>>Yeah, it's the queue covering the virtual vertical Big Data Conference 2020. Brought to you by vertical. >>Hi, everybody. And welcome to this cube special presentation of the vertical virtual Big Data conference. The Cube is running in parallel with Day One and day two of the vertical of Big Data event. By the way, the Cube has been every single big data event in It's our pleasure to be here in the virtual slash digital event as well. Gabriel Chapman is here. He's the director of Flash Blade Products Solutions Marketing at Pure Storage. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you too. How's it going? >>It's going very well. I mean, I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel, but, uh, you know, and hopefully we'll be able to meet it, accelerate at some point, future or one of the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows, but because we've been covering that show as well. But I really want to get into it. And the last accelerate September 2019 pure and vertical announced. Ah, partnership. I remember a joint being ran up to me and said, Hey, you got to check this out. The separation of compute and storage by EON mode now available on Flash Blade. So, uh and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on Prem and in the cloud. So I want to ask, what were the trends and analytical database and cloud led to this partnership? You know, >>realistically, I think what we're seeing is that there's been a kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the traditional, you know, Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of directors that storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected. When we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises, they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore, you know, the flash blade platform ended up being a great solution to support America in their transition Tian mode. Leveraging essentially is an S three object store. >>Okay, so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of the flash blade, you make the claim that Flash Blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever. That's a bold statement. So defend that What? >>I would like to go beyond that and just say, you know, So we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of, you know, as as we've developed Flash Blade as a platform and keep in mind, it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has been very successful for pure storage. The reality is, is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go, and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object best file storage place in realistically, which we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics. But doing so on Prem for a multitude of different reasons. We've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around, you know, making things this year that you know, fast matters for us. Ah, simple is smart. Um we can provide, you know, cloud integrations across the spectrum. And, you know, there's a subscription model that fits into that as well. We fall that that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern day takes variance. And it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio. >>Okay, so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of flash blade and then understand the fit for, uh, analytic databases generally, but specifically for vertical. So it is a blade, so you got compute and network included. It's a key value store based system. So you're talking about scale out. Unlike, unlike, uh, pure is sort of, you know, initial products which were scale up, Um, and so I want on It is a fabric based system. I want to understand what that all means to take us through the architecture. You know, some of the quote unquote firsts that you guys talk about. So let's start with sort of the blade >>aspect. Yeah, the blade aspect of what we call the flash blade. Because if you look at the actual platform, you have, ah, primarily a chassis with built in networking components, right? So there's ah, fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades. Individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside. It's not like we're just taking SSD is and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off the shelf hardware design. This is very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast filing past object scalability, massive parallel ization. When it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to 150 that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for, especially as we start to address these larger analytics pools. They are multi petabytes data sets, you know that single addressable object space and, you know, file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale up storage platforms are able to deliver. >>Yes, I interviewed cause last September and accelerate, and Christie Pure has been attacked by some of the competitors. There's not having scale out. I asked him his thoughts on that, he said Well, first of all, our flash blade is scale out. He said, Look, anything that adds complexity, you know we avoid. But for the workloads that are associated with flash blade scale out is the right sort of approach. Maybe you could talk about why that is. Well, >>realistically, I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to work with large, unstructured data sets. I mean, flash blade is unique. The architected to allow customers to achieve superior resource utilization for compute and storage, while at the same time, you know, reducing significantly the complexity that has arisen around this kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytics solutions. I mean, we're really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered are created applications in the public cloud space of dress, you know, object storage and an unstructured data. And for some organizations, the importance is bringing that on Prem. I mean, we do see about repatriation coming on a lot of organizations as these data egress, charges continue to expand and grow, um, and then organizations that want even higher performance and what we're able to get into the public cloud space. They are bringing that data back on Prem They are looking at from a stamp. We still want to be able to scale the way we scale in the cloud. We still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud, but we want to do it within control of our own, our own borders. And so that's, you know, that's one of the bigger pieces to that. And we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models? A zealous the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers to do that with inside their own data center. >>So you're talking about the trends earlier. You have these cloud native databases that allowed of the scaling of compute and storage independently. Vertical comes in with eon of a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you, You love me. Here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight, you know, go to market. Are there other aspects of this partnership that they're non Barney deal like, in other words, any specific engineering. Um, you know other go to market programs? Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, >>it's it's It's more than just that what we consider a channel meet in the middle or, you know, that Barney type of deal. It's realistically, you know, we've done some first with Veronica that I think, really Courtney, if they think you look at the architecture and how we did, we've brought to market together. Ah, we have solutions. Teams in the back end who are, you know, subject matter experts. In this space, if you talk to joy and the people from vertical, they're very high on our very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to leverage on mode and get into some of the the nuance task specs of how they leverage the depot depot with inside each individual. Compute node in adjustments with inside their reach. Additional performance gains for customers on Prem and at the same time, for them, that's still tough. The ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to. And so I think a lot of it is around. How do we partner is to companies? How do we do a joint selling motions? How do we show up in and do white papers and all of the traditional marketing aspects that we bring to the market? And then, you know, joint selling opportunities exist where they are, and so that's realistically. I think, like any other organization that's going to market with a partner on MSP that they have, ah, strong partnership with. You'll continue to see us, you know, talking about are those mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market. >>Okay, you know, of course, he used to be a Gartner analyst, and you go to the vendor side now, but it's but it's, but it's a Gartner analyst. You're obviously objective. You see it on, you know well, there's a lot of ways to skin the cat There, there their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, etcetera for every vendor. So you have you have vertical who's got a very mature stack and talking to a number of the customers out there who are using EON mode. You know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases makes sense. It's not just the economics of scaling and storage independently. I want to talk more about that. There's flexibility aspect as well. But Vertical really has to play its its trump card, which is Look, we've got a big on premise state, and we're gonna bring that eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now. There obviously have been there to play catch up in the cloud, but at the same time, they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago. So you know, so there's trade offs that customers have to make. How do you sort through that? Where do you see the interest in this? And and what's the sweet spot for this partnership? You know, we've >>been really excited to build the partnership with vertical A and provide, you know, we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the yang mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together. You know, it's ah, it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space, where I think that there's still not to say that not everybody wants to go there, but I think there's aspects and solutions that worked very well there. But for the vast majority, I still think that there's, you know, the your data center is not going away. And you do want to have control over some of the many of the assets with inside of the operational confines. So therefore, we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on prim. And that's realistically, where we start to see the stronger push for those customers. You still want to manage their data locally. A swell as maybe even worked around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring. You know, the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring applications purely cloud native. It's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with. And realistically, I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons, and we've been doing cloud long enough where people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center. So I mean, realistically, as we move forward, that's, Ah, that better option when it comes to a modern architecture that can do, you know, we can deliver an address, a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data, you know, based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage. And that's really what Flash was built for. It was built for a platform that could address small files or large files or high throughput, high throughput, low latency scale of petabytes in a single name. Space in a single rack is we like to put it in there. I mean, we see customers that have put 150 flash blades into production as a single name space. It's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms. Pure and Veronica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing uh, you know, particularly on technology. >>I'm interested in exploring the use case. A little bit further. You just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have, um, and take us through kind of what the customer discussions are like. Obviously you've got a big customer base, you and vertical that that's on Prem. That's the the unique advantage of this. But there are others. It's not just the economics of the granular scaling of compute and storage independently. There are other aspects of take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases. Yeah, you >>know, I mean, I could give you a couple customer examples, and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses vertical on last way to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time, You know, then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing their streaming and whatnot that they can. They can fine tune the grand we control that. So that's one aspect that that we address. We have a multinational car car company, which uses vertical on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision making trees. You know, that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built for, um, there's another healthcare organization that uses vertical on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time. The impact lives, especially when we start to look at and, you know, the current state of affairs with code in the Corona virus. You know, those types of technologies, we're really going to help us kind of get of and help lower invent, bend that curve downward. So, you know, there's all these different areas where we can address that the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real time analytics decision making tools like and you know, realistically is we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just, you know, a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of driving information >>that we're talking about Hadoop earlier. We're kind of going well beyond that now. And I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud, it was all about infrastructure. It was about, you know, uh, spin it up. You know, compute and storage is a little bit of networking in there. >>It >>seems like the next new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got. And it started with the cloud native databases. But then bringing in, you know, AI and machine learning tooling on top of that Ah, and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bog this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years. A lot of that is driven by a dupe bringing machine intelligence into the equation, scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on Prem scale. You know, across organizations and across your partner network, that really is a new emerging workloads. You see that? And maybe talk a little bit about what you're seeing with customers. >>Yeah. I mean, it really is. We see several trends. You know, one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab, but into production. Um, you know, especially when it comes to data science projects, machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept, easy to spin up in the cloud. But when a customer wants to scale and move towards a riel you know, derived a significant value from that. They do want to be able to control more characteristic site, and we know machine learning, you know, needs toe needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy. There's just too much data retrieving the cloud for every training job. Same time Predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking. You know, we see this. Ah, the visualization of Data Analytics is Tricia deployed is being on a continuum with, you know, the things that we've been doing in the long in the past with data warehousing, data Lakes, ai on the other end. But this way, we're starting to manifest it and organizations that are looking towards getting more utility and better elasticity out of the data that they are working for. So they're not looking to just build apps, silos of bespoke ai environments. They're looking to leverage. Ah, you know, ah, platform that can allow them to, you know, do ai, for one thing, machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much Jeff um, you know, it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environment. >>I think it's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years. Gable. I wish we were in Boston together. You would have painted your little corner of Boston orange. I know that you guys have but really appreciate you coming on the cube wall to wall coverage. Two days of the vertical vertical virtual big data conference. Keep it right there. Right back. Right after this short break, Yeah.

hi everybody and welcome to this cube special presentation of the verdict of virtual Big Data conference the cube is running in parallel with day 1 and day 2 of the verdict big data event by the way the cube has been at every single big data event and it's our pleasure to be here in the virtual / digital event as well Gabriel Chapman is here is the director of flash blade product solutions marketing at pure storage gave great to see you thanks for coming on great to see you - how's it going it's going very well I mean I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel but you know and and hopefully we'll be able to meet it accelerate at some point you cheer or one of the the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows but because we've been covering that show as well but I really want to get into it and the last accelerate September 2019 pure and Vertica announced a partnership I remember a joint being ran up to me and said hey you got to check this out the separation of Butte and storage by a Eon mode now available on flash played so and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on permit in the cloud so Gabe I want to ask you what were the trends in analytical database and cloud that led to this partnership you know realistically I think what we're seeing is that there's been in kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the the traditional you know Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of direct attached storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected when we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore you know the flash play platform ended up being a great solution to support Vertica in their transition to Eon mode leveraging is essentially as an s3 object store okay so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of a flash blade you make the claim that flash blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever that's a bold statement so defend that it's supposed to yeah III like to go beyond that and just say you know so we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of you know as as we've developed flash blade as a platform and keep in mind it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has you know it's been very successful for pure storage the reality is is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object of best file storage place in realistically would we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics but doing so on prem or multitude different reasons we've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around you know making things assure that you know vast matters for us simple is smart we can provide you know cloud integrations across the spectrum and you know there's a subscription model that fits into that as well we fall that that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern data experience and it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio okay so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of Flash blade and then better understand the fit for analytic databases generally but specifically Vertica so it is a blade so you got compute and a network included it's a key value store based system so you're talking about scale out unlike unlike viewers sort of you know initial products which were scale up and so I want to under in as a fabric base system I want to understand what that all mean so take us through the architecture you know some of the quote-unquote firsts that you guys talk about so let's start with sort of the blade aspect yeah the blade aspect meaning we call it a flash blade because if you look at the actual platform you have a primarily a chassis with built in networking components right so there's a fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades the individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside it's not like we're just taking SSDs and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off-the-shelf hardware design this is a very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast file and fast object scalability you know massive parallelization when it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to a hundred and fifty that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for especially as we start to address these larger analytic spools they have multi petabyte datasets you know that single addressable object space and you know file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale-up storage platforms are able to deliver yes I interviewed cause last September and accelerate and and Christopher's been you know attacked by some of the competitors is not having a scale out I asked him his thoughts on that he said well first of all our Flash blade is scale-out and he said look anything that that that adds the complexity you know we avoid but for the workloads that are associated with Flash blade scale-out is the right sort of approach maybe you could talk about why that is well you know realistically I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to learn to work with large unstructured data sets I mean flash plays uniquely architected to allow customers to achieve you know a superior resource utilization for compute and storage well at the same time you know reducing significantly the complexity that is arisen around these kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytic solutions I mean we really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered or created applications in the public cloud space that address you know object storage and and unstructured data and and for some organizations the importance is bringing that on Prem I mean we do seek repatriation that coming on on for a lot of organizations as these data egress charges continue to expand and grow and then organizations that want even higher performance in the what we're able to get into the public cloud space they are bringing that data back on Prem they are looking at from a standpoint we still want to be able to scale the way we scale on the cloud we still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud but we want to do it within control of our own you know our own borders and so that's you know that's one of the bigger pieces to that is we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models as well as the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers that do that with inside their own data center yes are you talking about the trends earlier you had these cloud native databases that allowed the scaling of compute and storage independently of Vertica comes in with eon of a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you you love me here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight you know go to market are there other aspects of this partnership that are that are non Barney deal like in other words any specific you know engineering you know other go to market programs can you talk about that a little bit yeah it's it's it's more than just you know I then what we consider a channel meet in the middle or you know that Barney type of deal it's the realistically you know we've done some first with Vertica that I think are really important if they think you look at the architecture and how we do have we've brought this to market together we have solutions teams in the back end who are you know subject matter experts in this space if you talk to joy and the people from vertigo they're very high on or very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to to leverage Eon mode and you know get into some of the the nuanced aspects of how they leverage the depot for Depot with inside each individual compute node and adjustments with inside there I reach additional performance gains for customers on Prem and at the same time for them there's still the ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to and so I think a lot of it is around how do we partner as two companies how do we do a joint selling motions you know how do we show up and and you know do white papers and all of the the traditional marketing aspects that we bring devote to the market and then you know joint selling opportunities as exists where they are and so that's realistically I think like any other organization that's going to market with a partner or an ISP that they have a strong partnership with you'll continue to see us you know talking about our chose mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market okay you know of course he used to be a Gartner analyst and you go over to the vendor side now but as but as it but as a gardener analyst you're obviously objective you see it all you know well there's a lot of ways to skin a cat there are there are there are strengths weaknesses opportunities threats etc for every vendor so you have you have Vertica who's got a very mature stack and and talking to a number of the customers out there we're using Eon mode you know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases make sense it's not just the economics of scaling compute and storage independently I want to talk more about that there's flexibility aspects as well but Vertica really you know has to play its trump card which is look we've got a big on-premise state and we're gonna bring that you know Eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now they're obviously you have to they had to play catch-up in the cloud but at the same time they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other you know cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago so you know so there's trade-offs that customers have to make how do you sort through that where do you see the interest in this and and and what's the sweet spot for this partnership you know we've been really excited to build the partnership with Vertica and we're providing you know we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the vertical yawn mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together you know it's it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space where I think that they're still you know not to say that not everybody wants to go the cloud I think there's aspects and solutions that work very well there but for the vast majority I still think that there's you know the your data center is not going away and you do want to have control over some of the many of the different facets with inside the operational confines so therefore we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on Prem and that's realistically where we start to see the stronger push for those customers who still want to manage their data locally as well as maybe even work around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring you know the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring you know applications purely cloud native it's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with and realistically I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons and we've been doing cloud long enough for people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center so I mean realistically as we move forward that's that that better option when it comes to a modern architecture they can do it you know we can deliver and address a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data you know based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage and that's really what flash Wood was built or it was built for a platform that can address small files or large files or high throughput high throughput low latency scale to petabytes in a single namespace in a single rack as we like to put it in there I mean we see customers that have put you know 150 flash blades into production as a single namespace it's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms pure and Vertica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing you know the verdict technology I'm interested in exploring the use case a little bit further you just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have in but take us through kind of what the discuss the customer discussions are like obviously you've got a big customer base you and Vertica that that's on prem that's the the the unique advantage of this but there are others it's not just the economics of the the granular scaling of compute and storage independently there are other aspects so to take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases yeah you know I mean I can give you a couple customer examples and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses verdict on flash play to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time and you know then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing they're streaming and whatnot that they can they can fine tune and grandly control that so that's one aspect that that we get address we have a multi national car con company which uses verdict on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision-making trees that you know that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built or there's another healthcare organization that uses Vertica on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time the impact Ives especially when we start to look at and you know the current state of affairs with Kovac in the coronavirus you know those types of technologies are really going to help us kind of get love and and help lower and been you know bend that curve downward so you know there's all these different areas where we can address the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real-time analytic decision making tools like Berta and you know realistically as we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just you know you know a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of drive in information we were talking about Hadoop earlier we're kind of going well beyond that now and I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud it was all about infrastructure it was about you know spinning up you know compute and storage a little bit of networking in there seems like the the a next a new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got and it started with the cloud databases but then bringing in you know AI and machine learning tooling on top of that and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bogs this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years a lot of that you know driven by Hadoop bringing machine intelligence into the equation scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on prams scale you know across your organizations and across your partner network that really is a new emerging work load do you see that and maybe talk a little bit about you know what you're seeing with customers yeah I mean it really is we see several trends you know one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab but into production you know especially when it comes to you know data science projects machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept easy to spin up in the cloud but when a customer wants to scale and move towards a real you know it derived a significant value from that they do want to be able to control more characteristics right and we know machine learning you know needs to needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy there's just too much data to retrieve in the cloud for every training job at the same time predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking you know we see this the visualization of data analytics is traditionally deployed as being on a continuum with you know the things that we've been doing in the long you know in the past you know with data warehousing data lakes AI on the other end but but this way we're starting to manifest it in organizations that are looking towards you know getting more utility and better you know elasticity out of the data that they are working for so they're not looking to just build ups you know silos of bespoke AI environments they're looking to leverage you know a platform that can allow them to you know do a I for one thing machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much different you know it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environments I think there's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years gay ball I wish we were in Boston together you would have painted your little corner of Boston Orange I know that you guys are sharing but I really appreciate you coming on the cube wall-to-wall coverage two days at the vertical Vertica virtual big data conference keep you right there but right back right after this short break [Music]

hi everybody and welcome to this cube special presentation of the verdict of virtual Big Data conference the cube is running in parallel with day 1 and day 2 of the verdict big data event by the way the cube has been at every single big data event and it's our pleasure to be here in the virtual / digital event as well Gabriel Chapman is here is the director of flash blade product solutions marketing at pure storage gave great to see you thanks for coming on great to see you - how's it going it's going very well I mean I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore Hotel but you know and and hopefully we'll be able to meet it accelerate at some point you cheer or one of the the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows but because we've been covering that show as well but I really want to get into it and the last accelerate September 2019 pure and Vertica announced a partnership I remember a joint being ran up to me and said hey you got to check this out the separation of Butte and storage by a Eon mode now available on flash played so and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on permit in the cloud so Gabe I want to ask you what were the trends in analytical database and cloud that led to this partnership you know realistically I think what we're seeing is that there's been in kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the the traditional you know Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of direct attached storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected when we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore you know the flash play platform ended up being a great solution to support Vertica in their transition to Eon mode leveraging is essentially as an s3 object store okay so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of a flash blade you make the claim that flash blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever that's a bold statement so defend that it's supposed to yeah III like to go beyond that and just say you know so we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of you know as as we've developed flash blade as a platform and keep in mind it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has you know it's been very successful for pure storage the reality is is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object of best file storage place in realistically would we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics but doing so on prem or multitude different reasons we've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around you know making things assure that you know vast matters for us simple is smart we can provide you know cloud integrations across the spectrum and you know there's a subscription model that fits into that as well we fall that that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern data experience and it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio okay so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of Flash blade and then better understand the fit for analytic databases generally but specifically Vertica so it is a blade so you got compute and a network included it's a key value store based system so you're talking about scale out unlike unlike viewers sort of you know initial products which were scale up and so I want to under in as a fabric base system I want to understand what that all mean so take us through the architecture you know some of the quote-unquote firsts that you guys talk about so let's start with sort of the blade aspect yeah the blade aspect meaning we call it a flash blade because if you look at the actual platform you have a primarily a chassis with built in networking components right so there's a fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades the individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside it's not like we're just taking SSDs and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off-the-shelf hardware design this is a very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast file and fast object scalability you know massive parallelization when it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to a hundred and fifty that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for especially as we start to address these larger analytic spools they have multi petabyte datasets you know that single addressable object space and you know file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale-up storage platforms are able to deliver yes I interviewed cause last September and accelerate and and Christopher's been you know attacked by some of the competitors is not having a scale out I asked him his thoughts on that he said well first of all our Flash blade is scale-out and he said look anything that that that adds the complexity you know we avoid but for the workloads that are associated with Flash blade scale-out is the right sort of approach maybe you could talk about why that is well you know realistically I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to learn to work with large unstructured data sets I mean flash plays uniquely architected to allow customers to achieve you know a superior resource utilization for compute and storage well at the same time you know reducing significantly the complexity that is arisen around these kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytic solutions I mean we really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered or created applications in the public cloud space that address you know object storage and and unstructured data and and for some organizations the importance is bringing that on Prem I mean we do seek repatriation that coming on on for a lot of organizations as these data egress charges continue to expand and grow and then organizations that want even higher performance in the what we're able to get into the public cloud space they are bringing that data back on Prem they are looking at from a standpoint we still want to be able to scale the way we scale on the cloud we still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud but we want to do it within control of our own you know our own borders and so that's you know that's one of the bigger pieces to that is we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models as well as the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers that do that with inside their own data center yes are you talking about the trends earlier you had these cloud native databases that allowed the scaling of compute and storage independently of Vertica comes in with eon of a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you you love me here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight you know go to market are there other aspects of this partnership that are that are non Barney deal like in other words any specific you know engineering you know other go to market programs can you talk about that a little bit yeah it's it's it's more than just you know I then what we consider a channel meet in the middle or you know that Barney type of deal it's the realistically you know we've done some first with Vertica that I think are really important if they think you look at the architecture and how we do have we've brought this to market together we have solutions teams in the back end who are you know subject matter experts in this space if you talk to joy and the people from vertigo they're very high on or very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to to leverage Eon mode and you know get into some of the the nuanced aspects of how they leverage the depot for Depot with inside each individual compute node and adjustments with inside there I reach additional performance gains for customers on Prem and at the same time for them there's still the ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to and so I think a lot of it is around how do we partner as two companies how do we do a joint selling motions you know how do we show up and and you know do white papers and all of the the traditional marketing aspects that we bring devote to the market and then you know joint selling opportunities as exists where they are and so that's realistically I think like any other organization that's going to market with a partner or an ISP that they have a strong partnership with you'll continue to see us you know talking about our chose mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing to the market okay you know of course he used to be a Gartner analyst and you go over to the vendor side now but as but as it but as a gardener analyst you're obviously objective you see it all you know well there's a lot of ways to skin a cat there are there are there are strengths weaknesses opportunities threats etc for every vendor so you have you have Vertica who's got a very mature stack and and talking to a number of the customers out there we're using Eon mode you know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases make sense it's not just the economics of scaling compute and storage independently I want to talk more about that there's flexibility aspects as well but Vertica really you know has to play its trump card which is look we've got a big on-premise state and we're gonna bring that you know Eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now they're obviously you have to they had to play catch-up in the cloud but at the same time they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other you know cloud native databases that might have just started a couple of years ago so you know so there's trade-offs that customers have to make how do you sort through that where do you see the interest in this and and and what's the sweet spot for this partnership you know we've been really excited to build the partnership with Vertica and we're providing you know we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the vertical yawn mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together you know it's it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space where I think that they're still you know not to say that not everybody wants to go the cloud I think there's aspects and solutions that work very well there but for the vast majority I still think that there's you know the your data center is not going away and you do want to have control over some of the many of the different facets with inside the operational confines so therefore we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on Prem and that's realistically where we start to see the stronger push for those customers who still want to manage their data locally as well as maybe even work around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring you know the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring you know applications purely cloud native it's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with and realistically I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons and we've been doing cloud long enough for people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center so I mean realistically as we move forward that's that that better option when it comes to a modern architecture they can do it you know we can deliver and address a diverse set of performance requirements and allow the organization to continue to grow the model to the data you know based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage and that's really what flash Wood was built or it was built for a platform that can address small files or large files or high throughput high throughput low latency scale to petabytes in a single namespace in a single rack as we like to put it in there I mean we see customers that have put you know 150 flash blades into production as a single namespace it's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms pure and Vertica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing you know the verdict technology I'm interested in exploring the use case a little bit further you just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have in but take us through kind of what the discuss the customer discussions are like obviously you've got a big customer base you and Vertica that that's on prem that's the the the unique advantage of this but there are others it's not just the economics of the the granular scaling of compute and storage independently there are other aspects so to take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases yeah you know I mean I can give you a cup of customer examples and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses verdict on flash play to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time and you know then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing they're streaming and whatnot that they can they can fine tune and grandly control that so that's one aspect that we get address we have a multi national car con company which uses verdict on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision-making trees that you know that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built or there's another healthcare organization that uses Vertica on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time the impact Ives especially when we start to look at and you know the current state of affairs with Kovac in the coronavirus you know those types of technologies are really going to help us kind of get love and and help lower and been you know bend that curve downward so you know there's all these different areas where we can address the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real-time analytic decision making tools like Berta and you know realistically as we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just you know you know a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of drive in information we were talking about Hadoop earlier we're kind of going well beyond that now and I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud it was all about infrastructure it was about you know spinning up you know compute and storage a little bit of networking in there seems like the the a next a new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got and it started with the cloud databases but then bringing in you know AI and machine learning tooling on top of that and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bogs this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years a lot of that you know driven by Hadoop bringing machine intelligence into the equation scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on prams scale you know across your organizations and across your partner network that really is a new emerging work load do you see that and maybe talk a little bit about you know what you're seeing with customers yeah I mean it really is we see several trends you know one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab but into production you know especially when it comes to you know data science projects machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept easy to spin up in the cloud but when a customer wants to scale and move towards a real you know it derived a significant value from that they do want to be able to control more characteristics right and we know machine learning you know needs to needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy there's just too much data to retrieve in the cloud for every training job at the same time predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking you know we see this the visualization of data analytics is traditionally deployed as being on a continuum with you know the things that we've been doing in the long you know in the past you know with data warehousing data lakes AI on the other end but but this way we're starting to manifest it in organizations that are looking towards you know getting more utility and better you know elasticity out of the data that they are working for so they're not looking to just build ups you know silos of bespoke AI environments they're looking to leverage you know a platform that can allow them to you know do a I for one thing machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much different you know it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environments I think there's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years gay ball I wish we were in Boston together you would have painted your little corner of Boston Orange I know that you guys are sharing but I really appreciate you coming on the cube wall-to-wall coverage two days at the vertical Vertica virtual big data conference keep you right there but right back right after this short break [Music]

from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas it's the cube recovering no joke on 2018 brought to you by Osho okay welcome back everyone we're here live here at hosts show con in Las Vegas the first security conference for blockchain its inaugural event and we're here with Gabriel Shepherd VP of strategy at Global Strike for host show they're the hosts of the event although it's an industry conference for the entire community all coming together Gabriel thanks for coming on and spend the time yeah thanks for having me thanks for you know supporting the event and we appreciate your team coming out and covering what we're trying to build here well we think it's super important now so you guys are doing a great service for the industry and stepping up and put in the event together and so props to you guys thank you this is not a hosts show sales like conference you guys aren't selling anything you're doing the service for the community so props to you guys in the team great stuff and we know this is a kernel of all the smartest people and its really an industry event so it shows in the session so appreciate that yes we think it's important because you know we see a lot of trends the queue has a unique advantage in how we cover hundreds of events and yeah so we get to go we see a horizontal observation space from the industry and when you have formation like this with the community this is important you guys have up leveled the conversation focused the conversation around blockchain where security is the top-level conversation that's it no I feel pitches right so for the folks watch and this is really one of those events where it's not a huge number of people here like the thousands and thousands of other blockchain shows that make money off events this is about community and around getting the conversations and having substantive conversations so great job so for the folks watching the content agenda is super awesome host show con-com you go browse it but give us some color commentary on some of the types of speakers here the diversity yeah I think I think the first thing that we wanted to accomplish was with Hojo Khan was we we wanted to put front and center the conversations that were not taking place at other events there are plenty of platforms and opportunities for companies early-stage companies to go pitch there are other great conference organizers that do events and have their own wheelhouse but what we wanted to do was put together a conference that was focused around a type of conference that we ourselves would want to attend as a cybersecurity firm and you know after traveling the world I mean you know you you and artesia spoke many times and hosho has sponsored quite a few events around the world after attending by the end of 2018 will attended something like a hundred plus events in some capacity and so it was clear to us early on that companies weren't our conferences weren't going to focus on security or at least put them on the main stage where I believed that they should be at least with all the hacks happening so what we wanted to do was bring together thought leadership with respect to security technical leadership with respect to developers and security engineers and we wanted to bridge those two what I mean by that is we wanted thought leadership that could get executives to start the non-technical people so start thinking about security in the larger format and how it's applicable to their company but what we also wanted to do is we wanted to connect these non-technical people with the technical people in an intimate setting where they could learn think about the brain power that we have in this hotel for hosho Khan you've got the minds of Andre Assante innopolis Diego's LDR of RSK Michael berkland of shape-shift josub Kuan of hosho we've got Ron stone from c4 you've got an on Prakash a world-class white hat bug bounty hunter consider what he's top-5 bug bounty hunter for our top top bug bounty hunter for Facebook five years in a row the the level of the calibre of technical talent in this building has the potential to solve problems that Enterprise has been trying to solve individually for years but those conversations don't take place in earnest with the non-technical people and so the idea behind hoshikawa was to bridge those to provide education that's what we're doing things like workshops sure we have keynotes and panels but we also have the ability to teach non-technical people how to enable two-factor authentication how to set up PGP for your email how to set up your hardware wallet these things aren't these conversations are not the bridge is a clearly established we interview people from on the compliance side all the way down to custodial services which again the diversity is not a group think events just giving them more props here because I think you guys did a great job worthy of promotion because you not only bridge the communities together you're bringing people in cross functionally colonizing and the asset test for me is simple the groupthink event is when everyone's kind of rah rah each other I know this conditions we got Andre is saying hey if you put database substitute database for blockchain and it reads well it's not a real revolutionary thing and oh all you custodian services you're screwed I mean so you have perspectives on both side that's right and there's contentious conversation that's right and that to me proves it and as well as the sessions are highly attended or we don't want it we don't want a panel of everybody in agreeance because we know that's not reality i mean that you you bring up the issue of curse of custody a prime example is we had a great talk a four-person panel led by Joe Kelly who's the CEO of Unchained Capital he had a panel with traditional equities custodian Paul pooi from edge wallet Joseph Kwon is the CEO of hosho and there was clear differences of opinion with respect to custody and it got a little contentious but isn't that the point yeah it's to have these conversations in earnest and let's put them out in the public on what's right and what's wrong for the community and let the community to decide the best way forward that's the best is exactly what you want to do I gotta ask you what are the big surprises for you what have you learned what's the big reveal for you that you've super surprised you or are things you expected what were some of the things that went on here yeah I think the biggest surprise to me was the positive feedback that we received you know I understand that we know people maybe looked at how shock on year one and said hosho like they're a cybersecurity firm what are they doing running a conference right but my background is a you know I've produced conferences I have a former employee of South by Southwest I believe a big an experience and so when we started to put this together we thought we knew we would make mistakes and we certainly made mistakes with respect to programming and schedule and just things that we had didn't think about attention to detail but we had plans far in that the mistakes were mitigated that they weren't exposed to the public right there behind the scenes fires that kind like a wedding or a party but no one actually really notices sure we put them out behind the scenes nobody that the our guests don't notice and that was my biggest concern I'm pleasantly surprised at the positive feedback we've yet to get any negative feedback publicly on Twitter telegram anecdotally individually people now they made just being nice to my face but I feel good about what the response that we've got it's been good vibes here so I gotta ask you well sure the DJ's were great last night good experience yeah experience and knowledge and and networking has been a theme to correct I lost him the networking dynamics I saw a lot of people I had I had ran to some people I met for the first time we've had great outreach that with the queue was integrated in people very friendly talked about the networking and that's been going on here yeah I mean this panels are great I'd love to hear from from panels and solo presentations but a lot of work gets done in the hallways and we have a saying in the conference business hallway hustlers right the ones that are hustling in the hallways are those early stage entrepreneurs or trying to close deals trying to figure out how to get in front of the right person serendipitously are at the bar at the same time as somebody they want to meet that is to me conference 101 that is the stuff I grew up on and so we wanted to make sure that we were encouraging those interactions through traffic flow so you'll notice that they're strategically the content rooms are strategically placed so that when you're changing rooms people are forced to cross interact with each other because they're forced to bump into each other and if you look at the programming we purposefully to our demise to be honest year one put a lot of programming that was conflicted with each other we made people make a decision about what talk they wanted to go to because there were two really compelling people at the same time or 10 minutes off yeah and so you had to make a decision vote with your feet you got to vote with your feet and and and from a conference perspective we call that FOMO right we want our guests to FOMO not because we want them to miss a particular talk but because we want them to be so overwhelmed with content and opportunity with networking that they when they walk away they've had a good experience they're fulfilled but they they think I got to go back here too because that thing I missed I'm not gonna miss this yeah we will point out to you guys made a good call on film all the session everything so everything's gonna be online we'll help guys do that yep so the video is gonna be available for everyone to look on demand you also had some good broadcast here we had a couple shows the cubes been here your mobile mention the DJs yeah yeah so good stuff so okay hallway conversations our lobby con as we call it when people hang up a lot on it's always good hallway con so what Gabriel in your mind as you walked around what was some of the hallway culture that you overheard and and that you thought were interesting and what hall would cartridges were you personally involved in the personal conversations I was involved with is why isn't somebody not this station why someone not Gardens but I will tell you i from what I heard from from conference attendees the conversations that I heard taking place were and I hope Jonathan doesn't mind but Jonathan Nelson from hack fund spoke on our main stage and I hope he doesn't mind me speaking out of turn but he came to me said this is one of the best run blockchain conferences I've ever been to and to have somebody like Jonathan say that who has done hundreds of talks and thousands was really meaningful but but what was more important is to talk to him and him feel comfortable enough to sit down with me and just talk generally that's the vibe we want for every attendant we want you to feel comfortable meeting with people in the hallway who you've never met and be vulnerable from a security perspective you know Michael Turpin for example sitting down and talking proactively about being the AT&T hack great these are opportunities for people to really talk about what's happened and be vulnerable and have the opportunity to educate us all how to get better as an industry you know the other thing I want to get your thoughts on is obviously the program's been phenomenal in the content side thank you but community is really important to us we're of a community model to q you guys care about the community aspect of this and as a real event you want to have an ongoing year after year and hopefully it'll get bigger I think it will basically our results we're seeing talk about the community impact because what you're really talking about there is community that's right well I mean Vegas we talk about there's multiple communities right regionally post-show is a Vegas based company we're born here we close I think forty some employees all based here in Las Vegas which is our home so the first thing that we did with respect to community as we created a local local price if you're a Nevada resident we didn't want you to have to invest a significant amount of money to come to something in your own town the second thing we did is we've invited the local Vegas Bitcoin meet up in aetherium meet ups to come and partake and not only participate but contribute to the content and opening day in fact there was so much influx of people from those meetups it wasn't official it wasn't like a program where we had actually a VTEC set up I thought I was gonna be like a meet-up there were so many people that attended we had to on the fly provide AV because we were overwhelmed with the amount of people that showed up so that's a regional community but with respect to the community from blockchain community what we wanted to do is make sure we brought people of all ethnicities all countries we have 26 countries represented in the first blockchain security conference and you had some big-name celebrities here yeah Neil Kittleson Max Keiser you go mama Anan Prakash Yakov Prensky a layer from your side pop popcorn kochenko has some big names yeah I'll see andreas yes here keynoting yeah I'm Michel parkland andreas Diego Zaldivar I mean these lena katina Viren OVA I mean these are big names yeah these big names okay what so so what's your takeaway of you as you know my takeaway is that there's a there's a yearning for this type of event my takeaway is that we're doing something right we have the luxury as hosho and that we're not an events company people think that might be a disadvantage to run a confident you're not a cotton vent company I think it's an advantage yeah because it holds my feet to the fire yeah much closer than an event organiser who doesn't have a company reputation and brand to protect hosho as you know has a good brand in the cybersecurity world with respect to blockchain we don't have the luxury of throwing a poor event giving you a bad experience because that would tarnish house of but also your in the community so you're gonna have direct feedback that's right the other thing too I will say I'm gonna go to a lot of events and there are people who are in the business of doing events and they have a profit motive that's right so they'll know lanyards are all monetize everything is monetized yeah and that sometimes takes away from the community aspect correct and I think you guys did a good job of you know not being profligate on the events you want to yeah a little bit of cash but you didn't / yeah / focus on money-making finding people right for the cash you really needed about the content yeah and the experience for and with the community and I think that's a formula that people want yeah I would like to see the model I would like to see the model changed over time if I'm being honest a majority of crypto conferences today are paid to play so a lot of the content you're getting this sponsored so I'm okay with that but I think it should be delineated between con disclose your disclosure you don't want water down the country but but the conference circuit and crypto is not ready for that it hasn't rest in my opinion hasn't reached that level of maturation yet like I told you I I'm a former South by Southwest guy that like my belief is you create the content and the sponsors will come I don't I don't begrudge conference organizers for for for sponsoring out events because they're really really expensive a cost per attend to manage demand to this hype out there yeah hundreds of dollars per attendee I get it I understand why they do it but what I would like to see is the model change over time whereas as we get more sophisticated as a technology space we should also grow as a vent and conference circuit as well what I mean by that is let's change the model that eventually someday it's free for all attendees to come and those conferences and the costs associated with them are subsidized by companies that want access to the people that are tending them it sounds like an upstream open source project sure how open source became so popular you don't screw with the upstream yep but you have downstream opportunities so if you create a nice upstream model yep that's the cube philosophy as well we totally agree with you and I think you guys are onto something pioneering with the event I think you're motivated to do it the community needs it yeah I think that's ultimately the self governing aspect of it I think you're off to something really good co-creation yeah I'll see we believe in that and the results speak for themselves congratulations thank you so much I appreciate you guys coming here and investing your time and I hope that all our staff has been accommodated and the hard rock is treated you well you guys been great very friendly but I think again you know outside of you guys is a great company and great brand and you guys and speaks for itself and the results this is an important event I agreed because of the timing because of this focus its crypto its crypto revolution its cybersecurity and FinTech all kind of coming together through huge global demand I mean we haven't gotten into IOT and supply chain yeah all the hacks going on with China and these things being reported this is serious business is a lot on the line a lot and you guys having a clear focus on that is really a service business Thank You staff doing it alright our cube coverage here in Las Vegas for host Joe Kahn this is the first conference of its kind where security is front and center it is the conference for security and blockchain bringing the worlds together building the bridges and building the community bridges as well we love that that's our belief as well as the cube coverage here in Vegas tigress more after this short break

(upbeat music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in Toronto for the Blockchain Cloud Summit, part of the Blockchain Futurist event happening tomorrow and Thursday here in Toronto. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here with Gabriel Abed who's the founder of Bitt and also the Digital Asset Fund. Great story he's been there from the beginning. President at creation in the movement that's now changing the world. Blockchain and cryptocurrency certainly. Infrastructure and token economics, changing how things are doing. And rolling out, reimagining everything from infrastructure to value exchanges. Gabriel welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you it's great to be here. >> So we were just talking on camera, you like to go after the big changes. You're an entrepreneur, you have that fire in your belly. You've been very successful. Where are we? I mean, you've been part of the movement, we're now on the cusp of mainstream adoption, there's still work to do. >> Oh, plenty of work. Lots of infrastructure still to build, many regulators and legislators still to educate, lots of laws still to be amended and changed. And, at the end of the day, it's happening and it's happening quickly and beautifully right now. The entire industry is changing. >> One of the things that you've done, you've taken on some big projects and you've made change happen. Regulation is one of the hottest topics we're hearing certainly in the United States, it affects innovation and there's so much entrepreneurial activity happening right now. There's so many entrepreneurs, alpha entrepreneurs really want to do great things, and regulation is just a blocker. It's an antibody for innovation. And you've busted through that. And it's probably going to continue. The old guard is either going to be replaced or adapting to the technology. You've done that, and a lot of people want to do what you've done. What's the secret? What's the secret of your success? How have you taken on these big, incumbent positions and taken them over >> But you're not running from regulators, you're embracing them. >> No, no, I think regulators are important to a responsible and sophisticated market. When my partner and I started Bitt in 2013, 2014, we immediately realized that if we wanted to build a product for the monetary authorities around the world, we needed to have the buy-in from the regulators. So from day one we were regulator-friendly. And it's not to say that we don't believe in a decentralized future, I'm as big of an advocate for decentralization and the freedom of information as anyone else, but I'm also a big believer in if you're a product for a market in the traditional world you have to involve the regulators in order to ensure that product does its job, keeps the consumers safe, and ensures that the economy around it doesn't collapse. So regulators are critical in this field. >> Talk about what you guys have done. Take a minute to explain the project you did, how it worked out, the tenacity, but also, what was the outcome? What were you trying to do in the project and where is it right now? >> It depends on the project you're referring to >> Maybe start at the beginning >> The Caribbean >> Let's start at the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, so, Gabriel Abed, born, raised, educated in Barbados, around the age of 19, I decided I was going to take my computer science education a bit further. I went to Canada, I did a Bachelor of IT, where I majored in network security. In Ontario, the University of Ontario. And, unlike the rest of of my peers, who usually stay in Canada, I decided to go back to my little nation with the education that I had just received. And I took that education home, and started one of the world's first blockchain companies, but at the time I didn't understand blockchain per se, I understood it as a commodity, as a cool investment, I didn't understand the true nature behind the protocol itself. It was only until 2013 that my partner and I ran one of the larger mining operations in the world, that we realized a commodity was actually a protocol. A network tool. A system that you could build on top of. So in 2014, we actually created one of the world's first blockchain assets, on Bitcoin's blockchain. And that a representation of a digital dollar for a central bank. And the notion behind Bitt.com in 2014 was, let's compete with cash, because it's inefficient, it's costly, and it slows down the movement of society. So what we wanted to do is create a digital version of that, that would save economies hundreds of millions of dollars. Cash is expensive to to create, that linen, plastic, paper money, it's easily forged, it can be counterfeited, it's hard to transport, it has an expense to transport, it has an expense to count, it has an expense to secure, and then it has overheads around the entire ecosystem of accountability. Whereas, a blockchain-based digital dollar eliminates all of those efficiencies, and increases the ability for a monetary authority to trace, track, and have a better form of anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing and a better overview of their entire society. So that all, we took that notion, went to the central bank of Barbados, who at the time was being led by Dr. DeLisle Worrell, and our very first meeting he had asked me to excuse his office. And 13 meetings later, and a whole two years, lots of development, building out infrastructure around compliance, around finance, around security, and around regulation, we finally got the nod of approval from Dr. DeLisle Worrell to operate a fiat example of a digital dollar in Barbados. And since then, we have been working with several central banks around the world, bitt.com today is the leading central bank provider for digital dollars. A lot has changed, I've developed other tools since, and other businesses, but bitt.com continues to be the best friend for central banks looking to move and transition into the digital arena. >> Why, I mean other than a closed mindset, why wouldn't every government around the world want to move in this direction? Initiate some kind of FedCoin, for example. >> Education, education, it's the fear that the system may not be scalable, it's the fear that the system could be hacked, it's the fear that they could be cut out, their control, at the end of the day, monetary authorities, like the Federal Reserve, they have a control on the money supply. Whereas, something like decentralized cryptographic currencies, there is nobody in control of the money supply. Hence, inflation versus deflation systems. Then there's the issue of hacking and the threat of digital and cybersecurity. Typically, the head of these monetary authorities are older gentlemen who are traditionally conservative. And who are not (mumbles) with cybersecurity. So the fear of hacking is very real for someone like them, whereas someone like me who is trained as a network security expert, those fears can be mitigated with good policy and procedure, cold wallets, and the right process, to ensuring the environment can run without the risk or the fear of malicious attacks. So it really boils down to education. The educated governors of central banks, like there's one, for example, Timothy Antoine. Dr. Antoine is the governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. And they govern and mandate the currency union of eight islands below them. St. Lucia, Grenada, Antigua, et cetera. Now, he's a governor that gets this and has wrapped his head around it, and understands that this is the future. He gets it so much that he signed an agreement with bitt.com to begin exploring a pilot for his currency union to have a digital dollar implemented in it. You also have governors and presidents like that of Curacao. Or the central bank of Curacao, where we've just signed an agreement to move forward with a phase of looking at the implications of rolling out a digital dollar in a society like Curacao and St. Maarten. What is the ramifications? What is the feasibility study behind that? So, to answer your question, it's not every single regulator, governor, and central bank manager is going to head toward this technology tomorrow. But with more education, and more lobbying, you will see more and more central bank governors moving in this direction, because it's better, cheaper, faster, makes their job easier, gives them more control, gives them more oversight, and provides all the things that they would want as a central bank to continue to do their job for their society. Which is to protect their dollar from alien threats. And to ensure that the dollar remains stable, and to just generally ensure that the society is functioning the way it should. >> Gabriel, what's your vision on what this will enable for the citizens? What's the impact that you see happening? If this continues down the trajectory, what is the adoption look like, impact to people's lives on a everyday basis. >> Well, for a very starting point, you democratize payment. Right now, if I want to make a payment, I have to go through a utility company called a bank. And this bank typically has frictional costs, and frictional overheads and time. That's one of the biggest problems, is that these monopolistic infrastructures hinder the ability for the average participation of a free-flowing payment system. So what you end up having is rather than me being able to make a digital payment in seconds, with no cost, I have to wait days, I have to use manual-based systems whether it's check, cash or the bank's Visa Mastercard system. And then it has frictional costs. So right off the bat, you democratize payment. What does that do for a society in a developing nation? It empowers people. And you're empowered because now as a developer, I can build on this payment system. As an entrepreneur, I can tap in to this payment system. As a merchant, I can utilize this low-cost payment system. As a society, I now have GDP growth because of financial inclusion. The underbanked, who do not have access to banking facilities for one reason or another, maybe they don't like the bank, maybe the banks don't like them. Maybe they don't have two proofs of ID. Maybe they don't have a fixed place of abode. Maybe they don't have the minimum deposit amount. All of these features keep the poor and the underbanked out of the system. Whereas, in developed nations, we have mobile penetration rates that are through the roof. In some cases, like Barbados, over 100 percent. So if you have 100 percent penetration rate of this mobile platform, this thing in my pocket, but I cannot access the banking system, well flip that around, democratize the payment system, allow payments to exist on this mobile phone, and watch how quickly society becomes banked. So what you end up having is full adoption. Why would we not have full adoption when it's cheaper, it's faster, it's more inclusive. >> And the data from that collective intelligence only creates a digital nation >> A more responsible environment. >> Wealth creation environment. >> It creates a more traced, tracked, and accountable society so that the monetary authorities in the government can now start making educated decisions on data. They now know who's buying milk, who's gambling, who's paying their taxes and who's not. >> The downstream benefits of this are massive. >> The downstream benefits are massive, enormous. They're disruptive. This is a brand new fiscal tool, a monetary tool, being given to central banks to start eroding the field of private e-money systems, and to start bringing about a uniform standard towards payments. Plain and simple. We're going to the central banks and introducing a new monetary instrument, that they're in control of. That now the commercial banks, the financial institutions, the corporatocracies, the citizens, and the merchants can all fall under one roof issued by their monetary authority. And this is not a cell phone company or a bank building their own private system that I have to jump through some hoops and some red tape and sign away my first born and give away my left arm to enter. This is a free and open source standard system. >> And it's networked, as you said, penetration is 100 percent on mobile or roughly that, it's a network society that now has digital fabric built into it. This is the future. >> But I played this out in terms of, when you talked about this in your panel, now every device, every thing, every physical asset will be instrumented. >> Yes. >> And as a result, theory can be coconuts. >> You're building the deep infrastructure. I remember we met with World Bank back in 2014 and they coined this term for me. Because they were saying we want to help entrepreneurs and it's important to help entrepreneurs in developing nations because they're the lifeblood of it. But what we are building is the deep infrastructure. And that's exactly what it is. It's the infrastructure that would allow the entrepreneur and the developer to now have a framework that they can build against to provide more uplift. So in essence, it's really going to be exponential growth once systems like this are implemented. The stock market can move digital, and people could buy stocks using digital dollars. E-commerce can occur because I can now buy things online or sell things online with digital dollars. I can now be part of a global, financial ecosystem, with my smartphone and my wallet. >> That's a great use case, congratulations on amazing success, so much is on your plate, you've had great success in this new era, what's on your plate now, what are you working on, what's happening in your world now? >> So in 2017, we realized Bitt was entering a new growth phase. It was no longer a battle of trying to convince regulators and central banks, our product had been proven. Our reputation had been proven. It was time now to scale the company into a professional level of dealing with these regulators around the world. At the end of the day, we would like to digitize cash, wherever cash exists. And to provide those tools for central banks around the world. That would require professional management, and that is not I. >> (laughs) >> So, our investors and shareholders were quite comfortable with our proposal of bringing on that professional management, so in 2017 I resigned as CEO, retained a board position and still single largest shareholder, but with the idea of what other types of infrastructure can I build, now that a deep infrastructure had been put in place. So I've been attacking three major markets, the banking sector, an actual commercial banking enterprise working with a group from the United States towards looking at deploying the future of where we think commercial banking is going. I think that the community, the crypto community in general, there's a lot of noise happening in the chats. And therefore we built a machine learning chat bot to start looking at market sentiments and aggregating market information and of course building common tools for community members. So we've launched a agent called Gabby, the form to gab. My name's Gabriel and my mom calls me Gabby, so it works out quite well. >> You have the gift of gab that's for sure. >> And then I launched a mutual fund with a very sophisticated former managing director of JPMorgan. A guy named Richard Galvin. And we launched the world's first protocol-only fund. We focus only on protocols. And that's called Digital Asset Fund. And we launched that in late 2017 and got full regulatory approval to become a professional fund, that handles 100 percent, solely crypto. And that's basically been my ride, and then outside of that, just your standard consulting, because everybody from World Bank, to IADB, to some government agency to some private organization wants to know about blockchain they want advice, and they need a team of people to give them that advice. So it's just been, all around, looking at how I can be an entrepreneur in this space, while finding great leaders, and partnering with those leaders to build out great companies. While still focusing on ensuring bitt.com becomes the solution for dollars, digital dollars, worldwide. >> Got a great mission, entrepreneur, builder, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Industry's lucky to have you, congratulations. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you guys. >> CUBE coverage here, live in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in concert with the Blockchain Futures Conference happening in the next two days after today. More coverage from theCUBE we're live here, stay with us for more great coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Hi everybody. We're back at UI path forward to five. This is Dave Ante with Dave Nicholson. Derek Mu is here. He's automation product line lead for Merck. Thank you, by the way, for, you know, all you guys do, and thank you Dave for having in the, in the, in the vaccine area, saving our butts. And Bill Engel is back on the cube. He's the director at cgi. Guys, good to see you again. >>Good to see you. Thank >>You. So Merrick, Wow, it's been quite a few years for you guys. Take us through Derek, what's happening in sort of your world that's informing your automation strategy? >>Well, Dave, I mean as you know, we just came out of the pandemic. We actually have quite a few products like Gabriel Antiviral Pill. Obviously we worked, you know, continue to drive our products through a difficult time. But, you know, is during these can last few years that, you know, we've accelerated our journey in automation. We're about four years plus in our journey, you know, so just like the theme of this conference we're we're trying to move towards, you know, bigger automations, transformational change, continue to drive digital transformation in our company. >>Now Bill, you've been on before, but CGI tell people about the firm. It's not computer graphics imaging. >>Sure. No, it's, it's definitely not. So cgi, we're a global consultancy about 90,000 folks across the world. We're a, we're both a product company and a services company. So we have a lot of different, you know, software products that we deliver to our clients, such as CGI Advantage, which is a state local government EER P platform. And so outside of that, we, my team does automation and so we wrap automation around R IP and deliver that to our clients. >>So you guys are automation pros, implementation partners, right? So, so let's go back. Yep. Derek said four years I think. Yep. Right, You're in. So take us through what was the catalyst, how did you get started? Obviously it was pre pandemic, so it's interesting, a lot of companies pre pandemic gave lip service to digital transformation. Sounds like you guys already started your journey, but I'll come back to that. But take us back to the Catalyst four years ago. Why automation? We'll get into why UI path, >>Right. So I, I would say it started pretty niche in our company. Started first in our finance area. Of course, you know, we were looking in technology evaluating different companies, Blue Prism, ui P. Ultimately we chose UI p did it on-prem to start to use automation in sort of our invoice processing, sort of our financial processes, right? And then from there, after it was really when the pandemic hit, that's when sort of we all went to remote work. That's when the team, the COE continued to scale up, especially during pandemic. We were trying to automate more and more processes given the fact that more and more of our workers are remote, they reprocesses. How, how do you do events? You know, part of our livelihood is, is meeting with engaging with customers. Customers in this case is, are doctors and physicians, right? How do you engage with them digitally? How do you, you know, you know, a lot of the face to face contact now have to kind of shift to more digital, digital way. And so automation was a way to kind of help accelerate that, help facilitate that. >>You, you, I think you mentioned COE as in center of excellence. Yep. So, so describe your approach to implementing automation. It's, that sounds like when you say center, it sounds like something is centralized as, as opposed to a bunch of what we've been hearing a lot about citizen developers. What does that interaction >>Look like? We do have both. I would say in the beginning was more decentralized, but over time we, over the few years as, as we built more and more bots, we're now at maybe somewhere between four to 500 bots. We now have sort of internal to the company functional verticals, right? So there's an animal health, we have an animal health function. So there's, there's a team building engaging with the animal health business to build animal health box. There's human health, which is what I work on as well as hr, finance, manufacturing, research. And so internally there's engagement leads, one of the engagement leads that interact with the business. Then when there's an engineering squads that help build and design, develop and support and maintain those as well as sort of a DevOps team that supports the platform and maintains all the bot infrastructure. >>So you started in finance common story, right? I'm sure you hear this a lot Belt, How did you decide what to target? Was it, was it process driven decision? Was it, was it data oriented? Like some kind of combination? How did you decide, Do you remember? Or do you, could you take >>Us back to Oh yeah. So for, for cgi how we started to engage with MER is, you know, we, we do a lot of other business with Merck. We work on all their different business lines and we, we understand the business process. So we, we knew where there was potential for automation. So we brought those ideas to Merck and, and really kind of landed there and helped them realize the value from automation from that standpoint. And then from there the journey just continued to expand, you know, looking for those use cases that, that, you know, fit the mold for, for, for RPA to start. And now the evolution is to go to broader hyper automation. >>And, and was it CFO led into the finance department and then, or was it sort of more bottoms >>Up? Yeah, so, so I think it started in, in finance and, and, but we actually really started out in the business line. So out in regulatory clinical, that's, that's where we, we have the life science expertise that are embedded. And so I partnered with them to come up with, hey, here's a real solution we could do to help streamline, say submission archiving. So when, when submissions come back from the fda, they need to be archived into, you know, the, their system of record. So that's, those are the types of use cases that, that we helped automate. >>Okay. Cause you're saying a human had to sort physically archive that and you were able to sort of replicate that. Okay. And you started with software robots, obviously rpa and now you're expanding into, we we're hearing from UI this the platform message. How does that coincide Derek, with what you guys are doing? Are you sort of adding platform? What aspects of the platform are, are you adding? >>Yeah, no, I mean we are, we are on-premise, right? So we have the platform, but some of the cool things we just had, another colleague of mine presented earlier today. Some of the cool things we're, we're doing ephemeral infrastructure. So infrastructure as code, which essentially means instead of having all these dedicated bot machines, that that, you know, cuz these bots only in some cases run 10 minutes and they're done. So we're, we're soon of doing all on demand, you know, start up a server, run the bot when it's finished, you know, kill the server. So we only pay for the servers that we use, which allows us to save a whole >>Lot of money. Serverless bots. So you, but you're doing that OnPrem, so you >>No, >>No, but >>That's >>Cloud. We, >>We, we we're doing it OnPrem, but our, our bot machines that actually run the, let's say SAP process, right? We spin that machine up, it's on the cloud, it runs it finish, Let's say it's processed in one hour and then when it's done, we kill that machine. So we only play for that one hour usage of that bot machine. >>Okay. So you mentioned SAP earlier you mentioned Blue Prism when you probably looked at other competitors too. You pull the Gartner Magic quadrant, blah, blah, you know, with the way people, you know, evaluate technology, but SAP's got a product. Why UI path mean? Is it that a company like SAP two narrow for their only sap you wanted to apply it other ways? Maybe they weren't even in the business that back then four years ago they probably weren't. Right? But I'm curious as to how the decision was made for UiPath. >>Well, I think you hit it right on the nail. You know, SAP sort of came on a little later and they're specific to sort of their function, right? So UiPath for us is the most flexible tool can interact by UI to our sales and marketing systems, to, to workday, to service Now. It's, it cuts across every function that we have in the company as well as you're the most mature. I mean, you're the market leader, right? So Right. Definitely you, you continue to build upon those capabilities and we are exploring the new capabilities, especially being announced today. >>And what do you see Bill in the marketplace? Are you, are you kind of automation tool agnostic? Are you more sort of all in on? I >>Would say we are, we are agnostic as a company, but obviously as part of a, as an automation practice lead, you know, I want to deliver solutions to my clients that are gonna benefit them as a whole. So looking at UI path, you know, that this platform is, it covers the end to end spectrum of, of automation. So I can go really into any use case and be able to provide a solution that, that delivers value. And so that's, that's where I see the value in UI path and that's why CGI is, is a customer as well. We automate our internal processes. We actually have, we just launched probably SALT in the, in the market last week, expanded partnership with UiPath. We launched CGI, Excel 360. That's our fully managed service around automation. We host our clients whole UI path infrastructure and bots. It's completely hands off to them and they just get the value outta >>Automation. Nice, nice. Love >>It. Derek, you mentioned, you mentioned this ephemeral infrastructure. Yeah. Sounds like it's also ethereal possibility possibly you're saying, you, you're saying you have processes that are running on premises, right? But then you reach out to have an automation process run that's happening off pre and you're, and you're sort of, >>It's on the cloud, so, so yeah, so we have a in-house orchestrator, so we don't, we're not using your sort of on the cloud orchestrator. So, so we brought it in-house for security reasons. Okay. But we use, you know, so inside the vpn, you know, we have these cloud machines that run these automations. So, so that's, that's the ephemeral side of the, of the >>Infrastructure. But is there a financial angle to that in terms of when you're spinning these things up, are you, is it a, is it a pay by the drink or by the, by the CPU >>Hours, if you can imagine like we, you know, like I mentioned where somewhere between four to 500 bots and every bot has a time slot to run and takes a certain amount of time. And so that's hundreds and hundreds of bot machines that we in the old days have to have to buy and procure and, you know, staff and support and maintain. So in this new model, and we're just beginning to kind of move from pilot into implementation, we're moving all, all of bots this in ephemeral infrastructure, right? So these, okay, these machines, these bot machines are, you know, spun up. They run the, they, they run their automation and then they spin >>Down. But just to be clear, they're being spun up on physical infrastructure that is in your >>Purview and they spun up on aws. Yeah. Okay. And then they spin down. Okay, got >>It. Got it. Interesting. Four >>To 500 bots. You know, Daniel one point play out this vision of a bot chicken in every pot, I called it a bot for every employee. Is that where you're headed or is that kind of in this new ephemeral world, not necessary, it's like maybe every employee has access to an ephemeral bot. How, how are you thinking about that? >>That's a good question. So obviously the, the four to 500 is a mix of unattended bonds versus attended bonds, right? That, that we also have a citizen developer, sort of a group team. We support that as well from a coe. So, you know, we see the future as a mix. There's, there's a spectrum of, we are the professional development team. There's also, we support and nurture the personal automation and we provide the resources to help them build smaller scale automations that help, you know, reduce the, you know, the mundaneness and the hours of their own tasks. But you know, for us, we want to focus more and more on building bigger and bigger transfer transformational automations that really drive process efficiencies and, and savings. >>And what's the, what's the business impact been? You mentioned savings and maybe there's other sort of productivity. How do you measure the benefit, the ROI and, and >>Quantify that we, you know, I, I don't, I don't profess I don't think we have all the right answers, but yeah, simple metrics like number of hours saved or other sort of excitement sort of in like an nps, internal NPS between the different groups that we engage. But we definitely see automation demand coming from our, our functional teams going up, driving up. So it's, it's continued to be a hot area and hopefully we, we can, you know, like, like what the key message and theme of this, of this conference. Essentially we want to take and build upon the, the good work that we've done in terms of rpa and we want to drive it more towards digital transformation. >>So Bill, what are you seeing across the, your customer base in terms of, of, of roi? I'm not looking for percentages there. I'm sure they're off the charts, but in terms of, you know, you can optimize for fast payback, you know, maybe lower the denominator, you know, or you can optimize for, you know, net benefit over time, right? You know, what are you seeing? What are customers after they want fast payback and little quick hits? Or are they looking for sort of a bigger enterprise wide impact? >>Yeah, I think it's, it's the latter. It's that larger impact, right? Obviously they, you know, they want an roi and just depending upon the use case, that's gonna vary in terms of the, the benefits delivered. And a lot of our clients, depending on the industry, so in in life sciences it may be around, you know, compliance like GXP compliance is huge. And so that may may not be much of a time saver, but it ensures that they're, they're running their processes and they're being compliant with, you know, federal standards. So that's, that's one aspect to it. But you know, to, you know, a bank, they're looking to reduce their overall costs and and so on. But yeah, I think, I think the other, the other part of it is, you know, impacting broader business processes. So taking that top down approach versus kind of bottom up, you know, doing ta you know, the ones you choose the tasks is not as impactful as looking at broader across the entire business process and seeing how we can impact >>It. Now, Derek, when you guys support a citizen developer, how does that work? So, hey, I got this task I want to automate, I'm gonna go write a, you know, software robot. I'm gonna go do an automation. Do I just do it and then throw her to the defense? You guys, you guys send me a video on how to do it. Hold my hand. How's that work? >>Yeah, I mean, good question. So, so we obviously direct them to the UI path Academy, get some training. We also have some internal training materials to how to build a bot sort of internal inside Merck. We, we go through, we have writeups and SOPs on using the right framework for automations, using the right documentation, PDD kind of materials, and then ultimately how do we deploy bot inside the MER ecosystem. But I, I, maybe I'll just add, I think you asked the point about ROI before. Yeah. I'll also say because we're, we're a pharmaceutical company. I think one of the other key metrics is actually time saved, right? So if, if, if we have a bot that helps us get through the clinical process or even the getting a, a label approved faster, even if it's eight days saved, that's eight days of a product that can get out to the market faster to, to our patients and, and healthcare professionals. And that's, that, that's immeasurable benefit. >>Yeah, I bet if you compress that ELAP time of, of getting approval and so forth. All right guys, we've gotta go. Thanks so much. Congratulations on all the success and appreciate you sharing your story. Thank >>You so much. Appreciate it. You're welcome. >>Appreciate it. All right. Thank you for watching this Dave Ante for Dave Nicholson, The cubes coverage, two day coverage. We're here in day one, UI path forward, five. We'll be right back right after the short break. Awesome. >>Great.

six five four three two one hi everybody and welcome to this cube special presentation of the verdict of virtual big data conference the cube is running in parallel with day 1 and day 2 of the verdict the big data event by the way the cube has been at every single big data event and it's our pleasure to be here in the virtual / digital event as well Gabriel Chapman is here is the director of flash blade product solutions marketing at pure storage Gabe great to see you thanks for coming on great to see you - how's it going it's going very well I mean I wish we were meeting in Boston at the Encore hotel but you know and and hopefully we'll be able to meet it accelerate at some point you cheer or one of the the sub shows that you guys are doing the regional shows but because we've been covering that show as well but I really want to get into it and the last accelerate September 2019 pure and Vertica announced a partnership I remember a joint being ran up to me and said hey you got to check this out the separation of Butte and storage by a Eon mode now available on flash played so and and I believe still the only company that can support that separation and independent scaling both on prime and in the cloud so gave I want to ask you what were the trends in analytical database and plowed that led to this partnership you know realistically I think what we're seeing is that there's been kind of a larger shift when it comes to modern analytics platforms towards moving away from the the traditional you know Hadoop type architecture where we were doing on and leveraging a lot of direct mass storage primarily because of the limitations of how that solution was architected when we start to look at the larger trends towards you know how organizations want to do this type of work on premises they're looking at solutions that allow them to scale the compute storage pieces independently and therefore you know the flash blade platform ended up being a great solution to support Vertica in their transition to Eon mode leveraging >> essentially as an s3 object store okay so let's let's circle back on that you guys in your in your announcement of a flash blade you make the claim that flash blade is the industry's most advanced file and object storage platform ever that's a bold statement I defend that it's supposed to yeah I I like to go beyond that and just say you know so we've really kind of looked at this from a standpoint of you know as as we've developed flash Wade as a platform and keep in mind it's been a product that's been around for over three years now and has you know it's been very successful for pure storage the reality is is that fast file and fast object as a combined storage platform is a direction that many organizations are looking to go and we believe that we're a leader in that fast object of best file storage place in realistically which we start to see more organizations start to look at building solutions that leverage cloud storage characteristics but doing so on prem for a multitude of different reasons we've built a platform that really addresses a lot of those needs around simplicity around you know making things assure that you know vast matters for us simple is smart we can provide you know cloud integrations across the spectrum and you know there's a subscription model that fits into that as well we fall that falls into our umbrella of what we consider the modern day day experience and it's something that we've built into the entire pure portfolio okay so I want to get into the architecture a little bit of Flash blade and then better understand the fit for analytic databases generally but specifically for Vertica so it is a blade so you got compute and a network included it's a key value store based system so you're talking about scale out unlike unlike viewers sort of you know initial products which were scale up and so I want to as a fabric base system I want to understand what that all mean so take us through the architecture you know some of the quote-unquote firsts that you guys talk about so let's start with sort of the blade aspect yeah the blade aspect mean we call it a flash blade because if you look at the actual platform you have a primarily a chassis with built in networking components right so there's a fabric interconnect with inside the platform that connects to each one of the individual blades the individual blades have their own compute that drives basically a pure storage flash components inside it's not like we're just taking SSDs and plugging them into a system and like you would with the traditional commodity off-the-shelf hardware design this is a very much an engineered solution that is built towards the characteristics that we believe were important with fast file and fast object scalability you know massive parallelization when it comes to performance and the ability to really kind of grow and scale from essentially seven blades right now to a hundred and fifty that's that's the kind of scale that customers are looking for especially as we start to address these larger analytics pools mayo multi petabyte datasets you know that single addressable object space and you know file performance that is beyond what most of your traditional scale-up storage platforms are able to deliver yeah I saw you interviewed cause last September and accelerate and and Christopher's been you know attacked by some of the competitors is not having a scale out I asked them his thoughts on that he said well first of all our flash plate is scale out he said look anything that that that adds the complexity you know we avoid but for the workloads that are associated with Flash blade scale out is the right sort of approach maybe you could talk about why that is well you know realistically I think you know that that approach is better when we're starting to learn to work with large unstructured data sets I mean flash plays uniquely architected to allow customers to achieve you know a superior resource utilization for compute and storage well at the same time you know reducing significantly the complexity that is arisen around these kind of bespoke or siloed nature of big data and analytic solutions I mean we really kind of look at this from a standpoint of you have built and delivered or created applications in the public cloud space that address you know object storage and and unstructured data and and for some organizations the importance is bringing that on Prem I mean we do seek repatriation that coming on for a lot of organizations as these data egress charges continue to expand and grow and then organizations that want even higher performance in the what we're able to get into the public cloud space they are bringing that data back on Prem they are looking at from a standpoint we still want to be able to scale the way we scale on the cloud we still want to operate the same way we operate in the cloud but we want to do it within control of our own you know our own borders and so that's you know that's one of the bigger pieces to that is we start to look at how do we address cloud characteristics and dynamics and consumption metrics or models as well as the benefits and efficiencies of scale that they're able to afford but allowing customers that do that with inside their own data center so you're talking about the trends earlier you had these cloud native databases that allowed the scaling of compute and storage independently Vertica comes in with Eon a lot of times we talk about these these partnerships as Barney deals of you know I love you you love me here's a press release and then we go on or they're just straight you know go to market are there other aspects of this partnership that are that are non Barney deal like in other words any specific you know engineering you know other go to market programs could you talk about that a little bit yeah it's it's it's more than just you know I then what we consider a channel meet in the middle or you know that Barney type of deal it's realistically you know we've done some first with Vertica that I think are really important if they think you look at the architecture and how we do how we've brought this to market together we have solutions teams in the back end who are you know subject matter experts in this space if you talk to joy and the people from vertigo they're very high on they're very excited about the partnership because it often it opens up a new set of opportunities for their customers to to leverage Eon mode and you know get into some of the the nuanced aspects of how they leverage the Depot or Depot with inside each individual compute node and adjustments with inside there I reach additional performance gains for customers on Prem and it's the same time for them there's still the ability to go into that cloud model if they wish to and so I think a lot of it is around how do we partner as two companies how do we do a joint selling motions you know how do we show up and and you know do white papers and all of the the traditional marketing aspects that we bring into the market and then you know joint selling opportunities exist where they are and so that's realistically I think like any other organization that's going to market with a partner or an ISP that they have a strong partnership with you'll continue to see us you know talking about our shows mutually beneficial relationships and the solutions that we're bringing it to the market okay you know of course he used to be a Gartner analyst and you go over to the vendor side now but as but as it but as a gardener analyst you're obviously objective you see it all and you know well there's a lot of ways to skin a cat there are there are there are strengths weaknesses opportunities threats etc for every vendor so you have you have Vertica who's got a very mature stack and and talking to a number of the customers out there who are using Eon mode you know there's certain workloads where these cloud native databases make sense it's not just the economics of scaling compute and storage independently I want to talk more about that there's flexibility aspects as well but Vertica really you know has to play its trump card which is look we've got a big on-premise state and we're gonna bring that you know Eon capability both on Prem and we're embracing the cloud now they're obviously having they had to play catch-up in the cloud but at the same time they've got a much more mature stack than a lot of these other you know cloud native databases that might have just started a couple years ago so you know so there's trade-offs that customers have to make how do you sort through that where do you see the interest in this and and and what's the sweet spot for this partnership you know we've been really excited to build the partnership with Vertica and we're providing you know we're really proud to provide pretty much the only on Prem storage platform that's validated with the vertical Aeon mode to deliver a modern data experience for our customers together you know it's it's that partnership that allows us to go into customers that on Prem space where I think that they're still you know not to say that not everybody wants to go the cloud I think there's aspects and then solutions that work very well there but for the vast majority I still think that there's you know the your data center is not going away and you do want to have control over some of the many of the different facets with inside the operational confines so therefore we start to look at how do we can do the best of what cloud offers but on Prem and that's realistically where we start to see the stronger push for those customers you still want to manage their data locally as well as maybe even work around some of the restrictions that they might have around cost and complexity hiring you know the different types of skills skill sets that are required to bring you know applications purely cloud native it's still that larger part of that digital transformation that many organizations are going for going forward with and realistically I think they're taking a look at the pros and cons and we've been doing cloud long enough where people recognize that you know it's not perfect for everything and that there's certain things that we still want to keep inside our own data center so I mean realistically as we move forward that's that that better option when it comes to a modern architecture they can do it you know we can deliver and address a diverse set of performance requirements and allowed the organization to continue to grow the model to the data you know based on the data that they're actually trying to leverage and that's really what flash Wood was built for it was built for a platform that can address small files or large files or high throughput high throughput low latency scale to petabytes in a single namespace in a single rack as we like to put it in there I mean we see customers that have put you know 150 flash blades into production as a single namespace it's significant for organizations that are making that drive towards modern data experience with modern analytics platforms pure and Vertica have delivered an experience that can address that to a wide range of customers that are implementing you know the verdict technology I'm interested in exploring the the use case a little bit further you just sort of gave some parameters and some examples and some of the flexibility that you have in but take us through kind of what to discuss the customer discussions are like obviously you've got a big customer base you and Vertica that that's on prem that's the the unique advantage of this but there are others it's not just the economics of the granular scaling of compute and storage independently there are other aspects so to take us through that sort of a primary use case or use cases yeah you know I mean I can give you a couple customer examples and we have a large SAS analyst company which uses verdict on flash play to authenticate the quality of digital media in real time and you know then for them it makes a big difference is they're doing they're streaming and whatnot that they can they can fine tune and grandly control that so that's one aspect that we need to address we have a multi national car company which uses verdict on flash blade to make thousands of decisions per second for autonomous vehicle decision making trees you know that's what really these new modern analytics platforms were built for there's another healthcare organization that uses Vertica on flash blade to enable healthcare providers to make decisions in real time the impact vibes especially when we start to look at and you know the current state of affairs little Co vid and the coronavirus you know those types of technologies are really going to help us kind of get love and and help lower and been you know bend that curve downward so you know there's all these different areas where we can address the goals and the achievements that we're trying to look bored with with real-time analytic decision making tools like birth and you know realistically as we have these conversations with customers they're looking to get beyond the ability of just you know you know a data scientist or a data architect looking to just kind of drive in information you know you know I'm gonna set this model up and we'll come back in a day now we need to make these and the performs characteristics the Aeon mode and vertical allows for can get us towards this almost near real-time analytics decision-making process and that the customers and that's the kind of conversations that we're having with customers who really need to be able to turn this around very quickly instead of waiting well I think you're hitting on something that is actually pretty relevant and that is that near real-time analytic you know database we were talking about Hadoop earlier we're kind of going well beyond that now and I guess what I'm saying is that in the first phase of cloud it was all about infrastructure it was about you know spinning up you know compute and storage a little bit of networking in there seems like the the a next a new workload that's clearly emerging is you've got and it started with the cloud native databases but then bringing in you know AI and machine learning tooling on top of that and then being able to really drive these new types of insights and it's really about taking data these bogs this bog of data that we've collected over the last 10 years a lot of that you know driven by Hadoop bringing machine intelligence into the equation scaling it with either cloud public cloud or bringing that cloud experience on-premise scale you know across your organizations and across your partner network that really is a new emerging work load do you see that and maybe talk a little bit about you know what you're seeing with customers yeah I mean it really is we see several trends you know one of those is the ability to take a take this approach to move it out of the lab but into production you know especially when it comes to you know data science projects machine learning projects that traditionally start out as kind of small proofs of concept easy to spin up in the cloud but when a customer wants to scale and move towards a real you know that derived a significant value from that they do want to be able to control more characteristics right and we know machine learning you know needs to needs to learn from a massive amounts of data to provide accuracy there's just too much data to retrieve in the cloud for every training job at the same time predictive analytics without accuracy is not going to deliver the business advantage of what everyone is seeking you know we see this the visualization of data analytics is traditionally deployed as being on a continuum with you know the things that we've been doing in the long you know in the past you know with data warehousing data lakes AI on the other end but but this way we're starting to manifest it in organizations that are looking towards you know getting more utility and better you know elasticity out of the data that they are working for so they're not looking to just build ups you know silos of bespoke AI environments they're looking to leverage you know a platform that can allow them to you know do a I for one thing machine learning for another leverage multiple protocols to access that data because the tools are so much different you know it is a growing diversity of of use cases that you can put on a single platform I think organizations are looking for as they try to scale these environments I think there's gonna be a big growth area in the coming years Gabe well I wish we were in Boston together you would have painted your little corner of Boston Orange I know that you guys are sure but I really appreciate you coming on the cube and thank you very much have a great day you too okay thank you everybody for watching this is the cubes coverage wall-to-wall coverage two days of the vertical Vertica virtual Big Data conference keep her at their very back right after this short break

>>Ly from San Diego, California. It's the cube covering to clock in cloud native con brought to you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and its ecosystem Marsh. >>Welcome back. This is the cubes fourth year at coupon cloud native con 2019 here in San Diego. I'm zooming in and my cohost is John Troyer and welcome to the program, John Coyle, who's the vice president of business and corporate development at Sumo logic. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. All right, so John, we had the cube at Summa logic illuminate, uh, where you had a relevant announcement. I've heard you've had some great momentum of that. So why don't you bring us up to speed kind of the communities related >>happy to, yeah, this is an exciting CubeCon for us. This year, two months ago at our user conference, we announced our, our Kubernetes solution. Um, we believe it's the, the, the uh, the first true dev sec ops solution for Kubernetes that is one platform to, to provide monitoring, troubleshooting, and security across a Kubernetes environment. And uh, so far it's been an incredibly successful launch. Um, it seems to have hit a real, real sweet spot with, uh, with customers that are, uh, increasingly, or their adoption of Kubernetes and, uh, and growing, uh, growing quite rapidly and, and figuring out how to monitor and troubleshoot and secure that at scale is a huge challenge. >>Well, yeah, so look, you brought up DevSecOps and, and you know that scaling the surface area is ever increasing. We're talking a lot about edge at this conference, uh, too. So that that surface area is getting order of magnitude bigger, the amount of change going through there. So, you know, how do you help those teams? You know, it can't just be people. There's gotta be, there's gotta be automation, there's gotta be platforms that just enable me. Yeah. Great. So what do we really mean by dev sec >>ops instead of just throwing it around? Really, the way we break it down, uh, broke the solution down is that the three core components, the ability to, uh, to, to, to do discoverability observability and security. So when we say discoverability, creating an intuitive interface by which, uh, everyone from an SRE to a SOC analyst can easily, uh, denify, um, issues and, and uh, the context of the application that's running on Kubernetes. The next piece is then observability being able to, um, get all of the relevant data, the logs, the metrics, the events that you care about to, to determine whether you have an issue or not. And then doing that all in the context of not a traditional infrastructure view, but really in a service level view, which our practitioners and our customers really care about. They think about their, their microservices based apps in terms of the app itself and the all of the different microservices that uses not on the underlying infrastructure that's there. And, uh, although that may sound subtle difference between monitoring and providing visibility from an infrastructure perspective, it actually makes all the difference in terms of being able to effectively and quickly identify an issue and then remediate it. Um, these environments are getting way, way too complex, especially in on top of Kubernetes as you look. The, I had serverless, the ephemeral nature of these environments. It's, it's, it's, it's a huge trend. >>All right, so just, I hear you throw out a lot of things and there's a word I didn't hear that I've been hearing a lot this year, especially when you talk about, uh, you know, when the container rolled and even serverless, it's observability because you know, that the traditional looking at logs, monitoring environments, I need a system view. I need to be able to deal with all of the realtime changes. So, uh, what, what sumos take on a kind of this observability trend that we've heard a lot of companies talking about. >>Yeah, yeah. That's where we've invested. The vast majority of the, the, the, the development in this solution is around deservability. And again, it starts with being able to ingest all the logs, metrics and events. Um, and in that, in, in that way, we've, we've embraced the open source community and you're using things like fluent bit fluent D Prometheus's. So leveraging the tools that are already out there, getting that data into the platform and then being able to allow, you know, different users. The, uh, a hierarchical approach to navigate through the data and the content that they care about and basically apply the mental model they have for their microservices that are Coobernetti's infrastructure to, to the actual tool they're using. So we've brought out, uh, a new Explorer UI, which allows, as I mentioned, from an SRE to a SOC analyst to go get the view they care about that's relevant to the security problem they're trying to solve or, you know, a reliability issue they're seeing with one of their, one of their core applications. >>John, I want to stick with good with Kubernetes itself for a minute here. And some of the words that have already been, you've already, we've already said here are things like microservices. Yup. And also scalability and complexity. So what is Kubernetes and apps that are built on Kubernetes bringing, uh, to the data center or the, or the public cloud that, uh, are, what are the problems they're bringing with them that, that you all are helping solve? Oh yeah, that's a great question. Um, I think some of them were, you know, complexity of microservices. And let me ask you for answering first in the context of what we see. Uh, at our larger customers that are more traditional, that have legacy systems, generally what's happening is they're their most important applications. The customer facing, the revenue generating applications, whether it's an insurance company or a bank. Those applications are getting modernized first and they're moving to containers, microservices, Kubernetes. >>Um, and as those teams go ahead and develop and build, um, the, uh, the it and the security systems designed for legacy apps can't really support them. So first and foremost, those teams are struggling with visibility to what actually is happening and, and, you know, the traditional monitoring and troubleshooting, but really doing it from a service focused perspective as opposed to just an infrastructure, you know, whether something's up or down or, or, or, or, or, or, or slow or fast. And that is one of the biggest challenges they have. And providing that, that discoverability coupled with that observability is key for our more mid market type customers that were born in the cloud or cloud native. They get this right away and have really been solving this problem by uh, a hodgepodge of different solutions and really having a swivel chair type management where they move from one pane of glass to another and they kind of connect the dots. >>And again this comes back to they already have a mental model of the way their infrastructure and their applications work so they're able to piece that together. Um, but I think that that, that, those days of, of, of relying on that are, are, are, are, are fewer and fewer because the applications and the, and the systems are becoming more and more distributed, more and more complex. And especially then as you add security into the mix, which I think a lot of customers are waking up. This is great. We're not really securing this as effectively as we should be. How do you bring that into the mix also? So John, I'm wondering if you could bring us into the organizational dynamics of what's happening here. You talk about scale. Every customer we talk to here is they're spanning between their traditional environment and then they're modernizing things. >>They build some new somethings get ported over. But you know, I don't want to use the word bi-modal, but they need to pull things along and security needs to live in all of these worlds. So, so what, what, what kind of impact is that having on the organization? And we think it's dramatic and that's why I, I started out the conversation by we really believe we have a dev sec ops solution. It's just not marketing speak where, um, if you look at the announcement we made at illuminate, um, we, we highlighted how we, we've also embraced Falco, the security opensource Gabriel, but also announced integrations with the leading container and Kubernetes solutions in the market. Aqua Twistlock, uh, stack rocks where, um, dev ops and security are really all coming together. Where that, again, back to the analogy I made before the platform needs to be able to serve both the SRE for a traditional, you know, reliability issue all the way up to a SOC analyst who's trying to troubleshoot and identify whether there's a real threat with a particular application vulnerability. >>And it all needs to be in the context of, of, of one platform. You can't have two different systems going forward. The, uh, with the, um, I lost my question here. So a partnership announcement announced this week. We were talking about some of the partners you work with. Give us broader view as to, you know, what the, what, what the news is this. Yeah, we're, we're excited. So the, we, uh, on Monday we announced the, the Sumo logic app intelligence partner program. Um, and really this, the, the first iteration of this was this was announced at illuminate with, uh, with the, the partners I mentioned. Uh, Aqua stack rocks Twistlock, um, armory, um, circle CEI, uh, code fresh who all built apps integrated into our Kubernetes solution that provides customers with, uh, with a deep insight into monitoring, troubleshooting and securing those different tools. Um, and this partner program extends that where we're now making it a much more open and easier for any, any, any vendor here today to join the program, build, uh, an integration directly to the Sumo logic platform and, and provide rich, rich content. >>We've been building an awful lot of these apps ourselves over the years. Um, but we're working, looking to work with partners more closely as they know their, their apps, their use cases, their content much better than we will. And kind of forging that, that, that, that, that partnership to, to bring that, you know, combined added value to customers. And this is something that our customers continually ask us for. I've got this new tool, I want to get that information into Sumo and be able to, to, to get value like I am with all the other solutions. I haven't seen them. I do want to follow up now. Okay. Which is that you do have a great customer base, right? And so you have a great visibility into the market. Yeah. One of the buzzwords that flies around the industry is multi-cloud. Yes. And so I'm very curious on how you and your customers are seeing the progression in the marketplace, their landscape, multi-cloud. >>Because there are people out out there who are very, very far ahead of everybody else who are kind of, sometimes the word multicloud gets made fun of. I think it's actually real life. So can you talk to us a little bit about your costs? Yes. Yeah. We've, we see that, uh, we see that front and center and Kubernetes has run to the big drivers to it, right? It's, it's, uh, it's made these different clouds, uh, very equal for whether I run a, a Kubernetes environment on premise or move in AWS. I could easily move into GCP or Azure. And, uh, at our user conference two months ago, we brought out a continuous talent report that we bring out annually. And there's some interesting statistics in that where we see the more the growth and, uh, customers that are multi-cloud. It's all being driven by their adoption of Kubernetes. >>And it, it, it basically, uh, abstracts out the, the underlying the underlying infrastructure and now allows them to, to move across that. And uh, we see that as a huge demand. Yeah. I actually have some of the stats here that's, which reminded me of my question, which is, you know, enterprise adoption of multi-cloud in your survey, 50% growth year over year, you know, 80% of customers, if you look at all the clouds are, are using some sort of Kubernetes. So I mean that's the, those are real struggling numbers actually. Yeah. Yeah. Just about every major company we speak to has some initiative to get to multi-cloud timing question of how large and when they're going to actually do all that. But it's on everyone's roadmap for sure. >>All right, well, John, I'm glad we've solved all the security issues in multicloud today. Um, for, for those people that might have a little bit more to fix, you know, give us a little bit of a look forward as to what more, uh, you know, where we're going. Uh, both for Sumo and for everybody in the dev sec ops space on that, that kind of the, the, the, the growing, uh, maturity there. >>Yeah, I think, uh, you know, two areas, uh, we're, we're excited about is, um, being able to, you know, many respects. I, I look at our business, uh, we're very, very similar to a bank. People in invest or we ingest their data into the bank of Sumo, uh, with the promise of returning it back to them with some interest or some, some, some return on it. And, um, there's no shortage of data coming to us. So being able to allow customers to do and use that data in more granular, uh, and bifurcate that data all day does not, uh, created equal but allow them, uh, economically to get more value out of that data. You're going to see a lot of, uh, you know, what we call like economic disruption coming from us in the next, uh, next few weeks, next, uh, next year. And some of the things we're, we're, we're talking about. >>Um, and then also, um, taking a, a powerful platform like sumos continuous intelligence platform and really helping customers map it more directly to specific use cases. Uh, we have, uh, we have, uh, a graphic on the, on the new website announcing the app intelligence partner program that basically shows here's just about any customers, uh, uh, uh, development pipeline, whether it's a bank or a hot startup going from an idea all the way to production. Um, they need visibility and security across all of that. That, that, that, that, that, uh, that infrastructure and those applications and we can provide that what we need to do a better job is helping customers understand how they can apply the power of what we have to these specific use cases all along that pipeline. Um, and you know, as I'm sure you can attest some other conversations there, there's, there's a lack of, of a, uh, there's a labor shortage of knowledge of how you take all these new technologies and really apply them, uh, very effectively at scale. Um, and that's, that's an area we're going to be investing in heavily to help customers do that. All right, >>perfect. Way to end. Thank you, John. Thanks for giving us the update. Chandon congratulate to them the progress since illuminate for John Troyer Omstead amendment. Stay with us for more wall-to-wall covered here from cube con cloud native con 2019 stay classy. San Diego and thank you for watching the cube.

>> From the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering HoshoCon 2018. Brought to you by Hosho. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for the first annual blockchain security conference. The brightest minds in the industry coming together, it's called HoshoCon, and it's presented by, and sponsored by Hosho. But it's not their event, it's an industry event. And we're here with the co-founder and president, Hartej Sawhney, who is theCUBE alumni. Great to see you. You guys are doing a great event. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, it's always good to see you, and I'm so glad theCUBE is here at HoshoCon. >> So you've talked with us many times, but recently in Toronto about this event. This is not your company's event. You guys are putting it together. You're holding it because there's no other conferences that do this, but it's not just you guys. You guys are bringing the industry brains together. >> Yeah, I mean, we see ourselves as being on the intersection of cybersecurity and blockchain. And (coughs) just getting over a cold, but not a lot of conferences are out there that have a open discussion about cyber security in the blockchain industry. And hundreds of millions of dollars are stolen from exchanges. And 10% of all the money in the ICO space has been lost or stolen. And there's simply not enough platforms for this to be discussed. So, we figured we'd start the first conference that solely focuses on being a blockchain security conference. We chose not to have any ICO pitch competition. And it feels like there's more and more typical blockchain conferences out there, but it's important to be home base for anyone who wants to affiliate themselves with cyber security and the blockchain industry. >> And the depth and breadth of security is changing. We are hearing talks with, unfortunately I won't be able to attend the sessions, we're interviewing people all day, but amazing talks. How to hack an exchange, all these new surface areas. I mean, people kind of generally know they're unsecure, but this growth going on. There's new things happening. This is exposing some of the security vulnerabilities. What is the hot topics in the talk tracks here at HoshoCon? >> We have Anand Prakash, who runs a company called AppSecure. He's one of the worlds best white hat hackers. Who has hacked into the likes of Linkedin, Facebook, Google, all the top names. And to have someone walk us through today, Anand Prakash said, "Here's how you hack into a crypto "currency exchange and here's how they actually did it." And to have a white hat hacker walk us through that, it opens up our eye balls as to how easy it actually was for a Japanese exchange to loose 500 million dollars. That's no small sum of money. And this industry is only going to survive if we together as a community come together and evaluate how was it that 500 million dollars got stolen? And how can we as a community of global lovers of bitcoin make sure that this does not happen moving forward? >> On that exchange hack, 500 million dollars in Japan, was that white hat done or was that black hat? >> It was black hat. Unfortunately the money's not been given back. >> So it's not given back. So that's a half a billion dollars? >> It's half a billion dollars stolen, yeah you know. How many industries are worth just about that much? >> Yes, you could feed a couple countries. This is legit, right? Obviously it's like total, you know, wild west if you want to call it. Stage coach robberies they got the mask on. No one knows who it is. This is real, this is absolutely real. What are you guys doing as an industry? What's happening here to prevent this? What are the key, you know hygiene or social, anti-social engineering? What are the key things that are going on that are solving this problem? >> So, every exchange needs to value security and get a penetration test. Every company needs to make sure that somebody at their company is in charge of their in house security practices. Most companies when you ask them, "Who's in charge of security?" They point their finger at the CTO. The CTO is in charge of architecting the software. You need to have somebody full time, in house taking care of the security. Ideally a CISO and if you can afford it, pay someone five to ten thousand dollars a month as a consultant to come in for a couple of months and take care of your in house security. These are basic things that, you know, surprisingly most bitcoin exchanges often times when they're hacked, they're hacked by a basic phishing attack. That one of your employees opened up the wrong email. They opened up a PDF and the hacker gained access to your computer and is now monitoring your keyboard strokes and stole millions of dollars. Or the exchange didn't get an actual penetration test of their exchange. Or exchanges are listing contracts that have not gone through a professional smart contract audit. These things are now, also we're seeing them service in regulation with central governments. And it seems that all the smaller island nations are spearheading the way in terms of writing clarity on regulation. In Malta, Bermuda, Gibraltar, all of them are trying to spearhead the way. I'm much more excited, to be honest, about some of the larger nations bringing clarity on regulation in the next two to three years. We all can't just move to a small island off the coast of Italy that is infamous for actually laundering money in the gaming space. Yes, now they're trying to bring clean clarity doing KYC and AML in Malta and write a actual regulation about security. And if you're domiciled in Malta and you're a exchange then you can only list a token that's been audited. It's wonderful but at the end of the day Malta is also a part of the EU and if the EU changes their mind, things can change Malta. I just feel like it shows the immaturity of the space. If very legitimate companies are all going to flee to small countries like Malta or to islands like Bermuda. Good on those island nations for being so pragmatic and forward thinking and for bringing legal clarity. I mean if I was in an exchange today, arguably yes you have to go to Malta if you want clarity on regulation and you don't want to be in the United States. Right now, Malta is your choice. I'm just personally a little bit much more excited about the next three years where, I make a joke to my co-founder and I say, "The suits are coming." That we look around these conferences and you don't see that many suits but the fortunate 500, many of them are either writing private blockchains, they're evaluating how they're going to leverage blockchain technology in their major businesses and they're going to leverage decentralized applications and tokenization for already running products that have millions of customers, that are already profitable and then when they get tokenized they're going to be up and running right away. So the next two to three years are going to be very interesting. From Hosho's perspective we've taken a big turn towards catering towards more publicly traded large sophisticated companies. We've partnered up with Telefonica. Telefonica is a Fortune 200 company. Its wonderful to be able to leverage that kind of a brand. To deal with major world wide entities that are publicly traded come to Telefonica and evaluate how they can leverage blockchain technology and get one bundled security package that includes Hosho, Rivets, and Telefonica. >> Yeah the Rivets solution is interesting. It's a hardware based solution. So the subscriber of the phone becomes the entity. It's really interesting and I think this points to new paradigms of security, which I want to get to in a second but I want to just unpack what you said about the small country, big country dynamic. Great for the small countries to be opportunistic. To be creative and capture this opportunity. But people want stability. They want clarity on regulations, yes, but also standards, technical standards. >> We can't all just move to the small country of Malta. >> Yeah I'll be in a plane the whole time. >> It just doesn't work. >> Yeah and by the way the game changes too. Whats the implications of say, Malta decides one day, "You know what?" "We're getting out, we're changing things." A company would have to move their domicile again. So it's a moving train, you don't know what you're going to get. It might be stable now but it's not a scalable opportunity. >> Yeah, people have families and they want to stay where they are. Simple as that. We have large countries that have a strong crypto community that's growing and let's see how they pan out. Singapore seems like a likely next candidate. You have Korea. I would argue to say that the worlds first decentralized application that will be massively adopted will be in Korea. Korea is going to be the place where we have the worlds first decentralized application launched with mass adoption, a paradigm shift. The kind of shift where you forgot what it was like before you used Gmail regularly. >> Yeah, total, total infrastructure change. Alright so I got to ask you the hallway conversation question. Obviously you're very popular here. It's you event, you're sponsoring with the community. I see you talking to a lot of people at the VIP dinner last night. What are some of the hallway conversations that you're having? A lot of interesting people here from diverse backgrounds, in security, technology, some policy, some regulatory, some business, and legal, but really bright minds. What's the hallway conversation like? What are you talking about? >> We're talking about how all of us are going to survive crypto winter that we just entered. We've entered a time where fund raising has become extremely difficult. A lot of funds are simply bleeding. They lost a lot of money and they're not cutting checks right now. So the companies that are going to survive and stick around through this crypto winter, they're making a strong statement and they're going to be the ones that are going to stick around. And a lot of them are here at this conference at HoshoCon. And it amazing to have discussions to see what are the problems that fellow founders are facing? Building companies that will survive this crypto winter. Another thing has been just what are we going to do as a community to self-regulate? Are we going to create self-regulatory organizations? Are we going to let another Moody's get created? What is our viewpoint on regulation in the space overall, right? We love Max Keiser. His viewpoint on regulation is very extreme where he believes bitcoin is a self-regulatory technology. And on the other hand we have people saying, "No, we need to quickly move to regulate the space. "Work with central banks, work with central governments, "and write out the regulations." That's been lot of the hallway conversation. And a lot of other ones that have been really intriguing to me has been people talking about what are things that they have done within their company to protect their employees. Because the reality is in the crypto currency space every single employee of a major company in this industry is a target by naturally being in this industry. And this includes you. We are all naturally targets. And it's not about how much bitcoin you have maybe its about how much bitcoin someone thinks you have. And all of a sudden you become a target. And we need to think about things like our physical security. So some of the more interesting conversations I've been having with people have been around, along the lines of what are you doing to protect you and your family in regards to your physical security? On top of that your online presences. >> So ransoms, people getting kidnapped and or extorted. These kinds of physical pressures? >> Yeah, like ShapeShift has a lot of great stories. Michael Perklin from, the CIS of ShapeShift is here. You should totally talk to him and get him on theCUBE. Michael Perklin has a long list of war stories that ShapeShift has been through. Some of them they went through before he was actually hired as a CISO. And ShapeShift would've also not been hacked of millions of dollars if they had brought on a CISO earlier such as Michael Perklin. I believe they had hired him as a consultant. Did not renew the contract, got hacked, and brought him on as CISO. And he was like, "If you had continued working with me "I would of, this would of been avoided." And that's really-- >> It's foolish. >> One other thing I've seen with ShapeShift actually is online you'll notice that all the employees of ShapeShift, their last names are not online. So on the website it says, their chief marketing officers name is Emily, it says "Emily Shape Shift". And their badges at conferences also says "Emily Shape Shift". These are interesting things to learn from other companies that this is what you're doing to protect your employees from them being hacked. It's very interesting for us to all exchange notes-- >> Shoot I'm out there, (mumbles) everywhere pretty much online. >> Well I'm out there as well. We just got to protect ourselves and we got to think about things like our physical security. People feel uncomfortable thinking about their physical security. They think that, "Oh no we're in America, "we'll just call the cops." What about when we travel? What about when you and I are in a village in Thailand hanging out? We are microorganisms and when microorganisms are hungry they'll do what ever it takes to eat. So if they smell abundance, you and I are in trouble. >> Yeah, we got to be careful. And this is something that you really got to worry about because there's been tons of war stories. Now ultimately when you get back down to the wallet, it's one of the things we've been talking a lot this morning on, with Rivets, was on about the notion of how hard it is for mainstream to use tokens. Where's my private key? This has always been the crypto problem, even with private key encryption. >> Yeah, or should we build a multi-sig wallet to store your tokens in a secure manner? People have been asking us for a long time, Crypto funds, ICO's, "How do we store our tokens!" And our problem was that A, we've either hacked into the other wallets that are available and we saw that they're insecure or the UI and UX completely sucks. So we said lets build our own and so we built our own. >> Are you open sourcing that, is that-- >> No, we're going to be, this is going to be a unique multi-sig wallet that we release, it's not. You're open sourcing the actual code of the wallet or else it's not going to be considered legitimate. >> Yeah, it's good, it's a goldmine. >> It's a profitable venture. >> And that's going to be 100% bullet proof? >> It's going to be very secure. >> Let's talk about Meadow Suite. >> So, we came to a point where our engineers needed better tooling to find security vulnerabilities in smart contracts. And what is available, Truffle, is weak and slow. And so we built Meadow Suite. We built in a long list of tools and a full suite of tooling that we believe are going to be used by a long list of people that are building on the Ethereum blockchain. Including a lot of our competitors. And so we've open sourced it and we're excited for people to check out Meadow Suite. It's on GitHub and our engineers have put a lot of time and effort into it. We even have our own logo for it. >> And the goal is to automate things, make it easier? What's the main, main initial goals? >> I would say, long story short, is to find security vulnerabilities in smart contracts and to build tooling around that. And to effectively build and find vulnerabilities in smart contracts. >> So they build it into their development process natively? >> Correct. >> Alright Hartej great to have you on and hey congratulations for putting on this event. I know we've talked about >> Awesome to be here. it in the past, it actually happened. It's the first inaugural one. >> We had this vision and I'm glad it came through. We had a great global events team. Gabriel Shepherd, and Ryan Shewchuk, and Brad Horspool, and Michelle Yon. And like they've put on conference's the size of Southwest by Southwest. And our vision is, look we're not in the events business. And we're a cyber security business at the end of the day. But we found it necessary that there has to be a conference where there's a platform for people to talk about cyber security intersecting with the blockchain industry. There's got to be a platform for someone to get on stage and say, "Hey here's lessons that "we learned from getting hacked" And if this industry is going to survive, this topic needs to survive. And the brands that want to affiliate themselves with blockchain security and that want to be apart of the discussion. This will be a go to conference every single year. We're going to keep doing it and I look forward to having you at every single one, coming. >> It's been great. And you know what's key is having reputable people working together in a community, building an open community, sharing data, sharing best practices, and having candid conversations. >> Yep, it's the only way to get someone as epic as Andreas Antonopoulos to your conference. I mean my co-founder and I have been looking up to Andreas for so long. Watching videos of Andreas. Watching videos of Max Keiser, Stacy Herbert. To have them here is really just truly remarkable and I'm grateful, I'm honored, I'm touched. I'm touched to have you here. I miss David Vellante, I wish he was here. >> He's in San Francisco, he says hi. He was going to fly in tonight but-- >> He texted me. >> He did, okay. >> Hartej it's great to see you. >> Great to see you >> Congratulations. as well. thank you. >> Great event. Okay we're here live with theCUBe coverage for HoshoCon 2018, the first inaugural security conference on blockchain. Industry leaders coming together. The brilliant, bright minds of the industry working out the solutions, trying to pedal faster. Better security, check it out HoshoCon.com. I'm John Furrier stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (techno music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back. This is theCUBE's live coverage here in Toronto, for the Untraceable event. Here in the industry, it's called Blockchain Futurist. It's where all the industry elite are getting together here in Canada, to talk about the future of blockchain, crypto, and everything. It's theCUBE's specific coverage. As we continue 2018, kicking off event coverage with our CUBE brand. But right now we've got two great guests from Start-up, and they're called Quantum EXchange and Bank, QuantEXchange. Manie Eagar, Executive Chairman. And, John Willock, who's the CEO. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So you guys got some hard news to talk about. >> We do. >> But, you guys are doing an exchange model, bringing something really cool to the market. >> Yep. >> Which, we need to kind of get this figured out. Take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, the problem you're solving, and then we'll get to the news. Absolutely. So, I think the lot of people are doing exchanges. You see them coming all the time, and most of them don't really have any specific differentiation or value add. We are not like that at all. We have spent our careers as part of most of the team, in traditional financial services. And, we're coming from the securities exchange business to bring the learnings from NASDAQ, the learnings from the like of that sort to the Crypto Exchange space. And, to be able to facilitate not only a regulated exchange venue, but also one that is institutional grade in terms of tools and the client experience, as well as the trust factor with the platform itself. So, that's really what we're trying to get done with the Quantum Exchange that we're building right now. >> And how old's the company? How long you been around? When do you guys start? How funded are you? What's happening there? >> So, I'll refrain from discussing funding at this point. But, I will say we've started this year. I left the Toronto Stock Exchange specifically to pursue this in conjunction with Manny. And, we've been batting this idea around for the last couple of years. And, the market reached the stage in maturity and size, that we said now is the time to get going and do it. And, so far, fanfare has been fantastic. Reactions from people in the Crypto Ecosystem, people in the Securities Ecosystem, has been equally positive. >> Yeah. >> There's a strong desire to see something like this come to market. And, we're very excited to be able to launch. >> Before we get to the news, Manie, I want to ask you a question. One of the things that we've seen is two types of behavior. The other guy's got to lose for me to win, and then, or both parties can win. We're seeing trends where people are taking a posture against regulations. Oh, they're evil, they're causing all the problems. They kind of don't know what they're doing, kind of, they're evolving. Maturity levels are different based on countries. But, where the success is happening, like Gabriel with Bit. Okay, there's collaboration. Because the regulars actually want to do a good job most cases. They just can't get there fast enough. This is the new model. This is what people are looking at. This is the kind of solution ... >> Absolutely. >> A bridge between industry, and the slow but, yet want to change regulators. Your thoughts? >> Very, very good point. The good news is we're all talking to each other. I think there's dialogue at the moment, but it's not maybe as open as it should be. Because it's all day one. What I bring to the community, and have for the ... since I got engaged in launching the first Bitcoin ATM in the world, in Vancouver, part of that team. And, I think Anthony Bold from Bit is for an alliance. And, blockchain association in the block forum, which we'll announce tomorrow. 'Cause I worked for Blockhouse. I worked for Vodafone. I was involved in the Empasa project. And, I can see and understand what does it take for people to start using technologies. I think what everybody is hoping for is this golden moment. Like when the first iPhone arrived on the scene. >> Yeah. >> People queued around the block through the night to get ahold of that first device. We haven't had that moment yet. For Blockchain and Crypto. We've had the wild enthusiasm, which is all speculation as far as most of us are concerned. But, maturity is coming, these technology if Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies want to succeed, there needs to be another converging technology with what's already out there. The internet, your financial ecosystem, and so forth. >> Yep. >> In my view, there'll be a coming together. There'll be new models altogether. Incumbents will have to pick up the pace in terms of how they go about it. >> Yeah. >> But, we see the opportunity for ourselves, for Quantex. And the industry as a whole is where the convergence takes place, the dialogue becomes more mature, and open, and transparent. Regulators become aligned. At the moment, we hear of a lot of jurisdictions announcing this, announcing that. But, when you start investigating or assessing, it's different flavors, different cultures, different economies. >> Yeah. >> There's the Commonwealth Block. There's the North American Block. There's the Asian Block. Europe is a whole different ball of wax. >> Yeah, I agree with you and I just want to ... >> So, this is where it gets interesting . That's where we come into the boat. >> Absolutely. >> Well, I agree with you, I just want to make a point. During the dotcom bubble, during that internet wave, there was some over-speculation. But at the end of the day, the forcing function of reality was the growth of the online users was growing every day. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And, the demand and the commerce dollars were still real. Now, certainly there was an exuberance. Irrational, in some cases. But, it all ended up happening. I think here in this market, the forcing function is the reality that there's demand, and there's money, and there's impact. >> There is now, we now know that. >> This is coming. It's not like Doomsday. Well, it was fake. No, not really. >> No, we are still in the first inning of seeing what is actually coming out of all of this. I think last year's price speculation runoff obviously was set to decline at some point. But, there has been a long series of momentum coming out of that, where people have realized that this is something much more important and significant than what it looked like three years ago, perhaps. And, a lot of that talent is now coming to this space. Bringing, the capital, bringing the know-how, us included, to deliver something for the next generation of platform, tools, and ecosystem to really grow this massively. And, bring it much more to the mainstream. >> And, I think the idea of aligning with regulars, help them move faster. You mentioned adopt technology, but, still in the phase of deploying operational infrastructure. You mentioned some of the things, the projects you've worked on. Vodafone, that's cellular, that's towers, that's infrastructure. So, I think we're still in this hybrid model of, in parallel, capital formation, building companies, and then, just, we got to get the roads built. >> Well, and understand the posture that a lot of people are taking on. We need to decentralize, we need to open this thing up. But, at the end of the day, the consumer votes. You and I know if we don't have viewers, we don't have a channel. If we don't have users, people actually using the technology, not only investing, but actually using it. It aint going to happen. Decentralize, centralize to a hybrid. And, that's the part that we need to open ourselves. >> Let me ask you guys a question before we get to the news. This exciting news you get to share. How do you standardize something? Because, one common thread of all these major deflection points, at least, with the major cycles I've lived through, has been standards. >> Absolutely. But, it's not going to be your grandfather's standards.So, TCPIP was different. The OSI model is a different generation. The internet was different. Web social is different. What may happen may be different. So, but, standards play an important role. But, no one has clear visibility yet what will be standardized, what should be standardized. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? >> Well last year John comes in, and he's learned the world of standards at NASDAQ, and TMX, and elsewhere. >> That's true. >> Now, we need to bring it to this world. >> How do we scale operational lead to get a cohesive exchange that can scale and demure value? Where do the standards focus need to be? What should the emphasis ... where does the light get shined on, and where's the energy go to? >> I think, you know, you want to look at standards, think about something like this ETF debate that's been going on. Huge speculation about whether or not that's coming. I think a lot of people who are looking at that ETF debate, specifically, don't actually understand some of the economics and the mechanisms behind the scenes. So, for example, what is a fork? When you think about traditional securities, you got corporate actions like a stock split or dividend. A fork is an entirely different concept with entirely different results. Those are the sorts of things that need to be discussed, standardized, and brought to an industry cohesion to be able to successfully deal with some of these events as the market progresses. And, to bring some normalcy to some of this as well, especially if you want to bring institutions to the plate. And, I think that comes to one of the other initiatives that we're working on ... Which is the industry body, called block forum, which we're going to be discussing in a moment. That can really help be that joining voice >> Hold on, hold on a second. This is the news. >> behind everything. >> This is the news. You guys are announcing, let's get to the news. >> Okay. >> You're announcing a couple things. Start with what you were just talking about. You guys are announcing a forum. Can you explain? >> Correct, correct. So, we're launching, officially, to the remainder of the crowd here tomorrow, block forum. Which is an industry association that will be especially behind driving adult thinking behind all this, putting regulation into place, discussing commonalities around policy, around how to standardize, and how to really make all of this interoperable. And, I think that's the key word. If you have individual pillars of, islands of activity, that's not going to be the same as having a cohesive global solution. And, that's what we really want to drive. >> An exchange solution? >> Well, in our case in Quantex, absolutely. But, an exchange in the services we can offer is one part of the whole puzzle. There's a whole series of inter-connected affairs that have to work together. And, that's what block forum is going to drive, is this assembly of different connected parties who are all working for the greater benefit of the Prio ecosystem. >> Who is going to be involved in the forum? Who is the stakeholders? Who can join? Is it a membership? Is it a consortium? >> It is a membership. There will actually be a token that will have very interesting membership related tokenomics attached that we can disclose at a later date. And, that economic alignment between the parties who are staking effectively their interests in the certain topics that they want back or the certain efforts will be a completely unique model compared to what we've seen in the industry today, where generally speaking, it is a committee who drives something on behalf of members. This is really fundamental for all members, democratically from individuals all the way up to institutions, to be able to participate and voice their interests. >> So you will see governments as members. >> Yes, yes, absolutely. >> You will see industry leading stakeholders and practitioners. The whole idea of the body is not to create new policy or reinvent the wheel. We're getting policy, we're receiving regulation. So, how do we put this in practice? Where are the success stories? How can we show the industry as a whole? Governments across jurisdictions to align around their spacing. >> So a melting pot of people to get a conversation going. >> Right. >> To start shaping an agenda or just start talking? >> So, we're talking to governments at premier and cabinet level. We're talking to boardrooms of banks. We're talking to think of your top 40 leaders in blockchain and crypto. We're talking to all of them and engaging with them. >> And, what's the vision of the outcome that you can envision in your mind? What is that outcome for this group? What do you hope to accomplish? What is the end result, if you can kind of assume things go in a good way, what happens? >> I think this is a unifying voice for leadership in the industry to discuss what the outside, outside of crypto world that is, and really bridge that gap between those who are within and understand natively and those who need to be brought in to be able to interact with this and really grow all of this industry. >> And, promote the role models. >> And, exactly that. Exactly that. To bring the best to the front. And, really show that there is actually serious opportunity, serious business. This is not just a series of hackers or whatever nefarious activity these people casually may think the block chain industry is. This is something very serious and very real. And, we want to be a voice for that. >> Awesome. And, you guys had some other news on the fundraising front. >> Industry first. >> You guys are raising some money, you're doing a private sale, and new gear as much as you can, it's pretty invested, so, I think you can promote it. >> I will say with a caveat as you say, it's pertinent to investors only, and we have not completed our discussions with our legal counsel. Having said that, we are taking the model of a traditional securities exchange membership, seats on an exchange, which can be purchased, which have rights attached, which are a titled asset separately from equity of the exchange, for example, separately from a utility token as you would have seen with many other exchanges. This is something that we feel is a very unique model. We are very excited to be able to launch this, and come to market first with this concept. Which again, is blending the best of the old and new. We're taking tokenization, we're taking a concept that have existed in the previous markets and previous worlds, and blending them together for something that is somewhat unique and wholly new in this application. >> Well, I hope you guys raise a lot of money. We need more harmony between regulating and government entities to bring the whole world together. And, certainly from the money-making standpoint, what the liquidity and exchanges can provide as the world starts to understand where the groove swing is and where those swim lanes are, especially with security tokens. >> You bet, you bet. And, the success is going to be measured in ability to scale sustainably. And, we want to demonstrate that with this model. >> We need some leadership there. So, good luck. Best of luck. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you, thank you. >> We are here live in Toronto, Canada for the Blockchain Futurists Conference. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Describing the single millers, talking to the most important people, the hottest stories. Here are the most colorful people, people traveling around the world sharing that insights with you. Stay with us for more day coverage here. The first day of two day coverage of Blockchain Futurists. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> Live, from Toronto Canada, it's the CUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by the CUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back. This is the CUBE's exclusive coverage here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference, we're here all week. Yesterday we were at the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit put on by DigitalBits and the community, here is the big show around thought leadership around the future of blockchain and where it's going. Certainly token economics is the hottest thing with blockchain, although the markets are down the market is not down when it comes to building things. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, here with CUBE alumni and special guest Hartej Sawhney who is the founder of Hosho doing a lot of work on security space and they have a conference coming up that the CUBE will be broadcasting live at, HoshoCon this coming fall, it's in October I believe, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Always great to see you man. >> What's the date of the event, real quick, what's the date on your event? >> It's October 9th to the 11th, Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, we rented out the entire property, we want everyone only to bump into the people that we're inviting and they're coming. And the focus is blockchain security. We attend over 130 conferences a year, and there's never enough conversation about blockchain security, so we figured, y'know, Defcon is still pure cybersecurity, Devcon from Ethereum is more for Ethereum developers only, and every other conference is more of a traditional blockchain conference with ICO pitch competitions. We figured we're not going to do that, and we're going to try to combine the worlds, a Defcon meets Devcon vibe, and have hackers welcome, have white hat hackers host a bug bounty, invite bright minds in the space like Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert, the founder of the Trezor wallet, RSA, y'know we've even invited everyone from our competitors to everyone in the media, to everyone that are leading the blockchain whole space. >> That's the way to run an event with community, congratulations. Mark your calendar we've got HoshoCon coming up in October. Hartej, I want to ask you, I know Dave wants to ask you your trip around the world kind of questions, but I want to get your take on something we're seeing emerging, and I know you've been talking about, I want to get your thoughts and reaction and vision on: we're starting to see the world, the losers go out of the market, and certainly prices are down on the coins, and the coins are a lot of tokens out there, >> Too many damn tokens! (laughing) >> The losers are the only ones who borrowed money to buy bitcoin. >> (laughs) Someone shorted bitcoin. >> That's it. >> But there's now an emphasis on builders and there's always been an entrepreneurial market here, alpha entrepreneurs are coming into the space you're starting to see engineers really building great stuff, there's an emphasis on builders, not just the quick hit ponies. >> Yep. >> So your thoughts on that trend. >> It's during the down-market that you can really focus on building real businesses that solve problems, that have some sort of foresight into how they're going to make real money with a product that's built and tested, and maybe even enterprise grade. And I also think that the future of fundraising is going to be security tokens, and we don't really have a viable security exchange available yet, but giving away actual equity in your business through a security token is something very exciting for sophisticated investors to participate in this future tokenized economy. >> But you're talking about real equity, not just percentage of coin. >> Yeah, y'know, actual equity in the business, but in the form of a security token. I think that's the future of fundraising to some extent. >> Is that a dual sort of vector, two vectors there, one is the value of the token itself and the equity that you get, right? >> Correct, I mean you're basically getting equity in the company, securitized in token form, and then maybe a platform like Securitize or Polymath, the security exchanges that are coming out, will list them. And so I think during the down-markets, when prices are down, again I said before the joke but it's also the truth: the only people losing in this market are the ones who borrowed to buy bitcoin. The people who believe in the technology remain to ignore the price more or less. And if you're focused on building a company this is the time to focus on building a real business. A lot of times in an up-market you think you see a business opportunity just because of the amount of money surely available to be thrown at any project, you can ICO just about any idea and get a couple a million dollars to work on it, not as easy during a down-market so you're starting to take a step back, and ask yourself questions like how do we hit $20,000 of monthly recurring revenue? And that shouldn't be such a crazy thing to ask. When you go to Silicon Valley, unless you're two-time exited, or went to Stanford, or you were an early employee at Facebook, you're not getting your first million dollar check for 15 or 20 percent of your business, even, until you make 20, 25K monthly recurring revenue. I say this on stage at a lot of my keynotes, and I feel like some people glaze their eyes over like, "obviously I know that", the majority are running an ICO where they are nowhere close to making 20K monthly recurring and when you say what's your project they go, "well, our latest traction is that we've closed about "1.5 million in our private pre-sale." That's not traction, you don't have a product built. You raised money. >> And that's a dotcom bubble dynamic where the milestone of fundraising was the traction and that really had nothing to do with building a viable business. And the benefit of blockchain is to do things differently, but achieve the same outcome, either more efficient or faster, in a new way, whether it's starting a company or achieving success. >> Yep, but at the same time, blockchain technology is relatively immature for some products to go, at least for the Fortune 500 today, for them to take a blockchain product out of R&D to the mainstream isn't going to happen right now. Right now the Fortune 500 is investing into blockchain tech but it's in R&D, and they're quickly training their employees to understand what is a smart contract?, who is Nick Szabo?, when did he come up with this word smart contracts? I was just privy to seeing some training information for multiple Fortune 500 companies training their employees on what are smart contracts. Stuff that we read four or five years ago from Nick Szabo's essays is now hitting what I would consider the mainstream, which is mid-level talent, VP-level talent at Fortune 500 companies, who know that this is the next wave. And so when we're thinking about fundraising it's the companies who raise enough money are going to be able to survive the storm, right? In this down-market, if you raised enough money in your ICO, for this vision that you have that's going to be revolutionary, a lot of times I read an ICO's white paper and all I can think is well I hope this happens, because if it does that's crazy. But the question is, did they raise enough money to survive? So that's kind of another reason why people are raising more money than they need. Do people need $100 million to do the project? I don't know. >> It's an arm's race. >> But they need to last 10 years to make this vision come true. >> Hey, so, I want to ask you about your whirlwind tour. And I want to ask in the context of something we've talked about before. You've mentioned on the CUBE that Solidity, very complex, there's a lot of bugs and a lot of security flaws as a result in some of the code. A lot of the code. You're seeing people now try to develop tooling to open up blockchain development to Java programmers, for example, which probably exacerbates the problem. So, in that context, what are you seeing around the world, what are you seeing in terms of the awareness of that problem, and how are you helping solve it? >> So, starting with Fortune 500 companies, they have floors on floors around the world full of Java engineers. Full Stack Engineers who, of course, know Java, they know C#, and they're prepared to build in this language. And so this is why I think IBM's Hyperledger went in that direction. This is why even some people have taken the Ethereum virtual machine and tried to completely rebuild it and rewrite it into functional programming languages like Clojure and Scala. Just so it's more accessible and you can do more with the functional programming language. Very few lines of code are equivalent to hundreds of lines of code in linear languages, and in functional programming languages things are concurrent and linear and you're able to build large-scale enterprise-grade solutions with very small lines of code. So I'm personally excited, I think, about seeing different types of blockchains cater more towards Fortune 500 companies being able to take advantage, right off the bat, of rooms full of Java engineers. The turn to teaching of Solidity, it's been difficult, at least from the cybersecurity perspective we're not looking for someone who's a software engineer who can teach themselves Solidity really fast. We're looking for a cybersecurity, QA-minded, quality-assurance mindset, someone who has an OPSEC mindset to learn Solidity and then audit code with the cybersecurity mindset. And we've found that to be easier than an engineer who knows Java to learn Solidity. Education is hard, we have a global shortage of qualified engineers in this space. >> So cybersecurity is a good cross-over bridge to Solidity. Skills matters. >> If you're in cybersecurity and you're a full sec engineer you can learn just about any language like anyone else. >> The key is to start at the core. >> The key is to have a QA mindset, to have the mindset of actually doing quality assurance, on code and finding vulnerabilities. >> Not as an afterthought, but as a fundamental component of the development process. >> I could be a good engineer and make an app like Angry Birds, upload it, and even before uploading it I'll get it audited by some third party professional, and once it's uploaded I can fix the bugs as we go and release another version. Most smart contracts that have money behind them are written to be irreversible. So if they get hacked, money gets stolen. >> Yeah, that's real. >> And so the mindset is shifting because of this space. >> Alright, so on your tour, paint a picture, what did you see? >> First of all, how many cities, how long? Give us the stats. >> I just did about 80 days and I hit 10 countries. Most of it was between Europe and Asia. I'll start with saying that, right now, there's a race amongst smaller nations, like Malta, Bermuda, Belarus, Panama, the island nations, where they're racing to say that "we have clarity on regulation when it comes to "the blockchain cryptocurrency industries," and this is a big deal, I'd say, mainly for cryptocurrency exchanges, that are fleeing and navigating global regulation. Like in India, Unocoin's bank has been shutdown by the RBI. And they're going up against the RBI and the central government of India because, as an exchange, their banks have been shut down. And they're being forced to navigate waters and unique waves around the world globally. You have people like the world's biggest exchange, at least by volume today is Binance. Binance has relocated 100 people to the island of Malta. For a small island nation that's still technically a part of the European Union, they've made significant progress on bringing clarity on what is legal and what is not, eventually they're saying they want to have a crypto-bank, they want to help you go from IPO to ICO from the Maltese stock exchange. Similarly also Gibraltar, and there's a law firm out there, Hassans, which is like the best law firm in Gibraltar, and they have really led the way on helping the regulators in Gibraltar bring clarity. Both Gibraltar and Malta, what's similar between them is they've been home to online gambling companies. So a lot of online casinos have been in both of their markets. >> They understand. >> They've been very innovative, in many different ways. And so even conversations with the regulators in both Malta and Gibraltar, you can hear their maturity, they understand what a smart contract is. They understand how important it is to have a smart contract audited. They already understand that every exchange in their jurisdiction has to go through regular penetration testing. That if this exchange changes its code that the code opens it up to vulnerabilities, and is the exchange going through penetration testing? So the smaller nations are moving fast. >> But they're operationalizing it faster, and it's the opportunity for them is the upside. >> My only fear is that they're still small nations, and maybe not what they want to hear but it's the truth. Operating in larger nations like the United States, Canada, Germany, even Japan, Korea, we need to see clarity in much larger nations and I think that's something that's exciting that's going to happen possibly after we have the blueprint laid out by places like Malta and Gibraltar and Bermuda. >> And what's the Wild West look like, or Wild East if you will in Asia, a lot of activity, it's a free-for-all, but there's so much energy both on the money-making side and on the capital formation side and the entrepreneurial side. Lay that out, what's that look like? >> By far the most exciting thing in Asia was Korea, Seoul, out of all the Asian tiger countries today, in August 2018, Seoul, Korea has a lot of blockchain action going on right now. It feels like you're in the future, there's actually physical buildings that say Blockchain Academy, and Blockchain Building and Bitcoin Labs, you feel like you're in 2028! (laughs) And today it's 2018. You have a lot of syndication going on, some of it illegal, it's illegal if you give a guarantee to the investor you're going to see some sort of return, as a guarantee. It's not illegal if you're putting together accredited investors who are willing to do KYC and AML and be interested in investing a couple of hundred ETH in a project. So, I would say today a lot of ICOs are flocking to Korea to do a quick fundraising round because a lot of successful syndication is happening there. Second to Korea, I would say, is a battle between Singapore and Hong Kong. They're both very interesting, It's the one place where you can find people who speak English, but also all four of the languages of the tiger nations: Japanese, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, all in one place in Hong Kong and Singapore. But Singapore, you still can't get a bank account as an ICO. So they're bringing clarity on regulation and saying you can come here and you can get a lawyer and you can incorporate, but an ICO still has trouble getting a bank account. Hong Kong is simply closer in proximity to China, and China has a lot of ICOs that cannot raise money from Chinese citizens. So they can raise from anybody that's not Chinese, and they don't even have a white paper, a website, or even anybody in-house that can speak English. So they're lacking English materials, English websites, and people in their company that can communicate with the rest of the world in other languages other than Mandarin or Cantonese. And that's a problem that can be solved and bridges need to be built. People are looking in China for people to build that bridge, there's a lot of action going on in Hong Kong for that reason since even though technically it's a part of China it's still not a part of China, it's a tricky gray line. >> Right, in Japan a lot going on but it's still, it's Japan, it's kind of insulated. >> The Japanese government hasn't provided clarity on regulation yet. Just like in India we're waiting for September 11th for some clarity on regulation, same way in Japan, I don't know the exact date but we don't have enough clarity on regulation. I'm seeing good projects pop up in Korea, we're even doing some audits for some projects out of Japan, but we see them at other conferences outside of Japan as well. Coming up in Singapore is consensus, I'm hoping that Singapore will turn into a better place for quality conferences, but I'm not seeing a lot of quality action out of Singapore itself. Y'know, who's based in Singapore? Lots of family funds, lots of new exchanges, lots of big crypto advisory funds have offices there, but core ICOs, there was still a higher number of them in Korea, even in Japan, even. I'm not sure about the comparison between Japan and Singapore, but there is definitely a lot more in Korea. >> What about Switzerland, do you have any visibility there? Did you visit Switzerland? >> I was Zug, I was in Crypto Valley, visited Crypto Valley labs... >> What feels best for you? >> I don't know, Mother Earth! (laughs) >> All of the above. >> The point of bitcoin is for us to start being able to treat this earth as one, and as you navigate through the crypto circuit one thing as that is becoming more visible is the power of China partnering up with the Middle East and building a One Belt, One Road initiative. I feel like One Belt, One Road ties right into the future of crypto, and it's opening up the power of markets like the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore. >> What Gabriel's doing in the Caribbean with Barbados. >> Gabriel from Bit, yeah. >> Yeah, Bit, he's bringing them all together. >> Yeah, I mean the island nations are open arms to companies, and I think they will attract a lot of American companies for sure. >> So you're seeing certainly more, in some pockets, more advanced regulatory climates, outside of the United States, and the talent pool is substantial. >> So then, when it comes to talent pools, I believe it was in global commits for the language of Python, China is just on the verge of surpassing the United States, and there's a lot of just global breakthroughs happening, there's a large number of Full Stack engineers at a very high level in countries like China, India, Ukraine. These are three countries that I think are outliers in that a Full Stack Engineer, at the highest level in a country like India or Ukraine for example, would cost a company between $2,000 to $5,000 a month, to employ full time, in a country where they likely won't take stock to work for your company. >> Fifteen years ago those countries were outsource, "hey, outsource some cheap labor," no, now they're product teams or engineers, they're really building value. >> They're building their own things, in-house. >> And the power of new markets are opening up as you said, this is huge, huge. OK, Hartej, thanks so much for coming on, I know you got to go, you got your event October 9th to 11th in Las Vegas, Blockchain Security Conference. >> The CUBE will be there. >> I look forward to having you there. >> You guys are the leader in Blockchain security, congratulations, hosho.io, check it out. Hosho.io, October 9th, mark your calendars. The CUBE, we are live here in Toronto, for the Blockchain Futurist Conference, with our good friend, CUBE alumni Hartej. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, be right back with more live coverage from the Untraceable event here in Toronto, after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's TheCUBE. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017 brought to you by Samsung. (techno music) >> Hello there and welcome to the special exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference 2017 here at the Moscone West in San Francisco, TheCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and co-host of TheCUBE. We're here with Leah Hunter: author, thought leader, covers technology design, women in tech, a variety of things author at O'Reilly's Safari Books, Fast Company, Forbes, among a lot of other things you've done. Welcome to TheCUBE conversation here at the Samsung Developer Conference. >> Thank you. I appreciate it. >> So, Samsung obviously is tied with Google. We saw Google onstage. The story we're seeing here emerging is the edge of the network of mobile devices. That means the humans involved. That means the consumer and the technology are intersecting. This has been a big part of TheCUBE coverage, we've been looking at this for a while. We were just in China talking with Alibaba Cloud and the design ethos culture. Not just creating user experience, that's been out for a while, but it's not about speeds and feeds anymore. It's about enabling human interactions, we're seeing some bad stuff now. The fake news, all that bad behavior, but now, all the data's out there. This is a big part of the developer design now coming forward. What's your thoughts? >> Well, there are two ways that I see that playing out really powerfully and that it can play out powerfully. One, ethnography and social science is getting embedded into what people are creating now and I'm thrilled to see that, because we're at the beginning of a lot of new technologies, augmented reality is one of my specializations, and we're, you know, sure, it's been around for 60 years if you're counting that way, 15 really deeply, but we're just at the cusp of it really taking hold for consumers. And there's this opportunity for anyone developing AR specifically to build social science ethnography user research into their team to create things in a way that is, like, start as you mean to go on. We can be wise about what our future world looks like. And the second thing is around art. You know, when I came here and I sat down, you mentioned at Alibaba there had just been a conversation about art. Well, in my latest book I interviewed someone who is an artist. His name is Alex Mayhew, he did a bunch of work with Peter Gabriel, he's a digital artist who just happened to slide into technology. And because his background is in something entirely different, he approaches AR in a really different way. He just did something for an art museum in Ontario that's really fantastic and worth checking out. You can actually look up the exhibit. It's called ReBlink. I'm going to write about it, but it's there now. >> Well, you've been covering technology many ways, now you're onto AR, and also you're seeing the front range if you will of these new concepts. But before you get it there, define what ethnography is for the folks that might not know what it is. (laughs) >> Thank you. I forget, okay, so I define ethnography as kind of like seeing the world like a five year old. There's an author that I love, her name is Keri Smith. She writes children's books. I found the first copy of this at the Teat Museum. It's called How to be a Life Artist. But her books are all about close observation, collecting everything, paying attention to the world, and finding everything interesting. Being curious in the same way you do when you're a five year old. Well, that's essentially what an ethnographer does in a business context. They observe, they interview people, they go around and collect data the same way that anyone who's on the data side is doing it with numbers. They do it with quotes and observation and pictures and then aggregate that into a story. >> That brings up a great conversation we're seeing here at the Samsung conference as a trend, a mega trend if you will, and that is the blending of analog and digital. Or, they say, physical to digital. Whatever they want to call it. Internet of things is the tech buzzword, >> (Leah) Yeah >> Internet of things being the senses on devices, or wearables, or things of that nature. That is defined as the edge of the network. This is the big wave that's forcing things to be different at the tech level. So this is where this blending comes in. It's the consumerization of tech. This is a big part of these consumer companies who have to kind of get their act together on cloud computing, and a lot of tech detail. So it's coming down from the edge, the infrastructures being redefined, or replatformed as we say. How do you view that, and what does your data show for you around how companies are reacting, what are the consumer expectations? >> Well, I'm going to speak to what I'm seeing in the world because I approach the world like an ethnographer. I wander around, and I collect interesting bits of things, kind of like a magpie. >> (John) Yeah. >> One thing that I saw this week, or I saw two things that were very interesting. I was just in New York, and I walked past an area where it was branded Amazon, but it kind of looked like a carnival. And I was like, what is going on here? And basically, Amazon is doing pop-ups, I believe they said in 18 cities, they just started in New York, but it's a pop-up where you can text in, and you can buy an item on Amazon that you can't get anywhere else. In this instance it was a Nintendo. You go and you pick it up in this physical space that kind of operates like a carnival and has circusy lights and beautiful trucks and whatever. But I thought that that was the coolest blend, and they also gave me their marketing materials that kind of looked like a ticket to a carnival. But I liked that, because it was a new way a digital focused company is operating in the physical world, to your point. It's a new way of blending those. And Amazon doesn't necessarily have to do it. It's just smart marketing. But it also shows the way that companies are pushing from the internet into the physical world. Now that's also happening in reverse. There's a company I really like called Shimmy that basically uses Kinect sensors to measure your body and make custom-made swimsuits for women. They're using that digital information and they're sort of, like, pushing it, so, yeah. >> Yeah, this is a big thing, I mean, this is about reimagining the future. And I think developers, this is a developer conference, so they tried out all the shiny new toys, Bixby, which is personalization now, IOT, which is kind of a geeky message, but ultimately the developers and the ecosystem partners of Samsung have to create the future together. So the question for you is around how you see the ecosystems developing. I see developers learning more about the real world. Less being behind the wall, if you will. Being the super geeks coding away. You're seeing developers on the front lines. And I think that's super important. I do want to get it noted here that you got a book coming out. >> Yes. >> So tell us what you're working on, cause it's going to ship in December? >> Yeah, I... >> What is the book about? I mean, obviously it's chroniclizing this new wave. What is the book about? Tell us a little bit about the book you're writing. >> So I wrote a book, my last book was about industrial augmented reality specifically, and it was sponsored by PTC, so you can actually go and find it for free. They wanted something that would work around industrial AR, and I wrote it in editorial independence so it is truly my perspective, but what was interesting about that at the time I wrote it, I discovered industrial AR was the most powerful place to play, because there were real world examples of AR actually helping people. >> John: Yeah. >> Now, I've broadened that look to see okay, Goldman Sachs said that there's going to be all this growth. Are the areas that they're looking at, things like education, real estate, you know, construction, is there actually growth there? So it's a broad look at a AR. And it's on O'Reilly's Safari Books. >> John: Well, that's interesting. One of the things that's interesting, you know, I've seen many waves myself, I've been through a bunch of cycles. It used to be the consumers that would lead the trends. But you're bringing up an interesting point around AI, augmented reality, even virtual reality. The innovations coming from the enterprise side. So, industrial IOT is really hot right now cause people are connecting physical plant and equipment. You see drones and it's mostly about industrial, AR's industrial because the use cases are so obvious. >> That's right. >> Not necessarily the consumer side has it yet. So it's almost flipped the entire world around. >> But, with, you know, Pokemon Go, that did sort of give consumers the scent, a scent of, okay, this is what it is you know, with AR kit, it hasn't completely lived up to our expectations, but there has been a flurry of activity around people experimenting to see how it can be applied in a consumer way. And, frankly, you know, there are people like DHL who are starting to roll it out in a way that is somewhere between industrial use and consumer in a broad way. So it's moving there. It is nowhere near ready for it yet. >> Leah Hunter here. A thought leader, writer, author, and a new book coming out. I'll give you the final word. What are you up to? What are you going to do after this event? What's next for you? What's the next couple months look like? Obviously, you've got to jam hard on the book, get that done, what else you working on? >> (laughs) I'm an interesting person to ask that question. I produce a television show called Created Here. I'm flying to Austin after this to interview artists and musicians and shoot our next episode of the show. Then we're going to LA and then New York. >> And where are you based out of? >> Me? >> Yeah. >> San Francisco, New York, a little bit Paris, and some New Orleans. >> You're on the plane a lot. >> I am. I like my life. >> Well, you've got a great life, and obviously great work you're doing. Come by TheCUBE studio in Palo Alto, give us an update on what your findings are as you go get that new perspective of art, artistry, artisans are really going to be the craft, we believe that TheCUBE will be the future of intersecting with technology. More exclusive coverage here in Moscone West in San Francisco, this is the Cube's coverage of Samsung Developer Conference. We'll be right back with more coverage after this short break.