>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>>Fly from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cube covering Cisco live 2020s brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >>Welcome back everyone cubes live coverage from Barcelona, Spain. We are here for Cisco live 20 twists to keeps coverage. I'm Chomper with myself. It goes to minimum. This has been four days of coverage. We got another day tomorrow. A lot of action around application developers and programmable infrastructure and really at the heart of this is hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, which is the future of where the enterprises are going. And really it's at the center of it is the suppliers, the cloud service providers. I say Cisco power. They've got two great guests and cube alumni. David cope, senior director of cloud business development, Cisco, Benjamin MacLean, EMIA chief product officer for three D S outscale. Guys, welcome back. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming. Benjamin. We talked to two years ago here I think was what the early days when we started publicly riffing on the notion of cloud service providers going to start to be really more instrumental in how enterprises will deploy and manage workloads and applications. So we were right, it turns out we were right. We >>went actually even even further than that is. Um, so now I'll scale is not only a primary care provider or now we also have a, an on prem solution. So you can uh, we can deploy all stacks, uh, on your prem with hardware, software and services. And we actually, uh, start building locally compliance, uh, stacks. So in France we actually got the second class certification for the French government and we are also working for the ITI FedRAMP certification for the U S >>great. Take a minute to give an update of the busy. You just had an acquisition, you're now part of a different company. Explain that and the relationship to the bigger company. >>So, um, I'll scale was actually founded in 2010 and we actually started to provide to be called services starting 2012, something like this. And a decile system was always one of the big customers. Um, they were actually transforming themselves from being a software vendor to a software as a service company, which is a huge move for a company this size. And we are actually supporting them going this direction and they felt that they needed, uh, to intern to have an internal support, uh, phone call services, uh, within the group so that we actually part of the family now. >>Well congratulations. But I think this trust of the larger trend, David, we talked about how cloud service right are going to be merged emerging as more of a focal point. The global system integrators are already doing it. This is a tell sign for how enterprises, large enterprises, they start to be thinking they need people to support them with multiple, their own stacks, their own in house teams supporting these new workloads. What's your thoughts on, >>well, I mean I think these guys are a great example of sort of the evolution we've seen with the cloud. I think came out of beta in 2008 or something like that. And, and since then we've seen cloud go through sort of skepticism, >>experimentation, debate about private versus public. But today I think both desires and also tools have enabled companies to start focusing just on their business and realize now they can place and manage workloads wherever their business priorities drive them, not it constraints. And so you can get the best of both worlds. You can support this agility and yeah, you can also start to manage governance and policies across these very different private and public environments. Benjamin, bring us a little bit inside your really hybrid solution. You're helping with customers. Uh, we've had many years looking at this. I've seen some providers say, Oh, we're going to help put a stack on your environment, but if you let it touch it, Oh well I need to adjust something or make a change. And then you know, if you're helping manage it, Oh wait, you're, you're out of compliance. You've done something different from an application standpoint. We have seen, I, I might have my monolith in my data center, I have microservices in the public cloud or you know, in your service provider there. It makes sense to do that. But help us understand kind of what goes where, who manages what and what's really happening for your customers. So, >>uh, we try to come in with a very simple approach where basically the perimeter of responsibility is the same everywhere you go. So whether you're on prem or into the cloud, you should see your focus on your application and your area of expertise as a company and being able to deliver to your customers. And um, so we just want to make sure that's focused for our customers. Very easy to say, okay, it's not because I'm on prem, then I need to do it jobs. I'm still need to manage the application. And um, since Oscar is actually providing both public cloud and on premise solution, we want to provide it with as much as solution isolation as possible. And that's one of the reasons why else get actually, uh, was integrated within Cisco cloud center. So we can actually live rate, uh, the governance across the board, the, the immersion 80 of of deploy, application, deployment, whatever, wherever you are. And it's exactly the same thing for the customer. You don't have to sacrifice anything because you're on frame or you want it to be out. >>What specifically about Cisco is driving that? Because you said a couple of things that caught my attention. One is you're providing a platform so the apps could work anywhere. I heard you kind of tease that that is that one of the things that Cisco is bringing to the table. What's the, what's the Cisco value there? >>For me it's um, we, I mean it's been like 40 years that this goes around and they always, uh, worked, uh, to actually bring bridges between platforms, between solutions, between companies. And I feel that the, exactly why we're actually using the solution. So it's different for each. It's not a network bridge for this one, it's more an application ratio. Uh, I would say a pipeline application bridge and that's where we actually find the value for us. Your >>thoughts real quick, go off on tangent a little bit on the operating model of cloud, cause we were riffing on this two years ago. This is now the big conversation here. Hybrid really is all about having that operating model, whether it's on public or on premises. How do you guys serving your customers when they have an app? Hey I got a dad, I just want to build my app. I don't care where it is and I have my operation gotta be seamless across. How are you implementing that? >>To be honest, I don't feel like it's like it's a, we are still, we are not there yet. I feel companies still struggle to actually uh, build an app, being able to deploy whatever the tenants they choose, whether it's going to be a to be cloud provider or an American one. They under your plan one or even a Chinese one now. And uh, all on trend. And since the stacks are always different, they always have to pay for the difference within this platform on their side. And I feel like the tools are actually helping these companies. So it's not actually the cloud providers making the Fort is usually the tools and the ecosystem around these providers are actually providing more tools and more solutions. So it's easier for the companies that actually manage the application at the end. >>David, maybe you can help us dig in a little bit to the management and the software that Cisco's uh, working on and delivering here to help with these type of environments. You know, the way I look at the world is is businesses have applications, applications run on infrastructure in the state of the industry today is you should no longer care about where that application is running. It's just infrastructure. It's in my data center. It's in somebody else's data center called the cloud. So the state of the business today is how do I create sort of a declarative model which describes my application independent of having to know the nuances of each of the end points and then be able to manage the entire life cycle from optimizing cost, performance placement and then the ongoing policy based governance. And for us, that management platform is cloud center, which is a cloud management platform. There's others in the industry that take a similar approach. But that really is where this blurring of data centers and clouds supporting any apps, uh, is, is occurring because your, what's some of the workloads that you guys work on? Give some anecdotal feedback on some of the day to day things you're working on. Is it on premise driving the action? Is that the app developers, your customers, but you have, you're serving multiple, a big company, right? >>Yeah. Um, from what I seen is, uh, we have a lot of traction on OnPrem solution because historically it's been, uh, usual stacks, which are usually lack of usability for the customers. Um, they are now used to use it to the public cloud, the features, the capabilities, the agility, and then where you'll go by, you're going back on frame. You, you, you feel like you're traveling time, bike and backwards. And that's, that's usually an issue, uh, with our solution where we don't change the level of responsibility of the customer. So it doesn't have to have a data center, people, operation people. It's still the same guys that were actually working into the public out and they are going to operate exactly the same way on prem. So that's a huge premise for this for these companies right now. Yeah. Yeah. Actually. Great. So we deployed a one like the beginning of this year to last year and it's gonna continue to grow. Uh, especially if you're a dental assistant company, uh, as a, >>I forgot to ask you as an expert then Nirvana, the Holy grail or whatever word we want to use is to have applications just completely have programmable infrastructure. That's the dev ops, you know, Holy grail, which we're getting there. Yeah. Where are we in your mind, how far do we have to go to get the app developers just coding away in the progress of innovation? What's your thoughts on where the industry is and what we're dealing with here? >>I think you can already do it. If you sacrifice a part of your freedom or your part or part of your possibility. We can find tools that actually working pretty well with each other. But once you're in, you're going to be in for at once. The issue is more always going to become a more standardized way to actually work for this company. And that means also for us providers to provide kind of assemble level of interface and the same which works. So the company, and I mean so apart from code center, like the application actually being able to work across infrastructure platforms, whatever they are, I be cloud center for the cross platform work. Yeah. So customer is one of these tools that actually kind of, uh, leverage different platforms and don't really care. And as a user, you don't really care all the difference you can deploy, whether it's going to be on VMware, on to the cloud, and you don't expect the same level of capability in terms of infrastructure. But still you still deploy exactly the same pipelines and some workloads exactly the same way. >>What do I have to think about it? Whether it's, whether it's so managing all of its operating divisions or whether it's it ops trying to manage its developers is there's this sort of natural, some usually unspoken tension where it ops wants to support the agility that developers are looking for in business units are looking for, but at the same time it ops is torn because they have to ensure governance and security and all that. So today I think with these new platforms you do a little bit of judo frankly, is you are allowed developers or operating units to use the environment or tools of choice, but you still have these new cloud management platforms that allow you to apply and enforce governance. And those policies can either be exposed to them or it can be hidden from them. You get to choose, well that's the choice is key in the policy. >>It means automation. Yes, the policies nailed down the business logic. Get automation exactly as the Holy wishes even better, which I'm psyched to see more of that. But I got to ask you guys, I stopped at your Cisco booth, your multi-cloud with this. By the way, I love the demos over there. You get all the Cisco servers, provide everything else, but you guys got a multi cloud section. Of course there's a lot of Kubernetes being discussed there. So Benjamin, I got to get your take on this because Stu and I always joke, the joke is just broke containers around it. You can do anything. You're dealing with a lot of on premises legacy and enterprise stuff Coubernetties and as service meshes come down the pike and micro services, that seems to be really a great way to deal with it. How were you looking at that? What's your vision and how, what are some of the practitioner tools that are out there? What's your view on that? >>For me, the appeal of communities for, for the customers is, uh, less, uh, a way to work than the fact that it's actually is, is a standout. So we are talking about the fact that wherever you are, you're always a, I think different APA calls a different way to educate yourself differently. Policy management. And I feel that the appeal of communities is that you can use it over any cloud platform in the world. And he's always failed to send me, they always behave the same way and he's kind of the promise. The same is that you can get with containers, but you get it on the orchestration layer of these containers. Uh, and I feel that that's why people are quite rushing into it because they feel that if it doesn't work there, then it might work somewhere else. >>So are you dealing with some of these enterprise applications? What do you guys do? >>Um, so the interest for se, so we just, we provide, uh, the control plane or the master nodes and usually customers see or manage the resources or the, the resource pool, uh, on which they're going to deploy containers in whatever we S we still manage mostly VMs and block storage. So the, the basic breaks of any, uh, infrastructure as a service provider and um, and the customers start from there and actually build on the application and they can even reuse things that have been done somewhere else. Uh, in any other cloud platform. >>David, talk about the Cisco vision here because I think you guys have been seeing this now. I used the multi-cloud is kind of a future state that's out. See everyone has multicloud now, but hybrid is where the action is and this by getting this common operating model with you've got these Kubernetes trends and things coming down the pipe with micro services that really is impacting the momentum. How do you guys see that? What's your position on this? >> I think you're right. I mean when you look at Kubernetes specifically, I think it's obviously maturing from just developer centric activities now into production. Most Kubernetes today, it has been deployed on prem or in the cloud, but now that's the foundation that's going to enable the future of hybrid workloads where I can start again. Blurring the boundaries between data centers and clouds develop on the cloud, prod on prem, develop on prem, access to service on the cloud. >>So we're just starting to see sort of these hybrid Coobernetti's workflows. And Cisco has a container platform that's native Kubernetes but we've also, it runs on prem but it's also optimized to work with public clouds that support Kubernetes. And so it really becomes a single environment, a pool of resources for the application. >> I think it sets the table nicely for the app developers, the future because end of the day students just develop your app and yeah, things go and happen. Benjamin, final question while you're here. I want to get your expert opinion on this because I want to kind of go back to our 2018 and modernized our chat a little bit around cloud service providers because I think this is still going to be the hottest area because I think you are, you're a unique, you got acquired and you're still servicing a big customer base, but you're now part of the mother I guess. Um, which is good. You got a lot of work to do, but cloud service providers will still serve as a lot of customers and this is going to be a fast growing market. What's your advice for other cloud service providers out there that are really trying to understand how do I build my infrastructure? How do I deal with the clouds? Do I just go all in on one, do I build my own? How do I serve as the on premises? What's your advice? >>I think like if your company, a main area of expertise is not it, you shouldn't actually invest, uh, in house. Its, I think nowadays we, you, we have like, and I'm not talking only about our scale, but we have like a lot of different solution, a lot of, uh, technological partners such as Cisco and NetApp, uh, that have a great solution that actually proven, uh, there is solution as ourselves. So at scale. Um, so I feel like anything that you do try to be or from the ground, uh, would have a huge advantage in terms of, of time of technology. Um, and again, for any other cloud provider. I think also we're going to see kind of the separation we're talking about in 2018 is still going to continue to exist and I think it's going to even increase where we're going to see, um, local compliance or great regulation. I actually for the past two years, uh, dramatically increased in terms of of strengths and numbers and uh, and that, and I feel like the approach of Muti local cloud as we've been pushing for the past 10 years within our scale, it makes even more sense. >>Do you see specialty clouds emerging fast or are building on say Amazon, Google or other clouds or what do you see? >>Yeah, to be honest, I even think that the, the big three in the U S are even starting to find their own place, which is not the same. And I feel we're going to see the same thing with the Chinese and reopen actors as well. >>Awesome. Benjamin's great to have you on. Great to have your insight from the field. Appreciate David. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate that insight from Cisco as well. It's the cube coverage day. Three of our four days of coverage on shofar is do men and men stay with us for more coverage from Barcelona after this short break?

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello, I'm John Furrier, here in New York City, for on the ground coverage of Consensus 2018, it's part of Blockchain Week, New York. All the action's happening here, sold out show, tons of events happening in New York City. You got the New York City crowd, you got the Hollywood crowd, you got the tech crowd, all kind of coming together, entrepreneurs, the entire ecosystem. My next guest I Lars Rensing, who's the co-founder of Arc.io, its own blockchain, its own coin, CFO. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks John for having me here. >> So your signs everywhere I see, Arc.io, you're a big sponsor, top-tier sponsor. Congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks. >> Why sponsoring this event? >> Because it's a big event, lots of commitments, lots of people will be here, lots of important people are in this space, so like this is a good area to be and show ourselves more. >> You guys have a lot of traction with your offering, your project. Can you take a minute to explain Arc, >> Yeah sure. >> What is it? What is Arc coin, what's the development plans? You have multiple moving parts to this opportunity. Take a minute to explain. >> So what we're trying to build is the interoperability between blockchains, because we see that every use case probably needs their own blockchain, otherwise, you get one single point of failure. Where you you see them clogging up, old projects watered down because we have more blockchain. So every use case should have their own blockchain really. >> And also blockchain has different developer ecosystems too. You might want to have certain developers, like JavaScript might like Hyperledger, right? >> Yeah, exactly. Once every, like that's also what we are building with our SDKs, every developer in their own language, getting into blockchain is important, because there are not that much blockchain developers at all >> What's going on now? Obviously you guys are a blockchain platform. Developers really are engaging. What's your strategy with developers? >> So far we are working on our new V2. We started from scratch because we saw some limitations in our code, so okay, we needed to start from scratch, build a new V2, and we are internal testing that right now and working on that. >> Do you guys publish your roadmap? >> We publish a roadmap but we don't give dates. (John chuckles) Because we feel like we launch when it's ready, not when we set a date. We launch when it's ready. >> What's the community like for Arc? What's it like, what's the vibe? >> Really good, really commitment, working together. We're working actively with the community because we ask feedback from them. Like, with the V2 when we publish, okay, we're going to work on this project or on a V2, we ask community what's your feedback on it, and we actively took feedback from them and made it into the, in our development. So you're the CFO and co-founder, and you got a lot of co-founders, I know you got some other co-founders. >> Yeah. >> But I just love having a CFO that's not talking speeds and feeds on the spreadsheet. You also know the technology, you're in the community. I've been saying on theCUBE many times now that a new role's emerging in these companies of Chief Economic Officer. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause the token economics and the developer, there's interplay now between the business and the technology. Can you talk about that? >> Yeah sure. When we started, we really looked into the economics, how are we going to build it, how are we going to look into our Arc, the token is economize. How are people going to use it. So we saw that if you do an infinite supply of new tokens, because people are burning money. In this space it's still, insecure to sometimes lose you best basis. So money is still burnt. So you need some inflation to keep running your tokenization. >> You guys have an ecosystem? >> Yeah. >> What is your ecosystem strategy? You have developers. >> Yeah. >> Anyone else in the ecosystem that's notable? >> So far we are working on our core code, and when we are done with that, we are looking into partnerships and expanding our ecosystem with different projects. One of them is currently is Persona, which is a personal identity on the blockchain >> Lars, how did you get into all this? I mean, did you just fall out of a boat one day and fall in the water and say, hey blockchain? Was there a project, was it open source? Did you come in for a certain... Did you have an itch you were scratching? How did you guys get into this? >> I got into this because I have always had, my background is in construction, but I always had a passion for IT, and the new developments in that. So I started reading more about blockchain, and how it works and how it can change the world. So I said, okay, this vision is so great, I want to do something with it, and work more on this than my real job, and at the time I was not really practical to do both anymore, so I said okay, I'm going to full-time with this because I love this. >> When did Arcs all come together? What year, when did it all kind of come together? >> August or September 2016 we started. >> So you guys a couple of years ago, good. So it's a couple of years under the belt. So I got to ask you the question that comes up a lot here on theCUBE in my Cube conversations is, you have people looking at the new wave. >> Yeah. >> The infrastructure's changing completely over from old e-commerce web stack to a whole new network effect, decentralized and distributed, distributed computing's still very relevant, cloud computing of the source, now you've got decentralized. People are asking themselves, is a blockchain and decentralized apps a fit for me? So the question to you is, how do you answer that question? When someone says, "Why blockchain?" what's the answer? >> Depends, because you know always, blockchain is not always the answer. I think some people are putting too much blockchain on projects were are not really needing blockchain. And so I think it really depends on the use case or if it's needed. It's a solution to a problem. It's not always the... Not always needed, in that sense. >> John: Well, it's got to be a good fit. >> Exactly. >> You can't just say I'm doing blockchain and just throw it on top of it. >> No. >> It's got to be decentralized, it's got to be some... Well it kind of depends on the token too. Can you explain the token strategy? So let's just say, okay, I have a decentralized vision, architecture, but now I have to make my economic model match my token model. So there's certain coins, you have work coins for utility, you have you know Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium. So there's different approaches. What's your vision on how that's going to play out? Will it sort itself out? Is there a certain swim lane or a certain token model that fits a certain use case? Is there any patterns emerging? >> I think it really depends on what is needed, where are you looking at, where it's used for, is it just for utility, is it for security, it's really different but... So we said like, every use case would have their own blockchain, but because if you want to do something specific for your token, you can adapt to it, and not be stuck with the project you're working with. >> So you got to think it through. >> Yeah. >> Really do some deep thinking. >> Yeah. >> It's almost like designing an architecture for an OS. I mean it's really an operating system kind of decision to the business logic. Okay, so back to the event, you're a big sponsor. What's going on here for you? Obviously you've got great visibility. You guys doing any activities, are you showing anything, what's the big focus for the show for Arc? >> Just more, being out more to the world, bring everyone more, seeing what we are building and showing us like, and educating everyone what you are building and what you are doing and that we are actively working even with the French government about Arc. >> Why is Arc exciting for your contributors? What are they saying about you? What are some of the community mem... What's the feedback? >> That we are really engaged with the community, and that the community's even here, and we are actively talking with each other and even discussing the development with them, and even brainstorming with them. So we are really engaged with the community. >> Is there a differentiator that you have on your blockchain, is it faster, is it better, is it, what's the... What's the core thing that you tell people on why they should work with you? >> We are dedicated proof of stake, but in the vision that we are not vote multiple times, which your stake, you can only vote one time, and maybe that 80% of the coins in circulation are used for voting. So, and 51% to take is almost impossible, and there's lots of decentralization that delegates even. >> What does that mean for them? What's the impact to your partners and customers and users? >> The delegates are really helping because of their... Not only they provide a service to securing the network, they're also actively promoting our... Doing meetups, just everything, it's creating a great community. >> So it's growing? >> Yeah. >> Lars, thanks for coming on. Congratulations, you're a true entrepreneur. Love the hustle, love the fact you took a bold move in the big sponsorship. That was a tough decision, no, probably easy decision? >> No, it's a tough one. >> Big money. Good luck, Lars, with Arc.io, great project, got a good success, very community focused. Check 'em out online at Arc.io. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. theCUBE.net is our URL, we're out in the open, we're in the open here on the floor at Consensus 2018, part of Blockchain Week New York. Thanks for watching, more live coverage after this short break.