>>Welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave ante coast of the hub. We're two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. Our 12 year covering VMware's annual conference day, formerly world. Now VMware Explorer. We're kicking off day tube, no Sharma director of product management at Google cloud GCP. No Thankss for coming on the cube. Good to see you. >>Yeah. Very nice to see you as well. >>It's been a while. Google next cloud. Next is your event. We haven't been there cuz of the pandemic. Now you got an event coming up in October. You wanna give that plug out there in October 11th, UHS gonna be kind of a hybrid show. You guys with GCP, doing great. Getting up, coming up on in, in the rear with third place, Amazon Azure GCP, you guys have really nailed the developer and the AI and the data piece in the cloud. And now with VMware, with multicloud, you guys are in the mix in the universal program that they got here had been, been a partnership. Talk about the Google VMware relationship real quick. >>Yeah, no, I wanna first address, you know, us being in third place. I think when, when customers think about cloud transformation, you know, they, they, for them, it's all about how you can extract value from the data, you know, how you can transform your business with AI. And as far as that's concerned, we are in first place. Now coming to the VMware partnership, what we observed was, you know, you know, first of all, like there's a lot of data gravity built over the past, you know, 20 years in it, you know, and you know, VMware has, you know, really standardized it platforms. And when it comes to the data gravity, what we found was that, you know, customers want to extract the value that, you know, lives in that data as I was just talking about, but they find it hard to change architectures and, you know, bring those architectures into, you know, the cloud native world, you know, with microservices and so forth. >>Especially when, you know, these applications have been built over the last 20 years with off the shelf, you know, commercial off the shelf in, you know, systems you don't even know who wrote the code. You don't know what the IP address configuration is. And it's, you know, if you change anything, it can break your production. But at the same time, they want to take advantage of what the cloud has to offer. You know, the self-service the elasticity, you know, the, the economies of scale efficiencies of operation. So we wanted to, you know, bring CU, you know, bring the cloud to where the customer is with this service. And, you know, with, like I said, you know, VMware was the defacto it platform. So it was a no brainer for us to say, you know what, we'll give VMware in a native manner yeah. For our customers and bring all the benefits of the cloud into it to help them transform and take advantage of the cloud. >>It's interesting. And you called out that the, the advantages of Google cloud, one of the things that we've observed is, you know, VMware trying to be much more cloud native in their messaging and their positioning. They're trying to connect into that developer world for cloud native. I mean, Google, I mean, you guys have been cloud native literally from day one, just as a company. Yeah. Infrastructure wise, I mean, DevOps was an infrastructures code was Google's DNA. I, you had Borg, which became Kubernetes. Everyone kind of knows that in the history, if you, if you're in, in the, inside the ropes. Yeah. So as you guys have that core competency of essentially infrastructures code, which is basically cloud, how are you guys bringing that into the enterprise with the VMware, because that's where the puck is going. Right. That's where the use cases are. Okay. You got data clearly an advantage there, developers, you guys do really well with developers. We see that at say Coon and CNCF. Where's the use cases as the enterprise start to really figure out that this is now happening with hybrid and they gotta be more cloud native. Are they ramping up certain use cases? Can you share and connect the dots between what you guys had as your core competency and where the enterprise use cases are? >>Yeah. Yeah. You know, I think transformation means a lot of things, especially when you get into the cloud, you want to be not only efficient, but you also wanna make sure you're secure, right. And that you can manage and maintain your infrastructure in a way that you can reason about it. When, you know, when things go wrong, we took a very unique approach with Google cloud VMware engine. When we brought it to the cloud to Google cloud, what we did was we, we took like a cloud native approach. You know, it would seem like, you know, we are to say that, okay, VMware is cloud native, but in fact that's what we've done with this service from the ground up. One of the things we wanted to do was make sure we meet all the enterprise needs availability. We are the only service that gives four nines of SLA in a single site. >>We are the only service that has fully redundant networking so that, you know, some of the pets that you run on the VMware platform with your operational databases and the keys to the kingdom, you know, they can be run in a efficient manner and in a, in a, in a stable manner and, and, you know, in a highly available fashion, but we also paid attention to performance. One of our customers Mitel runs a unified communication service. And what they found was, you know, the high performance infrastructure, low latency infrastructure actually helps them deliver, you know, highly reliable, you know, communication experience to their customers. Right. And so, you know, we, you know, while, you know, so we developed the service from the ground up, making sure we meet the needs of these enterprise applications, but also wanted to make sure it's positioned for the future. >>Well, integrated into Google cloud VPC, networking, billing, identities, access control, you know, support all of that with a one stop shop. Right? And so this completely changes the game for, for enterprises on the outset, but what's more like we also have built in integration to cloud operations, you know, a single pane of glass for managing all your cloud infrastructure. You know, you have the ability to easily ELT into BigQuery and, you know, get a data transformation going that way from your operational databases. So, so I think we took a very like clean room ground from the ground of approach to make sure we get the best of both worlds to our customers. So >>Essentially made the VMware stack of first class citizen connecting to all the go Google tool. Did you build a bare metal instance to be able to support >>That? We, we actually have a very customized infrastructure to make sure that, you know, the experience that customers looking for in the VMware context is what we can deliver to them. And, and like I said, you know, being able to manage the pets in, in addition to the cattle that, that we are, we are getting with the modern containerized workloads. >>And, and it's not likely you did that as a one off, I, I would presume that other partners can potentially take advantage of that, that approach as well. Is that >>True? Absolutely. So one of our other examples is, is SAP, you know, our SAP infrastructure runs on very similar kind of, you know, highly redundant infrastructure, some, some parts of it. And, and then, you know, we also have in the same context partners such as NetApp. So, so customers want to, you know, truly, so, so there's two parts to it, right? One is to meet customers where they already are, but also take them to the future. And partner NetApp has delivered a cloud service that is well integrated into the platform, serves use cases like VDI serves use cases for, you know, tier two data protection scenarios, Dr. And also high performance context that customers are looking for, explain >>To people because think a lot of times people understand say, oh, NetApp, but doesn't Google have storage. Yeah. So explain that relationship and why that, that is complimentary. Yeah. And not just some kind of divergence from your strategy. >>Yeah. Yeah. No. So I think the, the idea here is NetApp, the NetApp platform living on-prem, you know, for, for so many years, it's, it's built a lot of capabilities that customers take advantage of. Right. So for example, it has the sta snap mirror capabilities that enable, you know, instant Dr. Of between locations and customers. When they think of the cloud, they are also thinking of heterogeneous context where some of the infrastructure is still needs to live on prem. So, you know, they have the Dr going on from the on-prem side using snap mirror, into Google cloud. And so, you know, it enables that entry point into the cloud. And so we believe, you know, partnering with NetApp kind of enables these high performance, you know, high, you know, reliability and also enables the customers to meet regulatory needs for, you know, the Dr. And data protection that they're looking for. And, >>And NetApp, obviously a big VMware partner as well. So I can take that partnership with VMware and NetApp into the Google cloud. >>Correct. Yeah. Yeah. It's all about leverage. Like I said, you know, meeting customers where they already are and ensuring that we smoothen their journey into the future rather than making it like a single step, you know, quantum leap. So to speak between two words, you know, I think, you know, I like to say like for the, for the longest time the cloud was being presented as a false choice between, you know, the infrastructure as of, of the past and the infrastructure of the future, like the red pill and the blue pill. Right. And, you know, we've, I like to say, like, I've, you know, we've brought, brought into the, into this context, the purple pill. Right. Which gives you really the best of both tools. >>Yeah. And this is a tailwind for you guys now, and I wanna get your thoughts on this and your differentiation around multi-cloud that's around the corner. Yeah. I mean, everyone now recognizes at least multi clouds of reality. People have workloads on AWS, Azure and GCP. That is technically multi-cloud. Yeah. Now the notion of spanning applications across clouds is coming certainly hybrid cloud is a steady state, which essentially DevOps on prem or edge in the cloud. So, so you have, now the recognition that's here, you guys are positioned well for this. How is that evolving and how are you positioning yourself with, and how you're differentiating around as clients start thinking, Hey, you know what, I can start running things on AWS and GCP. Yeah. And OnPrem in a really kind of a distributed way. Yeah. With abstractions and these things that people are talking about super cloud, what we call it. And, and this is really the conversations. Okay. What does that next future around the corner architecture look like? And how do you guys fit in, because this is an opportunity for you guys. It's almost, it's almost, it's like Wayne Gretsky, the puck is coming to you. Yeah. Yeah. It seems that way to me. What, how do you respond to >>That? Yeah, no, I think, you know, Raghu said, yes, I did yesterday. Right. It's all about being cloud smart in this new heterogeneous world. I think Google cloud has always been the most open and the most customer oriented cloud. And the reason I say that is because, you know, looking at like our Kubernetes platform, right. What we've enabled with Kubernetes and Antho is the ability for a customer to run containerized infrastructure in the same consistent manner, no matter what the platform. So while, you know, Kubernetes runs on GKE, you can run using Anthos on the VMware platform and you can run using Anthos on any other cloud on the planet in including AWS Azure. And, and so it's, you know, we, we take a very open, we've taken an open approach with Kubernetes to begin with, but, you know, the, the fact that, you know, with Anthos and this multicloud management experience that we can provide customers, we are, we are letting customers get the full freedom of an advantage of what multicloud has to has to offer. And I like to say, you know, VMware is the ES of ISAs, right. Cause cuz if you think about it, it's the only hypervisor that you can run in the same consistent manner, take the same image and run it on any of the providers. Right. And you can, you know, link it, you know, with the L two extensions and create a fabric that spans the world and, and, and multiple >>Products with, with almost every company using VMware. >>That's pretty much that's right. It's the largest, like the VMware network of, of infrastructure is the largest network on the planet. Right. And so, so it's, it's truly about enabling customer choice. We believe that every cloud, you know, brings its advantages and, you know, at the end of their day, the technology of, you know, capabilities of the provider, the differentiation of the provider need to stand on its merit. And so, you know, we truly embrace this notion of money. Those ops guys >>Have to connect to opportunities to connect to you, you guys in yeah. In, in the cloud. >>Yeah. Absolutely >>Like to ask you a question sort of about database philosophy and maybe, maybe futures a little bit, there seems to be two camps. I mean, you've got multiple databases, you got span for, you know, kind of global distributed database. You've got big query for analytics. There seems to be a trend in the industry for some providers to say, okay, let's, let's converge the transactions and analytics and kind of maybe eliminate the need to do a lot of Elting and others are saying, no, no, we want to be, be, you know, really precise and distinct with our capabilities and, and, and have be spoke set of capability, right. Tool for the right job. Let's call it. What's Google's philosophy in that regard. And, and how do you think about database in the future? >>So, so I think, you know, when it comes to, you know, something as general and as complex as data, right, you know, data lives in all ships and forms, it, it moves at various velocities that moves at various scale. And so, you know, we truly believe that, you know, customers should have the flexibility and freedom to put things together using, you know, these various contexts and, and, you know, build the right set of outcomes for themselves. So, you know, we, we provide cloud SQL, right, where customers can run their own, you know, dedicated infrastructure, fully managed and operated by Google at a high level of SLA compared to any other way of doing it. We have a database born in the cloud, a data warehouse born in the cloud BigQuery, which enables zero ops, you know, zero touch, you know, instant, you know, know high performance analytics at scale, you know, span gives customers high levels of reliability and redundancy in, in, in a worldwide context. So with, with, with extreme levels of innovation coming from, you know, the, the, the NTP, you know, that happen across different instances. Right? So I, you know, I, we, we do think that, you know, data moves a different scale and, and different velocity and, and, you know, customers have a complex set of needs. And, and so our portfolio of database services put together can truly address all ends of the spectrum. >>Yeah. And we've certainly been following you guys at CNCF and the work that Google cloud's doing extremely strong technical people. Yeah. Really open source focused, great products, technology. You guys do a great job. And I, I would imagine, and it's clear that VMware is an opportunity for you guys, given the DNA of their customer base. The installed base is huge. You guys have that nice potential connection where these customers are kind of going where its puck is going. You guys are there now for the next couple minutes, give a, give a plug for Google cloud to the VMware customer base out there. Yeah. Why Google cloud, why now what's in it for them? What's the, what's the value parts? Give the, give the plug for Google cloud to the VMware community. >>Absolutely. So, so I think, you know, especially with VMware engine, what we've built, you know, is truly like a cloud native next generation enterprise platform. Right. And it does three specific things, right? It gives you a cloud optimized experience, right? Like the, the idea being, you know, self-service efficiencies, economies, you know, operational benefits, you get that from the platform and a customer like Mitel was able to take advantage of that. Being able to use the same platform that they were running in their co-located context and migrate more than a thousand VMs in less than 90 days, something that they weren't able to do for, for over two years. The second aspect of our, you know, our transformation journey that we enable with this service is cloud integration. What that means is the same VPC experience that you get in the, the, the networking global networking that Google cloud has to offer. >>The VMware platform is fully integrated into that. And so the benefits of, you know, having a subnet that can live anywhere in the world, you know, having multi VPC, but more importantly, the benefits of having these Google cloud services like BigQuery and span and cloud operations management at your fingertips in the same layer, three domain, you know, just make an IP call and your data is transformed into BigQuery from your operational databases and car four. The retailer in Europe actually was able to do that with our service. And not only that, you know, do do the operational transform into BigQuery, you know, from their, the data gravity living in VMware on, on VMware engine, but they were able to do it in, you know, cost effective, a manner. They, they saved, you know, over 40% compared to the, the current context and also lower the co increase the agility of operations at the same time. >>Right. And so for them, this was extremely transf transformative. And lastly, we believe in the context of being open, we are also a very partner friendly cloud. And so, you know, customers come bring VMware platform because of all the, it, you know, ecosystem that comes along with it, right. You've got your VM or your Zerto or your rubric, or your capacity for data protection and, and backup. You've got security from Forex, tha fortunate, you know, you've got, you know, like we'd already talked about NetApp storage. So we, you know, we are open in that technology context, ISVs, you know, fully supported >>Integrations key. Yeah, >>Yeah, exactly. And, and, you know, that's how you build a platform, right? Yeah. And so, so we enable that, but, but, you know, we also enable customers getting into the future, going into the future, through their AI, through the AI capabilities and services that are once again available at, at their fingertips. >>Soo, thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. And, you know, as super clouds, we call it, our multi-cloud comes around the corner, you got the edge exploding, you guys do a great job in networking and security, which is well known. What's your view of this super cloud multi-cloud world. What's different about it? Why isn't it just sass on cloud what's, what's this next gen cloud really about it. You had to kind of kind explain that to, to business folks and technical folks out there. Is it, is it something unique? Do you see a, a refactoring? Is it something that does something different? Yeah. What, what doesn't make it just SAS. >>Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that, you know, there's, there's different use cases that customers have have in mind when they, when they think about multi-cloud. I think the first thing is they don't want to have, you know, all eggs in a single basket. Right. And, and so, you know, it, it helps diversify their risk. I mean, and it's a real problem. Like you, you see outages in, you know, in, in availability zones that take out entire businesses. So customers do wanna make sure that they're not, they're, they're able to increase their availability, increase their resiliency through the use of multiple providers, but I think so, so that's like getting the same thing in different contexts, but at the same time, the context is shifting right. There is some, there's some data sources that originate, you know, elsewhere and there, the scale and the velocity of those sources is so vast, you know, you might be producing video from retail stores and, you know, you wanna make sure, you know, this, this security and there's, you know, information awareness built about those sources. >>And so you want to process that data, add the source and take instant decisions with that proximity. And that's why we believe with the GC and, you know, with, with both, both the edge versions and the hosted versions, GDC stands for Google, Google distributed cloud, where we bring the benefit and value of Google cloud to different locations on the edge, as well as on-prem. And so I think, you know, those kinds of contexts become important. And so I think, you know, we, you know, we are not only do we need to be open and pervasive, you know, but we also need to be compatible and, and, and also have the proximity to where information lives and value lives. >>Minish. Thanks for coming on the cube here at VMware Explorer, formerly world. Thanks for your time. Thank >>You so much. Okay. >>This is the cube. I'm John for Dave ante live day two coverage here on Moscone west lobby for VMware Explorer. We'll be right back with more after the short break.

>>From around the globe, it's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. >>Oh, great. To have you with us here on the cube, as we continue our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, doing it virtually of course, uh, out of a necessity as I'm sure all of you can appreciate we're joined now by Alex Sanchez, who is the head of cross GDC networks and Fujitsu and Fujitsu provider of global it services and solutions. And so their footprint, um, again, is, is around the world. Uh, Alex, thanks for joining us here on the cube. We appreciate your time. And, uh, I'd like to hear a little bit more about your role first off before we jump in and tell us a little bit about Fujitsu for those who might not be familiar with it. >>Thank you very much, Sean. I really appreciate it. Uh, well, uh, first, uh, let me start by providing some background on Fujitsu. We're a global it digital transformation company offering a full range of technology products, solutions, and services. Uh, we exist to keep our customer's business running and we strive to give the best possible experience across every customer touch point. My role as head of cross CDC networks, uh, makes me in charge of standardizing technology networks across our global delivery centers. And for the past couple of years, I have been working on the standardization of our contact center platform across all of our global delivery centers. >>Yeah, yeah. I mean, you mentioned global delivery centers, so let's, let's jump into that. Uh, first off, what are they, um, you know, how have you structured your business in that respect and, um, ultimately what kind of service or a solution are they providing to your customers? >>Absolutely. So our global delivery centers are interconnected, integrated global teams. Uh, we deliver a broad portfolio of standardized services, which includes cybersecurity workplace and much more. We're based out of, uh, eight different key countries. We serve customers in over 100 and uh, different countries and we provide support in over 40 different languages. Uh, we enabled, uh, those CDCs enabled us to consistently and resilient provide services to our customers, uh, 24 seven 365 days of the year. Uh, the service, uh, that we offer, uh, as, uh, for you to global delivery teams are constructed from fully standardized components. Uh, it allows us to, uh, be configured to meet our customer needs and deliver a flawless global consistency services. >>You just, you were just talking about multiple languages, right? You've got to deal with countries, uh, environments, uh, continents, uh, businesses with different needs of, of all, you know, all over the, over the map. If you might say that, um, how do you balance that? Or how do you approach that when you do have so many customers in a wide variety of venues with a wide variety of needs and yet, you know, you want to provide for them that exemplary service that they expect when they come to Fujitsu? >>Uh, well, yes, as I mentioned, uh, we strive to evolve our contact centers so that it meets that global need that global expansion. And we adapt to our customers' needs. Uh, we have our GDCs with teams that are engaged and enabled so that we can provide customers with, uh, the best customer experience we like to help our customers reimagine their employee experience. >>Yeah. You mentioned, uh, you're talking about the contact centers and I know that you're going through this major transformation right now, in terms of, of, uh, how they're operating, um, before we get into that and, and, and jump a little bit deeper into what you've already touched on, what was the problem before, or, you know, there's always a problem, right? We're always trying to solve something, make something better, put a little finer point on that in terms of, of what you were doing before, you know, where were we? >>Well, uh, if we get to this global delivery organization, uh, tries to build trust at every opportunity we aim to deepen our customer relationships by adding a value of mix, uh, of rock, solid delivery, innovation and collaboration. However, some of our previous systems, the net always offer us the functionality and flexibility that we needed to provide a diverse range of, uh, services to our customers and what they required. So that is the basis of our, uh, challenges and, uh, what we were striving to overcome. >>So you've, you've turned AWS, um, uh, again, Amazon connect, I know that, uh, that you've got widely deployed. What was it that, that attracted you to that in terms of finding the value in it, and then what kind of efficiencies and what kinds of improvement in your operations is, is connect providing you >>Well, uh, being able to, uh, think about the art of the possible adding value to our customers. Introducing next generation features, uh, our road with AWS connected started as a two month proof of concept, uh, with over 150 different agents initially supported out of one of those global delivery centers, providing support and services to, uh, one of the regions. So, uh, we started as a way to innovate and provide next generation functionality. >>Yeah. Proof of concept periods are always interesting, aren't they? Because you, you think you're going to find out some thing and, and you might, but then you sometimes find out something else, right. That, that you're like, okay, well, the, uh, there's another application here. There's another service here. There's another layer here. Um, what was it in that period of time for you then, as far as your takeaways that convinced you that, you know, this is right, this is good. We need this. And, and so we're going to jump in. Absolutely. So, >>Uh, I would say that one of those things is that we made marked improvements in our customer experience. We were able to rapidly onboard new agents and provide automated features, such as call recording sentiment analysis, integrated callback features. We were able to help our customers faster while simultaneously improving the service quality. >>Yeah. COVID, uh, has been, um, certainly wreaking havoc in, in every facet of life. Right. Um, no question personally, professionally unit, multiple industries. So how about the impact on your, in your world first off, just from, from COVID-19, uh, how you've had to assess what your client's needs are, how you, what your needs are and, and first off, how you've, how have you balanced that >>In the past year? Yes, well, uh, Fujitsu was able to move, uh, 95% of our contact survey agents to remote work environment, equipped with the tools that they needed to provide, uh, services while remaining safe and productive. Our contact center agents and operations was not able to persist, but actually thrive during the COVID 19 pandemic and provide the much needed support that our customers were expecting and, uh, provided from, from us. How fast >>Was it, you know, I guess it required, what, how quickly did you have to respond? Cause, uh, you know, I mean, this certainly has caught a lot of, or caught a lot of people by surprise back in early March and April. Um, and I assume that that Fujitsu's no different, right? All of a sudden you have, uh, a pandemic on your hands and you've got to move nimbly and quickly. So just talk about that, if you would, that, that quick transformation that you had to make and in terms of responding to the >>Absolutely. So with AWS connect, we were able to automate and simplify the complex contact center flows that we had previously, a product of this is it's ability to now make ad hoc changes in seconds while avoiding multiple vendors to actually get those implemented. One example of this is that for you to help one of our customers move from 4,500 QS to less than 400 by actually doing call tagging attributes, instead of just creating independent flows for each one of those countries. And this mainly because of the needs from the operation to be able to quickly create reports based on countries and languages. Yeah. >>And I know you were involved or, and, and, and I might still be, I'm not sure a beta testing, uh, with some of the new, um, AWS connect features that were announced recently, you know, here at, uh, during re-invent what, what is, um, what's got you going there, you know, what, what, uh, what's caught your attention and what are you excited about seeing I go into practice on a, on a wider basis? >>Well, John, I would to say that introduction of ado list tasks has greatly helped us improve our agent productivity. We were able to see improvements of around 30% and we expect refine our customer experience even further by adding additional AWS integrations. >>Now, you mentioned, mentioned further, there's always a next step, right? Isn't there Alex. I mean, there's always, it's as good as you are now. You can't afford to sit still. I mean, that's the competitive nature of your landscape. So where do you see yourself in, in terms of rollouts in the future, or if there's an area that you think this is the next, uh, challenge for us, uh, in the, in the short term, what would that be? >>Well, that AC very good question for you to provide, uh, contact center services to around 300 diverse customers with agents speaking dozens of different languages. And we are continually looking to improve those services and experience for our customers, as well as our employees. We believe that if our employees are happy and safe and they have the tools that they need to do their work, that would result in an M in a much more improved, uh, service to our customers as such, uh, for you to source invest money, invest in heavily in the of transformation. Some of those elements would include a location agnostic delivery. This would actually allow us to create virtual teams with so employees working from Fujitsu offices while some will continue working from home. This approach will offer, uh, significantly and greater flexibility for our employees, as well as an improved efficiency of our services. >>Uh, the ability to introduce self service and automation by introducing, uh, virtual assistants, uh, robotics, uh, voice recognition, speech to text conversion, sentiment analysis. It will help us reduce the time it takes for agents or staff in repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on the more important, uh, improvement, adding value to our customers. Being able to add, uh, tasks such as technology upgrades, uh, knowledge and data management, uh, that analytics business recommendations from our customers. This would then, uh, tied into what we're doing with improved planning, uh, as situation changes. And definitely COVID has been one example of that. Uh, Fujitsu needs to respond rapidly to ensure that we continue to provide support to all of our customers, uh, wrote a planning system, provides insights recommendations to help us deal with those changes as well as offering a level of flexibility for employees to align with their personal needs. And, uh, finally, and tying this up with those innovations that we're looking into, uh, being able to take those into employee engagement. We're introducing a proof of concept with gamification on some of our contact center, uh, desks to provide employees with a rewarding environment that offers an increase, uh, find while also doing the work reinforcing behaviors and enhancing customer satisfaction while there's certainly, um, a new >>Order, a new world, right? In, in terms of how we have to operate in a business environment. And I think you hit a key word there it's flexibility, right? Ultimately giving your employees the flexibility to still do their jobs in a very productive environment and a safe environment is critical. And it seems like Fujitsu is committed to doing that. So congratulations on that and thank you for the time today. We really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much, Sean. And thank you for the opportunity.

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE! Covering E3, 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff right here at theCUBE. We're at the L.A. Convention Center in E3. It's our first time coming to this convention. It's 68,000 people and every single hall and outside, inside hotels. It's pretty crazy--pretty crazy scene. We're happy to be here. Well, we've got our next guest. She's been coming for a while. It's Katie Stone Perez. She's the director of Mixer Interactive. From Mixer, Katie, great to see you. >> Thanks so much for having me! >> Absolutely. So before we jump into it, I'd love to get your perspective. You've been in this industry for-- >> 17 years. >> 17 years. I wasn't going to say that. I was going to say close to two decades. >> (Laughing) >> So as you've been in and watched this thing develop, what are your impressions today in 2018 and how it's transformed?-- >> Of the show? You know, the whole game industry has so fundamentally transformed over the last 17 years, right? I mean, at that point in time, we didn't even have services like Xbox Live where people were connecting and playing online together. Everything was really sold as a disc-based media. So you walked into a store to purchase your disk. Now we have so many digital purchases happening online. We had no player data. We had no way to actually know how far in the game our players were getting and all of this kind of stuff-- >> [Jeff] That's right. You just shipped the disc out, right? You didn't know. >> And now we have all of this telemetry, right? We have all of these experiences. You have the, you know, free-to-play has made a huge rise. We have mobile, right? Mobile gaming within the space. So the show has so transformed both from the people who are playing within the space, the technologies that people are using, and the growth. I mean, we can also just see-- years ago, it was really much more about a trade show so that the big people who are going to buy the disc can actually come to E3-- >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> Check out our games and place their disc orders. And now it's really much more of a consumer phenomenon as well. >> [Jeff] So I'm curious, we covered a ton of tech shows. Just I've been here before and data and the use of data is a huge part of the digital transformation story. >> Yeah. >> So I'm curious from your point of view from a game developer point of view, how did that change? Because you guys are a little bit ahead of the curve in getting the usage data, getting the tracking data. How did that impact the industry in the way you developed and shipped games? >> It's phenomenal. You know, all of a sudden, you can start to understand who your players are and so if you're gonna do an upsell offer, you know, you can understand, like, "Oh, this person has actually already purchased this type of material." So I'm gonna give him this type of upsell vs this type of upsell. Or, You know, "I see all of my players are really struggling on level three and no one is making it through. What's wrong with level three?" Let's look at changing that up a bit. >> [Jeff] Right. >> So data has actually really informed us in so many ways to re-look at our basic gameplay loops. Our retention mechanics and all of that kind of stuff and, you know, most game companies now have teams of data analysts who are just specifically focusing on those KPIs and just analyzing the data and learning. >> [Jeff] Right. >> But with that too, we've also then had to get more agile in our development and publishing processes because, you know, when you ship a disc and you just let it go, you can get data but then what are you gonna do about it, right? >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> Your next sequel is a couple of years out and so now, too, with the ability to push updates over the air and all of this kind of stuff, It changes it so we can actually take that information, have an immediate impact, and sometimes you can get that data within one or two days. Actually have an impact, you know? >> [Jeff] Right. >> So I actually work on mixer which is a game broadcasting platform so we have a live service. So we can just constantly update and make these changes. >> [Jeff] I'm gonna ask you a philosophical question that I'm always thinking about. In terms of difficulty and the right amount of difficulty, and just kind of generically but engage specifically-- >> Right. >> You want to be difficult enough so people feel challenged and want to continue the journey. >> Yeah. >> But obviously you can't make it so difficult that they just couldn't get through. So I just wondered if you had some-- >> Yeah! >> If there's some best practice or philosophy about what's the right level to the degree of difficulty? >> Yeah, you know funny enough, I gave a talk at GDC in, like, 2005 and it was called Let Me Win and so my background is actually in psychology and it was really as someone who has a psychology background who loves to play games. My issues of playing through so many games in our media because we're a very defeatist mentality. If you think about it, we started as an industry as this coin-op industry where we had to kill you off because we needed you to put another quarter in the machine. But now we carry that trope with us even though we have people put 60 quarters-- $60 worth of quarters in the machine in advance >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> But we're still killing you off in the same way. And so it's kind of crazy to me. And so we really as an industry, I do think, need to think about that more. Now there's certain games like Cuphead is one of my favorite games but it's really brutally hard but that was very much the intention, you know? >> [Jeff] Right. >> These dark souls and the cupheads in those games. Their genre is that they are super hard-- >> [Jeff] Right. >> So people kind of know that going into them. But I do think across our broader audience, we need to think about how we're being more inclusive in our design And that's everything from, you know, still giving people that harder experience but also an educational principal called scaffolding. So, you know, just like when you're teaching a kid to do something, you're not gonna say "Okay, do this and this and this and this and this." Because that's not fun. >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> So instead, if you can be, like, "Here's what the goal is. Here's your tools." And then within the game, we want to help do that. Now with data, actually, we can help scaffold better. Cause we can actually see "Oh, these players didn't do this" Or "This age group of players didn't do this." Or "This type of thing didn't do this." So we can actually use that to inform our decisions and actually do better scaffolding within the game. >> [Jeff] Okay, so before we get to mixer and streaming which is like the latest thing, I want to get to this middle step which was the Cloud. And really opening up the ability to do multi-player games, opening up the ability to go from just that consul out into the universe and play lots of other people. Again, how did that really transform the way you guys thought about designing and delivering games? >> I mean, fundamentally, you know, Xbox Live was a apart of our program. Very early on, Live came into the Xbox business and I think it was actually great because we had that as a Microsoft asset and strength that we can bring over that type of infrastructure. And we've seen it really just connect and bring people together in form community, right? And it's so much fun. There's some element that you get when you're sitting next to someone and playing but not everyone in the world has someone sitting next to them. >> [Jeff] Right. >> So we're doing that over Live by bringing people together and through different platforms and services like Mixer as well where we can bring these communities together. >> [Jeff] Right. >> So it's really, I really think about creating that essence of community. It just makes everything more fun. >> [Jeff] Right. So now we're in 2018 and actually, it's been going on for a little while which is a whole different level of community and that's streaming where someone's playing a game for those that aren't familiar and other people are invited to participate with them. >> Yeah. >> Again, another huge shift in the way that people interacting with the game. And more importantly, kind of the social aspects around their playing with the game. >> Yeah and that's what's so cool. So in traditional game streaming platforms too, there's quite a bit of latency so what the gamer-- the streamer's actually doing at the time, you know, by the time the viewers end up seeing it on a platform, and then, you know, they can comment on it and then the streamer kind of sees it. There's a lot of latency there. So Mixer was actually created by two young kids who actually were huge in the Minecraft community. They had already created a million dollar business actually hosting Minecraft servers and they had all these streamer friends that were Minecraft streamers and they were talking about how frustrating it was because they were streaming and people were like "Put the block over here, put the block over there." But by the time they saw that feedback from their fans, they had already moved on. They had already done something different. So Mixer created low latency streaming. So what we called our faster-than-light technology where we have sub-second latency. So exactly what's happening in the game, that's what people on Mixer are seeing. And then they can comment and the streamer immediately sees those comments and that then paved the way for this richer conversation. And from there, we had interactivity come about. So we have all of our new Mixplay experiences where people can actually come on to Mixer and not just watch. Now they are playing themselves. So you can actually be playing one of our games like Next Up Hero and I can actually choose to help heal you or I can choose to help throw in enemies. Then you'll see my gamer text "Sweets" go right across the screen, right? You can actually see as a gamer who's then broadcasting, you can see what I'm doing on Mixer and how that's having an impact within your game. >> Didn't the streamer kind of like the latency so that they had time to kind of split their attention between playing the game and interacting with the community? >> No because it's all->> streamers for them, It's all about community. Now there are certain competitive sports events and things like that that we do within the e-sports space, and so there might be certain instances in which you don't want to have low latency engaged. But for the most part, streamers want to be having that conversation and are faster- >> than-light technology on Mixer really enables that for them. >> [Jeff] Right. And it just seems like it's almost gonna come full circle so if I'm engaging with the streamer and I'm participating in the game to some degree, at some point, do I just step in and we're playing the game together? >> Yeah. I mean, really now, you can play on Mixer. That's really what we're talking about with our new Mixplay experiences. So we even have games that are playable only on Mixers so these games aren't even-- we were talking about distribution, right? These games aren't even shipping. There's no disc. They're not even shipping on any of these other platforms. They're playable only on Mixer and so you can actually go to mixer.com today and check out several of these game experiences and you can actually look for Mixplay experiences. We have filters and so you can actually find all of that content. >> [Jeff] Alright. So to get your perspective before we let you->> you've been at this for a while. So as storage and compute and networking, it gets infinite in scale and asymptotically approaches zero in cost. As you look forward, where do you see leveraging some of this new horsepower? >> Well, I think again, you know, Microsoft actually just had this amazing acquisition of PlayFab technology and I love seeing what they're doing within this space and bringing that into our portfolio of content as well. Because again, it's about having this data and being able to really respond and change your game instantly to really make sure that you're doing the best things for your business. And so it really just makes developers be informed and be able to be much more agile in their approach. And it's also democratizing that opportunity. Previously years ago, to get some of these insights, you would have had to be one of the largest game companies on the planet. And now with the democratization of these different game engines, and then then the democratization of this type of tooling and online services that are available, with things like Azure and things like PlayFab, it really creates an amazing opportunity for all developers everywhere. >> [Jeff] And to me, the democratization, the thing where you're over and over-- >> Yeah. >> More of data, more of the tools, and more of the ability to do something about it is distributed to a broader audience. Alright Katie, well thank you for-- >> We get more voices with that, right? >> Right, right. >> You get a much broader set of content that ends up like the content that you see here today is much more diverse and much broader. You know, we still have a long way to go as an industry but it's very different than my first E3 17 years ago. >> [Jeff] 17 years ago. Alright Katie, well thanks for taking-- >> Thank you! >> a few minutes out of your day and congrats on all the success. >> Thanks! >> Alright, this is Katie and I'm Jeff. You're watch theCUBE from E3, L.A. Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat, techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive, three days of coverage here at IBM Think 2018. I'm John Furrier co-host with Dave Vellante, hosting three days and next is Joel Horowitz, Vice President Strategic Partnerships and Offering, of The Digital Business Group. >> Thanks. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me here. >> Thanks for coming on. >> You've been on theCUBE, probably so many times, talking big data, talking analytics, now, in your new role in The Digital Group, the digital transformation. I really want to just ask you right off the bat about your new role, and how it relates to the changing ecosystem. >> Joel: Yeah. >> All of these markets are changing big time, the role of the ecosystem, the leverage that they have with technology and the value propositions, whether it's decentralized applications in Blockchain to storage and infrastructure, and big data. What is your role, take a minute to explain what you're doing, because you have a unique position, because this demand for partnerships, this demand for collaboration at many levels. What's the latest? >> So I would describe my role as being a champion of our partners, for sure. I look at, you know, I take, a very outside in perspective on IBM. Joining just over three years ago now, I came in, really through analytics, as you know, focused on machine learning, data science, and the growth of A.I. at that time. Last year I was part of the corporate development team over there. So looking, really, at a lot of the industry trends and what's going on, as well, in analytics, data, and A.I. This year, you know, we recognize that we're only going to do so many strategic partnerships a year, right, where there's probably a handful that we're going to work with. For example, last year we did a great partnership with Lightbend to bring their reactive platform to IBM, and we launched the iPhone 10, with Verizon on Lightbend's platform. But, these days, my team, can't be everywhere, obviously, and part of the value of digital, and that route to market is really the idea that partner should be able to self service. So, you know, my job this year, is frankly to put myself out of a job, right. Meaning, if I can get, you know, 70% of the work my team does, right, contracting, legal, setting up, provisioning, all of that on our cloud, and partners can just do that themselves. Then we'll capture a much larger swath of the emerging A.I., data, and cloud market. >> I want to talk about the killer app creating value and then the role the market place is playing. You mentioned self service. I want to kind of go down that. Before we get there, I want to get your thoughts on this because I noticed, in your role you're covering, it's cutting across a lot of different things, and you know we've been talking about cloud, as a horizontally disrupting technology, >> Joel: Yeah. >> Certainly in the data space you saw that. And stacks will be horizontally scalable with the cloud. >> Yeah. >> But you could be vertical specialization in the applications. So I noticed you're covering analytics, Watson, Cloud, hybrid cloud, emerging technologies. >> Yeah. >> Blockchain, and many others. >> Yeah. >> So talk about, it's obvious you guys are now cutting across, horizontally, across the different IBM divisions. Is that by design? >> Yeah. >> What's the impact of the ecosystem and partners for that horizontally cut over? >> Yeah, I know, I mean it's a great question, I think. Look, there are some specific design patterns that we see across every technology, across every, you know, business at IBM. One design pattern is pretty obvious, you saw it with the launch of the IBM cloud private data. Following up on last years IBM Cloud Private. And that design pattern is really about people containerizing applications. And so, at the end of the week, we have the business partner, or PartnerWorld Leadership conference. Excuse me. Where a number of our partners really are looking at how do I bring that work load to the cloud. And it's not so much the cloud is the end point. That's really the starting off point to A; Get much wider distribution and B; Be able to take advantage of a lot of these emerging technologies, like Blockchain, like A.I. Like IOT, and numerous others, Quantum, et cetera, they'll just keep coming. So really cloud to me is just a way for us to open the door to a lot of the technology that's flooding the market. >> Dave: Joel, can you talk about partnership, you mentioned before that you guys are kind of selective, John calls them Barney deals, ya know. I love you, you love me. You guys sound like you don't look for those, not volume, it's quality. >> Yeah. >> What are the criteria that you're looking for? How do you get value out of those? How do you measure that value out of the partnerships? If someone is a prospective partner out there, how should I be interacting with you? >> Yeah, I think, there's probably two steps. I think one is really recognizing that, in my own personal view, is that we really want to partner with folks who embrace open standards. Now I'm not going to like go as far to say open source, 'cause I think there is a lot that goes into that. But I will say open standards, meaning, not these like large monolithic applications, but can you actually integrate with us in some meaningful way? And to do that, that's why we actually started on this new platform that we are launching today. Called IBM Partner Self-service. Is the ability to first integrate with IBM. So, if you can demonstrate that you can build with IBM first, whether that's a startup, an ISV, a business partner. Like that's criteria number one. Criteria number two is are you a trusted partner? So, do you actually have the same level of competency that we would expect from, frankly, our own sellers, and our own people. And so, to do that, we've also launched new competency paths for business partners and partners as well. So, those are the two major criterias. And then the third one, which I think is kind of the holy grail, is selling with IBM. So we also launched a sell with path today where you can actually list in our marketplace. And then we will actually help you reach new markets. And then demonstrate there's clients, there's a client need that really wants our joint solution, right? And so, to me, those are the three things, to re-state. Like, you know, building with us, having a level of competency with us, and then demonstrating client success with us. >> Okay, so, integrate, you really don't need you guys to do that. I can just dive in and do that. Bake it out a little bit, and then approach you. What kind of help do you give? Do you have programs once you get by those gates? >> So, you know, I would categorize into two groups, I think we have a ton of online support. So, you know, we even embrace Slack at IBM. If you're not aware of that, we have Slack everywhere. And, so, for a self service, I want to say, look, what does zero touch mean, right, in this day and age, for a partner. And so, they can go to our site today, and actually get, you know, sign up for Slack, and talk directly to our technical specialist as well as to our developer advocates. And so, on the enablement and integration side, my colleague, Angel Diaz and team, have done a great job of launching hundreds of IBM code patterns. So that you can just pick these artifacts up, these assets up, and leverage them to integrate all sorts of capabilities into your product. >> You know, Dave, I want to get your thoughts on this, because you and I have been talking about the API integration, and I want to get back to Joel's point in a second because I think this is critical for startups and ecosystem partners. API's are the (speaking quickly) for developers right now, so if I don't want to take a big chance on being all in on IBM, say I want to kick the tires, API's are critical. So the question is, are you seeing that traction on your side of the house, in terms of the end now, since the level of API integration, is that the touchpoint? Is it like the beginning phases? And what level of commitment that you're seeing with people. >> Well, John, to me it comes down to innovation, and it's interesting because Joel came out of the data world. To me, the innovation in the next 10 years starts with data. The second component of that innovation, I think, over the next decade or so is going to be, really, A.I., whether you call it cognitive or machine intelligence or artificial intelligence. And then third, I think is cloud economics and that's really where the API economy fits in. You got to have API'S to integrate, as Joel was saying. You've got to have marginal... You've got to have scale, marginal costs go to zero eventually. You've got to have network effects and you've got to be able to track startups, which is another question I have. >> Now Joel, back to you, on the start on the integration, whether it's a startup or a big company. It used to be, the old days, you got to go all in. You've got to get the developer kit, >> Joel: Yeah. >> Download it, line it to a swim lane, get deeper, prove your value. >> Yeah. >> Find the value's faster; what's the first hurdle if someone wants, hey I want to give IBM a shot here? Love the sell, holy grail option, is it API'S, can people integration on their own? Talk about that specific first step because some people might open up the door and go whoa! There's more here than I thought. Or, wow, there's some real tech. Or, I don't want to use IBM tech, I want to use some of mine. There's that first indifference point. >> Yeah, I think there are areas where we've seen dramatic customer experience improvements. So to give one example, as we've partnered with Ubisoft, Redstorm last year around a new title game that they released called Star Trek Bridge Crew, and so, you know, to me, we went on our own merit, and I think that publisher chose IBM because Watson Conversation is absolutely the best on the market. And so what that did is it enabled game players, their end customer, their end user, to speak into a VR headset and just give commands, as you would naturally. And so, I think a lot of, as you think about IBM, it's, yeah, we've made it completely easy to access our API'S. I think, there's a great quote from the founder of Flickr that I read years ago, I'll go dig it up for you guys later, but it was along the lines of business development means, today is exposing your API'S, like, that's it! And, on the other side of it, we give a lot away in terms of cloud credits, right, and so, today, if you go and sign up on our self service platform, we'll give you $10,000 a month in free cloud credits to build and build quickly. Because, at the end of the day, if it's not self service, if it requires more heavy lifting, then, frankly, we're not doing our jobs. And so that's my commitment, is to make sure that is available, is accessible, and there's experts there that can help you on your journey. >> So that attracts startups, obviously, 10K a month is a honey pot for those guys. What about existing IBM clients that want to get to the cloud. Migrate to the cloud. How do you help those guys? >> Yeah, so, in the migration front, we have a great team in place with IBM services, who basically have set up a migration factor, if you will, and there are numerous ways to chart your course to the cloud. Whether it's, you know, full cloud or hybrid cloud, or some offloading, some aspects to the cloud. There's a lot of different paths you can take and so to do that, we're offering $50,000 in migration credits for the first couple months. We're also offering 35% off for professional services. So, we have a great offer going on over the next few months to help people make that first step. >> Incentives are key. >> And, look, we're here with you so it's not like, here, throwing it over the fence, and good luck! You know, tweet at me, instant message me, I'm around. And I will be absolutely committed to partner success. >> Yeah, you know, incentives are critical, that's going to get the market going. But, the end of the day, it's the type of value, and I want to get your thoughts, it's something that's come up that I've heard people talk about in the hallways and other conferences. They kind of chirp about "Hey, you know, "I'd like to get this, from suppliers. "I want to see more tools, more programs "to help me get more customers, to get more value. "I'm building apps, but also got a business to run." What are some of the conversations you've had over the past year with customers and partners? Stack rank the top three or four things that they talk about, either their pain points or things that are on their mind, that's worth noting? >> I mean, I would say first and foremost, I mean, me, myself, being in a startup at H2O. Three, four years ago. We used to walk in there and sell into the data scientists, right, so if you don't know H2O, they're a great company, a machine learning company, but we would get the data scientists really excited about working with our product, and then lo and behold, we'd get to the CIO office saying, "Hey, what is this stuff? "Get it out of here." You know, Hadoop was the same way, by the way, 2010 working at AVG, like, we'd bring in Hadoop. Like what is this data like thing? There's no governance, it's a mess. Where they could really, you know, work with IBM, where they see value from IBM is when we go into the CIO office together and say, look, we've demonstrated that there's value here. We've demonstrated that there's actual customer need. We can create a lot of help in terms of getting the rest of the organization bought in. Put in the right governance around it. Because, look, I mean GDPR is real, it's a big deal. Like, data privacy, is huge. So, you know, Rob Thomas likes to say, "You can't have good A.I. without I.A." I think that's a great information architecture. So, I agree, and so I think that's what the number one benefit is. Really get in there, move quickly, demonstrate value, and then when you're ready to make that next step of how you roll that out to the rest of the enterprise, that's when IBM becomes a huge help. >> You know, you mentioned GDPR. With regulatory issues now are becoming criteria for a lot of application developers that are small that may not have the resources to handle the right to get your name out of a database or other tools, and other regulations, certainly. Decentralize applications with Blockchain, another regulatory challenge-- >> Yep. >> Opportunity as well. Are you guys having those kinds of conversations, like putting specific things in place beyond GDPR, and if so what regulatory and legal things do you see out there that could be blockers for customers, that you guys hope to go after? >> I mean, I don't think there's a one word answer here. I do think that you take it on a case by case basis. I think you're seeing different countries adopt GDPR differently. Germany, obviously, being a very strict kind of country in doing that. So, you know, IBM services, as well as our analytics team, are really focused on that. I think, like I said, what you saw with ICP data coming out this week, I think that's a really important way to look at it. My own personal view, I think, for sure there's a lot of compliance, They have to look at, and understand the workflow, workflows of how people are using that data, as well as application architecture is big. And those are all the considerations, I think, that you are going to see as people move. I read a statistic that 40% of all CSP'S, MSP'S, are moving, are growing, like it's 40% growth from IBC, 50% of all developers are now embedding A.I. So, this market is growing and growing fast. But, you're right. If folks out there aren't really taking GDPR seriously, you can get yourself into some hot water. >> Well, we've observed that scale matters, certainly, whether it's a partner or cloud, that gets, that helps people. >> Yeah. >> Joel, well, thanks for coming onto theCUBE, we really appreciate it. >> Yeah, my pleasure. >> Before we end, I want to get your thoughts, just share with the folks that are watching. What kind of deals do you want to do? What's on your radar? What's the priorities for you? From a strategic business development standpoint. To develop across that horizontally scalable, IBM division space, as well as technology space? >> You know, it's not what deals I want to do, it's really what deals our partners want to do. >> Come on, your in charge, come on. >> It's really what deals our partners want to do, ya know. I mean, look, I get excited about transforming industries, I really do, so I look at, not what's the transactional partnership, like go, we'll do something, and there's some revenue, or something. I look at how do we transform an industry? >> Let me rephrase the question. What's on the priority list for you guys, from a transformational area, that's important for your partners. >> Yeah, I would say for sure, obviously, A.I. is huge. Obviously data is huge, obviously cloud is huge. But, looking really specific, I think you just add tech after each industry. So Addtech, Fintech, Healthtech obviously. Game tech and, I think, probably the last one, to me personally, is the most exciting. We signed an amazing deal with Unity at the end of last year, the start of this year. In fact GDC game developer conference is going on as we speak in San Francisco. So half my team right now is over there, demonstrating Watson as like VR, AR, and it's not just for games, right. It's like with BMW and VW doing some cool stuff there as well. So, I'm really excited about the, AR, VR, industry growing, especially with our partner Unity. >> There's a new creative out there-- >> Can I jump in before you exit? I want to ask you a follow up on that, because if transformation is sort of the target for your partnerships. Healthcare is an area that should be transformed. But, needs to be transformed, but it's hard to transform healthcare. >> Joel: It is, yeah. >> Do you feel like you could start moving the needle from a partnership perspective? Or is that going to take some more time? >> You know, I think there's a lot of great work being done there. I do believe... Look, in general, I think we can move a lot faster with partners, in fact, I like to call it like the Nordstrom model. Right? Like IBM in the past has been Barney's of New York, forever, right? From a branding and from how we partner with folks, like I think we need to move more to a Nordstrom, like, yeah, we'll sell our own offerings off the rack, but then we need to help partners come in and create the right styles for the right need and the right industry. >> Yeah and then there's a Nordstrom Rack you're going to need to put that on. (laughing) Over technology goes the Nordstrom Rack. Joel Horowitz, thanks for coming out. Vice President Strategic Partnerships and Offerings, here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, with three days of IBM Think live streaming, all of the videos will be up on thecube.net sports live now. Youtube.com/siliconangle for all the ondemands when the show's over. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by Blockchain Industries. (Latin music) >> Welcome back everyone, this is theCUBE, exclusive coverage of Puerto Rico covering Blockchain Unbound's global conference where token economics meets the real world global society, Blockchain decentralized applications, and of course, cryptocurrency all kind of coming together. You got investors, you got developers, you got billionaires and millionaires, and you got the capital markets all rolled up into one. My next guest is Andrew Prell, founder and CEO of Convergence, entrepreneur, visionary, experienced entrepreneur, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me! >> So you're doing some really radical, not radical, progressive, I mean radical sounds (mumbles) Awesome things, you're re-imagining gaming. >> Andrew: Correct. >> Got a great team of people who have seen that movie before, literally, seen the entertainment side of gaming, the pro gaming side to the tactical gaming side, take a minute to explain what you guys are doin' that's super fascinating, how it works in this new era. >> So, we're re-imagining the entire game space, when I say that I'm talking the consumer side, that's cell phones all the way through consoles and PCs, out to the out-of-home entertainment side, which is arcades, location-based entertainment and full-blown theme parks, and marrying them all together with one backbone platform that allows all of the devices to interact with each other in the same game space. So you can be in a $300,000 simulator at Disneyland, workin' with guys on cell phones against guys in their head-mounted displays. Any of that, they all work together in one game space. >> So basically the world is the device, every device. >> Yes. >> On the network, IP connection or global, player, console, screen, and you're connecting them all together. Hence Convergence. >> Right, we're giving every device in the eco-system it's proper place and it's proper prestige. 'Cause if you've got a $5,000 gaming rig, you don't think a guy with a $800 cell phone should be at the exact same level, but maybe 10 other cell phones could be a equal match to you. >> Take me through a use case of how you're going to converge this all together. So you talk to some purists out there, "I've got a 4K monitor, I don't want this cell phone guy "comin' in here, he's got lag, "I got all kinds of gaming issues." Does that go away, how does it all work? >> What we're havin' to do is contextual-based interfaces, meaning that your roles and responsibilities in the game space is dependent on the devices that you bring in. Because virtual reality is not just the head-mounted display, it's all the new gear coming out with the tactile feedback, the bodysuits, the gloves, the boots, the treadmills, all of that. All of that, your roles and responsibilities in each game space is dependent on the device that you enter with. >> So I was at Sundance this year and I had a theme, I did a panel I put together called The New Creative. And if you look at all the new artists out there, they want to break down the elite gatekeepers, right? I mean the virtual-reality and augmented-reality world is colliding with film, filmmakers. You got YouTubers out there with a million, 10 million subscribers, built-in audiences, this new technology coming out. A lot of people are bringing storytelling, filmmaking, and it's just really in the early stages right now. People love the characters, but you start to see the new kind of format. Does this play into your world? I can imagine that, if you're thinking to be disruptive in the way you're thinking, new games're going to emerge so it's not thinking about the old games, it's thinking about potentially new games. >> Andrew: Correct. >> How do you view that, is that somethin' that you see? What's your reaction to that trend of this new, multifaceted VR, AR. >> We see that everybody is going to get to play together, cross every device, the developers are going to get rewarded for creating content, people are going to be rewarded for creating things inside of the games, and the players are going to get rewarded for doing all the top things, and getting to the top levels of all the games, and we're going to reward them through our cryptocurrency. >> We're in Puerto Rico obviously, this world's goin' to another level, Brock Pierce, his community, the Blockchain community, they're comin' to Puerto Rico, tax incentives, the government's here opening up their arms, But you're starting to see it go to the next level. These early industries you got the entrepreneurs and the promoters. The promoters promote the entrepreneurs, there's a lot of love goin' back and forth. But then they hit that threshold, the capital markets come in, you know, you start to see the opportunities, but the money start flowing in. It's kind of happening now, so it's goin' the next level. In your opinion, token economics; now that there's so much money flowin' in, now that people see that Blockchain's legit, now that people see that this is actually a new model, not everybody, but majority-a' people in the industry are all noddin' their heads, "Okay, Blockchain's "got some potential, token economics is a legit thing, "it's disrupting capital structures, "it's disrupting funding." How is it disrupting the gaming business? Can you share your opinion on that? >> People don't understand the overall impact. We didn't understand the overall impact. A lot of the investors coming in still don't fully understand the overall impact. I was in a discussion the other day, I'd written some articles in Medium about token economics, and about the virtuous circle of a token-based investment fund. Meaning everything that it invests, all the fees, everything coming out of it, is all based on a token inside of an ecosystem. We're about to head to GDC, Game Developers Conference, just like Kevin Bachus did for the Xbox, we're going out there to license and buy up all the content that we can through our tokens. Now the cool thing here, the thing that just makes the investment, the cash funds dead, is a dollar bill can not change in value other than go down over time slightly. So we'll just say the dollar bill doesn't change in value. If I was Kevin Bachus back when the Xbox was coming out, and I went and invested a million dollars in a hundred companies in crypto, say the Xbox is crypto, and you could only get to those games through the token, which is what we're doing, and I found Halo, which, a hundred-million people bought the Xbox just because of Halo, then what that does for a cash fund is everybody pats each other on the back because you've got one game that's goin' to exit and that's kind of cool, but that's it. Doesn't affect the rest of the economy other than a nice network effect. Halo gets a hundred million users, the next guy might get five million of those or 10 million of those, that's a nice small impact. When you do it with crypto, and you start out with a penny token, that you put a million dollars into a hundred companies, and you find that Halo, and it explodes, your penny token might go to 10 cents. So what you just did was you just 10-exed what you invested into Halo. >> It's a futures contract on gaming. >> Well. >> Kind of. >> I'm not going to talk to that point. (laughs) We're going to just talk about this example, is you 10-exed, you went from a million to 10 million in Halo, but you also 10-exed every single investment you just did, and you 10-exed every person in that ecosystem that's involved in it, that's getting paid in it. Your suppliers, your publishers, your media. >> John: Everyone gets paid. >> Everybody get 10-exed because you found Halo. So that makes this whole ubiquitous ecosystem involved with everybody else, meaning I get rewarded if you get rewarded, so everybody helps everybody else. >> That is exactly the model of token economics. >> Exactly, it explodes because it's so powerful. >> This is interesting, the inefficiencies of the process that you pointed out, the old way, is eliminated by the new model. Hence, the people who pick up the game are the participants who shorten that efficiencies. >> I had a guy the other guy ask me, "you're not asking for enough money with your ICO, "'cause you've got to go invest in all these companies." And I was like, "you don't understand token economics!". All I have to do is unlock the power of my token and invest with that, and I've already proven, back in 2015 we proved that a lot of the game developers would take our token without it even having a secondary market. >> You haven't even gone to a whole 'nother dimension that you don't even have to go to now, but that's future, is the role of consensus in these communities really also do the filtering at many levels. >> Andrew: 100%! >> If you look at what Activision got their ass handed to them, all you got to do is look at the Reddit threads. The whole gaming thing is, no one wants to see games go corporate. Because they had to force a business model, this is a huge issue, people are losing their shirts. "Oh, great creative studio, they sold out, game's over". The audience flocks away, why? 'Cause they have no incentive. Do you agree? >> I agree a 100%, but there's a lot of professional investors that don't. So we broke up the sum of our funds that we're investing into all these startups, we broke it up into 10 funds, and we're going to turn it into a game. We're going to give one of the funds purely to our token holders, and do a consensus model, and let them vote on what they think we should, what should be in our network. And they're going to go up against nine other investors. I threw down the gauntlet. Whoever gets best wins the extra bonuses. >> So are you raising money now or did you raise the token sale already? >> We're closing out our private presale, and because of Blockchain Unbound I doubt we'll actually hit the open market with the ICO, so people will have to go to our developers that we invest in, and get the tokens through them somehow. >> Good success year, huh? Blockchain Unbound been a good success for you? >> Oh yeah, Brock Pierce is on board, been pushin' behind us since Cayman. Him and Crystal both fully supported us and we're havin' awesome. >> What's your advice to people out there, scratchin' their heads, "Andrew, give me "the 101 on token economics, what's the bottom line, "what do I need to know about, where do I get started, "what do I do?". >> Once you get your token actually, say, authenticated, realized, everything's transparent, and it gets on that secondary market, it's better to use that to invest in anything you need to invest in. Get everybody incentivized around your token. All your employees, all your vendors, everybody incentivized around that token, it's a 1000% more powerful than a dollar, 'cause a dollar doesn't go up in value. Your token can go up and down, but trends up, and as soon as you find just one spark that blows up, everybody, all boats rise equally. It's awesome. >> All right, Andrew Prell, CEO, reimagining gaming. Token economics is a disruptive force. There's math involved, every company will need a a chief economic officer, that'll be a new title, we'll be certainly seein' that out. Thanks for comin' on theCUBE, 'preciate it. I'm John Furrier, you're watchin theCUBE. Exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound. Part of our two-day wall-to-wall coverage, thanks for watchin', we'll be back with more after this short break.

I[Announcer] Live from Silicon Valley, it's "The Cube." Covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> 'Kay welcome back everyone, we are live in Palo Alto for "The Cube" special coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017. We're in our new 4,500 square foot studio, just moved in. We'll be expanding, you'll see a lot more in-studio coverage from "The Cube" as well as our normal going out to the events and extracting. Anyways I'm John Furrier Joining me is Jeff Frick. General manager of "The Cube." But a breakdown, all the action. As you know, we do a lot of data science. We've been watching the grid. We've been on the treadmill all weekend. All last week, digging into the Mobile World Congress. Sentiment, the vibe, the direction, and trying to synthesize all the action. And really kind of bring it all together for everyone here. And of course,we're doing it in Palo Alto. We're going to bring folks in from Silicon Valley that could not have made the trek to Barcelona. We're going to be talking to folks on the phone, who are in Barcelona. You heard from Lynn Comp from Intel. We have Floyd coming up next. CTO and SAP breaking down all the action from their new cloud. And big Apple news. SAP now has a general availability of the iOS native development kit. Which should change the game for SAP. There is tons of smart cities, smart stadiums, you know IOT, autonomous vehicles. So much going on at Mobile World Congress. We're going to break that down every day starting at 8AM. In-studio. And of course, I want to thank Intel for headlining our sponsorship and allowing us to create this great content. With some contributing support from SAP clouds I want to give a shout out, a bit shout out to Intel. Check out their booth. Check out their coverage. And check out their new SAP cloud, that's been renamed from HANA Cloud to SAP cloud. Without their support we wouldn't be able to bring this wall-to-wall great commentary. Jeff so with that aside. We got two days. We've got Laura Cooney coming in. Bob Stefanski managing this bridge between Detroit and Silicon Valley. And all that great stuff. Phones are ringing off the hook here in the studio. Go tweet us by the way at the cube or at ferrier We have Guy Churchwood coming in. We have great content all week. We have entrepreneurs. We have Tom Joyce, a Cube alumni. Who's an executive interviewing for a bunch of CEO positions. Really going to break down the changing aspect of Mobile World Congress. The iPhone's 10 years old. We're seeing now a new step function of disruption. Peter Burris said the most terrible in time. And I even compounded the words by saying and the phones are getting faster. So it's beyond the device. I mean what are you seeing on the grid? When you look at the data out there? >> John a bunch of things as we've been watching the stream of the data that came in and surprised me. First off just a lot of early announcements around Blackberry and Nokia. Who are often not really mentioned as the leaders in the handsets base. Not a place that we cover real extensively. But really kind of, these guys making a move and really taking advantage of the void that Samsung left with some of the Note issues. But what I thought was even more interesting is on our hashtag monitoring tools that IOT and 5G are actually above any of the handset manufacturers. So it really supports a hypothesis that we have that while handsets will be better and there'll be more data enabled by 5G, what 5G's really all about is as an IOT enabler. And really another huge step in the direction of connected devices, autonomous vehicles. We've talked about it. We cover IOT a lot. But I thought that was pretty interesting. >> Well Robo Car's also in there. That's a. >> Well everybody loves a car right. >> Well it's kind of a symbol of the future of the car. Which again ties it all together. >> Right right. The driverless race car, which is pretty interesting. >> Takes sports to a whole other level. >> I thought that was interesting. Another little thing as we watch these digital assistants and these voice assistants John, and I got a couple for Christmas just so I could try them out, is that Motorola announced that they're going to partner with Alexa. And use the Alexa voice system inside of their phones. You know I'm still waiting, I don't know why Siri doesn't have a stand-alone device and really when you use a Google Home versus an Amazon Alexa, very different devices, really different kind of target. So I thought that was an interesting announcement that also came out. But fundamentally it's fun to see the support of IOT and 5G, and really enable this next great wave of distribution, disruption, and opportunity. >> We're going to have Saar Gillia in the studio later today and tomorrow as a guest analyst for us on "The Cube." Of course folks may know Saar from being on "The Cube," he was recently senior vice reporting to Meg Whitman, and built out that teleco service provider, NFV business model for HP. And he's been to Mobile World Congress almost every year. He didn't make it this year, he'll be coming in the studio. And he told me prior to being, extremely vetting him for "The Cube" if you will, to use a Trump term, after extreme vetting of Saar Gillia he really wants to make the point of, and this is going to be critical analysis, kind of poking a hole into the hype, which is he doesn't think that the technology's ready for primetime. And specifically he's going to comment around he doesn't believe that the apps are ready for all this bandwidth. He doesn't think, he thinks that 5G is a solution looking for a problem. And I don't necessarily agree with him, so we'll have a nice commentary. Look for Saar today on "The Cube," at 11:30 he's coming on. It's going to be a little bit of a cage match there with Saar. >> I always go back to the which is the most underrepresented and most impactful law. Which is probably in the short term, in the hype cycle 5G's probably not going to deliver on their promise up to the level of the hype. As we find over and over with these funny things like Bluetooth. Who would ever think Bluetooth would be such an integral part of so many things that we do today? I think over the long term, the mid term, I think the opportunity's giant. >> I meant I think for people to understand 5G, at least the way I always describe it over the weekend, when I was at lacrosse games and soccer games over the weekend, for the folks that aren't in tech, 5G is the holy grail for IOT, mobile cars, and AI. Because what 5G does, it creates that mesh of rf, or rf radio frequency, at a whole other level. You look at the radios that Intel's announcing across their Telco partners, and what Intel's doing really is a game-changer. And we all know LTE, when the signal's low on the phone, everyone freaks out. We all know when WiFi doesn't work, the world kind of comes to a crawl. I mean just think 15 years ago wifi wasn't even around. So now think about the impact of just what we rely on with the digital plumbing called wireless. >> [Jeff] Right, right. >> When you think about the impact of going around the fiber to the home, and the cost it takes, to bring fiber to, Lynn Comp was commenting on that. So having this massively scalable bandwidth that's a radio frequency wireless is just a game-changing thing you can do. Low latency, 10 20 gig, that's all you need. Then you're going to start to see the phones change and the apps change. And as Peter Burris said a turbulent change of value propositions will emerge. >> It's funny at RSA a couple of weeks back the chatter was the people at RSA, they don't use wifi. You know, they rely on secure mobile networks. And so 5G is going to enable that even more, and as you said, if you can get that bandwidth to your phone in a safer, and secure, more trusted way, you know what is the impact on wifi and what we've come to expect on our devices and the responsiveness. And all that said, there will be new devices, there will be new capabilities. And I guess the other thing that's kind of funny is that of course the Oscar's made their way up to the, on the board. I thought that might wipe everything out after last night. But no IOT and 5G is still above Oscar's on the trending hashtag. >> Well I mean, Oscar's bring up... It's funny we all watch the Oscar's. There was some sort of ploy, but again, you bring up entertainment with the Oscar's. You look at what Hollywood's going through, and the Hollywood Reporter had an article talking about Reed Hastings with Netflix, he talked today really kind of higher end video so the entertainment business is shifting the court cutting is happening, we're seeing more and more what they call over the top. And this is the opportunity for the service providers but also for the entertainment industry. And with social media and with all these four form factors changing the role of media will be a packet data game. And how much can you fit in there? Whether it's e-sports to feature film making, the game is certainly changing. And again, I think Mobile World Congress is changing so radically. It's not just a device show anymore, it's not about the handset. It's about what the enablement is. I think that's why the 5G impact is interesting. And making it all work together, because a car talking to this device, it's complicated. So there's got to be the glue, all kind of new opportunities. So that's what I'm intrigued by. The Intel situation where you've got two chip guys battling it out for who's going to be that glue layer under the hood >> Right and if you look at some of the quotes coming out of the show a lot of the high-level you got to get away from the components and get into the systems and solutions, which we hear about over and over and over again. It's always about systems and solutions. I think they will find a problem to solve, with the 5G. I think it's out there. But it is... >> My philosophy Jeff is kill me with the bandwidth problem. Give me more bandwidth, I will consume more bandwidth. I mean look at compute pal as an example. People thought Morse law was going to cap out a decade ago. You look at the compute power in the chips with the cloud, with Amazon and the cloud providers it's almost infinite computes. So then the role of data comes in. So now you got data, now you got mobile, I think give us more bandwidth, I think the apps have no problem leveling up. >> [Jeff] Sucking it up. >> And that's going to be the debate with Saar. >> It's the old chip. The Intel Microsoft thing where you know, Intel would come out with a faster chip then the OS with eat more of it as part of the OS. And it kept going and going. We've talked through a lot of these John and if you're trying to predict the future and building for the future you really have to plan now for almost infinite bandwidth for free. Infinite storage for free, infinite compute for free. And while those curves are kind of asymptotically free they're not there yet. That is really the world in which we're heading. And how do you reshape the way you design apps, experiences, interphases without those constraints, which before were so so significant. >> I'm just doing a little crowd check here, you can go to crowdcheck.net/mwc if you want to leave news links or check in with the folks chatting. And I was just talking to SAP and SAP had the big Apple news. And one of the things that's interesting and Peter Burris talked about this on our opening this morning is that confluence between the consumer business and then the infrastructures happening. And that it was called devos but now you're starting to see the developers really focusing on the business value of technology. But yet it's not all developers even though people say the developers, the new king-makers, well I would say that. But the business models still is driven by the apps. And I think developers are certainly closer to the front lines. But I think you're going to start to see a much more tighter coupling between the c level folks in business and the developers. It's not just going to be a developer-led 100% direction. Whether it's entertainment, role of data, that's going to be pretty interesting Jeff. >> So Apple's just about finished building the new spaceship headquarters right. I think I opens up next month. I'm just curious to get your take John on Apple. Obviously the iPhone changed the game 10 years ago. What' the next big card that Apple's going to play? 'Cause they seemed to have settled down. They're not at the top of the headlines anymore. >> Well from my sources at Apple, there are many. Deep inside at the highest levels. What I'm hearing is the following. They're doing extremely well financially, look at the retail, look at the breadth of business. I think Tim Cook has done an amazing job. And to all my peers and pundits who are thrashing Apple they just really don't know what they're talking about. Apple's dominating at many levels. It's dominating firstly on the fiscal performance of the company. They're a digital presence in terms of their stickiness is second to none. However, Apple does have to stay in their game. Because all the phone guys they are in essence copying Apple. So I think Apple's going to be very very fine. I think where they could really double down and win on is what they did getting out of the car business. I think that was super smart. There was a post by Auto Blog this weekend saying Silicon Valley failed. I completely disagree with that statement. Although in the short term it looks like on the scoreboard they're kind of tapping out, although Tesla this year. As well as a bunch of other companies. But it's not about making the car anymore. It's all about the car's role in a better digital ecosystem. So to me I think Apple is poised beautifully to use their financial muscle, to either buy car companies or deal with the digital aspect of it and bring that lifestyle to the car, where the digital services for the personalization of the user will be the sticking point for the transportation. So I think Apple's poised beautifully for that. Do they have some issues? Certainly every company does. But compared to everyone else I just see no one even close to Apple. At the financial level, with the cash, and just what they're doing with the tax. From a digital perspective. Now Google's got a self-driving cars, Facebook's a threat, Amazon, so those are the big ones I see. >> The other thing that's happening this week is the game developer conference in San Francisco at Moscone. So you know again, huge consumers of bandwidth, huge consumers of compute power. Not so much storage. I haven't heard much of the confluence of the 5G movement with the game developer conference. But clearly that's going to have a huge impact 'cause most gaming is probably going to move to a more and more mobile platform, less desktop. >> Well the game developer conference, the one that's going on the GDC, is kind has a different vibe right now. It's losing, it's a little bit lackluster in my mind. It's classic conference. It's very monetized. It seems to be over-monetized. It's all about making money rather than promoting community. The community in gaming is shifting. So you can look at how that show is run, versus say e three and now you've got Twitch Con. And then Mobile World Congress, one of the big voids is there's no e-sports conversation. That certainly would be the big thing to me. To me, everything that's going digital, I think gaming is going to shift in a huge way from what we know as a console cult. It's going to go completely mainstream, in all aspects of the device. As 5G overlays on top of the networks with the software gaming will be the first pop. You're going to see e-sports go nuclear. Twitch Con, those kind of Twitch genre's going to expand. Certainly "The Cube" will have in the future a gaming cube. So there'll be a cube anchor desk for most the gaming culture. Certainly younger hosts are going to come one. But to me I think the gaming thing's going to be much more lifestyle. Less culty. I think the game developer conference's lost its edge. >> And one of the other things that comes, obviously Samsung made a huge push. They were advertising crazy last night on the Oscar's, with the Casey add about you know, people are creating movies. And they've had their VR product out for a while but there's a lot of social activity saying what is going to be the killer app that kind of breaks through VR? We know Oculus has had some issues. What do you read in between the tea leaves there John? >> Well it's interesting the Oscar's was awesome last night, I would love to watch the Hollywood spectacle but one of the things that I liked was that segway where they introduced the Oscar's and they kind of were tongue in cheek 'cause no one in Hollywood really has any clue. And they were pandering, well we need to know what they meant. It was really the alpha geeks who were pioneering what used to be the green screen technology now you go and CGI it's our world. I mean I want to see more of that because that is going to be the future of Hollywood. The tools and the technologies for filmmaking is going to have a Morse law-like impact. It's the same as e-sports, you're going to see all kinds of new creative you're going to see all kinds of new tech. They talked about these new cameras. I'm like do a whole show on that, I would love it. But what it's going to enable is you're going to see CGI come down to the price point where when we look at PowerPoints and Adobe Creative Suite and these tools. You're going to start to see some badass creative come down for CGI and this is when the artist aspect comes in. I think art design will be a killer field. I think that is going to be the future of filmmaking. You're going to see an indie market explode in terms of talent. The new voices are going to emerge, the whole diversity thing is going to go away. Because now you're going to have a complete disruption of Hollywood where Hollywood owns it all that's going to get flattened down. I think you're going to see a massive democratization of filmmaking. That's my take. >> And then of course we just continue to watch the big players right. The big players are in here. It's the start ups but I'm looking here at the Ford SAP announcement that came across the wire. We know Ford's coming in at scale as stuff with IBM as well So those people bring massive scale. And scale is what we know drives pricing and I think when people like to cap on Morse law they're so focused on the physical. I think the power of Morse law has nothing to do with the microprocessor per se. But really it's an attitude. Which we talked a little briefly about what does the world look like if you have infinite networking, infinite compute, and infinite storage. And basically free. And if you start to think that way that changes your perspective on everything. >> Alright Jeff well thanks for the commentary. Great segment really breaking down the impact of Mobile World Congress. Again this show is morphing from a device show phone show, to full on end-to-end network. Intel are leading the way and the entire ecosystem on industry partners, going to write software for this whole new app craze, and of course we'll be covering it here all day today Monday the 27th and all the day the 28th. Stay tuned stay watching. We've got more guests coming right back with more after the short break.