>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> From Orlando, Florida It's theCube covering SAP Sapphire Now 2018! Brought to you by NetApp. >> Welcome, you're watching theCube, On The Ground at SAP Sapphire Now. I'm your host, Keith Townsend. We're in steamy Orlando. Great convention center size of 16 American football fields. Got in about three thousand steps this morning, but you know what, I'm not here to talk about me. We're here talking about the relationship between Microsoft and NetApp. We have Brad Berkey, GM SAP Global at Microsoft and Kevin Zhang, Tech Solutions Pro, and this is a mouthful, SAP on Azure Intelligent Global and you're a black belt? >> Yes. >> Oh wow! >> Yes, I can kickbox. >> You can kick some SAP butt. >> Yes (laughs) oh no, yes, yes we do great solutions. >> So first off let's talk about the NetApp, Microsoft relationship as it pertains to SAP. What's the story behind NetApp and Microsoft? >> The great thing aout NetApp and Microsoft is you both have the same vision, right. For us, it's about our responsibility to help our customers innovate. And NetApp is a key partner for us in our ability to help our customers innovate and provide solutions around SAP. >> So, let's talk about those solutions around SAP. One of the things that's getting pushed an awful lot is that SAP is now cloud ready. We can go to the cloud. We can go to these hyperscalers, such as Azure or As-zure and swipe a credit card and get up and running with HANA. Tell us about that experience. How does that go exactly? >> Kevin? >> Oh yeah, so I don't know if you have heard. We just announced we released a 12 terabyte memory size virtual machine. Our Halo logging instances can go up to 24 terabytes. So we ran the largest SAP workload in the world. There are so many customers, about 400 SAP Azure customer. Personally I work with about 30 SAP on Azure customers and over 77 or 80 SAP HANA on Azure customers. So, it's very exciting and we see that the trend is picking up, the demand is picking up worldwide. >> Wow! Bill McDermott on stage yesterday gave the numbers around SAP HANA in general, 1800 customers. So Microsoft having 400 SAP HANA customers. >> Sure, just to be clear on that. So when we talk about customers that are sitting inside of Azure for their SAP Landscape, that's both traditional NetLever base and HANA base and I think the number that you have is closer to 70 of that larger number. The real important thing that customers are seeing today is the... When people think of cloud, they think about cost reduction. I'm gonna save money because I'm gonna be renting equipment. The true value is in your ability to be nimble to innovate, right? So imagine a customer puts their SAP Landscape inside of Azure and it's NetLever based say the older stuff. At any point along that journey, they can call us up and say, "I want the infrastructure for HANA." They can innovate at will. If they buy hardware that sits on-premise, that hardware's set to run that particular landscape, it's not set to run HANA. So there's some opportunities for the customer to innovate using Azure. It's not just cost savings, it's around efficiencies and the ability to innovate at will. >> So let's talk about hybrid clouds scenarios around that very concept. We had another NetApp partner on that talked about the scenario in which customers have this desire to innovate quickly. Traditionally, in a traditional enterprise, to your point, if I wanted to spin up a HANA workload, I'd have to procure hardware, I'd have to get my bases team to lay down the NetWeaver stack along with HANA. It could be a couple of months before I'm up and running. Then I can innovate, do my innovation. How does Microsoft help shorten that cycle? >> I can speak to it. We actually have another partner here with there model, as well, SUSE. HANA is drawn SUSE right ahead and different flavors of Linux. and they're running on Azure. Today, we are able to deploy the entire SAP Landscape using alternative scripts inside Azure. In 30 minutes, you have the entire SAP Landscape deployed including the large virtual machine M series for your HANA cluster. You also have the ESCS, the central instances and also the AFS Cluster as well as your application servers. All of those things running your automation, your cloud speed in 30 minutes instead of three months. >> So one of the obviously manages of cloud, in general, is this ability to get to agility. There's a concept that once I've innovated in the cloud, I know what the workload is, it's stable, it's not changing that I bring that back in house. Is that something that you're seeing, are people continuing to run these workloads steady state in the cloud as well? >> I think they're gonna run more so in steady state. We don't see them kind of moving it back. The idea that in a traditional SAP Landscape is that everything is always on. >> Right. >> Right. Since the lights are always on, why not I have my own equipment as opposed to renting just compute from a hyperscaler like Microsoft. The reality is, is again, back to that notion of innovating. If I'm gonna role out, let's say, S4 on top of HANA, so you think about Suite on HANA and then S4, I'm gonna set up all of these test environments, multiple test environments, versions of it as I roll out. I'm gonna be really big for a short period of time then I'm gonna roll it out and shrink back down. Also, when I do upgrades, you think about it like if you're doing payroll at the end of the month, I'm gonna be big for short periods of time. So we call that bursting, and it's that bursting that allows you to continually to reduce costs you wouldn't bring back on-prem, where you can't burst, right? Makes sense? >> That makes sense. So let's talk about some of these business conversations that you've had with customers. What have been some of the primary drivers other than the obvious agility? What are some of the conversations that you look at the broader Microsoft portfolio solutions that you're able to bring into customer conversations? >> Two things come to mind. One of which is when you think about enterprise-class security across all domains, right? So right now we provide Azure for Office 365. That's an Azure tenant. And we can give you advance security for that. Imagine that I can provide that same security for your SAP system. I want to give you an example of the type of security solutions. We have an intelligent IOT-based security model that sits inside of Azure that will predict hacks. They'll look at your environment and say, "you look just like a customer who has been hacked" or "you have the attributes of a customer "who could get hacked" and they'll proactively come in and say you need to make these adjustments That kind of stuff sits inside of the cloud in Azure. So it's not just... And again, I think the misnomer is it's just about cost savings 'cause if it was just about cost savings, then at some point, your depreciation models for on-premise hardware as long as you can stay and not change, so not changing would save you a lot of money. So that's why I get back to you, it'll allows you to change without burden of impact. >> Talking about change in the industry, we can't have a 7.5 billion dollar acquisition and not talk about it on theCube. We kind of eat this stuff up. You guys acquired GitHub. Let's talk about the relationship of developers, one of the things I haven't heard a lot, at least in conversations I've had on theCube so far this week have been about the developer. Talk about the importance of the developer relationship and potential integrations with GitHub, if you can, and SAP. >> First, that is one of my favorite topics I have. I came from a development background we call enable agility allow you to run continuous development and continuous integration, and the GitHub has been a integrate part of Microsoft Solution already. We are probably the largest contributor in the GitHub before Google and Facebook where if you ranking based on the history. The open source has been cultural after the Satya takeover as CEO has been our winning grace, open source, and we actually... The majority of our code and our deployment is in the GitHub. In the SAP world, the ARM templates for automation templates, JSON templates, and all the automation scripts we deployed in the GitHub, and we share with customer as a community. If they actually use those scripts through their deployment, continuously improve the scripts for automation. >> So, continuous integration, continued development is not a term that we hear a lot in the SAP world. As we're bringing these concepts from I think thought into reality with services such as GitHub to store DevOps scripts, automation scripts, what has been the business impact of being able to bring a continuous integration, continued development practice to SAP which is usually not big? >> I'll give you a good example. For example, when Brad Berkey mentioned earlier doing the SAP Landscape deployment, you have no N+1 deployment and you want to do a test environment, you want to do a Sandbox to troubleshoot the incidence. Today, with the scripts automation, you can spring up an entire system in three hours, four hours, including S4, including the time old system when you put in the business object BI and the other things together. You can test this and then shut down the entire system and delay the resource group inside Azure. As we move that system, they re-spring up as necessary. Also, we're working with SAP called Landscape Manager which allows you to clone the system inside the Azure. The scripts behind it is actually a computer integration into the dual element type of scripts allows you to replicate system files, allow you to deploy another testing system or training system. It gives you a lot of modern deployment methodology to give you fast agility to the business. >> So Microsoft, the ultimate platform company, one of the things that designates the platform company is that your partners basically make more money than you off the platform. Windows is a great example of a platform. So you have platform, Azure is definitely becoming known as a platform, and then we have NetApp, the data driven company. Talk through the value of the NetApp data fabric, data driven technology and platform as it pertains to the ability to have the same data operation strategy on-prem and in the Microsoft Cloud. >> Okay, I'll give you an example. A lot of our customer, Brad sells a lot of SAP on Azure to many customers. I've supported those customers. Many of them because NetApp has a super, very high speed fastest management, snapshot management to data protection and data recovery and backup, and also the DR capability, customers demand asks us can we actually work with Microsoft in the cloud or use a similar technology. So they deployed the NetApp ONTAP inside of Azure today. And we're able to support AFS file services to file sync from on-prem to the cloud, from one Azure region to another region, leverage those ONTAP snap mirroring and all the technology as well. So to enable to provide an enterprise level file sync, file protection, file recovery and warning replication as well. >> So, you guys are pretty good. I'm trying to throw you curve balls but you're pretty much knocking 'em out the park, so I'ma try to throw another curve ball. Bring the hybrid IT story in for me from a Microsoft perspective when it comes to Azure stack. How does Azure stack play a role in the overall vision whether it's Edge, Core, or like stationed into the cloud, how does Azure stack play a role in it? >> In Azure stacks. It's not for SAP. >> Yeah, okay. Azure stack is a very important overall view from Edge to the entire cloud. We have the 50 regions globally. We have many data centers combined. The largest of public quota from region perspective, but still they're areas, for example, like a cruise ship, like a defense department, they may actually require Edge inside a prime type of technology stack. Azure stack allow you to use the same interface, same view to deploy the technology. When you actually connect it, you can synchronize your subscription. So it can allow you to have end-to-end access from your on-premise into the cloud. Microsoft has the perfect hybrid cloud strategy here, and it allow you to do not only the IaaS and PaaS and also the SaaS solution to our customers. >> So, okay, let's bring the conversation back up a couple of levels and talk, Brad, what have been the conversations here? After the keynote this morning, talking about the intelligent business, the conversations yesterday with Bill McDermott with the super-high energy about SAP going into CRM, what has been the conversations with customers? >> We've had a privilege for a lot of customer meetings in here. The great thing about SAP Sapphire is you got about 20,000 customer attendees here. They're the big ones, and at the C-Suite, so we get to have some great conversations. The customer conversations have been around the notion of the responsibility that Microsoft and SAP have to them. To the point where I was speaking with a customer early, he says, "You have an accountability "to help me be innovative." That's a very important responsibility. A lot of that revolves around enterprise-class security. A lot of that revolves around uptime and legacies between those environments. "What's my performance attribute?" and "Are you going to be there with me forever?" Now when a customer chooses Azure or they choose SAP and they choose Azure, certainly, it's really a three-part partnership. The customer, Microsoft, and SAP as a partnership. If I had to add a fourth one to that, it would be the systems integrator because in the case, Microsoft doesn't upgrade, migrate, move or install anything. So we rely on all the many partners that are here to do that set of work, everywhere from Accenture to Gemini to Brave New World. That was ABC, right? I got those out, right? All of those partners are very key to both Microsoft and SAP to ensure customer success. So a lot of the meetings that we've had here have been with those partners and those customers. >> Wow, to be a fly on the wall for those. I would love to go into more detail. We've run out of time. I'm getting the wrap sign, but I would love to have a conversation around support, integration, way more areas than we have time for. We'll have to get you on theCube again. You're now Cube veterans. From Orlando, this is Keith Townsend for theCube. Stay tuned or stay in the YouTube feed to find out more about what's going on about SAP Sapphire Now On The Ground. Talk to you soon. (lively music)

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

>> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco , it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay we're back here live in San Francisco at Moscone West for exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference on John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and the host of the cube here. Our next guest is Mary Min, Vice President of Global Business Development at SE Works Inc. Former entrepreneur, gamer, still entrepreneurial in her new world, but has seen the evolution of gaming. Here to talk about Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, and kind of the trajectory of life in the digital era. Welcome to The Cube. >> Okay thank you. >> So we were just talking before we came on about the evolution of your career. You had a start-up, you sold it. It was a game. You been gaming since the late 90s and looking forward. What is the evolution of gaming and how it relates to Augmented Reality? Because there's a debate that goes on in the industry. Oh, VR is the next big thing, but yet it failed. Tim Cook recently came out and said hey, you know, don't get your hopes up. There's still more head room to do. Not necessarily a bad thing. Because now Augmented Reality is winning. You're seeing it in industrial IOT. You're seeing Augmented Reality. So what's your thoughts about how people should think about the evolution of this new wave of innovation. >> I think that with any new technology that's really life-changing for society as a whole, nothing ever gets done on the first iteration or the first phase. Things will never really take off on the first round especially when you're going mass consumer. Because people need time for learned behavior. People are creatures of habit. They like to stick what's familiar. And in order for them to move from one leap to the next, you need baby steps. And those baby steps unfortunately will include pioneers in whatever field, whether it be AR, or VR, that need to blaze the trail for their successors to come and start building on top of that as well. I read something really interesting this morning coming here where if you have someone who's trying to dig a well, and you need to dig 10 feet, the first person fails because they only dug the first foot. Second person, third person, subsequently until the ninth person, that well is not dug. But that 10th person is who successfully has the water filling the well. That 10th person could not have dug that final last foot if the first nine didn't go before him. And I consider that's really the phase that VR and AR honor as well. We needed that first iteration of VR in order to have the new generation of engineers, entrepreneurs, product people, mindset people, to start thinking about how to shape the future of this ecosystem. And we needed that to have it's course in order for AR to build on top of those learnings. And hopefully as we subsequently start to build on those as well, we don't view this as failures necessarily, but as necessary advancements in order to get to the ultimate goal of integrating more technology into our lives to make it a better life. >> And the relationship between the hardware platforms, whether it's console, PC, handset, or headset, and software, is interesting. And I want to talk about that with you. But first I want to tell you a story. Tell about your entrepreneur story. You were at UC-Berkeley Cal here, University of California - Berkeley, my daughter is a junior there, but... Great school, doing a lot of cutting-edge stuff there at Berkeley, and certainly not a lack of protests either these days. But, tell us the story. You dropped out and started a company. Tell the story. >> So I was attending Berkeley, and I'm very grateful that I was able to go to Cal. Particularly because I grew up in southern California where around the time that I grew up, there really wasn't a lot of start-ups or entrepreneurial minded people. And I came up here and became really immersed in tech and that was my first foray into it. And during college, I was working at a gaming company to help support myself through school. And just really fell in love with it. And decided that was truly what I wanted to do. My parents supported my decision, and so with their help and approval, I started building games. And I've been building games since, again, the mid-to-late 90s until now. Ran a couple of companies. Founded a few of them. And the latest one that I founded was a few years ago called Second-Wave Games. We had sold it to a larger company called World Golf Tour. And here I am now building tools for game developers actually. >> And what an evolution. You go back, I mean, the Nokia phones. You know, then the iPhone hit the scene. The smart phones. So everything in-between has been a balance of being creative with software and art, if you will gaming as art. What has changed? I mean obviously things fail, because it's a content business. Content is games. So there's always that symbiotic relationship between hardware and software. Who pushes who? Is it the yin and the yang? Or is it the good and the bad? What's going on between the relationship these days? Because we certainly see it on the enterprise side. Software at the end is driving infrastructure. What's the relationship from the content, from the artistry standpoint, and the handset. >> From our point, content makers are not very interested in any platform or hardware that doesn't have the distribution. But the hardware manufacturers need the content in order to push the distribution of hardware. So it becomes a chicken and the egg problem. And it really depends on the approach that people will take. The content distributors do not own the platform. They don't own the distribution of the actual devices that will run things. So it really kind of falls on the hardware manufacturers to decide what path they will go down. We will see more aggressive things like Microsoft when they first launched the Xbox for example. They took a heavy loss on every unit that they sold. But they were focused primarily on distribution. And then, they hit on this magic, very very like, really really run-away hit called Halo. You like Halo, you have to play on Xbox. It's not available on the other consoles. >> And Call of Duty right after it. >> Call of Duty right after it. >> The list is endless. >> So that becomes a really excellent example of how content drives adaptation of hardware. Because if you are huge fans of this title, you have to go to this hardware. And there is no other argument about it. >> It's interesting, the evolution of the internet, early adopters you saw as the adult industry. It was a leading indicator of the trends in online advertising. That's a big joke in the industry. Now, you are seeing the leading indicators in terms of cutting-edge pioneer blade trailers is gaming. Virtual communities, virtual currencies, the gaming culture you can almost use as a precursor to what you're seeing on the crypto side with blockchain. You can see on the Augmented Reality. That's a gamification of life where now the content is the real world. So that's super exciting for someone who has been in the gaming era. And software developers got to be sitting there licking their chops saying, hey I want to get in on this. >> So at my current company, SEWORKS, when we started developing our solution, we actually tested it first and foremost with gaming. With gaming apps above everything else. And people were a little puzzled thinking why would you test gaming above finance or healthcare or IOT? And our answer is because gaming is the most complex thing anyone can possibly make. It contains pretty much every single piece of technology that you could ever know. There are communications layers, there have the most sophisticated graphics layers, they have intense AI layers, they have intense algorithms, anything calculated, and it is in itself an inherit small economical ecosystem as well. So it is a very complex mini-world that you are building inside of the constraints of one application which then has to be very sophisticated in technology in order to run on our current set of hardware and devices. So it's the most challenging thing that we could build for and that's why we chose it. And I see the same thing happening. Gaming is life and life is games. Outside of solving your very basic human needs of shelter, food, and sleep, clothing. What's the immediate next thing that you want to do? People want to be entertained in some format or another. And games are really just almost like a primal urge in an instant. >> Yeah, and you said you're seeing the intersection of E-commerce, entertainment, and web services or cloud. Which you can bundle in IOT, all intersecting. And that's really what the real world is. Analog digital coming together is the consumerization of physical and digital. Which Samsung is putting out there. And this is the perfect beginning wave coming. Do you agree? >> I think so. As I was sitting through the keynote today, and I'm just reflecting on the future where I can watch TV and there's this beautiful scene of a local in northern California. Then I say, I want to go! And I jump in my car and the destination is magically loaded on my GPS in my very smart car, and it just takes me there. I don't have think about it. And on the way, they've already made reservations, right? It seems like a very seamless integration of everything if it's ideally done, and part of me, I think the security paranoia in me, is also a little afraid that too much information is going to be not necessarily a good thing in a lot of senses, because what we see, and what I've seen in almost 20 years of tech, is every time we rush to new technology, new platforms, new distribution, methodologies, people rush in and make the same mistakes over and over again. So I am a little afraid that with this era, it's going to be exactly the same. Where we see explosion of growth, we see explosion of content, people coming in with a gold rush, and then a few years later when thing are established, we're going to start to see the security leaks, the data leaks, the breaches. >> It's kind of like you don't know that smoking is bad for you until they realized people die of lung cancer. It's like data is the same thing. You don't know how much privacy you have given up. I mean look at Equifax. There's going to be more of those. So I think permission-less, permission-based data security, huge issue governing. That's big. >> It is, particularly because your average consumer is not very privacy sensitive. If I want to use something, I want to use something and asking me for permissions is just a hurdle that if I'm motivated enough to actually use a service, or use an app, I'm just going to keep brushing aside without really thinking about it. And alarmingly, the number of apps that we look at, the number of permissions that they ask, is kind of scary. >> Mary, great to have you on the cube. Great conversation. Great thought leadership. I'll give you the final word. What are you guys doing at SEWORKS? What are you up to after the event? What are some of the things you're working on? Get the plug in for your company. >> Yeah, so, what SEWORKS does is, we do tools for developers to help you alleviate your security needs when you're developing for mobile apps or for IOT or for connected, anything actually. If you're building on Android or iOS, we have a solution for you. We're essentially like your armory so we outfit you with an incredible shield that protects your application when it ships to the public. Against hacking and reverse engineering. >> So security as a service? >> We're security as a service. Just think of us as your on-call hackers, how's that? >> Great, your white hat shield for the apps, for mobile, mobile development is hot obviously. New user experiences and expectations are here. There's a big wave coming in, we're seeing on machine learning. You're seeing with AI. And certainly Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality. All powered by unlimited compute in the cloud. Mary Min, SEWORKS, The Cube, more live coverage here in San Francisco after the short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering InterConnect 2017 brought to you by IBM. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE coverage of their cloud and big data event Watson Analytics, and IoT Cloud. It's theCUBE coverage for three days. A lot of great interviews. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Scott Francis, an entrepreneur, CEO, co-founder of BP3. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Great to have an entrepreneur on because you've been, in your business, you co-founded it, built it form the ground up, >> Scott: Right. >> Hundreds of employees. Now, over 100 employees. >> Scott: Right. >> IBM partner, great story. >> Yeah, we started with just two of us 10 years ago. And, we'll have our 10th anniversary in May this year. >> John: Congratulations. So take us through the, you know, state of the art. I mean, go back 10 years ago. You've actually provisioned your own servers. You actually had to load routers and networking gear. That's like, I'd say a tax of at least 100K in just gear. And then you've got the ISP chart, all that stuff. >> Right, well the economics have totally changed, right? For us and for our customers, and I think the main benefit is you can get to business value so much faster now and spend less money that's sort of wasted spend, right? >> So take a minute and talk about what you guys do and what your role is here. And then I want to get into some of the things that are changing the market place, that people are seizing opportunities around, certainly around processing and new innovations. So, give us a quick update on who you guys are, and your role here today. >> Yeah, so our focus is on business process and decision management. And, you know, our experience is that it is foundational technology and foundational aspect to almost everything you're hearing going on, right? Whether it's block chain or cognitive, or moving to the cloud. What are their key considerations? How does it impact my business process? How does it impact my operations? How does it impact my decisions? So we feel like in our space, we're right at the sweet spot of what all our customers are worried about. And when we hear them talk about block chain, we know we've got a process problem we've got to address. And when we hear about moving to the cloud, we better address all the Halo applications around that, application that's moving to the cloud and make sure they're all addressed and part of the new business process. >> It's interesting, the whole decoupling of existing systems models >> Right. >> Is really kind of what I see as the micro trend over the past six years, and like you mentioned, foundational building blocks is key, right? >> Scott: Right. So that's key. And, so let's take this to the next level. I want to ask you a question because I think this is something we see all the time on theCUBE when we do interviews, is that technology now is so much different. In the old days it was, we knew the process. >> Scott: Right. >> And we don't really know the technology. Let's go automate that accounting, blah, blah, blah. You know we saw that, ERPs, CRM, all those vendors. Now it's, I have technology, I don't know what the process is going to be because some new, big data analytics people changed the insight, and changed the value chain, or changed the business model, one tweak radically will disrupt proven, process which no one wants to change. Whoa, you know, so there's now a real factor. Give us some insight and color around how that goes down, because someone has an insight, they want to roll it in and implement it. It changes the entire process flow. >> Right, well the key thing is, having an insight as a single person in a process is one issue, but rolling it out across a Fortune 500 company is a whole other proposition, right? You've got regulatory issues and compliance issues, and customer experience issues that you've got to work through. And all those accommodations may be there. The value prop may be there, but you've got to work through it. You can't, you know, at a billion dollar organization, you can't just change it for that, you have to work all that out. >> John: So what's the playbook? >> Yeah, so the playbook is when we have an insight, what we talk to customers about is you've got all these tools now to arrive at insights you couldn't get to before, or by the time you got to them, you're doing your analytics over data that's six months old. Okay, now I have an insight about what would've worked six months ago. The difference is with cognitive and machine learning algorithms, and the analytics you have available today, and the access to the data, those insights are available now. We have to re-architect the processes to reflect that and to let me make new decisions within that operational context. >> Go ahead. >> Operationalizing those insights. Go ahead, finish your thought. >> Well the data first thing that you talked about is key. We just had our big data event. It's look in value in conjunction with strata hadoop was data in motion and badge are working together now to your point, the times series of data is relevant in the time you need it, right? >> Scott: Right. >> Not yesterday. So this brings up the question of, Okay, you've got some spark thing going on. I see IBM has got spark, that's cool. But now, how do you get into the app, right? To developers? I'm a developer. I'm a coder. Do I need to be a wrangler, data wrangler, or data scientist, to make that happen? So this is the conversation people are trying to figure out. What's your perspective on that? >> I think a lot of the tools that are, that are available now, basically made a common coder, right? Has a decent chance OF that competing with their data scientist friends. There's a different level of expertise, obviously, for the data scientist. But much like in business process, you know years ago, you had to get your lean six black belt, and you really had to study it to get good at it, and really master statistics, and I've got tools that will run the statistics for you, right? So you don't have to master the statistics but you've got to collect the right data, you have to engage in the business. So I think you see a sort of, democratization of data science, right? With the tools that are available now. >> Talk a little bit more about decision management. Go back to the mid-2000s and the Harvard Business Review is writing articles that gut feel trumps, you know, paralysis, analysis, paralysis by analysis every time. That's seemingly changed but what specifically has changed in regards to operationalizing those insights? >> Well I think they're a couple of things that are interesting. If you look at how processes were traditionally designed, you know, before BPM came along, BPM and decision management tools came along, just write the code. Build your application. And when you wanted to change the decision, well you had to find where that was modeled in the code, and edit the code, right? And that was a challenging proposition. The guys that wrote it might have moved to other projects. So how do you figure it out? >> So gut feel was faster. >> Yeah, and BPM, and OEM, you know, gave us tools for managing those things. BPM in terms of process, having a diagram that a mere mortal can understand and find the right context for whenever that decision gets made. And decision management to mange rule sets and the interactions between these rules in a more codified way that again, mere mortals can understand, right? So you don't have to go hunting through code. We're looking at a model, a representative model. I think the change now with machine learning, with cognitive computing, the real time access to data is that you have to really rethink your processes and allow those decisions to be altered in real time, not later, six months later, when I'm doing a revamp of the process as a separate, sort of institutional operation but actually as I'm running my process. We design it to accommodate the idea that as we're collecting data we're going to learn and get better, and actually affect those decisions, or recommend a different decision to the person whose Johnny-on-the-spot. >> Are you finding that the business impact is that your customers, the consumers of this sort of new way of doing decision management are seeing things that they wouldn't have seen before, or is it more greater conviction and faster time to everybody pulling the same direction? >> Well, I think for sure they're seeing things they haven't seen before. We're surfacing data that they just didn't have access to before in a timely fashion. And in the context of their process which was always a difficult thing to do in traditional systems, right? For any of your traditional ERP, or CRM system, the notion of where you are in your cross functional process may not be present. Today you have that context. You have the real time access to it. That really changes the nature of what you're seeing. I think the other bit is, yeah, the action ability, right? How easy it is to turn that insight into an action. >> And have you seen any effect on the politics of decision making, because we all know the P and L manager whose the strong voice in the organization, he or she is going to pull data that supports their business case. Have you been able to, sort of, neutralize that sometimes damaging effect in organizations? >> Yeah, well, I think in the cycle of the economic cycle, you know, if we rewind five or six years ago, almost every project we engage with with a customer is about operational controls, reducing costs, trying to produce the same result with fewer resources, right? And that has shifted dramatically over the last few years. The last two years it's been almost entirely about capturing revenue. >> Dave: Opportunistic, yeah. >> Serving new revenue streams without having to hire as much to support it. It's much more about revenue capture and customer experience. And I think that reflects the stage we're in in the cycle. >> Dave: Is that a bubbling cater? I hope it reflects a good long term view. >> Dave: I hope so too. >> You know, but it's interesting. There's a customer speaking here at InterConnect today, StubHub, about their customer experience. And they BPM to manage their customer experience, and back in 2009, 2010, when everybody was pulling back, and they were all focused on cost containment. You know, I recall StubHub was working on how to make their customer experience better. It's kind of interesting, right? And they've done very well over the years, right? So I think that value system in that culture really pays off over time, but you have to really mean it. If you're just swinging back and forth with the ebb and flow of the economy, then I think it's very difficult. >> Well, if you're doubling down when everybody else is sitting on their hands, you're going to get a competitive. >> It's a great opportunity, right? >> So, talk a little bit more about the IBM connection. What's going on in InterConnect, and what's the relationship there? >> Well, IBM is our best partner. You know, we've been partnered very closely with IBM ever since they acquired Lombardi which was our company that we came out of back in 2007. And that has become, you know, the heart of the IBM, BPM portfolio. And we work with their business process products, decision management, as well as cognitive and blue mix. So we're in the mix with IBM in a big way, and I think this conference is a great opportunity for us to not only reconnect with folks from IBM, but also with our customers who tend to come to this conference as well. So it's a great opportunity for us. >> So specifically you're leveraging IBM tooling, sort of. >> That's right. >> Repackaging that in your solutions for your clients. >> Right. So we are a reseller. We're also OEM IBM software, and we do delivery work for IBM customers. So, it's kind of a trifecta. >> You started this company 10 years ago. We love this start up story. Tell us, you and your colleagues started. Tell us your start up story and how you go to where you are now. >> Well we were, you know, we would meet up at a coffee shop, right? And get together and kind of talk about, you know, the fact that it felt like there was a big opportunity out there. >> Dave: This is in Austin. >> Yeah in Austin. My co-founder and I, you know, we were working at Lombardi but we felt like there was an opportunity to build a great services firm in our space, right? In this business process space, that there was a lot of untapped potential. And as we met and talked about it, we just got the bug that we needed to go out and do it. And when we started the company, you know. It was just the two of us initially. We bootstrapped the firm. Last summer, for the first time, we actually raised money, outside capital, to help fund the growth. >> Dave: 10 years then. >> Yeah, yeah. But all that time we self funded which was a great experience. A great learning experience. Certainly lost some sleep over the years. But, you know, there is an aspect of kind of putting the band back together. You know, hiring people we really enjoyed working with in previous lives, previous jobs, and putting together a killer team to go after it. >> So the decision to take outside capital, maybe talk a little bit about that because that's probably wasn't an easy one, or maybe it was, I don't know. >> No, I think, you know, what we've been fortunate to do is we've taken some calculated risks over time, right? We used to only operate in the United States. We acquired a business in London to expand to Europe. And now a third of our business is in Europe. But those risks, you can put the whole company at risk taking a chance like that. And so it occurred to us, after taking a few of those calculated risks and winning that maybe we should hedge our bets a little bit and have some more capital to work with, and have a good financial partner that if we were engaged in that kind of discussion, someone who could help, both advise and also possibly fund if we got into that situation. And so, we took an investment from Petra Capital based out of Nashville. They're a great growth equity firm, and they invest in healthcare and tech start ups, like ourselves. And so we got some great people on the board as a result. Mike Simmons from T2 Systems, and Jeff Rich from another capital investment firm. These guys have been operators. They've run companies much bigger than ours but they've also been in the mix at our size. So we've got some great outcomes out of taking that investment. >> So you've been cashflow positive since the early days. You had to be. Is it the plan to continue to do that, or do you make gasoline in the fire type investments? >> You know, I think it's cultural, right? I know there's a lot of business models where there's actually some good since in the running and not worrying about profit for awhile, but I also think you need to develop habits and our business serving enterprise customers, I think they deserve to know that we're being responsible with our money, with how we spend, with how we grow, and that we have a responsible level of growth. We could spend more and grow faster at the same type of process. >> John: At the risk of service. >> But at the risk of service quality for our customers and that's not worth it for us because ultimately, it's the repeat business with customers that really drives our growth long term. >> We feel the same way, obviously self funded. You know I'd say Silicon Valley is a story like that. Heirarchy of entrepreneurs and it's well known that the number one position is self funded growth without outside capital. It's a lot harder. No offense to my VC funded friends. It's a lot harder to do it from the ground up than just get other people's money. So tier one is do it yourself, which you guys are in. Get some capital, grow that and have an exit. Three, try and fail, or four, work for a company. (laughs) >> I think the key thing is it takes patience. If you're going to do it yourself and self fund it, you know, let the business fund itself, not just throw in your own personal money, but actually make the business fund itself. You have to have a lot of patience to stick with it. And I think whether by hook or crook, we picked a space that afforded us some of that patience, right? >> Yeah, you get rewarded for innovation. You get awarded for good service delivery. >> We feel like business is a human endeavor, right? So a good business process and good decisions are going to be problems that our children will face, not just us. >> And they're going to get more exciting for you as processes get automated with machine learning and AI right here on the doorstep, and Devops exploding with IoT coming on full line. It's going to change the game big time. >> Yeah, and I can't remember who said it but someone just yesterday was saying, you know, "It's not so much about automation "as it is about augmentation." And I really think that's true. I think if you automate out all the mundane, what's left is the stuff that's really interesting, right? And that's kind of how we view our job is to automate all the stuff that's getting in the way of highly skilled people doing their job taking care of their customers. >> I always love the story when IBM super computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess. You've heard this a million times. Kasparov didn't just say, "All right we're done." He created a competition, and he beat the computer, and now the greatest chess player in the world is a combination of human and machine. So it's that creativity, that common atoria factor that's drives the machine. >> It's actually better than the machine only, right? >> The creativity is going to change the game. Scott Francis, entrepreneur, founder, co-founder and CEO of BP3 in Austin. Thanks for joining us, appreciate it. More live coverage here. Stay with us, theCube is at IBM Interconnect here in Las Vegas. More great interviews after this short break. (upbeat techno music)