(lively orchestral music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. We're here in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, the cofounder of SiliconANGLE Media, cohost of theCUBE. We're here with fellow cloud influencer, friend of theCUBE, Sarbjeet Johal, who's always on Twitter. If you check out my Twitter stream, you'll find out we've always got some threads. He's always jumping in the CrowdChat and I think was in the leaderboard for our last CrowdChat on multi-cloud Kubernetes. Thanks for coming in. >> Yeah, thank you for having me here. >> Thanks for coming in. So you're very prolific on Twitter. We love the conversations. We're gettin' a lot of energy around some of the narratives that have been flowing around, obviously helped this week by the big news of IBM acquiring Red Hat for, what was it, 30, what was the number, 34? >> 34, yeah. >> $34 billion, huge premium, essentially changing the game in open source, some think, some don't, but it begs the question, you know, cloud obviously is relevant. Ginni Rometty, the CEO of IBM, actually now saying cloud is where it's at, 20% have been on the cloud, 80% have not yet moved over there, trillion-dollar market which we called, actually, I called, a few years ago when I wrote my Forbes story about Amazon, the Trillion Dollar Baby I called it. This is real. >> Yeah. So apps are moving to the cloud, value for businesses on the cloud, people are seeing accelerated timelines for shipping. Software. >> Yeah. >> Software offer is eating the world. Cloud is eating software, and data's at the center of it. So I want to get your thoughts on this, because I know that you've been talking a lot about technical debt, you know, the role of developer, cloud migration. The reality is, this is not easy. If you're doin' cloud native, it's pretty easy. >> Still pretty easy, yeah. >> If that's all you got, right, so if you're a startup and/or built on the cloud, you really got the wind at your back, and it's lookin' really good. >> Yeah. >> If you're not born in the cloud, you're an IT shop, they've been consolidating for years, and now told to jump to a competitive advantage, you literally got to make a pivot overnight. >> Yeah, actually, at high level, I think cloud consumption you can divide into two buckets, right? One is the greenfield which, as you said, it's not slam dunk, all these startups are born in cloud, and all these new projects, systems of innovation what I usually refer to those, are born in cloud, and they are operated in cloud, and at some point they will sort of fade away or die in cloud, but the hard part is the legacy applications sitting in the enterprise, right? So those are the trillion dollar sort of what IBM folks are talking about. That's a messy problem to tackle. Within that, actually, there are some low-hanging fruits. Of course, we can move those workloads to the cloud. I usually don't refer the application, the workloads as applications because people are sort of religiously attached to the applications. They feel like it's their babies, right? >> Yeah. >> So I usually say workload, so some workloads are ripe for the cloud. It's data mining, BI, and also the AI part of it, right? So but some other workloads which are not right for the cloud right now or they're hard to move or the ERP system, systems of record and systems of engagement or what we call CRMs and marketing sort of applications which are legacy ones. >> Yeah, hard-coded operationalized software frameworks and packages and vendors like Oracle. >> Yes. >> They're entrenched. >> Oracle SAP, and there's so many other software vendors that have provided tons of software to the data centers that they're sitting there, and the hard part is that nobody wants to pull the plug on the existing applications. I've seen that time and again. I have done, my team has done more than 100 data center audits from EMC and VMware days. We have seen that time and again. Nobody wants to pull the plug on the application. >> 'Cause they're runnin' in production! (laughs) >> They are running in production. And it's hard to measure the usage of those applications, also, that's a hard part of the sort of old stack, if you will. >> Yeah. So the reality is, this is kind of getting to the heart of what we wanted to talk about which is, you know, vendor hype and market realities. >> Yeah. >> The market reality is, you can't unplug legacy apps overnight, but you got a nice thing called containers and Kubernetes emerging, that's nice. >> Yeah. >> Okay, so check, I love that, but still, the reality is, is okay, then who does it? >> Yeah. >> Do I add more complexity? We just had Jerry Chen and hot startup Rockset on, they're trying to reduce the complexity by just having a more simple approach. This is a hard architectural challenge. >> It is. >> So that's one fundamental thing I want to discuss with you. And then there's the practical nature of saying assuming you get the architecture right, migrating and operating. Let's take those as separate, let's talk architecture, then we'll talk operating and migrating. >> Okay. >> Architecturally, what do people do, what are people doing, what you're seeing, what do you think is the right architecture for cloud architects, because that's a booming position. >> Yeah. >> There's more and more cloud architects out there, and the openings for cloud architects is massive. >> Yeah, I think in architecture, the microservices are on the rise. There are enabling technologies behind it. It doesn't happen sort of magically overnight. We have had some open source sort of development in that area the, the RESTful APIs actually gave the ports to the microservices. Now we can easily inter-operate between applications, right? So and our sort of, sorry I'm blanking out, so our way to divide the compute at the sort of micro-chunks from VM, virtual machine, to the container to the next level is the serverless, right? So that is giving ports to the microservices, and the integration technologies are improving at the same time. The problem of SEL lies in the data, which is the storage part and the data part and the network, and the network is closely associated with security. So security and network are two messy parts. They are in the architecture, even in the pure cloud architecture in the Kubernete world, those are two sort of hard parts. And Cisco is trying to address the network part. I speak, I spoke to some folks there, and what they are doing in that space, they are addressing the network and SCODI part, sort of deepening-- >> And it's a good time for them to do that. >> Yeah. >> Because, I mean, you go back, and you know, we covered DevNet Create, which is Susie Wee, she's a rising star at Cisco, and now she's running all of DevNet. So the developer network within Cisco's has a renaissance because, you know, you go back 20 years ago, if you were a network guy, you ran the show, I mean, everything ran the network. The network was everything. The network dictated what would happen. Then it kind of went through a funk of like now cloud native's hot and serverless, but now that programability's hitting the network because remember the holy trinity of transformation is compute, storage, and networking. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> Those aren't going away. >> Yeah, they aren't going away. >> Right, so networking now is seeing some, you know, revitalization because you can program it, you can automate it, you can throw DevOps to it. This is kind of changing the game a little bit. So I'm intrigued by the whole network piece of it because if you can automate some network with containers and Kubernetes and, say, service meshes, then it's become programmable, then you can do the automation, then it's infrastructure, it's code. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Infrastructure is code. It has to cover all three of those things. >> That is true, and another aspect is that we talk about multi-cloud all the time, which Cisco is focusing on also, like IBM, like VMware, like many other players who talk about multi-cloud, but problem with the multi-cloud right now is that you cannot take your security policies from one cloud provider to another and then just say, okay, just run there, right? So you can do the compute easy, containers, right, or Kubernetes are there, but you can't take the network as is, you cannot, you can still take the storage but not storage policies, so the policy-driven computing is still not there. >> Yeah. >> So we need, I think, more innovation in that area. >> Yeah, there's some technical issues. I talk a lot of startups, and they're jumpin' around from Azure to Amazon, and everyone comes back to Amazon because they say, and I'm not going to name names, but I'll just categorically say with what's going on is when they get to Microsoft and Oracle and IBM, the old kind of guards is they come in and they find that they check the boxes on the literature, oh, they do this, that, and that, but it's really just a lot of reverse proxies, there's a lot of homegrown stuff in there-- >> Yeah. >> That are making it work and hang together but not purely built from the ground up. >> Exactly, yeah, so they're actually sort of re-bottling the old sort of champagne kind of stuff, like they re-label old stuff and put layers of abstraction on top of it and that's why we're having those problems with the sort of legacy vendors. >> So let's get into some of the things that I know you're talking about a lot on Twitter, we're engaging on with with the community is migration, and so I want to kind of put a context to the questions so we can riff together on it. Let's just say that you and I were hired by the the CIO of a huge enterprise, financial services, pick your vertical. >> Yeah. >> Hey, Sarbjeet and John, fix my problems, and they give us the keys to the kingdom, bag of money, whatever it takes, go make it happen. What do we do, what's the first things that we do? Because they got a legacy, we know what it looks like, you got the networks, you're racking stack, top-of-rack switches, you got perimeter-based security. We got to go in and kind of level the playing field. What's our strategy, what do we what do we recommend? >> Yeah, the first thing first, right? So first, we need to know the drivers for the migration, right, what is it? Is it a cost-cutting, is it the agility, is it mergers and acquisitions? So what are the, what is the main driver? So that knowing that actually will help us like divvy up the problem, actually divide it up. The next thing, the next best practice is, I always suggest, I've done quite a few migrations, is that do the application portfolio analysis first. You want to find that low-hanging fruit which can be moved to the cloud first. The reason, main reason behind that is that your people and processes need to ease into using the cloud. I use consumption term a lot, actually on Twitter you see that, so I'm a big fan of consumption economics. So your people and processes need to adapt, like your change control, change management, ITSM, the old stuff still is valid, actually. We're giving it a new name, but those problems don't go away, right? How you log a ticket, how you how the support will react and all that stuff, so it needs to map to the cloud. SLA is another less talked about topic in our circles on Twitter, and our industry partners don't talk about, but that's another interesting part. Like what are the SLAs needed for, which applications and so forth. So first do the application profiling, find the low-hanging fruit. Go slow in the beginning, create the phases, like phase one, phase two, phase three, phase four. And it also depends number, on the number of applications, right? IBM folks were talking about that thousand average number of applications per enterprise. I think it's more than thousand, I've seen it. And that, just divvy up the problem. And then another best practice I've learned is migrate as is, do not transform and migrate, because then you're at, if something is not working over there or the performance problem or any latency problem, you will blame it on your newer architecture, if you will. Move as is, then then transform over there. And if you want me to elaborate a little more on the transformation part, I usually divide transformation into three buckets, actually this is what I tell the CIOs and CTOs and CEOs, that transformation is of three types. Well, after you move, transformation, first it is the infrastructure-led transformation. You can do the platforming and go from Windows to Linux and Linux to AIX and all that stuff, like you can go from VM to container kind of stuff, right? And the second is a process-led transformation, which is that you change your change control, change management, policy-driven computing, if you will, so you create automation there. The third thing is the application where you open the hood of the application and refactor the code and do the Web service enablement of your application so that you can weave in the systems of innovation and plug those into the existing application. So you want to open your application. That's the whole idea behind all this sort of transformation is your applications are open so you can bring in the data and take out the data as you weave. >> From your conversations and analysis, how does cloud, once migrations happen in cloud operations, how does that impact traditional network, network architecture, network security, and application performance? >> On the network side, actually, how does it, let me ask you a question, what do you mean by how does it-- >> In the old days, used a provisional VLAN. >> The older stuff? >> So I got networks out there, I got a big enterprise, okay, we know how to run the networks, but now I'm movin' to the cloud. >> Yeah. >> I'm off premises, I'm on premise, now I'm in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> How do I think about the network's differently? Whose provisioning the subnets, who's doing the VPNs? You know, where's the policy, all these policy-based things that we're startin' to see at Kubernetes. >> Yeah. >> They were traditionally like networks stuff-- >> You knew what it was. >> That's now happening at the microservices level. >> Yeah. >> So new paradigm. >> The new paradigm, actually, the whole idea is that your network folks, your storage folks, your server folks, like what they were used to be in-house, they need to be able to program, right? That's the number one thing. So you need to retrain your workforce, right? If you don't have the, you cannot retrain people overnight, and then you bring in some folks who know how to program networks and then bring those in. There's a big misconception about, from people, that the service, sorry, the service provider, which is called cloud service provider, is it responsible for the security of your applications or for the network, sort of segmentation of your network. They are not, actually, they don't have any liability over security if you read the SLAs. It's your responsibility to have the sort of right firewalling, right checks and balances in place for the network for storage, for compute, right policies in place. It's your responsibility. >> So let's talk about the, some tweets you've been doin' 'cause I've been wanting to pull the ones that I like. You tweeted a couple days ago, we don't know how to recycle failed startups. >> Yeah. (chuckles) >> Okay, and I said open source. And you picked up and brought up another image, is open source a dumping ground for failed startups? And it was interesting because what I love about open source is, in the old days of proprietary software, if the company went under, the code went under with it, but at least now, with open source, at least something can survive. But you bring up this dumping concept, that also came up in an interview earlier today with another guest which was with all this contribution coming in from vendors, it's almost like there's a dumping going on into open source in general, and you can't miss a beat without five new announcements per day that's, you know, someone's contributing their software from this project or a failed, even failed startup, you know, last hope, let's open source it. Is that good or bad, I mean, what's your take on that, what was your posture or thinking around this conversation? It is good, is it bad? >> Yeah, I believe it's, it's a economic problem, economics thing, right? So when somebody's like proprietary model doesn't work, they say, okay, let me see if this works, right? Actually, they always go first with like, okay let me sell-- >> Make money. >> Let me make money, right? A higher margin, right, everybody loves that, right? But then, if they cannot penetrate the market, they say, okay, let me make it open source, right? And then I will get the money from the support, or my own distro, like, distros are a big like open source killer, I said that a few times. Like the vendor-specific distributions of open source, they kill open source like nothing else does. Because I was at Rackspace when we open-sourced OpenStack, and I saw what happened to OpenStack. It was like eye-opening, so everybody kind of hijacked OpenStack and started putting their own sort of flavors in place. >> Yeah, yeah, we saw the outcome of that. >> Yeah. >> It niched into infrastructures of service, kind of has a special purpose-built view. >> And when I-- >> And that it comes cloud native didn't help either. Cloud grew at that time, too, talking about the 2008 timeframe. >> Yeah, yeah, and exactly. And another, why I said that was, it was in a different context, actually, I invested some money into an incubator in Berkeley, The Batchery, so we have taken what, 70-plus startups through that program so far, and I've seen that pattern there. So I will interview the people who want to bring their startup to our incubator and all that, and then after, most of them fail, right? >> Yeah. >> They kind of fade away or they leave, they definitely leave our incubator after a certain number of weeks, but then you see like what happens to them, and now also living in the Valley, you can't avoid it. I worked with 500 Startups a little bit and used to go to their demo days from the Rackspace days because we used to have a deal with them, a marketing deal, so the pattern I saw that was, there's a lot of innovation, there was a lot of brain power in these startups that we don't know what, these people just fade away. We don't have a mechanism to say, okay, hey you are doing this, and we are also doing similar stuff, we are a little more successful than, let's merge these two things and make it work. So we don't know how to recycle the startups. So that's what was on it. >> It's almost a personal network of intellectual capital. >> Yeah. >> Kind of, there needs to be a new way to network in the IP that's in people's heads. Or in this case, if it's open source, that's easy there, too, so being inaccessible. >> So there's no startup, there's no Internet of startups, if you will. >> Yeah, so there's no-- >> Hey, you start a CUBE group. (Sarbjeet laughing) You'll do it, start a CrowdChat. All right, I want to ask you about this consumption economics. >> Yeah. >> I like this concept. Can you take a minute to explain what you mean by consumption economics? You said you're all over it. I know you talk a lot about it on Twitter. >> Yes. >> What is it about, why is it important? >> Actually, the pattern I've seen in tech industry for last 25, 24 years in Silicon Valley, so the pattern I've seen is that everybody focuses on the supply side, like we do this, we like, we're going to change the way you work and all that stuff, but people usually do not focus on the consumption side of things, like people are consuming things. I'm a great fan of a theory called Jobs to Be Done theory. If you get a time, take a look at that. So what jobs people are trying to do and how you can solve that problem. Actually, if you approach your products, services from that angle, that goes a long way. Another aspect I talk about, the consumption economics, is age of micro-consumption, and again, there are reasons behind it. The main reason is there's so much thrown at us individually and and also enterprise-wise, like so much technology is thrown at us, if we try to batch, like if were ready to say, okay, we're not going to consume the technology now, and we're going to do every six months, like we're going to release every six months, or new software or new packages, and also at the same time, we will consume every six months, that doesn't work. So the whole notion when I talk about the micro-consumption is that you keep bringing the change in micro-chunks. And I think AWS has mastered the game of micro-supply, as a micro-supplier of that micro-change. >> Yeah. >> If you will. So they release-- >> And by the way, they're very customer-centric, so listening to the demand side. >> Exactly. So they kind of walk hand in hand with the customer in a way that customer wants this, so they're needing this, so let us release it. They don't wait for like old traditional model of like, okay, every year there's a new big release and there are service packs and patches and all that stuff, even though other vendors have moved along the industry. But they still have longer cycles, they still release like 10 things at a time. I think that doesn't work. So you have to give, as a supplier, to the masses of the workers of the world in HPs and IBMs, give the change in smaller chunks, don't give them monolithic. When you're marketing your stuff, even marketing message should be in micro-chunks, like or even if you created like five sort of features and sort of, let's, say in Watson, right, just give them one at a time. Be developer-friendly because developers are the people who will consume that stuff. >> Yeah, and then making it more supply, less supply side but micro-chunks or microservices or micro-supply. >> Yeah. >> Having a developer piece also plays well because they're also ones who can help assemble the micro, it's in a LEGO model of composeability. >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so I think that's definitely right. The other thing I wanted to get your thoughts on is validated by Jerry Chen at Greylock and his hot startups and a few others is my notion of stack overhaul. The changes in the stack are significant. I tweeted, and you commented on it, on the Red Hat IBM deal 'cause they were talkin' about, oh, the IBM stack is going to be everywhere, and they're talking about the IBM stack and the old full-stack developer model, but if you look at the consumption economics, you look at horizontally scalable cloud, native serverless and all those things goin' on with Kubernetes, the trend is a complete radical shifting of the stack where now the standardization is the horizontally scalable, and then the differentiations at the top of the stack, so the stack has tweaked and torqued it a little bit. >> Yeah. >> And so this is going to change a lot. Your thoughts and reaction to that concept of stack, not a complete, you know, radical wholesale change, but a tweak. >> Actually our CTO at Rackspace, John Engates, gave us a sort of speech at one of the kind of conferences here in Bay Area, the title of that was Stack, What Stack, right? So the point he was trying to make was like stack is like, we are not in the blue stack, red stack anymore, so we are a cross-stack, actually. There are a lot of the sort of small LEGO pieces, we're trying to put those together. And again, the reason behind that is because there's some enabling technology like Web services in RESTful APIs, so those have enabled us to-- >> And new kinds of glue layers, if you will. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Abstraction layers. >> Yeah, I call it digital glue. There's a new type of digital glue, and now we have, we are seeing the emergence of low code, no code sort of paradigms coming into the play, which is a long debate in itself. So they are changing the stack altogether. So everything is becoming kind of lightweight, if you will, again-- >> And more the level of granularity is getting, you know, thinner and thinner, not macro. So you know, macroservices doesn't exist. That was my, I think, my tweet, you know, macroservices or microservices? >> Yeah. >> Which one you think's better? And we know what's happening with microservices. That is the trend. >> That is the trend. >> So that is that antithesis of macro. >> Yeah. >> Or monolithic. >> Yeah, so there's a saying in tech, actually I will rephrase it, I don't know exactly how that is, so we actually tend to overestimate the impact of a technology in the short run and underestimate in the long term, right? So there's a famous saying somebody, said that, and that's, I think that's so true. What we actually wanted to do after the dot-com bust was the object-oriented, like the sort of black box services, it as, we called them Web services back then, right? >> Yeah. >> There were books written by IBM-- >> Service-oriented architecture-- >> Yeah, SOA. >> Web services, RSS came out of that. >> Yes. >> I mean, a lot of good things that are actually in part of what the vision is happening today. >> It's happening now actually, it just happening today. And mobile has changed everything, I believe, not only on the consumer side, even on the economic side. >> I mean, that's literally 16, 17 years later. >> Yes, exactly, it took that long. >> It's the gestation period. >> Yes. >> Bitcoin 10 years ago yesterday, the white paper was built. >> Yeah. >> So the acceleration's certainly happening. I know you're big fan of blockchain, you've been tweeting about it lately. Thoughts on blockchain, what's your view on blockchain? Real, going to have a big impact? >> I think it will have huge impact, actually. I've been studying on it, actually. I was light on it, now I'm a little bit, I'm reading on it this and I understand. I've talked to people who are doing this work. I think it will have a huge impact, actually. The problem right now with blockchain is that, the speed, right? >> It's slow, yeah. So yeah, it's very slow, doc slow, if you will. But I think that is a technical problem, we can solve that. There's no sort of functional problem with the blockchain. Actually, it's a beautiful thing. Another aspect which come into play is the data sovereignty. So blockchains actually are replicated throughout the world if you want the worldwide money exchange and all that kind of stuff going around. We will need to address that because the data in Switzerland needs to sit there, and data in the U.S. needs to stay in the U.S. That blockchain actually kind of, it doesn't do that. You have a copy of the same data everywhere. >> Yeah, I mean, you talk about digital software to find money, software to find data center. I mean, it's all digital. I mean, someone once said whatever gets digitized grows exponentially. (Sarbjeet laughing) Oh, that was you! >> Actually I-- >> On October 30th. >> That was, that came from a book, actually. It's called Exponential Organizations. Actually, they're two great books I will recommend for everybody to read, actually there's a third one also. So (laughs) the two are, one is Exponential Organizations. It's a pretty thin book, you should take, pick it up. And it talks about like whatever get digitized grows exponentially, but our organizations are not, like geared towards handling that exponential growth. And the other one is Consumption Economics. The title of the book is Consumption Economics, actually. I saw that book after I started talking about it, consumption economics myself. I'm an economics major, actually, so that's why I talk about that kind of stuff and those kind comments, so. >> Well, and I think one of the things, I mean, we've talked about this privately when we've seen each other at some of theCUBE events, I think economics, the chief economic officer role will be a title that will be as powerful as a CSO, chief security officer, because consumption economics, token economics which is the crypto kind of dynamic of gamification or network effects, you got economics in cloud, you got all kinds of new dynamics that are now instrumented that need, that are, they're throwin' off numbers. So there's math behind things, whether it's cryptocurrency, whether it's math behind reputation, or any anything. >> Yeah. >> Math is driving everything, machine learning, heavy math-oriented algorithms. >> Yeah, actually at the end of the day, economics matters, right? That's what we are all trying to do, right? We're trying to do things faster cheaper, right? That's what automation is all about. >> And simplifying, too. >> And simplifying service. >> You can't throw complexity in, more complexity. >> Yeah. >> That's exponential complexity. >> Sometimes while we are trying to simplify things, and I also said, like many times the tech is like medicine, right? I've said that many times. (laughs) Tech is like medicine, every pill has a side effect. Sometimes when we are trying to simplify stuff, we add more complexity, so. >> Yeah. What's worse, the pain or the side effects? Pick your thing. >> Yeah, you pick your thing. And your goal is to sort of reduce the side effects. They will be there, they will be there. And what is digital transformation? It's all about business. It's not, less about technology, technology's a small piece of that. It's more about business models, right? So we're trying to, when we talk about micro-consumption and the sharing economy, they're kind of similar concepts, right? So Ubers of the world and Airbnbs all over the world, so those new business models have been enabled by technology, and we want to to replicate that with the medicine, with the, I guess, education, autos, and you name it. >> So we obviously believe in microcontent at theCUBE. We've got the Clipper tool, the search engine. >> I love that. >> So the CUBEnomics. It's a book that we should be getting on right away. >> Yeah, we should do that! >> CUBEnomics. >> CUBEnomics, yeah. >> The economics behind theCUBE interviews. Sarbjeet, thank you for coming on. Great to see you, and thank you for your participation-- >> Thanks, John. >> And engagement online in our digital community. We love chatting with you and always great to see you, and let's talk more about economics and digital exponential growth. It's certainly happening. Thanks for coming in, appreciate it. >> It was great having, being here, actually. >> All right, the CUBE Conversation, here in Palo Alto Studios here for theCUBE headquarters. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (lively orchestral music)

Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's the Cube. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by, Blockchain Industries. >> Welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the Cube, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. In Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound, this is a global conference. Going to the next level in industry migration up and growth, and blockchain, decentralized internet and obviously cryptocurrency, changing the world up and down the stack. I have an industry veteran here. My next guest Salim is founding CEO, Singularity University and author of the best-selling book, Exponential Organizations. He's seen many waves, friend, known him for years. Haven't seen you in a while, you look great. You haven't changed. >> (laughs) The hair has changed a lot. >> (laughs) I've still got mine. Hey great to see you. Bumping into you in Puerto Rico is really compelling because you have a nose for the future, and I've always respected that about you. You have the ability to understand at the root level what's going on but also pull back and see the big picture. Puerto Rico is the center of all the action because the killer wrap in this is money. So money is driving a lot of change, but there's some fundamental infrastructure, stack upgrades going on. Blockchain has been highly discussed, crypto is highly hyped, ICO's are-- Scammers out there but now some legits. What's your take? What's your view right now on the current situation? >> Well I think what's happening with a place like Puerto Rico is. When you get kind of wiped out of the old, you have the chance to leap-frog. When you think about any of our traditional environments, laying down Blockchain technologies, et cetera. It's really, really hard because you have to get the Supreme Court, the Constitution to approve blockchain based land titles, and then you build a stack there from a legal perspective. Here they can basically start from scratch and do it completely from the ground up. Which is what's exciting for everybody here. >> The top story that we've been reporting here is that Puerto Rico is rebooting. The hurricane obviously, I won't say a forcing function, but in general when you get wiped out, that is certainly an opportunity to rebuild. If there's any kind of silver lining in that. >> There's a long history of that. Japan got wiped out during World War II, so did Germany and they rebounded incredibly. We've seen that recently with Rwanda. We do a lot of work in Medillin, in Colombia, and that's just been one of the worst cities in the world, is now the most innovative city in the world. So this is the transition that we've seen a pattern for. >> One of the things I'm really excited about decentralization and blockchain is all the conversations have the same pattern. Efficiency is getting wired into things. So if you see slack in the system or inefficiencies, entrepreneurs are feeling the void. The entrepreneurial eye of the tiger goes that to that opportunity to reset, reduce steps, save time and make things easier. Classic value proposition in these new markets. You run a great university but also author of Exponential Organizations. A lot of people are scared, they're like, "Whoa, hold on. Slow down, this is bullshit, "we're not going to prove it." And then the other half saying, "No this is the future." So you have two competing forces colliding. You have the new guard saying, "We got to do this, this is the future." Old guard saying, "Blocks, Road blocks, blockers" You covered this in your book in a way, so how do you win, who wins? How do you create a win win? >> You can create a win win. What you have to do is leap-frog to the newest, fast as possible. The only question is, how can you get to the new? And the problem that you have is, as you rightly pointed out is. When you try disruptive innovation in any large organization or institution, the immune system attacks. I saw this at Yahoo running Brickhouse. Yahoo is supposedly a super advanced organization, and yet the minute you try to do something really radical, you spend all your time fighting the mother ship. So I've been focusing a lot of time the last few years focused on that particular problem, and we're pretty excited, we believe we've cracked it. >> How does someone crack that code? If I'm Puerto Rico, obviously the government officials are here at Blockchain Unbound. This is not just a tech conference. It's like a tech conference, investor conference, kind of world economic form rolled into one. >> Sure >> There's some serious players here. What's your advice to them? >> So what we do, and let me describe what we do in the private sector and what we do in the public sector. A couple of years ago, the global CI of Procter & Gamble came to me and said, "Hey, we'd like to work with you." And what we typically see is, some executive from a big company will come to Singularity. They'll go back headquarters with their hair on fire going, "Oh my god!" If they're from BMW for example. They go back going, "Drones, autonomous cars, hyperloop, VR." Back in Munich, they'll be given a white coat and some medicine and be put in a corner. "You're too crazy, now stand over there." And that's the tension that you are talking about. And then somebody else will come six months later then they'll do the Silicon Valley tour, then they'll have one of our people go over there, and it takes about three years for the big company to get up to speed, just the C-Suite to get up to speed. Forget transmitting that down. So I was talking to Linda Clement-Holmes and I said, "Look we're about to start this three year dance "I've been thinking about this, "let's shrink it to 10 weeks." So we designed what we now call an ExO Sprint. Which is how you get a leadership, culture and management thinking of a legacy organization, three years ahead in a 10 week process. And the way we do it is, we're in an opening workshop, that's really shock and awe. Freaks out all the incumbent management. And then young leaders and future lieutenants of the business do the thinking of what should come next. And they report back. Some thing about that opening workshop suppresses the immune system, and when the new ideas arrive they don't attack them in the same way. >> It's like a transplant if you will. >> It's like when you do a kidney transplant. You suppress the immune system, right? It's that same idea. So we've now run that like a dozen times. We just finished TD Ameritrade, HP, Visa, Black & Decker, et cetera. We're open-sourcing it. We're writing a manual on how to do it so that anybody can self-provision that process and run it. Because, every one of the Global 5000 has to go through that process with or without us. So then we said, "Okay, could we apply it to the public sector?" Where the existing policy is the immune system. You try and update transportation and you're fighting the taxis. Or education and you're fighting the teacher's unions. We have a 16 week process that we run in cities. We do it through a non-profit called the Fastrack Institute based out of Miami. We've run it four times in Medillin, in Colombia and we just finished four months with the mayor of Miami on the future of transportation. We're talking to the officials here about running a similar process here in Puerto Rico. >> Are they serious about that? Because they throw money at projects, it kind of sits on the vine, dies on the vine. Because there is an accelerated movement right now. I mean, exponential change is here. I'll give you an example. We're seeing and reporting that this digital nation trend is on fire. Suddenly everyone wants digital cities, IoT is out there. But now what cryptocurrency, the money being the killer app. It's flowing everywhere, out of Colombia, out of everywhere. Every country is moving money around with crypto it's easier, faster. So everyone is trying to be the crypto, ICO city. Saw it on Telegram today, France wants to be, Paris wants to be the ICO city. Puerto Rico, Bahrain, Armenia, Estonia. U.K. just signed a deal with Coinbase. What the hell is going on? How do you rationalize this and what do you see as a future of state here? >> Well I think, couple of thoughts. And you're hitting into some of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently. Number one is, that when you have a regulatory blockage, it's a huge economic developing opportunity for anybody that can leap-frog it. Nevada authorized autonomous cars early and now a lot of testing is done there. So the cities that have appreciated-- >> So you're saying regulatory is an opportunity to have a competitive advantage? >> Huge, because look at Zug in Switzerland. Nobody had ever heard of the place. You pass through there on the way to Zermatt. But now it's like a destination that everybody needs to get to because they were earlier. This is the traditional advantage of places like Hong Kong or Dubai or whatever. They're open and they're hungry. So we're going to see a lot of that going on. I think there's a bigger trend though, which is that we're seeing more and more action happen at the city level and very, very little happen at the national or global level. The world is moving too fast today for a big country to keep up. It's all going to happen this next century at the city level. >> Or smaller countries. >> Or small countries. >> So what's going on here at Blockchain Unbound for you? Why are you here? What are you doing? What's your story? >> I have this kind of sprint that we run in the private sector and in the public sector and then a community of about 200 consultants. And I have to pay 200 people in 40 countries and it's and unholy mess. Withholding taxes and concerns around money transfer costs-- >> It's a hassle. >> It's a nightmare. And so I've been thinking about an internal cryptocurrency just to pay our network. All of a sudden now, three or four countries have said, "Hey we want to buy that thing, "to have access to your network." So I've got all this demand over here, and I need to figure out how to design this thing properly. So I've been working with some of the folks like Brock and DNA and others to help think through it. But what I'm really excited about here is that, there's a-- You know what I love is the spectrum of dress. You got the radical, Burning Man, hippie guy, all the way to a three-piece suit. And that diversity is very, very rich and really, real creativity comes from it. This feels like the web in '96, '95. It's just starting, people know there's something really magical. They don't quite know what to do. >> Well what I'm impressed about is that there's no real bad vibe from either sets of groups. There's definitely some posturing, I've noticed some things. Obviously I'm wearing a jacket, so those guys aren't giving me hugs like they're giving Brock a hug. I get that, but the thing is, the coexistence is impressive. I'm not seeing any real mud-slinging, again I didn't like how Brock got handled with John Oliver. I thought that was unacceptable because he's done a lot of good work. I don't know him personally, I've never met him, but I like what he's doing, I like his message. His keynote here, at d10e, was awesome. Really the right messaging, I thought. That's something that I want to get behind and I think everyone should. But he just got trashed. Outside of that, welcoming culture. And they're like, "Hey if you don't like it, "just go somewhere else." They're not giving people a lot of shit for what they do. It's really accepting on all sides. >> Here's my take on the whole decentralization thing. We run the world today on a series of very top down hierarchical structures. The corporation, the military industrial complex, Judeo-Christian religions, et cetera. That are very hierarchical-- Designed for managing scarcity, right? We're moving the world very, very quickly to abundance. We now have an abundance of information, we'll soon have an abundance of energy, we'll soon have an abundance of money, et cetera. And when you do these new structures, you need very decentralized structures. Burning Man, the maker movement, the open-source movement, et cetera. It's a very nurturing, participatory, female type of archetype and we're moving very quickly to that. What we're seeing in the world today is the tension going from A to B. >> And also when you have that next level, you usually have entrepreneurs and sponsorships. People who sponsor entrepreneurs the promotion side of it, PR and that starts the industry. Then when it hits that level it's like, "Wow it's going to the next level." Then it gets capital markets to come in. Then you have new stake holders coming in now with government officials. This thing is just rocket-shipping big time. >> Yes >> And so, that's going to change the dynamics. Your thoughts and reaction to that dynamic. >> Completely, for example... When we do these public sprints we end up usually with a decentralized architecture that needs to built. For example, we're working with the justice system in Colombia. And the Supreme Court has asked us to come in and re-do the entire justice system. Now you think about all the court filings and court dates, and briefs, and papers all should be digitized and put on a blockchain type structure because it's all public filing. We have an opportunity to completely re-do that stack and then make that available to the rest of the world. I think that trend is irreversible for anything that previously had centered-- I mean, most government services are yes, ratifying this and ratifying that. They all disappear. >> Well Salim, I want to tap your brain for a second. Since you're here, get it out there, I want to throw a problem at you, quick real time riff with you. So one of the things that I've been thinking about is obviously look at what cloud computing did, no one saw Amazon web services early, except some of the insiders like us. Who saw it's easy to host and build a data center. "I have no money, I'm a start-up or whatever." You use AWS, EC2 and S3... They were misunderstood, now it's clear what they're doing. But that generated the DevOps movement. So question for you is, I want to riff with you on is, "Okay that created programmable infrastructure, "the notion of server-less now going mainstream." Meaning, I don't have to talk about the server, I need resource so I can just make software, make it happen. That's flipped around the old model, where it used to be the network would dictate to the applications what they could do. How is that DevOps ethos, certainly it's driven by open-source, get applied to this cryptocurrency? Because now you have blockchain, cryptocurrency, ICO is kind of an application if you will, capital market. How does that model get flipped? Is there a DevOps model, a blockchain ops model, where the decentralized apps are programming the blockchain? Because the plumbing is the moving chain right now. You got, Hashgraph's got traction, then you got Etherium, Lightning's just got 2.5 million dollars. I mean, anyone who's technical knows it's a moving train in the plumbing. But the business logic is pretty well-defined. I'm like, "I want to innovate this process. "I'm going to eliminate the efficiency." So this dynamic. Does the business model drive infrastructure? Does the plumbing drive the business model? Your thoughts on this new dynamic and how that plays out. >> I suspect you and in violent agreement here. It's always going to be lead by the business model because you need something to act as the power of pull to pull the thing along, right? The real reason for the success of Etherium right now is all the ICOs and it was a money driven thing. Today we're going to see these new stacks, now we're on version three of these new types of stacks coming along, and I think they're all looking for a business model. Once we find some new killer ops for this decentralized structure, then you'll see things happen. But the business model is where it's at. >> So basically I agree with you. I think we're on the same page here. But then advice would be to the entrepreneurs, don't fret about the infrastructure, just nail your business model because the switching cost might not be as high as you think. Where in the old days, when we grew up, you made a bad technical assess and you're out of business. So it's kind of flipped around. >> Yeah, just hearing about this term, atomic swaps. Where you can just, essentially once you have a tokenized structure, you can just move it to something else pretty quickly. Therefore, all the effort should be on that. I think finding the really compelling use cases for this world is going to be fascinating to see. >> So software-defined money, software-defined business, software defined society is coming. >> Yes >> Okay, software defined, that's the world Salim thanks for coming on, sharing your awesome expert opinon. Congratulations on your awesome book. How many countries is your book, Exponential Organizations-- >> It's now about a quarter of a million copies in 15 languages. >> Required reading in all MBA programs, and the C-Suite. Congratulations, it's like the TANEx Engineering that Mark Dandriso put out. A whole new paradigm of management is happening. Digital transformation. >> We now have the ability to scale an organization structure as fast as we can scale technology. >> Blockchain you know, the nature of the firm was all about having people in one spot. So centralized, you can manage stuff. Now with blockchain you have a decentralized organization. That's your new book, the Decentralized Organization. >> Although, I'm not sure I have another book in me. >> There's a book out there for somebody, Decentralized Organizations. Salim, thank you for joining us. The Cube here, I'm John Furrier the co-host. Day two coverage of Blockchain Unbound more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for our CUBE Conversation, taking a little break from the shows as we get ready, actually, for the winter break which will be a nice little break for us and the crews and the gear. This is different, exciting. It's a little bit more intimate. We're really excited to have our next guest. He's Sunil Khandekar. He's the founder and CEO of Nuage Networks which is part of Nokia, a CUBE alumni. I think we last saw you at DockerCon 2016. >> That's right. >> Jeff: So, great to see you. >> Good to see you again. >> Absolutely, so, been a little more than a year. >> Sunil: That's right. >> So, what do you see as the evolution since we last spoke at DockerCon? >> Sure, it's been great. I couldn't be more pleased with the momentum that we have garnered in the industry: more adoption of our solution, more validation, more events, more customers. >> Jeff: (chuckling) >> Which is great, that's all good stuff. And really, more specifically, in terms of adoption, large service providers across the globe like BT, Telefonica, TELUS, Exponential-e, they're all adopted and launched with our SDN solution. We have had breakthrough wins in terms of public cloud whether it's Fujitsu or whether it's an NTD Data like China Mobile. And of course, you know we continue to have a solid momentum in financial services companies, for private cloud automation, as well as to provide them security software to find security in addition to the private cloud automation. And we had another breakthrough win in China Pacific Insurance Company. So, that continues, and of course it's great always to receive some good validation. So we've won award at MEF on the best SDN solution recently. We won the Right Stuff Award, Innovation Award at ONUG for software-defined security. And every leading analyst firm, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, IHS Markit, ACG, and recently Global Data, they've all put us in the top two as the inventors for doing automation of networking end-to-end. >> Right, because automation in networking was the last piece of kind of the virtualization stack, right, in the automation. So, what is it that you think that you guys are doing special that's allowing you to win? >> Right, so if you remember when we talked, when we started Nuage, we started Nuage to automate networking end-to-end with a software-based approach at the heart of which is a declarative policy and analytics engine. And what that means is we were doing intent-based networking before it was even a thing. >> Jeff: Right. >> And we were doing software-defined networking but in a way that allowed us to do software-defined networking not only in the data center, between the data centers to the public cloud across the wide area and to the enterprise branches. What that means is you're not providing a siloed automation, but we are doing automation end-to-end because ultimately it's about connecting users to the applications. >> Right, right, you had a great quote. I picked it up in doing some research. You know, the metaproblem is you said, "Connect users everywhere to applications everywhere," a really simple kind of statement of purpose but not very simple to execute. >> Sunil: You got it. >> A lot of complexity behind that statement. >> That's right, that's right, incredible amount of complexity, but it's important to construct the metaproblem, look at what it is that enterprises have pain with. They have, let's look at it, right? They have users everywhere, and they want to connect to applications anywhere whether it's private or public cloud. How do they want to do it? Quickly, securely, in a self-service manner, but they want this agility without sacrificing safety and security. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So what you have is you've got to solve this network automation problem for brownfield or greenfield, because there is nothing like just greenfields. >> Right. >> And we are to do it in their private data centers. You've got to help them burst into the public cloud securely. And you've got to connect all their branch sites together. And what we've seen in the industry and our competitors, they are taking a very narrow view of the problem. So what they have is an automation for only the data centers and automation for just the wide area. And that's only solving half the problem. >> Right, right, and then you've got these pesky things that have just reestablished the expected behavior, the expected access, and oh, by the way, added significantly more attack surfaces and really changed the game in terms of what people want from their applications, what they expect from their applications. And it's tough for businesses to deliver to this level of promise. >> Indeed, and you know, the wall is about instant gratification. You want access to your data quickly, instantly wherever you are. >> Right. >> And what that means is, as consumers, we have everything at our fingertips. But as soon as you step into the business environment, that's completely not true. And so, it's all about consumerization of IT on how do you make IT that agile, how do you actually modernize IT. Because enterprises, their high-order problem is what? To innovate faster by having massive automation across all aspects of their business. What underpins that is a modern IT and cloud architecture. And what underpins modern IT and cloud architecture is three clear things that we are seeing in the industry: software-defined data centers, software-defined wide area network, and software-defined security. So, we like and our customers love that we've thought the problem end-to-end and provide all these three, which is absolutely unique in the industry. No one does this. >> So, I'm curious to get your perspective cause you've been doing this for awhile. >> Sunil: Yes. >> As the security landscape has changed. >> Sunil: That's right. >> Everyone is getting, we get reports every day, we're numb to it now. You know, basically everyone at Yahoo got hacked. >> Sunil: That's right. >> And Equifax got hacked, so everyone's getting hacked. So it's really not about the big wall anymore. There's no such thing as the big wall. >> Sunil: That's right. >> The wall's about crumbled. So it's evolving. We've also seen an increase in state-sponsored attacks as opposed to just kids having fun in the basement. >> Sunil: Yeah. >> How have you seen the evolution of the attacks change and how have you responded within your solutions over this period of time to kind of evolve to the modern security stance that you have to have? >> Look every CXO I meet, the absolute thing that's top of mind is how do you make us go from where we are, a traditional environment, to a higher edge automated environment but make it more secure than what we have. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And as you noted, the attack surface has increased thanks to the mobility. And you have a lot more surface area because you have applications in public cloud, you have applications in private cloud, you have more mobile users. So, the industry term that often gets used is microsegmentation. Now, what that means is, and that's in response to the fact that, as you noted again, that perimeter security just doesn't cut it anymore. And not only that, but it's also very complex and very manual. So what you've got to do is, while you're automating the data centers, while you're automating the wide area, you've got to bring the security along. You've got to make it as agile. And again, what we have done is we do microsegmentation from the branch all the way to where the application is for that particular user. So in other words, finance users can only access finance applications. And that's a microsegment end-to-end. No one in the industry does that today. What they do is they do microsegmentation only for the applications within the data center or they prevent just the users to communicate between each other but not users to the applications. So, that is very important for our customers to know that we have that capability. But then it's all about also understanding what's going on in the network. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that's where the rich analytics that we have just really help them understand who's talking to who at application level, and being able to then have that domain-wide view and be able to very quickly respond to CERT alerts. So, because today, when a CERT alert comes in, they don't know what to do. They take a brute force approach because they simply don't know where and how to react. But now, because you have this centralized intelligence and you have domain-wide view, and you're able to do microsegmentation end-to-end, you are able to push a button and be as course or as granular but be very surgical and take action very quickly. >> Alright, so, hard to believe that we're almost to the end of 2017 which I can't believe. So as we turn the calendar, what are some of your priorities for 2018? You've been doing this for awhile. What are you working on? What's kind of top of mind as we enter this new calendar year? >> Right, and what we are noticing is we're going from beachheads to mainstream. So, we are getting deployed. The solid deployments is not only as I noted in data centers, in public cloud, private cloud, but also in the wide area. We are collaborating with our customers to really make this mainstream because it is super-important in terms of not only providing that automation and agility but also the security. So that's what we are focused on. We continue to do that, not only for what we call the virtualized security services solution that we have and not only the telco clouds, but also the virtualized services, cloud services. We're going to cover the gamut and that's what we're after. We are really excited to be leading the charge here. >> Alright, well, Sunil, thanks for taking a few minutes. Hopefully it won't be 18 months before we sit down again. And we look forward to watching the progress. >> Great, thank you. Thank you for having me. >> It's a pleasure. He's Sunil. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)