helping customers to succeed. We appreciate your time. >> Yep. >> Thanks for having us. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer '22, stick around, Dave and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (gentle upbeat music)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to two cubes. Live coverage in San Francisco, California for VM World 2019. I'm John Ferrier, Postal Cuba David Lattin, My Coast, Dave. 10 years covering the BM World Paul Maritz laid out the stack early on. We saw that and watch it go through Its motions now >> remain from the marketing people got a hold of >> that mainframe turned into cloud Now hybrid cloud seven years after we first started about 2012 has been great Our next guest, Paul Falsone, S V. P and general manager of the Cloud Native APS. This is a business unit within VM where that is going to the next level. This is the Act three is Jerry Chen said any of you I talked earlier for VM wears a company. I won't say moving up the staff because there is no stack. It's cloud, right? So its applications on top of operating infrastructure Dev ops going enterprise scale is about developers building APS operating them in scale. This is a big focus of what you're doing. >> It is a dead end of the day. One of my close friend of mine, who's in front of customers all the time, reminds our team constantly that our customers applications matter of the most cause. That's what they used to get in front of their customers with the Dillman teams and the tools they're building the user. Japs come second cause that's what supports the abs. And then the infrastructure comes third zone away. There is that stacks it, but never forget you were at the bottom of the pecking order, if you will, when it comes to ultimately bringing full customer value to our company, our customers, businesses. >> And it's one of the things we've been looking back at our 10 years covering VM where I think you're 13 15 of'em world is that the virtual ization of all very quickly around really optimizing server virtualization really kind of change. The game of one kind of knows that our knows the history there, but it did it without any code changes, too, APs and I think that was a very innovative thing. Now we looking containers and what Kubernetes is bringing to the table. You're starting to get some clear visibility into what's happening and what's possible. Could >> you >> share your vision on what that visibility is that you guys are eyeing for the marketplace in four of'em, where, >> sure, the APP development methodologies are changing, changing more today than they have in the last 20 years. We're seeing ah lot of new concepts and approaches that right now really only accessible to a small percentage of application developers worldwide. We want to try to bring those application development methodologies, practices tools to the mainstream so we can. We can touch the 13 or $14 million.1,000,000 enterprise developers around the world and help the CEOs in their line of business counterparts at our customers get a CZ much productivity out of their development teams as possible. At the end of the day, those APS we're gonna power the next decade of those organizations success or failures with their customers, and so that's becoming a real competitive asset. I've had a number of customer discussions here this week where the primary theme is how me help my developers move faster at enterprise scale, but in a regulated environment in an environment where compliance is is front center >> to big things going on in your world that we covered extensively, honestly, pretty impactful to the Vienna, where portfolio one as open source and hefty oh, acquisition half a billion dollars almost a year ago, about a year left in less than a year, probably was that we close in December last year. So yes, ovary. Just recently we know those guys all people. I mean, I've been covering that for a while, and then I'll see the pivotal acquisition. Just announced a drink from the fire hose. There be doing tons of press briefings, those to impact points, kind of leaving a mark. >> So we've been we've been building up to this. I joined AA Drink them were in 2012 through the Sierra acquisition, but I moved into this role about just about three years ago, and one of the things that we identified early on was, ah, close partnership with Pivotal was going to be essential inside of the Del Technologies umbrella for us to exist in thrive together. And so that's where the idea for P Cass was born. So the combination of V. M. R. R and D with pivotal RND focused on delivering our first community service to our enterprise. Customers we brought helped you in last year. Once they saw what we were doing and thought about the possibility of what would happen if we actually took some of the concepts of communities and p ks and embed them into V sphere, That was, I think, the real ah ha moment for for us and the happier team coming together in the power of what that could enable. But all along the way, we always believed that that was just covering the infrastructure side of the equation. You still needed to get through the making the APP developers productive and efficient in this new infrastructure world and so on to be able to do so on any cloud. And that's where the pivotal piece finally came together last just last month. July Pivotal put out a lot of information in the market around how they're evolving their portfolio to be very cool, bernetti centric, moving forward. And that was a big part about getting all the pieces lined up so that the M word could deliver what we announced this week. The in the town's a portfolio with the component tree for building running in managing modern applications on any club, >> we've kind of come full circle here, predates, and I Sarah, But you guys talking about the stack? Yeah. Paul Moretz. I used to have the whole stack. Ed actually applications up here with Simba. Spring sources around. Exactly. And then you had these when I used to call the misfit toys. Have you had some assets in the M. C as coming in Vienna, where Paul Maritz, Joe Tucci decided, create pivotal as the The platform developed next generation applications. Now it's all come full circle there. So my question is related to that stack and particularly the death part of that stack. This audience is not Deb's not, but increasingly, you've gotta attract that audience. So what's what's your thoughts there? And so >> I think pivotals done a very nice job over the years through the Con Foundry Foundation. The work they've done there through the spring community Spring is at this stage is is arguably the most popular modern Java development environment on the planet. So, you know, we're seeing a tremendous amount of leverage of that of that framework and so between the events of pimples is actively involved in Leeds and their ability to help customers, um teach their enterprise developers how to get the most out of this modern tool kit. We think that there is some wonderful ingredients to a recipe to really scale this thing up in a big way. We way. I also believe that Veum we're still has a lot to learn about what it means to best support enterprise developers and their organizations. And so we are quite a bit in learning mode right now. We're gonna take a lot of lessons from the pivotal team as we as we move forward towards the close and learn a lot more about the team in the culture and their customer engagements. But one of the things I think is is front and center to what pivotal has for customers today is their transformation Service's customers. You've got different groups inside a customer summer looking to build the newest applications. Some of them are just trying to get more operational efficiency out of what they have today. Some of these customers have 12,000 applications in their environments. Um, pivotal has ah set of service is that come in and they help them take their existing monolithic applications and just modernize key components of them so they can operate them more efficiently and reclaim a lot of resources to go do other things. That, I think is probably the lowest hanging fruit for enterprise organizations today. And I'm very, very excited about the service is that pimple has to make available the customers on that front. >> Assad and Jerry Chen, earlier than the other set I was mentioning earlier is a VC now, Greylock, big time to your one. We see former VM Where, uh, guy from 22,003. He also worked on cloud foundries in sight. We ask about the white spaces where starts to thrive in one of the transit is kind of pointing to was have some cummings going public. Some are being bought at sizable numbers, but we rift on. The idea of monitoring was a boring category right now. Observe ability, which is just be monitoring 2.0, you got I pose. You got acquisitions. I mean, major action happening in this observe ability space. I bring this up because that's an area you think, Oh, it's a white space Data opportunities for companies to build service is really points to this cloud. 2.0 application Renaissance And I want to get your thoughts on that environment. What needs to be in place to make that happen? Honestly, pivotals keep for you guys. I get that on Vienna. Where side, but for the ecosystem and for the marketplace, people trying to make careers and or do things What is that cloud 2.0, complexity that need to be abstracted away or >> so The Pepto team had a great Craig and Joe had this great, uh, one liner on kubernetes is all about where the people structure meets the infrastructure. When you think about that, our enterprise organizations have thousands if not tens of thousands of developers all trying to do similar. But a lot of cases different things at the same time, across lots of different cloud infrastructures. On the infrastructure team side, you've got private cloud, you've got hybrid cloud. You've got public cloud environments that you have to get your arms around, monitor, manage, secure and get visibility into. We believe that Carini sits at that perfect layer between the two domains on. This is a big part of why we developed Tom's a mission control. It's just that that perfect layer between the two domains, too, access the company's later and give you full visibility into what all of your developers were doing on every piece of your infrastructure. And we also think that's gonna be a very interesting place for third parties to plug into to gain access to all of the community's clusters that we're helping. Our customers managed across their app landscape to do very interesting things. And so we're really excited about the ecosystem that that project will open up. >> You think this opportunity to start ups in there? >> I do. I do. I think there's a ton of other I mean, think about it just really basic math. Ah, VM based application. When it gets containerized, it has just on the compute side alone. Never mind the networking in the storage site. There are 10 times as many moving parts. A typical containerized EPA's 10 times as many moving parts as avian bay Step. If you think about that applied to the networking layer, you think about that applied to the storage layer, the security layer. You've got 10 times as many points to secure. Now, how do you get your head around that level of complexity As a an operations person, you can't do it. Humans can't do it anywhere. You can't write down your actions. Control this on a pad of paper and know what's what's accessing what anymore, >> Dave. One more question, if I may, on the on the VM container thing, there's a debate or are architectural kind of conversation, and customers are having around when to do containers in three days on bare metal or with V EMS. How do you guys talk to that house? The >> steam going because that was my question. So there was a snarky tweets yesterday. I want to get your reaction to it. And the tweet was during yesterday's keynote. I thought we we launched pivotal so that we didn't have to run containers on V EMS. Now the reality to your point is that people are running containers on bare metal. They're running him on vehement the EMS. I don't have any data, but I wonder if you could comment on that >> so way Probably have a couple of snarky comments of our own on this three share one of the things that put up on stage. Yes, I'll start at the kind of a little little. And I worked my way up at the base layer. The testing we're doing with Project Pacific, which is something we announced this week, which is effectively bringing kubernetes into the heart of the sphere. We're actually using combinations to make the sphere better. We're also going to expose communities to our customers through V sphere, just like we exposed the EMS today. This is a pretty exciting project for the for the company in our early testing of this project, based on the advanced scheduling capabilities of the SX hyper visor take advantage of modern hardware. We're seeing an 8% better performance in a certain test sweet versus what you'd see on bare metal so are ready at the early stages. We're seeing some benefits now take that a step further. The big public college for writers out there if you look at service is like G K on Google. If you look at a ks, uh, recast on Amazon, a cast on his door, every single one of their community service is is run against a virtualized environment, not on a bare metal environment. Why is that? Well, because their customers are using containers in VM, side by side, the flexibility you get out of that virtualization layer. Whether you're a big public cloud provider or your ah smaller enterprise shop running your own data centers, the benefits are proportionate, rather equal on dso >> the narratives off a little bit. What you're saying. What I hear you saying is people use virtualization for a lot of efficiency and scale reasons that's independent of what happens with bearnaise decisions. So if you decide you want to run Cubans on bare metal, go >> to go to town. We think >> if you want to do that, >> you want to do that. But we don't. We actually see a lot of customers who have started down that path. When they go to get to that operational stage, they're realizing they're now dealing with firm where again, they're dealing with Nick drivers again. They're dealing with stuff, and they can easily take that and turn it over to their ops team that's already managing a huge virtualized state and operated with the same tool. >> That's a really a layer thing around round scale. You do the virtual ization for Ryan reasons, and then cos sits on top of it for a whole another reason. >> And the I'd say its operations scale these operations teams need to, you know, just look at the number of announcements we made this week. For an ops team to get their head around all of these new technologies simultaneously is impossible to bring them in one new capability of time into the thing that they're already operating for. That organization is very >> positive. If I understood yesterday, you're claiming better before 8% better performance relative to bare metal. I know that's apples to apples. Or what kind of juicing you're doing on the benchmark >> sex schedule that it chooses it right there. >> I want to ask you about integration and look at it as a quasi. His story of the the industry. You go back to see A with all the acquisitions, right? Historical force it with fusion. Different layer of the stack. I know. Certainly Del did a lot of acquisitions. Some of them work. Some of them didn t m c. Same thing pretty successful. Actually. VM were great engineering. Um, very strong. Go to market on really good acquisitions. My question is on integration with the nice Sarah background, I wonder. I mean, nice. Sarah seems to be very well integrated into the VM. Where platform How is integration The state of integration today within V. M. Where is it a lot easier today because we're living in this AP I economy. What about VM? Wears sort of integration ethos. One of the challenges. I wonder if you could comment and that long. So >> I've been through, uh, to significant integrations of'em where the 1st 1 was with this nice era on. I was on the I was on the incoming side, not the receiving side. The next was with hep Theo. I was on the receiving side, not the incoming side. And so, as coming into this year, back in 2012 Pat was extremely supportive and asked his entire team to be very supportive of getting us integrated quickly and productive. A CZ fastest possible. We were on campus on the via more campus from the next era office within days of the deal closing. That's how efficient Veum work. That's like that's the mindset hammerhead coming into. We were in a building. We were co located with the other networking engineers and product managers. Within the first week on, we were off to the races. That was about 100 20 person company. Hep Ko is about 100% company, Um, about the same efficiency we were consolidating. Offices were bringing them over again, mostly distributed team, but they had a center of gravity. In Seattle. We had a center of gravity in Bellevue. We brought the team's over within within a couple of months in about three months. In three and 1/2 months in, we had the team fully integrated. The organizational design done all the tools in a greater we're all in the same systems. So what happens very quickly now, an organization that's much bigger like like pivotal 3000 employees. Public company takes a little bit longer to get from Deal announced the deal close because it's too public entities. It'll take a little bit longer to do all the integration, but we're already thinking thinking about we know them so well and they know us so well. We already know where the potential landmines are, where the potential rough spots are. Pat prides himself and, uh, this pushes down into the rest of them were on well, welcoming new team members in new groups into the company. And so we try to do that really were very culturally sensitive way optimized for the right tool kit s O that we take, we take some learning like cloud health. When they came in, they had a lot of expertise around. SAS drooling and support of customers were adopting all of that, right. Were jettisoned some of our older tools in favor of some of the things that >> we're gonna win the modernization. So I want to get your thoughts on the last question for the second congratulations, your your your area. We love what you're doing. We think it's super important. Would be covering it like a blanket this year and going forward. But Pakistan came on was wrapped. Talking about 10 years and doing the riffing on the Cube are 10 years covering it. We have some 10 years forward, which waves to be on. They highlighted on the past 10 years in this ear acquisition as a critical moment to bring VM. We're into the S T D C kind of concept started networking up, so we know the history they're sti n and then going forward, he says. If you're not a networking and security in the next wave and Kubernetes is Number one, you're really gonna be missing out. So we highlighted networking, security and kubernetes. But networking. It's nice here on both sides of that 10 year spectrum. You're part of that. >> Why is that? Why is that wise >> watching people know that networking is the most important piece of the wave here? What's the relevance of what he's saying? Share their thoughts on >> Think about the increasing complexity of what at modernization drives into the infrastructure. You're getting smaller and smaller moving parts that that need to operate together at scale in a comprehensive, logical way. But at any point in time, if you're if you're an enterprise organization, if you've got if you've got compliance requirements, audit ability, requirements. If you want to protect, you hear about the number of of small towns that get blackmailed on a daily basis because someone's secured an encrypted There, there, there count taxpayer data and they're there, their victims. All right, this is this >> is some say, cyber warfare. >> It is something. So if you think about in orderto help, our customers get the most out of their developers, these tools that open up I think the potential of a lot more avenues of attack get a lot more complex. And so we think that these two have to progress hand in hand. One. We do want to help developers go as fast as possible. We won't help enterprises get the most out of those developers. That's a big part of why we brought them were into into the damn warfare. We're bringing a pivotal into the VM. We're family, but at the same time, we recognize that the infrastructure has to progress. Every bit is fast, and the network is the thing that ties all these parts together. Whether it's a layer three year layer for networking today or level layer several networking layer seven AP I based networking in the future >> all. I mean, I'm not gonna bring up I ot or industrial i ot to takeovers of physical devices, whether it's a self driving bus off a cliff or taking over towns and cities warfare, I mean the service areas of enormous networks, Internet connectivity applications over the cloud native. Anyway, we know that, right? So a lot to talk about. Thanks for coming on. The Cube Sharing your insight. Senior Vice President, General manager, The Cloud Native APS Group. This is really the key instrument with envy em where to take kubernetes and the advancement of cloud to 0.0 to the next level. I'm John for a day. Volante, be back after this short break.

(electronic music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada. It's the Cube. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by the Cube. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Cube coverage here in Toronto, Canada. We're in Ontario to the Untraceable Blockchain Futurist Conference. This is day two of two days of coverage. I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest is serial entrepreneur, Chris Harper, the CEO of Jereki and Mapogo Ventures. Welcome. >> And ZippedScript. >> And ZippedScript. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Hey, lot of balls in the air, a lot of irons in the fire. Welcome to the Cube. >> Hey, good to have me, man. I'm excited to be here. This is awesome. >> So before we get into, you're a serial entrepreneur, what are you working on now? Take a quick minute, explain. >> Yeah. >> Where the names came from, what do they mean, what are you doing? >> So, first things first, we'll start with Jereki. Jereki is a Japanese proverb which means to achieve enlightenment through one's own efforts. So Jereki is a shell company and we currently run this company, it's called Chase your Drink. It basically is replacing pop and juice as a mix for any hard liquor. No sugar, no calories, nothing artificial and the kicker, we got 90 vitamins in these to combat your hangover the next day. So if you're not drinking with Chase, you're drinking wrong. (laughs) >> It's a chaser. >> Chaser, exactly. >> Yeah. >> And these are in stores like, it'll be in Sobeys, Farm Boy in Canada, GNC soon. And it's going really well. >> Okay, how 'about the venture firm? >> Yes, so the next company is Mapogo Ventures. Mapogo is actually, it comes from a group of lions in the African Savanna that were only six lions, but they dominated the savanna for their whole life span, which is super rare, and they took down animals like giraffes, rhinos, and became legend. It was a folk legend about these Mapogo lions. So Mapogo is a venture firm. We specialize in food and beverage companies. If you're doing something epic, we want to talk to you. And then we also specialize in blockchain cryptocurrency and anything that's on the forefront of what's going on in the tech space. So if anybody's interested, they think they have a great idea, you can reach out to us wherever you guys put contact information, I don't know. >> We'll put it up there. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. >> What's the website? >> Mapogoventures.com >> Okay, got it. >> Yeah, Mapogoventures.com. >> And how much are you guys investing? What's the kind of round size you guys do? >> So it totally depends. We almost don't have a limit or a minimum. It's all about the team, the idea, where you're going, and what you need. We'll get you what you need. >> Is it a new firm, are you making business? >> It's a new firm, it's a new firm. So we have two companies that we're looking at right now, but we don't have any companies in the portfolio, we're looking to add. >> Great, awesome. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Well any great ideas, check it out. How about crypto? What's your seeing, what's your thing, what are you seeing on crypto? What kind of deals? Obviously the flight to quality right now is starting to see the ICOs kind of burning out here and there, but the ones that are solid are standing and growing in a build-out mode. >> I mean, the whole space right now, everybody's worried about it, right? If you're an outsider, you're looking at it like it's all down. But one thing I did want to say during this interview was this is a great event. Untraceable, they sent up an incredible event and even if you're not into cryptocurrency, if you're a business person, crypto's only been around for, you know, six, seven years. So everybody in this room did something before crypto. Right? So they're all multi-faceted individuals and if you're not in crypto, if you're scared of crypto, if you're hesitant about crypto, if you don't understand it, you should be here. You should be at these events because it's priceless networking and who knows where you can go. >> Plus, starting companies on a down, on down the bottom of the market-- >> Yeah. >> Is when the best companies get built. >> 1000%, you know. What did Warren Buffet say? Be fearful when others are greedy, be greedy when others are fearful. Looks to me that the market-- >> Yeah. >> Is incredibly fearful. So maybe you should consider being greedy right now. >> For the people that aren't here, what's the vibe of the show? What's your take, what's the hallway conversations like? >> Yeah, I mean, the vibe of the show. This is actually one of the best conferences I've been to. I've been to a few in New York. This one is incredible. Everyone's so friendly. You can come here, don't know anyone. >> Yeah. >> People will say hi to you. They'll introduce themselves to you. Next thing you know, you had an idea, now you have funding. But it's up to you to make this situation a great situation. >> What's interesting is this sector, blockchain and crypto. >> Yeah. >> Attracts alpha entrepreneurs, alpha engineers. >> Okay. >> You mentioned-- >> Mapogo. >> Smart people are in this world. They've done things before, so this is really interesting. >> Yeah, like people always forget that. They see crypto and they get nervous 'cause like I don't know anything about it. Remember guys, this is a new industry. And we're only in, you know, the first couple innings. This is going to be huge. So come, learn, and surround yourself with killers. >> Alright, what's the coolest thing you've seen so far here? >> The coolest thing I've seen so far. You know, I'm going to be completely honest with you. Larry King. I was so happy to see Larry King and it's awesome that a guy like that is supporting the community, you know. >> Yeah. >> Because this is really a revolutionary technology, the blockchain technology. >> You've done a lot entrepreneurial things since you were 10, you were talking before we came on. >> Yeah. >> How does that help you right now navigate this scene and looking at deals and your own deals and you're building out, you're investing. Other entrepreneurs are coming in, sometimes first time entrepreneurs, how does that help you and what advice would you give other entrepreneurs? >> So I started really young, not knowing where I was going to go. It was kind of just like in my blood. But, you know, you got to get out, you got to talk to people, you know. I always say no deal happens on your couch. You got to jump off the porch. You got to go out, you got to network, you got to meet people. And I started doing that at a young age which got my conversation skills a lot more advanced, so now I can go in and close a deal in 10 minutes where, you know, back in the day, it might take me two hours and I probably wouldn't even close it. So what I would say. >> 10 minutes is a good metric. >> It is. >> That's hey. >> Hey, I don't need to say more or less. If it's an interesting idea, let's go. You should be able to tell me what it is. >> Yeah. >> We should be able to hammer something out. Yeah, yeah, that's pretty much what's going on. >> Awesome. And what's some of the plans that you have for your ventures? Let's go back, the zip line, what's that one? >> Oh, yeah, ZippedScript. >> ZippedScript, I'm sorry. >> So I can't talk too much about ZippedScript. It's launching in fall of 2018. ZippedScript is basically going, it is revolutionizing the higher education industry and the transcript section in that industry. And all I can say is we may or may not be using blockchain technology to do it. >> Got it, okay. >> Yeah. >> And how about the chaser, that sounds very cool. >> Yeah, it is really cool. And, I mean, you guys can go to chase your drink.com, check it out. You can head over to our Instagram, Chase Your Drink. It's taken over. You know, this cola flavor I've got here and tropical thunder is pineapple mango, but cola tastes just like Coca-Cola. >> Yeah. >> Without any of the bad ingredients. And it's really taken over. You know, our biggest problem is supply. >> Yeah. >> We just can't produce enough, but we're fixing that problem. >> That's a good problem to have. >> It's a very good problem to have, right. >> How did you get into the venture side? Just you're scratching an itch, you wanted to put some of your money to work, did you raise unlimited partners, how's that, how'd that develop? >> Totally. >> And what's the current situation? >> Yeah, so it was a group of fellow entrepreneurs and we're all working on our own companies, but we're all ADD, right? And we're like I'm doing this, I'm doing that, but we have all these contacts, all these different skill sets, and we're all great friends. So that's another very important thing that most people talk about. Surround yourself with like minded people, but you want them to have different skill sets. >> Awesome. >> I don't want a clone. I have a clone, we're not going to work well together. >> You want added value, you don't want to subtract value. >> Yeah, exactly. So we came together and we're like we have so much value in so many different spaces, we can walk companies through, you know, a proven concept in any industry, food and beverage, cryptocurrency, and basically you won't make mistakes that we made. That's the bottom line. So you'll accelerate your success by working with us. >> Well, Chris, great to have you on. >> Yeah. >> Congratulations on your success. >> It was amazing, man. >> Check out Chase, check out the fund if you've got a great idea, contact Chris, go the cube.net, you can find his information there. I'm John Furrier here in Toronto with all the action here at the Blockchain Futurist Conference where the future's being created, robust industry, people looking at the long term, this is where the action is. Thanks for watching. Stay with us for day two coverage after this short break. (electronic music)