(light upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's day two live coverage of VMware Explore 2022 from Moscone Center in San Francisco. Lisa Martin here as your host with Dave Nicholson. We've got a couple of guests here and we have some props on set. Get a load of this Nature Fresh Farms produce. Keith Bradley joins us, the VP of IT from Nature Fresh Farms, and Alison Biers is back, as well, director of marketing at Edge Solutions for Dell. Guys, welcome back to the program and thanks for bringin' some food. >> Well, thank you, yeah. >> Thank you so much. >> So, Keith, talk to us a little bit about technology from Nature Fresh Farm's perspective. How do we look at this farming organization as a tech company? >> As technical, we're something that measures everything we grow. So, we're 200 acres of greenhouse, spanning probably about 3 or 400 acres of land. Everything's entirely environmentally controlled. So, the peppers that we have in front of you, the tomatoes, they're all grown and controlled from everything they get from light to moisture to irrigation and nutrients. So, we do all that. >> So, should I be able to taste the Dell goodness in these cucumbers, for example? >> I'd like to say Nature Fresh slash Dell good. >> Connect the dots for us. So, let's go through that sort of mental exercise of how are these end products for consumers better because of what you're doing in IT? >> So, one of the things that we've been able to do, and one of the transformations we made is we are now able to run our ETLs. So, analyze the data realtime at the Edge. So, making decisions which used to be only once a day based on analytics to now multiple times a day. Our ETLs used to take 8 to 10 hours to run. Now they run- >> So, extraction, transformation and load. >> Yep, yep. >> Okay. So, we consider it a party foul if you use a TLA and you don't find it the first time. >> Okay. >> But you get a pass 'cause you're an actual and real person. >> I'll give you that one. >> I already had a claim laid on that. I'm sorry, so continue. >> Yeah, yeah. So, it allowed now the growers to make multiple decisions and then you start adding the next layer. As we expanded our technology base, we started introducing AI into it. So now, AI is even starting to make decisions before the grower even knows to make them based on historical data. So, it's allowed us to become more proactive in protecting the health and longevity and even taste of that plant and the product coming out to you. >> That's awesome. Alison, talk to us about from Dell's perspective how is it helping Nature Fresh to simplify the Edge which there's a lot of complexity there? You talked about the size of the organization but how do you help simplify it? >> I think Nature Fresh had a lot of common problems that we see customers have. So, they had some really interesting ambitions to improve their produce and do it in a GMO free way and really bring a quality product to their customer. But yet, they were each solving their problems on their individual farms in different ways. And so, one of the ways that we were able to help was to consolidate a lot of those silos as they were expanding the scope and scale of what they really wanted to do from a technology perspective. And then being able to do that in a secure way that's delivering the insights they need when they need them right there at the Edge is really critical. >> I think it's wonderful that we have the actual stuff here. Because we often talk in these abstract terms about outcomes. There's your outcome right there. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> But talk about this growing in the soil somewhere. You have growers. It's not an abstraction. These are actual actual people. Where does the technology organism interface occur here? You have organically grown crops. Where's that interface? Where's the first technology involved in this process? Literally physically. >> Physically. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is there a shack with a server in it somewhere? >> So, we actually have, we have a core data center at the center of Nature Fresh set up basically where everything ends up. We have our Edge. So, we have computers, we're at the Edge analyzing stuff. But if you want to go right back to the grassroots of where it actually is, is it's right at, not dirt, but a ground up coconut husk. That is what the plants are grown in. And we analyze the data right there, 'cause that is our first Edge. And people think that's static for us. The Edge isn't static. 'Cause the Edge now moves. We have a plant that grows. Then we pick it. And then we have to store it and then we have to ship it. So, our Edge actually does move from area to area to area. So, statically one thing isn't the same all the time. It's a hard thing to say how it all starts but it's just a combination of everything from natural gas to everything. >> Okay, then are those, 'cause we think of things in terms of like internet of things and these sensors. >> Oh yeah. >> Things are being gathered. So, you've got stuff happily growing in husks and then being picked. What's the next step there? Where is that aggregated? Where does that go? Is that all going straight back to your data center or are there sort of intermediate steps in the process? >> So, what we do is we actually store everything at the Edge, and we do daily processes right there. And then it aggregates that data and it drops it down from a large number to a smaller number to go to the core. >> Got it. >> And then that way, at the core, it does the long term analysis. 'Cause again, a lot of the data that we collect, we don't need to keep. A lot of it is the temperature was X, the temperature was X, the temperature, we don't need that. So, it aggregates it all down. So, that way the information coming to the core doesn't overwhelm it. Because we do store enough information. And to give you an idea of how our 1.8 million plants are living and breathing. We actually have estimated 1.8 million plants throughout our 200 acres. >> At any moment. >> Yeah. >> That's how many plants they're tracking. And so, that realtime information is helping to make sure that they water the plants precisely with the amount that they need, that they're fertilizing them. And you were telling me about how the life of a plant, you're really maintaining that plant over the life of 12 months. So, if you make a mistake at any point along the line, then you're dealing with that in terms of their yield throughout the life of the plant. But you aggregate a lot of that data right there on site so that you're not having to send so much back to the cloud or to the core. And you do that a lot with VxRail as well as other technology you have on site. Right? >> Yeah. Our VxRail is the center of the core of how we process things. It allowed us to even expand, not even just for compute but GPUs for our AIs to do it. So, it's what we did. And it allowed us to mold how we do things. >> Alison, question for you, this sounds like a dynamic Edge the way that you described it, Keith, and you described it so eloquently. How does the partnership that Dell has with Nature Fresh, how is Dell enabling and accelerating and advancing its Edge solutions based on what you're seeing here and this need for realtime data analytics. >> Well, we spend a lot of time with customers like Keith and also across all kinds of other industries. And what we see is that they have a really common set of problems. They're all trying to derive realtime data right then and there so that they can make business decisions that impact their profitability and their competitiveness and all of their customers experience their product quality. And what we see a lot of times is that they have a common set of concerns around security. How to manage all of the hardware that they're implementing. And at the same time, they really want to be an enabler for the business outcome. So, people have creative ideas and they come to IT hoping for support in that journey. If you're managing everything as a snowflake, it becomes really hard and untenable. So, I think one of the things that we have as our mission is to help customers simplify their Edge so that they can be the enabler that's helping the business to transform and modernize. One of the things I really admire about Nature Fresh Farms is that they decided it from a full organization perspective. So, everybody from the operational technologists to the IT to the business decision makers and leaders at the company, they all decided to modernize together. And so, I think from a partnership perspective, too, that's one of the areas that we try to work with our customers on is really talking about total transformation and modernization. >> So, it sounds like, Keith, there was an appetite there as Alison was saying for a digital transformation and IT transformation. Talk to me a little bit about from a historical perspective, how old Nature Fresh is and how did you get the team on board sounds so eloquent. How did you get the team on board to go, "This is what we need to do and technology needs to fuel our business because it's going to impact the end user, consumer of our fabulous English cucumbers." >> So, it's actually really neat. Our owner, Pete Quiring, when he first started out he really wanted to embrace technology. And this is going back right to 2000. 2000 is when we first had our first planting. And he was actually a builder by nature. He actually was a builder and fabricator and he built greenhouses for other companies. But he said they're getting a little bigger and it's the labor amount, and the number of growers he needed for a range was getting exponentially higher. So, he was one of the first ones that said, "I'm going to put a computer right in the middle and control this 16 acre range." >> It's a pretty visionary view when you really think about it. He's trying to operate his farm. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> From one single computer. >> Operationalize it. It's really cool. >> So, it was neat concept and it was actually very much not a normal concept then. You go back to 2000, people weren't talking about internet of things. They didn't talk about automation. It wasn't there. And he basically said, this is the way to go. And unfortunately, he thought, "I'll sell it to somebody. I'll grow it, I'll put a product in for a year and I'll sell it." And then guess what happened? He didn't sell it. He says, "Ah, it's not big enough. I'll build another phase two." And then his comment to me was after he built the fourth phase, he says, "I guess I'm in the pepper and cucumber business now." And that's what he is just grown. But he said it was a great relationship we had and it's a great concept. And it even goes back, and I know we talked about before, is the computer allowed one senior grower to control large number of acreages. Where before, you'd need multiple growers that know exactly what to do, 'cause they'd have to manually change all these things. Now, from a single computer they can see everything that's going on in the entire range. >> You mentioned temperature and water. And this is kind of out of the blue question, but how have global circumstances and increases in the cost of fertilizer affected you? Or is that fertilizer that's not the type that you use in your operation? You have any insight into that. >> Yeah, everything has, the global change in cost has changed everybody. I don't think there's anybody that's exempt from it. The only thing that we've been able to do is we're able to control it. We don't need to rely on, I guess you can say, rely on the weather to help us do things. We can control how much is. And we recycle all of our water. So, what the plant doesn't absorb today for nutrients, we'll put it back in the system, sterilize- >> Wait, when you say 200 acres, it's all enclosed? >> Yep, 200 acres. >> 200 acres of greenhouse. >> Yep, at 200 acres of greenhouse entirely enclosed. >> Okay, okay. >> There is not a single portion of our greenhouse that's actually gets exposed to the outside. And if you ever see a picture of a greenhouse and you see one of these lovely plants here wet, that's not true. That's just a nice to make it look better. >> Spray it for the photo. >> Yeah, yeah. They spray it for the photo. But actually everything is dry. That water goes directly to the roots and we monitor how much we put in and how much comes out. And then we recycle it. We even get so much recycling, we run natural gas generators to heat the water to heat the greenhouse. We take the burn-off of natural gas, the CO2, and funnel that into the greenhouse to give it natural stimulant. >> So, this is starting to remind me of "The Martian", if you read the book or if you seen the movie. >> Oh yeah. >> But planting the potatoes inside the hab, in the habitat. >> Yeah, and you cut 'em in half and the little ones grow with that next ones. But yep, we recycle everything that we do. And that's what we do. >> That's amazing. >> And all that information at their fingertips. Really, I think what technology is enabling you all to do is focus on what you all are good at, which is focusing on your farming operation and not necessarily the technology. So, one of the places I think we deliver some value is in validating a lot of the solutions so that customers don't have to figure that all out themselves. >> Yeah, 'cause I'm not a security expert. I don't always understand the true depth of security, but that's where that relationship is. We need this and we need that. And we need a secure way to let those communicate. And we can hand that off to the experts at Dell and let us do what we do best. >> What have been some of the changes? In the last couple of years, we've seen the security elevate skyrocket to a board level conversation. Ransomware is a when, not if, we get attacked. How does Dell help you from a security perspective ensure that what you're able to do ultimately gets these products to market in a secure fashion so that all that data that you're generating isn't exposed? >> So, like I said, I agree 100%. It's not matter of if it's going to happen, it's when it's going to happen. So, one of the things that we've actually done is we started to use Dell solution, the PowerProtect Data Manager to back up our solutions on the VxRail. And it actually did twofold for us. It allowed us to do a lot of database manipulation from restores and stuff like that. But we're now actually even investing in the cyber recovery vault that gives us that protection. And it allows us to now look at how long will it take us to get back up. And we're doing some tests right now and the last test we did is we're able to get back up going as a company from a full attack in about an hour. >> Wow. >> We've actually done a few simulations now. So, we are able to recover what our core needs are within an hour. >> Which is a very different metric than simply saying, "Oh, the data's available." >> Yeah. >> No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You get zero credit for that. We need our operations to be back up and running. >> Even that hour is stressful to our growers. >> Sure. >> It's a variable within a variable because if you go in the summer when it's super hot, they'll be very stressed out within an hour. And then you got nice calm weather day, it's not as bad. But the weather can change in how they have to close the vents. And you're not just closing one vent, you're closing 32, 64, 100 acres of vents. And you're changing irrigation cycle. You need that automation to do it for you. >> How do you let people eat these things after all the care that goes into it? I'm going to feel mildly guilty for just about a second and a half before I sink my teeth into the cucumber. >> Oh, but that's the joy of it. That's one of the things that I love. >> This is serious. You're proud of this, aren't you? >> Oh yeah. You know what? There's not single person at Nature Fresh that isn't proud of what we do each day. We enjoy what we do and it's a culture that makes us strive to do better every day. It's just a great feeling to be there every day and to just enjoy what you're doing. >> And see, it's real. It's real. Isn't it great? Isn't it great to be a part of? My background's in economics. I think of these things in terms of driving efficiency. And this is just a beautiful thing. When you control those variables, you leverage the technology and what's the end result? You're essentially uplifting everything in the world. >> Yeah, so true. >> Not to get philosophical on ya. >> Right, and feeding the world, especially during the last couple of years, that access. One of the things we learned in the pandemic, one of many, is access to realtime data isn't a nice to have anymore, it's essential. >> Yeah. >> So true. >> And so, the story that you're telling here, the impact to the growers, enabling them to focus what you were saying, Alison, on what they do best, Dell Technologies, VxRail enabling Nature Fresh to focus on what it does best, ultimately delivering food to people during the last couple of years was huge. >> Yeah, and allowing even at a reduced labor number for us to keep growing and doing things by automation. We still need labor in the greenhouse to pick, prune and do stuff like that. But again, we're looking into technologies to help offset that. But again, it was one of those things that we just had to be efficient at everything we do. And we drove that through everything we have. >> Well, and you guys haven't stopped. Right? >> Yeah. >> You're continuing to figure out, he was just telling me a little bit about what their next step is. So, just getting more and more accurate, more intelligence as they grow. So, it's the possibilities, that's what's exciting to me about Edge. I think this example is great, 'cause it's so relatable. Everybody can understand what the Edge is in this context. And it's really driven by the fact that you can put compute into so many different places now. It's more though a matter about how do you gather it? How do you do it in a way where you can actually understand and glean information and insights from it? And that, I think, is what you all are really focused on. >> Yeah, yeah, information is key. >> It is key. What's next from Dell's perspective for Edge computing technologies? what are some of the things you guys got cooking? >> Yeah, we're going to try to help customers to continue to simplify their Edge. So, to deliver those insights that they need where they need them, to do it in a really secure way. I know we talked about security but to do it in really a zero trust fashion. And to help customers to do it also in a zero IT fashion. Because in this example, it's the growers that are out there in the fields, or in your greenhouse in this sense, helping people that aren't necessarily IT specialists to be able to get all the benefits from the technology. >> So, do you think that VxRail technology could be used to optimize say the production of olive oil? I'm looking here and we have the makings of a pretty good salad. >> Yeah, you do. >> There you go. >> It obviously doesn't just apply to food production. >> Yeah, it really goes across the board. Whether we're talking about manufacturing or retail or energy, putting technology right there at the point of data creation and being able to figure out how to manage that inflow of data, be able to figure out which portion of the data is really valuable, and then driving decisions and being able to understand and intelligently make decisions for your business based on that data is really important. >> Keith, what's next? Give us, as we wrap out this segment here, what's next from a technology perspective? You mentioned a couple things you're looking into. >> Yeah, so I think automation is really going to change the way we do things. And automation within the greenhouse is truly just becoming a reality. It's funny we go back and we say, can we do this stuff? And now it's like, oh, even three years ago, I don't think we were quite ready for it, but now it's right there. So, I see us doing a lot more work with vendors like Dell and to do automatic picking, automatic scouting, all that stuff that we do by hand, do it in an automated fashion. >> And at scale, right? >> Yeah. >> That's the important part. I think when you're managing a snowflake, you can only do it to some level, and to be able to automate it and to be able to break down those silos, you're going to be able to apply it to so many parts of your business. >> Yeah, wide applicability. Guys, thank you so much for joining us, sharing the Nature Fresh, Dell story, bringing us actual product. This is so exciting. We congratulate you on how you're leveraging technology in a really innovative way. And we look forward to hearing what's next. Maybe we'll see you at Dell Technologies World next year. >> Sounds great. >> Sounds great. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, our pleasure, guys. >> Thank you. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer 2022. Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. So, stick around. (light upbeat music)

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of AWS public sector summit live in Washington D. C. A face to face event were on the ground here is to keep coverage. I'm john Kerry, your hosts got two great guests. Both cuba alumni Shannon Kellogg VP of public policy for the Americas and john would ceo tell us congratulations on some announcement on stage and congressional john being a public company. Last time I saw you in person, you are private. Now your I. P. O. Congratulations >>totally virtually didn't meet one investor, lawyer, accountant or banker in person. It's all done over zoom. What's amazing. >>We'll go back to that and a great great to see you had great props here earlier. You guys got some good stuff going on in the policy side, a core max on stage talking about this Virginia deal. Give us the update. >>Yeah. Hey thanks john, it's great to be back. I always like to be on the cube. Uh, so we made an announcement today regarding our economic impact study, uh, for the commonwealth of Virginia. And this is around the amazon web services business and our presence in Virginia or a WS as we all, uh, call, uh, amazon web services. And um, basically the data that we released today shows over the last decade the magnitude of investment that we're making and I think reflects just the overall investments that are going into Virginia in the data center industry of which john and I have been very involved with over the years. But the numbers are quite um, uh, >>just clever. This is not part of the whole H. 20. H. Q. Or whatever they call HQ >>To HQ two. It's so Virginia Amazon is investing uh in Virginia as part of our HQ two initiative. And so Arlington Virginia will be the second headquarters in the U. S. In addition to that, AWS has been in Virginia for now many years, investing in both data center infrastructure and also other corporate facilities where we house AWS employees uh in other parts of Virginia, particularly out in what's known as the dullest technology corridor. But our data centers are actually spread throughout three counties in Fairfax County, Loudoun County in Prince William County. >>So this is the maxim now. So it wasn't anything any kind of course this is Virginia impact. What was, what did he what did he announce? What did he say? >>Yeah. So there were a few things that we highlighted in this economic impact study. One is that over the last decade, if you can believe it, we've invested $35 billion 2020 alone. The AWS investment in construction and these data centers. uh it was actually $1.3 billion 2020. And this has created over 13,500 jobs in the Commonwealth of Virginia. So it's a really great story of investment and job creation and many people don't know John in this Sort of came through in your question too about HQ two, But aws itself has over 8000 employees in Virginia today. Uh, and so we've had this very significant presence for a number of years now in Virginia over the last, you know, 15 years has become really the cloud capital of the country, if not the world. Uh, and you see all this data center infrastructure that's going in there, >>John What's your take on this? You've been very active in the county there. Um, you've been a legend in the area and tech, you've seen this many years, you've been doing so I think the longest running company doing cyber my 31st year, 31st year. So you've been on the ground. What does this all mean to you? >>Well, you know, it goes way back to, it was roughly 2005 when I served on the Economic Development Commission, Loudon County as the chairman. And at the time we were the fastest-growing county in America in Loudon County. But our residential real property taxes were going up stratospherically because when you look at it, every dollar real property tax that came into residential, we lose $2 because we had to fund schools and police and fire departments and so forth. And we realized for every dollar of commercial real property tax that came in, We made $97 in profit, but only 13% of the money that was coming into the county was coming in commercially. So a small group got together from within the county to try and figure out what were the assets that we had to offer to companies like Amazon and we realized we had a lot of land, we had water and then we had, you know this enormous amount of dark fiber, unused fibre optic. And so basically the county made it appealing to companies like amazon to come out to Loudon County and other places in northern Virginia and the rest is history. If you look today, we're Loudon County is Loudon County generates a couple $100 million surplus every year. It's real property taxes have come down in in real dollars and the percentage of revenue that comes from commercials like 33 34%. That's really largely driven by the data center ecosystem that my friend over here Shannon was talking. So >>the formula basically is look at the assets resources available that may align with the kind of commercial entities that good. How's their domicile there >>that could benefit. >>So what about power? Because the data centers need power, fiber fiber is great. The main, the main >>power you can build power but the main point is is water for cooling. So I think I think we had an abundance of water which allowed us to build power sources and allowed companies like amazon to build their own power sources. So I think it was really a sort of a uh uh better what do they say? Better lucky than good. So we had a bunch of assets come together that helps. Made us, made us pretty lucky as a, as a region. >>Thanks area too. >>It is nice and >>john, it's really interesting because the vision that john Wood and several of his colleagues had on that economic development board has truly come through and it was reaffirmed in the numbers that we released this week. Um, aws paid $220 million 2020 alone for our data centers in those three counties, including loud >>so amazon's contribution to >>The county. $220 million 2020 alone. And that actually makes up 20% of overall property tax revenues in these counties in 2020. So, you know, the vision that they had 15 years ago, 15, 16 years ago has really come true today. And that's just reaffirmed in these numbers. >>I mean, he's for the amazon. So I'll ask you the question. I mean, there's a lot of like for misinformation going around around corporate reputation. This is clearly an example of the corporation contributing to the, to the society. >>No, no doubt. And you think >>About it like that's some good numbers, 20 million, 30 >>$5 million dollar capital investment. You know, 10, it's, what is it? 8000 9000 >>Jobs. jobs, a W. S. jobs in the Commonwealth alone. >>And then you look at the economic impact on each of those counties financially. It really benefits everybody at the end of the day. >>It's good infrastructure across the board. How do you replicate that? Not everyone's an amazon though. So how do you take the formula? What's your take on best practice? How does this rollout? And that's the amazon will continue to grow, but that, you know, this one company, is there a lesson here for the rest of us? >>I think I think all the data center companies in the cloud companies out there see value in this region. That's why so much of the internet traffic comes through northern Virginia. I mean it's I've heard 70%, I've heard much higher than that too. So I think everybody realizes this is a strategic asset at a national level. But I think the main point to bring out is that every state across America should be thinking about investments from companies like amazon. There are, there are really significant benefits that helps the entire community. So it helps build schools, police departments, fire departments, etcetera, >>jobs opportunities. What's the what's the vision though? Beyond data center gets solar sustainability. >>We do. We have actually a number of renewable energy projects, which I want to talk about. But just one other quick on the data center industry. So I also serve on the data center coalition which is a national organization of data center and cloud providers. And we look at uh states all over this country were very active in multiple states and we work with governors and state governments as they put together different frameworks and policies to incent investment in their states and Virginia is doing it right. Virginia has historically been very forward looking, very forward thinking and how they're trying to attract these data center investments. They have the right uh tax incentives in place. Um and then you know, back to your point about renewable energy over the last several years, Virginia is also really made some statutory changes and other policy changes to drive forward renewable energy in Virginia. Six years ago this week, john I was in a coma at county in Virginia, which is the eastern shore. It's a very rural area where we helped build our first solar farm amazon solar farm in Virginia in 2015 is when we made this announcement with the governor six years ago this week, it was 88 megawatts, which basically at the time quadruple the virginias solar output in one project. So since that first project we at Amazon have gone from building that one facility, quadrupling at the time, the solar output in Virginia to now we're by the end of 2023 going to be 1430 MW of solar power in Virginia with 15 projects which is the equivalent of enough power to actually Enough electricity to power 225,000 households, which is the equivalent of Prince William county Virginia. So just to give you the scale of what we're doing here in Virginia on renewable energy. >>So to me, I mean this comes down to not to put my opinion out there because I never hold back on the cube. It's a posture, we >>count on that. It's a >>posture issue of how people approach business. I mean it's the two schools of thought on the extreme true business. The government pays for everything or business friendly. So this is called, this is a modern story about friendly business kind of collaborative posture. >>Yeah, it's putting money to very specific use which has a very specific return in this case. It's for everybody that lives in the northern Virginia region benefits everybody. >>And these policies have not just attracted companies like amazon and data center building builders and renewable energy investments. These policies are also leading to rapid growth in the cybersecurity industry in Virginia as well. You know john founded his company decades ago and you have all of these cybersecurity companies now located in Virginia. Many of them are partners like >>that. I know john and I both have contributed heavily to a lot of the systems in place in America here. So congratulations on that. But I got to ask you guys, well I got you for the last minute or two cybersecurity has become the big issue. I mean there's a lot of these policies all over the place. But cyber is super critical right now. I mean, where's the red line Shannon? Where's you know, things are happening? You guys bring security to the table, businesses are out there fending for themselves. There's no militia. Where's the, where's the, where's the support for the commercial businesses. People are nervous >>so you want to try it? >>Well, I'm happy to take the first shot because this is and then we'll leave john with the last word because he is the true cyber expert. But I had the privilege of hosting a panel this morning with the director of the cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency at the department, Homeland Security, Jenness easterly and the agency is relatively new and she laid out a number of initiatives that the DHS organization that she runs is working on with industry and so they're leaning in their partnering with industry and a number of areas including, you know, making sure that we have the right information sharing framework and tools in place, so the government and, and we in industry can act on information that we get in real time, making sure that we're investing for the future and the workforce development and cyber skills, but also as we enter national cybersecurity month, making sure that we're all doing our part in cyber security awareness and training, for example, one of the things that are amazon ceo Andy Jassy recently announced as he was participating in a White house summit, the president biden hosted in late august was that we were going to at amazon make a tool that we've developed for information and security awareness for our employees free, available to the public. And in addition to that we announced that we were going to provide free uh strong authentication tokens for AWS customers as part of that announcement going into national cybersecurity months. So what I like about what this administration is doing is they're reaching out there looking for ways to work with industry bringing us together in these summits but also looking for actionable things that we can do together to make a difference. >>So my, my perspective echoing on some of Shannon's points are really the following. Uh the key in general is automation and there are three components to automation that are important in today's environment. One is cyber hygiene and education is a piece of that. The second is around mis attribution meaning if the bad guy can't see you, you can't be hacked. And the third one is really more or less around what's called attribution, meaning I can figure out actually who the bad guy is and then report that bad guys actions to the appropriate law enforcement and military types and then they take it from there >>unless he's not attributed either. So >>well over the basic point is we can't as industry hat back, it's illegal, but what we can do is provide the tools and methods necessary to our government counterparts at that point about information sharing, where they can take the actions necessary and try and find those bad guys. >>I just feel like we're not moving fast enough. Businesses should be able to hack back. In my opinion. I'm a hawk on this one item. So like I believe that because if people dropped on our shores with troops, the government will protect us. >>So your your point is directly taken when cyber command was formed uh before that as airlines seeing space physical domains, each of those physical domains have about 100 and $50 billion they spend per year when cyber command was formed, it was spending less than Jpmorgan chase to defend the nation. So, you know, we do have a ways to go. I do agree with you that there needs to be more uh flexibility given the industry to help help with the fight. You know, in this case. Andy Jassy has offered a couple of tools which are, I think really good strong tokens training those >>are all really good. >>We've been working with amazon for a long time, you know, ever since, uh, really, ever since the CIA embrace the cloud, which was sort of the shot heard around the world for cloud computing. We do the security compliance automation for that air gap region for amazon as well as other aspects >>were all needs more. Tell us faster, keep cranking up that software because tell you right now people are getting hit >>and people are getting scared. You know, the colonial pipeline hack that affected everybody started going wait a minute, I can't get gas. >>But again in this area of the line and jenny easterly said this this morning here at the summit is that this truly has to be about industry working with government, making sure that we're working together, you know, government has a role, but so does the private sector and I've been working cyber issues for a long time to and you know, kind of seeing where we are this year in this recent cyber summit that the president held, I really see just a tremendous commitment coming from the private sector to be an effective partner in securing the nation this >>full circle to our original conversation around the Virginia data that you guys are looking at the Loudon County amazon contribution. The success former is really commercial public sector. I mean, the government has to recognize that technology is now lingua franca for all things everything society >>well. And one quick thing here that segues into the fact that Virginia is the cloud center of the nation. Um uh the president issued a cybersecurity executive order earlier this year that really emphasizes the migration of federal systems into cloud in the modernization that jOHN has worked on, johN had a group called the Alliance for Digital Innovation and they're very active in the I. T. Modernization world and we remember as well. Um but you know, the federal government is really emphasizing this, this migration to cloud and that was reiterated in that cybersecurity executive order >>from the, well we'll definitely get you guys back on the show, we're gonna say something. >>Just all I'd say about about the executive order is that I think one of the main reasons why the president thought was important is that the legacy systems that are out there are mainly written on kobol. There aren't a lot of kids graduating with degrees in COBOL. So COBOL was designed in 1955. I think so I think it's very imperative that we move has made these workloads as we can, >>they teach it anymore. >>They don't. So from a security point of view, the amount of threats and vulnerabilities are through the >>roof awesome. Well john I want to get you on the show our next cyber security event. You have you come into a fireside chat and unpack all the awesome stuff that you're doing. But also the challenges. Yes. And there are many, you have to keep up the good work on the policy. I still say we got to remove that red line and identified new rules of engagement relative to what's on our sovereign virtual land. So a whole nother Ballgame, thanks so much for coming. I appreciate it. Thank you appreciate it. Okay, cute coverage here at eight of public sector seven Washington john ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm.

>> Narrator: From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Qualys Security Conference 2019, brought to you by Qualys. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We're in Las Vegas at the Bellagio at the Qualys Security Conference. They've been doing this for 19 years. They've been in this business for a long time, seen a lot of changes, so we're happy to be here. Our next guest works for Caterpillar. He is Brian Rossi, the senior security manager vulnerability management. Brian, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I was so psyched, they had an interview, a gentleman from Caterpillar a few years ago, and it was fascinating to me how far along the autonomous vehicle route Caterpillar is. And I don't think most people understand, right? They see the Waymo cars driving around, and they read about all this stuff. But Caterpillar's been doing autonomous vehicles for a super long time. >> A really long time, a really long time, 25-plus years, pioneering a lot of the autonomous vehicle stuff that's out there. And we've actually, it's been cool, had an opportunity to do some security testing on some of the stuff that we're doing. So, even making it safer for the mines and the places that are using it today. >> Yeah, you don't want one of those big-giant dump-truck things to go rogue. (laughing) >> Off a cliff. Yeah, no, bad idea. >> Huge. Or into a bunch of people. All right, so let's jump into it. So, vulnerability management. What do you focus on, what does that mean exactly? >> So, for me, more on the traditional vulnerability management side. So I stay out of the application space, but my group is focused on identifying vulnerabilities for servers, workstations, endpoints that are out there, working with those IT operational teams to make sure they get those patched and reduce as many vulnerabilities as we can over the course of a year. >> So we've done some stuff with Forescout, and they're the kings of vulnerability sniffing-out. In fact, I think they have an integration with Qualys as well. So, is it always amazing as to how much stuff that gets attached to the network that you weren't really sure was there in the first place? >> Yes, absolutely. (laughs) And it's fun to be on the side that gets to see it all, and then tell people that it's there. I think with Qualys and with some of the other tools that we use, right? We're seeing these things before anybody else is seeing them and we're seeing the vulnerabilities that are associated with them, before anyone else sees them. So it's an interesting job, to tell people what's out there when they didn't even know. >> Right, so another really important integration is with ServiceNow, and you're giving a talk I believe tomorrow on how you use both Qualys and ServiceNow together. Give us kind of the overview of what you're going to be talking about. >> Absolutely, so the overview is really what our motto has been all year, right? Is put work where people work. So what we found was that with our vulnerability management program, we're doing scanning, we're running reports, we're trying to communicate with these IT operational teams to fix what's out there. But that's difficult when you're just sending spreadsheets around and you're trying to email people. There's organizational changes, people are moving around. They might not be responsible for those platforms anymore. And keeping track of all that is incredibly difficult in a global scale, with hundreds of thousands of assets that people are managing. And so we turned to ServiceNow and Qualys to really find a way to easily communicate, not just easily, but also timely, communicate those vulnerabilities to the teams that are responsible for doing it. >> Right, so you guys already had the ServiceNow implementation obviously, it was something that was heavily used. You're kind of implying that that was the screen that a lot of people had open on their desktop all the time. >> We lucked out that we were early in the implementation with ServiceNow. So, Caterpillar was moving from a previous IT service management solution to ServiceNow so we got in on the ground floor with the teams that were building out the configuration management database. We got in with the ground floor with the teams who were operationalizing, using ServiceNow to drive their work. We had the opportunities to just build relationships with them, take those relationships, ask them how they want that to work, and then go build it for them. >> Right, it's so funny because everyone likes to talk about single pane of glass, and to own that real estate that's on our screens that we sit and look at all day long, and it used to be emails. It's not so much email anymore, and ServiceNow is one of those types of apps that when you're in it, you're working it, that is your thing. And it's one thing to sniff out the vulnerabilities and find vulnerabilities, but you got to close the loop. >> Brian: You got to, absolutely. >> And that's really where the ServiceNow piece fits. >> And it's been great. We've seen a dramatic reduction in the number of vulnerabilities that are getting fixed over the course of a 30-day period. And I think it simply is because the visibility is finally there, and it's real-time visibility for these groups. They're not receiving data 50 days after we found it. We're getting them that data as soon as we find it, and they're able to operationalize it immediately. >> Right, and what are some of the actions that are the higher frequency that you've found, that you're triggering, that this process is helping you mitigate? >> I would say, actually, what it's really finding is some of our oldest vulnerabilities, a lot of stuff that people have just let fall off the plate. And they're isolated, right? They may have run patching for a specific vulnerability six months ago, but there was no view to tell them whether or not they got everything. Or maybe it was an asset that was off the network when they were patching, and now it's back on the network. So we're getting them the real-time visibility. Stuff that they may have missed, that they would have never seen before, without this integration. >> So I'd love to get your take on one of the top topics that came in the keynote this morning, both with Dick Clark as well as Philippe, was IoT-5G and the increasing surface-area, attack surface area, vulnerability surface area. You guys, Caterpillar's obviously well into internet of things. You've got a lot of connected devices. I'm sure you're excited about 5G, and I'm sure in a mining environment, or those types of environments are just prime 5G opportunities. Bad news is, your attack surface just grew exponentially. >> Yeah. >> So you're in charge of keeping track of vulnerabilities. How do you balance the opportunity, and what you see that's coming with 5G and connected devices and even a whole other rash of sensors, compared to the threat that you have to manage? >> Certainly in the IoT space it's unique. We can't do the things to those devices that we would do with normal laptops' assets, right? So I think figuring out unique ways to actually deal with them is going to be the hardest part. Finding vulnerabilities is always the easiest thing to do, but dealing with them is going to be the hard part. 5G is going to bring a whole new ballgame to a lot of the technology that we use. Our engineering groups are looking at those, and we're going to be partnering with them all the way through their journey on how to use 5G, how to use IoT to drive better services for our customers, and hopefully security will be with them the whole way. >> Right, the other piece that didn't get as much talk today, but it's a hot topic everywhere else we go is Edge, right? And this whole concept of, do you move the data, do you move the data to the computer or the computer to the data? I'm sure you guys are going to be leveraging Edge in a big way, when you're getting more of that horsepower closer to the sites. There's a lot of challenges with Edge. It's not a pristine data center. There are some nasty environmental conditions and you're limited in power, connectivity, and some of these other things. So when you think about Edge in your world, and maybe you're not thinking of it, but I bet you are, how are you seeing that, again, as an opportunity to bring more compute power closer to where you need it, closer to these vehicles? >> So I think, I wish I had our other security division here with me to talk about it. We're piloting a lot of those things, but that's been a big piece of our digital transformation at Caterpillar, is really leveraging data from those connected devices that are out in the field. And we actually, our Edge has to be brought closer to home. Our engineers pack so much into the little space they have on the devices that are out there, that they don't have room to actually calculate on that data that's out in the field, right? So we are actually bringing the Edge a little closer to home, in order for us to provide the best service for our customers. >> Right, so another take on digital transformation. You talked about Caterpillar's digital transformation. You've been there for five years now. Before that you were at State Farm. Checking on your LinkedIn, right? State Farm is the business of actuarial numbers, right? Caterpillar has got big heavy metal things, and yet you talk about digital transformation. How did you guys, how are you thinking about digital transformation in this heavy-equipment industry that's in construction? Probably not what most people think of as a digital enterprise, but in fact you guys are super aggressively moving in that direction. >> Yeah, and for us, from a securities perspective, it's been all about shift-left, right? We have to get embedded with these groups when they're designing these things. We have to be doing threat models. We have to be doing pen testing. We have to be doing that secure life cycle the entire way through the product. Because with our product line, unlike State Farm where we could easily just make a change to an application so that it was more secure, once we produce these vehicles, and once we roll them out and start selling them, they're out there. And we build our equipment to last, right? So there's not an expectation that a customer is going to come back and say, "I'm ready to buy a new truck two years from now," because of security vulnerability. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So, yeah, it's a big thing for us to get as early in the development life cycle as possible and partner with those groups. >> I'm curious in terms of the role of the embedded software systems in these things now, compared to what it was five years ago, 10 years ago 'cause you do need to upgrade it. And we've seen with Teslas, right? You get patches and upgrades and all types of things. So I would imagine you're probably a lot more Tesla-like than the Caterpillar of 20 years ago. >> Moving in that direction, and that is the goal, right? We want to be able to get the best services and the most quality services to our customers as soon as possible. >> Right, very cool. Well, Brian, next time we talk, I want to do it on a big truck. >> Okay. >> A big, yellow truck. >> Let's do it. >> I don't want to do it here at the Bellagio. >> Let's do it, all right. >> Okay, excellent. Well, thanks for-- >> Thank you. >> For taking a few minutes, really appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> All right, he's Brian, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, not on a big yellow truck, out in the middle of nowhere digging up holes and moving big dirt around. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE, covering Inforum DC 2018, brought to you by Infor. >> Well, good morning. Welcome back here on theCUBE. We are live in Washington DC, at Inforum 2018. You can tell, Infor's just over the shoulder here. We're on top of the show floor, looking down, and a lot of buzz, a lot of activity out there. Good to be a part of that excitement here in DC. I'm John Walls, along with Dave Vellante, and we're joined by, he said, "Just call me Soma." Soma Somasundaram, who's the CTO at Infor. Soma, good job on the keynote stage this morning. Thanks for joining, appreciate that. >> Yeah, and yesterday. >> Yup, yup, thanks. >> So, talk about a couple of new products, one launched, one in beta. Why don't you go ahead and tell our audience a little bit about that, about what you're bringing to the marketplace now? >> Yeah, so, you know, we have, you know, as I mentioned in today's keynote, we're all about product innovation, and we're engineers. Charles is an engineer, I'm an engineer, and we're constantly driving new innovation. So, some of the innovation, there's fundamentally, we want to build what I would call a shared services platform that all of our cloud suites can utilize. There's no need for each of the applications to go reinvent the wheel to build a middleware, or a data lake, or an API layer, so we built a shared services platform, which is what we called Infor OS. As part of Infor OS, we continued to release new things. You heard today, we released something called Infor Go. As the name might suggest, the idea is that you as an employee in one of the customer organizations, you want to have, easily go to the app store, download something called Infor Go, it automatically is configured for your role. It gives you, if let's say you're a salesperson, it gives you access to CRM data, to curate your pipeline, it gives you access to employee data, because you're an employee of the organization, gives you ability to file expense reports, because you're a traveler. You get the idea. So, in a role, you don't want to be dealing with 20 different apps. It's just one thing. You just go in, one sign on, you get access to everything you need. That's one announcement we made. That's on the technology side. And on the functional side, you know, we launched a new CRM this morning, and the idea there again is that, we're in the CRM business not to build a horizontal CRM. Our idea is, you build, anything you do must be industry-specific, right? When you are selling and servicing an excavator, and you are a dealer of moving equipment, you want to know what kind of configuration installed, what kind of accessories I can sell to this farmer, what kind of terrain they're operating on. That is industry-specific. So to us, that is important. That's what we're doing with CRM. We built it on obviously our own platform, technology platform, multi-tenant, running in the cloud, but the main differentiation is industry, right? So that's something we announced. We've been on building a next generation HCM suite, which we talked about a lot yesterday. The final piece of that is payroll, which is important. So that payroll, which just went beta this morning. It's all built on the exact same platform, with Infor OS, multi-tenant, and it's highly extensible, so that completes our HCM suite on a unified platform. Those were the announcements we made today. >> So I wanted to talk a little bit about the platform. So last year, after Inforum 17, I wrote a blog post, and I put up the strategy and technology stack, and I kind of missed the OS underneath. So we'll come back and maybe course-correct that. But one of the problems with enterprise software, especially suites, is there are a lot of cul-de-sacs. You go down a road, and then you hit a dead end, and then you have to come all the way back, and if you want some other function, you have to go down and come all the way back, and it's a very frustrating user experience. So, I'm inferring that what you guys have done is try to address that and other problems with a platform approach. So a platform, in my view, beats products. So maybe talk about platform and what that means to you guys, and then I would love to get into the sort of conceptual and actual stack. >> Yeah, so, it is what should be common sense, in my opinion, that if you buy a HCM suite from a provider of software, you buy ERP from that same provider, you buy travel and expense application from the same provider. You would think that they all have the same user experience, and are integrated out of the box, they all seamlessly work together, with single sign-on. That would be a normal expectation as a customer, I would think, but unfortunately, the market's not going that way, right? Everybody's got their own, even within one company, you have multiple products, they don't work together well. Our idea is that if you buy an industry cloud suite, you must feel like it came from Infor, it all should have one single user experience, it all should work together as an integrated suite, it should all be sharing data for analytics, and so on and so forth. So that is the whole idea behind building this Infor OS. So, Infor OS has got several services underneath, starting with, you know, user experience, which is developing a hook and loop. So we have all of the controls, whether it's a dropdown box, or a grid control, or date picker, they all behave exactly the same way. Whether you're in CRM, or HCM, or inside a purchasing application, they all work the same, right? So, starting with that, then you go-- >> So if I can interrupt, so the Infor OS has the core services that you need, that the software needs to access for any function that you're building, correct? >> Exactly, yeah, yeah. >> Okay, please. >> So it's user experience, then you have integration. We have one integration layer called ION, and ION supports both an API layer, if you want to build a mobile app, you need APIs into the software, so built a lot of APIs into our applications. Those are exposed through a single gateway. There's one way to get into Infor applications through this API layer. We built that as part of Infor OS. We also built Coleman, which we announced last year. Coleman depends on two things. One, a lot of access to data, so I can crunch and do machine learning, and a lot of access to APIs. So what if you could create an acquisition, tucked into a device, versus having to open up a form, right? To do that, you need APIs. If you can order Domino's pizza from home, using Alexa, why can't you do that at work? So we built this framework for those kind of things. So it's got APIs, it's got Coleman, it's got data lake. So all of this data is in one place, so you can build analytics. We have Birst, which sits on top of the data lake, and I can go on. So that's really what we're doing with Infor OS. It's really, that's very, very important. It's not like your Intel Inside kind of thing. Without Infor OS, Infor apps don't work. >> So, if I can, if you bear with me, just to conceptualize the stack, the OS is at the bottom layer, and then you've got your micro-vertical functions as sort of the next layer, and then the cloud, which is really AWS, is the cloud infrastructure, then you've got the GT Nexus, essentially, the network commerce platform, so all those data and supply chain connection points that you have access to, Birst, the analytics, which was in acquisition last year, and then the Coleman AI completes the stack. My question is, as it relates to, for instance, Birst, that was an acquisition. So, you have to bring that in and do some engineering work to make it fit into the stack, is that right, or is it just kind of bolted on? >> No, you know, so, everything has to be done with the conscious way of design, right, so it just doesn't happen by itself. So, Birst is a fantastic world-class analytics platform, right? They as a company built a world-class platform that allows for department analytics, so if you're working in sales or working in marketing, you can go bring your own data, you can do analytics. It's great at that. At the same time, it's great at enterprise analytics, where you have all of this data in one place, you harmonize the data and do that. As a platform, it's a fantastic platform, but we're about delivering content on top of that platform, so we need to bring the network data, like you said, we need to bring the industry data, we need to bring the employee data from HCM. Bringing it all together and exposing that using Birst as the visualization layer is how we are exposing it. So to that extent, Birst was connected into the data lake, and it sits on top of the data lake, leverages that data. We built a semantic layer, which reflects the model of data that we have in the data lake, so yeah, it does, and we have the single sign-on, so it actually surfaces within Ming.le, within the homepage of a purchasing manager or whoever, and that's work, that's what we did. >> So you essentially re-platformed it. So of course, part of the due diligence is how challenging it's going to be to do that, how fast you can get that to market, but this is complicated. It requires a significant engineering resource on Infor's part. We talked about this a little bit at the analyst meeting last year, the industry analyst session. Couple things, one is the integration and exploitation of AWS cloud, and all the services there, the data pipelines, and the services there, but also modern software development. You know, microservices, and containers, and all of that good stuff. Can you talk about those sort of two dimension and any other points that you'd like to emphasize in terms of the things that Infor developers are doing to create this modern platform? >> Yeah, so, first of all, you know, we are all about applications, right, so we're not building databases, we're not building our own data centers, we're not building our own operating systems. We're a business software application company. Our belief is that if you try to verticalize and try to innovate on every single layer of what you do, it stifles innovation. Why not embrace industry's innovation, right? Can we out-spend AWS, in terms of building a cloud infrastructure? I don't think so. >> No way. >> No one can. And so, it's important to focus on what you do best, and leverage innovation that's coming in outside the four walls of Infor, to embrace that to deliver what the customer requires. So, what we really did is we took the AWS services, and we encapsulated them into our application, so when the application does disaster recovery, it's actually AWS services, right? When we call Elasticsearch, we're using AWS services there. We use DynamoDB for graphing the data in the data lake. Much like Facebook works on Open Graph, of trying to find people who are connected to each other, data inside the data lake is connected, right? Sales order is connected to a sales person. It's connected to a customer. Customer is connected to returns, and so on and so forth, so, we've done those kind of things. So, we've built a layer above the web services of AWS to actually create hooks into the application that leverages that, and we built our application itself in a sort of a microservices architecture. Granular APIs is a better way to describe how we did it, so that those granular APIs can be used in a digital project to create your own mobile app. It's the same APIs that are used in Coleman, for our digital assistant, or chat bots. All of those things require clear thought in terms of design, how you expose the functionality, and how you expose data, and that's what we did. >> Yeah, so, as a developer, in an engineering organization, having access to those primitives, those granular APIs, gives you what, greater flexibility, if the market turns, you can turn more quickly. I mean, it's more complicated, right, but it gives you finer grain control. Is that fair? >> Absolutely the case, yeah, and by the way, we know that the world is heterogeneous, right? I would love for a customer organization to just use Infor for everything, nothing else, right? But that's probably not realistic. So we built this to be able to work in a heterogeneous environment. So creating APIs and having this loosely-coupled architecture allows for that to happen. Ultimately, the customer has a choice. We obviously have to work to earn their business, but if they have other things outside of Infor that they're running in their ecosystem, you need to be able to embrace that. So this architecture actually allows for that. >> So it's the architecture, but if you're saying, if I'm a customer, and I want to run in the Google cloud, or Azure, technically, at least in theory, you can support that, but do you actually do that today, or is that sort of roadmap stuff? >> Technically, you could do that, right, but we obviously leveraged a lot of AWS services in our stack. What I meant to say in heterogeneity is that if you run a non-Infor application, right, so like, Salesforce for CRM, right? I would love for the customer to use Infor CRM, 'cause we think we are very competitive, but if they are running Salesforce, and they don't want to replace that, we need to be able to work in that environment, where it's running in a different cloud, it's running in a different architecture. So, we built Infor OS and the layer to be able to deal with that kind of hybrid deployments. >> Technically, what's the enabler there? Is it just sort of an API-based framework, or... >> It is API-based framework. It's also got federated security built into it. It's got the middleware understands, ION understands that data could come from a non-Infor system. As long as you're talking, you know, you go to United Nations, if everybody there has a headset, to really translate what anyone is saying, versus if everyone speaks English, well, world would be wonderful. >> But they spoke English yesterday. (John laughs) >> I got one more, I got one more geeky question. Anytime I get the head of engineering, you know, the CTO-- >> You love this. >> We love to get into it. The audience eats the stuff up. >> Yes. >> And we love the business talk too. But, I've heard a lot about multi-tenant architecture. My friends at servers now make a big deal about multi-instance, saying, oh, and I don't know if it's, if it can't fix a feature kind of thing, or if there's really, you know, additional value there, but the claim is it's more secure. Multi-tenant, I think conceptually, is certainly more cost-effective. What's your take on sort of multi-tenant? Why is it important? Maybe discuss the security levels that you guys engineer in, your comments. >> Yeah, yeah, if you have something that you can call it a feature, you can, like you said, but our belief is that multi-tenant architecture allows for faster innovation, easier update to the customer, to keep them current, and you know, you think about having thousands of individual instances that you have to update, on a weekly basis, because we will get to a weekly update. We are currently doing monthly update, and we get to a weekly update. That requires a natural act to create automation to be able to update all of them. I mean, there's, you know, you could argue which is really more pure, but multi-tenant architecture for us is one single application server farm that is able to work for different tenants, understanding their configuration, their business process, and operate the way they want it to be operated, but it is running in one single farm, that we can update as frequently as we need, without obviously causing disruption, so that is, I think is a good design scenario. Having said that, we actually isolate the data of a tenant, right, because you could have a scenario where all tenants' data is in one database. We don't do that. We actually insulate tenants so that data is not permeable. You can't go across tenants. So, we think that this is an elegant way to architect and keep it agile, and we can bring innovation faster to the customer. >> So when you go from monthly to weekly, to daily, to hourly, to minutely. Every customer comes with you, whereas in the multi-instance world, you actually have to plan for it. You've got to plan the migration. You're maybe N minus one, or maybe even N minus two, if that's supported, and it's more disruptive. >> That's correct. >> Okay, and then, you've got to engineer, you know, the security, and other factors. Thank you for that explanation. >> So, I always like to get back to, at the end of the day, you know, what are folks doing with what you're providing them, right? So, in kind of like your new services world, your new product world, what are some of the more, I guess, unique ways in which your customers are putting these great tools that you have to work for them, that you would like to use as kind of the poster child of success, and say, you know, we're providing this new value and these new enhancements, and give you the chance to take it to others, and use them as examples? >> Yeah, so, fundamentally, I'll be remiss if I don't start with the industry, right? So, it may not be very sexy, but ultimately, if I'm in a food and beverage industry, I really need to have a piece of software that understands that, right? Like for example, if you're an ice cream plant, you pay by part of a carton, you don't pay for the gallons of milk you get, right, so, does the software understand that? Right, if it don't, then you have to work around it, right? So, it may not sound sexy, but that's important to us, right? So, customers deploy without customization is very, very important for us. That's why we call it last man functionality. But if you flip to the technology side of things, I think that we're just scratching the surface in terms of what users want to do with Coleman. Coleman digital assistant, for example, like I earlier said about placing an acquisition target into a device. I think our idea is that every single employee of our customer organization should be using technology. Typical ERP, as it was deployed 20 years ago, only power users used it, right? Other people wrote on a piece of paper and sent it around. >> Same thing with decision support. There was like, three guys, two guys in the company who knew it. You had to go ask them to build a cube for you. >> Exactly. That doesn't scale, exactly. And we're living in a very diverse, global sort of set up. It doesn't work if you have three people who understand how to do BI, you know, two people who can create work flows, and I always like to use this example of this website called ifttt.com. I don't know if you've tried this or not. It literally stands for if this, then that. If I can go and describe something, and if this happens, then do that. Why can't we do that in enterprise software, right? Why is it that you have to go to knock on the door of IT to do it? So our idea is to bring that level of innovation, so we can innovate, our partners can innovate, customers can innovate, we don't step on each other. >> I got to ask you about a topic that we've heard a lot about this week, is robotic process automation, and you guys have essentially intimated, or at least, I've inferred that you've got quite a bit of capabilities in that regard. We're talking about software robots here, essentially, to replace sort of humans doing mundane tasks, or maybe augment humans. What is the capability that you have with RPA? Is it something that you're shipping today, and I have some follow up questions, if I may. >> Yeah, so, we built ION when we started building this years ago. We built it with the notion of build it on a data-rich architecture, right? What I mean by that is when something happens, an event happens in an application, a sales order is taken, or it's updated, give me a full copy of that document, that anyone can understand, right? That is a foundation of what you need to be able to externalize things like RPA. So we have access to the document as things happen. That's point number one. Point number two is that we built the Coleman AI platform, which we talked about earlier today. That actually leverages that workflow, as points in the workflow, to be able to go and do AI-based services that are hooks that are there in the workflow. So, where human beings need to intervene, I give an easy example. How often, like, there are people reporting to you, I do, and we get expense reports that people submit. First of all, I don't even look at them, Michelle looks at them, and do you think she opens and actually looks at how much somebody spent for dinner? No, you just push the button and approve. Why are we doing that, right? Why can't a robot figure out is there something that looks not quite right, then flag it, versus having to do this mundane work? So why can't Coleman do that? That's the way we've done it, and it's because we have a workflow engine, we have the API architecture, we have an AI platform, it's easy to wire these things together and having data externalized allows us to do that. >> So, in looking at the RPA market, there's several companies out there, and a lot of software companies, many of which are very, very complicated. You can't get your hands on the software. There is some, or maybe one in particular, it's easy, you download it, and it's low code or even no code, so I would imagine, I'm envisioning some kind of studio for a user like myself, who can, you know, is not technical, who can use it, and then maybe some kind of orchestrator, to be able to actually effect what I want done to get done. Is that something that you're shipping today, or how do I do it, as a user, and is it low code or no code? >> As an end user, if you are trying to figure out, yeah, I'll go to them to deploy, then obviously, you need a data scientist, okay? So, that part of it, we have a platform that is available for the data scientist, to be able to go look at the data, curate the data set, allow them to deploy different algorithms to figure out which one work, is the right for certain, then deploy that, and when you say deploy, it automatically creates an API, and allows for use anywhere. From an end user standpoint, like I said, this ifttt.com, you should be able to go in and say, set up your own alerts, that if I see, if you see, you know, X, Y, Z happen, let me know, or if I see X, Y, Z happen, you know, do this. So that part of capability exists in the platform, right? So, you can't completely replace data science and everything with the real end user doing it, but if you package the services in such a way that an end user can actually pick and choose and deploy, that can be done today. >> Your expense report, or approval example, and there are many, many others, so, are great, thank you for great. >> Soma, thank you, for the time too. We appreciate that. Thanks for dropping in, and again, great job on the keynote stage, and wish you success down the road here. >> Thanks a lot, appreciate it. >> I don't think you need it, though, I think you've got your, your act together really well. >> And your hands full. >> Yes, you do. A lot going on. All right, back with more here. We're live in Washington DC. You're watching theCUBE.

(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)

[Music] [Applause] welcome back everybody traffic here with the cube we're in our Palo Alto studios having a cube conversation the madness of the fall conference season is just over the horizon but hasn't it yet so we're excited we get some time to bring people into the studio and we're excited to have a mini time cube alone but he's never been to the studio before it's Franco farm the CMOS Blanc Brian great to see you great to be here this is amazing I could say how you like the day love it it's awesome it's nice you don't have to set up the lights every time like we do it at all the various shows so what's going on it's Blanc give us give us an update just had the quarterly or the quarterly announcement came out a month or so ago I wasn't into that before you came in another rock and roll revenue growth you guys just seemed to be hitting it time and time and time again on fire things are going great it's Blanc we just you know huge rounds of customer success lots of new products and technology I think it's been a big focus for us how do we continue to drive the innovation engine for security and for IT and really transform how you know as the leader in Big Data how we help our customers right super fun and from the marketing side you know we're driving an enormous amount of transformation I think you see this happening for CMOS everywhere their businesses are changing you know I fundamentally believe that the marketing department is the market department going through the most transformation right now Ramos or under the most pressure to change and so there's so much going on and how we're thinking about digital first how we're thinking about being data-driven Splunk on Splunk in many ways how we're using our own technology by our business and community which I know you guys are super passionate about here right who ended no a community but your kind of reputation when you came in is you're a data guy you like to measure the data you like to you know see how things are working not like you're your dad's old marketing department where you just kind of throw it up and write 50 percent of that budget is wasted we're just not sure which 50 percent yeah that was a great excuse for a long time you know I we talk about kind of hashtag math camp is one of the things we talk about a lot how do we think about leveraging data in everything that we do how do we get data-driven insights how do we have data-driven instrumentation and ultimately how are we using that to drive the marketing department I think what we're seeing so many places is first the accountability required and marketing is changing right you can no longer say if a 50-percent works I don't know what half its what's working right now for our customers and I you know we see the need to leverage data and digitization across businesses being a key part of that but we also can't lose sight in many ways of the need for community and the emotional connection that brands have with customers and I think one of the things no see the t-shirt that's right energy like one of the things we're doing really uniquely beyond being amazing at delivering big data solutions for our customers is creating that community in that connection building that emotion and doing that in a way where we can connect the dots from you know the relationship that we're building customer success and ultimately you know super happy and satisfied right customers and we've seen that we've been going to sponge-like compact who is my first cube gig in 2012 oh my god back at the Aria knows that the cosmos is the Cosmo so you guys have you know a super vibrant community really passionate and engaged and I don't know if it's by smart planning or circumstance or you know a little bit of both but you know kind of your play in the security market as the security market has just exploded yeah and using machine data which oh by the way has something to do with IOT and IOT so you know you guys are really well positioned sitting on all that machine generator you think about the roots around IT first right how do we help IT professionals find out what's going wrong with their systems and fix them as fast as possible they can really focus on customer outcomes taking those same patterns to security which you rightly acknowledge on fire super important board level issues and now we think about businesses going through digital evolution but they're iteratively trying to add more and more digital components you see it in the marketing department right we have better access to data so we can become more digital and as we see our customers evolve the patterns that were successful in IT and security now work in other parts of the business a great example this is a customer sample Yelp wait in Bay Area I don't know if for you if it's not on Yelp and I'm not looking at a review I can't eat there because it's too much risk but the they they were working through how did they improve the quality of the experiences customers have a food delivery it's not a mighty thing this so it's not security but it's how do you take their data and begin to investigate the root causes of issues right how do you then monitor and detect changes in those patterns and how do you automate and analyze the resolution with the end goal of very clearly having bet warmer food for customers right so it's been an amazing experience for them and if amazing outcomes and all of that is as more and more data explodes across the business you see Splunk adding value in every department so I'd love to get your take something we talk a lot about on the cube and you've been in the business for a long time before spunk as well and that's you know before data was really a liability it was expensive to gather it was expensive to store you had to buy a bunch of boxes and stick it in a data center and usually bought like 75% more than you needed in case you had a bump so it was really kind of a liability now obviously as you said data is a huge asset some would say the oil etc it's an asset but it's not measured on the balance sheet it's still not measuring on the balance sheet today so when you see some crazy valuations for a lot of companies say at Facebook or Google it's really a reflection of a multiple of the value of their data not necessarily just a multiple of the value their revenue or their earnings so as you work with your customers and as you measure kind of ROI on return of an investment say the Yelp investment it's a very different measure of ROI if the date if the investment on the data side is to drive better outcomes it's to drive more revenue is to drive maybe new product development innovation and yet again it's not really measured as an asset so how does that kind of play into how people decide to do projects how they measure the success of projects when it's it's not the cost center of it and that's the transformation that's happening right right digital is happening everywhere which really means data is happening everywhere and it's not just the structured data that we're used to it's all the unstructured data though data that people were unaware necessarily had enormous amounts of value certainly not balance sheet value but any value right right I think the world has realized in every department that that data has value and so those decisions on where to have projects if you will stems from that understanding and then the best way to evaluate it is what our customers doing right we're working with dahmer automotive company and their challenges were how do they secure you know their automotive systems their their plant systems and they had out there in the old world that was disconnected it was offline and as more and more of that becomes digital it's way easier to sort of take advantage of software like Splunk and apply it to those use cases and start to realize the value and the value at the end of the day comes from I'm solving a set of problems I'm more secure I'm happier customers I'm delivering better process I have faster time to resolution with my systems recovery and in marketing if you think about it from the CMO lens which could be you know it's really important we can start to tune you know our investments and the campaigns that we're running and the messages that we're using for the audience and it's particularly important in b2b marketing where you have a lot of data I put its longer sales cycles and I don't know you know I believe it's the CMO in many ways and the marketing department works for sales but it's our responsibility to drive the demand to help our business right but at the same time it's critical that we don't lose sight of that creates having that community that is so important to the loyalty that happens over time with brick right and that's another just such an interesting point right is back in the day you know the brand's controlled the messaging the brands controlled the information the brand's controlled the content that's no longer the case anymore by the time somebody inquires to you or participates in a campaign or shows a better spunk event or or goes to the website they've probably done some homework they've probably talked to their peers they've probably done some investigation on online and I know and I go online to investigate stuff I'm looking at the other people talking about the products that I'm interested not necessarily the company's product so it's a really different challenge from a CMO perspective to engage enable and help those people be your advocates while at the same time you don't really have this quite as control the message as you used to have back well hey that's actually I think a great thing right most customers are doing more due diligence on their own and I think there's there's research you can see research from others that say something to the effect of 60 or 70 percent of the decision-making process is occurring before they even engage the brand right and so once you recognize that how you tie all these things together becomes super important so I'll go back to community I don't want to over harp on it but that's the only way that you can effectively manage the unknown unknowns in that first 70% how do you get your customer advocates to tell their stories the value they're getting how do you make sure that the content that you think is relevant to the industry is out there you're contributing to it how do you in your just think about what you guys are doing right how do you distribute the value chain of content creation to more valuable individuals that then can tie back to organizations and how do you tie it the stories that we tell right right so I want to I want to test another hypothesis bite because again you're smart guys and we talk about a lot here which is really kind of classic old-school have a big number with some small conversion rate and that's your yield yep versus having a relatively small but targeted number with a much higher conversion rate because these are actually the people that care versus more of a kind of broadcasting yeah strategy are you seeing some of that are you trying to execute I think that's critical in the future of all marketing right the broad reach stuff is expensive it's really hard to measure the impact and yeah if you can do 10 million here and 50 basis points you'll get to some outcome but the world is pivoting to vary outcome driven right how many transactions that I Drive what's the value of those transactions or more importantly how successful were my customers that we care at Splunk deeply about getting the software adopting the software getting value from the software and so that has nothing to do with big broad you know hit a hundred million people right it's hit the right ten thousand people right pull them through a customer journey that starts with their research phase ultimately puts them through the adoption phase an incredibly successful way and that Tunes everything you're in best your philosophy what you reward because they think in the the older school model there was this belief that more is better right just do more what you're a successful company so what are you gonna do just do more more and more and more and more and more and you get these linear growth patterns on more and eventually that stops working because something else breaks and you realize that more wasn't actually doing anything it just felt good in the moment it was just more it was just more and it kept people busy and it was great it was great in those sense and so that's why measurement that's why being able to take your data and get value from your data and listen to your data is so critical in every department and marketing more than anyone else now has that data so you can be targeted I mean if I can tell you if I only touched five people and those five people became incredibly successful customers that's an amazing marketing campaign right with huge success yeah versus I ran a commercial during the Super Bowl and I touched you know 240 million people but no one bought any software you might feel good about that right but it isn't necessary driving the outcomes and the results and then b2b that's so critical yeah and obviously we're huge believers of that and also on the community side as well because you know we want to get peers you know your buyers peers talking about their experience with the product is very very different than reading your marketing brochure or those types of things so it's such a critical component I mean just with the Yelp example that's a pure concept that applies exactly the same to enterprise software community like community is critically but digital is the trend that's driving all the change right that gives you access to data which forces accountability into new parts of the organization that never really had it before no more excuses and now you have this incredibly new community driven model which never used to be important but actually to me is the lifeblood of the long-term investment that marketers are making right right the other thing that you guys have done a good job kind of growing with the times if you will and that's customers want choice and they want buying choice right so you guys have obviously adopted cloud you have more subscription type of opportunity so what if you could speak to you know from a marketer point of view you have to kind of repackage things you've got to look for funny arbitrage opportunity I kind of screwed things up in the market your channel partner conflict you have to kind of manage all these things but but the reality is people want to buy the way they want to buy and you have to give them the options that they expect to be there and I think that's really the big change is the expectation is there that you have those different types no one's successful in isolation any more any belief that one vendor and one product is the solution to all ills is policy and so you know there's two views there one is what are you doing from a technology innovation perspective and that's for us very clearly focused on making sure Splunk and all the software you already have work better together the sum of the parts should be greater right right and then from a marketing perspective it's recognizing you know how you can go to market how you can sell with all the partner in the ecosystem right this isn't a competitive conversation it's how do we make customers successful and so Splunk and salesforce is better because I can look at my Salesforce data I can use Splunk I can drive my organization that's what we're doing inside the house and we see customers starting to do it right Splunk in Hadoop it's not about the Hadoop ecosystem per se being separate those that that data Lake coupled with our software is a better solution and so it's Punk with all these different technologies together being more effective is critical right and it's exactly what you said customers have what they have they've made the investments that they've made they have great reasons for all those things and I want to augment their success with ourself right right it's such an exciting time to be to be in marketing especially in the movie space so give the last word Brian for we cut out here Spong kampf 2019 is good what are you just knock off 18 18 is coming up so what can we expect how many people what what should people be making sure they get registered and get them glad it's not 2019 yet yes I have like 15 months and so we're not starting the planning on that we are calm 18 it's our amazing user conference you are there in 2012 we're gonna have almost 10,000 people there it's in Orlando Florida October 1st to October 4th it's it's really it's an amazing experience it really focused on celebrating our amazing user community now demonstrating all the way innovations and then bringing them together to share share ideas which i think is really for me as someone who's only been a spunk for almost two years so exciting every one of our customers is using our software at Splunk in innovative ways and what we're seeing more and more is it's expanding outside of just IT insecurity and so as our customers talk to each other share ideas share use cases we see the lightbulb moments the aha moments if you will going off and that part is incredible right well we'll be there again so yeah we're looking forward to it all right Brian well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day on a Friday to it to stop by thanks for having me it's awesome a pleasure he's brian i'm jeff you're watching the cube we're in palo alto studios thanks for watching see you next time [Music] you

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios for a Cube Conversation as part of the Western Digital Data Makes Possible program it's very gracious of Western Digital to sponsor us to go out and talk to a lot of different companies that are doing a lot of cool innovations. At the end of the day it's all powered by data, at the end of the day all software is just an algorithm sitting on data with a nice display for a specific solution. But this one we're diving into sports and there's so much going on with sports and technology and this is a great company that's actually been kind of flying under the radar for 10 years unless you're into the space. But we're happy to have them as GumGum and we're joined here by Brian Kim he's a senior vice president of Product from GumGum. Brian, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me Jeff. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. So for the folks that aren't familiar with GumGum give 'em kind of the quick overview. >> Sure, so GumGum's a artificial intelligence company with a expertise in computer vision. And what that means in kind of common language is that we focus on building algorithms that allows computers to identify what's happening in imagery. And then we apply that into different businesses that we feel like the usage of computer vision could essentially automate scale or drive significant value to those different businesses themselves. >> Right, but you guys have been at this for awhile you're almost 10 years old, like you said your 10 year anniversary's coming up. >> Yeah we were founded in 2008 and a lot of the core team still together from the original team that worked there. And we were doing computer vision before computer vision was probably sexy. >> Right right. >> So. We've been working on it for a long time we've built a lot of expertise around that and with a lot of the improvements that have happened in machine learning and A.I. these days it's just been kind of the big, hot thing that has continued to accelerate and helped us grow significantly over the last few years. >> Yeah all of our social media feeds are filled with the picture with the chihuahuas and the blueberries right? Trying to figure out which is which. But you guys have a very different approach then kind of what we read about now in the popular press. You built computer vision capabilities but you built them for a very specific application not just as a generic kind of computer vision so I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your strategy and how you guys got started in the ad space. >> Sure, so you know, to your point Jeff I think a lot of companies have focus on what we like to call A.I. as a service and what that means is that they build the capability of using computer vision but it's really up to the end user to build it use it as a tool in to their actual business and figure out where it'll actually apply. Our path forward has been focusing on building what we like to call full stack vertical solutions meaning that we decide to go into a specific industry or division like ads for example. We build an ad solution that's using computer vision itself and we actually sell that ourselves to agencies and brands direct and then we work with the publishers on the other side of the coin to actually deliver those ad experiences and continue to kind of build our businesses around that model. >> Right, and how is a computer vision, A.I. driven ad experience different than the alternative? >> Well I think there's a few things that we've focused on that make it different. The biggest I would say is the placement of where the ads actually are themselves. So compared to your standard display ads that are around the content on a web page what we've focused on is actually building ad experiences that are within the content itself. What we call in-image ads and that's an ad that overlays on top of that photo editorial content that's on a publisher website. And what we've done there is we've applied our computer vision to understand what's going on in the actual images. And we leverage that tech to be able to then contextually match the ads from our clients to the actual pages themselves so that they're completely relevant to the page. And we make them look very slick and that's kind of the design of it so that it feels very sticky and natural to the way that the page is actually designed. >> Right >> And built. >> So what's different just so I'm clear is that unlike a typical kind of an ad placement in a page which is going into a dedicated spot as soon as the page loads it takes some data. >> Yep. >> And goes to auction. You guys are actually looking at the page as I the consumer of the page am looking at the page, and based on the things that are loaded regardless of where I am on the page: top, middle, bottom, that's the stuff that drives your ad placement. >> Yeah, perfect example would be you might be reading an article about cats and, you know, PetSmart wants to advertise with us so we'll understand that the image itself is about cats and put like a cat food, PetSmart ad that's placed within the actual image itself you might scroll down a little bit farther and find another article that's about a completely different topic. And we would actually match that to the relevant advertiser that fits that example as well. >> So how are advertisers measuring the delta in the value? I mean some of the stuff researching for this I saw a great quote that you guys in your ad "Delivery want to be seen and frequent and respectful" which I think is a really interesting way to take a point of view because clearly ads run a risk of being way too obtrusive, popovers and popunders and popups. I go to a page, I'm a huge customer in two seconds they're asking me if I want to buy something, I'm already your biggest customer! (Brian laughs) So how are the content publishers measuring this different type of an engagement with an ad presentation the way you guys do it? >> Yeah I think what you talked about is the right approach of how we want to go to market which is that we want to provide a premium offering that's high impact but not obtrusive to the end customer, and provides value to both sides of the ecosystem. So to the advertiser it might be a premium CPM that they're paying in order for that ad placement but because of how relevant it is and how viewable it is 'cause if you think about where your eyes are on the webpage, you're not looking at scanning the sides of the page you're focusing on the content that's going down the image is right in the middle of that. So if an ad pops up right in the middle of that image its much more viewable than say all the ads that are typically around the content itself. And on the publishers side to kind of end frequency we don't want to blast an ad on every single image we want to match it to the most contextual and right placement and then therefore to the publisher when they get an ad, that ad is actually paying out a pretty significant price point back to them. And then they're happy with that experience because their users not saying I'm seeing 50 ads on one page which is kind of the traditional problem that they deal with right now. >> So that's a ad tech market and you guys have been doing that for awhile but the reason we reached out to you specifically is your activity in sports which is a relatively new business for you guys. So how did you get into sports, how did you guys identify this opportunity? And then we'll dig into it a little deeper. >> Yeah, so GumGum as a whole has always been looking at different ways that we think computer vision can be applied in a myriad of different industries. And the opportunity that about 18 months ago we identified was that there was a very legacy business that was being built around providing media evaluation around sports sponsorships. So what I mean by that is how do you quantify the value of a sponsor showing up, State Farm for example showing up in a basketball game. Whether that's an LED placement there on the basket stanchion arm, or they're part of the half-time show. And the measurement that was being done traditionally was essentially done by people. So, people were watching those clips, they were timing how long the different brands were showing up, they were measuring how big those actual placements were. And they were then calculating some value off of it. And we really thought that computer vision can one, automate that entire process, so take the humans out of the loop and get it to a point that its completely automated and you don't have to have people involved. We can deliver it faster, so a computer can do something a 1000 times faster than a human being can probably analyze it. And your providing much more accuracy and efficiency of the actual data that you're providing back. You know that exact dimensions pixel by pixel that a computer is telling you versus a human being trying to eyeball where and when certain ads are showing up. So, what we've done there is then built a business that is now called GumGum Sports, where we provide media evaluation to sports sponsorships so both on the team side, which we call rights holders, and on the brand side and we're essentially the middle man who's providing third party reporting to both sides so that they understand the value of what they're getting across their sports sponsorships, both on digital which is essentially broadcast T.V. but also across social media which has been a huge gap that nobody's addressed to date. >> So just before we go into the impact before it was just a person, they're watching the game and every time that State Farm ad pops up on the stanchion they're writing down approximately how big was it could I see it, was it blurry, was it moving? Was it in the center or the side? You guys, obviously that's just right for algorithmic treatment 'cause you know, like you said you know, the pixels. You're doing time, you're doing placement, you're doing quality, you've added a number of things beyond just simple, that is there. >> [Brian] Correct. >> In terms of metrics to measure. >> Yeah so we look at things like where's the action happening? So if we can identify in a basketball game where the actual ball is that's probably where people are focused on 'cause the action's happening near that ball. So the closer you are to the ball the better score that you'll possibly get. To your point, how clear is it if you're panning back and forth through a game of your logo showing up? How big is it, how prominent is it and we've factored that into what we call our MVP factor of media value percentage which helps calculate what that end value looks like to the client. >> And was the demand driven on the suppliers side or the buyers side, were they looking for validation of this money. >> I think both. >> Value or were you saying it was both really? >> Yeah sorry to interrupt you. >> No, it's okay. >> Both sides were looking for somebody who's not favoring one or the other to give you validation so they wanted an arbitrator who would basically say this is what I think the value is in the ecosystem so that both sides know how to negotiate when they want to put together their deals next year. >> [Jeff] Right. >> You know the value to the teams are the more value you can generate obviously the higher that they can increase their price points. And I think to the brands what they're focused on is how do I optimize my ROI? Buy the placements that are generating the most value for me and not waste my money in other placements that don't generate value for them. >> Right, any big surprises in terms of the value of a stanchion versus the value of a half-time show versus a electronic thing on the scoreboard? >> So I think more than the placements themselves I think the biggest surprise that we found was how big social media actually has become in the valuation of all of media in general. You know, there's a lot of talk about subscribers numbers going down on T.V. That broadcast is declining, that nobody's watching. >> Super Bowl was down I think this year? Which doesn't happen very often. >> You know, live sports is just not what it used to be. But the reality is I think consumers have just changed their habits of where they're consuming that content. So instead of having to sit in front of a T.V. for two hours they might go check the highlights on YouTube, they might go look at their Instagram stream and see a bunch of posts that are coming from fan accounts that they're following that give you the highlight clip. So, being able to measure that piece of it that nobody's done before what we found is that that value is actually as big if not bigger than the broadcast side of it. Which nobody has really quantified to this date. >> That's really interesting. So you're what sniffing hashtags or something around a particular event to grab that data how are you grabbing all the social data around say a basketball game or whatever? >> So that's where the computer vision actually gets applied so we don't even need to look at specific hashtags or specific accounts. We can look at the full stream literally all of social media that's available publicly and we're able to sift. >> [Jeff] Just plug into the API. >> Yes sift through all that with computer vision and say oh this is not a sport, oh this one happens to be a sport now I know that it's NFL, now I know it's tied to the Super Bowl. And then you now classify all that data and then figure out the actual post that you want to analyze and the ones you don't want to analyze. >> It's so interesting I can't help but think back to like the Grateful Dead back in the day they were the only band that would allow people to record at the concerts, right. There was this huge, you can't record and no pictures! And then they would trade the tapes in the parking lot before the game and you saw that too with a lot of professional teams, no phones, I was at a concert the other day and they're like no phones! No phones, I mean that is the way that people experience and expand and amplify these live events. And it sounds like what you guys are doing is really validating how important that is to all the people that are participating in that live event. >> I'll give you a perfect example with the NBA all-star week just happened in Los Angeles recently. If you look at the slam dunk contests half of the all-stars that were in the crowd had their phones up (Jeff laughs) and are basically recording something that they're probably going to post on their social media account later. >> With massive, massive, massive followers. >> Each one of them might have two to 10 million people who follow them so you multiply all that and that's probably a bigger audience then actually who'll tune in to TNT or whichever channel that happened to be watching live the actual slam dunk contest itself. >> That's crazy. So, I'm curious to know what the response is as you come back to this data obviously it's great news for the publishers right a bunch of value that they didn't even know they were delivering no one's even capturing. At the same time I would imagine the advertisers are thrilled to actually to see that they are getting this whole nother traunch of activation that they had no clue or at least no way to measure. >> Correct. I think that's been the biggest surprise to everybody is how much value has been unlocked to them and both sides are thrilled about it because now they can start to measure that on a consistent basis and then moving forward they can figure out how that fits into their overall plan for whether they want to charge more for their sponsorships or whether they want to price certain things in like social media that they never did before. >> Right right. So, my mind is going all kind of places, so could you on sniffing that feed find say the State Farm logo stay on the same thing. Where's State Farm logo showing up in a billboard that's on the 101 that happens to be in front of a pretty spot where people take bike paths. Are you seeing or even attempting to look for other kind of secondary social impacts of other forms of advertising outside of your core solution within the sports? >> Yeah, I mean we've started to get feedback of people who are interested in solutions like that whether it's digital out of home different kind of businesses that have built themselves around wanting to track this type of ROI and we've looked at a few use cases and talked to a couple clients that we're starting to dabble in now that might be interesting for us to build new businesses around. Just like the use case that you talked about with the digital out of home example. >> Right, another one of my favorite lines that gets thrown around a lot these days is in God we trust everybody else better bring data. So I'm just curious as to the feedback you're getting from both sides of that equation within the sports application of now we have this data I mean how is that impacting peoples evaluations, how is that impacting their business decision, just kind of generally how does moving from I think this is a good value, we bought it last year we're going to re-up this year, to here's all the impressions you got the quality of the impressions, a score, plus we've uncovered all this additional value I would imagine data driven decision making has got to be so refreshing in these environments. >> It is and I think the challenge that a lot of them had was that they were getting the data six to eight weeks later, so if you think of it from a brand prospective I'm already off to my next sponsorship six to eight weeks later I can't even think about what I previously did so for us to be able to give them a solution where they can get their data back in a week or less really helps them make smarter decisions to your point about taking data driven decision making and figure out real time how they want to adjust to how their audience is adjusting. >> And do they make a lot of real time corrections in those types of packages or are those like annual deals I would imagine in the sports thing. >> Yeah I think a lot of them at this point are still annual deals the way that they sign up for it but I think now that they're having access to this data they're starting to rethink that model and trying to figure out how do we need to change the way that we purchase these things in the future to better fit how they're getting the data around it. >> Has anyone repriced the inventory based on the data that's come out of the research. They increase the price of a stanchion and decrease, I'm just making stuff up, decrease the price of some other ad unit within the stadium based on some of the data that's come out of your system. >> We've had a lot of our clients talk about their plans of how they plan to go do that. I think we're only 18 months into this business so a lot of them are still in the first season or maybe halfway through the second season of working with us so they're still trying to figure out how to message that properly and what the right channel is for them to recoup those gains but I think the ability for them to start those conversations is something they've never had before so exposing that to them now allows them to really rethink how their business model is. >> It's such a cool example of how data actually allows both halves of the equation to do a better job It's really beneficial to everybody right it's not just one sided information that's giving somebody a big advantage over the other one. >> Exactly. >> All right so Brian before I let you go we're in 2018 still hard to believe I can't believe we're almost through the first quarter, we're ripping through it. Some of your priority's for 2018 what is GumGum working on what are you excited about if we sit down a year from now what are we going to be talking about? >> Yeah I mean we've been doing this advertising business since 2011 it's our most mature business so I'm definitely continually scaling that business from a automation standpoint and continually growing that particularly internationally has been one of our main goals for this year. As I said GumGum Sports is a pretty new business to us but we're expecting that to start to bring in significant revenue for us this year and want to see that growth happen. And we're also looking into new emerging areas where we potentially think computer vision can be applied just like we did in GumGum Sports. It could be the medical space it could be television there's a lot of different applications there that we haven't quite tapped into yet but we're starting to noodle around what are the right ways that we want to go after that and potentially where we want to invest in with how successful we've been so far. >> Yeah, the exciting opportunity ahead. >> Yeah. >> All right. All right Brian, he's Brian Kim, he's the senior vice president of Product from GumGum. Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and stopping by. >> Thanks Jeff. >> All right, pleasure. I'm Jeff Frick you're watching theCUBE catch ya next time, thanks for watching. (instrumental music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT, Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, with Jeff Frick, and we have just spent a really interesting educational day at the Fork to Farm event, Food IT. Jeff we've spoken with investors, ag-tech experts, folks in academia who are training the next generation of farmers, to Campbell Soup, who's been around since the late 1800s, are really focused on helping the agriculture and food industry combat the challenges of environmental sustainability, of climate change, of labor shortages, it's been a really, really intriguing day, where tech meets food and agriculture. >> Yeah and just a huge opportunity. One of the themes that kept coming up over and over again, is the average age of the farmers today. Heard 70 something, 60 something, whatever, they're getting old, so there's going to be a huge turnover in this industry, so both a challenge as well as an opportunity for the next generation of ag-people to make some of these changes, and change the way the industry works. The other thing that's really interesting that I found Lisa, is that there's really big social issues that are at play here. We talked about water, we talked about labor, that play into this whole thing, sustainability. And again, tying it back to their theme of its fork to farm, how much of that's now driven by the consumer and the industry, it's kind of a reaction to the consumer, which we see over and over and over in all the other shows that we go. The consumerization IT, driven by younger people's interactions with their phones, is setting an expectation of the way they want everything to work. And so, it sounds like the food industry is really at the cutting edge of this, still really early on, but as we saw in some of those market maps, and the innovation is rich, feels like we're really at the start of this thing. So even though this show has been around for a few years, they have the big show in Salinas next week, the Forbes show, that's still really early days of leveraging tech, innovation, to change the food industry. >> It is, and you brought up that the labor shortages, and that was echoed quite a bit today, for a number of reasons. One, the aging population of farmers as you mentioned. Two, also in California, the minimum wage going up, and that's not only going to be a problem Jeff for farmers, but it's actually now pervading into the retail space, where they're going to have to start depending on robotics to be able to create, or to reduce their cost, to provide even fast food. That was something that was quite interesting to me, I hadn't really quite thought about, from that channel perspective. >> Right, right. >> And then as you mentioned, on the tech enabled consumer side, I was talking with Jeff earlier, I kept thinking farm to fork, 'cause farm to table is so trendy now, right? There's a lot of apps. And you gave me this a-ha grasshopper look, and it was really because as consumers we've really demanded so much. We want transparency, we want to know exactly what's in things, and we want organic, and hormone-free, and we also want things delivered whenever, and wherever we want them. We think of the distribution model, has really become very decentralized, and a lot of that being driven by the consumer. On the farm side too, regarding the attrition, there's also a lot of antiquated, especially in the post-harvest supply chain, things that are still written down on paper, traceability is a huge challenge for them. And I think from some of the things we heard today, a lot of the farming, especially in California, they can't really quite see all the data that they have, but they are sitting on a lot of information, that not only could make their farms more efficient, but could also facilitate you think, even knowledge transfer to the next generation of farmers. Right, right. Yeah a lot of talk about kind of there wasn't a lot of data, now it's a data flood. So how do you use those data sources to be more intelligent in what you do? And I specifically asked some of the guests, you know, are kind of the classic big data players participating in this space, and she said, "Not really." They're all kind of holding off on the side waiting to get in. But these are big numbers, this is a big impact. The professor from St. Louis Episcopal talked about a billion dollars worth of strawberries that you got to get off the field, and if you don't have the labor to get it off, and the data to get the labor and to time it right, it's a billion dollars worth of strawberries, and these are big numbers. And the other thing that just fascinated me, is again, this power of the consumer. The Google guy who took basically what was a service just to feed employees and keep them around so they write more code, but using that as a platform to drive much more thoughtfulness and intelligence. And supply chain changes around food, and even called it food shot in reference to the moon shot. >> The moon shot, yes. >> Enabled better diets, shift diets, food transparency, reduced loss and waste, accelerate transformation to a circular food economy. So, and they said, I think he's been at it for 15 years or thereabout. So really an interesting kind of a twist, on what you would not expect from the food service people, you think of them just supplying food. >> Exactly. >> Not trying to drive cultural change. >> Exactly, and trying to scale, but they're using data from their own googlers, to help determine and evaluate what people are doing, what they want, preferences, making it more personal, and using data in that way to also then facilitate some of the upstream, you know from the supply perspective, making things, meeting those challenges that the consumers are demanding, but you said he's been at Google for five years, and when he first got the call being in hospitality for so long, he just thought, "Google, what do they want to talk to me for?" And how revolutionary they've been, and you can think of how much education can happen from Google Food alone. I was quite blown away by that. >> Yeah, the other kind of theme is unused resources. So, one of the food trucks that they had seaweed. Why seaweed? Because it takes no fresh water, it takes no fertilizer, and it's carbon negative. So not really about how does it taste, but some specific reasons to try to make seaweed a better food, a more satisfying food. Talked about kale, and really again what a great example of a, can't say it, Fork to Farm tradition, 'cause before kale was a throwaway, nobody grew kale, now suddenly everybody wants kale smoothies, and so there's nothing, plant became something of importance, driven by the consumer, not necessarily by the producers. So, very dynamic times. I think again, the trend we see over and over and over, finding the hollowing out of the middle. You know, you don't want to be just a generic provider in the middle, you better have massive scale, or you better be a real specialty provider. And then finally the ramifications of the Amazon purchase of Whole Foods, really validating, yes you want digital, yes you want data, yes you want to provide better customer service. But at the same time, you still need a physical presence, kind of validating the physical presence of the store like Whole Foods. So really a very dynamic activity going on in this space. >> And it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next five to 10 years, as farming generationally changes hands. And there is technology that's available today, right? We talked about big data, there's many, many sources of public data, whether it's satellite imagery, water data that can be utilized and then paired with private data that a farm has. Or using GPS devices on tractors and combines, robotics. You talked to the inventor of the Sally Salad machine, there's a lot of technology that might be, I don't know if I'd say ahead of its time, but I think from a farming perspective, there's a little bit of a gap there right now. So it'll be very interesting to see how farms evolve from a technology perspective. I love how the Forbes AgTech Summit, I think it's tomorrow and Thursday in Salinas Valley, what a great juxtaposition of Silicon Valley and a world hub of technology innovation, to Salinas, which is the salad bowl of the world. I think that is quite interesting, and some of the dynamics that they've seen, I think this was their fourth event tomorrow. >> Jeff: Fourth event, right, right. >> Really starting to get more farmers interested in understanding the potential that ag-tech can have on profitability, efficiencies, reducing waste, even things like discovering and preventing foodborne pathogens. >> Right, and robots, we need robots, we don't have enough labor. Michael Rose said there's going to be a shortage of hundreds of thousands of line cooks. Just regular, ordinary line cooks at restaurants, and that's really kind of one of the applications of the salad machine, because as you hit the button below that cook, you can hit the button to load that salad, while you run off and pull the rest of the entree meals together. So, again, it's really fun to see the consistent themes that we see over and over, that's computing cloud and data-driven decision making, applied to what's arguably one of the most important things going on, which is feeding us a lot of conversation about the world's population getting to 10 billion in the not too distant future, that have to be fed. And again, with the aging of the population, the traditional farmers, a real opportunity to do kind of a refresh with a bunch of people that have grown up with these things. So, really cool show, a great day, hope you had fun, I had fun. >> Oh, I had a great time, it was really educational. I think that you hit the nail on the head, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think what the Mixing Bowl is doing, along with Better Foods, is really bringing the people that are creating food, and producing it together, and connecting them with the people that are creating technology. So, I think this is the tip of the iceberg head of lettuce, maybe? So, I am excited to see what happens over time, but not only was it a great event, but I'm now very hungry. >> Now you're very hungry, there's more food trucks outside. Alright Lisa, well thank you again for hosting. >> Thank you. >> Again, another great show. I think last time we were together was at the NAB. >> NAB. >> Talking about media entertainment, so the digitization, transformation continues, driven by all these huge macro-factors of cloud, big data, so the beat rolls on. >> It does. >> Alright, she's Lisa Martin, and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube. Thanks for watching, we've got a busy spring coming to an end. Had a little bit of a lull in the summer then we'll hit it hard again in the fall, so thanks for watching siliconangle.tv, youtube.com/siliconangle, and siliconangle.com for complete coverage of a lot of stories beyond just theCUBE. I'm Jeff Frick, signing off with Lisa Martin from Food IT, from Fork to Food, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From the computer history museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube. Covering food IT, Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back to The Cube. From the food IT event, From Fork to Farm, yep, you heard that right, Fork to Farm. I'm Lisa Martin. Really excited to be joined by my next guests who are influencing the food chain with Big Data, Cloud, IoT and Blockchain in some very, very interesting ways. We have Rob O'Reilly, senior member and technical staff of Analog Devices. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> And we have Raja Ramachandran, the founder and CEO of Ripe.io. Welcome. >> Thank you Lisa. >> So I made that joke about the Fork to Farm because we think so often how trendy it is, farm to table, farm to mouth. And this has been a really interesting event for us to talk with so many different people and companies across the food chain that we often, I think, take for granted. So Rob, wanted to kind of start with you. Analog Devices has been around for 50 years. You serve a lot of markets. So how is, and maybe kind of tell me sort of the genesis, and I know you were involved in this, of Analog Devices evolving to start using Cloud, Big Data, IoT in the food and agriculture space. What was the opportunity that you saw light bulb moment? >> Yup. It's an interesting story. We started with a piece of technology, a sensor that we can connect. I was looking of an app to apply, 'cause it was a full sensor to the Cloud strategy I was working on. And through some conference attendees that I had met and from a fellow who's now our partner, we kind of put together a strategy of "Well we've got the sensor to the Cloud, "where would we apply this?" And we decided though a little bit of banter, tomatoes. And most of it was because, in New England specifically, there's a lot of, there's 7,000 farms in Massachusetts. >> Lisa: Wow. >> Not all of them produce tomatoes, but a lot of them do. So it was like having a test bed right in our backyard. And from that point it's grown to what it is now. >> And I hear that you don't like tomatoes. >> I really don't like tomatoes. >> Lisa: What about heirloom tomatoes? >> I don't like any tomatoes. >> Lisa: Mozzarella, little basil, no? >> No, no. (laughs) I don't mind pasta sauce so much, but that's just because it's all salt. >> Lisa: That's true. >> And sugar. But no, and I've managed to get through this entire project without anybody forcing me to eat a tomato, so. >> That's good, they're respectful. >> I'm proud of that. >> So I was joking earlier, we cover a lot of events across enterprise innovation, and we were at a Hadoop Dataworks events a couple weeks ago and one of the guests was talking about Big Data and how it's influencing shipping, and how shipping companies are leveraging Big Data to determine how often they should clean the ships to remove barnacles 'cause it slows them down. So the funny thing that popped into my mind from that show is, barnacles and Big Data? Never thought that. Today, the wow factor for me, the internet of tomatoes. What is the internet of tomatoes? >> The problem statement when we started was "Why do tomatoes taste like cardboard?" >> Lisa: He really doesn't like tomatoes! (laughs) >> And, you know, in order to go dig into that was let's collect data. So there's a variety of methods that we use to collect the data. We had to create all of this on our own, so we created our own apps for the phones, our own matchups for the web, our own gateways. We built our hardware, we 3-D printed all the housings, and two of us just went off and started to deploy so we could collect data. The second half of it was, "well, what is in the tomato? "and why does it taste the way it does?" So we started doing some chemistry analysis. So a bunch of refractometers and other instruments so we can see what the sugar levels were, what the acid levels were. We infused ourselves into the Boston Tomato Contest, which they have annually. So we showed up, we looked like the Rolling Stones. We showed up with cases of, trap cases of equipment. It took us about 11 and a half hours to test 113, I think it was, tomatoes, and then we compared those to the chefs' scorecards. And in the chef's scorecard, there wasn't just a taste profile, there was the looks and everything else. Well I found a few markers between what the chef's profile said was a good tasting tomato and what the chemistry said. So a year later we showed up with our optical solution and we managed to test 450 tomatoes. >> Wow. >> About 100 of those go to the slicing table, so we had information on 100 of them and we did the same thing. So it got to the point to where we at least had that reconciliation of "what's the farmer doing "and how does it taste?" And by bringing Raja and his group in, we're bringing a lot more of other Big Data, if you will. Other weather data, aerial drone data, you know, anything we could find in a telematic range that would affect the processing or whatever of the tomato. So that in a nutshell is the internet of tomatoes. >> And is this something that, you know, being able to aggregate Big Data from a variety of sources, something that you're planning to then take to, I heard you earlier in the talk, talking about kind of at the relationship building stage. Is this a dialogue that you're having yet with farms? You mentioned 7,000 farms in Massachusets. What's that kind of conversation like? >> Well that's a very interesting dynamic and I think, you know, that data point for the industry is you better go talk to the farmer. It's really been interesting, the hesitation from a farmer to talk to a semiconductor company was odd. But I wasn't John Deer, I wasn't Monsanto, so they were a little more open. And they understand, a lot of these farmers that I'm dealing with now are generational, you know they're fifth, sixth generation. They really haven't made significant change on their farm in 100 years. >> Probably nor do they have a lot of data that's automated, right? There's probably a lot of things that are in Excel. >> And a lot of it is, I mean beyond their first level of contact, say with a seed or a pesticide manufacturer, They have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world. Unlike, you know, a lot of the big, large farms that we see. But at the smaller region, they're regional. And we've still have Hatfield-McCoy type things going on in New England, where families don't talk to each other, they don't share information. So through one of our work groups, we actually invited two of them, and I felt like match maker. We were trying to just get these two to talk. And they did, and they both realized that they were spending way too much money on fertilizer, and they were both over watering. So, it's still Hatfield and McCoys but at least I think they wink at each other every once in a while. >> Right, I love that you bought that up. That was something that was talked about a number of times today is the lack of collaboration maybe that's still in the sort of competitive stage. So Raja, talk to us about Ripe.io. First of all, I think the name is fantastic, but Blockchain and food. What's the synergy? And what opportunity did you see coming from the financial services industry? >> So, you know one of the key points about what we felt brings all this together is creating a web of trust. And so in financial markets, insurance markets, healthcare markets, you know big institutional regulated markets, there's a lot of regulations that really bind together that notion of trust, because you have a way in which you could effectively call out foul. Now, so there's a center of gravity in each of those industries, whether it's a central bank, you know or a state regulator insurance, so the government in healthcare. Here, there's not. It's disparate. It's completely fragmented, yet somehow magically we all get food everyday, ane we're not dead you know. So from that perspective we just marvel at the fact that you're there. So, bringing Blockchain was a way to basically talk to the farmer, talk to the distributor, talk to the buyer, the producer, and all these different constituents, including certifiers, USDA, whomever it might be. And then also even health to health companies, right, so that you can relate it. So the idea is to basically take all of these desperate sets of data, because they don't necessarily collaborate in full, capture it in the way that we're working with ADI so that you can create a real story about where that food came from, how is it curated, how did it get transported, what's in it, you know, do I get it on time, is it ripe, is it tasty and so on, right? And so we looked at Blockchain as a technology, an enabling technology that quickly captures the data, allows each to preserve its own security about it, and then combine it so that you can achieve real outcomes. So you can automate things like, were you sustainable? Were you of quality? Did you meet these taste factors? Was it certified? That's what excited us. We though, this is a perfect place because you've got to feed 9,000,000,000 people and no one trusts their food, you know? >> Lisa: Right. >> So we felt this would be an excellent opportunity to deploy Blockchain. >> And it's interesting that you know, the transparency is one of the things that we hear from the consumers, you know. We want all these things. We want hormone free, cage free, et cetera. We want organic, we want to make sure it is organic, but we also want that transparency. I'm curious since you are talking to the farmers, the distributors and the consumers, what were some of the different requirements coming from each, and how do you blend that to really have that visibility or that traceability from seed to consumption? >> And it's a good point right, because there's all these competing factors where farmers want certain information done, they don't want the price to go to zero because it's so commoditized. The distributor, not entirely sure if they want anybody to know what they do is if they deliver it, they've done their job. The aggregator, a grocery store, a restaurant or whomever, are really feeling the pinch of demographic changes. Not only in America, but globally, you know about this notion that "I need to know more about my food". Millennials are doing it, look at Amazon and Whole Foods. >> Lisa: Yup. >> That is a tipping point of like where this is all going to go. So for us, what Blockchain does allows for each of those drivers to remain clean. And so in essence, what you can do is you take something called smart contracts, not a great word but basically these are codes in which you've got a checklist or if-then statements that you can say, "What does the farmer want?" "What is the distributor doing to get something there?" And of course the buyer. And so in that sense, we've talked a lot about a scorecard or this notion that you can basically highlight and show all of these different values, so that if the consumer is looking for, you know, I definitely want this in my lettuce, in my beets, in whatever it is, and I need to make this type of salad, how acidic should my tomatoes be? Well that's hard to count, like combine all that information. Since we're capturing that data set and validating it to make sure that they're true, then you actually enable that trust for that consumer. So the consumer may want a lot of information, the issue is will they pay for it? There's some evidence that they will. The second part is, you know, does the grocer have the ability to manage wide varietals in their shelf space, and so on. All the techniques that a grocer would go through, yet they want a clean supply chain. >> Lisa: Right. >> So you know, so like what're we're saying is that this is definitely not easy. And so we're taking it where the influencer of the entire chain is able to help drive it, in the meanwhile we're trying to help create a farmer community that creates a level of trust. Bind those together, we believe Blockchain and a lot of the technology that ADI is deploying helps achieve that. >> And it sounds like from a technology perspective, you're leveraging Blockchain, Big Data, aggregating that to help farmers, even consumers, grocers, retailers, become more data-driven businesses. >> Oh absolutely. I mean in one instance we've got, you know a customer that they're learning how Blockchain can be used to open up their markets and improve their existing customer service. So what they have are like data sets, you know Rob would definitely understand this, but basically you have data set on like what's best for apples, pears, avocados to ripen, you know. Now, they know it in their heads, right? But the issue is, they don't know when there's conditions that change. The grocery store says I want Braeburn apples to be 20% more crisper, well they actually have the answer but they don't know how to tie all that together. >> Lisa: Right. >> So this data-driven capability exposes automation, so that you can fulfill on that. Create new markets, 'cause if your growers don't have it you can go find it from elsewhere. And for the consumer, you're going to deliver that component on time. And so in that sense, you know these things are revealed as ways to, not only like lower cost you know, because in the end Blockchain has this sort of notion that it lowers costs. Like any technology, if you insert it, it typically adds costs. And I'm not saying that our Blockchain does, but the greater value is branding, preserving it, you know. A better economic consequence about it, a better customer satisfaction because I now have knowledge in transparency. >> Lisa: Right. >> So you can't value these things right, because I'm a millennial like all of a sudden I got all my information, well how did you value it? I just paid $60 at Whole Foods, or is it something else? >> Lisa: Right. >> So we think that there's whole new economic revitalization about the entire farming system and the food nag system, because if you show the transparency, you've got something. >> That's so interesting. Last question, and we're almost out of time, Rob you mentioned a lot of small farms in Massachusets. Where are those small farms in terms of readiness to look at technologies and the influence of Big Data? Is it still fairly early in those discussions, or is your market more the larger farms that ... >> I said it earlier, we're at the beginning of the beginning. I was actually shocked, excuse me, when I went out and started talking to them. I was under some assumption that a lot of this was already going on. And it turns out it's not, certainly at that level. So we were like new to these guys, and the fact that we had a technology that would help them was unique to them. The issue was, well how do you communicate with them? How would you sell that? What's the distribution channel? So through a lot of the workshops that we do with the farmers we ask the question, "If their is new technology and you want to go get it, "what do you do?" They google it. I said, "Okay, that's probably not the answer "I was looking for." (laughs) But no, the supporting infrastructure, the rest of the ecosystem they need to take advantage just isn't there yet. So a lot of that I think is slow for the adoption, but it's also kind of helped us because we're working on technologies. You know, timing is everything. So the fact that we've had time to catch up to what we thought was really needed, and then learned more from the farmer, well no, no this is really what they want. So we've been able to iterate. You know, we're a very small team. We've been able to fail miserably many, many times. But the good news is, when we're successful that's all people see. And the farmers are starting to see that, that hey, we're getting actionable data. You're telling me things that I kind of knew, 'cause they fly by the seat of their pants a lot. >> They want it validated, verified. >> Oh yeah, they're very frugal. >> Trustworthy, as you said Raja. >> There's a big push back to spend any money on anything at a farm. That's just the way it is, it's not anything unique. So when you show up now with some technology that could help them, they just want to make sure that you're spot on, you can predict what it is, and when they hand me the money they can start planning on the return on their investment. >> Well gentlemen, we want to thank you so much for sharing your insights, Blockchain of food, what ADI is doing in their 50th year. Sounds like the beginning is very exciting and we wish you the best of luck. I'm not going to hold my breath that you're going to like tomatoes but, you know. (laughs) We wish you the best of luck and enjoy the rest of today. We want to thank you for watching The Cube at the Food IT event, From Fork to Farm. I'm Lisa Martin, thanks for watching. (upbeat pop music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley it's the Cube, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm brought to you by Western digital. >> Hi welcome back to the Cube. We are at the fourth annual Food IT: Fork to Farm event at the Computer History Museum. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Jeff Frick Very excited to to welcome our next guest, Paul Noglows, who is the executive producer of the Forbes AgTech Summit. Paul, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you >> So we're in the heart of Silicon Valley right now, but you are the creator of the Forbes AgTech Summit, which happens tomorrow, June 28th and 29th in Salinas, the salad bowl of America. Talk to us about this event that you've created. What was the genesis of this, and why Salinas? >> We were doing a series at Forbes in 2014 called reinventing America, and we were going around cities mostly in the midwest, but we were mostly looking at industries that were really reinventing themselves and remaking themselves, so we focused on advanced manufacturing in Chicago, we focused on healthcare in Indianapolis, then we went up to Detroit and we focused on reinventing the workforce. So we did a series of five shows over 15 months. And the last one, we thought we were going to reinvent the farm, and we thought we were going to do it somewhere in the Midwest. But we got a proposal from the city of Salinas and they said, why don't you come out and see what we got here, and it's the salad bowl of the world, and I knew Monterey pretty well from having lived out here, and we used to take our kids down to the Monterey Aquarium, but I never really knew Salinas or the Salinas valley. So I got a tour from the former mayor, Dennis Donohue, and it was just we were blown away by how much was going on, and really, it's become the epicenter of AgTech innovation. We're just thrilled at Forbes that we were able to be part of that and to support it. And the summit has grown dramatically over the three years, and so we're really looking forward to a terrific show. >> Tell us about the growth that you've achieved in this summit. The opportunities, the types of people that are there, and what they are going to be able to see and discuss. >> Yeah, We started out with about 400 participants in the summer of 2015, we had 20 startups, but it's really mushroomed from there. This year, we're have 650 participants, we'll have 50 companies in the innovation showcase, we've expanded the field demos and the plant tours to a full day. About a good third of our audience are farmers, and that's really been the secret sauce for us. Is that we've priced the summit right. There's a lot of summits out there, and people are starting to get big numbers for an afternoon at the Marriot Marquee. Ours is really different, we've kept the rate low enough so that farmers can participate, and we love to have everyone outside. We do it all under giant white tent right out in front of the Taylor building on main street in Salinas, and we also have people out at the local processing plants and the local fields. We go out to Hartnell's Alisal campus and we use the USDA test field. >> Its interesting because Salinas has been at the forefront of Ag Innovation a long time ago. It was one of the first refrigerated rail cars to try to get fresh lettuce for salad to Chicago. I remember reading about that numerous times, and the first couple didn't work that well. >> Well it's really amazing. It's been such a privilege to deal with folks Bruce Taylor. It was Bruce's father and grandfather who really were the pioneers of iceburg lettuce. The more you get into it, you know, I've gotten really passionate about it and the history and everything else. You see the continuation today, and with the developments. And, even if it's a Taylor farm putting a startup's robotics, putting them in their processing plants. This is really the cutting edge of AgTech innovation. >> So I'm curious, we cover a lot of big tech events, usually more on the infrastructure side, this is really on the application side. So as you look at cloud, and edge computing, and big data, and mobile, and some of these big trends. What if you can just highlight some of the ones that really jump out to you that have enabled some of these innovations, autonomous vehicles obviously drones, we're seeing so much of it, but now they're putting it to work. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, there's so much going on. We look in field robotics, we look at precision automation, precision agriculture, and the use of big data, and the ability to harness that and to really apply it, it's changed a lot of things. It's changed the way we can grow. It's also changing consumer's tastes in what consumers want. And that's a lot of what we're talking about here today. So it really has been revolutionary. I think we need the industry, we need to industry to really agriculture itself to get really get together. I think sometimes there still this is looked at as competitive advantage, so what I, we, find interesting is are we going to move beyond competitive advantage and what's good for your plant or your farm. Is there going a collective effort to really start applying this across the agricultural system. >> What are the interesting things that they talked about this morning in the general session was and the theme of the event. We're so used to farm to table, farm to fork, and I looked at that and fork to farm? The consumer is so empowered, very demanding. Right, we want cage free, we want organic, we want hormone free, we want, we've changed the distribution model. How are, but also there's this paradox of the consumer not wanting factory farms. How are farmers, you said quite a bit of the attendees are farmers, how are they embracing this consumer demand with technologies like big data, cloud computing, block chain? >> Well I think it's really the key. It's that you have different farmers and different processors. There's a wide spectrum in terms of adoption and in terms of innovation. But they are putting it to work, and that's why there's so much interest in the startups, and there's so much interest in how can we do this more efficiently, how can we do this better. I think it used to be that you basically needed to have a crisis, like the ecoli crisis, for things to really change in the industry. But hopefully, we've moved beyond that. In that it's not going to take a crisis for folks to really start embracing these new technologies. >> So then in the other trend that has come up in a number of times in doing some background in this show is that there's not only kind of the very organic, cage free specialty demands in the customer. On the other hand, the population is growing, and we got to feed 10 billion people, I think number is projected by 2050. There's no new dirt being created last time I checked, except in Hawaii. How are the farmers embracing that challenge specifically cause, it's kind of this bipolar thing, one you want to increase specialization, on the other hand you got to get yields way way up at massive scale. >> Well, and that's it, and it's really looking at how do you increase yield. This is a lot of the interest. This is a lot of the interest in genetics and everything else and looking at the real science of growing. But it's also interesting in this is a little bit more further afield, but I was talking to Bruce Taylor even about kale. You know 10 years ago kale was considered a throwaway crop. >> Right >> Paul: It wasn't even harvested. And now you look at the impact kale is having on the American diet and you know you have a crop that represented really nothing probably as recently as five years ago. >> Jeff: Right >> Now it's an important crop. So there's all sorts of innovation, all sorts of different ways of looking at things, but I do think for the most part that's the reason we have those things. We've always been adamant that we don't want to get people together to talk about 2050, we're not futurist. We're looking at near term solutions to current problems. So what we're really interested in, you know, what is the farm of 2020 look, not the farm of 2050. >> Jeff: Right, right >> As we look at California that's just come out of this severe drought, the event being hosted in the salad bowl of the, really, the world, what are some of the challenges that are really common across farms, across the heartland of America? Water, planting inefficiencies, harvesting or supply chains, are you seeing a lot of commonalities? >> There are a lot of commonalities. I think there's a mistake. We actually have a conversation tomorrow. I kind of feel like the assumption is all the water problems are over, and the water problems are not over. They maybe over for a short period of time, but I am fully convinced that this is going to be. Two years ago this was the topic du jour at our conference. I'd say this year probably the major topic is labor. And labor, you see, having tremendous impact. You have, across the country. And so, you have the issues of immigration, you've got issues of minimum wage, that certain farms are saying we don't know how we are going to do this. >> Lisa: Right >> We don't know how to make this work. But the major pressures, things like that water, labor, those haven't gone away, and those haven't been solved. But that's why we're all getting together. That's why we're here today, and that's why we're going to be down in Salinas Wednesday and Thursday. >> And on the labor front, it's that you've talked about the Californian minimum wage is going up quite considerably. But it's also things like an aging farming population, and there's, you can see the value there from a big data perspective to be able to capture, to facilitate some automation and drive the next generation of >> Paul: Well >> Lisa: the farmers. >> And one of the ways we're going to close our conference on Thursday afternoon is I'm going to moderate a discussion on farmers of the future. Because we've all heard it, we've all heard it time and time again. The average of the American farmer, I think it's pushing 70 years old, and there's no succession planning and that no body gets into this business unless they're basically born into it or forced into it in some way, and what we're finding is that it's not really true. We're putting up four young farmers, who are really making a difference, and who are applying innovation to be able to build their farms. And so, we think that it's actually more hopeful, and more interesting than may at first blush. So yeah, we do think there is a future for farming, and we're determined to explore it to its fullest. >> That's fantastic. Aught to be a fly on the wall on that conversation. Well Paul, thank you so much for joining us on the Cube, and we wish you the best of luck in your third annual Forbes AgTech Summit in the salad bowl. If you haven't been to Salinas, as Paul said, it's worth a drive down there, it's incredible. Roll down the window, take a nice breath in, and it's a beautiful place. And again, we wish you the best of luck at that summit, and we look forward to hearing about some of the great things that come out of that. >> Paul: Thank you >> And we want to thank you at the Cube at the Food IT: Fork to Farm event, I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Jeff Frick. Stick around, we're going to be right back.

>> Announcer: From the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Food IT: Fork to Farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey welcome back everybody Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Food IT show at the Computer History Museum here in Mountain View, California. Really an amazing show, 350 people, all kind of pieces of the spectrum from academia to technology, to start-ups to Yamaha. Who thought Yamaha was into food tech, I didn't think that. To start-ups and we're really excited to have two of the partners form the Mixing Bowl and the Better Food Ventures, Brita Rosenheim and Seana Day welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thanks Jeff. >> So first off, congratulations on the event, what are your impressions? you guys been doing this for a couple years now I think. Bigger, badder, better? >> No I think this is great. We've has a fantastic turn out and the content's always very interesting and the interaction between the audience and the speakers is fantastic. >> Yeah, we just finished up a panel, IoT, Internet of Tomatoes, so there's always some great conversations really going. >> I think we're talking about that later this afternoon. >> Oh fantastic. >> It is interesting right, because all the big megatrends of cloud and we cover these in tech infrastructure all the time and big data and sensors and IoT and drones and these things. Really, all being brought to bare in agriculture from everything from producing the food to eating the food to the scraps that we don't eat I guess. >> No, you're spot on, some of the big macro challenges are what's driving a lot of the innovation. As you said food scraps, but waste is a major challenge. Labor, certainly here in California is something that we've seen a lot of innovation around solving some of those labor pain points. Certainly sort of environmental sustainability and resource management, you know, how are we using water, how are we using our inputs. Those are a lot of big themes that are driving interest in this sector and driving investment. >> Right so you guys are talking about some of the investments, like you guys put on a show, but you also have an investment arm, so you're looking for new technologies that play in this space correct? >> Yeah, Better Food Ventures makes early stage, seed investments so really kind of, not ideation stage, but pretty close after that. So working with entrepreneurs and really helping them, nurture them, and grow into hopefully successful companies. We've made 12 investments so far, I think seven of them have stepped up to priced equity so. >> Excellent, and you guys have brought this architecture landscape of the innovation. We won't share this on camera because it's way too many names for you to see, but obviously you can go online. >> Seana: It's available for download on our website MixingBowlHub.com. >> It's fascinating, there are literally what, a dozen categories and many firms within each category per side, so I wonder if you can give us a little bit more color on this landscape. I had no idea, the level of innovation that's happening in the food tech space, you just don't think about it probably if you're not in the industry. >> I'll let Seana kick off, between Seana and I, we cover Fork to Farm, so Seana covers from the farm, all the way through distribution and the area that I focus on, distribution all the way to consumer consumption. So we have a nice harmony there. We'll start at the beginning with Seana. >> Looking at over 3,000 companies. >> Jeff: 3,000? >> 3,000 between the two of our sort of database's. My coverage area is really infield technologies, hardware, software, applications. So anything from sensors, drones, soil moisture, weather, crop management, farm management software, all the way through as Brita said, distribution. So looking at supply chain management, logistics, trading platforms, collaboration platforms, so there's a lot going on. Every time, I roll out one of these technology landscapes. I'm always adding categories, which is sort of representative of the way that the market is evolving. I think that there is a lot of interesting stuff happening now in the post-harvest part of this market that more investors are starting to pay attention to. We've heard of that more today's even as well. Technologies that are focused on minimizing waste in the supply chain, making things more efficient helping shorten that supply chain so that we've got fresher food. More local options for consumers. >> I've been tracking the space for the last six or seven years, and to echo Seana's point on every time you put a new map out, you know we're thinking about different categories I mean every single year you've looked at it, the ecosystem has changed so much in terms of even how you categorize or even think of the different innovations that are shaping the space. I focus on, the way I look at my map is from in-home media consumption, discovery, so media, marketing, advertising, all the way through eCommerce, so both the B2B and B2C eCommerce platforms, all the way through restaurant and retail. So grocery, delivery, hyper-local marketing and the like. >> So can you explain the crazy success of these little, event handling, short food videos that are just taking the internet by storm? It's fascinating right? >> Yeah, BuzzFeed's tasty. >> Media consumption is really something to see. >> Yeah, I think BuzzFeed really took the traditional food media category by surprise. They really created the new, literally, video content for consumption that is extremely addicting, short, it makes everything seem approachable. It's kind of the bite-size version of the Food Network and I find myself. >> Off the chart right? >> You can't stop. Whether I'll make it or not you know, like the twirling potato and. (Brita chuckling) >> So the other, the sub-theme for this years conference is Fork to Farm and I'm just curious right. Because we've seen consumerization of IT impact all the different industries that we cover. It is really the end user at the end point that's driving the innovation back upstream. I wonder if you could speak to kind of the acceleration of that trend over time. Or is it relatively recent or you know there's some specific catalyst that you've seen as you've studied the market that has really driven an acceleration of that? >> Seana: Do you want to start with consumer and then we'll get back into the grower side of that? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you've seen kind of the long evolution since my web grocer cosmos of 10, 15 years ago and you know, people thinking, I'm never going to buy food online really don't have that trust level and you know kind of eCommerce in general, mobile technology in general has changed the consumers expectation and purchase and consumption patterns, period, for all other goods, so we've gotten to a point where there is a level of trust of if something is going to come to you in the mail there's just an expected level of trust or you can send it back. So that's kind of lent itself to this food category. I think in one way, that's been an overall industry shift in terms of the changing expectations of the consumer. You want to push a button, you've got your shoes, your lipstick you know your dog toys at the push of a button, why not your food. So the problem with that is food is very different it's has to be hot or cold, you have the cold chain speed, the manual labor involved. Just kind of the cost infrastructure is totally different than sending a box of lipstick and makeup to a consumer so I think you've seen a tremendous amount of funding in this on-demand delivery category a ton of different Uber for this, Uber for that, around the food space. Meal kits, but I think the reality of running those businesses have proven to be very difficult in terms of making the costs work out in terms of a business model so. >> Don't they all know why Van failed? They all probably too young to miss the Webvan and AT&T. >> Yeah, that being said, there's some opportunity there it's just about getting to the right scale. So obviously Amazon just bought Whole Foods last week I think there is room for a brick and mortar approach here but there, I think on-demand delivery's not going away in the food category, so who can actually deliver that because the consumer's not going to say, oh the business model doesn't make sense, I don't want this anymore. They just don't want to pay for it. Somebody has to figure out a way to. >> Oh that other pesky little detail About. And Seana it used to be if we make it they will eat right? I guess that doesn't hold true anymore. >> Well, you know it's a different adoption dynamic in the grower part of the technology adoption curve the consumers tend to pick things up more quickly than the traditional Ag player, Ag stake holder, the growers have been a little bit more tentative in terms of trying to figure out what kinds of technologies actually work. They're all of a sudden confronted with this idea of data overload. All of a sudden, you go from having no data to more data than you know what to do with. That's driving some of these adoption dynamics. People really trying to figure out what works, what business models are sustainable in agriculture and I know unsustainable from a resource standpoint. But just, will that business be around in six to nine to 12 months to support the technology that's in the field. So it's been a little slower I would say, on the production agriculture and grower side in terms of that uptake, but you know the other challenge that I think we face in terms of those models is really the flow of data. The flow of information is still very silo'd and in order to get the kind of decision support tools and the supply chain efficiencies that we're looking for in the food system, we really need to figure out how to integrate those data sources better. What's coming out of the field, what's happening in the mid-stream processing, and then what's happening on the supply chain and logistics side before you get to that consumer who's demanding it. But there's a lot of stages of information that need to harmonize before we can really have a more optimized system. >> Right, and are you seeing within the data side specifically some of the traditional players, like Tableau and clearly there's been a lot of activity in big data for awhile we've been going to Hadoop Summit and Hadoop World for ever and ever, are those people building Ag specific solutions or are there new players that really see the specific opportunity and better position to build you know the analytics to enable the use of that data? >> I think the big IT incumbents are looking at this very, very carefully. But there's are a lot of nuances to agriculture that are different from some of the other vertical industries and there's been a lot of observing from the sidelines down there, less from the deployment of actual technologies. Until people really understand how this market is starting to shake out. I think IBM and some of those big tech players are definitely on the fringes here, but I think again, we've got this challenge of how do you actually deliver value to growers. So, you've got all this data and you can crunch all this data how do you present that in a way that a grower can make a better decision about their operation. And oh, by the way, does the grower trust that data. That sort of is the challenge that I think we're still in the early innings in terms of of how that. It will come, but we're still in the early innings. >> Which is always the case right, to go from kind of an intuition, we've always done it this way, you know, like three generations of grandfathers that have worked this land too, you know here's the data, you can micro-optimize for this, that and the other and really take a different approach. >> I's say one of the challenges both on the Ag side, but also even on the food side, that there's a lot of start-ups that you meet with that are all about big data, big data, but big data really needs to be big data. So the incumbents are really the only ones that are in the position to crunch that amount of data. You can't actually get the insights when you don't have scale so there's a tremendous amount of companies that have a really interesting, innovative, approach to collecting data, to how you can use it and all they need is scale. That's virtually impossible unless they're acquired by or have a partnership with, which isn't going to happen a larger incumbent so big data, you really need a tremendous amount of data points to actually get to something that's useful. >> Alright, well, Seana and Brita thanks for taking a few min utes again, where can people go to get the pretty download it's a lot of data on this thing. >> It's MixingBowlHub.com so that's available both the AdTech landscape and the Food Tech landscape. >> Alright great, well again thanks, for inviting us to the show, really great show and congrats to you both for pulling it off. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks very much. >> Alright, Brita, Seana, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE we're at FoodIT in the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, California. We'll be back after the short break. Thanks for watching.

>> Intro Man: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin here at the FOOD IT: Fork to Farm event at the Computer History Museum talking with amazing guests, from farmers to technologists, helping to increase the sustainability and the food chain. Next, we are joined by Michiel Bakker, the Director of Google Food. Michiel, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. It's great to be here. >> Well, so we're in Google's backyard here at the Computer History Museum, and I've always heard of Google Food as fantastic. You're going to hear it here first, Michiel did invite me, I have his card. I've never been able to eat at one of the restaurants, but now I have it on film. >> Michiel: Check! (Lisa Laughs) >> So, but tell me about ... You come from a hospitality background. Google Food, what was your segue into hospitality to being the Director of Food for Google? >> So, I worked for many many great years for Starwood Hotels and Resorts. For fifteen years over in the U.S. and my last two years with them, I was responsible for Food and Beverage operation in Europe, Middle East and Africa. So ... amazing times in Europe. At the time we were building out our hotel portfolio in the Middle East, and while I was there I got this call from that company out of Mountain View, Google, and said, "Would you be interested in having a conversation "with us about our food program?" That peaked my interest. I had never heard of their food program and how they were thinking and running food, so that led to a very fascinating interview journey, and, a year after the initial call, I started over here March of 2012, and I have loved every minute of it since. >> Well, your passion I was telling you I've seen some videos of you online, and your passion for it is really clear. What was it that Google was looking for you to help facilitate five years ago? >> So, prior to my arrival, we had three great regional teams that were responsible for everything that they were doing with food in their respective regions. My bosses at the time were very aware of how we would continue to grow, and they were aware of both the challenges and the opportunities of growing our program with the same rate of the growth of Google. So they were looking for an individual who could bring structure as well as capability options for our program. So, my role was, in the beginning, to really think through "How can you get Google Food ready "for ongoing growth for a great number of years?" >> So, one of the things that's interesting about this event, and I kept thinking I was misreading the title "Fork to Farm," and we're so used to, in the trend of Farm to Table and Fork to Farm, the consumer, the tech-savvy consumer, being very influential, organic, cage-free, hormone-free. Of course, you're now at the hub of technology. Everyone in the world knows Google. Everyone's got a million devices. Talk to us about how you're using technology at Google to improve the relationships with suppliers, the type of supply of food that you get. >> Yeah. So, it starts really with the user. So, we believe that our role is to enable individuals to make personal, informed food choices. So, personalization truly has to do with how we live and work these days. It's about me. I want it now. I want it whenever I want it and whatever I want, and I think that technology can play a great role in that. So, we've developed, internally, an app that will help, actually, users to find whatever they are looking for. So that will be one. But, if you then go further back into the food chain, then you get the question, "Is there data, "technology or platforms out there that might help us "with what do we call that food transparency "or food insight." Where we can really think through: "How might we help a consumer "to determine where food is coming from?" "What is in my food?" "What are the nutrients?" and I think, just as importantly, we don't speak about this much: "Where does my food waste go to?," because we're very focused on what I get but less interested today where it is actually going to. So we're thinking through: "What can we develop internally?" "What is already available "in the broader Google or Alphabet portfolio?" If you think about Google Search, if you think about Youtube, there are a lot of platforms or tools out there that can help individuals to make those informed food choices. And then, I think, what is harder, if you go further up the food chain, in really determining how can you trace a product from the farm or from the boat all the way back up to the consumer, and I think that is a journey that many partners, many stakeholders in the food system continue to work on. >> That's a big challenge because there's a tremendous amount of money that can be lost. I was reading that California supplies 90% of the world's almonds, and in the last three years there's been over 35 truckloads of almonds that have disappeared. >> Michiel: Yeah. >> And the trace-ability being a massive challenge, and that's tantamount to 10 million dollars. But you touched on something really interesting, and that's the personalization. We want it with everything, right? We are so tech-enabled and tech-savvy and ... we want it. You mentioned transparency. That's essential. So, talk to us about what is it that you're learning from, so I presume it's an app that Googlers have access to. How are you using that big data and analytics to influence the next generation of Google Food? >> So we'll think to the beginning of that. So, with the Eat app, that's the app we have internally, you have a profile as well, and you can set up your profile in such a way about the foods you like and the foods you like to avoid. So, you can apply the filters. So, what we now get the more people within our organization that would use the app the better insight we're going to get off. What ultimately, what percentage, is vegetarian, or what percentage is actually vegan or flexitarian? So, we get a better insight of where do you have what percentage of your population sit, so you can ultimately develop offerings that resonate with your population. >> And, so, you also talked about food waste. I was reading a McKinsey & Company report that reports that about one third of all food produced in the world is lost or wasted, which accounts for about 940 billion dollars world wide. And we kind of think, oh, we get a little, me, overzealous at the grocery store. We have these plans. So, how are you using the data that you're gathering from your Eat app to reduce food waste across Google? >> We don't really use that app for that yet, but we're working with the great company called LeanPath. So, LeanPath is a technology platform company that enables you to track food waste in a kitchen environment. So, every time when a chef throws something out, we wait, we take a picture of it, and we tag it, and as a result of having done that now for a couple of years, we have a very large global database with these food waste moments, and then what you can do in an individual kitchen you can analyze of actually what is driving food waste in your kitchen. And I think what we've learned, Two things happened: so the first one is, because you're paying attention to food waste, you get the Hawthorne Effect. People pay more attention to it, and, as a result of that, you will reduce food waste with that, but, secondly, you have ultimately learned of what is driving food waste in a specific kitchen. And then, I think, with that we've learned, as well, that it becomes complex. For example, we really would like our users, the rest of the world, to eat more vegetables and more fruit. So, we've learned that in our kitchens a big part of our food waste is driven by vegetables. So, now you get these two interesting conflicts, because you can say that on the one hand, if I want to reduce food waste, I should actually be scrappier with the vegetables, but, at the same time, we would like our users to eat more vegetables, so, ultimately, what is more important? And I think with that we've learned it's about the value of the product and then to think through we're probably better off focusing on reducing the waste of meat, versus ultimately reducing the waste of a carrot. The environmental impact of meat is significantly larger and, therefore, you need to, ultimately, focus your efforts on where can you make the biggest impact within the available capacity that you have. >> Now, have you, this is so interesting. Have you gone on, like, the speaking circuit to educate other, not just tech companies or businesses that want to scale, but there could be so much from the learning that you've done with big data and analytics to educate other businesses, even down to the farms. Is that something that's part of your ... >> So, our team and I would actually attend, will attend, various conferences around the world, but I think we're very focused on learning more and making a bigger impact and then sharing at the right opportune moment, because you can spend your whole life chatting about what you have done or are thinking of doing. Ultimately, we're an organization that is feeding a lot of individuals on a daily basis in a very responsible way, and we're going to learn more. We're only at the beginning of figuring out where we can make a bigger impact. >> And ... How have you been able to facilitate this scale? You were mentioning, before we went live, when you started, five years ago, the number of people you fed then that you feed now. How has cloud computing, big data, analytics, machine learning helped drive that scale that Google wanted to see? >> So, I think we are very focused on collaboration. So, it's actually finding partners who are either just as excited about the opportunities, are better at what you do, and are willing to do stuff together. Because, I think, by working more with others, you increased your overall reach, you'll learn more together, and, therefore, you become better at what you do. So, I think an interesting opportunity for us is we're feeding a wide variety of teams at Google and Alphabet on a daily basis, and they are engaged with food. So, sometimes you find a team or an individual that might not necessarily be as focused on food, but they're looking actually in an real world challenge that they can use for their emerging technologies. So, you can find different starting points to ultimately bring people together to address a common challenge. Food waste is an interesting one. So, we now have the database, and now the question is; how might you deploy machine learning to learn stuff you've never thought about? We're at the beginning of that, so, we have a long way to go. >> Beside food waste, what's, maybe, kind of the next thing on your horizon for the rest of 2017 to influence? >> How can you move your population to move to more balanced, planned, forward diet but do it in such a way where people actually are willingly and excitingly joining you on the journey, versus it getting stuck in the conversation as you're telling me what I cannot do, or you're taking something away from me. So, it really becomes: how can you make the alternative, which might be a cuisine type, or a concept where meat is not necessarily the center of the plate, just as exciting, or if not more exciting, than what we're doing as of today. >> Wow, so interesting. Well, I'm looking forward to my lunch with you at one of the Google restaurants. Michiel, thank you so much for joining us here and sharing what you're doing at Google. >> It's been a pleasure. >> And we want to thank you for watching as well. Again, Lisa Martin live at the FOOD IT: Fork to Farm event in Silicon Valley. Stick around. We'll be right back. [futuristic music]

(Exciting Techno Music) >> Live from the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE covering food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE. We are live at the fourth annual food IT Fork to Farm Event. I am Lisa Martin with my Co-Host Jeff Frick. Jeff, this is a really interesting event. The first time we've been here with The Cube, and one of the first things I said to you this morning was "Fork to Farm - we always kind of think of it as "farm to fork, right, farm to table." But it's really interesting mix of investors here, people that are very educated in food and agriculture and one of the things they're focused on is connecting people who are feeding the world, billions and billions of people, with the people who are changing the world through technologies. And nowadays we're all this tech enabled food consumer which has really flipped farm to fork from fork to farm which I found really interesting. >> It's pretty interesting, our first kickoff call with Michael Rose from The Mixing Bowl and we were talking about the Conference. I'm like, "Michael didn't you get that mixed up? "Isn't it supposed to be Farm to Fork?" But as you said it's really now the tech enabled consumer and what they want to eat, like everything else, is being so consumer driven that we see in our other shows is driving now what the food producers have to create. And what's interesting is they don't necessarily think of all the ramifications of those decisions upstream and downstream. And so that's a big topic of the theme here. The other thing that struck me is some of the sponsors: Yamaha is here >> Yes. >> And one of the main sponsors. Google is here as one of the main sponsors. And we just had one of the opening keynotes from one of the guys from Google talking about how they've taken really just the task of feeding the employees to a much greater responsibility in both what people eat, how it gets produced, and really more sustainable longterm food kind of as a circle he called it. So it's pretty interesting, I'm excited. We've got Deans from a lot of big schools, we've got, of course, like I said, Yamaha. I'm really curious to find out what they're doing in this space. And it's fun to get, you know, out of the tech infrastructure space to see what's really happening on the front lines. I really want to get into edge computing, I really want to get into cloud, data, you know, all of the themes that we follow over and over and over again, but now a real specific application. And doing some of the research, you know, we have to feed 10 billion people in just a couple years and we're not growing any more land. So how are those challenges being addressed with technology? How are cloud, mobile, data helping solve those problems? And then how are the consumer driven prioritization impacting all of this? So it should be a great day. >> Absolutely, like you said, a great spectrum of guests on the show today. And we think of food and agriculture as one of the largest industries globally and as you said, there's a daunting responsibility feeding billions of people in a very short period of time. Having to deal with environmental sustainability, we're going to be talking about that on the program today, climate change, and also the consumer. But there's tremendous potential for big data and IOT and analytics to improve farming efficiencies from planting to weeding to fertilizing to the post-harvest supply chain logistics, traceability. There's, you know, opportunities for GPS sensors on tractors and columbines, as well as robotics and automation. We're going to be talking to a guy, the CEO Chell Botics, who invented Sally, a robot that makes salads. So there's a tremendous amount of opportunity and I'm really curious to see how these, from the University Folks, the Deans, to the investors, how Venture Capital is really seeing big data as revolutionary, the potential to be revolutionary, for the entire food supply, the food chain. >> Right, right. And another topic that's come up is really transparency and enabling consumers to see kind of where their food comes from, how it was raised, but as come up again in one of the earlier Keynotes, there's no perfect solution, right? There's always trade offs. So how are people creating values, making trade offs based on those values, and how are the food producers now being able to deliver to those values? So it should be, like I said, a fantastic day. We're going to go wall to wall. We'll be here till 5 o'clock today, full slate of guests, a lot of two guests, so we're going to pack them in. And it should be fantastic. >> Absolutely, I'm excited. >> Alright. >> A lot of great topics. >> So she's Lisa Martin, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Food IT: from Fork to Farm. We'll be right back with our first guest after this short break. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering Food IT: Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hi, welcome back, I'm Lisa Martin with theCUBE, we are at the Farm IT event. This is an incredible opportunity to talk with folks that are experts in agriculture, food and agriculture, academia, farmers, producers, those all across the food chain. The theme of this event is Fork to Farm, and I'm excited to be joined by my next two guests, we have Dan Sonke, the Director of Sustainable Agriculture from Campbell's Soup, welcome. >> Thank you. >> And you can't say this, but Dan has Campbell Soup tennis shoes on and they're awesome. And David Sypnieski, the Founder and CEO of Athena Intelligence, welcome gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So this has been, before we went on we were kind of talking about kind of my thoughts on Ag-Tech, and this is a really interesting and unique opportunity for theCUBE, to really look at the influences of Big Data and Analytics, Cloud Computing, Open-source Software, Blockchain, and how this all can be very influential across the food chain and you know, from the event's theme perspective, it's really been a lot this morning, talking about the tech-enabled food consumer really driving a lot of this change, expectation-wise. But Dan, first question to you, knowing, growing up on Campbell's Soup as a kid, founded in 1869, how is Campbell's Soup taking action to implement not only support-sustainable agriculture, but also, what were the drivers? >> Well, we definitely see consumers driving interest in where the food comes from, where ingredients that go into Campbell's Soup come from. We, a few years ago, decided that we wanted to be a company that makes real food that matters for life's moments, so that's our mission, that's our purpose, and so we want to connect to consumers with the information that supports that claim, that the food is trustworthy, that it's authentic, and that it resonates with the emotional side of how it's consumed in families, and the moments that matter. >> And also probably from a branch perspective, this is a historic brand in the United States, and that's probably quite important to meet those needs. >> Absolutely, we want to we the most transparent food company, we want to be open and honest with our consumers, and satisfy their desire for real food. >> So talk to us about kind of the genesis of the sustainability in agriculture at Campbell, when did that start? And really, besides the consumers, maybe some on the customer side, who was really driving this initiative? >> Well, we drive it internally, so six years ago, we decided to venture into sustainable agriculture in a formal way. We did a stakeholder assessment, so we talked to customers, we talked to investors, we talked to farmers, suppliers, folks inside the company, outside the company, North America, Europe, Australia, and asked them a series of questions, and said where should we focus, what are the crops, what are the subject areas we should focus on in agriculture sustainability? And we came up with a focus on tomatoes and other vegetables that people think of when they think of Campbell's Soup, we're largely a vegetable nutrition, and whole-grain nutrition company, so we wanted to focus there. And we focused on water, fertilizer, greenhouse gases, soil and pesticides, so that was our focus area, and we really took a measure-to-manage approach, so intentionally going to farmers, starting with tomatoes, with a limited set of questions that capture a lot of information and would be information growers would have, so we asked them how much water did you apply to make the crop, how much fertilizer do you use, what was the irrigation system, what are some of the decision tools that you used to make informed decisions? And so we started collecting that data. We also started capturing the geographic locations of the fields, believing that the technology would come to enable us to put that together, and lo and behold, fast-forward five years, now we have five years of data. We've tracked some really great stuff that our farmers have done. For example, last year water use per pound of tomato grown, was down by 20% over our first year of tracking that data. >> Wow. >> Huge gains, and efficiency and, you know, especially since it's a California crop, that was in the period of a five-year drought, so very encouraging to see that growers can do that kind of thing, and very proud of our growers for doing that. >> Absolutely, and on the technology side, so we've got David here. Athena Intelligence, talk to us a little bit about the genesis of Athena Intelligence, and how your working in partnership with Campbell's Soup. >> Sure, so I've got a storied background in agricultural tech work with production, growers, ag-tech companies, processors like Campbell's and others. And several years ago I kind of realized the fact that while all of this technology is from Silicon Valley and around the world, it's starting to, kind of make it's way into agriculture. An assumption that everyone makes is that the data is ready to be used in some sort of technology. >> Right. >> Alright, so kind of the the running joke in the field is that, you know, that a lot of technology has built a lot of solutions that are desperately looking for a problem to solve. And the problem, while it sounds simple, it not so easy to put together. But the problem is that, as Campbell's Soup for example, was collecting all of that data, you know, the entire industry has never really been familiar with the structure of how do you actually use data in any kind of meaningful kind of data science or analytical way and so, just being able to compile it all from various different formats and sources was a burden, so while you had all this data, it actually couldn't be used at all. And so Athena Intelligence was about basically, me coming to the realization, and collaborating with Dan, and Campbell's has been a great partner of saying, you know, we're going to solve that one problem, the unglamourous, the unsexy, problem of building a piece of technology which can efficiently and automatically begin to clean up, and normalize, and standardized data sets from multiple different sources and-- >> And we're talking about like data from weather sources, sensors, satellite imagery-- >> Right, so it's a fusion of public and private data, so the public data, everything from satellite imagery to soil, to weather stations, river flows, 98 different attributes of the weather, and water-related data. And then of course all of the private data, both Campbell's internal processing data, and then all the data that they're collaborating with their suppliers so, it's a pretty broad assortment which comes from, I mean the formats are everything from a hand-written notebook, to a PDF, to Excel to-- >> Wow. >> It's all over the board. >> So this is really Big Data and Analytics, being able to bring and aggregate data from different sources, facilitate data discovery. >> We're making data efficient right now, because the problem is that it's so, it's such a laborious effort. You know, 90% of the time people are putting in, just trying to clean and organize it. >> Right. >> Leaving very little time to be able to analyze it, let alone make any decisions or collaborate on it. So we're addressing that 90% of the time that people spend on trying to put the stuff together in the first place. >> Okay so Dan, walk us through kind of a use-case example of how your implementing, or have implemented, Athena Intelligence software, and what some of the outcomes have been so far. >> Right, so the goal has been to take the quality data that comes in to our systems, and that is one area where we do use data historically quite a bit, we have tons of data on every load of tomatoes that comes into our processing plants. But then we're marrying that data to the publicly available weather, soil, water data, and the data that the growers report on sustainability practices. And the goal is to find the win, win, win, the win for the environment, the win for the farm profitability, and the win for Campbell's Soup quality, and sustainability drivers as well. And the example that we're currently pursuing is tomato solids, so that's an obscure term for most people, but it's a industry measurement of how much sugar is in the tomatoes basically. >> Okay. >> The solids of the tomatoes coming in, affect how they process into our ingredients, the higher solids, the easier they are for us to process, and the less energy it requires for us to do that. So it's a sustainability win as well. We already pay growers for higher solids. We know a few things that can generate higher solids on the farm, but we think there are more pieces of information that have been hiding in that Big Data set. So can we tease out what soils produce higher solids, or what irrigation practices drive higher solids, or whatever it is, so we're in the process right now. We've got a project going between our research innovation fund, Athena, and that's the target that we're going after this summer is to dig into five years of data, and find that win. >> Wow. So it sounds like Athena Intelligence has really enabled Campbell's Soup to become a data-driven company? >> Well, we certainly are a data-driven company, but this is extending the reach of the data outside the four walls of our factory-- >> And also into the farmer, so you're really enabling the farmers to embrace data, evaluate what they have. Have you seen any...? So one of the things we were talking about earlier today, or was being talked about was the labor shortages, as well as attrition. So you mentioned you know, things in ledgers and hard copy. Are you also seeing an influence maybe, that Campbell's having to your farmers, becoming much more, less paper-driven, and maybe more modern in terms of the way that they're collecting and storing data? >> Well, I can't say that we can take credit for that, but we certainly want to be one of the many voices at events such as this one, to be a beacon, calling the industry to solve this problem. David really mentioned it. The challenge is, growers don't have the resources to capture data easily. If they were you know, if that was their mindset, they'd probably be accountants and not farmers right? Farm they have, you know, they're in farming for all the attributes of a farm lifestyle, not a data-capture lifestyle. >> Right. >> So capturing that farm data, and making it easy for them to get the data into systems that they can then use, is one of my passions right? A lot of companies are out there saying, "Oh, we can create a platform that will help Campbell's "get information out of the farms." And I keep telling them, "No, if you create the system "that makes it easier for farmers to use their own data, "to get more efficient and more profitable, "they'll put the data in." >> Okay. >> That's not-- >> So you think that's really where the sweet spot is, and the next step is really-- >> And that's how we drive sustainability. >> Because if they, if the tools can help them with the data to make more informed decisions that's, that's what we want to get out of our sustainability programs, it's not just data for reports say, for Campbell's, it's how do we drive progress on the farm, and we do that by creating the systems that everybody can use more easily. >> Well, it's so neat to hear that a company that so many of us know and have grown up with, has evolved so much to be very focused, and have sustainability really, as a core, and it's also great to know that there are technologists out there that have that Ag-Tech experience, that are enabling companies to leverage the power of Big Data, so gentlemen, I want to thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights with us, we wish you the best of luck, and look forward to seeing what happens in the next few years. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> My pleasure. And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE again, I'm Lisa Martin, and we are at the Farm IT event From Fork to Farm, or Food IT event. We will be back with some more great guests, so stick around. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the Cube, covering Food It, Fork to Farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here at the Cube. We're in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum which celebrates history but we're talking about tech in the food and agricultural space. Here at the Food IT Convention, about 350 people, somebody came all the way from New Zealand, got food manufacturers. We've got tech people, we've got big companies, start-ups and we have a lot of represents from academe which is always excited to have them on, so our next guest is Dr. Andy Thulin, he's the Dean of the College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, or SLO as we like to call them. Welcome. >> That's right. >> And all the way from Iowa, we have Dr. Wendy Wintersteen. She's the Dean of College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at Iowa State. Welcome. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> Absolutely, so first off, just kind of your impressions of this event? Small, intimate affair, one actually introduced everyone this morning, which I thought was a pretty interesting thing. Kind of your first impressions. >> It's a great environment. We have this mix of technology and a few production people here, but people thinking about the future. That's always an exciting place to be. >> Really, the environment, having the little set of exhibits, where people can go around, visit with entrepreneurs. It really, a great setting, I think for the discussion. >> So, Wendy, when you introduced your portion on the panel, you talked about the scale on which Iowa produces a lot of things. Pigs, and corns, and eggs, and chickens, and, so, you've been watchin' this space for a while. How do you see, from your perspective, kind of this technology wave, as it hits. Is it new, have we just not been payin' attention? Or is there something different now? >> Well, I think the speed of adoption, the speed of innovation is increasing, clearly. But, it's been a long time now that we've had power drive tractors so the farmers can sit and work on the technology in the cab related to their soil mapping, or yield monitors and the tractor's driving itself. So, we've had that sort of thing in Iowa for a long time and that continues to be improved upon, but that'd be just one example of what we're seeing. And, obviously, California has a huge agricultural presence, again, some people know, some people don't, the valley from top to bottom is something on the order of 500 miles of a whole lot of agriculture, so again, does this, do you see things changing? Is this more of the same? >> No, absolutely changing. I mean California produces some, a little over 400 different products. A lot of 'em, about a 100 of 'em, lead the country, in terms of marketplace. So, there's a lot of technology with the issues of water, lack thereof, or cleaning it up, or the labor challenges that we have for harvesting products. It's really turned into quite a challenge, so challenge drives innovation, you know, when you have your back against the wall, For example, in the strawberry fields I think, a year ago they had $800 million worth of labor to produce $2.4 million, billion dollars worth of strawberries. When you think about that, that's a lot of labor. When you can't get that labor in, you're drivin' by it, you got $300 million, wherever, they just weren't able to harvest it all 'cuz there was nobody to pick 'em. So, when you think about that, it's a billion dollars. It's a billion dollars that they couldn't get to. That drives innovation, so there's a lot of innovation goin' in these products. >> Pretty interesting, 'cuz, obviously, the water one jumps out, especially here in California, you know we had a really wet winter. The reservoirs are full. In fact, they're lettin' water out of the things. I would say we don't have a water problem, we have a water storage problem. This came up earlier today. The points of emphasis change, the points of pain change, and labor came up earlier. The number of people, the minimum wage laws, and the immigration stuff that's going on. Again, that's a real concern if you've got a billion dollars worth of strawberries sittin' in a field that you can't get to. >> Yeah, it's a real challenge. California faces a couple of shortages. We've got a water shortage, we've got a labor shortage, but we also have a talent shortage. We were talking this morning about the number of young people going to Ag colleges. It's up dramatically and we need all that talent and more. Everyone needs, all the grain industry, if you will, across the country, all the people that run these farms and ranches, and all, they're getting older. Who's coming back behind them? It's a technology driven industry today. It's not something that you can just go out and pick it up and start doing. It takes talent and science and technology to manage these operations. >> So, it's interesting. There's been science on kind of the genetic engineering if you will, genetically modified foods for a long time. Monsanto is always in the newspaper. But I asked something that's kind of funny, right, 'cuz we've been genetically modifying our food for a long time. Again, drive up and down I-5 and you'll see the funny looking walnut trees, that clearly didn't grow that way with a solid base on the bottom and a high-yield top. So, talk about attitudes, about this and people want it all. They want organic, but they also want it to look beautiful and perfect, be priced right and delivered from a local farmer. There's no simple solution to these problems. There's a lot of trade-offs that people have to make based on value so I wonder if you could talk about how that's evolving, Wendy, from your point of view. >> Well, certainly as we think about the products we produce in Iowa, we know that producers are willing to produce whatever the consumer would like. But they really want to be assured they have a market, so, right now in Iowa, we have cage-free eggs being produced, and those are being produced because there's a contract with a buyer, and, so I think producers are willing to adapt and address different opportunities in the big markets, different segments of that market, if they can see that profit opportunity that will allow them to continue in their business. From the producer's point of view, the subtheme of this show is Fork to Farm, as opposed to Farm to Fork which you think is the logical way, but it's come up and it's been discussed here quite a bit. It's the consumer, again, like they're doing in every business, is demanding what they want, they're willing to pay, and they're very specific in what they want. Was this like a sudden wave that hit from the producer point of view, or is this an opportunity? Is this a challenge? How is that kind of shifting market dynamics, impacting the producers? >> Well, I think it's all being driven by technology. We're talkin' this morning, years ago, it was the expert, you know, Wendy's of the world they had all the knowledge and then you had all the consumers listening to 'em and trusting 'em. Today, you have, as I call it, the mama tribe, or the soccer tribe, or that sort of thing, where they're listening to other parents, other mothers in that group, they're listening to the blogs, they're listening to their friends, that's driving the conversation and there's less science and technology behind it. They don't trust and the transparency thing comes up constantly. Technology has allowed this just wide open space where now they got so much information, how do they process that. What's real, what's not real, in terms of biotech, or is it this, or is it that? Is it wholesome, you know, all these factors. >> It's funny 'cuz you brought up the transparency earlier today as well, so people know what they're getting, they want to know, they really care. They just don't want to just get whatever generic ABC, like they used to. >> Right, and I think, again, there's a certain segment of the market that is very interested in that and companies are responding. I give the example of Nestles, and so, you get on their web page and you can see the ability to scan the code on a particular product and go and get a lot of information about that product back on the web page of that company. I think that for certain groups of consumers that's going to become even more important, and we have to be prepared to meet that demand. >> So, in terms of what's going on at your academic institutions, how is the environment changing because of technology, we've got these huge macro trends happening, right, cloud is a big thing, Edge Computing, which is obviously important, got to get the cloud to the edge (laughs) of the farm, sensors, big data, being able to collect all this data, I think somebody earlier said it went from no data to now a flood of data, how are you managing that? Better analytics and then, of course, there's fun stuff like drones and some of these other things that can now be applied. How's that workin' it's way into what you're doing in terms of training the next generation of entrepreneurs as well as the kind of traditional farmers in this space? >> Well, I think, first of all, we're seeing a lot more integration between what we do in engineering, and what we do in computer science, and what we do in agriculture and business. The overlap and the connection across those disciplines is occurring not just with our faculty but also with our students. We had a group of students at Iowa State before they graduated from the college, able to start a company called ScoutPro that was based on using technology to help farmers identify pests in the field, and that became a company using the technology to do that. Of course, that relied on software development, as well as clear understanding of agronomic and pest management strategy. I think those integrated approaches are occurring more and more. >> I think at Cal Poly it's, our motto has been for over a hundred years Learn by Doing, hands-on learning. That's key to us, as you have a lecture class, you have a lab that goes along with it so they're forced to. We have over 45 to 50 classes, enterprise classes, where you can come in and you can raise, let's say marigolds and then you can provide that whole value train, chain and sell it. You can raise broiler chicks every quarter, for 35 days you can raise 'em up, 7,000 birds and there's teams of students in these classes, they can do it, then they manage the whole process. A winery, for example, it's a bonded winery. They do the whole process. They know how to change the pumps and all that, so it's hands-on but you take that from there up to where those students go out into the industry. Our university just signed an agreement with Amazon for the cloud, so we're moving the whole complex, our IT, to the cloud through that organization. Is that right or wrong, I don't know, but we've got to do things faster, quicker, and just our infrastructure, would a cost us millions to do that, but that allowed the students, what is it, Apple is only, the iPhone is 10 years old tomorrow. Tomorrow. These kids, that's all they grew up with. So, we're constantly having to change our faculty, our leadership teams, constantly have to change to keep up and stay side-by-side with the technology, so it's changed our Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Cal Poly has a partnership with the community, with the university, it started in College of Business and we have a whole floor of a building in downtown San Luis Obispo and across the street we've got 60 apartments for students that are involved in these start-ups to live there so they can walk across the street, get right engaged. So, we're trying to do everything we can, every university is trying to do everything they can to kind of keep this space flowing, and this enthusiasm with these young people. That's where the change is going to occur. >> Right, right. Exciting times. >> It is exciting. >> It is. >> Alright, well, unfortunately, we are out of time. So, we're going to have to leave it there, but I really want to thank you for stopping by and wish you both safe travels home. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Dr. Thulin, Dr. Winterston, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching the Cube. It's Food IT in Mountain View, California. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back after this short break. (electronic music)