>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas, it's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path >>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube. We are here with UI path at forward for I'm Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante and a lovely setting at the Bellagio. We're going to be talking about automation from the CFO's perspective. Our next guest is our jet guard group financial officer at landmark group, or just welcome to the program. >>Thank you so much. Thank >>You. Before we dig into your transformation strategy and how automation is a key to that, help the audience understand a little bit about landmark. >>Absolutely. So landmark is one of the largest, uh, non-food primarily retailer in the middle east and Asia, India, and now increasingly in Southeast Asia. So we've got about 50 brands, uh, more than half of them, which are homegrown our own brands and some franchise brands. So about 2,200 stores, uh, across 20 countries, 55,000 employees. Um, so 30 million square feet of retail space >>They company. When was the company founded, >>Uh, 48 years ago, >>Legacy institution you were mentioning before we went live that you guys have been working with UI path since 2017. So talk to me about that legacy institution, embracing cloud digital transformation and automation as a, from a visionary strategic perspective. >>Yeah. So look, I mean, you know, you get so many technologies that are being thrown at you. So I would say you have packed or robotic process automation was just another one like that. So I wouldn't say it was like part of a grand strategy. You know, it comes as it looks like, Hey, this is cool. You know, in the, in the back office, when somebody showed me first 10 desks with nobody sitting on them, it's kind of spooky. So he said, Hey, this, this looks very interesting. So it started off like that, but then it has just grown because we've stayed with it. So we've amongst things in the early part of your parts customers and, and it's been phenomenal, you know, what, uh, what we're able to do with, uh, with, uh, robotic process automation. Uh, I mean, you know, I've been in this industry with my past employers, like Proctor and gamble and Cadbury, Schweppes, and all, and essentially we used to follow the part of, you know, you eliminate all the non-value add you, then try and automate whatever your ERP system, then all allowed you to automate. >>Then what's left, you consolidate, and then you find the right shore, right. It can be offshore or wherever. So that was the sequence. But I think a lot could not be automated because there are huge gaps in the systems that are being offered and you have a mosaic of systems, every company will have. Right. Um, and then we would end up doing lot more offshore or, you know, other kinds of tactics, but then once RPA showed up on the scene, it's suddenly disrupted everything because now whatever the systems can do, or when you have to move data from one system to the other or make sense out of it, that's where this technology sits. And so that's, so that's very, I, you know, we've now got a pretty large, uh, robotic process automation practice. And, and, you know, we are touching started with finance and now we are pretty much enterprise wide. So all the, >>These technologies are coming together, automation, RPA, cloud AI, they're all sort of converging. And as a retailer, I'm curious as to what your cloud strategy is and how that fits and all, there's always a lot of sensitivity from retailers that don't want to be on Amazon, maybe some do. And they say, Hey, we've, we've we compete in other ways, what's your posture in that? >>So we've also been an early adopter of cloud, both. If I talk within the UI path thing, we were, I think the first ones to put it on the cloud, because we just saw, even before you are part, uh, we saw how people could tamper with it, you know, attended robots, you know, on the desktop one. So we went on the cloud and that was good, uh, way back. But overall, the company also has a very pro you know, Val defined cloud strategy. So we are, you know, pretty much all a large part of our systems are on the cloud with Azure. >>Yeah. So, which makes sense, right. As a retailer, go, go with Azure, plus somebody, Microsoft, you know, X, such a lot of Microsoft expertise out there that you can leverage. And I got to ask you because everybody's freaked out on wall street about power automate, you know, competing with UI path. And I've told people they kind of different parts of the spectrum, but I've talked to a lot of customers this week. So yeah, we use both. We use UI path for end-to-end automation. We use power automate for a lot of our personal productivity stuff. How do you guys, do you use, uh, the power automate? How do you see those two? Yeah, >>No, I think, look, it's inevitable. A lot of technologies will keep evolving. I think Microsoft is a fantastic company. I mean, the way they perfected teams right in time, you know, and pretty, always hit, uh, a year before COVID hit teams was not ready, you know? So I think I know power automate is good. We use it, but not as you know, it's not ready for enterprise wide. So I think more, I'm not an expert in power automate yet. Um, you know, what, it kind of seemed more like when it's linked to the office automation versus linking major enterprise wide or >>Which is really where you're headed. Yeah. Talk about the results that you've seen, the higher you're measuring the return and the whole business case. When you evaluate it as CFO, >>See it being a CFO, I wear two hats. Right. I'm trying to help digital transformation. Although I must say I'm not the only one our company has. Every function is these days talking digital. Right. Because it's almost like table stakes. Yeah. Uh, you, you can't be in business a leader and we are like a leader in all the markets we are, and there's no choice, but to be fully digital. Right. Uh, but being a CFO absolutely. You know, you do look at the hard dollars. Right. Um, and initially when you're pushing any technology to any functional head or your colleague or the CEO or the board, they do want to see the dollars because a lot of softwares talk about the soft benefits. Um, I think they gotta pay for themselves. So I think it's like, yes, if I can get the hard dollars and then I can demonstrate softer benefits, whether it is the quality of work, less errors, better compliance, right. >>Or I think employee, uh, work work-life balance, right. I mean, in, in, uh, we are, uh, in a growing company we've been growing for the last four decades and there's a constant struggle to help colleagues maintain better work life balance. So I think once the basic return is off the table, everyone's talking about the quality of work enabling. And I think now we've, we are proudly talking, you know, that, Hey, we've got a lot of people, um, we've hired them. But what we are using of them is their fingers, their eyes, ears, and that's about it. Can we now get them to use their brain? So it's like, Hey, it's a freebie. You got so many people let's start using the gray matter. And that's, I think what this technology does, it takes away the Gronk and you can then tell them, Hey, analyze the data, look at it, better business outcomes. And I think that's where the real value is. >>That is, so we've heard a lot about time saved hours saved. That's kind of the key, a key metric. And you look at that as hard dollars. How, how do you translate that to the income statement? >>So, so let's put it, uh, you know, I was looking at applied science, applied materials presentation, and they had a 150,000 hours saved. Uh, I just did our math. I mean, so we've so far saved 342,000 hours per annum removed out of the system. Right. But I would say not all I can say, I took them to the bottom line. So probably 70% of that, because the rest is probably gone back to people doing more value added stuff. >>So how does it hit the income statement? Is it hit it as new revenue or cost savings or savings reduction in >>Yeah. Or are you don't hire as many as you needed to? Uh, >>Yes. That's the missing link. Yeah. Okay. Absolutely. Is I was going to need to hire or what 1,100 people hire 10 or whatever it is. Okay. Now I'm sorry. Does that, is that, does that get into a debate? Like, cause I can see a lot of people, if we don't do this, we're going to, you know, and then as a CFO, you might say let's defend that a little bit. >>Seek cost avoidance is always debated. Yep. And that's why I said, as long as you can prove that the hard dollars taken to the bottom line are visible and you can put your finger on them, then people become more comfortable saying, okay, as long as you know, I've got my payback, I've got something I can, you know, make sure that my cost line is not going up because it's very easy to do, you know, kind of say, Hey look, all this soft benefits and now your cost has also gone up. So I think once the, the, the hard dollars that you can bank are out of the way, then you can talk about costs avoided, and then you can talk about the softer benefits. Are there, there is no doubt because you try and what we do is we tell people if they're in a cell, okay, we'll shut, shut it down. >>I say, Hey, wait, well, right then, you know, but so you have four years of data on this, so you can prove it. And by the way, soft dollars are where the real money is. I don't mean to denigrate that, but I get into a lot of discussions with CFO's like, okay, show me the hard dollars first and then the hard, the soft dollars or telephone numbers. Yeah. >>Yeah. I think I look at it as an inverted pyramid. Yeah. Where you start with the cost saved, which is the smaller part of the pyramid. And then you get speed, right. Because speed is actually a big thing, which is very difficult to measure. Right? I mean, I'll give you an example in none of our largest markets, right. In the middle of COVID, they announced all products that are being imported, which is for us about 80,000 of them, um, uh, need to have a whole bunch of compliance forms on the government portal, import certifications. And you got like a month to do all that work. So now you'll get an army of 20, 30 people train them. We did nothing. We built the barns and we were ready ahead of competition. And I think, and, and life continues. Now the supply chain officer will sign on the dotted line for you saying he would have had to hire 30 people. And he, it's not easy to hire suddenly, but we were compliant and, and now that's cost avoided. But I would say a big business benefit because we were the first ones to have all our products compliant with the market requirements. That's a >>Great example. >>I think about some of the IDC data that was, did you see that that was presented this morning, looking at, you know, the positive outlook as, as RPA being a jobs creator over time. Talk to me a little bit about how you've navigated that through the organization and even done upskilling of some of those folks so that they're not losing, but they're gaining. >>I think there is, you know, you have to take all these projections with a pinch of salt, you know, I mean, saying you will, the world will save $150 billion and all, I mean, if you add all the soft dollars. Yes. But in reality, you know, I lose joke about it. If you take all the technology initiatives in a company and you add all the MPVs and that they have submitted, that would be larger than the market cap of the company. >>It's true. All the projects add up to more value. >>I think, I think, you know, we don't get carried away by these major projections, but I think some of it is true. I mean, you know, I kind of talk about the Luddites, right? I mean, when the first, you know, weaving machines game in, in Northern England, near Manchester and these Luddites, they were called, they were going around breaking down these machines because they were supposed to take away jobs. Now reality is a lot of people did lose jobs who could not make the transition, could not retrain themselves. It is inevitable. It will happen. But over time I would say yes, there have been lot more employment. So I think both go hand in hand. Um, but yes, the more one can help retrain people, get them to, you know, say, Hey, you don't need to spend the rest of your life. Copy pasting and just doing data entry. Uh, you can look at the data and make sense out of it. How much >>Of that was a part of your strategic vision years ago? >>I think years ago we knew it, but it was more, let's get these, you know, simple. When you have hundreds of people in a, in a back office, how do I get them to do more work or have slate or meet my, you know, my productivity goals? I would say it starts with that. Okay. Uh, if you start, uh, deep down because I, I am, you know, I believe in technology, I knew it, it would happen that we would eventually go from, let's say, robotic process automation to intelligent process automation. Right. Which is coming for us. It's we are able to see it, you try and sell that as the lead in and people shut down >>Because they're seen by intelligent process automation. W what do you mean? And, and >>So it's look, if I've got, uh, my robots and the tech, the RP infrastructure, which is processing whole bunch of transactions right now, if I'm able to add in some machine learning or AI, or what have you on top of it, and then I can read the patterns I can, for example, you know, we, we now have built on top of all the various security in our payment systems. If you've got a bot, which then does a final check, which goes and checks the history of that particular vendor as to what is the typical payments being done to that. And then it flags, if it's V out and it stops the payment, for example, right? So, or it goes and does a whole bunch of tests. We're building constantly building tools. So that's kind of, you know, a bit more intelligent than just a simple copy paste or, or doing a transaction >>Because why that's their job or because they it's a black box. They don't know how that decision is made. Or >>I think a lot of these have been sold previously similar technologies and things that would be, you know, the next best thing since sliced water and people have lost fit. So you got to show them the money and then take them along the journey. If you go too fast and try and give this whole, you know, people are smart enough and it, it turns them off. >>It's one of the failures of the tech industry is the broken promises. I can, I can rattle many off >>Cultural shift. It is. It is. How did you help facilitate that? See, I mean, we, we took, you know, the bottoms up and top down approach, uh, you know, the top down was, uh, I have my whole leadership team and as a joke, we locked them up in the boardroom and we got them to build bonds a long ago. And we said, let each of you, you know, download your bank statement and send yourself, uh, you know, if you say any transaction above 10,000, whatever, um, send, send an email to yourself. So as simple as that, or download the electricity bill and, and send it to your wife, you know, something like that. And half of them were able to build a bot in that couple of hours. The other half looked at it, and obviously are, you know, many of them are not as tech savvy, but it helped build the kind of it's aha moment three years ago that, wow, you know, I can build a bot. Um, for some people it was like, oh, they taught these metallic 10 bots are going to walk into the room. >>I love it. The bottom who's responsible for governance. >>So we've got a, we've got a team across it and finance. Um, I mean, somehow I have kind of, you know, created the skunkworks team. The S the center of excellence sits with me. Um, uh, but overall it's a combination and they now run governance, uh, you know, 24 7, >>Uh, you know, sorry, I got to get my crypto question. I ask every CFO's, when are you going to put crypto in the balance sheet? I know I'm teasing, but what you see companies doing this? Has it ever come up in conversation? Is it sort of tongue in cheek joke? Or what do you make of the crypto? >>Yeah, I think personally I'm a big believer, uh, but not for, uh, for a company. I think the, the benefit case of a company, we are not that, you know, we have enough other face too, you know? Um, uh, I think, uh, it's a bit further out for a company to start taking balance sheet position because that's then a speculation, right? Because, so I'm a believer in the benefit of the blockchain technology. We actually did a blockchain experiment a couple of years ago, moving goods, uh, from China to Dubai and also making the payments through a blockchain to, um, so we see huge benefits. We are working with our bankers on certain other initiatives, but I think on the balance sheet sounds like speculation and use of capital. So yeah, if it brings efficiency, if it brings transparency, which is what blockchains do, uh, I think absolutely it's, it is here to stay >>Last question. And then the last 30 seconds, or so for your peers in any industry who are it was, we saw some of the stats yesterday, the amount of percentage of processes that are automateable that aren't automated. What's your advice, recommendations to peers about pulling automation into their digital transformation strategy? >>I think, um, digital transformation can be hugely aided and accelerated if you first put RPLs, because that is the layer, which goes between the humans and whatever technology is out there or whatever you keep buying. So I think because they will be in every area, new technologies coming up, it's better to put RPA first because you can then get more benefit from whatever other technologies you're bolting on. So I would say it's a predecessor to your broader digital transformation, rather than just a part of it. >>Got it. A predecessor, or just thank you for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what you're, how you're transforming landmark. Good luck in your presentation this afternoon. I'm sure a lot of folks will get some great takeaways from your talk. >>Thank you so much. It's been >>Great. Our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas UI path forward for it. We'll be right back after a break.

>> Male Voice: From around the globe, it's theCUBE covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everybody, you're watching theCUBE. And this is Dave Vellante in our continuous coverage of the Discover 2020 Virtual Experience, HPE's virtual event, theCUBE is here, theCUBE virtual. We're really excited, we got a great session here. We're going to dig deep into machine intelligence and artificial intelligence. Dr. Arti Garg is here. She's the Head of Advanced AI Solutions and Technologies at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And she's joined by Dr. Sorin Cheran, who is the Vice President of AI Strategy and Solutions Group at HPE. Folks, great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> Hi, nice to meet you, hello! >> Dr. Cheran, let's start with you. Maybe talk a little bit about your role. You've had a variety of roles and maybe what's your current situation at HPE? >> Hello! Hi, so currently at HPE, I'm driving the Artificial Intelligence Strategy and Solution group who is currently looking at how do we bring solutions across the HPE portfolio, looking at every business unit, but also on the various geos. At the same time, the team is responsible for building the strategy around the AI for the entire company. We're working closely with the field, we're working closely with the things that are facing the customers every day. And we're also working very closely with the various groups in order to make sure that whatever we build holds water for the entire company. >> Dr. Garg, maybe you could share with us your focus these days? >> Yeah, sure, so I'm also part of the AI Strategy and Solutions team under Sorin as our new vice president in that role, and what I'm focused on is really trying to understand, what are some of the emerging technologies, whether those be things like new processor architectures, or advanced software technologies that could really enhance what we can offer to our customers in terms of AI and exploring what makes sense and how do we bring them to our customers? What are the right ways to package them into solutions? >> So everybody's talking about how digital transformation has been accelerated. If you're not digital, you can't transact business. AI infused into every application. And now people are realizing, "Hey, we can't solve all the world's problems with labor." What are you seeing just in terms of AI being accelerated throughout the portfolio and your customers? >> So that's a very good idea, because we've been talking about digital transformation for some time now. And I believe most of our customers believed initially that the one thing they have is time thinking that, "Oh yes I'm going to somehow at one point apply AI "and somehow at one point "I'm going to figure out how to build the data strategy, "or how to use AI in my different line of businesses." What happened with COVID-19 and in this area is that we lost one thing: time. So I think discussed what they see in our customers is the idea of accelerating their data strategy accelerating, moving from let's say an environment where they would compute center models per data center models trying to understand how do they capture data, how they accelerate the adoption of AI within the various business units, why? Because they understand that currently the way they are actually going to the business changed completely, they need to understand how to adapt a new business model, they need to understand how to look for value pools where there are none as well. So most of our customers today, while initially they spend a lot of time in an never ending POC trying to investigate where do they want to go. Currently they do want to accelerate the application of AI models, the build of data strategies, how then they use all of this data? How do they capture the data to make sure that they look at new business models, new value pools, new customer experience and so on and so forth. So I think what they've seen in the past, let's say three to six months is that we lost time. But the shift towards an adoption of analytics, AI and data strategy is accelerated a lot, simply because customers realize that they need to get ahead of the game. >> So Dr. Garg, what if you could talk about how HPE is utilizing machine intelligence during this pandemic, maybe helping some of your customers, get ahead of it, or at least trying to track it. How are you applying AI in this context? >> So I think that Sorin sort of spoke to one of the things with adopting AI is, it's very transformational for a business so it changes how you do things. You need to actually adopt new processes to take advantage of it. So what I would say is right now we're hearing from customers who recognize that the context in which they are doing their work is completely different. And they're exploring how AI can help them really meet the challenges of those context. So one example might be how can AI and computer vision be coupled together in a way that makes it easier to reopen stores, or ensures that people are distancing appropriately in factories. So I would say that it's the beginning of these conversations as customers as businesses try to figure out how do we operate in the new reality that we have? And I think it's a pretty exciting time. And I think just to the point that Sorin just made, there's a lot of openness to new technologies that there wasn't before, because there's this willingness to change the business processes to really take advantage of any technologies. >> So Dr. Cheran, I probably should have started here but help us understand HPE's overall strategy with regard to AI. I would certainly know that you're using AI to improve IT, the InfoSite product and capability via the Nimble acquisition, et cetera, and bringing that across the portfolio. But what's the strategy for HPE? >> So, yeah, thank you. That's (laughs) a good question. So obviously you started with a couple of our acquisition in the past because obviously Nimble and then we talked a lot about our efforts to bring InfoSite across the portfolio. But currently, in the past couple of months, let's say close to a year, we've been announcing a lot of other acquisitions and we've been talking about Tuteybens, we've been talking about Scytale we've been talking about Cray, and so on, so forth, and now what we're doing at HPE is to bring all of this IP together into one place and try to help our customers within their region out. If you're looking at what, for example, what did they actually get when Cray play was not only the receiver, but we also acquire and they also have a lot of software and a lot of IP around optimization and so on and so forth. Also within our own labs, we've been investigating AI around like, for example, some learning or accelerators or a lot of other activity. So right now what we're trying to help our customers with is to understand how do they lead from the production stage, from the POC stage to the production stage. So (mumbles) what we are trying to do is we are trying to accelerate their adoption of AI. So simply starting from an optimized platform infrastructure up to the solution they are actually going to apply or to use to solve their business problems and wrapping all of that around with services either consumed on-prem as a service and so on. So practically what we want to do is we want to help our customers optimize, orchestrate and operationalize AI. Because the problem of our customers is not to start in our PLC, the problem is how do I then take everything that I've been developing or working on and then put it in production at the edge, right? And then keep it, maintaining production in order to get insights and then actually take actions that are helping the enterprise. So basically, we want to be data driven assets in cloud enable, and we want to help our customers move from POC into production. >> Or do you work with obviously a lot of data folks, companies or data driven data scientists, you are hands on practitioners in this regard. One of the challenges that I hear a lot from customers is they're trying to operationalize AI put AI into production, they have data in silos, they spend all their time, munging data, you guys have made a number of acquisitions. Not a list of which is prey, obviously map of, data specialist, my friend Kumar's company Blue Data. So what do you see as HPE's role in terms of helping companies operationalize AI. >> So I think that a big part of operationalizing AI moving away from the PLC to really integrate AI into the business processes you have and also the sort of pre existing IT infrastructure you talked about, you might already have siloed data. That's sort of something we know very well at HPE, we understand a lot of the IT that enterprises already have the incumbent IT and those systems. We also understand how to put together systems and integrated systems that include a lot of different types of computing infrastructure. So whether that being different types of servers and different types of storage, we have the ability to bring all of that together. And then we also have the software that allows you to talk to all of these different components and build applications that can be deployed in the real world in a way that's easy to maintain, and scale and grow as your AI applications will almost invariably get more complex involved, more outputs involved and more input. So one of the important things as customers try to operationalize AI is think is knowing that it's not just solving the problem you're currently solving. It's not just operationalizing the solution you have today, it's ensuring that you can continue to operationalize new things or additional capabilities in the future. >> I want to talk a little bit about AI for good. We talked about AI taking away jobs, but the reality is, when you look at the productivity data, for instance, in the United States, in Europe, it's declining and it has for the last several decades and so I guess my point is that we're not going to be able to solve some of the world problems in the coming decades without machine intelligence. I mean you think about health care, you think about feeding populations, you think about obviously paying things like pandemics, climate change, energy alternatives, et cetera, productivity is coming down. Machines are potential opportunity. So there's an automation imperative. And you feel, Dr. Cheran, the people who are sort of beyond that machines replacing human's issue? Is that's still an item or has the pandemic sort of changed that? >> So I believe it is, so it used to be a very big item, you're right. And every time we were speaking at a conference and every time you're actually looking at the features of AI, right? Two scenarios are coming to plays, right? The first one where machines are here, actually take a walk, and then the second one as you know even a darker version where terminator is coming, yes and so forth, right? So basically these are the two, is the lesser evil in the greater evil and so on and so forth. And we still see that regular thing coming over and over again. And I believe that 2019 was the year of reckoning, where people are trying to realize that not only we can actually take responsible AI, but we can actually create an AI that is trustworthy, an AI that is fair and so on and so forth. And that we also understood in 2019 it was highly debated everywhere, which part of our jobs are going to be replaced like the parts that are mundane, or that can actually be easily automated and so on and so forth. With the COVID-19 what happened is that people are starting to look at AI differently, why? Because people are starting to look at data differently. And looking at data differently, how do I actually create this core of data which is trusted, secure and so on and so forth, and they are trying to understand that if the data is trusted and secure somehow, AI will be trusted and secure as well. Now, if I actually shifted forward, as you said, and then I try to understand, for example on the manufacturing floor, how do I add more machines? Or how do I replace humans with machines simply because, I need to make sure that I am able to stay in production and so on and so forth. From their perspective, I don't believe that the view of all people are actually looking at AI from the job marketplace perspective changed a lot. The view that actually changes how AI is helping us better certain prices, how AI is helping us, for example, in health care, but the idea of AI actually taking part of the jobs or automating parts of the jobs, we are not actually past yet, even if 2018 and even more so in 2019, it was the year also where actually AI through automation replaced the number of jobs but at the same time because as I was saying the first year where AI created more jobs it's because once you're displacing in one place, they're actually creating more work more opportunities in other places as well. But still, I don't believe the feeling changed. But we realize that AI is a lot more valuable and it can actually help us through some of our darkest hours, but also allow us to get better and faster insights as well. >> Well, machines have always replaced humans and now for the first time in history doing so in a really cognitive functions in a big way. But I want to ask you guys, I'll start with Dr. Arti, a series of questions that I think underscore the impact of AI and the central role that it plays in companies digital transformations, we talk about that a lot. But the questions that I'm going to ask you, I think will hit home just in terms of some hardcore examples, and if you have others I'd love to hear them but I'm going to start with Arti. So when do you think Dr. or machines will be able to make better diagnoses than doctors? We're actually there today already? >> So I think it depends a little bit on how you define that. And I'm just going to preface this by saying both of my parents are physicians. So I have a little bit of bias in this space. But I think that humans can bring creativity in a certain type of intelligence that it's not clear to me. We even know how to model with the computer. And so diagnoses have sometimes two components. One is recognizing patterns and being able to say, "I'm going to diagnose this disease that I've seen before." I think that we are getting to the place where there are certain examples. It's just starting to happen where you might be able to take the data that you need to make a diagnosis as well understood. A machine may be able to sort of recognize those subtle patterns better. But there's another component of doing diagnosis is when it's not obvious what you're looking for. You're trying to figure out what is the actual sort of setup diseases I might be looking at. And I think that's where we don't really know how to model that type of inspiration and creativity that humans still bring to things that they do, including medical diagnoses. >> So Dr. Cheran my next question is, when do you think that owning and driving your own vehicle will become largely obsolete? >> (laughs) Well, I believe my son is six year old now. And I believe, I'm working with a lot of companies to make sure that he will not get his driving license with his ID, right? So depending who you're asking and depending the level of autonomy that you're looking at, but you just mentioned the level five most likely. So there are a lot of dates out there so some people actually say 2030. I believe that my son in most of the cities in US but also most of the cities in Europe, by the time he's 18 in let's say 2035, I'll try to make sure that I'm working with the right companies not to allow them to get the driving license. >> I'll let my next question is from maybe both of you can answer. Do you take the traditional banks will lose control of payment system? >> So that's an interesting question, because I think it's broader than an AI question, right? I think that it goes into some other emerging technologies, including distributed ledgers and sort of the more secure forms of blockchain. I think that's a challenging question to my mind, because it's bigger than the technology. It's got Economic and Policy implications that I'm not sure I can answer. >> Well, that's a great answer, 'cause I agree with you already. I think that governments and banks have a partnership. It's important partnership for social stability. But similar we've seen now, Dr. Cheran in retail, obviously the COVID-19 has affected retail in a major way, especially physical retail, do you think that large retail stores are going to go away? I mean, we've seen many in chapter 11. At this point, how much of that is machine intelligence versus just social change versus digital transformation? It's an interesting question, isn't it? >> So I think most of the... Right now the retailers are here to stay I guess for the next couple of years. But moving forward, I think their capacity of adapting to stores like to walk in stores or to stores where basically we just go in and there are no shop assistants and just you don't even need the credit card to pay you're actually being able to pay either with your face or with your phone or with your small chips and so on and so forth. So I believe currently in the next couple of years, obviously they are here to stay. Moving forward then we'll get artificial intelligence, or robotics applied everywhere in the store and so on and so forth. Most likely their capacity of adapting to the new normal, which is placing AI everywhere and optimizing the walk in through predicting when and how to guide the customers to the shop, and so on and so forth, would allow them to actually survive. I don't believe that everything is actually going to be done online, especially from the retailer perspective. Most of the... We've seen a big shift at COVID-19. But what I was reading the other day, especially in France that the counter has opened again, we've seen a very quick pickup in the retailers of people that actually visiting the stores as well. So it's going to be some very interesting five to 10 years, and then most of the companies that have adapted to the digital transformation and to the new normal I think they are here to stay. Some of them obviously are going to take sometime. >> I mean, I think it's an interesting question too that you really sort of triggering in my mind is when you think about the framework for how companies are going to come back and come out of this, it's not just digital, that's a big piece of it, like how digital businesses, can they physically distance? I mean, I don't know how sports arenas are going to be able to physically distance that's going to be interesting to see how essential is the business and if you think about the different industries that it really is quite different across those industries. And obviously, digital plays a big factor there, but maybe we could end on that your final thoughts and maybe any other other things you'd like to share with our audience? >> So I think one of the things that's interesting anytime you talk about adopting a new technology, and right now we're happening to see this sort of huge uptick in AI adoption happening right at the same time but this sort of massive shift in how we live our lives is happening and sort of an acceptance, I think that can't just go back to the way things work as you mentioned, they'll probably be continued sort of desire to maintain social distancing. I think that it's going to force us to sort of rethink why we do things the way we do now, a lot, the retail, environments that we have the transportation solutions that we have, they were adapted in many cases in a very different context, in terms of what people need to do on a day-to-day basis within their life. And then what were the sort of state of technologies available. We're sort of being thrust and forced to reckon with like, what is it I really need to do to live my life and then what are the technologies I have available to meet to answer that and I think, it's really difficult to predict right now what people will think is important about a retail experience, I wouldn't be surprised if you start to find in person retail actually be much less, technologically aided, and much more about having the ability to talk to a human being and get their opinion and maybe the tactile sense of being able to like touch new clothes, or whatever it is. And so it's really difficult I think right now to predict what things are going to look like maybe even a year or two from now from that perspective. I think that what I feel fairly confident is that people are really starting to understand and engage with new technologies, and they're going to be really open to thinking about what those new technologies enable them to do in this sort of new way of living that we're going to probably be entering pretty soon. >> Excellent! All right, Sorin, bring us home. We'll give you the last word on this topic. >> Now, so I wanted to... I agree with Arti because what these three months of staying at home and of busy shutting down allowed us to do was to actually have a very big reset. So let's say a great reset but basically we realize that all the things we've taken from granted like our freedom of movement, our technology, our interactions with each other, and also for suddenly we realize that everything needs to change. And the only one thing that we actually kept doing is interacting with each other remotely, interacting with each other with our peers in the house, and so on and so forth. But the one thing that stayed was generating data, and data was here to stay because we actually leave traces of data everywhere we go, we leave traces of data when we put our watch on where we are actually playing with our phone, or to consume digital and so on and so forth. So what these three months reinforced for me personally, but also for some of our customers was that the data is here to stay. And even if the world shut down for three months, we did not generate less data. Data was there on the contrary, in some cases, more data. So the data is the main enabler for the new normal, which is going to pick up and the data will actually allow us to understand how to increase customer experience in the new normal, most likely using AI. As I was saying at the beginning, how do I actually operate new business model? How do I find, who do I partner with? How do I actually go to market together? How do I make collaborations more secure, and so on and so forth. And finally, where do I actually find new value pools? For example, how do I actually still enjoy for having a beer in a pub, right? Because suddenly during the COVID-19, that wasn't possible. I have a very nice place around the corner, but it's actually cheaply stuff. I'm not talking about beer but in general, I mean, so the finance is different the pools of data, the pools (mumbles) actually, getting values are different as well. So data is here to stay, and the AI definitely is going to be accelerated because it needs to use data to allow us to adopt the new normal in the digital transformation. >> A lot of unknowns but certainly machines and data are going to play a big role in the coming decade. I want to thank Dr. Arti Garg and Dr. Sorin Cheran for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. Thank you for a wonderful conversation. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and the HPE 2020 Virtual Experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to our coverage here on theCUBE of Red Hat Summit 2019. We're live in Boston right now, and I'm joined by a couple of award winning professionals. And we're looking forward to hearing what their story is because it's fascinating on both fronts. And also by DeLisa Alexander who has a great job title at Red Hat. Chief People Officer. I love that title. DeLisa, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Also with us, Limor Fried who is the and founder and lead engineer of Adafruit and Saloni Garg who is an undgergrad student, third year student, at the LNM Institute of Technology. And that's in Jaipur, India. So Saloni, glad to have you with us. And Limor, a pleasure as well. >> Thank you. >> And you're all lit up. You've got things going on there, right? >> I'm glowing, we're gonna get all into that. >> We'll get into that later. First, let's talk about the award that, they're two women in open-source are our winners this year. On the community side, Limor won, on the academic side, Saloni won, so talk about the awards if you would, DeLisa. The process and really what you're trying to do with recognizing these kinds of achievements. >> Well, this is our fifth year for the Women in Open-Source Award. So after this period of time, I can tell you what we wanna do is make an impact by really fostering more diverse communities, particularly gender diverse in open-source. And so that's the whole goal. Five years into it, what we've discovered is that when you really focus on diversity and inclusion within a community, you actually can make an impact. And the thing that's so exciting this year is that our award winners are really evidence of that. >> So talk about the two categories then if you would please. You have community on one side, academics on the other. It appears to be pretty clear cut what you're hoping to achieve there by recognizing an active contributor, and then somebody who is in the wings and waiting for their moment. But go ahead and fill in a little bit about, >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Limor and Saloni too about, why are they here. >> Limor: Why am I here? >> Yes, well, really what we're trying to do is create role models for women and girls who would like to participate in technology but perhaps are not sure that that's the way that they can go. And they don't see people that are like them, so there's less a tendency to join into this type of community. So with the community award winner, we're looking at the professional who's been contributing to open-source for a period of time. And with our academic winner, we're looking to score more people who are in university to think about it. And, of course, the big idea is you'll all be looking at these women as people that will inspire you to potentially do more things with open-source and more things with technology. We've been hearing for many, many years that we definitely need to have more gender diversity in tech in general and in open-source. And Red Hat is kind of uniquely situated to focus on the open-source community, and so with our role as the open-source leader, we really feel like we need to make that commitment and to be able to foster that. >> Well, it makes perfect sense. Obviously. Great perfect sense. Saloni, if you would, let's talk first about your work. You've been involved in open-source for quite some time. I know you have a lot of really interesting projects that you're working on right now. We'll get to that in a bit, but just talk about, I guess, the attraction for you in terms of open-source and really kind of where that came from originally through your interest in stem education. >> Okay, so when I first came to college, I was really influenced to contribute to open-source by my seniors. They have already selected in programs like Google Summer of Code Outreach channel, so they actually felt empowered by open-source. So they encouraged me to join it too. I tried open-source, and I feel really, like, I'm a part of something bigger than myself. And I was helped greatly by my seniors, so I feel it's my duty to give it back to my juniors and to help them when they need it so that they can do wonders, yeah. >> Great. And Limor, for you, I know you founded the company. 100% female owned. You've got-- >> Yeah, 100% me. >> Yeah, right. 100% you. >> It's my fault. >> Right. Well, I wasn't going to blame you. I'll credit you instead. >> Yeah, that's our big thing. We wanna change. Get blame to get credit. >> Right. It's all about credit. >> More positive. >> So 100 employees? Is that right? >> 100, 150, yep. >> Okay, talk a little bit about kind of the origin, the genesis of the company and where that came from and then your connection on the open-source side. >> Well, I, yeah, so I grew up actually in Boston. So I've lived here a very long time. >> You said like a block from here. Two blocks. >> I used to live, actually, yes, in South Station nearby. I used to live by the Griffin Book line, and so Wilson has a very strong open-source community, you know. Ephesoft is here. And, yeah, that's kind of the origins of a lot of this free software and open-source software community. And when I went to school, I ended up going to MIT, and the open-source software and open-source technology is kind of part of, like, the genetics there. There's actually this thinking that you wouldn't do it. It's kind of by default. People write code, you open-source, you release it. There's a culture of collaboration. Scientists, engineers, students, researchers. All working together and sharing code. And when I was in school, so I had to take Thesis. I really didn't wanna do it, and so instead, I started building, like, MP3 players and video games. Taking all the engineering that I was studying and, like, not doing the work I was supposed to be doing. But instead, I was having fun and building cool electronic parts, and I would publish these projects online. I had, like, a MediaLab webs page, and I would publish, you know, here's all the chips and the schematics and the layout. And people sort of started coming up with the idea of open-source hardware. Let's take the philosophy of open-source software where we release the source code. But, in here, you release CAD files, firmware, layouts, 3D models. And so I did that, and I was publishing here's how you make this, like, Lite-Brite toy for Burning Man or an MP3 player or a cell phone jammer. All these fun projects, and people would end up contacting me and saying, hey, these are really cool projects. I would like to build this project myself, but unlike software where you just, like, type in, like, make, config, and compile and all that. You actually have to buy parts, you have to get these physical things. And so they said, you know, could you sell me a kit, like a box, where we'd get it and take it home and be able to build it. And I was totally like, no, I'm busy. I have to, like, not write this thesis. >> That's not what I do. >> But eventually, I did write the thesis. And then I was really stuck because I'm like, now what do I do? So I ended up selling kits. So I sold the synthesizer kits and such, and I did an art fellowship and stuff. And then, eventually, I was kind of like, this is, I was doing, you know, it's, you kind of fall into business by accident because if you knew what you were getting into, you wouldn't do it in my opinion. So I ended up sort of developing that, and that was 13 years ago. And now we have 4,000 products in the store, you know. >> 4,000 products? >> Yeah, I know. Ridiculous, right? That's a lot. >> Yeah, who's doing that inventory, right? >> Well, we have a pretty intense inventory system that I'd love to talk to you about, but it's kind of boring. >> I'll bet you do. Now, I was reading something about an circuit playground express. >> Yes. >> Is that right? So is that what this is all about is-- >> Yes! I knew you'd ask, and that's why I wore this. >> So it's a, kind of, an exploratory circuit board of-- >> Yeah! It's open-source, open-source hardware, open-source software and firmware. And we had a lot of parents and teachers and educators and camp counselors come to us and say, we wanna teach physical computing. We wanna teach coding but with physical hardware because, you know, we all, all the tier coders, right? No, I don't know. But, eventually, you're like, I'm typing on the screen. And you want to take that and you wanna make it physical. You wanna bring it out into the world where there's a wearable or a cosplay or assistive technology, or you wanna make video games, that are, like, physical video games. And the problem that teachers had were the classrooms, a lot of these classrooms, they don't have a lot of money. So they said it has to be very low-cost. It has to be durable because these kids are, like, chewing on it and stuff, which is fun. And it also has to work on any computer, even extremely old computers. 'Cause a lot of these schools, they only have a budget every seven years to buy laptops. And so this actually becomes a very difficult technological problem. How do you design something that's $20 but can teach physical computing to anybody? From kids who are not even good at typing all the way to college students who wanna implement fast 48 transforms, and so we designed this hardware. It's open-source, and it's cool 'cause people are, like, remixing it and making improvements to it. It's open-source circuit playground, and I'm wearing it. And it's glowing, and I don't know. It's fun! It's got LEDs and sensors. And you can just alligator clip to it and make projects, and we've got schools from around the world learning how to code. And I think it's a much more fun experience than just typing at a computer. >> Absolutely. Yeah, Solani, on your side of the fence, so I obviously, in your education years if you will, not that we ever stop learning, but formally right now. But you're involved, among the many projects that you've been involved with, a smart vehicle. >> Yeah, I'm working on it. >> Project, right? So tell us a little bit about that and how open-source has come into play with what you're looking at in terms of, I assume, traffic and congestion and flows and those kinds of things. >> Yeah. So what we're working on is, basically, we'll be fitting cameras and Raspberry Pis on buses, college buses. And then they'll detect, like, they'll detect lane detection and traffic signal violation and will report the assigned people. If there's any breakage of law or any breakage of traffic signals, so that's what, basically, we are working on and how open-source comes into the play is that we actually knew nothing about OpenCV and all the technology that is before all this. So I looked up some open-source projects that had already the lump sum of all this, and I got to learn a lot about how things actually work on the code-based side. So that's how open-source actually helped me to make this project. >> And, ultimately, who do you report to on that? Or how is that data gonna become actionable or, I assume it can be. >> Yeah. >> At some point, right? I mean, who's your partner in that? Or who is the agency or the body that, you know, can most benefit from that? >> Yeah, so, currently, this is an academy project, and a classmate of mine has been working with me. And we are working on a faculty member. And so, basically, we have decided to expand this project and to use it as a government project. And we, authorities we'll be reporting to whenever there's a signal or law breakage is that the traffic police department will be notifying them in case of any signal breakage. >> So if there's an uptick in speeding or red light running in Jaipur, we know who to blame. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Shouldn't have run a report. >> It's, Solani, why'd you do that to them, right? All right, ladies, if you would. And I'm gonna end with DeLisa, but I'd like to hear your thoughts about each other. Just about, as you look at the role of women in tech and the diversity that Red Hat is trying to encourage, Limor, what have you seen in Solani here over the last day, day and a half, that maybe you think will leave a lasting impression on you? >> I love Solani's energy and her passion, and I can just, she's has this emanated strength. I can just tell that nothing stops her from achieving what she wants. Like, she wants to, like, do this Raspberry Pi traffic camera. She's just gonna figure out what it takes to solve that problem. She's gonna use open-source software, hardware, whatever it takes. And she's just gonna achieve her goal. I totally sense that from her from the last few days we've been together. >> That's great. >> Thank you. >> Yeah! >> All right. Solani, your turn. For Limor. >> What I have done is just a fraction of what she has been doing. She's, like, inspiration. I look up to her, and I, also, I mean, I hope I start my own company someday. And she's really a role model and an inspiration for me. So yeah. >> Yeah, I think you've got a pretty good mentor there in that respect. And then, DeLisa, when you see young ladies like this who are, you know, their achievements are so impressive in their respects. What does that say to you about Red Hat, the direction of the program, and then the impact on young women that you're having? >> Well, the program has gotten so much more participation. So many people, 8,000 people actually voted to select our winners. And all of our finalists were so impressive. We have major contributors to open-source, and so, along with our finalists, our winners are people who are just role models. And I am just so impressed with them, and I think that every year, we're learning something different from each of the winners. And so, as they round down into a community, the things that they'll be able to mentor people on will just be exponentially increasing. And so it's really exciting. >> Fantastic. Well, thank you all. The three of you, the ladies. Congratulations on your recognition, your accomplishments. Well done. Safe travels back to New York and back to India as well, and I would look forward to hearing more about what you're up to down the road. I think this is not the last we're gonna hear from the two of you. >> Thank you for having us. >> And thank you for calling me a young lady. >> Absolutely. I mean, look at the source. Open-source, you might say. That was awful. All right, back with more Red Hat Summit 2019. We're live here on theCUBE in Boston. (gentle music)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] welcome to the special cube conversations here in Palo Alto cube studios I'm John Ferrier the founder of Silicon angle in the cube we're here with divest cargoes the founder and CEO of arcus Inc our curse com ar-are see us calm and Steve Herod General Partner at at General Catalyst VCU's funded him congratulations on your launch these guys launched on Monday a hot new product software OS for networking powering white boxes in a whole new generation of potentially cloud computing welcome to this cube conversation congratulations on your >> launch thank you John >> so today I should talk about this this >> startup when do you guys were founded let's get to the specifics date you were founded some of the people on the team and the funding and we were formally incorporated in February of 2016 we really got going in earnest in August of 2016 and have you know chosen to stay in stealth the the founding team consists of myself a gentleman by the name of Kop tell he's our CTO we also have a gentleman by the name of Derek Young he's our chief architect and our backgrounds are a combination of the semiconductor industry I spent a lot of time in the semiconductor industry most recently I was president of easy chip and we sold that company to Mellanox and Kher and Derek our networking protocol experts spent 20 plus years at places like Cisco and arguably some of the best protocol guys in the world so the three of us got together and basically saw an opportunity to to bring some of the insights and and architectural innovation you know we had in mind to the Mobius a pedigree in there some some top talent absolutely some of the things that they've done in the past from some notable yeah I mean you know some if you if you'd like some just high-level numbers we have 600 plus years of experience of deep networking expertise within the company our collective team has shipped over 400 products to production we have over 200 IETF RFC papers that have been filed by the team as well as 150 plus patents so we really can do something on the pedigree for sure yeah we absolutely focused on getting the best talent in the world because we felt that it would be a significant differentiation to be able to start from a clean sheet of paper and so really having people who have that expertise allowed us to kind of take a step back and you know reimagine what could be possible with an operating system and gave us the benefit of being able to you know choose >> best-in-class approaches so what's the >> cap the point that this all came >> together what was the guiding vision was it network os's are going to be cloud-based was it going to be more I owe t what was the some of the founding principles that really got this going because clearly we see a trend where you know Intel's been dominating we see what NVIDIA is doing competitively certainly on the GPU side you're seeing the white box has become a trend Google makes their own stuff apples big making their own silicon seeking the that's kind of a whole big scale world out there that has got a lot of hardware experience what was the catalyst for you guys when you found this kinda was the guiding principle yeah I would say there were three John and you hit you hit on a couple of them in your reference to Intel and NVIDIA with some of the innovation but if I start at the top level the market the networking market is a large market and it's also very strategic and foundational in a hyper-connected world that market is also dominated by a few people and there's essentially three vertically integrated OEM so that dominate that market and when you have that type of dominance it leads to ultimately high prices and muted innovations so we felt number one the market was going through tremendous change but at the same time it had been tightly controlled by a few people the other part of it was that there was a tremendous amount of innovation that was happening at the silicon component level coming from the semiconductor industry I was early at Broadcom very you know involved in some of the networking things that happened in the early stages of the company we saw tremendous amounts of innovation feature velocity that was happening at the silicon component level that in turn led to a lot of system hardware people coming into the market and producing systems based on this wide variety of choices for you know for the silicon but the missing link was really an operating system that would unleash all that innovation so Silicon Valley is back Steve you you know you're a VC now but you were the CTO at VMware one of the companies that actually changed how data centers operate certainly as it certainly as a pretext and cloud computing was seeing with micro services and the growth of cloud silicon's hot IT operations is certainly being decimated as we old knew it in the past everything's being automated away you need more function now there's a demand this is this penny how you see I mean you always see things are a little early as of technologist now VC what got you excited about these guys what's the what's the bottom line yeah maybe two points on that which so one silicon is is definitely become interesting again if you will in the in the Silicon Valley area and I think that's partly because cloud scale and web scale allows these environments where you can afford to put in new hardware and really take advantage of it I was a semiconductor I first austerity too so it's exciting for me to see that but um you know is the fish that it's kind of a straightforward story you know especially in a world of whether it's cloud or IOT or everything networking is you know like literally the core to all of us working going forward and the opportunity to rethink it in a new design and in software first mentality felt kind of perfect right now I think I I think device even sell the team a little short even is with all the numbers that are there kr for instance this co-founder was sort of everyone you talk to will call him mister BGP which is one of the main routing protocols in the internet so just a ridiculously deep team trying to take this on and there been a few companies trying to do something kind of like this and I think what do they say that the second Mouse gets the cheese and I think I think we've seen some things that didn't work the first time around and we can really I think improve on them and have a >> chance to make a major impact on the networking market you know just to kind of go on a tangent here for a second >> because you know as you're talking kind of my brain is kind of firing away because you know one of things I've been talking about on the cube a lot is ageism and if you look at the movement of the cloud that's brought us systems mindset back you look at all the best successes out there right now it's almost a old guys and gals but it's really systems people people who understand networking and systems because the cloud is an operating system you have an operating system for networking so you're seeing that trend certainly happened that's awesome the question I have for you device is what is the difference what's the impact of this new network OS because I'm almost envisioning if I think through my mind's eye you got servers and server list certainly big train seeing and cloud it's one resource pools one operating system and that needs to have cohesiveness and connectedness through services so is this how you guys are thinking about how are you guys think about the network os what's different about what you guys are doing with ARC OS versus what's out there today now that's a great question John so in terms of in terms of what we've done the the third piece you know of the puzzle so to speak when we were talking about our team I talked a little bit about the market opportunity I talked a little bit about the innovation that was happening at the semiconductor and systems level and said the missing link was on the OS and so as I said at the onset we had the benefit of hiring some of the best people in the world and what that gave us the opportunity was to look at the twenty plus years of development that had happened on the operating system side for networking and basically identify those things that really made sense so we had the benefit of being able to adopt what worked and then augment that with those things that were needed for a modern day networking infrastructure environment and so we set about producing a product we call it our Co s and the the characteristics of it that are unique are that its first of all its best-in-class protocols we have minimal dependency on open source protocols and the reason for that is that no serious network operator is going to put an open source networking protocol in the core of their network they're just not going to risk their business and the efficacy and performance of their network for something like that so we start with best-in-class protocols and then we captured them in a very open modular Services microservices based architecture and that allows us the flexibility and the extensibility to be able to compose it in a manner that's consistent with what the end-use case is going to be so it's designed from the onset to be very scalable and very versatile in terms of where it can be deployed we can deploy it you know in a physical environment we can deploy it visa via a container or we could deploy it in the cloud so we're agnostic to all of those use case scenarios and then in addition to that we knew that we had to make it usable it makes no sense to have the best-in-class protocols if our end customers can't use them so what we've done is we've adopted open config yang based models and we have programmable api's so in any environment people can leverage their existing tools their existing applications and they can relatively easily and efficiently integrate our Co s into their networking environment and then similarly we did the same thing on the hardware side we have something that we call D pal it's a data plane adaptation layer it's an intelligent how and what that allows us to do is be Hardware agnostic so we're indifferent to what the underlying hardware is and what we want to do is be able to take advantage of the advancements in the silicon component level as well as at the system level and be able to deploy our go S anywhere it's let's take a step back so you guys so the protocols that's awesome what's the value proposition for our Co S and who's the target audience you mentioned data centers in the past is a data center operators is it developers is it service providers who was your target customer yeah so so the the piece of the puzzle that wraps everything together is we wanted to do it at massive scale and so we have the ability to support internet scale with deep routing capabilities within our Co s and as a byproduct of that and all the other things that we've done architectural II were the world's first operating system that's been ported to the high-end Broadcom strata DNX family that product is called jericho plus in the marketplace and as a byproduct of that we can ingest a full internet routing table and as a byproduct of that we can be used in the highest end applications for network operators so performance is a key value public performance as measured by internet scale as measured by convergence times as measured by the amount of control visibility and access that we provide and by virtue of being able to solve that high-end problem it's very easy for us to come down so in terms of your specific question about what are the use cases we have active discussions in data center centric applications for the leaf and spine we have active discussions for edge applications we have active discussions going on for cloud centric applications arcus can be used anywhere who's the buyer those network operator so since we can go look a variety of personas network operator large telco that's right inner person running a killer app that's you know high mission-critical high scale is that Mike right yeah you're getting you're absolutely getting it right basically anybody that has a network and has a networking infrastructure that is consuming networking equipment is a potential customer for ours now the product has the extensibility to be used anywhere in the data center at the edge or in the cloud we're very focused on some of the use cases that are in the CDN peering and IP you know route reflector IP peering use cases great Steve I want to get your thoughts because I say I know how you invest you guys a great great firm over there you're pretty finicky on investments certainly team check pedigrees they're on the team so that's a good inside market tamp big markets what's the market here for you but how do you see this market what's the bet for you guys on the market side yeah it's pretty pretty straightforward as you look at the size of the networking market with you know three major players around here and you know a longer tail owning a small piece of Haitian giant market is a great way to get started and if you believe in the and the secular trends that are going on with innovation and hardware and the ability to take advantage of them I think we have identified a few really interesting starting use cases and web-scale companies that have a lot of cost and needs in the networking side but what I would love about the software architecture it reminds me a lot of things do have kind of just even the early virtualization pieces if you if you can take advantage of movement in advantages and hardware as they improve and really bring them into a company more quickly than before then those companies are gonna be able to have you know better economics on their networking early on so get a great layer in solve a particular use case but then the trends of being able to take advantage of new hardware and to be able to provide the data and the API is to programmatic and to manage it who one would that it's creative limp limitless opportunity because with custom silicon that has you know purpose-built protocols it's easy to put a box together and in a large data center or even boxes yeah you can imagine the vendors of the advances and the chips really love that there's a good company that can take advantage of them more quickly than others can so cloud cloud service refined certainly as a target audience here large the large clouds would love it there's an app coming in Broadcom as a customer they a partner of you guys in two parts first comes a partner so we we've ported arc OS onto multiple members of the Broadcom switching family so we have five or six of their components their networking system on chip components that we've ported to including the two highest end which is the jericho plus and you got a letter in the Broadcom buying CA and that's gonna open up IT operations to you guys and volge instead of applications and me to talk about what you just said extensibility of taking what you just said about boxes and tying applique and application performance you know what's going to see that vertically integrated and i think i think eloping yeah from from a semiconductor perspective since i spent a lot of time in the industry you know one of the challenges i had founded a high court count multi processor company and one of the challenges we always had was the software and at easy chip we had the world's highest and network processor challenge with software and i think if you take all the innovation in the silicon industry and couple it with the right software the combination of those two things opens up a vast number of opportunities and we feel that with our Co s we provide you know that software piece that's going to help people take advantage of all the great innovation that's happening you mentioned earlier open source people don't want to bring open source at the core the network yet the open source communities are growing really at an exponential rate you starting to see open source be the lingua franca for all developers especially the modern software developers wine not open sourcing the core the amino acids gotta be bulletproof you need security obviously answers there but that seems difficult to the trend on open source what's the what's the answer there on why not open source in the core yeah so we we take advantage of open source where it makes sense so we take advantage of open and onl open network Linux and we have developed our protocols that run on that environment the reason we feel that the protocols being developed in-house as opposed to leveraging things from the open source community are the internet scale multi-threading of bgp integrating things like open config yang based models into that environment right well it's not only proven but our the the the capabilities that we're able to innovate on and bring unique differentiation weren't really going back to a clean sheet of paper and so we designed it ground-up to really be optimized for the needs of today Steve your old boss Palmer rich used to talk about the harden top mmm-hmm similar here right you know one really no one's really gonna care if it works great it's under the under the harden top where you use open source as a connection point for services and opportunities to grow that similar concept yes I mean at the end of the day open source is great for certain things and for community and extensibility and for visibility and then on the flip side they look to a company that's accountable and for making sure it performs and as high quality and so I think I think that modern way for especially for the mission critical infrastructure is to have a mix of both and to give back to community where it makes sense to be responsible for hardening things are building them when they don't expense so how'd you how'd you how'd you land these guys you get him early and don't sit don't talk to any other VCS how did it all come together between you guys we've actually been friends for a while which has been great in it at one point we actually decided to ask hey what do you actually do I found that I was a venture investor and he is a network engineer but now I actually have actually really liked the networking space as a whole as much as people talk about the cloud or open source or storage being tough networking is literally everywhere and will be everywhere and whatever our world looks like so I always been looking for the most interesting companies in that space and we always joke like the investment world kind of San Francisco's applications mid here's sort of operating systems and the lower you get the more technical it gets and so well there's a vaccine I mean we're a media company I think we're doing things different we're team before we came on camera but I think media is undervalued I wrote just wrote a tweet on that got some traction on that but it's shifting back to silicon you're seeing systems if you look at some of the hottest areas IT operations is being automated away AI ops you know Auto machine learning starting to see some of these high-end like home systems like that's exactly where I was gonna go it's like the vid I I especially just love very deep intellectual property that is hard to replicate and that you can you know ultimately you can charge a premium for something that is that hard to do and so that's that's really something I get drugs in the deal with in you guys you have any other syndicates in the video about soda sure you know so our initial seed investor was clear ventures gentleman by the name of Chris rust is on our board and then Steve came in and led our most recent round of funding and he also was on the board what we've done beyond that institutional money is we have a group of very strategic individual investors two people I would maybe highlight amongst the vast number of advisers we have our gentleman by the name of Pankaj Patel punka JH was the chief development officer at Cisco he was basically number two at Cisco for a number of years deep operating experience across all facets of what we would need and then there's another gentleman by the name of Amarjeet Gill I've been friends with armored teeth for 30 years he's probably one of the single most successful entrepreneurs in the he's incubated companies that have been purchased by Broadcom by Apple by Google by Facebook by Intel by EMC so we were fortunate enough to get him involved and keep him busy great pedigree great investors with that kind of electoral property and those smart mines they're a lot of pressure on you as the CEO not to screw it up right I mean come on now get all those smart man come on okay you got it look at really good you know I I welcome it actually I enjoy it you know we look when you have a great team and you have as many capable people surrounding you it really comes together and so I don't think it's about me I actually think number one it's about I was just kidding by the way I think it's about the team and I'm merely a spokesperson to represent all the great work that our team has done so I'm really proud of the guys we have and frankly it makes my job easier you've got a lot of people to tap for for advice certainly the shared experiences electively in the different areas make a lot of sense in the investors certainly yeah up to you absolutely absolutely and it's not it's not just at the at the board it's just not at the investor level it's at the adviser level and also at you know at our individual team members when we have a team that executes as well as we have you know everything falls into place well we think the software worlds change we think the economics are changing certainly when you look at cloud whether it's cloud computing or token economics with blockchain and new emerging tech around AI we think the world is certainly going to change so you guys got a great team to kind of figure it out I mean you got a-you know execute in real time you got a real technology play with IP question is what's the next step what is your priorities now that you're out there congratulations on your launch thank you in stealth mode you got some customers you've got Broadcom relationships and looking out in the landscape what's your what's your plan for the next year what's your goals really to take every facet of what you said and just scale the business you know we're actively hiring we have a lot of customer activity this week happens to be the most recent IETF conference that happened in Montreal given our company launch on Monday there's been a tremendous amount of interest in everything that we're doing so that coupled with the existing customer discussions we have is only going to expand and then we have a very robust roadmap to continue to augment and add capabilities to the baseline capabilities that we brought to the market so I I really view the next year as scaling the business in all aspects and increasingly my time is going to be focused on commercially centric activities right well congratulations got a great team we receive great investment cube conversation here I'm John furry here the hot startup here launching this week here in California in Silicon Valley where silicon is back and software is back it's the cube bringing you all the action I'm John Fourier thanks for watching [Music]

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live. We were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier your host with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg. Welcome to theCUBE. You are the Director of Product Management Converged Infrastructure Group at NetApp. >> Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. >> One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean I've wrote stories back when Tom Georges was the CEO when Amazon just came on the scene. NetApp has been really into the cloud and from the customer's standpoint but now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now startin' to be mindful. >> Absolutely. >> Of how to maximize the scale and with All Flash kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? >> So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp, is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco and in that we have got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for Healthcare which is in FlexPod we've been doing horizontal application so far which are like the data bases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical our application, the first one we're looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for Healthcare. That's the first piece that we are addressing. >> What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod's been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it because Cisco's CEO was onstage today talking about Cisco's value proposition, about the old ways now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool, new things going on with FlexPod. >> Correct, so the All Flash FAS, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year as customers keep wanting to improve their infrastructure with better latencies and better performance the All Flash FAS has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double-digit growth over the last five quarters consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about, the managed private cloud on FlexPod. >> Yeah, Arun, I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So I think back to when Cisco launched UCS it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. NetApp with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins is talking about onstage, how do I modernize, how do I get you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from you know, a good virtualized platform to this is, I think you said managed private cloud, FlexPod in Cisco. >> Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on I need a VM, small, medium, large, and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket, then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure, then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure's working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some DSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized and therefore these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as a managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds, a cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. >> Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live you guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? >> So we, all these solutions we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that what we do is there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies agree. >> So it's tightly integrated. >> It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned, the marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team. That's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer he knows that both Cisco and NetApp teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it all. >> Yeah, over in one of the other areas that's been talked about this show we talk about modernization. You talk about things like microservices. >> Yes. >> Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? >> Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads, the cloud-native workloads or the type two native. Type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with a Cisco cloud center platform, which is the quicker acquisition. And we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we are dealing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team the ACI fabric is very important to them. So that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on Healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco, as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. >> Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So say you've got a customer, obviously you guys have a lot of customers together with Cisco, they're doing some complex things with the technology, but for the customer out there that has not yet kinda went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? 'Cause a lot of storage guys are lookin' at All Flash, so check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they gotta integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and say the competition? >> So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos, but the advantage of taking a converged infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore is reduces their deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. >> So they got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. >> Yes. >> Okay, great, now I'm gonna ask you another question. This comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. >> Yes. >> So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are custom to verticals. But with cloud one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that, because these verticals, they gotta get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? >> Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep their data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions. And the security of their data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second pieces are analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insight you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability all in their control so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for health care what it does is when you have All Flash FAS it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. [Interviewer] - Yeah. >> Plus the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up so I can give an example on that too. >> Well before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big megatrend. It's not really kinda talked much about but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPs, the performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. >> Correct. >> So it's just you've gotta have table stakes of great, fast storage. >> Yes. >> But it's gotta be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? >> Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One I can name the customer. So they'll come at our booth tomorrow, in a minute here. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with they need a hospital, fast. And they decided on FlexPod because within three months with the wire one's architecture and application they could scale their whole IT data center for health care. So that has helped them tremendously to get it up and running. Second is with the All Flash FAS they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. >> Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job. In following NetApps recent success lately, as always, NetApp's always goin' the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show? So I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ah-ha? >> So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level within 10 base networking, its data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing, where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution we can provide the subscription base through the managed private cloud through our managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we have come up with this solution which matches both these trends of Cisco as well as NetApp. >> And the number of connected devices going up every day. >> Yes. >> More network connections, more geo domains, it's complicated. >> It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. >> Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp at Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Silicon Angle Media presents TheCUBE! Covering Alibaba Cloud's annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier.... >> Hi, I'm John Furrier of Silicon Angle Media based in the United States in Silicon Valley in Palo Alto, California. I'm also co-host of TheCUBE where we go out through the event and extract the signal from the noise. We're here in China, we are here with a business development director of America's for Alibaba Cloud International, Karen Lu. Thanks for taking the time. >> Karen: Sure, absolutely. >> So, it's exciting for us from the US to come to China to hear the (mumbles), but I'm blown away by the culture. It's not a B-to-B tech conference. It's not boring. It's exciting. Talk about the Alibaba Cloud. What's so special about Alibaba Cloud? >> Sure. Alibaba Cloud is actually the encumbered cloud provider in China, and further more we extend our reach into global market since two years ago, and our strategy for globalize our cloud services is really to bridge up the business communities from overseas to China, from US to China, from US to Asia-Pacific, and to connect the rest of the world as well. Our goal is set up the platform to enable our enterprise customers, our SMEs, small and medium customer base be able to utilize our platform to develop their applications, their vertical solutions to benefit their end users. >> Alibaba Cloud has come such a long way since 2009. So much has happened, Alibaba grew up as a company. It's not just e-commerce. It's intersecting e-commerce, entertainment and web services, which is the magical formula that consumers want. They don't want just a business solution or just do e-commerce. You guys have weaved that formula together. What's special about that formula, and why is Alibaba important to the folks in the United States? >> I think it's all about the ecosystem and what makes the people, the people's community, and business community benefit from the services we provided to the world, right? Not just the e-commerce platform that have been running for the past 18 years, but also entertaining, to the map services, location services, the data services like Ali Cloud is providing, and be able to put out those elements together, and benefit people's lives, and help to improve users' experience from globally. >> It's been impressive here in China. Now as you go outside of China in the globalization plan, what's the strategy, what's the tactics? What are you going to do? >> I think our value is to, as I mentioned earlier, bridge up the business communities, especially to enable the outside world benefit a huge market from Mainland China and rest of the world as well, so I think I think our key value is to enable the business communities and be able to help them reach out outside the world. That being said, one of our key globalization strategy is to be able to help the SME's, small and medium companies to benefit the new technologies to the level that they won't be able to get in the past. It's the old technologies. >> John: What's some of the statistics or facts, fun facts, or Alibaba stats in the US, North America, your presence there, can you share what the current situation is? >> Sure. I think things about two years ago, when we extend our reach in two your market, we now have more than two thousand customers from individual to startup, to medium enterprises, and to some very large enterprises in the world as well. People are from the communities get to know Alibaba Cloud and get to know Alibaba not only provide to the e-commerce services, the EWTP platform to the world. We're also brought the data technologies. We also provided the technologies to the world that benefit their reach to the world. >> Everyone talks about data-driven. You guys have a very specific data formula, data fueling, not just getting the data from engagement data and user data, but fueling data in for user experience. The question is as you go outside of China into the US, certainly you have a developer ecosystem, you have a business ecosystem. >> Correct. >> How do the folks benefit locally in the US, to our business, do they have have access to China? Is it the services, is it the technology? Can you share the benefits to the developers and to the businesses? >> Sure absolutely. We ran a program called the China Connect, and that's the program we help the business communities you have, from the IVs, the independent after vendors, from the sales providers and developers' opportunity of communities to be able to develop their applications and software, and bring those benefits to China market. Through this process, it's hard to navigate a brand new market, especially in China, without knowing the people, the communities, the culture, the business practices here, right? We actually provide a platform, a program to help them to get to know the market, and help them to land their business in China through this program, and help them, of course, expertise their business roles in China. >> A lot of people want to know what's inside their cloud. It's one of those things where this mysterious cloud. The security's a concern, but partnerships are critical. Talk about what's inside your cloud. Intel's a big partner. What's the Alibaba-Intel partnership like? >> It's a fantastic partnership. We have been established over the past years, and Intel is one of our strategic alliance in the marketplace. They provide us a lot from hardware to technology, in terms of helping us to establish the platform with the business communities, not only China, but globally, so we really appreciate Intel's partnership, and moving forward we are looking for more reciprocal partnership with Intel to be able to form more strategic partnership to be able to benefit the business communities, and people's communities as well. >> For the folks in the US, I'll say that this is an amazing conference. It's got a million people here. I don't even know the numbers. I'm sure you have the numbers handy, but it's a mix of developers. You have a crowded house here with developers, but you also have some business people. You have key partners. I saw some US companies here. What's the vibe at the event? What's the feeling here? You got a music festival three nights. It's not a boring tech conference. Is that by design? Share the stats, how many people are here? >> I guess this is the excitement of this, the conference, annually, we actually invite a lot of our customers from US, and the rest of the world to join us to share the excitement from China, to share the experience from Alibaba. Just like Jack said, the vision for us is to make people's lives more healthier and happier. The 2H strategy from us, right, is not just the hardworking. It's also the fun. It's also the the excitement for us to share these technologies, to share this platform, and to enable people to enjoy this technology. >> The scene I see here is interesting. I've seen at Apple, in the late 90's when Steve Jobs transformed that company, he had the vision of technology meeting liberal arts. That became their calling card. You guys have art and science come in together. It's not just scientists and developers. You have artists here because user experience is super important >> exactly. >> Is that part of the culture as science and art comes together because Jack is a charismatic leader. He's a culptive personality. Young Company. >> Karen: It is. >> Share the culture. >> It is. Just like Jack and other topic executives has been sharing with the community, we want to make sure technology is inclusive elements to everyone in the community, not just for the programmers or developers, or the very high-tech companies, right? It should benefit the entire society, and fun, of course, always as part of it to make people's life happier, and to make users' experience more satisfied. >> You had a career in international technology industry for a while. You see how it's played out in the past. We're in a different now. It's a global world. The internet has opened up a lot of good things, and sometimes not so good things. The US have the selection in fake news, but as the culture starts connecting, a new kind of normal is evolving. How does Alibaba see themselves in this new world order? >> I think we see ourselves as the enabler and platform to bring the technology, and bring the people, and bring the happiness together to benefit everyone in the world, not just the tech sectors, or just the e-commerce sectors, or just one of the single verticals. We are trying to bring the technologies, and the enablement, the platform that everybody can enjoy. That's the core value for us as the inclusive technology provider. >> For the folks in the United States that will see this video, share something that they may not know about Alibaba. Might be the first time in getting to see some of the culture and some of the commentary, what should they know about Alibaba as you guys move in and become global? They're going to see some services. Is it the services, is it the people, the culture, what should they engage with Alibaba at cloud? How should they see Alibaba Cloud? >> First of all, we are one of the top three cloud providers in the world. If you look at the latest (speaks in foreign language) released a couple of weeks ago, and that's why globalization is critical for us, and we want to be able to reach out to the overseas communities, and we want to build up the trust and the confidence with the local business communities, like the rating, where in US market for instance. For us, become the global family is critical for us, and this is our vision to bring the values to them as well. >> That's fantastic, spectacular culture, and the ecosystem is just now growing, open-source software is growing exponentially, global fabric of communities developing. It is opportunities for US companies and developers to access China. Talk a little bit more about the potential that entrepreneurs and businesses could have in this global framework. >> Sure. The beauty of cloud is actually the ecosystem. It's not just one company or one vertical. For us, for instance, we try to enable the small business, especially those startup business by offering them the free resources from our infrastructure at global level, be able to enable those young peoples, especially, to create their own ideas, to be innovative, and to utilize our resources, be able to access the technologies like the way the big companies has been invested into. This is, I think, as an example for us to commit to this global market. I think for us to be part of that family, especially in Silicon Valley is critical because of the technologies, because of innovations, and because of the mindset in Silicon Valley. That's why we set up our R&D centers, we set up our frontend back office in Silicon Valley as well be able to part of that reach in, and not only to learn the technologies, but sense the mindset in our reach in. I think that's critical for us as well as the Chinese headquarter of the company, but with a global vision. >> And where in Silicon Valley is your office? >> We're headquartered in San Mateo, California for US operations. >> And entrepreneurship is changing, and it's global. It's exciting. What's the benefit to entrepreneurship? Certainly, ventured capitalists are highly interested in the China market. They've been in here for a while. Is it coming together? >> Yes, it is indeed. Actually, not only we funding a lot of the new tech companies, we also been able to help them to find their partners to build up a extended ecosystem. In Silicon Valley, in West Coast reach ins, as well as extend from the inner US, in mid-western reach in, Chicago for instance, to New York coastal areas as well. >> I noticed on the sponsorship list and partner list in your ecosystem, a logo that is new, but it's super important in the US. It's growing like crazy. The Cloud Native Compute Foundation's here, and that's the Linux Foundation. They're partnering with you. The cloud native developer market is evolving very, very quickly. They're different than the old classic IT developers. A new generation, it's not IT anymore. It's data that's driving it, and it's open-source. How do you guys engage with that community because, clearly, they win with you. >> Yes. We're actually working with a lot of open-source partners like Docker, (mumbles), and others, be able to help them to bring the communities to bring their customers onto our infrastructures and create this platform to help the developer communities to develop their applications. It's a lot of vertical focus, the solution department tasks right now. >> Excuse me, you mentioned small, medium size enterprises and business, but the big enterprises are transforming as well. How do you see Alibaba helping them because they're going cloud native? They're going private cloud on premise. You have quantum computing. You even have IOT. You have a lot of things. How's the digital transformation message for enterprises and for small businesses that don't want to pay the technology tax. >> I think for large enterprises, the most strategy you have been seeing from the marketplace, one is multi-cloud strategy. People need redundancy. People want to reduce the dependencies for one or two cloud providers, and we work with other cloud providers in the community to provide interval qualities to support this multi-cloud strategies. On the other side, couple years back, people didn't know what's in a cloud. And then, people rush to cloud for everything. And now, people come back and review the strategies and find out hybrid-cloud strategy is more suitable for large enterprises. They have their on-prem architect and infrastructure. Meanwhile, they move some of their applications to cloud. It's a good combination of on-prem physical infrastructure cloud topology. We have been seeing a trend for both for large enterprise clients. For small business, especially for small business, they don't have the upfront huge investment paying to the infrastructure, and we provide them the instant access to the infrastructure, not only from computing storage network and the database perspective, more importantly from security perspective. >> The Alibaba Infrastructure services, I saw a part of the display here, very prominent in that equation. You guys have the scale. What can you share about the under-the-hood? What's the technology look like? What's the engine of Alibaba Cloud? How mature is it? What's to do? Where's the strategic direction? Block-chain is important, but now, that's changing everything It's all this new wave's coming. >> Just like the (speaks in foreign language) indicated two months ago, if you look at the overall qualifications to be a world lead cloud provider, we're number four, after AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, but if you look at market share and revenue, we're number three. That being said, we actually provide a very comprehensive technology, and the infrastructure to the business communities, and people's communities. For instance, from the global footprint perspective, right now, we have 14 reach ins, pretty much cover all the major market in the world. By end of this year into beginning of next year, we're going to activate two to three reach ins, make it 16 to 17 reach ins globally, that we can offer the global cloud solutions for the big and small businesses. >> That's exciting, and Silicon Valley certainly import our home base. Are you guys hiring, is there expanding? Share a little bit of a public service announcement on what's going on in the Silicon Valley area. You guys hiring, looking for engineers, what kind of people are you looking for? >> Yes, (laughs) great question. Actually, we are hiring, and we're looking for talented professionals join us from those marketing, business development, to cloud architect, to technical account management, to marketing premises, so we want to build up a business that we can truly build up the trust towards the local business communities. That's why we hire a lot of local talented young professionals, and to help them to be able to fit in to the culture, the unique culture of Alibaba, and also be able to contribute to this journey, very exciting journey... >> China has always been big. Everyone in the United States knows. The numbers are big here in terms of mobile deployment, app size. A lot of the people in the US look at China and say, "Wow, we can collaborate with China." It's a very nice distribution system, but they got to take care of their needs at home. >> Exactly. >> This is a big part of the undercurrent we're hearing. How do you guys help? >> Globalization is always critical for any business, even for some small business. Just like Jack Ma said this morning at his speech, even for small business, they need to globalize. They need to reach out to more business communities, and more customers. For us, because of the huge market in China, because of the EWTP platform we set up globally, because Alibaba Cloud Infrastructure and our global footprint, we're actually being able to help our customers, not only access the infrastructure from cloud perspective, but also help them to leverage our ecosystem from different business unit, and more partnership, to be able to help them to expertise their business in China and globally. >> That's exciting. Finally, developers are a big hot button. Everyone always says, I hear comments like, "We have to own the developer community," not that you could own the developer. No one wants to be owned, but what they mean is they want to win over the hearts and minds of developers. A lot of competition, and developers want programmable infrastructure. In dev ops world, that's called dev ops. That is really the new normal in developer community. How do you guys attack that developer market? >> We actually want to enable the developers community, not own or just win over. We want constantly enable them with the new platform, the new business models, the new programs that we can bring them together. That's our mission, enablement. >> Congratulations on a spectacular formula. Thanks for having us here, TheCUBE and Silicon Angle, and thanks for your time. >> Thank you so much for the opportunity. >> Karen Lu here in China with TheCUBE. Exclusive coverage in China, bringing the stories of the most important trends and tech in Alibaba Cloud. Really changing the game with their formula of e-commerce, entertainment, and entertainment. This is not B-to-B, boring to boring. It's exciting, in a music festival. 60 thousand people are here at this conference. Developers in the world watching, I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

(car engines) >> [Voiceover] Live from Silicon Valley, it's theCube, covering Mobile World Congress 2017. Brought to you by Intel. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here live in Palo Alto for the Cube's special coverage of two days of wall to wall coverage of Mobile World Congress 2017, we're doing it here in Palo Alto, covering what's happening in Barcelona, with folks over there, we've got analysts, we've got reporters, and we have friends there phoning in and sharing their commentary, certainly on Twitter as well. And we're doing it from inside our new studio in Palo Alto, and we're going to break it down. As their day ends, we're going to be analyzing and discussing the future implications of what it all means, teasing out the top news, giving our opinion and our commentary in reaction to all the breaking news. I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angle and theCube. I think the next guest is Willie Lu, who is a Facebook friend who I've been having conversations with, it's great to meet in person. He's a wireless guru, going back to his ph.D in the 90s, now chairman of the Palo Alto Research Group. Extensive experience in dealing with fixed wireless, mobile wireless, but more importantly, creating the technologies with industry to understand what's it going to take to invent the future. Willie, great to have you inside the studio. >> Thank you very much, John. >> One of the great things about having the Palo Alto studio is while everyone's out in Barcelona right now having dinner, probably going out for the evening, we get to sit inside the studio and talk about what they did today. So the big story inside Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was obviously, the devices. You're seeing Blackberry making a comeback, Nokia, you know, pumping their new muscles, bringing back the old Nokia Phone, and rolling out their new ones. Huawei, you got bringing in their Apple killer, they want to go up and down the stack. So certainly the device centric jewelry, if you will, the phone, the eye candy, the VR, the AR, the virtual reality. But also 5G. Intel, Qualcomm, Ericsson, Nokia, all the major telcos are rolling out essentially what they are calling 5G and beyond, which is essentially not just wireless, but an end to end network to be the new fabric of wireless. Not only for the devices in the phones, but the devices being the people in the cars. And the factories, and the cities, and the entertainment, this is an area that you have a lot of work in at a technical level. So I went to spend this segment talking about the picture of the future. Right? You know, obviously we need that next step up function of architecture, we need that next network. We need those next devices, that's something that you're thinking a lot about. What's your picture, what's the future look like for you? >> Yeah, thanks John. I'm the wireless mobile system architect for almost 25 to 30 years. So from my point of view, because I'm the technical eyes, from a technical point of view, when you're talking about mobile communications, normally we have three factors we have to trade off, compromise each other, okay? The first is high speed transmission, the second one is mobility, fluid mobility, the third one is capacity. Make sure capacity, right? Make sure the operator make money, right? So, before, previously in the last 20 or 30 years, our phones from the step-by-step, from 2G which is GSM or CDMA, the basic CDMA which is IS-95 to 3G which is WCDMA to the 4G which is OFGMA, including LTE. And these phones basically is still focused on one issues, even mobility issue, even high speed issue, but in the future in the 4G, 5G, 6G whatever, you know we need a very high speed. Very high speed, one giga beyond, over there. We also need a mobility, frame mobility, right? We also make sure able to make money, the operator make money, right? >> That's the number one. >> So how to, we want three, we want mobility, high speed, capacity. We, everything we need. And then single one standard is not going to work, because if you want pick LTE, a very high speed, you lose the mobility. If you pick free mobility, you lose the bandwidth. So the issue, that's the issue. We, 20 years ago, when I do the ph.D and when I was Stanford professor， I was a consulting professor at Stanford, we started the open wireless access, it's means converge a multiple standard together, converge the wifi, LTE, and the broadband wide access together in a same device. So when you have a wifi, you can go to wifi, which is very high speed, can be very very high speed in the future right? And then you go to the highway, where very fast there, you cannot get a wifi, but you can get LTE, or 3G or 2G, that's fine. So that's the research we are working on the open wireless access or open wireless architecture or OWA. And there's, it's the (inaudible) map is from TGMA, CGMA, OFDMA, to OWA. Okay, that's the technical point side. And for the device design side, my picture is for the next five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, which very clear, okay? Before that, in the last 20 years, everybody their mobile phones, is still a carrier-centric mobile phone. Is means when I have a mobile phone, it's AT&T, it's AT&T, it's locked to AT&T or it's AT&T phone, right? And right now, from last year to this year, we are on a very important transition from the carrier-centric phone to a user-centric phone. Yeah probably, couple of company, Google, other company, they are working on the, on the virtualization, mobile virtualization right? Means what? Means a user can pick up different operators on the way, right? So this phone, if I don't have signal, I don't have T-mobile signal, I can using AT&T to get a LTE. And if I don't have AT&T, I can use Verizon. So we are on the way from the carrier-centric to a user-centric at the moment. >> [John] So let's stop right there, 'cus I really think you're onto something really important and I think this is, there's some history to look at. I mean if you look at wireless, I agree, this is a very carrier-centric. And for the consumers out there, you can think of just the basic concepts of most people's experience: I want to unlock my phone, right? These are kind of known terms of consumers, whether they're, it's my kids or adults. "I don't want to be stuck to the carrier" "on their plan." "I want to move my phone around." But that's just on the service. Now you want to decouple it further to the person. So, take a car. I might want to have a relationship with my car, as if I'm, going to be never buying a car, I might use autonomous cars or Uber or other services. And I get into the car and I need personalization. So this is the user-centric thing is that super important point. But now we are stuck, still stuck, in my opinion, in siloed telco stacks, meaning I'm stuck to the carrier, I have limited services, and now I want to shift that to better performance. I mean you can't look any further than hyper convergence or converged infrastructure on the data centers. So where it's networking combining. So are you taking that same approach to say that you think wireless will converge in? Is that the idea? >> Yes, when you wireless converging. Take examples: wifi, LTE, and converge together. So your phone basically is running on wifi. Actually in the priority order, wifi first. Wifi first, and then second is LTE, and then probably 3G is the second one there. So, and then if you have wifi you go wifi, and if car, the car also can be a micro base station, okay, to connect to the wifi, LTE together, and then distribute to the passengers in the car, so this is also we can, for the future, work in mobile office project. I can stay in the car, and the car itself is a sub base station, and then connect each other. There also, okay let's talking about the future picture, okay. In the next five years, okay, there's a couple companies working, already working on the mobile wifi network. So it's means if I am living in Palo Alto there, I'm moving around in my neighborhood in Palo Alto, I don't have, I don't even add AT&T, Verizon operator, I can have a mobile service because I can share all neighbor's wifi networks together as a mobile protocol. Then I can moving, I can hike, I jogging, your house, my house to there. We can share the wifi together, we call. We divide the wifi into the home wifi, and the visitor wifi we can rent the service to outside. So this called community mobile network based on wifi. That's the next five years picture. >> [John] How does that happen? I mean I just found, first of all I believe, and that's a great philosophy. And you're starting to see Xfinity do that with their current wifi, creating a little metro neighborhood network. That's really hard to pull off 'cus of the security concerns. Is it viable in the next five years, do you think that is even doable? What has to happen to make that happen? >> I think this going to be not a major issue because wifi still have a lot of bandwidth, right? And you can exchange bandwidth with security issue there. So wifi is more easy to the security than LTE, because LTE for the similar network, the spectrum is very expensive right? So that's why we cannot using a lot of overheads for security. So I always say, the most secure is wifi, then LTE. 'Cus LTE, the data, right? When you open it, there's not much overhead available for secure encryption, whatever there. So wifi you can, >> [John] So they're maximizing their signal for performance, not security. >> Yeah, not security. And wifi you can take like 40%, 30% the overhead load for the security and it's very secure. So that's not issue, that's why. That's the five, next five moment. Okay and then beyond that, when the mobile wifi neighborhood is built, right? Then we back to the traditional settled operator networks there. We'll converge together, then user for the next ten years, after ten years, user can pick up his preferred operators as he like. For example, if I'm in Palo Alto and then AT&T give me a good package, right? They give an offer, and I click my AT&T, it's go to AT&T. And I back to the Cupertino and Cupertino, >> [John] It's like network hopping. >> Yeah. >> It's like not radio hop, frequency hopping, it's network hopping. >> That's an idea, right right right. But still you need a converging network info together. >> So let's take it back to Mobile World Congress. So right now the current present is, that they're painting the picture of a 5G world where autonomous vehicles, entertainment, smart cities, and smart home are all being powered by an end-to-end, from the network to the edge, software and capabilities, from silicon software to device. >> Yes. >> So that's cool, makes a lot of sense. Now is 5G truly the enabler, that 5, 6 G is the wireless enabler for this in your view? In your picture of the future, what role does wireless play in creating this new fabric? >> Yeah, I think it's very much possible because when I say when we converge the different wireless solutions together then you have more space to focus on one direction, you focus on very high speed. We can one giga, two giga, even ten giga is enough right? And the other side, we increase the mobility issue, right? And then the other side we converge on the operator side. In the future, I mean AT&T, Verizon, it's not, they're not going to just provide the cellular mobile access only, they want to provide more service around its 5G, 6G, be new business model right? For traditional business model, you just provide the radio, the hand phone access. But in future, this operator is going to help provide more service, service-oriented platform. >> Is that consistent, that service business model, is that viable in your vision of the future. What is, or let me ask differently. What is the business model for the operator, in your vision of this multi-network world? What do they do, what kind of services are they delivering? >> I think in the future, very important service, around the ten years, around the time frame, is very important service is called mobile virtualization service. So in the future, Google can run mobile service, but they're working with AT&T and Verizon. >> [John] It's like MVL on steroids, basically, it's all doing pipe management. >> Yeah and then let's say for example, Google did a contract with AT&T for how much bandwidth every year, probably one P, or a large bandwidth. And then AT&T provides its bandwidth to Google, right? And then AT&T can do other service also, so AT&T save a lot of cost in the individual marketing. You know, right now the operator spend a lot of money for the marketing, right? But later they can cut off this cost, because Google can do marketing, right? >> [John] So it's, this is economic reconfiguration. >> [Willie] Yes. >> Okay, so here's the next question. In today's landscape of the marketplace, what would be bad behavior from your standpoint, that would screw up that future? What would be the signs that it's not going the right way in the ecosystem, because part of the things that I'm seeing with things like Intel and the big players is there's an ecosystem that needs to get agreement; That to accelerate the future, there has to be a new model, a new network. What are some signs that are warning signs for you? You know, people holding onto a certain thing, certain technology. What would be a red flag for you, if you look at the marketplace, what kind of activities would say "woah, that's not good." >> Okay, I think it depends on, for the operator, I think it's not good, in the future it's not good, you just focus on making money from the access size. Because in the future, access will be cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. So if AT&T just focus on access revenue, it's going to red flag, okay? So you have to provide total solution, right? And from the vendor side, you cannot support one single standards. You only support LTE, it's going to dangerous. So you have to be open. So in the future, I think in the future, from my personal point of view, Comcast, AT&T, all these company, they are going to merge together. Because they want provide a converged solution, right? So in the future access will be cheaper, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. And then you have to, they have another revenues from the other sides. >> [John] I wrote a paper in 2001 called "Broadband Starvation". And it was the beginning before wifi really hit, and then wifi hit and New York Times picked it up, was one of those stories. But we talked about the starvation from America for more bandwidth. Obviously even outside the US, you saw accelerated bandwidth, broadband penetration. I called it the "Broadband Starvation" because broadband starvation was in rural areas, so it always was limited by the actual physical connection. You know, the cable, the last mile. We all know the history of the policy side of the Arbox and the days of you know, the telephone companies. But now Comcast and now AT&T (laugh), they're the fiber to the home, there's some, or the coaxial to the home. They bring in, off the street and terminate it into the house. Wireless changes that. Is that a scenario where you see 5G going where ultimately, this notion of fiber to the home could be you know, ancient history? Or, 'cus that always, there's still construction. You got to still trench, you still got provisions, and the circuits to the homes. You know, is wireless an opportunity there? And will that free up more competition? >> Yeah, I think that's a big question, and a big picture, okay. I think from my personal experience, when we design technology for next 10 years, 15 years, the very big picture you think about is very important is: we're on the way to transition, to transition from the mobile communication to a personal communication. So previously, the mobile communication >> Personal communication, you mean people-centric? >> Yeah, people-centric. So mobile communication, previously we call mobile communication is a telecom term. Is means just for connection, just for envisioning connection, right? But in future >> [John] Endpoint, that's it. >> Yeah that's right. So we're on the way. Even at some universities, they change the course from mobile communication to personal communication. Personal communication means is: everything is personal. Personal-centric, right? So in a personal-centric, so in the future, the operator, the vendor, the provider think about, in the future, you're not only provider, information connection only, you provide anything a person needed for his life, including health, security, right? Everything there. >> [John] Transportation. >> Transportation, yeah. >> [John] Could be all digital services. >> The transportation, security. >> healthcare. >> And everything there and then each application will need a different requirements of the bandwidth, right? Especially for the health, we need lots of lots of video transmission, right? And this is going to, that's why we need a WLAN, a wireless network, is converging together. And then wireless is still a lots, lots of way we have to invent. >> The word "convergence" is back again, it's happening everywhere. Willie, thanks so much for the commentary. Love this, this is consistent with, Wikibonds had a research, siliconANGLE had a research, Peter Burris who was on our opening segment talking about not IOT, only IOT, internet of things, but IOT and P, people. Internet of People. >> [Willie] Yes, and think about IOT, okay? What's the major technologies inside the IOT? One is sensing technology, okay? The other one is wireless connection, right? You want to connect to that billion billion nodes together, so we need a multidimensional, different wireless technology. How to connect this billion billion nodes together? That's also we need wireless technology. >> I worry about that not happening because I think the telcos have been slow, and I think I'm seeing movement now with the telcos, that now is the time to make their move. NFV's viable, and now their business model is somewhat emerging. The question is, will they be fast enough to move? That's the question. >> Yeah, I think. >> Are they? >> That's also my question, because the moving, the virtualization like from Google, they're moving very fast than a traditional telco, right? So telco have to change their way of thinking in the business, right? >> I think Google should be the telco, take over the telco. >> That's why in the the next five, ten years, people just go to Google, using Google account to get access to the phone, to the mobile phone. You get a phone number from Google, right? >> They're going to call it Apple World Congress, or Google World Congress. Uber World Congress, if we don't. >> But anyway, we still need everybody work together. It's like different wireless standards converge together. And different company they also want to converge together. And then eventually, the target is very simple. It's the personal, it's the personal centric, user centric, the wireless world. That's the future. >> [John] Willie Lu here from Palo Alto Research. In here Palo Alto, a good Facebook friend guru in the wireless area all the way down from back in his ph.D days, as a practitioner and inventing the future. Great vision, I agree with it 100%. I think Intel and all the big players would agree. The ecosystem of smart movement right now is critical, and I think there's a huge opportunity to, to tie it all together there in IOT and people, a people-centric world. Congratulations on your work at the Wireless Mobile Congress that you started, and also the open, this open alliance, open wireless alliance. Congratulations. Willie Lu here inside theCube, I'm John Furrier, for more exclusive coverage of Mobile World Congress here in Palo Alto after the short break. (electronic music) (cheerful electronic music)

>> Hello, my name is Daniel Wichs, I'm a senior scientist at NTT research and a professor at Northeastern University. Today I want to tell you about incompressible encodings. This is a recent work from Crypto 2020 and it's a joint work with Tal Moran. So let me start with a question. How much space would it take to store all of Wikipedia? So it turns out that you can download Wikipedia for offline use and some reasonable version of it is about 50 gigabytes in size. So as you'd expect, it's a lot of data, it's quite large. But there's another way to store Wikipedia which is just to store the link www.wikipedia.org that only takes 17 bytes. And for all intents and purposes as long as you have a connection to the internet storing this link is as good as storing the Wikipedia data. You can access a Wikipedia with this link whenever you want. And the point I want to make is that when it comes to public data like Wikipedia, even though the data is huge, it's trivial to compress it down because it is public just by storing a small link to it. And the question for this talk is, can we come up with an incompressible representation of public data like Wikipedia? In other words can we take Wikipedia and represent it in some way such that this representation requires the full 50 gigabytes of storage store, even for someone who has the link to the underlying Wikipedia data and can get the underlying data for free. So let me actually tell you what this means in more detail. So this is the notion of incompressible encodings that we'll focus on in this work. So incompressible encoding consists of an encoding algorithm and a decoding algorithm, these are public algorithms. There's no secret key. Anybody can run these algorithms. The encoding algorithm takes some data m, let's say the Wikipedia data and encodes it in some probabilistic randomized way to derive a codeword c. And the codeword c, you can think of it as just an alternate representation of the Wikipedia data. Anybody can come and decode the codeword to recover the underlying data m. And the correctness property we want here is that no matter what data you start with, if you encode the data m and then decode it, you get back the original data m. This should hold with probably one over the randomness of the encoding procedure. Now for security, we want to consider an adversary that knows the underlying data m, let's say has a link to Wikipedia and can access the Wikipedia data for free does not pay for storing it. The goal of the adversary is to compress this codeword that we created this new randomized representation of the Wikipedia data. So the adversary consists of two procedures a compression procedure and a decompression procedure. The compression procedure takes its input the codeword c and output some smaller compressed value w and the decompression procedure takes w and its goal is to recover the codeword c. And a security property says that no efficient adversary should be able to succeed in this game with better than negligible property. So there are two parameters of interest in this problem. One is the codeword size, which we'll denote by alpha, and ideally we want the codeword size alpha to be as close as possible to the original data size. In other words we don't want the encoding to add too much overhead to the data. The second parameter is the incompressibility parameter beta and that tells us how much space, how much storage and adversary needs to use in order to store the codeword. And ideally, we want this beta to be as close as possible to the codeword size alpha, which should also be as close as possible to the original data size. So I want to mention that there is a trivial construction of incompressible encodings that achieves very poor parameters. So the trivial construction is just take the data m and add some randomness, concatenate some randomness to it and store the original data m plus the concatenated randomness as the codeword. And now even an adversary that knows the underlying data m cannot compress the randomness. So the incompressibility, so we ensure that this construction is incompressible with incompressibility parameter beta that just corresponds to the size of this randomness we added. So essentially the adversary cannot compress the red part of the codeword. So this gets us a scheme where alpha the size of the codeword, is the original data size m plus the incompressible parameter beta. And it turns out that you cannot do better than this information theoretically. So this is not what we want for this we want to focus on what I will call good incompressible encodings. So here, the codeword size should be as close as possible to the data size, should be just one plus little o one of the data size. And the incompressibility should be as essential as large as the entire codeword the adversary cannot compress the codeword almost at all, the incompressible parameter beta is one minus little o one of the data size or the codeword size. And in essence, what this means is that we're somehow want to take the randomness of the encoding procedure and spread it around in some clever way throughout the codeword in such a way that's impossible for the adversary to separate out the randomness and the data, and only store the randomness and rely on the fact that it can get the data for free. We want to make sure it's impossible that adversary accesses essentially this entire code word which contains both the randomness and data and some carefully intertwined way and cannot compress it down using the fact that it knows the data parts. So this notion of incompressible encodings was defined actually in a prior work of Damgard-Ganesh and Orlandi from crypto 2019. They defined a variant of this notion, they had a different name for it. As a tool or a building block for a more complex cryptographic primitive that they called Proofs of Replicated Storage. And I'm not going to talk about what these are. But in this context of constructing these Proofs of Replicated Storage, they also constructed incompressible encodings albeit with some major caveats. So in particular, their construction relied on the random Oracle models, the heuristic construction and it was not known whether you could do this in the standard model, the encoding and decoding time of the construction was quadratic in the data size. And in particular, here we want to apply this, we want to use these types of incompressible encodings on fairly large data like Wikipedia data, 50 gigabytes in size. So quadratic runtime on such huge data is really impractical. And lastly the proof of security for their construction was flawed or someone incompleted, didn't consider general adversaries. And the slope was actually also noticed by concurrent work of Garg-Lu and Waters. And they managed to give a fixed proof for this construction but this required actually quite a lot of effort. It was a highly non-trivial and subtle proof to proof the original construction of Damgard-Ganesh and Orlandi secure. So in our work, we give a new construction of these types of incompressible encodings, our construction already achieved some form of security in the Common Reference String Model come Random String Model without the use of Random Oracles. We have a linear encoding time, linear in the data size. So we get rid of the quadratic and we have a fairly simple proof of security. In fact, I'm hoping to show you a slightly simplified form of it and the stock. We also give some lower bounds and negative results showing that our construction is optimal in some aspects and lastly we give a new application of this notion of incompressible encodings to something called big-key cryptography. And so I want to tell you about this application, hopefully it'll give you some intuition about why incompressible encodings are interesting and useful, and also some intuition about what their real goal is or what it is that they're trying to achieve. So, the application of big-key cryptography is concerned with the problem of system compromise. So, a computer system can become compromised either because the user downloads a malware or remote attacker manages to hack into it. And when this happens, the remote attacker gains control over the system and any cryptographic keys that are stored on the system can easily be exfiltrated or just downloaded out of the system by the attacker and therefore, any security that these cryptographic keys were meant to provide is going to be completely lost. And the idea of big-key cryptography is to mitigate against such attacks by making the secret keys intentionally huge on the order of many gigabytes to even terabytes. And the idea is that by having a very large secret key it would make it harder to exfiltrate such a secret key. Either because the adversary's bandwidth to the compromised system is just not large enough to exfiltrate such a large key or because it might not be cost-effective to have to download so much data of compromised system and store so much data to be able to use the key in the future, especially if the attacker wants to do this on some mass scale or because the system might have some other mechanisms let's say firewall that would detect such large amounts of leakage out of the compromised system and block it in some way. So there's been a lot of work on this idea building big-key crypto systems. So crypto systems where the secret key can be set arbitrarily huge and these crypto systems should testify two goals. So one is security, security should hold even if a large amount of data about the secret key is out, as long as it's not the entire secret key. So when you have an attacker download let's say 90% of the data of the secret key, the security of the system should be preserved. And the second property is that even though the secret key of the system can be huge, many gigabytes or terabytes, we still want the crypto system to remain efficient even though the secret is huge. And particularly this means that the crypto system can even read the entire secret key during each cryptographic operation because that would already be too inefficient. So it can only read some small number of bits of the secret key during each operation, then it performs. And so there's been a lot of work constructing these types of crypto systems but one common problem for all these works is that they require the user to waste a lot of their storage the storage on their computer in storing this huge secret key which is useless for any other purpose, other than providing security. And users might not want to do this. So that's the problem that we address here. And the new idea in our work is let's make the secret key useful instead of just having a secret key with some useless, random data that the cryptographic scheme picks, let's have a secret key that stores let's say the Wikipedia data at which a user might want to store in their system anyway or the user's movie collection or music collection et cetera and the data that the user would want to store on their system. Anyway, we want to convert it. We want to use that as the secret key. Now we think about this for a few seconds. Well, is it a good idea to use Wikipedia as a secret key? No, that sounds like a terrible idea. Wikipedia is not secret, it's public, it's online, Anyone can access it whenever they want. So it's not what we're suggesting. We're suggesting to use an incompressible encoding of Wikipedia as a secret key. Now, even though Wikipedia is public the incompressible encoding is randomized. And therefore the accuracy does not know the value of this incompressible encoding. Moreover, because it's incompressible in order for the adversary to steal, to exfiltrate the entire secret key, it would have to download a very large amount of data out of the compromised system. So there's some hope that this could provide security and we show how to build public encryption schemes and the setting that make use of a secret key which is an incompressible coding of some useful data like Wikipedia. So the secret key is an incompressible encoding of useful data and security ensures that the adversary will need to exfiltrate almost entire key to break the security of this critical system. So in the last few minutes, let me give you a very brief overview of our construction of incompressible encodings. And for this part, we're going to pretend we have something a real beautiful cryptographic object called Lossy Trapdoor Permutations. It turns out we don't quite have an object that's this beautiful and in the full construction, we relax this notion somewhat in order to be able to get our full construction. So Lossy Trapdoor Permutation is a function f we just key by some public key pk and it maps end bits to end bits. And we can sample the public key in one of two indistinguishable modes. In injective mode, this function of fPK is a permutation, and there's in fact, a trapdoor that allows us to invert it efficiently. And in the Lossy mode, if we sample the public in Lossy mode, then if we take some value, random value x and give you fpk of x, then this loses a lot of information about x. And in particular, the image size of the function is very small, much smaller than two to the n and so fpk of x does not contain all the information about x. Okay, so using this type of Lossy Trapdoor Permutation, here's the encoding of a message m using long random CRS come random string. So the encoding just consists of sampling the public key of this Lossy Trapdoor Permutation in injected mode, along with the trapdoor. And the encoding is just going to take the message m, x over it with a common reference string, come random string and invert the trapdoor permutation on this value. And then Coding will just be the public key and the inverse x. So this is something anybody can decode by just taking fpk of x, x over it with the CRS. And that will recover the original message. Now, to add the security, we're going to in the proof, we're going to switch to choosing the value x uniformly at random. So the x component of the codeword is going to be chosen uniformly random and we're going to set the CRS to be fpk of x, x over the message. And if you look at it for a second this distribution is exactly equivalent. It's just a different way of sampling the exact same distribution. And in particular, the relation between the CRS and X is preserved. Now in the second step, we're going to switch the public key to Lossy mode. And now when we do this, then the Codeword part, sorry then the CRS fpk of x, x over m only leaks some small amount of information about the random value x. In other words, even if that resists these, the CRS then the value x and the codeword has a lot of entropy. And because it has a lot of entropy it's incompressible. So what we did here is that we actually start to show that the code word and the CRS are indistinguishable from a different way of sampling them where we placed information about the message and the CRS and the codeword actually is truly random, has a lot of real entropy. And therefore even given the CRS the Codeword is incompressible that's the main idea behind the proof. I just want to make two remarks, our full constructions rely on a relaxed notion of Lossy Trapdoor Permutations which we're able to construct from either the decisional residuoisity or the learning with errors assumption. So in particular, we don't actually know how to construct trapdoor permutations from LWE from any postquantum assumption but the relaxed notion that we need for our actual construction, we can achieve from post quantum assumptions that get post quantum security. I want to mention two caveats of the construction. So one is that in order to make this work, the CRS needs to be long essentially as long as the message size. And also this construction achieves a weak form of selective security where the adversary decides to choose the message before seeing the CRS. And we show that both of these caveats are inherent. We show this by black-box separation and one can overcome them only in the random oracle model. Unless I want to just end with an interesting open question. I think one of the most interesting open questions in this area all of the constructions of incompressible encodings from our work and prior work required the use of some public key crypto assumptions some sort of trapdoor permutations or trapdoor functions. And one of the interesting open question is can you construct and incompressible encodings without relying on public key crypto, using one way functions or just the random oracle model. We conjecture this is not possible, but we don't know. So I want to end with that open questions and thank you very much for listening.