>> Announcer: From New York, it's The Cube covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello everybody, welcome back. I'm John Furrier, host of The Cube here in New York City for Blockchain Week, New York, also part of the consensus 2018 event, wrapping up day three. We've been rocking and rolling. All the action, cryptos here from business models, financing, technology change and a lot of demos. It's been great. My next guest is Alex Scarsini who's the president of Edgewater Markets. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thank you very much. We're excited. >> So we were chatting about a lot of the capital markets and then the go-to markets for these companies, and I got to say the feedback here at the show is the demos are kind of suck-y 'cause everyone's working on the backend technologies. So it's the evolution, but you're starting to see the technology having a real impact. >> Of course. >> What are you working on? Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, and then we can chat about the general market. >> Sure, sure. So Edgewater Markets, we are developing what we think will be the preeminent platform for the institutional market purely institutional market that'll enable sophisticated investors to be able to buy and sell all the digital currencies or at least in the first stage of our rollout, the 10 or 15 most selected currencies in the same manner that they transact their currency business today, which is efficiently, at low cost, in a low latency environment, and with a A-Z turn around of trade processes from the initial buy or sell to the confirmation process. We've done this before at Edgewater Markets. We do it in the currency business. We have a one-stop shop platform where our clients come to us and efficiently access global equity for the currencies they want. In the market that we have today, it's virtually impossible for the institutional segment to get in and get involved in a scalable manner. There's just too much dislocation globally in terms of exchanges, in terms of collateral that needs to be posted or not, in terms of accessing rates in a low latency environment. None of this exists. >> So is it their problem in that there's too much time to do work? Is it mechanisms that aren't in place? What's the real frustration that you guys are solving? I mean, mention dislocation, be specific. Is it the time it takes? No systems in place? >> Well, imagine that, imagine that you are a large institutional trader and you wanted to buy 1000 units of bitcoin. It's a million dollar log or eight million five hundred dollar log. You'd have to go and check prices on 20 different exchanges where you can buy three cheaply, where you can buy the next four cheaply. By the time you've looked and figured all this out, the price has moved. >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's impossible. Moreover, our clients want to buy 1000 logs and they may very well want to sell them out in 30 seconds. They don't want delivery of the coin, they don't want to deal with cold storage, warm storage. They want to speculate on the movement of these digital currencies the same way they do in Eurodollar, et cetera, so they need to be able to buy their interest in one place efficiently and at the best price. >> It's a great model, so much value there. How's it work and how's it coming together? So, you got to go set up, what, all the market-making deals? So you have to set up the connections? What are you guys bringing to the table? How does the platform work behind the scenes? >> Well the good part about all this is we've done it before. We've been in business for ten years. We've set up offices globally in London, Singapore, New York, Chicago. We're in Mexico City, as well. We have servers in each one of these locations, so we're already a very low latency provider of liquidity, and we already have a like-product for the FX side. We have, obviously, a smart order routing system. We have a central limit order book. We have a pricing engine. We have algos. We've already developed a lot of the processes that we will need for this new product. The most important part of the equation, for us, is we have 300 active institutional clients that are waiting for this product. >> Yeah, they're dying. >> That's why we have a tremendous advantage. >> So what changes are you making for cryptos? So you've got the great leverage from your previous experience, check, awesome. What's the cryptos tweak to your model? What's the key? >> So the market is yet to solve for the custodian part of the equation. In today's world, institutions, and I'm talking about the household names in the macrospace or the high frequency space, I would say 99% of the institutional space deals in the name of their PB, prime broker. Goldman, Morgan Stanley, et cetera, as do we. Now these exchanges are what we call the liquidity providers. You would have to go up and literally set up an account with each one of these exchanges so you can access that liquidity. It's completely inefficient. So what we aim to do, in the absence of a solution in the next year, what we plan to do for our rollout is to open those accounts ourselves and have that collateral with each one of these exchanges, obviously we'll get leverage, there's going to be some cross pollination of products between exchanges at some point. The way you have it today between a London exchange in the equities world and a New York stock exchange where they cross pollinate some of their liquidity pools, you will see that in exchanges throughout the world, and you'll also see some consolidation in that space. So we're going to put up the collateral, we're going to deal with the exchanges, we're going to make sure that we do the post-trade processes on behalf of our client. Our client comes to us, buys 100 units and sells them 30 seconds later, and he's either made money or he's lost money, and that just gets netted out at the end of the day or at the end of the week depending on the agreements that we have with our institutional clients. >> I look at all this, some of the transactions it takes, such a long time to get stuff done because it's just kludgy, it's really a mess. It's exciting that you guys are doing this. >> Well, but there's a need for it. The market is growing tremendously fast. I mean, it's evolved just in the last year, we've evolved from some concepts that were in the preliminary stage to a real demand for a product for an institutional client base that is dying for new product in this environment, meaning the currency markets are very quiet. The bond markets, although they're picking up or percolating right now, are very quiet. This is an area that gives the institutional traders and speculators a chance to arbitrage, to produce alpha, and to do it efficiently. They need a product, and we're there for it. >> Alex, how do people get involved? Obviously they're lining up, waiting for the mousetrap to be built 'cause it's a better mousetrap, obviously, than what's out there. What's next for you guys? How do people get involved? They just call you up at Edgewater Markets? Is there a front end website? How do they contact you guys? >> Well, yeah, certainly we have a website. We're in the process of putting together a product we think will be ready in the next three months for a beta roll out. We've got all hands on deck building it out. We have a handful of clients that have agreed to beta test it for us, so we do think we're ahead of the curve. I've seen a lot of other companies that are trying to do what we do, and we always believe that in the absence of a real clientele that demands the product, it's tough to build what you don't know you'll be asked to build eventually. Our clients are looking at our products, giving us live feedback today as we speak, and these aren't small institutional clients. These are your household names in the macrospace. >> Yeah, they need it. >> The big boys. And so we think we'll have something great in the next few months. >> Great Alex, thanks for coming onto The Cube, really appreciate it. Good luck tonight and continue the events here, and great job. We need that. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Liquidity's critical marketplaces are being developed. You've got two-sided marketplaces, you got cryptocurrency. This is a new, exciting product at many levels. Financial obviously here with Alex, technology, business model, all covered on The Cube here. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. More coverage here in New York City after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's the Cube. Covering Enterprise Connect 2019, brought to you by Five9. >> Hello from Orlando, Florida. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman on the Cube, at Enterprise Connect 2019. Stu and I are joined by a guest from Ribbon Communications. We've got Sacha Gera, the SVP of Cloud. Sacha welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So we've had the opportunity to talk to one of your colleagues from Ribbon before but let's give our audience an opportunity to learn more about Ribbon, who you guys are, what you do and then of course we'll talk about some of the great new exciting announcements that you'll make here this week. >> Absolutely, so Ribbon Communications is a global leader in providing real-time communications. We provide piece parse technology to over a thousand carriers around the world and increasingly to independent software vendors and enterprise. So we came into existence about 18 months ago with the amalgamation of Sonus and GENBAND coming together and about 18 months old and doing some big things now so. >> And a lot of news coming out this week. Talk to us about some of the key announcements that Ribbon is making with some of your partners, AT&T for example. >> Absolutely, so our Kandy cloud communications business which is our SaaS brand, we're a white label platform as a service providing UCaaS and CPaaS services to independent software vendors and carriers around the world. And we're really excited about AT&T's announcement ahead of the conference here and AT&T, you know a lot of people have been saying, "We're waiting for the big tier one service providers to fire back at some of the more well-known CPaaS players out there." And so what we do is we helped AT&T with an end-to-end platform as a service play to help them launch their marketplace. And the key word there is marketplace. There is a lot of folks providing APIs and SDKs as you look around the conference here but when you think about the Fortune thousand looking for those low code, no code-type digital solutions that can have the easy button to launch and transform into the digital evolution that's going on, that's what we are helping AT&T to do. So it's been quite they announcement for us. >> Sacha, I love that. We've been saying for years you know, the enterprise really needs an upmarket place, just like we have on our phones, it'd be great to have that, you know when I came into the show. my first time coming here it was like okay, how much is it just API compatibility? And we were working amongst each other but as I walk around the show floor it's like, "Oh well yeah that (mumbles) makes sense." And then these kind of pieces, which ones come together and which ones would I, as an enterprise or service provider just be able to, you know, plug into. So can you speak a little a little of that maturation of the marketplace and what the reality out there is there today. >> Absolutely and think about that large enterprise that has an existing procurement vehicle with the large carriers. They're getting their data services, their telephony, their collaboration. It's an actual extension to want to sell use cases and digital solutions. And so with the carrier, you've got an existing bill. One bill. Now your adding APIs and SDKs, turn key digital solutions and an easy button that's more E-commerce centric. And that's really what we've been able to help AT&T do, to really move up the value chain, so. >> So when you're out talking with customers and I know one of your customers, Hertz was on the customer panel this morning during the general session. When you're out talking with customers, talk to us about real-time communication. It's this huge opportunity for customers. It's almost an imperative that they'll be able to have real-time communications with whoever they are transacting business with. How are you guys helping customers embrace and deliver real-time communications? >> Absolutely, so we were really pleased to hear Hertz give us the shout out this morning and you know our end customer is actually not Hertz. Hertz is a customer of IBM and we are helping IBM with their white label platform as a service for their UCaaS and collaboration services. And of course Hertz is transforming all of their rental car branches around the world into the cloud, using our hosted voice over IP and UCaaS services. So we're really pleased about the announcement. So when it comes to real-time communications, I mean this is, you got to think about the customer journey and we've heard this from a lot of folks. The consumer is more empowered than ever when it comes to the customer journey. Gone are the days of necessarily walking into a bricks and mortar shop, taking an hour to kind of learn about what's going on. People are making decisions like this because all the information is at the touch of their fingertips. And today it's about customer engagement and it's about making the best informed decisions as possible and customer engagement in especially the contact center is increasingly playing an important role. So we're helping customer like IBM transform their portfolios, fill in portfolio gaps where they can provide new hosting services but at the same time transform that contact center experience and really help drive new sales with engagement tools and new technologies like WebRTC and CPaaS are playing a really important role there. >> So Sacha, it's interesting you have for the most part a degree of separation between yourself and the end consumer. There's one of the press releases that caught my eye though, the scourge to the consumer today is robocalls. It's like most of all, I want to turn off my phone number because most of the calls that come through, even when it says it's somebody you think you know, often times it isn't. Can you talk about, there's an engagement that Ribbon has with a number of service providers, helping to attack this big challenge today. >> Absolutely. So we recently hosted a forum with a number of carriers coming down because there's some studies that show that upwards of 50% of calls in the next couple of years are going to be robocalls and they're annoying as heck, depending on the geography and where you live. So with our new kind of end-to-end portfolio which kind of mixes both analytics and our strategic positioning in the core and the edge. The enterprise edge as well as the core of the carrier. We're in a very strategic place to get that information, data mine it and proactively identify where we're not only getting robocalling but fraud and helping carriers and others to monetize that business and do proactive things with that data. So we have a new kind of solution coming out STIR-SHAKEN, you'll hear a little bit more about that and don't ask me to spell out that acronym. It does actually stand for something that's more technical but we're really excited about what's going on there. The robocalling industry is becoming quite annoying for a lot of folks. It's a big opportunity for us. >> Heck, John Oliver did a segment on it a couple of weeks ago. So, hopefully, your company can help solve that issue because that definitely holds us back today. >> Absolutely. >> So in terms of industry adoption, we mentioned Hertz as a customer of yours through IBM but talk to us about some of the verticals maybe that you're seeing as leading-edge. I think governments, health care, financial services. Are you really seeing those industries kind of lead in this real-time communications opportunity area? >> Absolutely, likes we like to think of ourselves more as of a horizontal player and specifically all verticals are kind of going towards frictionless real-time communications. And you know we have a great thing going on with Five 9s for example. Five 9s is a well-known Cloud contact, it's a center it's a service player and one of the things we're doing with Five 9s is they've got a bunch of end customers who are revolutionizing their contact center and so one of the things we were able to do with Five 9s for example is enable them with WebRTC services. And it was about this time last year, maybe a little bit before when WebRTC ubiquitously kind of got standardized in all the major web browsers. And what we're able to help do with Five 9s is introduce a new frictionless in context way of communicating into the contact center over WebRTC which is great for customers who want to save on the toll-free minutes. It's kind of over the top web toll-free but it's kind of in browser in context like again, contact center agents have that full contextual toolkit of engagement to be able to preserve customers and upsell and cross-sell and provide great customer service. And we're not really seeing any particular vertical that is necessarily adopting that more than the other. We like to think of ourselves as horizontal but certainly governments, financials, retails, telemedicine, we're seeing tremendous traction across all of those. >> See, oh go ahead Stu. >> Yeah I was just being in the cloud, can you talk about some of the relationships with the public cloud. No, no, there were some announcements with Microsoft, believe with Amazon also. How are you seeing, that the hyper-scale public clouds impacting your space? >> Absolutely. So you know in this day and age, you've got to be able to fire up new micro-services and new cloud services instantly and practically anywhere. And there's reasons for that. Some of that is data privacy, some of it's security, some of it's just latency and so on And you know AWS, Azure we're kind of agnostic to the public cloud infrastructure but we're pretty excited about some of their announcements. We've been working with Amazon and Microsoft Azure for some time and increasingly with IBM SoftLayer as well. And so the ability to fire up some of our piece parts or Session Border Controllers. Our WebRTC gateways up in the public cloud and able to facilitate our channel partners to go to market in rapid time. It's an important part of our strategy. With Microsoft, obviously we're one of two certified vendors and with Microsoft and Teams, you know a lot of enterprises are going towards the Teams. We're able to help carriers play in that by having those interconnects to the carriers to provide the voice services and the carrier services and fire up practically instantly in the public cloud. So we're pretty excited about some of those announcements here as well. >> And what can some folks find out and learn about in your booth here at Enterprise Connect? >> Yeah, so I think at our booth you'll see a number of key topics being highlighted. Obviously the public cloud and the Microsoft as well as some of the other public cloud announcements we've had. In addition to that, we recently acquired a company called Edgewater and so our heritage, we've been known very much as kind of a carrier SBC player of choice but we've kind of extended that to the enterprise edge with the acquisition of Edgewater. And what Edgewater provides us is kind of that Enterprise SBC, but with SD-WANs. So SD-WANs, a growing part of our story, having that end-to-end quality of service, over the top with analytics and all the protection of security and all that kind of stuff. So it's a perfect fit into our portfolio and that's another area that you'd be able to see at our booth here this year at Enterprise Connect. >> Excellent last-- >> So if I understand that, I'm sorry. So you have an SD-WAN offering, is it something we've been watching quite a bit in the multi-cloud space and a lot of movement high growth in that area? >> Absolutely. So the SD-WAN offering with the Edgewater product offers a number of key services. Obviously the disaster recovery, having multiple broadband inputs and being able to switch from an LTE to another broadband input is part of that but the analytics in the end-to-end quality of service are equally important and you know for somebody who helps run our cloud communications business, when we go deploy to folks like Hertz, putting that Edgewater CPE box on the prem is an important part of our solution to have that end-to-end visibility for things like SD-WAN but also the analytics and inevitably security and protection as well. >> As we talk about at this event the evolution of communication, the evolution of this event and collaboration, I know we're only kind of halfway through day two here but I'm just curious, any key takeaways that you have gleaned so far from the event that you're looking forward to bringing back to HQ after this event is over? >> Absolutely. You know, every year is a little bit different. There's always a buzz word or two. I think this year what I'm starting to see is there's a lot more focus on the use cases as opposed to the technology. You know in the past, you come here, you talk a lot about the three-letter acronyms, SIP and UCaaS and CPaaS and WebRTC. This year, you're seeing a lot more about how can we actually monetize the business? What are the use cases? And you know as opposed to APIs being a big part of how you get there and the focus on the how, it's more about the what, like APIs are just kind of de-facto and you need them to help mask the complexity of the network and monetize and do things like creating new digital solutions and use cases. So you know it's just an example of how people are trying to talk about things this year as well as analytics and BI. People aren't just talking about how they're doing it, they're showing you what they can do with sentiment analysis. They're showing you how proactive policy can be applied. So that's pretty cool because we're now getting into the fun part of monetizing all of this great technology investment we've made for 10 years. >> And actually showing the business outcomes that it should be delivering, >> Absolutely. >> Right? That's the need, right? >> That's right, yeah. >> Well Sacha thank you so much for stopping by the Cube and chatting with Stu and me. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Our pleasure. >> All right. >> Thank you for watching the Cube, Lisa Martin for Stu Miniman, you're watching the Cube. (upbeat music)