(uplifting music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. Really excited to have a start up in the serverless space here in our studios in Palo Alto. Welcome to the program, first-time guest, we have Nate Taggart, who's the CEO, and Farrah Campbell, who's the Ecosystem Manager, both with Stackery. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu, thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> Farrah, I know you're just in from Vegas and from the DevOps Enterprise Summit. Why don't we start there a little bit? DevOps, this big wave, a lot of changes, what's the energy you're hearing, what are people talking about what's exciting them these days? >> A lot of things are exciting them. I think that the whole ecosystem is changing. There's so much happening it's almost like the 80s and 90s, you know what I mean, where there's like the dot-commer I guess. There's so much new technology that's out there and it's available. I think that people are really trying to understand where they should go. Maybe I've already started with containers, now people are talking about serverless. What do I do? >> It's a great point. These waves of technology come so fast. When people write their strategy, you might now even want to write it in ink. (Nate and Farrah laughs) They may be drawing because Clay Christensen always says it's something you should revisit. You should go at least once a quarter. It's directionally where I need to go, but things change. All right, Nate, Stackery. Bring us back. First, give us a little bit about the team's background, yourself and what led to the formation of the company. >> Yeah, thanks, Stu. My founding team actually comes out in New Relic. We were early employees there, stayed 'til the IPO. We've worked building, DevTooling for a long time, hand-managing at scale infrastructure. One of the things that we found was, I mean, New Relic was a high-velocity engineering team and the bottleneck, in many cases, was infrastructure. After New Relic, I worked with the data science group at GitHub, again, building massive data infrastructure and the bottleneck was not figuring out what to do. It wasn't the work in front of us. It was the underlying, un-differentiate heavy-lifting of infrastructure. Chase Douglas, my co-founder, and I, when we saw AWS Lambda come out us, it's the first example of a wave of serverless services, we got really excited and realized this took away a lot of the barriers and a lot of the burden of building new applications, started playing with it. This was three years ago. Over the next few years, we've been working with all the serverless pioneers figuring out what are the changes that they're experiencing from their operations cycle from managing the life cycle of an application, how are their teams in the dynamics changing the workflow. We took those best practices and built it into Stackery, which is now a software product to accelerate serverless operations. >> We've been watching this for a while. Give us a little bit of a perspective first. There's some things different about this serverless wave or functions as a service. I'm an infrastructure guy by background and we've always wanted to not have the boat anchors of network and storage slow us down, but I lived through the virtualization wave. (Nate laughs) I've got the scars of over a decade. >> Sure. >> Working in the ecosystem of trying to fix that. Everybody got super excited when containers in a Docker helped bring that to the mainstream, but it was tools helping us move up the stack a little. Serverless, to me, when I look at it, it really starts from the application level down and there's still lots of infrastructure stuff. It's not like it disappears. I've got the great T-shirt from the cloud guru people. (Nate laughs) It's like there is no cloud of someone else's computer, they have the longer version of that for serverless. I love your viewpoint 'cause, New Relic, they'd seen, they track, they monitor that, you had a great way to look at it, GitHub of course, but what's the same, what's different about what's so important about serverless and what it does for companies? >> Fundamentally, we're looking at just two different patterns and neither one of them is right or wrong, but they have different use cases, different applications, areas where they excel. New Relic was a big champion in early pioneer of Docker. We used a lot of containers, a lot of orchestration technology, so I'm still a big proponent of that. I think when I look at the serverless marker today, it's tempting to look at it as an abstraction layer, disfunction as a service, there's maybe micro-container type view. It's not really the pattern we're seeing in industry. What we're actually seeing is people are saying it's a manage service and it's not just Lambda, it's not just compute as a manage service. It's me stringing together the manage components I need to develop quickly and deliver business value to focus on business logic instead of the plumbing. I think API Gateway is manage service, I think there's manage databases in their manage service, there's event streams. You pull all the pieces together and Lambda may be a component of that. In that way, it actually fits in and compliments a container program. >> Absolutely. What I was trying to say is containers kill VMs and serverless kills this. It's kind of like cloud is more of an operation model. >> Sure. >> Serverless is more of how I build my applications and services that I can use, not the unit of how I build something. Farrah, when I look at it, the conversations I've had with users, it's not the okay, let me take the person that did some silo and teach them to code or put that together. I've talked to marketing people that are like, "I got involved and I can do this." What are you seeing from the personnel and who's using it, how is it very different from what we've seen in the past? >> I think it opens up a lot of doors. I think it makes the unattainable attainable. You see people that go from front end to full stack. It takes you to the tip of technology. I'm mentoring a woman that is using serverless as a way to get app out. She doesn't understand infrastructure, she doesn't understand all the ops and how to set all those things up and it would take a long time to figure all those things out. Those are harder doors to open. Everything's been done the same for a very long time. There's like this free knowledge is shared here. Serverless has an ecosystem. It's kind of like a community where everybody is working together, sharing knowledge and trying to actually build something bigger and better, something that feels good to be a part of. We have a lady that's working at our office coming out of code school and she is a killer engineer. You can talk more about what Anna's doing for us at Stackery, but she's coming out of a code school and is operating as if she's a full-stack engineer >> I think that's really the compelling story behind serverless, is focus on business value. >> Yeah. >> And that's the mission of every software engineer. It's the reason most of us got into software engineering was 'cause we wanted to solve puzzles, we wanted to work with logic and idea, we wanted to build. We didn't want to sit and configure infrastructure as code templates in order to stand up some basic EC2 server, so that we can run our application, right? >> Nate, maybe you troned a little bit for us. What does Stackery do in this ecosystem? What are you helping customers? If you've got any customer examples, we'd love to hear that. >> Absolutely. First off, the development model is changing. If you want to do serverless, serverless, again, is a manage service. I can't replicate all of AWS on my laptop. In order to work with these manage services, in the development cycle, I'm shipping code to the cloud. I'm provisioning resources in the cloud. Maybe in my own account or a developer account, but I have to know how to provision those resources and then configure those resources. If I'm doing this in a professional environment, then it means I need to do this in a way that's automated, scalable, I can hand off to someone else, they can replicate and this is the workflow to tooling, the guardrails that Stackery brings to your serverless program. We make it so that a developer can take a branch out of version control and deploy their own instance of it in their sand-boxed environment within their AWS account. This was kind of automation workflows, handling of configuration templating, being able to pull a resource off the shelf, I need to put my database in a VPC (Nate snaps fingers) and boom, it's pre-configured and ready for you to go. >> Okay. >> Stackery also enables you to work on your core problems. I'm not busy trying to research how the 1400 services are going to interact with each other. I don't have time to do that. I'm trying to focus on one of my projects. I'm focused on a deadline. I'm trying to get a specific task done. I don't have time to research for a week to try to get that, to figure that out. Not only that, it's not a language, so focusing time and trying to figure out and formulate cloud formation, it seems like a waste of time. >> The flip side of this is that that is some of the most important mission critical work that teams are doing. You can't provision into your production AWS account if you have misconfigured IM roles. You don't want to open access to that account to every single person in the organization. You don't want misconfigured resources. This new model, this new development change, where the application is at the heart of the life cycle, if we're not helping people to quickly stand up correctly configured resources then we're putting more load on the ITT, more load on the operational team and actually slowing down development. >> Bring us inside. When do you usually get engaged, who's driving those engagements, when you talk about write, what were they doing before and what does this enable them to do once they're engaged? >> Even though serverless feels like an infrastructure solution, it's actually the application development side of the house that tends to be the leading adopter. A lot of cases, they're trying to un-bottleneck their operations team or not send them low-criticality work loads. A typical entry point might be something like a cron job. We have this little function that just needs to run once a day. Do I really need to have a capacity-planning meeting with the ops team to get this out in production? They go, "Okay, we'll write the code, we'll ship it as a serverless function and we'll get it out the door." That works really well when you're a single-principle engineer with maybe elevated privileges in your cloud accounts. It doesn't work so well as a replicable process that you can then scale across the org. I don't think ops leaders want just like let's open the gates to our kingdom. Instead, what we see is that four companies to go through a maturing curve of embracing this technology where they go from background tasks, data pipelines, cron jobs, low-visibility work to maybe more core services that can extend their product or deliver more customer-facing value. They have to answer a lot of questions in terms of how do we change our process and our culture in order to embrace the velocity of serverless without losing the control that our ops team's been providing for us. >> Also, setting your team up for success. Anybody knows that if I'm working on a specific task or we get a project I'm working on, if I don't understand it and can't figure it out, I'm going to get frustrated, I'm not liking my job anymore, I hate this problem that we're working on, this initiative is dumb, I don't want to be a part of this, but Stackery allows somebody, it made me feel good about it, all the things that you can accomplish. We have a customer that's using this right now that they are moving faster than they ever thought that was possible and it's been so much fun to see their excitement and more things that they learn about that they're using it like, "Look what we just did!" They were going to pull out the whiteboard. He was like, "Let's not pull out the whiteboard, Let's just pull out Stackery." That's awesome. >> It's really fun. We opened Slack channels for some of our customers and it's so exciting to watch them get so fired up about being able to self-serve, being able to actually deliver value and hit their milestones very quickly and successfully. You were talking about what segments are driving this. One of the interesting patterns that we've seen is that it's not like the cutting-edge infrastructure team. In a lot of cases, it might be the under-served software teams in an organization. One of our first customers was an enterprise company doing retail and it was their marketing enablement team, a business enablement team that says, "Hey, our work is important. It drives revenue," is critical to our business, but it feels like a busy workload to the ops team and it's hard to get priority on this. For them to be able to self-serve to relieve some of that back pressure, but then deliver the business value, it was like an immediate measurable win for 'em. >> We often talk about the future of jobs so often, it's like oh, well. Really, you need to be a data scientist. You could go get all this training, you need to get there. It sounds like the bar is kind of low to be able to jump in here and don't necessarily need to go through certifications to start getting real results. >> I think maybe instead of saying, "The bar is low," we're opening the doors wider. We're saying that you can be successful by being able to write software and deliver business value and that you don't need to learn, also, how to configure cloud resources or write infrastructure as code templates or manage an operations lifecycle, personally, to be able to ramp up and add value to your organization. >> All right. Nate, how many people in the company, tell us what you can about funding and which expect to see from you and the team throughout the next six to 12 months. >> Absolutely. Officially, our company is now two years old, we're a team of 15 and we've raised seven and a half million dollars led by Voyager Capital and Hummer Winblad. >> Okay. >> I want to add that I had been involved in a number of startups. This team is different. We have five women on our team. >> Yeah. >> When I joined 10, there was four. We have one in ops and three women engineers >> We're up to six now. >> I know, but that's what I'm saying. I'm talking 'about when I started and that is like you don't see that. >> I wonder. There's certain shows I go to when I go to the Cloud Foundry show, when I go to Kubernetes show, when I go to, more of, the developer-centered shows, I do tend to find a higher percentage women. Are we seeing it or is that really? >> Oh, for sure. My first conference, when I started Stackery, was Serverlessconf. It was awesome. I walked into this hackathon actually scared to death because I've been to them before and was basically laughed out of there like, "What are you doing here?" I asked to be a part of a team that had to build a product and we to demo it and I went up to 'em and told 'em that I knew nothing about. I'm not an engineer, I can't write code at all, but I did understand business problems and I was trying to understand where serverless could be useful or what service would be useful. They were like, "Let's find you a team," and they had me working on the business plan while they were doing all the coding and I was like, "Let's do check-ins every single hour." Just that feeling like a welcome. You felt welcomed there and, as a women working in tech, I haven't felt welcomed at a number of conferences or a lot of hackathons, but I definitely felt welcomed there. >> It's great to hear. I saw on Twitter the other day and it was like, "Could you just imagine if for the last thousand years, we'd actually use the brainpower of the entire human race, (Nate laughs) not having kept 50% of the population from contributing." Nate, want to give you the final word. Serverless, it's growing fast, there's a lot of excitement, but what do you see as the biggest challenges. What does the industry need to work on? What's exciting you that, when we come and sit down in 2019, you're hoping we've moved the ball more? >> I think that one take-away that I want to make sure your audience has is that if you're sitting here saying, "We're not doing serverless," you're wrong. Someone in your organization is doing it. If you have this self-served model where pockets of the organization, this is the old shadow IT, where they are self-serving their configuring resources, their provisioning and it's outside of your peri-view, you're going to want to start putting practice steps in place to make sure that they're able to be successful with that mission. If they're not successful with that mission, they increase risk on your cloud strategy as a whole. They put more workload back on the operations team if that team ends up being a bottleneck for these needs. I hear a lot of IT leaders going, "I don't know if we're doing serverless today." It's like, "No, you are. I've talked to two of your engineers. I know you are." (Nate chuckles) >> Absolutely, right there. When I interviewed Andy Jassy, we had him on theCUBE last year, it was serverless becomes the underlying foundation for everything that AWS is doing. It is going to leave the audience with it is not a single product, or unnecessarily a single tool, but this is what all the cloud is doing and it's moving there pretty fast. It's something that the users can get involved with even more. All right. >> Absolutely. >> Nate and Farrah, thank you so much for joining us. Look forward to watching Stackery and seeing the updates. Make sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage. We'll have a big coverage of course from AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. Lots of other shows. I'm personally always excited about what's having in the serverless and emerging trends. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. >> Thanks.

(orchestral music) >> Hello there and welcome to this special CUBEConversation. I'm John Furrier, here in theCUBE Studios, in Palo Alto, California. I'm here with special guest, Shawn Douglass, who's the Founder and CEO of Amberdata, Amberdata.io. It's a hot blockchain-based analytics startup kind of taking a different approach. I obviously would like to highlight some of the startups that are doing pretty amazing things. Shawn welcome to this CUBEConversation >> Great, thank you very much for having me here. >> So you have an enterprise background. You're entrepreneur, technical, been a CTO at EMC. You've helped EMC run their venture capital firms over the years. Helped them build it up from scratch. Done a variety of startups. Kind of cloud, kind of like large-scale. Now doing the blockchain startup. That's, I find super interesting. I think you might have more there than you think, but that's my opinion seeing the demo. Folks watching Amberdata.io is the site. Let's talk about that, I mean obviously blockchain, we've been covering pretty heavily recently with theCUBE. We've been covering Bitcoin since 2010 on our blog SiliconANGLE.com But you're seeing a renaissance in software development, with cloud computing, but now you start to see a new wave coming. We've been documenting. We've been calling it, you know, the future of money, the future of work, the future of infrastructure, because what blockchain and decentralized applications are doing is changing the stack a bit. And you've been in, in many, involved in those waves, so you're at the heart of it. So I got to ask you, you know, as an entrepreneur, before we get into what your company does, I want to just get your take on, you know, I mean, you kind of look at this market and say, it's a wide-open space. >> Right. >> As an entrepreneur who's doing a start-up, what's it like? What's your view? And how do you see the marketplace evolving? >> Yeah, that's a great question, there's a lot there. Let me try to unpack that the best that I can. So having gone between startup to big company to investor, helped buy, build, sell, in companies and operating for as long as I have in Silicon Valley. I think, as you said, technology and innovation happen in waves. And I think that waves are mini-revolutions, if you will. And I think that revolutions are about addressing a fundamental human need. If we look at, look to history, to see where the future is going. If you look at the Industrial Revolution, it was about automation and supply, I mean, uh production chains, and to be able to produce things at scale. If you look at the Information Age it was about the ability to communicate, and the servers and the networks and the web 2.0 companies that arose out of that, was around communication. That was another major wave. If you look at what's happening with AI right now, and self-driving cars, that's about the ability, for the need to think, right? And you're starting to see algorithms and machine learning applied to Google self-driving cars, and you know, just about every facet of our life AI is touching, you're using Siri at home, whatever you're using. I think what we're seeing with blockchain is that next wave. It's that next revolution, and that revolution I believe is about trust, and about decentralization. So, coming out of web 2.0 we saw participatory and non-participatory consolidations, in creation of juggernauts of technology. The Facebooks of the world, the Amazons of the world. On the other side, the Equifaxes of the world, where you didn't opt-in, in exchange for being the product, to use their platform, they just got your data. We've seen violation of that trust in data breaches, you know, at every major player, you know. Equifax being the bad guy in this case, where they've lost every single citizen in the United States data, and we never benefited from that, but we carry the liability forward. And what we're seeing with blockchain is the ability for people to leverage decentralized platforms and smart contract platforms, specifically, as mechanisms to easily deploy with zero barrier to entry. These, you know, these smart contract vending machines, if you will, into a world where people are taking back trust. So I, that's what we see, and we see that opportunity across both the enterprise space, 'cause we're hard core enterprise people, that we're building member data, but we're also seeing new enterprises being created on chain and that list is really long. So it's pretty, it's definitely a big wave. >> Well, the one, blockchain's an infrastructure, I think people getting all crazy over that, which I think it's legit. And there's some people out there saying, "Oh, blockchain's not legit." They don't really know what they're talking about in my opinion, and that's just, and a lot of people are confused. So there's a lot of people who are, you know, obviously don't see it, some people do. But I think the phenomenon that's interesting is, you know, taking a tech stack approach is, if you look at the decentralized application market, >> Shawn: Right. >> Where Ethereum for instance has got a lot of, the most developers. And they're working fast on some technical challenges they had but they're making progress. The D applications, the distributed, I mean the decentralized applications, that's like an application server on the blockchain. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So what that happens, is the things are happening, so you almost think of it, and you and I were talking about this, is that, you know, the vending machine of the future or the transaction service layer is that decentralized smart contract. >> Absolutely. >> 'Cause that's where the value is going to be captured. >> Shawn: Absolutely. >> And created and captured. >> Let me unpack that, because that's spot-on, I 100% agree with what you're saying there. Is that, what is a blockchain? A blockchain is effectively a decentralized database and network put together. What I think is interesting, is smart contract platforms that put a virtual machine on top of that. Like Ethereum has the EVM. Where it's your application server. And what are smart contracts? Smart contracts, like you said, are vending machines. They're a vending machine that has the appropriate level of security, the appropriate level of service, and allows you to have an autonomous transaction with that. When you walk up to a Pepsi machine, you put in a dollar, you expect to get back a Pepsi, it works, you go away, you don't think anything about it. What blockchain is allowing anybody to do, is to publish a smart contract on chain and monetize that at the most elemental level. It's analogous to, if Amazon allowed you to deploy a lambda function and monetize that. It's analogous to, if E-Business Suite allowed you to monetize your plugins from an Oracle world. It's analogous to if SAP with, when Shai Agassi was still there doing composable applications, allowed you to, as a vendor, anybody publish into that SAP ecosystem and monetize that. This is a massive, massive transformation and it reduces barriers to entries for people to come in and compete with juggernauts like an Amazon or an Oracle because at the barrier to entry is, they're publishing into a globally available, decentralized, platform, right. >> And the thing too that's interesting, and just to tie that together with what's happening in the cloud world, is if you look at like Kubernetes containers, and micro-services, the ability to be efficient with micro-services, allows for that IT infrastructure to completely be re-platformized. >> Exactly. >> So what you're getting at, is with the smart contracts and the atomic nature of the transaction, you can be laser-focused and scale transactions, >> Right. >> and be efficient, so the efficiency is a big part of this. >> It is, there's efficiency, and there is the ability to decompose things, and that's been a trend, for as long as I've been in technology right. It's, first it was, you know, cloud services, then it was SOA, then it was cloud, and now it's serverless, it's blockchain, it's just on that spectrum. There's not a lot new here actually, right. It's a continuum of technology, and I think all of these waves are enabled by different revolutionary forces. >> Operational change and software drives it obviously And you got the characteristics of blockchain, immutability et cetera, et cetera and DApps is just a new way to kind of write the software for that. They create those vending machines or transactional services So I got to ask you, so with what you guys are doing, I want to tie that together, because one of the things we've been reporting on theCUBE is, the piece of action that's most hyped up is, ICOs. These blockchain apps that are changing, and the old guard and disrupting incumbents. But there's not a lot of tooling around it, so, you know, if you think about like trading platforms, >> Right. 24/7 traders have access to stuff. Now the world's a 24/7, 365 global. There's not a lot of tooling, not a lot stuff. So this instant industry's created. This new wave is coming. You're building some tooling, so I want to get your thoughts on the support needed to do this. >> Shawn: Right. >> Say I put my business on the blockchain >> Shawn: Right. >> And with, use developers to do decentralized applications. >> Yeah, so, >> I need tools. >> Aboslutely, that's exactly, so, you know, got a little gray hair here, and I grew up building internet software at scale, right. Whenever you run anything in production, you always have your network operations center. You have your AppD, you have your Splunks, you have your New Relics, you have all of this. You've instrumented your infrastructure. You've instrumented your application transactions. You've instrumented search for operational log data. You need to be able to triage a security instance. You need to be able to respond to performance or production issues. You need to be able to communicate with your customers. None of this existed when I looked at the blockchain space, and I'm like I don't get it. This is a massive opportunity, because if you look at the enterprise space, 'cause public right now, sure, it's very interesting. ICOs are the killer use case. There's 300 million dollars per hour traversing in the public at their IMNetwork, 50% of those are going to smart contracts. A lot of that is actual transactional trading volume. But step back from the hype for a second, and you look at IBM, you look at VMware, you look at Cisco, you look at Microsoft, you look at, you know, all these guys. JP Morgan with Quorum. You look at, they all have major bets that are starting to evolve around taking things and removing intermediaries, just like public chain, but they're doing it with things like swaps, credit default swaps, interest swaps, currency swaps. They're talking about removing escrow services, they're talking about, >> So pre-existing companies are going to take the efficiency side of this and drive it. >> It's going to, it is a massive transformation right, and especially when they're working with their trading partners, there's almost a, what, a 2006 VMware data center consolidation play. Remember when the data centers were full of servers, and then all of a sudden, you know, they started pulling back the number of servers and turning off the A/C because they were able to take entire data center floors and consolidate them inside of VMs where they had three and four virtual machines in a server. And I think that you're going to get those same types of efficiencies over time once they get to pass some scaling issues around blockchain where you don't have to have seven copies of your data across your front office, your back office, across your trading partner. You can have one single source of truth and operate in an open transparent world where you can reduce some of those inefficiencies. And then there's a whole business transformation play that, you know, there's there's just, I think it's a, >> It's a perfect storm. You have a consolidation piece, which is more efficient operationally, and then you got the top-line revenue opportunity with disrupting kind of industries with new transactional models, business models and token economics. So we've talked a lot about it in theCUBE. I want to talk to you about your company, Amberdata. So you guys are trying to make sense of what's happening because if you're going to put a business on the blockchain, >> You need this. >> and use decentralized applications as a transactional application server if you will, for lack of a better description. You got to know what's going on, and there's gas involved, you got to pay the mining fees, so where there's costs, you need visibility. >> Right. So the old school, the old model was, you'd have KPIs, set some alerts, dashboarding, you're doing that right? >> That's what we've done. >> So take a minute to explain what Amberdata's doing. Did you do a round of funding? What's going on with the company? You got the product up there Amberdata.io >> Right, yeah, so let me unpack, there's a lot there. So uh, we started the company end of August. We raised a round of funding with traditional enterprise venture capital firm Hummer Winblad. Lars Leckie, amazing investor, really understands enterprise software and how to enable companies to grow. Amazing partner to work with. We've been heads down building a product. About 45 days ago we launched our platform live, and what we have today, is we have instrumentation for blockchain infrastructure, decentralized applications, transactions, and an ontology-based search, that gives a clean user experience where you can be search-driven to drill into a smart contract, a transaction, into a block, and you know, if you're building on top of chain, I mean, we're a classic picks and shovels play, It's pure, it's enterprise software, we built this for enterprises. Today our platform supports public Ethereum, but it was really to demonstrate, if we can do this for the entire Ethereum network and we can do this for its scale, of course we can do this for any enterprise. And today we support public Ethereum and Quorum, which is private Ethereum, it's a JPMorgan project, that I think is the one of the leaders in private blockchain, and that's a project that's being supported by the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. We will also in our working with IBM, I was just on the Hyperledger technical steering committee this morning, I participate in that. So, we will support Hyperledger in the future, we will support multiple other public and private chains so the private ecosystem today is, you know, Enterprise Ethereum à la Quorum. It is Hyperledger. It is Corda. On the public side, it is Ethereum, it is Stellar, it is, you know, things like Quantum that are emerging, Neo, or emerging. >> So is your business model SaaS? Yes, it's a SaaS model and today we support public chain as a demonstration of it, but we're also working on allowing people to, just like a data dog, or what have you, where we have a connector, we can pull your data in, and it's private, it's only visible for you, for your private blockchain. Or we could deploy into their private cloud or into (talking over each other) >> John: So is Amberdata.io like a demo site, or is that more of, >> It's a demonstration of the ability to instrument blockchain infrastructure, applications, transactions, with search, the ability to set alerts on every single panel, which are your KPIs. If you're going to run a business, you either have explicit or implicit service level agreements, and you need to be able to instrument those service level agreements with KPIs, and those KPIs you need to be able to set alerts and events, receive emails, you know, all of those. >> I love the demo, the demo, I think the demo will be a great freemium model, because it showed, just my notes here, smart contracts on the decentralized application, top 50 sorted transaction volume, token velocity change in price, because you know gas you're still paying the gas to get the transaction written. I mean this is kind of like spot pricing for Amazon almost. You need to understand what am I paying for, if there's an SLA involved in a smart contract? >> Absolutely. >> You got to know the policy involved right? So, again, this is like old-school, like enterprise thinking, >> Shawn: Right. >> The world is now a global enterprise if you think about it. >> Shawn: Yeah, you absolutely need transparency into your operating costs. Those are your transactions costs of either, for your customers to consume your service or for you to provide your service. And, prior to this, there was very little transparency. It's ironic, is that, the most trustless, transparent platform, had no real view into it. And that's what we've built. We've built transparency and are enabling you to trust the trustless platform, to get transparency into your DApp KPIs, and so for example, if you're building, like you look at like EtherDelta's, EtherDelta's is one of the non-custodial smart contract based exchanges. They're doing 70 million dollars a month in transaction value. I don't know what they did before. We've talked with people that are consumers of that. We've talked to people on pretty much all of the decentralized exchange platforms. But the ability to understand, what are the number of transactions per hour, per second, per minute, that are hitting my smart contracts? What are the token transfers, if I've tokenized my unit economics. Who are the top 10 callers to my contract? Is my smart contract calling other contracts? What are my pending transactions? What is my book of trades? What is market depth of my gas prices? What, I need to be able to search if I've got failure. Show me transactions between this date, that date, to, from, where, that is all mission-critical stuff that you need if you're going to operate any business. >> So a lot of operational data and that's phenomenal, but are you worried that people aren't going to adopt? Blockchain I mean. >> I'm not worried about that at all. I actually think that there's an entire, when we started this, we were focused on enterprises exclusively, and we saw what we were doing on public Ethereum as a marketing ploy. We're like "Hey we'll go instrument "the whole public Ethereum Network". I'm a big data guy, we've built high-throughput, four terabytes a day of social graph ingestion platforms. We're like, public Ethereum, you know, not that transactionally intensive. We're going to do this for the world. Now, after building the platform and seeing 300 million dollars an hour, with 50% of those transactions going to smart contracts, we're seeing a new Enterprise emerge. You can look at companies like, you know, Sia, Storj coin, IPFS. >> So can actually see the activity (slurred) it's encrypted, but you can look at the metadata and get the patterns. I mean you're essentially looking at the transactional volume, almost like a stock exchange. We can, we have full transparency into every transaction, that's happening on chain, and we can see, like the other day, I did a tweet on, there was a token that's traded, I don't know, we're not interested in the trading side but it's the use case that has the most buzz, and we have transparency, so we see it, we're like, "Hey, this smart contract went "from two thousand transactions, to 40 thousand "transactions. What is going on?" Right, and we actually saw that. >> You can see the pump-and-dump scams too. >> Oh you can totally see that. In providing transparency, is now, it's becoming easy for anybody to search for anything. >> Well that's a great free service, and I appreciate you, and I've been playing with that over the weekend, I love it, I'm like, "Hmm, I might get some trades on this thing." >> Thank you. Check it out. We'd love feedback from anybody that's seeing this, Amberdata.io and I can be reached at Shawn@Amberdata.io >> So, I mean obviously funding you must have a ton of VCs throwing money at you, is that the case? Are you thinking about an ICO? What's the thoughts on the capital expansion? Yes obviously got a great, hot startup here, so what's the funding strategy? >> We've been heads down on building things, and we're obviously getting inbound, but you know, we're well funded, we're in as, I think we're in a position of strength. What we're focused on is taking the mountain, and defining and being the category leader. I think right now, we have defined it. >> There's no one else doing it. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So you're like the solo, you're the only one doing it. >> So, we are going to define the space for operational monitoring analytics for public and private blockchain, and be that single pane of glass that allows enterprises to build on or around, you know, decentralized smart contract platforms, or, you know, private smart contract platforms. And we're going to take that hill, and we're going to stay out in front. So right now, we're heads down. We'll eventually, (talking over each other) >> Can I get an API to the data set? Can you just give me an API? Like a fire hose opportunity there? >> So we are enabling this as a platform, to drive network effects, and we're working with several exchanges, we're working, you know, some of non-custodial exchanges. We've got a lot of inbound interest from people more on the trading side. We're evaluating whether we do that, and we want people to be able to build on top of our platform, other analytics tools, you know, connect to exchanges, connect what have you, right and create that marketplace, create those APIs, inroads, and then allow people to drive that. And on the ICO front, we're really not focused on that. We're enterprise software. >> Well theCUBE team would love to have an API and program with it for theCUBEInsights, we'd love to look at that. >> That would be great right. >> That's something we can work together and collaborate on that. I got to ask you about the data 'cause this is fascinating, coming from the search background that I come from, it's almost like the Google crawler. You went out, >> It's a Google for blockchain. >> Is it true that you guys crawled all the Genesis nodes on Ethereum, so you got into the Genesis nodes? >> Shawn: That's correct. >> So from the Genesis nodes to today, you've essentially gotten all those instrumented, >> Shawn: Right >> And have real time data coming in. >> Yes, that is correct. So as far as I know, we're the only people that have done this. It's computationally intensive and from the data structure perspective pretty difficult to do. But what we've done is, and it has to do with the data structures in the way Ethereum works whether that be public or private, is that there's an account-based blockchain that has transactions, but then the smart contracts and transfers of tokens happen in messages. So what we've done is, we have the ability to, or we have done and we have the ability to do in perpetuity moving forward, we instrument every transaction, every internal transaction, every token transfer, with time series data, indexed, searchable, we also have graph as well as relational views into the data, to be able to give the transparency, enable trust, enable you to triage an issue. Like, you know, I think about having worked at, you know, other enterprises in the past. Where you have a, you know, a security incident, that you need to respond to. We're currently under attack we need to find out who, what are they doing, what have they done, what is our exposure, how do we contain that, how do we, you know, deal with that? Without what we have, you can't do that. You got to like right Python scripts, and do API (talking over each other) >> You're chasing a ghost basically, and by the time you get it, it's over. >> Right, and then for enterprises, they've got hard core regulatory compliance considerations that you need to deal with. Ad-hoc queries from an auditor, you need to be able to show "Hey, I've got confidentiality, I have availability, "I have integrity" >> Well, even these smart contracts are still software. They, and you know, we've interviewed Hartej Sawhney, who's got a company that's doing just that auditing, >> He's killing it right. >> Auditing, the smart contracts because someone's going to write the code, and the code's back vulnerabilities. >> Absolutely. >> So there's a compliance aspect coming, quickly. >> Yes, yes absolutely. Yeah, I mean, so there's, it's an amazing space. There's a tremendous amount going on. It's moving super fast. >> Picks and shovels for the new miners, literally miners. Shawn, great to have you on. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> On your new startup. I think you've got a great product. I've been playing with the data, I love it. I think it's fascinating. If you could summarize the data that you've learned from the tool that you've built and platformed, what's the summary? What if you had to kind of tease it out, what's actually happening right now in the market, on the Ethereum network, with the apps and blockchain? >> Right, so, there is, so at the end of the day, Ethereum is a smart contract platform, and it pans out, that 50% of the transactions are actually going to smart contracts, which is a great validation right. Two: the actual value being transferred and interacting with smart contracts is 300 million dollars an hour. That is, it's, on an enterprise software perspective, it's not huge, but it's definitely a validation. >> It's legit. >> It's legit. The number of smart contracts that have been created in the last three months, is 400%. It is just going through the roof. Some of this, there's a lot of junk, but there's a lot of stuff that are people are building new enterprises, and on the enterprise side, we're seeing real business cases going into production, working with a few large customers now, on instrumenting real, you know, removing, you know, instrumenting real, over-the-counter type use cases. It's very, very interesting times. >> Well, you know my rants. I've been ranting about some of these bankers that have come from an old-school bank, and they're young kids too, so they're not, they're younger than me but they're trying to valuation mechanisms around, you know, companies and tokens, and they're using like discounted cash flow. Now I mean I get how they could go there, 'cause they learn that in school. >> Shawn: Right. But the reality is there's a new school going on. The school's in session. If you know the data, you have very interesting valuation variables that could be constructed on these new models that need to be looked at. I mean, how do you value a company? Certainly velocity. >> Shawn: Yeah, volume. >> Who's actually doing the transactions? Are they real smart contracts? So there's a lot of gamification and, I won't say scams, but I would say the investors want the transparency too. >> Yeah, I think it's amazing is that, we have that transparency, we provide that transparency as free service to the community right now and the ability to have transparency into transaction volume for smart contracts, token velocity, number of unique callers, market capitalization, the change in price, this gives you the ability to value that. That's something that, you know, we've thought about extensively is, maybe we should just provide valuation as a service, on just these assets that are publicly available? Yeah, I don't know. >> You had a lot of opportunities, so great job. Congratulations, good work. You guys have really done the work on this project, love it. And again, it validates the reality of the smart contracts, the application side of the business changing. Shawn Douglass here, inside theCUBE for CUBEConversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. (orchestral music)