live from Los Angeles it's the queues covering open-source summit North America 2017 brought to you by the Linux Foundation and redhead he welcome back everyone here live in LA for the open source summit in North America I'm jumper with my co-host Jeff Fritz too many men he'll be back shortly is out scouring the hallways for all the news and analysis getting all the scuttlebutt are here we're here with our next guest brian behlendorf who is the executive director of the hyper ledger project for the Linux Foundation thanks for coming on thank ledger thanks for sharing we just talking before the camera started rolling about blockchain and the coolness around the hype around it but again the hype cycle is usually a pretext to the trend hyper ledger is one of those exciting projects that like AI everyone is jazzed about because it's the future right open source is getting bigger and bigger as Jim zemulon was saying 23 million developers and growing but there's still so much work to be done the global society's relying on open source it's shaping our culture - Ledger's one of those things where it is going to actually disrupt the culture and change it potentially and even this morning Chinese band virtual currencies and icos and all based upon doesn't mean it's time to invest yes and whatever China bands it's always been successful so your thoughts go first boy star let's get into hyper ledger project it's certainly super exciting probably people are talking about it heavily what's going on with the project give a quick update what's the purpose who's involved and when some of the milestones you guys have hyper ledger is less than two years old it was launched officially in December of 2015 I joined in main and it was founded on the principle that hey there's a lot of interesting stuff happening in the cryptocurrency world but there might be some more prosaic some more directly applicable applications of distributed ledger and smart contract technology to rebooting a lot of otherwise very thorny problems for industries in the world the main problem being you've got companies doing business with each other and the recording transactions and you know they'll have to go back and reconcile their systems to get audited bugs right and a lot of the systems out there depend upon processes at a very human processes that are prone to error prone to corruption right so the idea is the more that you can pull together you know information about transactions into a shared system of record which is really with the distributed ledger it's and then the more about of the governance and the and the business processes enclosed that you can automate by smart contract the more effective the more efficient a lot of these markets will be so that's what hyper ledger is about ok so certainly the the keynote was all about open sources being dependent upon and Jim's Emlyn as well as Christine Corbett said you know traditionally control we all know that open source but I love that the deployment changing the face of capitalism because hyper ledger is a term that you can almost apply to the notion of decentralize not just distributed but decentralized business so the notion of supply chain things in finance to moving Goods around the world this is interesting this is how about the impact of how you guys are seeing some of these applications we're now a decentralized architecture combined with distributed creates an opportunity for changing the face of capitalism flowing because the word distributed can be very loaded all right you know and even decentralized right it can be very loaded and what I what I tried to popularize is the idea of minimum viable centralization right you know football games and other sports games have referees right and when we play a game like this well sometimes you know sometimes we don't need a referee it's just us playing pick-up basketball but we want somebody on the periphery we all agree to who helps remind us what the rules are and throws a red flag from time to time all right and so you see in industries ranging from finance where you're building these transaction networks to you know supply chains where you need to track the flow of like food and to know when if food has gotten spoiled possibly where that came from or diamonds that have been involved in conflict time and you know other illegal activities right you want to know where that came for a minute and it involves that industry getting together and saying we all agree we have a big net interest in making our business actually follow certain rules and norms right and using a distributed ledger to to bring that about it's something that can just provide a lot of optimizations so most people think of like Bitcoin and ether a mezda with all this ICO buzz as de as the front end to really the underlying blockchain which you're talking about yeah and that's kind of like I get that fiat currency in this market developed to look crazed bubbles some people call it whatever but you're getting at something unique and this is that there's a real business value of hyper ledger I won't say boring but it's like meat and potatoes stuff it's like really kind of prosaic is the prosaic it's like so but it's disruptive so if you think about like the old days when we were growing up or I was growing up ERP was on mini computers and the prized resource planning relationship management software those were bloated monolithic software packages yeah still out there today and they handle the so called supply chain right so is the hypervisor a disruption to that is it an augmentation of that so some try to put it in context the cost of sending a shipping container from China to the United States right half of that is in paperwork half of that is because that container on average will go through 30 different organizations from the the you know the suppliers that you're assembling the goods into to all the different ports all the different regulatory authorities right out finally to where it's delivered and if you can optimize those business processes if you can make it so that the happen in a space where it's not about paper and facts which a lot of that world is still ruled by today or a bureaucrat sitting there reviewing stuff that's coming in and having to stamp it when really all that could be automated you could cut the cost of that and take the shipping industry from what is right now a money-losing industry to potentially being viable once again so optimization is really critical for them it's optimization but it but there's also some new capabilities here so I spent a year at Department of Health and Human Services trying to help make health care records more portable for patients right and we wrote it and got it I got the industry to write a ton of open source software implemented open standards to make these records shareable the problem was the patient wasn't involved right this was about trying to take two orgs do something that all of their bean counters told them not to do which was share patient records because no that's proprietary value and the HIPAA regulations all that not exactly blackens processes basically with blocking with blocking technology that we can reinvent that as a patient driven process right we could reinvent a lot of the other business processes out there that involve personally identifiable information like the Equifax disaster right we could reinvent how the credit markets assess risk in individuals through blockchain technology in a way that doesn't require us to build these big central anonymous third parties that Coover everybody's data and become these massive privacy titanic's right we can reinvent a lot of this through blockchain tech and that's a lot of what we're working on that Nagaraja because a analytics from that kind of a unique place because you're used to driving these big open-source projects there's a lot of people and they're trying to build the wrapper around the base core of blockchain to come up with their version or their kind of application if you will whether it be Bitcoin or whatever but you guys are in kind of a special place based on your roots we believe that I mean open standards are nice but what really matters is common code right and in a world like we envision where rather than saying you one big Network like Bitcoin or one big Network like aetherium you've got thousands or tens of thousands of these permission networks that cover different industries different geographies different regions what you need is common software so that when a developer goes to work on an application that touches one or multiple of these they've got familiar idioms to work they've got familiar technologies to work with like NGO or Java or JavaScript right but they've got a community of other technologies has been trained up on these technologies that can help them bootstrap and launch their project and maybe even become a contributor to the open source so what we've figured out at the Linux Foundation is how to make that virtuous cycle go right companies you know benefit commercially from it and then feed back into the project and that's what we're mentioning the word you get almost rethink and reimagine some of these things like the Equifax disaster yeah I think it's pretty man no breathing most tech people I really seen as as viable like absolutely it's gonna happen so there's a nice trajectory vision that people are buying into because it's somewhat you can see it hanging together playing out technically what are some of the things going on the project can you share with the folks watching about some things that you're doing to get there faster what's going on with the community with some of the issues with concerns how do people get involved take some time to go tobut deep words of the project so we're not a you know an RD kind of free thinking kind of thing we're about get writing code and shipping and getting into production right so hyper ledger fabric just hit a one dot oh that was a signal from the developers that this code is ready to be run in production systems and for you to track digital assets right doesn't by far does not mean it's the end of the road it's the end of chapter one right but at least it's a place where we you know the kind of the clear intent is let's make this actually usable by enterprises the other projects we've got eight different projects total at hyper ledger some of them even compete with each other right but we're driving all of them to get to a one dot oh and over time all of them talk about how they relate to each other in kind of complimentary ways what's some of the profile developers you're getting because some people always ask I know what should I get involved what can I sink my teeth into what are some of the meaty kind of things that people are doing with it who the persona that that are coming in these enterprise developers they more traditional full-stack developers can you give a range of some of the persona attributes because this is early code still I mean this whole space is still pretty early when it comes to understanding how to use these technologies especially at scale kind of at a DevOps scale a lot of the people first coming into the tech community now are fairly advanced right are kind of the whiz kids right but we're seeing that gradually broad broaden out we now are at a point where we could use developers coming in and writing sample applications right we could use people helping us with documentation we're developing training materials that will be creative commons-licensed so everybody will be able to deliver those and as they find bugs or add features to the training they can do that too we can really use anybody all right so folks watching get involved okay get any white spaces you might want to tease them out with that you see happening obviously mentioned tracking digital assets data is a stress that's cool anything that's going on with data probably is a digital asset but you'd agree what's some of the things that people could get motivated can you share any insight that you might have that would motivate someone to jump in I think any any industry has these challenges of weaving their systems together with other businesses and then trying to do that in a way that holds each other.you account right this is a system for building systems of record between organizations right and you know you running a database to me running a database we don't get there on our own we only get there by working with consortio by working in as a community to actually build these systems and so I'd say every every business has that challenge whether they're engineers have felt free to go in and try to tackle that extranet days when you see people building citizen networks similar concept where blockchain is one big happy family collaborative network all right final question for you kind of shooting for a little bit what do you expect to happen community any thoughts on some of the goals you have is executive director obviously you got some hackathons for good we'll see blockchain being applied to some real things with one dot out what do you see rolling out which some of your goals I massively grow the developer community both the well you know the one end of the spectrum which is the the whiz kids the hardcore developers to you know move forward on a kind of the leading edge of that but really we've got to bring you know hundred thousand developers into this space or the next couple years just to meet the demand that's there in the industry for that town alright so if I'm a now an executive as a hey I saw this great Cuban in friens awesome go get involved what how did someone get involved is just jump standard community model just jump in what advice would you give someone if they want to engage and participate for every one of our projects if you give gave it an hour you'd get to a running you know instance of that software right so fabric or sawtooth within an hour you should ever running for node instance that you can start writing chain code two which is the smart contract language right and and then from there getting involved in the community as a matter of joining mailing list joining our rocket chat channels rocket chats an alternative to slack that we actually prefer and I and I think you'll find a really welcoming community of other devs who want to tell you about what the projects are and want to help you kind of climb that learning curve one of the comments just enough good note here is that Christina gave him the key no she says code can shape culture you've been in the industry a long time you've seen the wave you've been on the shoulders of others and now as the open source goes to the next level how is code gonna shape the culture in your opinion actually people started working together to take that I would say that almost I'm not a moon shot but it's really more of an imperative that culture will be changed inclusion else is huge your thoughts on code shaping culture so we've we've had a decline in trust in institutions in the United States and worldwide not just in the last seven months since November but actually for the last 20 years there's Edelman does this survey every year where they ask you your trust in brands your trust in government your trust in the process the fairness of society and for 20 years that's been on a straight-line decline to the point where we ask ourselves like can you trust any level of government can you trust businesses to look out for your interest the answer almost generically is going to be no this is a technology that can save us from this is a technology that we I believe can help us define the rules of the game help us build society but then actually automate and implement that in a way that doesn't require us to have to bribe an official or curry favor with a school official to get our kid into that school or anything like that this is a way to try I think to make the world more accountable and more fair and open source has that inclusive and staying away from the gerrymander and I love the quote it's so confusing now it's like who do you ask where's the source of truth and it used to be RTFM and check the source code now it's not only there is no manual who is the source fake news all these bots means kind of crazy so this is that a call to arms the open source I think it is I think it really is the trust as a service ok Brian thanks so much for come on if you appreciate it Thank You director for the hyper ledger project super important project really a game changer changing the face of capitalism also continuing the trend accelerate open source I'm Shaun Frechette for more live coverage from the queue after this short break

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's day one coverage of Cloud Native SecurityCon 2023. This has been a great conversation that we've been able to be a part of today. Lisa Martin with John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Dave and John, I want to get your take on the conversations that we had today, starting with the keynote that we were able to see. What are your thoughts? We talked a lot about technology. We also talked a lot about people and culture. John, starting with you, what's the story here with this inaugural event? >> Well, first of all, there's two major threads. One is the breakout of a new event from CloudNativeCon/KubeCon, which is a very successful community and events that they do international and in North America. And that's not stopping. So that's going to be continuing to go great. This event is a breakout with an extreme focus on security and all things security around that ecosystem. And with extensions into the Linux Foundation. We heard Brian Behlendorf was on there from the Linux Foundation. So he was involved in Hyperledger. So not just Cloud Native, all things containers, Kubernetes, all things Linux Foundation as an open source. So, little bit more of a focus. So I like that piece of it. The other big thread on this story is what Dave and Yves were talking about on our panel we had earlier, which was the business model of security is real and that is absolutely happening. It's impacting business today. So you got this, let's build as fast as possible, let's retool, let's replatform, refactor and then the reality of the business imperative. To me, those are the two big high-order bits that are going on and that's the reality of this current situation. >> Dave, what are your top takeaways from today's day one inaugural coverage? >> Yeah, I would add a third leg of the stool to what John said and that's what we were talking about several times today about the security is a do-over. The Pat Gelsinger quote, from what was that, John, 2011, 2012? And that's right around the time that the cloud was hitting this steep part of the S-curve and do-over really has meant in looking back, leveraging cloud native tooling, and cloud native technologies, which are different than traditional security approaches because it has to take into account the unique characteristics of the cloud whether that's dynamic resource allocation, unlimited resources, microservices, containers. And while that has helped solve some problems it also brings new challenges. All these cloud native tools, securing this decentralized infrastructure that people are dealing with and really trying to relearn the security culture. And that's kind of where we are today. >> I think the other thing too that I had Dave is that was we get other guests on with a diverse opinion around foundational models with AI and machine learning. You're going to see a lot more things come in to accelerate the scale and automation piece of it. It is one thing that CloudNativeCon and KubeCon has shown us what the growth of cloud computing is is that containers Kubernetes and these new services are powering scale. And scale you're going to need to have automation and machine learning and AI will be a big part of that. So you start to see the new formation of stacks emerging. So foundational stacks is the machine learning and data apps are coming out. It's going to start to see more apps coming. So I think there's going to be so many new applications and services are going to emerge, and if you don't get your act together on the infrastructure side those apps will not be fully baked. >> And obviously that's a huge risk. Sorry, Dave, go ahead. >> No, that's okay. So there has to be hardware somewhere. You can't get away with no hardware. But increasingly the security architecture like everything else is, is software-defined and makes it a lot more flexible. And to the extent that practitioners and organizations can consolidate this myriad of tools that they have, that means they're going to have less trouble learning new skills, they're going to be able to spend more time focused and become more proficient on the tooling that is being applied. And you're seeing the same thing on the vendor side. You're seeing some of these large vendors, Palo Alto, certainly CrowdStrike and fundamental to their strategy is to pick off more and more and more of these areas in security and begin to consolidate them. And right now, that's a big theme amongst organizations. We know from the survey data that consolidating redundant vendors is the number one cost saving priority today. Along with, at a distant second, optimizing cloud costs, but consolidating redundant vendors there's nowhere where that's more prominent than in security. >> Dave, talk a little bit about that, you mentioned the practitioners and obviously this event bottoms up focused on the practitioners. It seems like they're really in the driver's seat now. With this being the inaugural Cloud Native SecurityCon, first time it's been pulled out of an elevated out of KubeCon as a focus, do you think this is about time that the practitioners are in the driver's seat? >> Well, they're certainly, I mean, we hear about all the tech layoffs. You're not laying off your top security pros and if you are, they're getting picked up very quickly. So I think from that standpoint, anybody who has deep security expertise is in the driver's seat. The problem is that driver's seat is pretty hairy and you got to have the stomach for it. I mean, these are technical heroes, if you will, on the front lines, literally saving the world from criminals and nation-states. And so yes, I think Lisa they have been in the driver's seat for a while, but it it takes a unique person to drive at those speeds. >> I mean, the thing too is that the cloud native world that we are living in comes from cloud computing. And if you look at this, what is a practitioner? There's multiple stakeholders that are being impacted and are vulnerable in the security front at many levels. You have application developers, you got IT market, you got security, infrastructure, and network and whatever. So all that old to new is happening. So if you look at IT, that market is massive. That's still not transformed yet to cloud. So you have companies out there literally fully exposed to ransomware. IT teams that are having practices that are antiquated and outdated. So security patching, I mean the blocking and tackling of the old securities, it's hard to even support that old environment. So in this transition from IT to cloud is changing everything. And so practitioners are impacted from the devs and the ones that get there faster and adopt the ways to make their business better, whether you call it modern technology and architectures, will be alive and hopefully thriving. So that's the challenge. And I think this security focus hits at the heart of the reality of business because like I said, they're under threats. >> I wanted to pick up too on, I thought Brian Behlendorf, he did a forward looking what could become the next problem that we really haven't addressed. He talked about generative AI, automating spearphishing and he flat out said the (indistinct) is not fixed. And so identity access management, again, a lot of different toolings. There's Microsoft, there's Okta, there's dozens of companies with different identity platforms that practitioners have to deal with. And then what he called free riders. So these are folks that go into the repos. They're open source repos, and they find vulnerabilities that developers aren't hopping on quickly. It's like, you remember Patch Tuesday. We still have Patch Tuesday. That meant Hacker Wednesday. It's kind of the same theme there going into these repos and finding areas where the practitioners, the developers aren't responding quickly enough. They just don't necessarily have the resources. And then regulations, public policy being out of alignment with what's really needed, saying, "Oh, you can't ship that fix outside of Germany." Or I'm just making this up, but outside of this region because of a law. And you could be as a developer personally liable for it. So again, while these practitioners are in the driver's seat, it's a hairy place to be. >> Dave, we didn't get the word supercloud in much on this event, did we? >> Well, I'm glad you brought that up because I think security is the big single, biggest challenge for supercloud, securing the supercloud with all the diversity of tooling across clouds and I think you brought something up in the first supercloud, John. You said, "Look, ultimately the cloud, the hyperscalers have to lean in. They are going to be the enablers of supercloud. They already are from an infrastructure standpoint, but they can solve this problem by working together. And I think there needs to be more industry collaboration. >> And I think the point there is that with security the trend will be, in my opinion, you'll see security being reborn in the cloud, around zero trust as structure, and move from an on-premise paradigm to fully cloud native. And you're seeing that in the network side, Dave, where people are going to each cloud and building stacks inside the clouds, hyperscaler clouds that are completely compatible end-to-end with on-premises. Not trying to force the cloud to be working with on-prem. They're completely refactoring as cloud native first. And again, that's developer first, that's data first, that's security first. So to me that's the tell sign. To me is if when you see that, that's good. >> And Lisa, I think the cultural conversation that you've brought into these discussions is super important because I've said many times, bad user behavior is going to trump good security every time. So that idea that the entire organization is responsible for security. You hear that all the time. Well, what does that mean? It doesn't mean I have to be a security expert, it just means I have to be smart. How many people actually use a VPN? >> So I think one of the things that I'm seeing with the cultural change is face-to-face problem solving is one, having remote teams is another. The skillset is big. And I think the culture of having these teams, Dave mentioned something about intramural sports, having the best people on the teams, from putting captains on the jersey of security folks is going to happen. I think you're going to see a lot more of that going on because there's so many areas to work on. You're going to start to see security embedded in all processes. >> Well, it needs to be and that level of shared responsibility is not trivial. That's across the organization. But they're also begs the question of the people problem. People are one of the biggest challenges with respect to security. Everyone has to be on board with this. It has to be coming from the top down, but also the bottom up at the same time. It's challenging to coordinate. >> Well, the training thing I think is going to solve itself in good time. And I think in the fullness of time, if I had to predict, you're going to see managed services being a big driver on the front end, and then as companies realize where their IP will be you'll see those managed service either be a core competency of their business and then still leverage. So I'm a big believer in managed services. So you're seeing Kubernetes, for instance, a lot of managed services. You'll start to see more, get the ball going, get that rolling, then build. So Dave mentioned bottoms up, middle out, that's how transformation happens. So I think managed services will win from here, but ultimately the business model stuff is so critical. >> I'm glad you brought up managed services and I want to add to that managed security service providers, because I saw a stat last year, 50% of organizations in the US don't even have a security operations team. So managed security service providers MSSPs are going to fill the gap, especially for small and midsize companies and for those larger companies that just need to augment and compliment their existing staff. And so those practitioners that we've been talking about, those really hardcore pros, they're going to go into these companies, some large, the big four, all have them. Smaller companies like Arctic Wolf are going to, I think, really play a key role in this decade. >> I want to get your opinion Dave on what you're hoping to see from this event as we've talked about the first inaugural standalone big focus here on security as a standalone. Obviously, it's a huge challenge. What are you hoping for this event to get groundswell from the community? What are you hoping to hear and see as we wrap up day one and go into day two? >> I always say events like this they're about educating, aspiring to action. And so the practitioners that are at this event I think, I used to say they're the technical heroes. So we know there's going to be another Log4j or a another SolarWinds. It's coming. And my hope is that when that happens, it's not an if, it's a when, that the industry, these practitioners are able to respond in a way that's safe and fast and agile and they're able to keep us protected, number one and number two, that they can actually figure out what happened in the long tail of still trying to clean it up is compressed. That's my hope or maybe it's a dream. >> I think day two tomorrow you're going to hear more supply chain, security. You're going to start to see them focus on sessions that target areas if within the CNCF KubeCon + CloudNativeCon area that need support around containers, clusters, around Kubernetes cluster. You're going to start to see them laser focus on cleaning up the house, if you will, if you can call it cleaning up or fixing what needs to get fixed or solved what needs to get solved on the cloud native front. That's going to be urgent. And again, supply chain software as Dave mentioned, free riders too, just using open source. So I think you'll see open source continue to grow, but there'll be an emphasis on verification and certification. And Docker has done a great job with that. You've seen what they've done with their business model over hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from a pivot. Catch a few years earlier because they verify. So I think we're going to be in this verification blue check mark of code era, of code and software. Super important bill of materials. They call SBOMs, software bill of materials. People want to know what's in their software and that's going to be, again, another opportunity for machine learning and other things. So I'm optimistic that this is going to be a good focus. >> Good. I like that. I think that's one of the things thematically that we've heard today is optimism about what this community can generate in terms of today's point. The next Log4j is coming. We know it's not if, it's when, and all organizations need to be ready to Dave's point to act quickly with agility to dial down and not become the next headline. Nobody wants to be that. Guys, it's been fun working with you on this day one event. Looking forward to day two. Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante and John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE's day one coverage of Cloud Native SecurityCon '23. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation! >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, your host for Cloud Native Insight. When we launched this series, one of the things we wanted to talk about was that we're not just using cloud as a destination, but really enabling new ways of thinking, being able to use the innovations underneath the cloud, and that if you use services in the cloud, that you're not necessarily locked into a solution or can't move forward. And that's why I'm really excited to help welcome to the program, I have the co-founders of Vendia. First we have Dr. Tim Wagner, he is the co-founder and CEO of the company, as well as generally known in the industry as the father of Serverless from the AWS Lambda, and his co-founder, Shruthi Rao, she is the chief business officer at Vendia, also came from AWS where she worked on blockchain solutions. Tim, Shruthi, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us in here, Stu. Great to join the show. >> All right, so Shruthi, actually if we could start with you because before we get into Vendia, coming out of stealth, you know, really interesting technology space, you and Tim both learned a lot from working with customers in your previous jobs, why don't we start from you. Block chain of course had a lot of learnings, a lot of things that people don't understand about what it is and what it isn't, so give us a little bit about what you've learned and how that lead towards what you and Tim and the team are doing with Vendia. >> Yeah, absolutely, Stu! One, the most important thing that we've all heard of was this great gravitational pull towards blockchain in 2018 and 2019. Well, I was one of the founders and early adopters of blockchain from Bitcoin and Ethereum space, all the way back from 2011 and onwards. And at AWS I started the Amazon Managed Blockchain and launched Quantum Ledger Database, two services in the block chain category. What I learned there was, no surprise, there was a gold rush to blockchain from many customers. We, I personally talked to over 1,092 customers when I ran Amazon Managed Blockchain for the last two years. And I found that customers were looking at solving this dispersed data problem. Most of my customers had invested in IoT and edge devices, and these devices were gathering massive amounts of data, and on the flip side they also had invested quite a bit of effort in AI and ML and analytics to crunch this data, give them intelligence. But guess what, this data existed in multiple parties, in multiple clouds, in multiple technology stacks, and they needed a mechanism to get this data from wherever they were into one place so they could the AI, ML, analytics investment, and they wanted all of this to be done in real time, and to gravitated towards blockchain. But blockchain had quite a bit of limitations, it was not scalable, it didn't work with the existing stack that you had. It forced enterprises to adopt this new technology and entirely new type of infrastructure. It didn't work cross-cloud unless you hired expensive consultants or did it yourself, and required these specialized developers. For all of these reasons, we've seen many POCs, majority of POCs just dying on the vine and not ever reaching the production potential. So, that is when I realized that what the problem to be solved was not a trust problem, the problem was dispersed data in multiple clouds and multiple stacks problem. Sometimes multiple parties, even, problem. And that's when Tim and I started talking about, about how can we bring all of the nascent qualities of Lambda and Serverless and use all of the features of blockchain and build something together? And he has an interesting story on his own, right. >> Yeah. Yeah, Shruthi, if I could, I'd like to get a little bit of that. So, first of all for our audience, if you're watching this on the minute, probably want to hit pause, you know, go search Tim, go watch a video, read his Medium post, about the past, present, and future of Serverless. But Tim, I'm excited. You and I have talked in the past, but finally getting you on theCUBE program. >> Yeah! >> You know, I've looked through my career, and my background is infrastructure, and the role of infrastructure we know is always just to support the applications and the data that run business, that's what is important! Even when you talk about cloud, it is the applications, you know, the code, and the data that are important. So, it's not that, you know, okay I've got near infinite compute capacity, it's the new things that I can do with it. That's a comment I heard in one of your sessions. You talked about one of the most fascinating things about Serverless was just the new creativity that it inspired people to do, and I loved it wasn't just unlocking developers to say, okay I have new ways to write things, but even people that weren't traditional coders, like lots of people in marketing that were like, "I can start with this and build something new." So, I guess the question I have for you is, you know we had this idea of Platform as a Service, or even when things like containers launched, it was, we were trying to get close to that atomic unit of the application, and often it was talked about, well, do I want it for portability? Is it for ease of use? So, you've been wrangling and looking at this (Tim laughing) from a lot of different ways. So, is that as a starting point, you know, what did you see the last few years with Lambda, and you know, help connect this up to where Shruthi just left off her bit of the story. >> Absolutely. You know, the great story, the great success of the cloud is this elimination of undifferentiated heavy lifting, you know, from getting rid of having to build out a data center, to all the complexity of managing hardware. And that first wave of cloud adoption was just phenomenally successful at that. But as you say, the real thing businesses wrestle with are applications, right? It's ultimately about the business solution, not the hardware and software on which it runs. So, the very first time I sat down with Andy Jassy to talk about what eventually become Lambda, you know, one of the things I said was, look, if we want to get 10x the number of people to come and, you know, and be in the cloud and be successful it has to be 10 times simpler than it is today. You know, if step one is hire an amazing team of distributed engineers to turn a server into a full tolerance, scalable, reliable business solution, now that's going to be fundamentally limiting. We have to find a way to put that in a box, give that capability, you know, to people, without having them go hire that and build that out in the first place. And so that kind of started this journey for, for compute, we're trying to solve the problem of making compute as easy to use as possible. You know, take some code, as you said, even if you're not a diehard programmer or backend engineer, maybe you're just a full-stack engineer who loves working on the front-end, but the backend isn't your focus, turn that into something that is as scalable, as robust, as secure as somebody who has spent their entire career working on that. And that was the promise of Serverless, you know, outside of the specifics of any one cloud. Now, the challenge of course when you talk to customers, you know, is that you always heard the same two considerations. One is, I love the idea of Lamdba, but it's AWS, maybe I have multiple departments or business partners, or need to kind of work on multiple clouds. The other challenge is fantastic for compute, what about data? You know, you've kind of left me with, you're giving me sort of half the solution, you've made my compute super easy to use, can you make my data equally easy to use? And so you know, obviously the part of the genesis of Vendia is going and tackling those pieces of this, giving all that promise and ease of use of Serverless, now with a model for replicated state and data, and one that can cross accounts, machines, departments, clouds, companies, as easily as it scales on a single cloud today. >> Okay, so you covered quite a bit of ground there Tim, if you could just unpack that a little bit, because you're talking about state, cutting across environments. What is it that Vendia is bringing, how does that tie into solutions like, you know, Lamdba as you mentioned, but other clouds or even potentially on premises solutions? So, what is, you know, the IP, the code, the solution that Vendia's offering? >> Happy to! So, let's start with the customer problem here. The thing that every enterprise, every company, frankly, wrestles with is in the modern world they're producing more data than ever, IMT, digital journeys, you know, mobile, edge devices. More data coming in than ever before, at the same time, more data getting consumed than ever before with deep analytics, supply chain optimization, AI, ML. So, even more consumers of ever more data. The challenge, of course, is that data isn't always inside a company's four walls. In fact, we've heard 80% or more of that data actually lives outside of a company's control. So, step one to doing something like AI, ML, isn't even just picking a product or selecting a technology, it's getting all of your data back together again, so that's the problem that we set out to solve with Vendia, and we realized that, you know, and kind of part of the genesis for the name here, you know, Vendia comes from Venn Diagram. So, part of that need to bring code and data together across companies, across tech stacks, means the ability to solve some of these long-standing challenges. And we looked at the two sort of big movements out there. Two of them, you know, we've obviously both been involved in, one of them was Serverless, which amazing ability to scale, but single account, single cloud, single company. The other one is blockchain and distributed ledgers, manages to run more across parties, across clouds, across tech stacks, but doesn't have a great mechanism for scalability, it's really a single box deployment model, and obviously there are a lot of limitations with that. So, our technology, and kind of our insight and breakthrough here was bringing those two things together by solving the problems in each of them with the best parts of the other. So, reimagine the blockchain as a cloud data implementation built entirely out of Serverless components that have all of the scale, the cost efficiencies, the high utilization, like all of the ease of deployment that something like Lambda has today, and at the same time, you know, bring state to Serverless. Give things like Lambda and the equivalent of other clouds a simple, easy, built-in model so that applications can have multicloud, multi-account state at all times, rather than turning that into a complicated DIY project. So, that was our insight here, you know and frankly where a lot of the interesting technology for us is in turning those centralized services, a centralized version of Serverless Compute or Serverless Database into a multi-account, multicloud experience. And so that's where we spent a lot of time and energy trying to build something that gives customers a great experience. >> Yeah, so I've got plenty of background in customers that, you know, have the "information silos", if you will, so we know, when the unstructured data, you know so much of it is not searchable, I can't leverage it. Shruthi, but maybe it might make sense, you know, what is, would you say some of the top things some of your early customers are saying? You know, I have this pain point, that's pointing me in your direction, what was leading them to you? And how does the solution help them solve that problem? >> Yeah, absolutely! One of our design partners, our lead design partners is this automotive company, they're a premier automotive company, they want, their end goal is to track car parts for warranty recall issues. So, they want to track every single part that goes into a particular car, so they're about 30 to 35,000 parts in each of these cars, and then all the way from manufacturing floor to when the car is sold, and when that particular part is replaced eventually, towards the end of the lifecycle of that part. So for this, they have put together a small test group of their partners, a couple of the parts manufacturers, they're second care partners, National Highway Safety Administration is part of this group, also a couple of dealers and service centers. Now, if you just look at this group of partners, you will see some of these parties have high technology, technology backgrounds, just like the auto manufacturers themselves or the part manufacturers. Low modality or low IT-competency partners such as the service centers, for them desktop PCs are literally the IT competency, and so does the service centers. Now, most of, majority of these are on multiple clouds. This particular auto customer is on AWS and manufactures on Azure, another one is on GCP. Now, they all have to share these large files between each other, making sure that there are some transparency and business rules applicable. For example, two partners who make the same parts or similar parts cannot see each other's data. Most of the participants cannot see the PII data that are not applicable, only the service center can see that. National Highway Safety Administration has read access, not write access. A lot of that needed to be done, and their alternatives before they started using Vendia was either use point-to-point APIs, which was very expensive, very cumbersome, it works for a finite small set of parties, it does not scale, as in when you add more participants into this particular network. And the second option for them was blockchain, which they did use, and used Hyperledger Fabric, they used Ethereum Private to see how this works, but the scalability, with Ethereum Private, it's about 14 to 15 transactions per second, with Hyperledger Fabric it taps out at 100, or 150 on a good day, transaction through, but it's not just useful. All of these are always-on systems, they're not Serverless, so just provisioning capacity, our customers said it took them two to three weeks per participant. So, it's just not a scalable solution. With Vendia, what we delivered to them was this virtual data lake, where the sources of this data are on multiple clouds, are on multiple accounts owned by multiple parties, but all of that data is shared on a virtual data lake with all of the permissions, with all of the logging, with all of the security, PII, and compliance. Now, this particular auto manufacturer and the National Highway Safety Administration can run their ML algorithms to gain intelligence off of it, and start to understand patterns, so when certain parts go bad, or what's the propensity of a certain manufacturing unit producing faulty parts, and so on, and so forth. This really shows you this concept of unstructured data being shared between parties that are not, you know, connected with each other, when there are data silos. But I'd love to follow this up with another example of, you know, the democratization, democratization is very important to Vendia. When Tim launched Lambda and founded the AWS Serverless movement as a whole, and at AWS, one thing, very important thing happened, it lowered the barrier to entry for a new wave of businesses that could just experiment, try out new things, if it failed, they scrap it, if it worked, they could scale it out. And that was possible because of the entry point, because of the paper used, and the architecture itself, and we are, our vision and mission for Vendia is that Vendia fuels the next generation of multi-party connected distributed applications. My second design partner is actually a non-profit that, in the animal welfare industry. Their mission is to maintain a no-kill for dogs and cats in the United States. And the number one reason for over populations of dogs and cats in the shelters is dogs lost, dogs and cats lost during natural disasters, like the hurricane season. And when that happens, and when, let's say your dogs get lost, and you want to find a dog, the ID or the chip-reading is not reliable, they want to search this through pictures. But we also know that if you look at a picture of a dog, four people can come up with four different breed names, and this particular non-profit has 2,500 plus partners across the U.S., and they're all low to no IT modalities, some of them have higher IT competency, and a huge turnover because of volunteer employees. So, what we did for them was came up with a mechanism where they could connect with all 2,500 of these participants very easily in a very cost-effective way and get all of the pictures of all of the dogs in all these repositories into one data lake so they can run some kind of a dog facial recognition algorithm on it and identify where my lost dog is in minutes as opposed to days it used to take before. So, you see a very large customer with very sophisticated IT competency use this, also a non-profit being able to use this. And they were both able to get to this outcome in days, not months or years, as, blockchain, but just under a few days, so we're very excited about that. >> Thank you so much for the examples. All right, Tim, before we get to the end, I wonder if you could take us under the hood a little bit here. My understanding, the solution that you talk about, it's universal apps, or what you call "unis" -- >> Tim: Unis? (laughs) >> I believe, so if I saw that right, give me a little bit of compare and contrast, if you will. Obviously there's been a lot of interest in what Kubernetes has been doing. We've been watching closely, you know there's connections between what Kubernetes is doing and Serverless with the Knative project. When I saw the first video talking about Vendia, you said, "We're serverless, and we're containerless underneath." So, help us understand, because at, you know, a super high level, some of the multicloud and making things very flexible sound very similar. So you know, how is Vendia different, and why do you feel your architecture helps solve this really challenging problem? >> Sure, sure, awesome! You know, look, one of the tenets that we had here was that things have to be as easy as possible for customers, and if you think about the way somebody walks up today to an existing database system, right? They say, "Look, I've got a schema, I know the shape of my data." And a few minutes later I can get a production database, now it's single user, single cloud, single consumer there, but it's a very fast, simple process that doesn't require having code, hiring a team, et cetera, and we wanted Vendia to work the same way. Somebody can walk up with a JSON schema, hand it to us, five minutes later they have a database, only now it's a multiparty database that's decentralized, so runs across multiple platforms, multiple clouds, you know, multiple technology stacks instead of being single user. So, that's kind of goal one, is like make that as easy to use as possible. The other key tenet though is we don't want to be the least common denominator of the cloud. One of the challenges with saying everyone's going to deploy their own servers, they're going to run all their own software, they're going to build, you know, they're all going to co-deploy a Kubernetes cluster, one of the challenges with that is that, as Shruthi was saying, first, anyone for whom that's a challenge, if you don't have a whole IT department wrapped around you that's a difficult proposition to get started on no matter how amazing that technology might be. The other challenge with it though is that it locks you out, sort of the universe of a lock-in process, right, is the lock-out process. It locks you out of some of the best and brightest things the public cloud providers have come up with, and we wanted to empower customers, you know, to pick the best degree. Maybe they want to go use IBM Watson, maybe they want to use a database on Google, and at the same time they want to ingest IoT on AWS, and they wanted all to work together, and want all of that to be seamless, not something where they have to recreate an experience over, and over, and over again on three different clouds. So, that was our goal here in producing this. What we designed as an architecture was decentralized data storage at the core of it. So, think about all the precepts you hear with blockchain, they're all there, they all just look different. So, we use a no SQL database to store data so that we can scale that easily. We still have a consensus algorithm, only now it's a high speed serverless and cloud function based mechanism. You know, instead of smart contracts, you write things in a cloud function like Lambda instead, so no more learning Solidity, now you can use any language you want. So, we changed how we think about that architecture, but many of those ideas about people, really excited about blockchain and its capabilities and the vision for the future are still alive and well, they've just been implemented in a way that's far more practical and effective for the enterprise. >> All right, so what environments can I use today for your solution, Shruthi talked about customers spanning across some of the cloud, so what's available kind of today, what's on the roadmap in the future? Will this include beyond, you know, maybe the top five or six hyper scalers? Can I do, does it just require Serverless underneath? So, will things that are in a customer's own data center eventually support that. >> Absolutely. So, what we're doing right now is having people sign up for our preview release, so in the next few weeks, we're going to start turning that on for early access to developers. That'll be, the early access program, will be multi-account, focused on AWS, and then end of summer, well be doing our GA release, which will be multicloud, so we'll actually be able to operate across multiple clouds, multiple cloud services, on different platforms. But even from day one, we'll have API support in there. So, if you got a service, could even be running on a mainframe, could be on-prem, if it's API based you can still interact with the data, and still get the benefits of the system. So, developers, please start signing up, you can go find more information on vendia.net, and we're really looking forward to getting some of that early feedback and hear more from the people that we're the most excited to have start building these projects. >> Excellent, what a great call to action to get the developers and users in there. Shruthi, if you could just give us the last bit, you know, the thing that's been fascinating, Tim, when I look at the Serverless movement, you know, I've talked to some amazing companies that were two or three people (Tim laughing) and out of their basement, and they created a business, and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I got VC funding, and it's usually sub $10,000,000. So, I look at your team, I'd heard, Tim, you're the primary coder on the team. (Tim laughing) And when it comes to the seed funding it's, you know, compared to many startups, it's a small number. So, Shruthi, give us a little bit if you could the speeds and feeds of the company, your funding, and any places that you're hiring. Yeah, we are definitely hiring, lets me start from there! (Tim laughing) We're hiring for developers, and we are also hiring for solution architects, so please go to vendia.net, we have all the roles listed there, we would love to hear from you! And the second one, funding, yes. Tim is our main developer and solutions architect here, and look, the Serverless movement really helped quite a few companies, including us, to build this, bring this to market in record speeds, and we're very thankful that Tim and AWS started taking the stands, you know back in 2014, 2013, to bring this to market and democratize this. I think when we brought this new concept to our investors, they saw what this could be. It's not an easy concept to understand in the first wave, but when you understand the problem space, you see that the opportunity is pretty endless. And I'll say this for our investors, on behalf of our investors, that they saw a real founder market-fit between us. We're literally the two people who have launched and ran businesses for both Serverless and blockchain at scale, so that's what they thought was very attractive to them, and then look, it's Tim and I, and we're looking to hire 8 to 10 folks, and I think we have gotten to a space where we're making a meaningful difference to the world, and we would love for more people to join us, join this movement and democratize this big dispersed data problem and solve for this. And help us create more meanings to the data that our customers and companies worldwide are creating. We're very excited, and we're very thankful for all of our investors to be deeply committed to us and having conviction on us. >> Well, Shruthi and Tim, first of all, congratulations -- >> Thank you, thank you. >> Absolutely looking forward to, you know, watching the progress going forward. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you. >> Thanks, Stu! >> All right, and definitely tune in to our regular conversations on Cloud Native Insights. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and looking forward to hearing more about your Cloud Native Insights! (upbeat electronic music)

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM. Everybody we're back. This is Dave Vellante the cube, and this is our wall-to-wall coverage, IBM's digital thing experienced for 2020. We're really excited to have Jerry Cuomo on. He's the, uh, vice president of blockchain technologies and an IBM fellow and longtime cube alum. Jerry, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on and wish we were face to face, but yeah, this'll do. Good to see you too. Yes, thanks for having me. So we've been talking a lot of and talking to, I've been running a CEO series a, of course, a lot of the interviews around, uh, IBM think are focused on, on COBIT 19. But I wonder if you could start off by just talking a little bit about, you know, blockchain, why blockchain, why now, especially in the context of this pandemic. >>David's, it's as if we've been working out in the gym, but not knowing why we needed to be fixed. And I know now why we need to be fit. You know, blockchain is coming just in time. Mmm. You know, with the trust factor and the preserving privacy factor. Okay. The way we move forward the world is now becoming more digital than ever people working from home. Um, the reliance and online services is, that's critical. our ability to work as a community accompanies companies. The shared data is critical. you know, blockchain brings a magical ingredient and that's the ingredient of trust, you know, in sharing data. Okay. When, if that data and the sources that are providing that data arc okay. From verified and trusted, we're more likely to use that data and you the, any friction that's caused for fear of trepidation that the data is going to be misused. >>Mmm. It goes start to go away. And when that happens, you speed up an exchange and we need speed. Time is of the essence. So blockchain brings a platform for trusted data exchange while preserving privacy. And that provides a foundation. I can do some amazing things in this time of crisis, right? Yeah. And it's, it's not only trust, it's also expediency and you know, cutting out a lot of the red tape. And I want to talk about some of the applications. You're heavily involved in that in the distributed ledger, a project, you know, one of the early leads on that. Um, talk about some of the ways in which you're flying that distributed a ledger. And let's go into some of the examples. So we're, we're really fortunate to be an early adopter blockchain and, and provider of blockchain technology and kind of the fruit of that. >>Um, as I said, it couldn't happen any sooner where we have, Mmm, I would say over a thousand, alright. Users using IBM blockchain, which is powered by the opensource Hyperledger fabric, I'd say over a hundred of those users, um, have reached a level of production networks. you know, it's been great to see some of the proprietors of those networks now repurpose the networks towards hastening the relief of, uh, and one, a couple of examples that stand out, Dave. Mmm. You've seen what's happening to our supply chain. And then I think we got some rebound happening as we speak, but companies all of a sudden woke up one morning and their supply chains were, I'm exhausted. So suppliers, we're out of key goods and the buyers needed very rapidly to expand. They're, the supplier is in their, in their supply chain. there are laws and regulations about what it takes to onboard a new supplier. >>You want to make sure you're not onboarding bad actors. So in IBM for example, we have over 20,000 suppliers to our business and it takes 30 to 40 days who, uh, validate and verify one of those suppliers. We don't have 30 to 45 days, you know, think about you're a healthcare company or a food company. So working with a partner called Jane yard, uh, co-created a network called trust yourself buyer. And we've been able to repurpose, trust your supplier now or companies that are looking, you know, around Kobe 19 to rapidly okay, expand, you know, their, their supply chain. So if you imagine that taking us 45 days or 40 days to onboard a new supplier, okay. Pick, pick a company in our supply chain, Lenovo, that supplier may very well want to go to Lenovo to and provide services to them. Well guess what, it's going to take 40 days, the onboard to Lenovo. >>But if they're part of the trust or supplier network and they've already onboarded to IBM, they're well on their way. You're being visible to all of these other buyers that are part of the IBM network, like Lenovo and many others. And instead of taking 40 days, maybe it only takes five days. All right. So radically, radically, you know, improving the time it takes them. You know, with companies like Ford making ventilators and masks, it will kind of be able to onboard Ford into, you know, health care, uh, companies. But you know, we want to be able to do it with speed. So trust your supplier is a great use of blockchain. Two, expand a buyer and suppliers. Mmm. Exposure. Mmm. And they expand their network to quickly onboard. And you know, with the trust that you get an exchanging data from blockchain with the Mmm provenance, that Hey, this company information was truly vetted by one of the trusted members of the network. >>There's no fee or trepidation that somehow these records were tampered with or, or misused. So that's one example they have of using blockchain. That's a huge, uh, example that you gave because you're right, there are thousands and thousands of companies that are pivoting to making, like you said, ventilators and masks and yeah, they're moving so fast and there's gotta be a trust involved. On the one hand, they're moving fast to try to save their businesses or you know, in the case of Ford, you help save the, the country or the world. On the other hand, you know, there's risks there. So that, that helps. I want to understand me. Pasa basically is, if I understand it, you can privately share, uh, information on folks that are asymptomatic but might be carriers of covert 19. Am I getting that right on? Okay. So me Pasa starts as a project, uh, from a company called has Sarah and their CEO Jonathan Levy. >>And among other things, Jonathan Levy is an amazing, uh, software developer and he's helped us and the community at large, bill, the Hyperledger fabric, uh, blockchain technology, that's part of IBM. Mmm. The power is IBM blockchain. So Jonathan, I have this idea because w what was happening is there were many, many data sources, you know, from the very popular and well known, uh, Johns Hopkins source. And we have information coming from the weather company. There are other governments, um, putting out data. Jonathan had this, this idea of a verified Mmm. Data hub, right? So how do we kind of bring that information together in a hub where a developer can now to get access to not just one feed, but many feeds knowing that both the data is an a normalized format. So that's easy to consume. And like if you're consuming 10 different data sources, you don't have to think about 10 different ways to interact it. >>No kind of normalizing it through a fewer, like maybe one, but also that we really authentically know that this is the world health organization. This is indeed John Hopkins. So we have that trust. So, okay. Yeah. With me, Pasa being I'm a data hub four, uh, information verified information related to the Kronos virus, really laying a foundation now for a new class of applications that can mash up information to create new insights, perhaps applying Mmm. Artificial intelligence machine learning to really look not just at any one of those, uh, data sources, but now look across data sources, um, and start to make some informed decisions. No, I have to say operate with the lights on, uh, and with certainty that the information is correct. So me Pasa is that foundation and we have a call for code happening that IBM is hosting for developers to come out and okay. Bring their best ideas forward and X for exposing me Pasa as a service to the, in this hackathon so that developers can bring some of their best ideas and kind of help those best ideas come alive with me. Me has a resource. >>That's great. So we've got two, we got the supply chain, we just need to share the Pasa. There's the other one then I think we can all relate to is the secure key authentication, >>which I love. >>Uh, maybe you can explain that and talk about the role that blockchain >>we're launching fits, right. So you know, there is people working from home and digital identity verification. It is key. You know, think about it. You're working remotely, you're using tools like zoom. Um, there's a huge spike in calls and online requests from tele-health or government benefits programs. Yeah. So this is all happening. Everything behind the scenes is, yeah. Around that is, is this user who they say they are, is this doctor who they say they are, et cetera. And there are scams and frauds out there. So working with speed, it means working with certainty. and with the verified me networks set out to do a couple of years ago and the beautiful part is, you know, it's ready to go now for this, for this particular usage it's been using. Mmm. Basically think about it as my identity is my identity and I get to lease out information too different institutions to use it for my benefit, not necessarily just for their benefit. >>So it's almost like digital rights management. Like if you put out a digital piece of art or music, you can control the rights. Who gets to use it? What's the terms and conditions, um, on, on your terms? So verified me, um, allows through a mobile app users to invite institutions who represent them, verify them. No. And so I'll allow my department of motor vehicle and my employer, Mmm. Two to verify me, right? Because I want to go back to work sooner. I want to make sure my work environment, um, I'm making this up. I want to make sure my work environment, the people have been tested and vaccinated, but I don't want to necessarily, you know, kind of abuse people's privacy. Right? So I'll opt in, I'll share that information. I'll get my, my doctor and my, uh, department of motor vehicle to say, yes, this is Gary. >>He's from this address. Yes, he has been vaccinated and now I can kind of onboard to services as much quicker whether that service is going through TSA. Do you get on an airplane badging back into my office or you know, signing on to a, you know, telemedicine, a service or government, a benefits program, et cetera. So verify me is using the self, uh, at the station through a mobile application to help speed up the process of knowing that that is truly you and you truly want this service. Uh, and you are also calling the shots as to that. What happens with your information that, you know, it's not spread all over the interweb it's under your control at all time. Right. So I think it's the best of all worlds. The national Institute for standards and technology looked at, verified me. They're like, Oh my gosh, this is like the perfect storm of goodness for identity. >>They actually appointed, yeah, it has a term, it's called triple blind data exchange. It sounds like a magical act. A triple blind data exchange means the requester. Mmm. Doesn't know who the provider is and less know the requester. Um, allows the provider to know, Mmm, the provider doesn't know who the requester requested, doesn't know who the prior provider is that is double-blind. And then the network provider doesn't know either. Right. But somehow across disformed and that's the magic of blockchain. I'm allowing that to happen and with that we can move forward knowing we're sharing information where it matters without the risk of it leaking out to places we don't want to do. So great application of secure key and verified me. Yeah, I love that. Then the whole concept of being able to control your own data. You hear so much today about, you know, testing and in contact tracing using mobile technology to do that. >>But big privacy concerns. I've always felt like, you know, blockchain for so many applications in healthcare or just being able to, as you say, control your own data. I want to better understand the technology behind this. When I think about blockchain, Mmm. I obviously you don't think about it. Cryptography, you've mentioned developers a number of times. There's software engineering. Yeah. Distributed ledger. Um, I mean there's, there's game theory in the, in the, in the cryptocurrency world, we're not talking about that, but there's the confluence of these technologies coming to them. What's the technology underneath these, these applications? Talking about it there, there is an open source, an organization called Hyperledger. It's part of the Linux foundation. They're the gold standard and open source, openly governed, Mmm. Technology you know, early on in 2018 yep. 18, 26. I mean, we got involved, started contributing code and developers. >>Two Hyperledger fabric, which is the industry's first permissioned blockchain technology. Permission meaning members are accountable. So the network versus Bitcoin where members are anonymous and to pass industry Reggie regulations, you can't be anonymous. You have to be accountable. Um, that's not to say that you can't, okay. Work privately, you know, so you're accountable. But transactions in the network, Mmm. Only gets shared with those that have a need, need to know. So that the foundation is Hyperledger fabric. And IBM has a commercial offering called the IBM blockchain platform that embodies that. That kind of is a commercial distribution of Hyperledger fabric plus a set of advanced tools to make it really easy to work with. The open source. All the networks that I talked about are operating their network across the worldwide IBM public cloud. And so cloud technology lays a really big part of blockchain because blockchains are networks. >>Mmm. You know, our technology, IBM blockchain platform runs really well in the IBM wow. But it also allows you to run anywhere, right? Or like to say where it matters most. So you may have companies, I'm running blockchain nodes in the IBM cloud. You may have others running it on their own premises behind their firewall. You might have others running an Amazon and Microsoft Azure. Right. So we use, um, you may have heard of red hat open shift, the container technology so that we can run Mmm. Parts of a blockchain network, I guess they said where they matter most and you get strengthened a blockchain network based on the diversity of the operators. Because if it was all operated by one operator, there would be a chance maybe that there can be some collusion happening. But now if you could run it know across different geographies across the IBM cloud. >>So almost three networks all run on use this technology or run on the IBM cloud. And Dave, one more thing. If you look at these applications, they're just modern application, you know, their mobile front ends, their web portals and all of that kind of, okay. Okay. The blockchain part of these applications, usually it's only 20% of the overall endeavor that companies are going through. The other 80% it's business as usual. I'm building a modern cloud application. So what we're doing in IBM with, but you know, red hat with OpenShift with our cloud packs, which brings various enterprise software across different disciplines, blends and domains like integration, application, data, security. All of those things come together to fill the other 80% the above and beyond blockchain. So these three companies, okay. You know, 99 plus others are building applications as modern cloud applications that leverage this blockchain technology. So you don't have to be a cryptographer or you know, a distributed database expert. It's all, it's all embodied in this code. Mmm. Available on the IBM cloud, 29 cents a CPU hour. It was approximately the price. So it's quite affordable. And you know, that's what we've delivered. >>Well, the thing about that, that last point about the cloud is it law, it allows organizations, enterprises to experiment very cheaply, uh, and so they can get, uh, an MVP out or a proof of concept out very quickly, very cheaply, and then iterate, uh, extremely quickly. That to me is the real benefit, the cloud era and the pricing model. >>I just mentioned, David, as I said it when I started, you know, it's like we were working out in a gym, but we weren't quite sure. We knew why we were, we were so keen on getting fit. And what I see now is this, you know, blossoming of users who are looking at, you know, a new agreement. We thought we understood digital transformation. Mmm. But there's a whole new nice to be digitized right now. You know, we're probably not going to be jumping on planes and trains, uh, working as, as, as more intimately as we were face to face. So the need for new digital applications that link people together. Uh, w we're seeing so many use cases from, um, trade finance to food safety, to proxy voting for stock, know all of these applications that we're kind of moving along at a normal speed. I've been hyper accelerated, uh, because of the crisis we're in. So blockchain no. Couldn't come any sooner. >>Yeah. You know, I want to ask you, as a technologist, uh, you know, I've learned over the years, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. Um, could you do the types of things that you're talking about without blockchain? Um, I'm, I'm sure there are ways, but, but why is blockchain sort of the right path, >>Dave? Mmm. You can, you can certainly do things with databases. Mmm. But if you want the trust, it's as simple as this. A database traditionally has a single administrator that sets the rules up for when a transaction comes in. Mmm. What it takes to commit that transaction. And if the rules are met, the transactions committed, um, the database administrator has access who commands like delete and update. So at some level you can never be a hundred percent sure that that data was the data that was intended in there. With a blockchain, there's multiple administrators to the ledger. So the ledger is distributed and shared across multiple administrators. When a transaction is submitted, it is first proposed for those administrators, a process of consent happens. And then, and only then when the majority of the group agrees that it's a valid transaction, is it committed? And when it's committed, it's committed in a way that's cryptographically linked two other transactions in the ledger, I'm making it. >>Mmm tamper-proof right. Or very difficult to tamper with. And unlike databases, blockchains are append only so they don't have update and delete. Okay. All right. So if you really want that center of trusted data that is a tested, you know, that has checks and balances across different organizations, um, blockchain is the key to do it, you know? So could you do it in data with a database? Yes. But you have to trust that central organization. And for many applications, that's just fine. All right. But if we want to move quickly, we really want to share systems of record. Mmm. I hear you. Sharing a system of record, you have regulatory obligations, you can say, Oh, sorry, the record was wrong, but it was put in there by, by this other company. Well, they'll say, well, >>okay, >>nice for the other company, but sorry, you're the one in trouble. So with a blockchain, we have to bring assurances that we can't get into that kind of situation, right? So that shared Mmm. Distributed database that is kind of provides this tamper resistant audit log becomes the Colonel cross. And then with the privacy preservation that you get from encryption and privacy techniques, um, like we have like these things, both channels, um, you can transact, um Hm. And be accountable, but also, Mmm. Only share of transactions with those that have a need to know, right? So you get that level of privacy in there. And that combination of trust and privacy is the secret sauce that makes blockchain unique and quite timely for this. So yeah, check it out. I mean, on the IBM cloud, it's effortless. So to get up and running, you know, building a cloud native application with blockchain and you know, if you're used to doing things, um, on other clouds or back at the home base, we have the IBM blockchain software, which you can deploy. Yeah. Open shift anywhere. So we have what you need in a time of need. >>And as a technologist, again, you're being really, I think, honest and careful about the word tamper. You call it tamper resistant. And if I understand it right, that, I mean, obviously you can fish for somebody's credentials. Yeah. That's, you know, that's one thing. But if I understand that, that more than 50% of the peers in the community, it must agree to tamper in order for the system. You tampered with it. And, and that is the beauty of, of blockchain and the brilliance. Okay. >>Okay. Yeah. And, and, and for, um, performance reasons we've created optimizations. Like you can set a consensus policy up because maybe one transaction it's okay just to have a couple people agree and say, Oh, well, you know, out of the a hundred nodes, Mmm. Three agree, it's good enough. Okay. Other, other policies may be more stringent depending on the nature of the data and the transaction, right? So you can tone, you can kind of tune that in based on the class of transaction. And so it's kind of good and that's how we can get performance levels in the, you know, thousand plus. In fact, IBM and RBC, um, recently did, um, a series of performance analysis because RBC said, Hey, can I use this for some of my bank to bank exchanges and we need to support over a thousand transactions per second. They were able, in their use case, there's support over 3000. Transact for a second. Okay. Mmm. You know, that we were very encouraged by that. I'm glad you clarified that because, so essentially you're saying you can risk adjust the policies if you will. >>That's great to know. Mmm. I could go on forever on this topic. Well, we're unfortunately, Jerry, we're well over our time, but I want to thank you for coming back, planning this important topic. Thrilled. IBM has taken a leadership position here, and I think, you know, to your point, this pandemic is just going to, can accelerate a lot of things and blockchain is, but in my view anyway, one of them. Thank you, Dave. Oh, great questions and I really appreciate it. So everyone out there, um, stay safe. Stay healthy. All right. Thank you Jerry, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube. Our coverage of the IBM think digital 2020 event. We'll be right back. Perfect. The short break.

>> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here with Arpit Joshipura, GM of Networking, Edge, IoT for the Linux Foundation. Arpit, great to see you again, welcome back to theCUBE, thanks for joining us. >> Thank you, thank you. Happy to be here. >> So obviously, we love the Linux Foundation. We've been following all the events; we've chatted in the past about networking. Computer storage and networking just doesn't seem to go away with cloud and on-premise hybrid cloud, multicloud, but open-source software continues to surpass expectations, growth, geographies outside the United States and North America, just overall, just greatness in software. Everything's an abstraction layer now; you've got Kubernetes, Cloud Native- so many good things going on with software, so congratulations. >> Well thank you. No, I think we're excited too. >> So you guys got a big event coming up in China: OSS, Open Source Summit, plus KubeCon. >> Yep. >> A lot of exciting things, I want to talk about that in a second. But I want to get your take on a couple key things. Edge and IoT, deep learning and AI, and networking. I want to kind of drill down with you. Tell us what's the updates on the projects around Linux Foundation. >> Okay. >> The exciting ones. I mean, we know Cloud Native CNCF is going to take up more logos, more members, keeps growing. >> Yep. >> Cloud Native clearly has a lot of opportunity. But the classic in the set, certainly, networking and computer storage is still kicking butt. >> Yeah. So, let me start off by Edge. And the fundamental assumption here is that what happened in the cloud and core is going to move to the Edge. And it's going to be 50, 100, 200 times larger in terms of opportunity, applications, spending, et cetera. And so what LF did was we announced a very exciting project called Linux Foundation Edge, as an umbrella, earlier in January. And it was announced with over 60 founding members, right. It's the largest founding member announcement we've had in quite some time. And the reason for that is very simple- the project aims at unifying the fragmented edge in IoT markets. So today, edge is completely fragmented. If you talk to clouds, they have a view of edge. Azure, Amazon, Baidu, Tencent, you name it. If you talk to the enterprise, they have a view of what edge needs to be. If you talk to the telcos, they are bringing the telecom stack close to the edge. And then if you talk to the IoT vendors, they have a perception of edge. So each of them are solving the edge problems differently. What LF Edge is doing, is it is unifying a framework and set of frameworks, that allow you to create a common life cycle management framework for edge computing. >> Yeah. >> Now the best part of it is, it's built on five exciting technologies. So people ask, "You know, why now?" So, there are five technologies that are converging at the same time. 5G, low latency. NFV, network function virtualization, so on demand. AI, so predictive analytics for machine learning. Container and microservices app development, so you can really write apps really fast. And then, hardware development: TPU, GPU, NPU. Lots of exciting different size and shapes. All five converging; put it close to the apps, and you have a whole new market. >> This is, first of all, complicated in the sense of... cluttered, fragmented, shifting grounds, so it's an opportunity. >> It's an opportunity. >> So, I get that- fragmented, you've got the clouds, you've got the enterprises, and you've got the telcos all doing their own thing. >> Yep. >> So, multiple technologies exploding. 5G, Wi-Fi 6, a bunch of other things you laid out, >> Mhmm. >> all happening. But also, you have all those suppliers, right? >> Yes. >> And, so you have different manufacturers-- >> And different layers. >> So it's multiple dimensions to the complexity. >> Correct, correct. >> What are you guys seeing, in terms of, as a solution, what's motivating the founding members; when you say unifying, what specifically does that mean? >> What that means is, the entire ecosystem from those markets are coming together to solve common problems. And I always sort of joke around, but it's true- the common problems are really the plumbing, right? It's the common life cycle management, how do you start, stop, boot, load, log, you know, things like that. How do you abstract? Now in the Edge, you've 400, 500 interfaces that comes into an IoT or an edge device. You know, Zigbee, Bluetooth, you've got protocols like M2T; things that are legacy and new. Then you have connectivity to the clouds. Devices of various forms and shapes. So there's a lot of end by end problems, as we call it. So, the cloud players. So for LF Edge for example, Tencent and Baidu and the cloud leaders are coming together and saying, "Let's solve it once." The industrial IoT player, like Dynamic, OSIsoft, they're coming in saying, "Let's solve it once." The telcos- AT&T, NTT, they're saying "Let's solve it once. And let's solve this problem in open-source. Because we all don't need to do it, and we'll differentiate on top." And then of course, the classic system vendors that support these markets are all joining hands. >> Talk about the business pressure real quick. I know, you look at, say, Alibaba for instance, and the folks you mentioned, Tencent, in China. They're perfecting the edge. You've got videos at the edge; all kinds of edge devices; people. >> Correct. >> So there's business pressures, as well. >> The business pressure is very simple. The innovation has to speed up. The cost has to go down. And new apps are coming up, so extra revenue, right? So because of these five technologies I mentioned, you've got the top killer apps in edge are anything that is, kind of, video but not YouTube. So, anything that the video comes from 360 venues, or drones, things like that. Plus, anything that moves, but that's not a phone. So things like connected cars, vehicles. All of those are edge applications. So in LF Edge, we are defining edge as an application that requires 20 milliseconds or less latency. >> I can't wait for someone to define- software define- "edge". Or, it probably is defined. A great example- I interviewed an R&D engineer at VMware yesterday in San Francisco, it was at the RADIO event- and we were just riffing on 5G, and talking about software at the edge. And one of the advances >> Yes. >> that's coming is splicing the frequency so that you can put software in the radios at the antennas, >> Correct. Yeah. >> so you can essentially provision, in real time. >> Correct, and that's a telco use case, >> Yeah. >> so our projects at the LF Edge are EdgeX Foundry, Akraino, Edge Virtualization Engine, Open Glossary, Home Edge. There's five and growing. And all of these software projects can allow you to put edge blueprints. And blueprints are really reference solutions for smart cities, manufacturing, telcos, industrial gateways, et cetera et cetera. So, lots of-- >> It's kind of your fertile ground for entrepreneurship, too, if you think about it, >> Correct; startups are huge. >> because, just the radio software that splices the radio spectrum is going to potentially maybe enable a service provider market, and towers, right? >> Correct, correct. >> Own my own land, I can own the tower and rent it out, one radio. >> Yep. >> So, business model innovations also an opportunity, >> It's a huge-- >> not just the business pressure to have an edge, but-- >> Correct. So technology, business, and market pressures. All three are colliding. >> Yeah, perfect storm. >> So edge is very exciting for us, and we had some new announcements come out in May, and more exciting news to come out in June, as well. >> And so, going back to Linux Foundation. If I want to learn more. >> LFEdge.org. >> That's kind of the CNCF of edge, if you will, right? Kind of thing. >> Yeah. It's an umbrella with all the projects, and that's equivalent to the CNCF, right. >> Yeah. >> And of course it's a huge group. >> So it's kind of momentum. 64 founding members-- >> Huge momentum. Yeah, now we are at 70 founding members, and growing. >> And how long has it been around? >> The umbrella has been around for about five months; some of the projects have been around for a couple of years, as they incubate. >> Well let us know when the events start kicking in. We'll get theCUBE down there to cover it. >> Absolutely. >> Super exciting. Again, multiple dimensions of innovation. Alright, next topic, one of my favorites, is AI and deep learning. AI's great. If you don't have data you can't really make AI work; deep learning requires data. So this is a data conversation. What's going on in the Linux Foundation around AI and deep learning? >> Yeah. So we have a foundation called LF Deep Learning, as you know. It was launched last year, and since then we have significantly moved it forward by adding more members, and obviously the key here is adding more projects, right. So our goal in the LF Deep Learning Foundation is to bring the community of data scientists, researchers, entrepreneurs, academia, and users to collaborate. And create frameworks and platforms that don't require a PhD to use. >> So a lot of data ingestion, managing data, so not a lot of coding, >> Platforms. >> more data analyst, and/or applications? >> It's more, I would say, platforms for use, right? >> Yeah. >> So frameworks that you can actually use to get business outcomes. So projects include Acumos, which is a machine learning framework and a marketplace which allows you to, sort of, use a lot of use cases that can be commonly put. And this is across all verticals. But I'll give you a telecom example. For example, there is a use case, which is drones inspecting base stations-- >> Yeah. >> And doing analytics for maintenance. That can be fed into a marketplace, used by other operators worldwide. You don't have to repeat that. And you don't need to understand the details of machine learning algorithms. >> Yeah. >> So we are trying to do that. There are projects that have been contributed from Tencent, Baidu, Uber, et cetera. Angel, Elastic Deep Learning, Pyro. >> Yeah. >> It's a huge investment for us. >> And everybody wins when there's contribution, because data's one of those things where if there's available, it just gets smarter. >> Correct. And if you look at deep learning, and machine learning, right. I mean obviously there's the classic definition; I won't go into that. But from our perspective, we look at data and how you can share the data, and so from an LF perspective, we have something called a CDLA license. So, think of an Apache for data. How do you share data? Because it's a big issue. >> Big deal. >> And we have solved that problem. Then you can say, "Hey, there's all these machine learning algorithms," you know, TensorFlow, and others, right. How can you use it? And have plugins to this framework? Then there's the infrastructure. Where do you run these machine learning? Like if you run it on edge, you can run predictive maintenance before a machine breaks down. If you run it in the core, you can do a lot more, right? So we've done that level of integration. >> So you're treating data like code. You can bring data to the table-- >> And then-- >> Apply some licensing best practices like Apache. >> Yes, and then integrate it with the machine learning, deep learning models, and create platforms and frameworks. Whether it's for cloud services, for sharing across clouds, elastic searching-- >> And Amazon does that in terms of they vertically integrate SageMaker, for instance. >> That's exactly right. >> So it's a similar-- >> And this is the open-source version of it. >> Got it- oh, that's awesome. So, how does someone get involved here, obviously developers are going to love this, but-- >> LF Deep Learning is the place to go, under Linux Foundation, similar to LF Edge, and CNCF. >> So it's not just developers. It's also people who have data, who might want to expose it in. >> Data scientists, databases, algorithmists, machine learning, and obviously, a whole bunch of startups. >> A new kind of developer, data developer. >> Right. Exactly. And a lot of verticals, like the security vertical, telecom vertical, enterprise verticals, finance, et cetera. >> You know, I've always said- you and I talked about this before, and I always rant on theCUBE about this- I believe that there's going to be a data development environment where data is code, kind of like what DevOps did with-- >> It's the new currency, yeah. >> It's the new currency. >> Yeah. Alright, so final area I want to chat with you before we get into the OSS China thing: networking. >> Yeah. >> Near and dear to your heart. >> Near and dear to my-- >> Networking's hot now, because if you bring IoT, edge, AI, networking, you've got to move things around-- >> Move things around, (laughs) right, so-- >> And you still need networking. >> So we're in the second year of the LF Networking journey, and we are really excited at the progress that has happened. So, projects like ONAP, OpenDaylight, Tungsten Fabric, OPNFV, FDio, I mean these are now, I wouldn't say household names, but business enterprise names. And if you've seen, pretty much all the telecom providers- almost 70% of the subscribers covered, enabled by the service providers, are now participating. Vendors are completely behind it. So we are moving into a phase which is really the deployment phase. And we are starting to see, not just PoCs [Proofs of Concept], but real deployments happening, some of the major carriers now. Very excited, you know, Dublin, ONAP's Dublin release is coming up, OPNFV just released the Hunter release. Lots of exciting work in Fido, to sort of connect-- >> Yeah. >> multiple projects together. So, we're looking at it, the big news there is the launch of what's called OVP. It's a compliance and verification program that cuts down the deployment time of a VNF by half. >> You know, it's interesting, Stu and I always talk about this- Stu Miniman, CUBE cohost with me- about networking, you know, virtualization came out and it was like, "Oh networking is going to change." It's actually helped networking. >> It helped networking. >> Now you're seeing programmable networks come out, you see Cisco >> And it's helped. >> doing a lot of things, Juniper as well, and you've got containers in Kubernetes right around the corner, so again, this is not going to change the need, it's going to- It's not going to change >> It's just a-- >> the desire and need of networking, it's going to change what networking is. How do you describe that to people? Someone saying, "Yeah, but tell me what's going on in networking? Virtualization, we got through that wave, now I've got the container, Kubernetes, service mesh wave, how does networking change? >> Yeah, so it's a four step process, right? The first step, as you rightly said, virtualization, moved into VMs. Then came disaggregation, which was enabled by the technology SDN, as we all know. Then came orchestration, which was last year. And that was enabled by projects like ONAP and automation. So now, all of the networks are automated, fully running, self healing, feedback closed control, all that stuff. And networks have to be automated before 5G and IoT and all of these things hit, because you're no longer talking about phones. You're talking about things that get connected, right. So that's where we are today. And that journey continues for another two years, and beyond. But very heavy focused on deployment. And while that's happening, we're looking at the hybrid version of VMs and containers running in the network. How do you make that happen? How do you translate one from the other? So, you know, VNFs, CNFs, everything going at the same time in your network. >> You know what's exciting is with the software abstractions emerging, the hard problems are starting to emerge because as it gets more complicated, end by end problems, as you said, there's a lot of new costs and complexities, for instance, the big conversation at the Edge is, you don't want to move data around. >> No, no. >> So you want to move compute to the edge, >> You can, yeah-- >> But it's still a networking problem, you've still got edge, so edge, AI, deep learning, networking all tied together-- >> They're all tied together, right, and this is where Linux Foundation, by developing these projects, in umbrellas, but then allowing working groups to collaborate between these projects, is a very simple governance mechanism we use. So for example, we have edge working groups in Kubernetes that work with LF Edge. We have Hyperledger syncs that work for telecoms. So LFN and Hyperledger, right? Then we have automotive-grade Linux, that have connected cars working on the edge. Massive collaboration. But, that's how it is. >> Yeah, you connect the dots but you don't, kind of, force any kind of semantic, or syntax >> No. >> into what people can build. >> Each project is autonomous, >> Yeah. >> and independent, but related. >> Yeah, it's smart. You guys have a good view, I'm a big fan of what you guys are doing. Okay, let's talk about the Open Source Summit and KubeCon, happening in China, the week of the 24th of June. >> Correct. >> What's going on, there's a lot of stuff going on beyond Cloud Native and Linux, what are some of the hot areas in China that you guys are going to be talking about? I know you're going over. >> Yeah, so, we're really excited to be there, and this is, again, life beyond Linux and Cloud Native; there's a whole dimension of projects there. Everything from the edge, and the excitement of Iot, cloud edge. We have keynotes from Tencent, and VMware, and all the Chinese- China Mobile and others, that are all focusing on the explosive growth of open-source in China, right. >> Yeah, and they have a lot of use cases; they've been very aggressive on mobility, Netdata, >> Very aggressive on mobility, data, right, and they have been a big contributor to open-source. >> Yeah. >> So all of that is going to happen there. A lot of tracks on AI and deep learning, as a lot more algorithms come out of the Tencents and the Baidus and the Alibabas of the world. So we have tracks there. We have huge tracks on networking, because 5G and implementation of ONAP and network automation is all part of the umbrella. So we're looking at a cross-section of projects in Open Source Summit and KubeCon, all integrated in Shanghai. >> And a lot of use cases are developing, certainly on the edge, in China. >> Correct. >> A lot of cross pollination-- >> Cross pollination. >> A lot of fragmentation has been addressed in China, so they've kind of solved some of those problems. >> Yeah, and I think the good news is, as a global community, which is open-source, whether it's Europe, Asia, China, India, Japan, the developers are coming together very nicely, through a common governance which crosses boundaries. >> Yeah. >> And building on use cases that are relevant to their community. >> And what's great about what you guys have done with Linux Foundation is that you're not taking positions on geographies, because let the clouds do that, because clouds have-- >> Clouds have geographies, >> Clouds, yeah they have agents-- >> Edge may have geography, they have regions. >> But software's software. (laughs) >> Software's software, yeah. (laughs) >> Arpit, thanks for coming in. Great insight, loved talking about networking, the deep learning- congratulations- and obviously the IoT Edge is hot, and-- >> Thank you very much, excited to be here. >> Have a good trip to China. Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you, thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here for CUBE Conversation with the Linux Foundation; big event in China, Open Source Summit, and KubeCon in Shanghai, week of June 24th. It's a CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching.

>> Live from Las Vegas! It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019 brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier on theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. This is day one of theCUBE's coverage for three days, two sets, lots going on. I'm pretty sure I can guarantee you a very energetic conversation that John and I are going to have with Dell Boomi CTO Michael Martin. Michael, great to have you on theCUBE. >> It's great to be here. Nice to meet both of you. >> So Michael Dell, the other Michael, talked about (laughs), you probably get that a lot the other Michael, >> No, not really. (laughs) >> Talked about Boomi's a leader in cloud integration this morning during the keynote. Stu Miniman and I had the chance to talk to your CEO Chris McNabb, who came with tons of energy. We want to talk to you about Blockchain. >> Blockchain? >> What, yes! Am I surprising you? >> Yes. >> What are your perspectives on it? Does it live up to the hype? >> Wow, that's a really good question. So, you know it's really funny because I talk to people about Blockchain all the time to be honest with you. And I would say that for as many people that are as excited about the technology and the possibilities, there are equal number of people that are the naysayers. Right, the doubters. And a lot of times the people in those roles are technology people, right? They'll say, well just use a database for that. Right, what, you know, what difference does it make? But they're missing the point. The point is this, what's really happening in the industry is collaboration. Blockchain, it is a technology, but the point is, it's creating relationships in business that have never been created before. So if you go and look at these consortium and work groups that are spinning up, you see a construction consortium, an energy consortium, health care consortium, transportation consortium, supply chain consortium, and you look at the people that belong to those, it is amazing the collaboration between these companies because of Blockchain as a concept. So really it is the, it's transforming the industry. So my advice is either get on board or you're going to be left behind. >> All right, so first of all, we're both pro Blockchain everyone knows, theCUBE knows, I love Blockchain. I love the idea of token economics. The ICO's initial coin offerings has really poisoned the market, I think, in the general market. Because people see Bitcoin, Ethereum, all kinds of currency, it's a lot of fraud outside the United States, and the government's cracked down on it, we know that story. But the fundamental technology is, changes the relationship between people and data, and their interactions. And so I think, I agree with you 100%, but also it's a cultural shift, too. You're thinking about new ways to do something. And I always say, I'd love to get your reaction to this Michael, because I always say to people, hey when the internet started the web, it was dial-up, it was the slowest piece of you know what you could ever see. But it was the first time we saw web pages, we could self-serve ourselves with information. So I think people tend to compare what I could do alternatively with a database to the early stages of where Blockchain, you had some latency issues or you're doing them real time, no problem, don't do Blockchain. But if you look at the benefits of what it could provide from supply chain to community, they're there. And it's disrupting the business model behind it. >> It is. >> And I think that is a part of the clue train that people can jump on and understand that if they just take the leap of faith, kind of like the web. There were people who poopooed the world wide web. It's a toy for people, aww it's nothing. >> Yeah. >> The graphics are horrible. Speeds are slow. No one really uses it. (laughs) >> You could say the same thing about cloud, and IOT, right? Think about 3 years ago, everybody's IOT drug, right? Everybody's happy, IOT IOT, right? But now? I'll make a provocative statement that I now say that I'm comfortable in saying is, if it's a business, you are not incorporating device data, either as a producer or a consumer, you're already behind. You're already behind, and so, I will probably say the same thing about Blockchain in 24 to 36 months. If you are not working on a strategy to have your business be more competitive by incorporating Blockchain, you're going to be behind. >> Talk about where people can get on the clue train here, because it's a good point. There's always the early adopters, the people who take the arrows in the back, so to speak. The entrepreneurs, and we've seen some cases of that. But it's maturing fast. Where are the entry points for say, a technologist, a business person, is there a pattern that you see that might be a good way for someone to jump in. How do they jump in? I mean it's certainly you can join a community, and get involved, but I mean, in terms of holistically thinking about impact to their business, to their customers, where should they be staring at for Blockchain? >> I always have two answers. One is, my business hat, and one is my technical hat. One is, join a consortium. Join a work group. Learn what others are doing. And look at your competition, right? There's a vast amount of data out there. So, just go ahead and search on your competition. It's very easy. And I guarantee that if there's anything that's motivating, it's what your competition's doing. But the second answer is this, get your hands dirty. Learn the technology, right? Don't be a PowerPoint strategy. Learn the technology. For sure. So understand what's there. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of Ethereum. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of Hyperledger Fabric. Start learning the technology. Really get your hands on it. Because that's what we had to do in Boomi, is. We've been also been looking at it for roughly two years. And it was last year that we came out with our support, because of working with our customers and partners, that we too had to work on a strategy of where is Boomi positioned, and how does it bring value to the market for our customers for Blockchain? For us, we had to just start doing it. So now in the past year, we're doing it, and we too, belong to different alliances, and participate and can't go without saying that with Dell technologies very much invested in Blockchain across the business, especially VMWare, we reap the benefits at a much broader scale. So we're just been in a great position of learning and understanding where Boomi fits. >> Why is it, if you look at your existing customers I mentioned before we spoke with Chris McNabb about an hour or two ago, I think I saw on Boomi.com there's over 8200 customers that you guys have, Rory Read energetically talked about how much growth you guys have achieved, the numbers of customers, sheer number of huge that you're adding monthly, quarterly. When you talk to your existing integration customers, what are those conversations, kind of along the lines of John's question, where you're talking to these customers about why integration is so important as it relates to Blockchain? >> Well, first of all, most importantly is customers need an integration strategy. They just need a strategy on integration. So let's push Blockchain aside, right? Like Michael Dell and everybody else says, "Every business needs to integrate." And let's fact it, the majority by far of customers that need an integration strategy are integrating data between legacy on-premise solutions in cloud, right? Once they get established of understanding the processes and the procedures in bringing in a solution like Boomi, it's a natural extension that boom, you already have Blockchain support, you're just extending your integration strategy to now basically on board. >> What kind of Blockchain features do you have in the product and the road map? What's it looking like? Where's the use case for you guys? >> So, I'll tell you what we're seeing. First of all, our support is Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric, it's also fully compatible with VMWare announced their beta in Blockchain at the end of last year, so we're fully compatible with the VMWare Blockchain, with is Ethereum-based. And for us, most of the conversations that we have, now of course, we all know that there is every industry is dabbling or really trying to be a front runner. But the clear front runner for us is Trusted Lineage. Track and trace, it's really tracking supply chain. That is by far the most predominate scenario that we see. Our partners and customers we work with seem to be the most interested in. >> It's interesting, digital is all supply chain. >> Yes. >> It's connected. >> Yep. >> And then, connecting the analog is interesting too. Some, a lot of examples we see a lot is shipping goods, a physical activity. >> Right. >> Where there's a digital component in it, that the ledger plays beautifully for. So, it's the confluence of physical world meets digital where now you have human relationships to a digital connected network. >> That's right. >> And if everything's connected, everything can be a supply chain at some point if you're looking at data. >> Right. >> Your thoughts on that? >> It's interesting you bring this up, because we've been talking like it's a business-automated process. You run something, it integrates, it pulls data, it transforms data, but interestingly enough, the other thing that people tend to think about is, they tend to think of Blockchain in a silo, right? I'm just installing Blockchain and here it's over humming in the corner, waiting to do something, right? But that's not going to be the case. Interestingly enough, people also think that's just integrating applications back and forth, but when you pull up a phone, and maybe do a financial transaction, you're really communicating with a smart contract in the back end. You are actually a person communicating or integrating with a smart contract. This is the beauty that people now, if they just to start thinking about it, and they learn it, is, oh, okay. Again, Boomi will help you integrate data back and forth between smart contracts. But it also presents you the user interface for a smart contract. >> And it removes the middle, intermediaries or middlemen and so that means in software is that you're going to go direct software-to-software with these smart contracts. So that's one. But also just in the real world, if you and I are online, and we want to do something, we could have a digital smart contract, no lawyers are involved, we can just agree and then it's immutable. >> That's right. >> So that's another benefit. Again, these efficiencies come from things being taken away. >> That's right. >> This seems to be a big part of the Blockchain. >> It is. As a matter of fact, geolocation's another example. Whether it be freight, or ships, or trains, we're already seeing cases where based on geolocation, it's denoting where the goods are, based on geolocation. A human's not even involved at all. It's all automated based on proximity. Right? It's all like this ecosystem is becoming just alive in itself and just starting to be self-building. >> What do you hearing of the integration of Blockchain into Boomi's product road map? What are you hearing from your customers, and your partners? >> For us, I will tell you that given that we've been working on this, there's no question that the validation and quality of what we have is because of our customers and partners. But, hands down, everybody's still on the journey. Everybody's trying to figure out. >> Early innings? >> Very much so. The other thing I need to point out, just to make sure the viewers know this, is Boomi itself is not a Blockchain, right? It's not a mechanism by which you install a Blockchain node, right? It is the ability to interact with a Blockchain that's pre-existing. That's very important because sometimes people look at us like, "Oh is Boomi helping me deploy a Blockchain?" It's like, no. We're helping you integrate your business with a pre-existing Blockchain, and there's a big difference there. >> And that's the partnership consortiums that you guys are a part of, that's the important part of you have mentioning to any consortiums. Not so much, you need to stand up your own, Blockchain, Hyperledger, for instance, patchy license, no problem. >> Right. >> So that's kind of where that integration point is. Okay, what's about speed and performance? Speeds and feeds because again, I've known about the latency issues around how tokens are being written to the Blockchain. It's not super fast, it's some innovations happening, so that's also I would say limiting the scope of the early market adopters. But if you're doing just a trivial transaction, where latency's not involved, it's a great use case. Where do you see the performance of Blockchain? How is that coming along, and what's your view on that? What do you see timetable-wise, and just if you throw a dart at the board, you know? >> Everybody want to aspire to be, to overcome the highest volume transactions today, which we know as probably credit card companies, right? Like that's the benchmark. And I will tell you that there is a ton of research going into performance. For example, today Boomi and VMWare work with the University of San Diego's Supercomputing lab. It's commonly known as, the short name is Block Lab. So, we actually are working together. >> I saw that, there was a recent announcement? >> It got announced not too recent, but I think it could have been at the end of last year was the first press that we did. Coming up now in May or June, we will, there will be another press release of what's going on. So, from a performance standpoint, again we are many universities, as you could imagine, it's a great university project for just that reason. And so we're involved in that together with VMWare. >> So with the developer involvement now, Ethereum attracted a lot of developers. >> Yep. >> And then there was some ease of use issues, performance, natural, then other languages, other Blockchain approaches came out. Where are the developers gravitating towards now, do you see? Because Solidity is a unique language for Ethereum but it's not as easy as Java script, for instance. >> Right. >> You got a Java script guy out there who can sling Hyperledger, possibly, so I'm starting to see tool chains, and how developers' orientations or preferences come into play. >> You do. I mean, whoever heard of Solidity, right, before Ethereum came on the scene, right? That's a whole different programming language. But the two front runners by far is Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Hyperledger Fabric, I mean, having support for Java toolkit, so that's going to cater to a much broader audience. So you've seen the evolution of both of these catering to more mainstream languages like Go and Java. It's going to happen. Yeah, it's going to happen. >> Predictions? >> Predictions? >> Yeah, when are we going to see Blockchain hit the mainstream? What's the tipping point? It may be a better question, tipping point, what's the catalyst? Tipping points? What's your, just your mental model? How do you think about looking at the signals from the marketplace to see a tipping point? For mainstream, at least awareness? >> Based on what we're seeing in the industry today, I believe that enterprise businesses will have to be integrating with Blockchains in 12 to 24 months. 24 months is probably the max, but 12 to 24 months, I don't think you're going to have a Fortune 100 company that's not integrating with a Blockchain, for one reason or another. Whether it be, currency or Trusted Lineage. But 24 months. >> Wow! Michael, Boomi, Blockchain, I feel like I need to say bazinga! I need another B-word. >> Boom. >> I promised you boom, Boomi, Blockchain. I promised you an energetic interview and I think these guys just gave it to you. Thank you so much, Michael, for joining John and me on the program. Excited to see what comes up and hopefully see it at Dell Boomi World. >> Yes, thank you very much for having me, it's great. >> Oh, our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE Live from Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching! (electronic music)

(futuristic electronic music) >> Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas with AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent 2018's CUBE coverage. Two sets, wall-to-wall coverage here on the ground floor. I'm here with Dave Vellante. Dave, six years we've been coming to re:Invent. Every year except for the first year. What a progression. We got great news. Always raising the bar, as they say at Amazon. This year, big announcements. One of them is blockchain. Really kind of laying out early formation of how they're going to roll out, thinking about blockchain. We're here to talk about here, with Rahul Pathak, who's the GM of analytics, and data lakes, and blockchain. Managing that. And Shawn Bice who's the vice president of non-relational databases. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> I wish my voice was a little bit stronger. I love this segment. You know, we've been doing blockchain. We've been following one of the big events in the industry. If you separate out the whole token ICO scam situation, token economics is actually a great business model opportunity. Blockchain is an infrastructure, a decentralized infrastructure, that's great. But it's early. Day one really for you guys in a literal sense. How are you guys doing blockchain? Take a minute to explain the announcement because there are use cases, low-hanging use cases, that look a lot like IoT and supply chain that people are interested in. So take a minute to explain the announcements and what it means. >> Absolutely, so when we began looking at blockchain and blockchain use cases, we really realized there are two things that customers are trying to do. One case is really keep an immutable record of transactions and in a scenario where centralized trust is okay. And for that we have Amazon QLDB, which is an immutable cryptographically verifiable ledger. And then in scenarios where customers really wanted the decentralized trust and the smart contracts, that's where blockchain frameworks like Hyperledger Fabric and Ethereum play a role. But they're just super complicated to use and that's why we built Managed Blockchain, to make it easy to stand up, scale, and monitor these networks, so customers can focus on building applications. And in terms of use cases on the decentralized side, it's really quite diverse. I mean, we've got a customer, Guardian Life Insurance, so they're looking at Managed Blockchain 'cause they have this distributed network of partners, providers, patients, and customers, and they want to provide decentralized verifiable records of what's taking place. And it's just a broad set of use cases. >> And then we saw in the video this morning, I think it was Indonesian farmers, right? Wasn't that before the keynote? Did you see that? It was good. >> I missed that one. >> Yeah, so they don't have bank accounts. >> Oh, got it. >> And they got a reward system, so they're using the blockchain to reward farmers to participate. >> So a lot of people ask the question is, why do I need blockchain? Why don't you just put in database? So there are unique, which is true by the way, 'cause latency's an issue. (chuckles) Certainly, you might want to avoid blockchain in the short term, until that gets fixed. Assume that every one will get fixed over time, but what are some of the use cases where blockchain actually is relevant? Can you be specific because that's really people starting to make their selection criteria on. Look, I still use a database. I'm going to have all kinds of token and models around, but in a database. Where is the blockchain specifically resonating right now? >> I'll take a shot at this or we can do it together, but when you think of QLDB, it's not that customers are asking us for a ledger database. What they were really saying is, hey, we'd like to have this complete immutable, cryptographically verifiable trail of data. And it wasn't necessarily a blockchain conversation, wasn't necessarily a database conversation, it was like, I really would like to have this complete cyrptographic verifiable trail of data. And it turns out, as you sort of look at the use cases, in particular, the centralized trust scenario, QLDB does exactly that. It's not about decentralized trust. It's really about simply being able to have a database that when you write to that database, you write a transaction to the database, you can't change it. You know, a typical database people are like, well, hey, wait a second, what does immutable really mean? And once you get people to understand that once that transaction is written to a journal, it cannot be changed at all and attached, then all of a sudden there's that breakthrough moment of it being immutable and having that cryptographic trail. >> And the advantage relative to a distributive blockchain is performance, scale, and all the challenges that people always say. >> Yeah, exactly. Like with QLDB, you can find it's going to be two to three times faster cause you're not doing that distributing consensus. >> How about data lakes? Let's talk about data lakes. What problem were you guys trying to solve with the data lakes? There's a lot of them, but. (chuckles) >> That's a great question. So, essentially it's been hard for customers to set up data lakes 'cause you have to figure out where to get data from, you have to land it in S3, you've got to secure it, you've then got to secure every analytic service that you've got, you might have to clean your data. So with lake formation, what we're trying to do is make it super easy to set up data lakes. So we have blueprints for common databases and data sources. We bring that data into an S3 data lake and we've created a central catalog for that data where customers can define granular access policies with the table, and the column, and the row level. We've also got ML-based data cleansing and data deduplication. And so now customers can just use lake formation, set up data lakes, curate their data, protect it in a single place, and have those policies that enforce across all of the analytic services that they might use. >> So does it help solve the data swamp problem, get more value out of the data lake? And if so, how? >> Absolutely, so the way it does that is by automatically cataloging all datas that comes in. So we can recognize what the data is and then we allow customers to add business metadata to that so they can tag this as customer data, or PII data, or this is my table of sales history. And that then becomes searchable. So we automatically generate a catalog as data comes in and that addresses the, what do I have in my data lake problem. >> Okay, so-- >> Go ahead. >> So, Rahul, you're the general manager. Shawn, what's your job, what do you do? >> So our team builds all the non-relational databases at Amazon. So DynamoDB, Neptune, ElastiCache, Timestream, which you'll hear about today, QLDB, et cetera. So all those things-- >> Beanstalk too, Elastic Beanstalk? >> No we do not build Beanstalk. >> Okay, we're a customer of DynamoDB, by the way. >> Great! >> We're happy customers. >> That's great! >> And we use ElastiCache, right? >> Yup, the elastic >> There you go! >> surge still has it. >> So-- >> Haven't used Neptune yet. >> What's the biggest problem stigmas that you guys are trying to raise the bar on? What's the key focus as you get this new worlds and use cases coming together? These are new use cases. How are you guys evaluating it? How are you guys raising the bar? >> You know, that's a really good question you ask. What I've found in my experience is developers that have been building apps for a long time, most people are familiar with relational databases. For years we've been building apps in that context, but when you kind of look at how people are building apps today, it's very different than how they did in the past. Today developer do what they do best. They take an application, a big application, break it down into smaller parts, and they pick the right tool for the right job. >> I think the game developer mark is going to be a canary in the coal mine for developers, and it's a good spot for data formation in these kind of unstructured, non-relational scenarios. Okay, now all this engagement data, could be first person shooter, whatever it is, just throw it, I need to throw it somewhere, and I'll get to it and let it be ready to be worked on by analytics. >> Well, yeah, if you think about that gamer scenario, think about if you and I are building a game, who knows if there's going to be one user, ten players, or 10 million, or 100 million. And if we had 100 million, it's all about the performance being steady. At 100 million or ten. >> You need a fleet of servers. (John laughing) >> And a fleet of servers! >> Have you guys played Fortnite? Or do you have kids that play? >> I look over my kid's shoulder. I might play it. >> I've played, but-- >> They run all their analytics on us. They've got about 14 petabytes in S3 using S3 as their data lake, with EMR and Athena for analytics. >> We got a season-- >> I mean, think about that F1 example on keynotes today. Great example of insights. We apply that kind of concept to Fortnite, by the way, Fortnite has theCUBE in there. It's always a popular term. We noticed that, the hastag, #wherestheCUBEtoday. (Rahul chuckling) I couldn't resist. But the analytics you could get out of all that data, every interaction, all that gesture data. I mean, what are some of the things they're doing? Can you share how they're using the new tech to scale up and get these insights? >> Yeah, absolutely. So they're doing a bunch of things. I mean, one is just the health of the systems when you've got hundreds of millions of players. You need to know if you're up and it's working. The second is around engagement. What games, what collection of people work well together. And then it's what incentives they create in the game, what power ups people buy that lead to continued engagement, 'cause that defines success over the long term. What gets people coming back? And then they have an offline analytics process where they're looking at reporting, and history, and telemetry, so it's very comprehensive. So you're exactly right about gaming and analytics being a huge consumer of databases. >> Now, Shawn, didn't you guys have hard news today on DynamoDB, or? >> Yeah today we announce DynamoDB On-Demand, so customers that basically have workloads that could spike up and then all of a sudden drop off, a lot of these customers basically don't even want to think about capacity planning. They don't want to guess. They just want to basically pay only for what they're using. So we announced DynamoDB On-Demand. The developer experience is simple. You create a table and you putyour read/write capacity in the on-demand mode, and you literally only pay for the request that your workload puts through system. >> It's a great service actually. Again, making life easier for customers. Lower the bill, manage capacity, make things go better, faster, enables value. >> It's all about improving the customer experience. >> Alright, guys, I really appreciate you coming in. I'm really interested in following what you guys do in the future. I'm sure a lot of people watching will be as well, as analytics and AI become a real part of, as you guys move the stack and create that API model for, what you did for infrastructure, for apps. A total game changer, we believe. We're interested in following you guys, I'm sure others are. Where are you going to be this year? What's your focus? Where can people find out more besides going to Amazon site? Is there certain events you're going to be at? How do people get more information and what's the plans? >> There's actually some sessions on lake formation, blockchain that we're doing here. We'll have a continuous stream of summits, so as the AWS Summit calendar for 2019 gets published that's a great place to go for more information. And then just engage with us either on social media or through the web and we'll be happy to follow up. >> Alright, well, we'll do a good job on amplifying. A lot of people are interested, certainly blockchain, super hot. But people want better, stronger, more stable, but they want the decentralized immutable database model. >> Cryptographically verifiable! >> And see as everyone knows. >> Scalable! >> Anyone who wants to keep those, they talk about CUBE coins but I haven't said CUBE coin once on this episode. Wait for those tokens to be released soon. More coverage after this short break, stay with us. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. 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>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to our Boston area studio. I'm happy to welcome back to the program a multi-time guest, Josh Rogers, who's the CEO of Syncsort. Josh, great to see ya. >> Great to see you. Thanks for having me. >> Alright so, Syncsort is a company that I would say is, you guys are deep in the data ocean. Data is at the center of everything. When Wikibon, when we did our predictions everything whether you're talking about cloud, whether you're talking about infrastructure, of course everything like IoT and Edge, it is at the center of it. I want you to help start off is there's this term, big iron, big data. Help explain to us what that is and what that means to both Syncsort and your customers. >> Sure yeah, so we like to talk about Syncsort as the leader in big iron to big data and it's a it's a positioning that we've chosen for the firm because we think it represents the value proposition that we bring to our customers but we also think it represents a collection of use cases that are really at the top of the agenda of CIOs today. And really we talk about it in two areas. The first is a recognition that large enterprises still run mission critical workloads on systems that they've built over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Those systems leverage mainframe computing, they leveraging IBM i or AS400 and they spent trillions of dollars building those systems and they still deliver core workloads that power their businesses. So mission number one is that these firms want to make sure that they optimize those environments. They run them as efficiently as possible. They can't go down. They've got the proper security kind of protocols around them and of course that situation's always changing as workloads grow and change on these environments. So first is how do I optimize the systems that while they may be mature, they are still mission critical. The second is a recognition that most of the critical data assets for our customers are created in these systems. These are the systems that execute the transactions and as a result have core information around the results of the firm, the firm's customers, et cetera. So second value proposition is how do I maximize the value of that data that gets produced in those systems which tends to be a focus on liberating it, making a copy of it and moving it into next generation analytic systems. And then you look at the technical requirements of that it turns out that it's hard. I'm taking data from systems that were created 50 years ago and I'm integrating it with systems that were created five years ago. And so we've got a special set of expertise and solutions that allow customers to both optimize these old systems and maximize the value data produced in those systems. >> You bring up some really good points. I've been talking the last couple of years to people about how do I really wrap my arms around my data and we're talking about a multi-cloud world and where we have pockets of information trapped. That's a challenge. So it's not just about my data center and Amazon. It's like oh wait, I've got all these SaaS deployments and I think it's probably, it's a blind spot that I had had as to sure, right, you've got companies that have let's call them legacy systems, ones that they've got a lot investment but these are mission critical, these are the ones that it is not easy to modernize them but if I can get access to the data and put this into these next generation systems it sounds like you kind of free that data and allow that to be leveraged much easier. >> That's right, that's right and we, what we try to do is focus on what are the next generation trends in data and how are they going to intersect with these older systems. And so that started as big data but it includes cloud and the multi-cloud. It includes real-time and IoT. It includes thing like Blockchain. We're really scanning the horizon for what are these kind of generational shifts in terms of how am I going to leverage data and how do we get really tight on the use cases that our customers are gonna need. So I'll integrate those new technologies with these old investments. >> Josh, I'd love to hear what you're seeing from customers. So we've talked to you at some of the big data shows. I know we've spoken to you at the Splunk shows. I felt like what we as an industry got bogged down in some of the tools for a couple of years. While Wikibon, we did the first market forecast on big data everybody was like oh, Hadoop Hadoop Hadoop and we're like well, Hadoop will catalyze a lot of things and companies will rod a lot of things but Hadoop itself will be a small piece of the market and we've started to see some consolidation in that market. So data and the value that I get out of the data is the important thing. So what are your customers focused on? How do they get from their traditional data warehouses to a more modern? What are the challenges that they're dealing with and where are you engaging with them? >> Right, sure. So I mean one of the challenges they do have is this explosion of kind of options. Am I doing things in Hadoop? What is Hadoop at this point? Which projects actually constitute Hadoop? So what repository I'm gonna use. Am I gonna use Hive? Am I gonna use something, am I gonna use MongoDB, Elastic? What are, what's the repository I'm targeting? Generally what we see is that each of those has, and a long list of additional repositories, has a role to play for the specific use case. And then how am I going to get the data there and integrate it and then get the data out and deliver insights? And that stack of technologies and tools is pretty intimidating. And so we see customers starting to coalesce around some market leaders in that space. The merger of Hortonworks and Cloudera I think was a very good thing for the industry. It just simplifies the life of the customer in terms of making decisions in confidence in that stack. It certainly simplifies our life as a partner of those firms and I think it will help accelerate maturity in that tech stack. And so I think we're starting to see pockets of maturation which I think will accelerate customers' investments in leveraging these next generation technologies. That then creates a big opportunity for us because now it's becoming real. Now I really have to get on a real-time basis my data out of my mainframe or my IBM i system into these next generation repositories and it turns out that's technically a challenge and so what we're seeing in our businesses real acceleration of our big data solutions against what I would say production-targeted workloads and projects, which is great. >> Alright, M&A, you got a always really active in this space. We've done ThinkSort for many years so we've watched some of the changes along the way. I believe you've got some news to share regarding M&A activity and there's also some recent stuff to tap in the last year. Maybe bring us up to speed. >> Sure so we've made two announcements. We made an announcement in the last few weeks and then one very recently that I'd like to share. The first is about two months ago we struck up a developmental relationship with IBM around their B2B collaboration portfolio and this product set really gives us exposure to integration styles between businesses. Historically we've been focused on integration within a business and so we really like the exposure to that. More importantly, it intersects with one of these next generational data themes around Blockchain and we believe there's a huge opportunity to help be a leader and how do you take Blockchain infrastructure and integrate it to these existing systems. So we're really excited to partner with IBM on that front. And IBM obviously is making huge investments there. >> Before we got, what's Syncsort's play there when it comes to Blockchain? We have definitely talked to IBM quite a bit about Blockchain, Hyperledger, everything going into there. So maybe give a little more color there. >> Sure, so look, we still think that production workloads on Blockchain are a few years out and we see a lot of pilot activity. So I think people are still trying to understand the specific use cases they're gonna deliver real value. But one thing is for certain, that as customers start to stand up production workloads on the Blockchain they're going to need to integrate what's happening in that new infrastructure with these traditional systems that are still managing the large majority of their transactions. And how do I add data to the Blockchain? How do I verify data on the Blockchain? How do I improve the quality of data on the Blockchain? How do I pull data off of the Blockchain? We think there's a really important role for us to play around understanding the specifics of those use cases, how they intersect with some of these legacy systems and how we provide tailored solutions that are best in class. And it's one of the reasons, it's one of the primary reasons we've struck up the relationship with IBM but also joined Hyperledger. So hopefully that gives you a little bit more context. >> That's great. >> The more recent announcement I want to make is that we've acquired a company called Eview and Eview is a terrific leader in the machine data integration space. They have a number of solutions that are complementary to what we've done with our iron string product and what we're trying to do there is support as many use cases as possible for people to maximize the value of that they can get out of machine data, particularly as it relates to older systems like mainframe and IBM i. And what this acquisition does is it allows us to take another step forward in terms of the value proposition that we offer our customers. One specific use case where Eview's been a leader that we're very excited about is integration with ServiceNow. And you can think of ServiceNow as kind of a next generation platform that we to date have not had integration with. This acquisition gives us that integration. It also gives us a set of technology and talent that we can put towards accelerating our overall big data plans. And so we're really excited about having the Evue team join the Syncsort family and what we can deliver for customers. >> Yeah great great. Absolutely, companies like ServiceNow and Workday, huge amounts of data there, are seeing a lot of it. Dave Alonte's been at the ServiceNow knowledge show with theCUBE for a number of years. Really interesting. Seems like this acquisition ties well in with I believe it was Vision that a year ago? >> Well so it ties in mostly with our iron string product. >> Okay. >> Now Vision contributed to the iron string product in that that gave us the expertise to deliver integration for IBM i log data into next generation analytic platforms like Splunk and Elastic. So we had built a product that was focused on delivering mainframe data in real-time to those platforms. Vision gave us both real-time capability and a huge franchise in the IBM i space. Eview builds on that and gives us additional capability in terms of delivering data to new repositories like ServiceNow. >> Great, maybe step back for a second. Give us kind of some of the speeds and feeds of Syncsort itself. Memento the company, you've been CEO for a while now. Tell us how we're doing. >> Yeah, we're doing well. We're having a record year. It's important to actually recognize that in September we celebrated our 50th anniversary. So I think we're a bit unusual in terms of our heritage. Having said that, we've never driven more innovation than we have over the last 12 months. We have tripled the size of the business over the last three years since I've been CEO. We've quadrupled the employee base. And we will continue to see I think rapid growth given the opportunity we set and we see in this big iron to big data space. >> Yeah, Josh, you talk about that. When I look at okay, a 50-year-old company. We talked about data quite a bit differently 50 years ago. What is the digital transformation today? What does that mean for Syncsort? What does that mean for your customers? Help put us in context. >> Yeah, I mean, it kind of goes back to this original positioning which is, the largest banks int he world, the largest telecommunications vendors in the world, healthcare, government, you pick the industry, they built a set of systems that they still run today over the last four or five decades. Those systems tend to produce the most important data of that enterprise, not the only data you want to analyze, but it tends to be that reference data that makes everything else, allows you to make sense of everything else. And as you think about how am I gonna analyze that data, how am I gonna maximize the value of that data there is a need to integrate the data and move it off of those platforms and into these next generation platforms. And if you look at the way a vSAN file was designed for computing requirements in 1970 it turns out it's really different than the way that you would design a file type JSON or a file for Impala. And so kind of knitting that together takes a lot of deep expertise on both sides of the equation and we uniquely have that expertise and are solving that. And what we've seen is as new technologies continue to come to market, which we refer to as the next wave, that our enterprise customer base of 7,000 customers needs a partner that can say how do I take advantage of that new technology trend in the context of the past 30, 40, 50 years of investment I've made in mission critical systems and how do I support the key integration use cases? And that's what we've determined where we can make a difference in the market is focusing on what are those use cases and how do we deliver differentiate solutions to solve 'em that help both our customers and these partners. >> Absolutely, it's always great to talk about some of the new stuff but you need to meet the customers where they are, get to that data where it is and help move it forward. Alright, Josh, why don't you give it the final words? Kind of broadly open. Big challenges, opportunities, what's exciting you as you look forward kind of the next six months? >> Yeah, so we'll continue to make investments in cloud, in data governance, in supporting real-time data streaming and in security. Those are the areas that we'll be focused on driving innovation and delivering additional capability to our customers. Some of that will come through taking technologies like Eview or like the B2B products and enhancing them for specific use cases where they intersect those things. It will also be additional investments from an acquisition perspective in those domains and you can count on Syncsort to continue to expand the value proposition that it is delivering to its customers both through new technology introductions but also through additional integration with these next generation platforms. So we're really excited I mean, we believe our strategy is working. It's led to record results in our 50th year and we think we've got many years to run with this strategy. >> Alright well Josh Rogers, CEO of Syncsort. Congratulations on the progress. New acquisition, deeper partnership with IBM and I look forward to tracking the updates. >> Thanks so much. Appreciate the opportunity. >> Alright, and thank you as always for joining. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Boomi World 2018, brought to you by Dell Boomi. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin Live at Boomi World 2018 at The Encore in Las Vegas. Been here all day, had a lot of great chats. We're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time a couple of gents from Hathority Implementation Partner of Dell Boomi, Philip Bernick, PhD, Principal, and Human-Centered Technologist, aka Technology Wonk. >> I go by both. >> It does say on your card, I think that's fantastic. And Vishwan Annam, MBA and principal technology architect at Hathority. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Yes, thank you. >> Thank you for having us Lisa. >> So Hathority has been an implementation partner with Dell Boomi for several years now, congratulations yesterday on winning the Innovation Partner of the Year. Philip, you had an opportunity to talk yesterday at the partner summit with CTO Michael Morton, talk to us a little bit about that and about this Innovation Partner of the Year award, that's a big title. >> It is, and we're really excited to be able to do really interesting things with Boomi. It's more than just an integration platform, it really let's us do a lot of things with devices. IOT is coming to the mainstream because now we have infrastructure that will support it. It's a lot of data, it needs a big, fat pipe. We need gigabit networks in order to move it all around, to get it to the people who need to make decisions or to get it to systems who are making decisions for us, the Dell Boomi atom let's us do that and we've got it running on little tiny devices like Raspberry Pies and we can put it on other Edge devices and routers so we've done some micro services for cities that are interested in improving their smartness. >> Excellent. >> So yeah, we're excited. >> Vishwam, tell us about, for those of our viewers who haven't heard of Hathority, tell us a little bit about what you guys do, who you are, where you're located. >> Sure, so we're a data integration company so we work with Dell Boomi in automating a lot of the data integration practices, so a lot of our customers, they're in all across the world and they're serving their different (mumbles). Just as there's airlines and the healthcare and smart cities, and some are like, you know, the gaming industry. So what we are doing is we are automating all of their work flows and connecting all of their systems in one place so that's where we are liberating. We're based in the greater Phoenix area so, and our employees are, some are here in the U.S., some are India, some are in U.K., so based on what the customers needs are like in Dell Boomi our, our consultants would work there so we are 35 in strength so far, our company. >> So about three or four years you've been in business, Dell Boomi, a number of things that came out this morning, I was up to hear numbers and statistics during the general session and Chris McNabb, CEO, talked about their adding five new customers every single day, they also were, I was reading this over the weekend, fifth year in a row strong leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for iPads, but they've come out today and said we are redefining the I in iPads. This is more than integration, it's more than integrating applications, you got to integrate data, news sources, existing sources, you got to integrate people and processings and trading networks with this new reimagination of the I to the intelligence. Philip, I'm curious, what does that signify to you about your partnership with Dell Boomi and what opportunities are you excited that this is going to open up for you? >> Well it says to me that they're excited about the same kinds of things that we're excited about so one of the things that we demonstrated, we have customers who are interested in lots of different technologies, yesterday they talked about three years ago IOT was the eyeroll, right, don't get a headache. This year it's Blockchain. But one of the demos we brought to Boomi World is a demo where we actually use Dell Boomi to integrate with Hyperledger, a Blockchain application, and on top of that we used Flow to produce the front end and so we can integrate across a variety of platforms and now we integrated into the Blockchain and our customers want these kinds of things. The Blockchain is interesting because it's immutable, it's auditable, and it's validated by all of the participants in a particular set of nodes in the Blockchain so, you know, it's an exciting technology. It's exciting because, not because of the tokenization, things like Bitcoin, but because it's a database that you can share, a ledger that we can share. >> Because one of the challenges that a lot of our customers run into is managing the data integrity when somebody sends the data, how reliable it is and whether there, is there any place in the middle that somebody's monitoring the data so those are the challenges that Blockchain would solve in guaranteeing the data delivery and the quality of it so those are kind of I that he was mentioning, you know, as part of integration, innovation and more of a, you know, new parts and transformation. >> We're really transforming. >> The data transformation in the digital world these days. >> So Blockchain, I often hear companies that might be integration companies that talk a lot about Blockchain and I kind of sit back and go I don't understand what your story is there. Talk to us about, cause it's a, you know, crypto Blockchain, huge buzzwords, talk to us exactly about what you guys do and what Dell Boomi is doing, I think they announced support for hyperledger fabric as well as Ethereum but-- >> Right. >> Help unpack that myth around Blockchain and what integrations role is in it. >> A lot of the confusion around Blockchain comes from things like Bitcoin so the interesting thing around Bitcoin is it was the first Blockchain and it's built around this idea of a token, the Bitcoin, right? And so what this ledger is keeping track of are these Bitcoin, but you can keep track of any sort of data on a Blockchain. You can contribute data of any sort to a, not the Bitcoin Blockchain, but Ethereum, for example, we can include software, we can include other sorts of data, you can include a healthcare record that is your healthcare record that you share only with individuals with whom you share part of your private key, right, but you own it and it's yours and it's always yours and you control it. But it's validated by all of the people who are participating in producing that Blockchain so it's decentralized but it's imutable and it's auditable so it guarantees integrity because unless all of the participants agree that a transaction took place, it didn't. So we ensure data integrity through the Blockchain. That's the interesting thing about it, for us. >> That's a major part of integration companies, because a lot of the technologies that we hear, Solaris is one of the messaging queuing systems that they presentate, so they're guaranteeing the delivery at the same time relabel messaging transmissions, streaming the data, and it's faster, reliable, and managing the full data usage. >> Here's a great use case, today is voting day. Many polling places no longer have paper ballots, so you cast your vote but you have no way to actually see the vote that you cast. If it were on a Blockchain, you could inspect your vote, but no body else could know how you voted. You could insure the fact your vote was entered into the Blockchain and count it in the way that you wanted it to be. >> That's a great example and relatable, so thanks for sharing that. So guys, Dell Boomi has, I think they said this morning, Chris McNabb, over 350 partners, you guys are one of them. They have a broad ecosystem. Embedded partners, implementation, GSIs. Talk to us about your partnership and how, as Boomi says, we want to be the transformation partner, and it is all about transformation, right? Especially in an enterprise that wasn't born in the cloud. It can't survive without, as the customer expectation drives, I want to be able to buy something from your physical store, maybe a partner store, online, Amazon, Zappos, whatnot and I expect as a customer to have a seamless experience. That's hard to do for a company that's maybe 20, 30 years old to transform. I'm thinking of omni-channel retailers as the example. How is your integration, pun intended, will Dell Boomi really helping customers transform their digital, IT, security, workforce, what goes through with that opportunity to transform? >> You know, the relationship between Dell Boomi and it's partners is really synergistic. I mean they provide a lot of support. There's really excellent training, there's excellent communication. There's marketing support, we share on projects in a variety of ways, we do jump starts. So we help teach people how to use Boomi in addition to helping Boomi folks teaching us how to use the new tools. There's a great community for providing feedback, for getting resources if there's something that we need to do that we don't know how to do. There's a huge community that shares, we all share connectors, right? We're building integration and a connector doesn't exist and we create a new connector, not the configuration of the connector itself, we share it. So that collaborative approach to doing business is really important to us and it reflects our companies ethos as we hope is also reflects Dell Boomi's ethos. >> We've been working in Boomi since 2012, so over the years like even though we were certified partners since 2015, we have been contributing to various channels, like the support or, like, the community channel, and contributing to the release planning as well, because we are the first line of defense from the customers, we know what the customers are expecting. So say they got Salesforce to implement it. So we as a system integrator, we come in and see what are the data points for the Salesforce. And say like user data, they want to build their contacts in there or any activities or sales data. So there are multiple systems that are feeding into Salesforce in this case. So we are the ones who are contributing to Dell Boomi. Okay, these are the features that we could consider. So because Salesforce a-walled in, just like Boomi, they launched a different watch list as well So as in Boomi, there is a different connector for Salesforce and Service Cloud and multiple layers in that so those are the unique cases that we are contributing to Dell, and obviously there, I mean, they take the feedback so from the partners like us where they see it as they work towards delivering with this. So one use case that we are working with some of out customers who have innovated, we have been asking Dell to build it, like, you know, and they were able to deliver it. There are, like, they want some reporting of it, so you transmit the data to one system to other, and they wanted to see okay how the data system was the source and the system was the destination and how this data was transmitted. So Boomi gave the real time visibility into those. So those are some kind of partnering opportunities like all the way from customer to the product so we are happy to be in the middle and contributing our part of it. >> That's one of the things that I've heard a lot today is that Boomi is listening, one of the great examples of that on stage this morning was Chris McNabb talking about the Dell Boomi employee onboarding solution. They actually did an internal survey earlier this year and found, whoa, this is really not an optimal process, and in implementing an onboarding solution to make that more streamline, to obviously, you know, you hire someone who's brilliant, you want to be able to get them up and running and innovating as fast as possible. I like they shared the feedback they got from their own employees and created a solution that they're now being able to deliver to the market. >> And there was another piece to that that was really interesting which is that they utilized their partner network in order to build solution, right? They didn't build all of it in house. >> You're right, they did talk about that. >> They reach out and partners, they work with partners in a variety of ways and we really, really appreciate that. >> Yeah, that listening, that synergy that you've both talked about was really apparent. So when we look at certain business initiatives, like onboarding or customer 360 or e-commerce, any favorite joint customer example that you've helped to integrate that has approached one of those daunting business initiatives, and worked with Hathority, and you're laughing, to really transform. >> They're all like that. >> Really interesting, yeah. Do you want to talk about it here? >> Give me one of your favorite examples. >> Share, well, share. >> Okay, so with some of our customers, and especially with some of our enterprise scale, so there are a lot of systems that are at stake for them because, you know, they want to have the digital transformation journey so the major one Dell Boomi contributes to is connecting all of the system, giving them their visibility so with, not only the point to point integrations, they also pull the real time integrations capability. So we're like, with this case, where the customer go into retail store and say they want to do something at the point of sale transaction, they want to purchase something, so there and you have the credit card transaction. I mean, those need to encrypt, I mean, we cannot wait for 10 minutes to get the data so that's where, you know, like Dell Boomi is scalable and it's robust in the sense that their response time is pretty quick. So it's on a real time basis. So a lot of these cases like, you know, with the Boomi that we are able to deliver it. You know, on the the integration side, APA side, and now with the EMB hedge, which is a master data hub, a new product from them within the last two years. We have been working with our customers implementing a master data hub as well as ManyWho, which is a Dell Boomi Flow which is amazing. Some of our customers, you know, with the APAs, like can you see the data? But with the Flow, you can visualize, these are the exact UI that you are seeing. How your data is getting in on the back end and then you can throw it out so, because these enterprise customers, especially on the business side if they're working with something, so they want to try it out, but you know, they don't want to learn, you know, programming to do that so that's when, like, Flow will, is already helping, we are already seeing the value of it with our customers. >> We've heard a little bit about that today as well, Flow and terms of the automation, but also how that will enable customers, there was a cute little video on their website that I saw recently which showed an example of Flow. Somebody bangs their car into a tree, gets out, and takes a photograph of the incident, uploads it to their insurance carrier app who then actually initiates the entire claim into process, and that's was to me a clear example of you have to go where the data is. Michael Dell says frequently there's a big boom at the edge, but if I'm in that scenario as a customer, I want to know, I don't care what's on the back end, I want to be able to get this initiated quickly and I thought that was a nice, kind of, example of how they're able to abstract that so that the customer experience can be superior than the competition. >> Absolutely, so that's where Boomi has something called run time engine, which is scalable, like you could install, like, you know, a smaller device like Raspberry Pie which is like, you know, just a mini computer. Or you you could install on the big switchboard itself, so this is a scalable so earlier, as Michael Dell was mentioning, the edge of computing. So you could install on a Gateway, which sits on the-- >> On a tree >> On a tree. (laughs) So you don't have to send all the data to cloud for processing so it's an amazing leap into the next distribution computing because, as you mentioned, the fast, the fastness of response time, you know. We don't have to wait for the cloud to respond so all the combinations and real time navigation's are happening within the Edge network itself so, we are all on the same, we have implemented the same solution so, which was one of the reason why we're the winner of Innovation Partner of the Year award. >> Well congratulations again for that gentlemen. Thank you so much for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> And sharing with our viewers a little bit about Hathority and what you guys are, how you really symbiotically innovating with Dell Boomi. Philip, Vishwam, thanks so much for your time today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you, thank you for having us. >> My pleasure, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live from Boomi World 2018 in Las Vegas. Stick around, I'll be back with John Frayer and our next guest after a short break. (upbeat music)

Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE, New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in New York City for our CUBE NYC event, #cubenyc. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem going back to the original Hadoop world, now it's evolved to essentially all things AI, future of AI. Peter Burris is my cohost. He gave a talk two nights ago on the future of AI presented in his research. So it's all about data, it's all about the cloud, it's all about live action here in theCUBE. Our next guest is David Richards, who's been in the industry for a long time, seen the evolution of Hadoop, been involved in it, has been a key enabler of the technology, certainly enabling cloud recovery replication for cloud, welcome back to theCUBE. It's good to see you. >> It's really good to be here. >> I got to say, you've been on theCUBE pretty much every year, I think every year, we've done nine years now. You made some predictions and calls that actually happened. Like five years ago you said the cloud's going to kill Hadoop. Yeah, I think you didn't say that off camera, but it might (laughing) maybe you said it on camera. >> I probably did, yeah. >> [John] But we were kind of pontificating but also speculating, okay, where does this go? You've been right on a lot of calls. You also were involved in the Hadoop distribution business >>back in the day. Oh god. >> You got out of that quickly. (laughing) You saw that early, good call. But you guys have essentially a core enabler that's been just consistently performing well in the market both on the Hadoop side, cloud, and as data becomes the conversation, which has always been your perspective, you guys have had a key in part of the infrastructure for a long time. What's going on? Is it still doing deals, what's? >> Yes, I mean, the history of WANdisco's play and big data in Hadoop has been, as you know because you've been with us for a long time, kind of an interesting one. So we back in sort of 2013, 2014, 2015 we built a Hadoop-specific product called Non-Stop NameNode and we had a Hadoop distribution. But we could see this transition, this change in the market happening. And the change wasn't driven necessarily by the advent of new technology. It was driven by overcomplexity associated with deploying, managing Hadoop clusters at scale because lots of people, and we were talking about this off-camera before, can deploy Hadoop in a fairly small way, but not many companies are equipped or built to deploy massive scale Hadoop distributions. >> Sustain it. >> They can't sustain it, and so the call that I made you know, actions speak louder than words. The company rebuilt the product, built a general purpose data replication platform called WANdisco Fusion that, yes, supported Hadoop but also supported object store and cloud technologies. And we're now seeing use cases in cloud certainly begin to overtake Hadoop for us for the first time. >> And you guys have a patent that's pretty critical in all this, right? >> Yeah. So there's some real IP. >> Yes, so people often make the mistake of calling us a data replication business, which we are, but data replication happens post-consensus or post-agreement, so the very heart of WANdisco of 35 patents are all based around a Paxos-based consensus algorithm, which wasn't a very cool thing to talk about now with the advent of blockchain and decentralized computing, consensus is at the core of pretty much that movement, so what WANdisco does is a consensus algorithm that enables things like hybrid cloud, multi cloud, poly cloud as Microsoft call it, as well as disaster recovery for Hadoop and other things. >> Yeah, as you have more disparate parts working together, say multi cloud, I mean, you're really perfectly positioned for multi cloud. I mean, hybrid cloud is hybrid cloud, but also multi cloud, they're two different things. Peter has been on the record describing the difference between hybrid cloud and multi cloud, but multi cloud is essentially connecting clouds. >> We're on a mission at the moment to define what those things actually are because I can tell you what it isn't. A multi cloud strategy doesn't mean you have disparate data and processes running in two different clouds that just means that you've got two different clouds. That's not a multi cloud strategy. >> [Peter] Two cloud silos. >> Yeah, correct. That's kind of creating problems that are really going to be bad further down the road. And hybrid cloud doesn't mean that you run some operations and processes and data on premise and a different siloed approach to cloud. What this means is that you have a data layer that's clustered and stretched, the same data that's stretched across different clouds, different on-premise systems, whether it's Hadoop on-premise and maybe I want to build a huge data lake in cloud and start running complex AI and analytics processes over there because I'm, less face it, banks et cetera ain't going to be able to manage and run AI themselves. It's already being done by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and others in the cloud. So the ability to run this simultaneously in different locations is really important. That's what we do. >> [John] All right, let me just ask this directly since we're filming and we'll get a clip out of this. What is the definition of hybrid cloud? And what is the definition of multi cloud? Take, explain both of those. >> The ability to manage and run the same data set against different applications simultaneously. And achieve exactly the same result. >> [John] That's hybrid cloud or multi cloud? >> Both. >> So they're the same. >> The same. >> You consider hybrid cloud multi cloud the same? >> For us it's just a different end point. It's hybrid kind of mean that you're running something implies on-premise. A multi cloud or poly cloud implies that you're running between different cloud venues. >> So hybrid is location, multi is source. >> Correct. >> So but let's-- >> [David] That's a good definition. >> Yes, but let's unpack this a little bit because at the end of the day, what a business is going to want to do is they're going to want to be able to run apply their data to the best service. >> [David] Correct. >> And increasingly that's what we're advising our clients to think about. >> [David] Yeah. >> Don't think about being an AWS customer, per se, think about being a customer of AWS services that serve your business. Or IBM services that serve your business. But you want to ensure that your dependency on that service is not absolute, and that's why you want to be able to at least have the option of being able to run your data in all of these different places. >> And I think the market now realizes that there is not going to be a single, dominant vendor for cloud infrastructure. That's not going to happen. Yes, it happened, Oracle dominated in relational data. SAP dominated for ERP systems. For cloud, it's democratized. That's not going to happen. So everybody knows that Amazon probably have the best serverless compute lambda functions available. They've got millions of those things already written or in the process of being written. Everybody knows that Microsoft are going to extend the wonderful technology that they have on desktop and move that into cloud for analytics-based technologies and so on. The Google have been working on artificial intelligence for an elongated period of time, so vendors are going to arbitrage between different cloud vendors. They're going to choose the best of brood approach. >> [John] They're going to go to Google for AI and scale, they're going to go to Amazon for robustness of services, and they're going to go to Microsoft for the Suite. >> [Peter] They're going to go for the services. They're looking at the services, that's what they need to do. >> And the thing that we'll forget, that we don't at WANdisco, is that that requires guaranteed consistent data sets underneath the whole thing. >> So where does Fusion fit in here? How is that getting traction? Give us some update. Are you working with Microsoft? I know we've been talking about Amazon, what about Microsoft? >> So we've been working with Microsoft, we announced a strategic partnership with them in March where we became a tier zero vendor, which basically means that we're partnered with them in lockstep in the field. We executed extremely well since that point and we've done a number of fairly large, high-profile deals. A retailer, for example, that was based in Amazon didn't really like being based in Amazon so had to build a poly cloud implementation to move had to buy scale data from AWS into Azure, that went seamlessly. It was an overnight success. >> [John] And they're using your technology? >> They're using our technology. There's no other way to do that. I think the world has now, what Microsoft and others have realized, CDC technology changed data capture. Doesn't work at this kind of scale where you batch up a bunch of changes and then you ship them, block shipping or whatever, every 15 minutes or so. We're talking about petabyte scale ingest processes. We're talking about huge data lakes, that that technology simply doesn't work at this kind of scale. >> [John] We've got a couple minutes left, I want to just make sure we get your views on blockchain, you mentioned consensus, I want to get your thoughts on that because we're seeing blockchain is certainly experimental, it's got, it's certainly powering money, Bitcoin and the international markets, it's certainly becoming a money backbone for countries to move billions of dollars out. It's certainly in the tank right now about 600 million below its mark in January, but blockchain is fundamentally supply chain, you're seeing consensus, you're seeing some of these things that are in your realm, what's your view? >> So first of all, at WANdisco, we separate the notion of cryptocurrency and blockchain. We see blockchain as something that's been around for a long time. It's basically the world is moving to decentralization. We're seeing this with airlines, with supermarkets, and so on. People actually want to decentralize rather that centralize now. And the same thing is going to happen in the financial industry where we don't actually need a central transaction coordinator anymore, we don't need a clearinghouse, in other words. Now, how do you do that? At the very heart of blockchain is an incorrect assumption. So must people think that Satoshi's invention, whoever that may be, was based around the blockchain itself. Blockchain is pieced together technologies that doesn't actually scale, right? So it takes game-theoretic approach to consensus. And I won't get, we don't have enough time for me to delve into exactly what that means, but our consensus algorithm has already proven to scale, right? So what does that mean? Well, it means that if you want to go and buy a cup of coffee at the Starbucks next door, and you want to use a Bitcoin, you're going to be waiting maybe half an hour for that transaction to settle, right? Because the-- >> [John] The buyer's got to create a block, you know, all that step's in one. >> The game-theoretic approach basically-- >> Bitcoin's running 500,000 transactions a day. >> Yeah. That's eight. >> There's two transactions per second, right? Between two and eight transactions per second. We've already proven that we can achieve hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of agreements per second. Now the argument against using Paxos, which is what our technology's based on, is it's too complicated. Well, no shit, of course it's too complicated. We've solved that problem. That's what WANdisco does. So we've filed a patent >> So you've abstracted the complexity, that's your job. >> We've extracted the complexity. >> So you solve the complexity problem by being a complex solution, but you're making and abstracting it even easier. >> We have an algorithmic not a game-theoretic approach. >> Solving the scale problem Correct. >> Using Paxos in a way that allows real developers to be able to build consensus algorithm-based applications. >> Yes, and 90% of blockchain is consensus. We've solved the consensus problem. We'll be launching a product based around Hyperledger very soon, we're already in tests and we're already showing tens of thousands of transactions per second. Not two, not 2,000, two transactions. >> [Peter] The game theory side of it is still going to be important because when we start talking about machines and humans working together, programs don't require incentives. Human beings do, and so there will be very, very important applications for this stuff. But you're right, from the standpoint of the machine-to-machine when there is no need for incentive, you just want consensus, you want scale. >> Yeah and there are two approaches to this world of blockchains. There's public, which is where the Bitcoin guys are and the anarchists who firmly believe that there should be no oversight or control, then there's the real world which is permission blockchains, and permission blockchains is where the banks, where the regulators, where NASDAQ will be when we're trading shares in the future. That will be a permission blockchain that will be overseen by a regulator like the SEC, NASDAQ, or London Stock Exchange, et cetera. >> David, always great to chat with you. Thanks for coming on, again, always on the cutting edge, always having a great vision while knocking down some good technology and moving your IP on the right waves every time, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Always on the next wave, David Richards here inside theCUBE. Every year, doesn't disappoint, theCUBE bringing you all the action here. Cube NYC, we'll be back with more coverage. Stay with us; a lot more action for the rest of the day. We'll be right back; stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE! >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference put on by Untraceable, Tracy and her team doing a fantastic job, so shout out to the team at Untraceable for another great event. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost's Dave Vellante, and we're here with CUBE's friend, CUBE alumni, from the CryptoChicks, Nataliya Hearn, director, good to see you, great to have you back. >> Thank you. (laughs) >> Okay, good to see you, we're laughing, we've got some great funny stories we've been telling, since PolyCon, but really, some great things going on, so give us the update, you had a hackathon recently, you got new things happening here in your organization, take a quick minute to explain what it is for the folks that don't know, what do you guys do, and what's going on? >> Good, well, CryptoChicks is a organization focused on educating women in blockchain and cryptospace. We started because at meetups there would be one or two women out of hundreds of men, who would be afraid to ask stupid questions, so we said, Oh, okay, there's no stupid questions, come and join us, and we'll show you how to open a wallet, what blockchain is all about, so we've been doing that. We've actually grew quite a bit, we are now have chapters in all over the world, in Pakistan, in Bahamas, in Moscow, we just teamed up with She Codes in Israel, which is 50,000 women, so, we're doing really well. >> Congratulations, a great mission, we totally support it, and, you know, I'm proud to say that I love my shirt that says, Satoshi is Female, thanks to Nyla Rodgers, who gave it to me, at Consensus in Blockchain Week in New York, but this is really beyond women in tech, it's beyond that, it's a really, you're doing some innovative things around onboarding, new talent and education, this is a really important, because the Internet is bounded on discovery, learning. >> Absolutely. >> What's the new thing? >> Well, you know when you hear, when you go to the blockchain conference and events, and we hear again and again about the chasm. How do we bridge the chasm, right? That's just the, like, big word that you hear like every third presentation, because the blockchain community needs it. But I think globally, blockchain represents something that's quite unique, and it's an opportunity not just to make money and speculate, or to develop new technology, it's technology that can liberate. But how do we get that message across? And I think we have to start with kids. Kids are our future, but they're also the ones who spend most of their time on social media, so that's a good thing, but if you ask their parents, that's not such a good thing necessarily. So how do we convert them, some of their time from social media to learning? So we've put, we're putting together this program that focuses on children to earn to learn. >> Earn to learn, like they earn coins or money, or? >> That's right, basically they can earn swag, so basically we're creating the marketplace that rewards children for learning. >> All kids, right? >> All kids, well we're focusing on -- >> On girls. >> No, not on girls, we're going to high schools, so immediate next generation. >> So girls, boys, everybody's welcome? >> Absolutely. Yep. >> Awesome. >> Next generation, and they're the next generation that has to solve the problems that we, and opportunities that can be captured, that's coming right to their front door. >> Absolutely, we have a lot of question marks in the blockchain community. Which blockchain, how do we do it, there is going to be multi-chain tokens, we're talking about, next generation is the one who's going to provide solutions for us. So we got to open their minds, and to show that blockchain is a tool like potentially calculus is a tool. To create something that hasn't been there before. >> You know, I have a lot of conversations in Silicon Valley and Nataliya, recently at the Google Cloud event, Google's been very much a great change agent, especially with women in tech and underrepresented minorities, but Aparna Sinha, who's one of the senior people there, dual degrees from Stanford, she's got a PhD, she said we're losing the girls early, and what came out of it was a conversation that, when you have these new market movements like blockchain, AI, these are new skills that you can level up, so the ability to come from behind and level up is an opportunity for people who have traditionally been behind, whether it's women or other minorities, to level up. So it's a huge opportunity now to put the naysayers down to rest, and saying, Screw you, we're going to level up and learn. >> Absolutely, and it's global, the thing is -- >> There's nothing stopping anyone from learning. >> Absolutely, and trust, and the borderless system that blockchain potentially can provide is at a global advantage. As long as you have a cell phone, you can be in a village, an old village, like at our last hackathon, we actually were streaming women hackers from Zimbabwe. So there you go, it's doable. >> So how are you, how are you scaling your message globally? >> So we're starting, one thing is that education today, is basically the bill is being paid either by the government or by parents. The reason I would call that a marketplace, I would like companies to be involved. And it could be local companies, or it could be global. What about creating ARVR classrooms, and providing the information to kids, via a completely new way that they would actually move away from swiping or just looking on some random YouTube videos, to something that they can get a phone, some shoes, mascara, focusing on girls, right? And to understand what that borderless economy really means by experiencing, what does it mean to have tokens that you can trade globally? You are used to your parents giving you some dollars, you go to a corner store. What about if you learn something, you go to a bakery, in Kenya, and for the work that you've done, you get a bun, right, or a meal? >> So this democratizing access, it's bringing education to the masses? >> And it's also uniting the blockchain community, 'cause we would be building this governance platform on blockchain, we would tokenize it, and there will be many elements of it, reward programs, smart contracts that reward content, some level of AI in terms of analysis of what we're doing, so I think this is why I was looking at multi-chain tokens. Maybe that would be a solution to kind of, to deal with -- >> Explain that, what does that mean? >> Well, we've got different chains right now, right? You've got Hyperledger, you've got Ethereum, and all this good stuff. How do you bridge all this, right, instead of having to choose one, you're now saying, I can work in all of them, because each one potentially can offer something unique. Maybe you don't have to choose one. We don't know. Only time will tell, as this, this is such a young industry, and this is why it's so exciting. >> Well, Nataliya -- >> It -- >> Oh, go ahead. >> No, I was going to say, and you're giving the kids examples, so a lot of times kids ask me, Well, what's the difference between crypto and Venmo? I'm like, okay, you know, let's talk about the different things you can do with crypto that you can't do, but they're closer than the older generations are to transferring, you know, money, at least, so now you're applying different use cases and expanding their minds in ways that, perhaps -- >> Absolutely, and I'll give you my example. I mean, I got into blockchain early before Ethereum was launched, and partly I was into public markets, and then I kind of stopped because that project ended, or I stopped and I actually reentered it, because my fifteen-year-old who started mining. But he started mining because I was in that field already, so there you go, it kind of, you know, what comes around. >> Good job. I hope he gets all his Bitcoin. >> Yeah, he did. (laughs) >> So, I want you to tell a story, of what you've seen that's been high impact from your work you've done. You had, again, that whole Pakistan thing going on, you've got all these hackathons, what is a good story you could share? >> You know, the good story we can share, I think the part that we were able to do, the hackathons that we are doing are local, but they're also global, it really is, there's this sense of empowerment, and you know what I think the best story, this is the best story: best story was, at the hackathon that we ran, it was women, over 100 women, that participated. But all our mentors were young, geeky programming guys. Sorry guys. But you really knew they really knew their stuff, so there was technology transfer, and we had a 48 hour hackathon, these guys stayed 48 hours, they didn't go to sleep, they didn't have to as mentors, and there was this amazing technology transfer that happened, and I think some relationships were formed too. >> Yeah, some serious bonding went on, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's actually a good thing that you're including people. It's not just a certain thing, you got this inclusion. >> Absolutely, and actually all it is is about inclusion, all it is is we are giving a platform for women not to be afraid, I mean, I'm an engineer, so I've been working with men all my life, so for me to ask difficult questions, or stupid questions, it's like natural now, because it's been what my life, but for women, for many, it isn't. So we just wanted to kind of cross that divide, it's not a chasm, it's just a little divide that we're bridged. >> So when you say stupid questions, do you mean like, Why do you do it that way? (laughs) Why don't you do it this way? >> Or, what's a wallet? Like, what's a private key? What's a public key? And asking that not once, but twenty times until you got it. That's okay too. >> That's called learning. >> Yeah. >> Last question, okay I got to ask you, the most important question is, how do someone get a CryptoChicks shirt? >> I think you can order it on our website, sizes are a problem, I know we've discussed this, so we need to -- >> Extra-large. >> Well, CryptoChicks is a not-for-profit organization so there are, we'll have to order this in bunches, so I'll figure this out, but what I wanted to say is that we have another hackathon that's coming up. And the hackathon is in New York, October 5th to 8th, and we have three streams, so if you're a developer, and this is for women, so if you're a developer, we have a stream. If you're not a developer, or you've never coded in your life, but you have a business mind, and you think you have a really good idea that you can put on blockchain, you're welcome to join as well, and now with all the news and regulations, we also have a regulatory stream. >> So for entrepreneurs and for business-minded people, that want to get involved, that they can come too? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, and their website is cryptochicks.ca, that's where you can get access to the information, that's great. >> October 5th to 8th, you said, right? >> That's right. >> And anybody can go? >> Anybody can register. >> And where in New York? >> It's going to be at University of New York, and at their School of Law. >> Great. >> Blockchain Educational Fun Hub. That's what it says on the website, love your website. Looking forward to getting some shirts, and putting it out there, and promoting your mission. Great job, good to see you again. >> You guys are awesome. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Nataliya. >> Thank you. >> This is crypto for good, a lot of education, and this opportunity, and our role is to share that, as a community, and I think this is a great example of the kind of community that crypto is. Education people can level up and move fast through and get proficiency, and change their lives. This is what this is all about, glad to bring us this CUBE coverage live, stay with us! Day One continues, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back from Toronto Blockchain Futurist Summit. Thank you. (techno music)

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

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone, welcome to the live coverage here in Toronto for the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit here put on as prior to the big event this week called the Futurist Conference. TheCUBE will be here all week with live coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante as we expand our coverage with theCUBE into the blockchain and crypto token economics world. We're here on the ground. We're covering the best events. We started in 2018 initiating CUBE coverage on the sector. Of course we've been covering Bitcoin and blockchain going back to 2011 on SiliconANGLE.com. Dave, we're here to kick off what is the first inaugural event of its kind, combining cloud computing coverage with blockchain, and as we had on our fireside chat last night, we discussed this in detail. Cloud computing and blockchain, either going to be a collision course or it's going to be a nice integration. And we discussed that. This is what this show is all about, is it's really about connecting the dots to the future. The role that cloud computing will play with blockchain and token economics, a variety of different perspectives, but again, this is the first time we in the industry are starting to unpack the mega-trend of cloud computing, which we know is like a freight train powering and disrupting, and we cover it in detail. But blockchain is certainly transforming and reimagining business and process coming together. >> Well, we're here in Toronto, which of course is the birthplace of Ethereum, and it's interesting to see how Toronto has attracted so many developers in the software and engineering space, and there's a huge crypto community here. I'll give you my take on the cloud and blockchain. I don't see them on a collision course. I see blockchain, and we've talked about this, and crypto as a part of this other layer that's emerging. You had the internet, you had the web. On top of that you had cloud, mobile, social, big data, and it was essentially a cloud of remote services. What we're seeing now is this ubiquitous set of digital services of which blockchain is one. And to me it's all about automation, machine intelligence, blockchain being able to do things without middle man. You made that point last night on the fireside chat. And I think it's complementary. You need cloud for scale. Everything's digital, which means data. And you need machine intelligence for automation. And that is the new era that we're entering, and blockchain is playing a big part of that because of its inherent encryption, its immutability, and its ability to show proof of work. So it's a key component of a number of different digital services that are going to transform virtually every industry. >> Certainly, then, that's a tailwind for the industry, and certainly we see that. All the alpha entrepreneurs, alpha geeks, and a lot of the business pros see blockchain and token economics as a dynamic that will certainly change things. Today in Toronto this week, certainly not a good week for pricing of currencies. The crypto market is down, Ethereum and Ripple are at yearly lows. And communities are kind of getting scared. We talked with Matt Roszak, an early investor and founder of BloQ, last night about the price declines, and he said, "I've seen this pattern before. "These price selloffs also kick off "the next wave of growth." So there's a kind of a weeding out, was his perspective. But you can't deny that over the past 24 hours, 30 billion has been erased from the crypto market caps, and the greatest decline is happening under Bitcoin's dominance, and still increased over, still 56% over the year. So Bitcoin seems to be holding more value than, say, Ethereum. Ethereum and Ripple really under a lot of pressure. So the insiders, some are scared, some are like, hey, we've seen this movie before. Waves are a little bit rough right now, but they're in for the long game. So this is a long game going on and then there's also money being lost. >> Well, Matt was saying bet the farm now. He said he's seen this before. Take everything, the mortgage, the house. I'm not sure I would advise doing that, but this is the time, buy low. So just for the numbers, Bitcoin's high last November/December was 19,000, it's down at 6,000 now. So as you say, it's still up almost 50% for the year, but if you compress that timeframe to nine months, it's down 60%, so very, very volatile. Ethereum, on the other hand, last September was trading at around 240, 250, and today it's in the 260s. So back to where it was last September. The curve on Ethereum sort of looks like it did end of last summer, whereas Bitcoin is still almost 70% up from where it was last September. So quite a bit of difference between the two cryptocurrencies. And you mentioned Ripple, IOTA, many of the cryptocurrencies-- >> Ripple's dropping 90% from its 2018 highs. 90%. (both laugh) Some money was made and lost on that one, so again, we always say when the music stops you better be sitting in a chair. Otherwise this is bubble behavior, but you know Matt and others and the insiders are saying they're still bullish because of the pattern. Even though it's a selloff, it's a weeding out process and they see still good deals going on. And again, this is going to come fundamentally down to whose technology's going to be adopted, what kind of application can be written on blockchain, which is seeing some promise in the enterprise. Just yesterday Microsoft announced a blockchain as a service kind of thing with proof of authority and new concepts. IBM, we've been covering IBM with blockchain, their work with the Hyperledger standards. You've got the enterprises. Amazon has kind of telegraphed, they actually put a professional service note out where they are doing some blockchain. The big clouds are getting into the game, so the question is, will the clouds suck all the oxygen out of the blockchain room, and will there be room for other blockchains? Again, this is the big debate. Is it going to be a fragmentation of a series of blockchains, or will there be some sort of set of standards? Again, we don't know what the stack's going to look like because the best thing about blockchain is you could roll it out and implement a portion of the stack and still coexist with whatever standards emerge. So again, these are the questions. >> Well, one of the conversations that of course is going on is actually, the number of transactions that's occurring with Bitcoin is way down, it's probably down 20% year to date. The other conversation is we all know that Bitcoin and Ethereum, the transaction volumes can't really support what we do with Visa or even Amazon. There's a discussion in the industry going around about what if Amazon shows some other coin? Like Ripple, for example, which has much higher transaction volumes. Or what if Amazon tokenized its own business, came up its own cryptocurrency? What would that do to the price of Bitcoin, if all of a sudden you could transact in Prime using AmazonCoin or something like that? And we know that Amazon understands how to scale, it obviously understands cloud. That's why I do see cloud and blockchain as complementary. It's very difficult to predict the future. There are those who say Bitcoin is the standard, it's got the brand. There are those who say that Ethereum, because it's much more flexible and you can program distributed apps with it, have a great future. And then everybody points to the transaction volumes and says, this is just a Petri dish for the future where new technologies will emerge that scale better and can produce. >> What's interesting last night on the, we had a fireside chat with Al Burgio, serial entrepreneur, founder of DigitalBits, and Matt Roszak, obviously founder of BloQ and investor, he's on the Forbes billionaire list, super active, very engaged on a lot of advisors, Binance is one and many other deals he's done, it's interesting, you got two perspectives. Al is the networking guy who knows plumbing, knows how networks work, and Matt's a token economics genius. So the two have interesting perspectives and the battle royal going on right now, in my opinion, is two things. I think token economics is a wonderful thing that's going to happen no matter what the standards are, 'cause token economics really is the value to me of the cryptocurrency that can be applied to new business models and efficiencies. The blockchain is a land grab, and here's why. I think whoever can nail the plumbing and the pipes of the infrastructure reminds me of the early days of the dial-up web, when you had points of presence and you had the infrastructure had to be laid down. Although slow, people can dial up and get the internet, then obviously the internet got faster and faster. Blockchain's struggling from that scalability performance issues, and so the question is, on a public blockchain, you got to have the supernodes, you got to have the core infrastructure plumbing nailed. I think Al Burgio takes that perspective. Then everything else just will flourish from there. So the question is, what do those hurdles look like? And this is where the cloud guys could either be an enabler or they could be a foe against the core community. Like you said, Amazon could just snap their fingers tomorrow and take out the entire industry with one move. Just, we're going to do our own blockchain as a service. Everyone uses it, here's our token, and then a set of sub-tokens would have to be coexisting with that. And that could be a good thing, we don't know. This is the discussion. >> And governments around the world could do the same. US government could do Fedcoin, the Chinese government could do Chinacoin. I mean, what would that do to the prices of cryptocurrencies? I mean, it would send it into a tailspin, you would presume. And it was interesting. Matt Roszak on your panel last night, I asked the question, well, traditional banks lose control of the payment systems. And granted, he's biased, and he was definitive. Yes, absolutely. But the counterargument to that, John, and I'd love your thoughts on this, is the US government and the banks have a lot to lose. And they're kind in bed together and always have been. So one would think, with the backing of the US, its might, its military, et cetera, that they're not just going to let the banks lose control. Now, to his point is, why do you need to pay transaction fees to a bank? But you're paying transaction fees to somebody, even in crypto. >> I think our government in the United States is really asleep at the wheel on this one. And here's why. One of the beautiful things about the internet was it was started through collaboration in the universities in the United States. The United States enabled the internet to happen, and the Department of Commerce managed it. The Domain Name System was managed in a very community-oriented way. Again, community, keyword. As opposed to all this, that history is well-documented. If people aren't familiar with the history of the Domain Name System, DNS, go check out the Wikipedia, research it. It was run by a bunch of people who managed the database of website names. And that became sacred and was distributed. >> And funded by the US government. >> Funded by the US government, but the community managed it. The problem with the US government today is that they are meddling in areas that they actually shouldn't be even playing in. You got the SEC, it's shutting down everything right now just by the threat of subpoenas in the ICO market, which puts the overall country into a handicapped position, because now the innovation of blockchain and the entrepreneurial innovation that's happening is stunted, and it's just shifting outside the United States. So what's happening is the money flow and the energy and the activity is so high that incubation's not happening in the United States, although a lot of people are working on it. There's no funding mechanism. The capital formation of blockchain's different than venture. It's not super different, but somewhat different, but it's happening outside the United States. Certainly the Chinese will be in benefit of this. And if the Chinese wanted to shut down blockchain they would have done it by now. They're actually fostering it, and it's an opportunity for someone on the international stage to get a lever in the United States. So that's one. The second thing is they can enable crypto if they wanted to and I think they really should look at that and I think the banks are central organizations, the World Bank, they're under a lot of pressure. They don't know what to do. So when I talk to people, that's the same answer in so many words, is the government and the regulators really just don't know what to do. >> Well, and Matt made the point last night, Matt Roszak, that when he talks to these banks they're talking about using blockchain and they're very excited because they're going to take hundreds of millions of dollars of cost out of their, you know, infrastructure and their processes that are just not very efficient, and that's going to drop right to the bottom line. And of course they're in the money business, so that gets them very excited. His point was that's really not what it's about. Yeah, that's nice, but it's really about transforming the businesses, and that's why I asked the question about banks losing control of the payment systems. Opens up a whole new opportunities, whether it's financial services, healthcare, automotive. And again, to me, it comes back to digital, which is data, plus machine intelligence plus cloud for scale. You called it. I think at IBM Think, you coined it the innovation sandwich. Data plus machine intelligence plus cloud for scale. Put that together, that is the innovation engine for the next decade plus. >> The innovation sandwich, unlike a wish sandwich, where you wish you had some meat in the middle. You know, this is a good point. Let's end this kickoff and get into some of the interviews here with these really early thought leaders in this new conference. This is the first of its kind, cloud and blockchain, and we're going to certainly continue this in Silicon Valley with theCUBE summit coming up and our events that we do. But let's get some predictions out, because remember, this is theCUBE. Everything's going to be out there, it's going to be on the record, so we can look back and say, hey Dave, remember in 2018 when I asked you what's going to happen? So let's get into a prediction. What do you think's going to happen? I'll start and you can think up an answer. So here's my prediction on this whole blockchain world. Not so much crypto or token economics. It's really two predictions. With respect to blockchain, I think you're going to see an exact movement that the cloud market took, and I think it's going to happen in three phases. Phase one is all the energy's going to go into public blockchain, and public blockchain will be figured out first, and people are going to get excited by the new operation models of blockchain, specifically the decentralization of how that works and the benefits of decentralized blockchain, immutability, no central authority, and all the benefits of blockchain. I think it's going to be very rapid growth in the fixing of blockchain. Speed, scale, that's going to happen very quickly. And it's going to happen publicly. Then you're going to see private blockchains. You're going to see on premises kind of like blockchain. Kind of like the cloud, people have onsite, private. And then you're going to see a hybrid. The hybrid will look like multi-chain solutions. This is almost an exact trajectory that cloud computing took, because blockchain feels like a cousin of cloud or a brother or a sister. So it's related, but not exactly, but I think it's kind of the same trajectory. Public, private, hybrid, which is a multi-chain model, and I think that's going to be the standards. That's going to be the market track. On the token side, I think you're going to see a couple key tokens, like certainly Bitcoin's not going away. I'd be doubling down on Bitcoin under 6,000, like everything on that. That should hit 20,000, in my opinion, over the next timeframe. But there's going to be a lot of token integrations. My token integrates with your token and almost natives and secondary tokens kind of blending together where people with coexist tokens on one platform. So it's just too powerful not to have that happen. So that's my prediction. What do you think? >> I think as it relates to blockchain, I think blockchain becomes, in the enterprise I think it becomes an invisible component of virtually every industry. 'Cause every industry has waste, can improve efficiencies, and blockchain becomes a way to, whether it's supply chain or settlements or shared ledgers, I mean, there's dozens of applications for them and I think blockchain becomes a fundamental component of a digital infrastructure, and it's starting now and I think it's here to stay for many decades and beyond. And you won't even see it. It's just going to be there. It's going to become a fundamental part of how we do business. On the token side, very interesting, obviously, hard to predict. I think that you're going to see continued volatility, of course, I think that's a safe bet. But I also think it's potentially going to get worse before it gets better. I think there's going to be a shakeout. I think you're going to see, there continues to be pump and dump scams going on, the US government's getting more aggressive, a bunch of subpoenas went out, and people are still trying to understand what that all means. So I think it's going to be rocky roads for a while. I think you're going to see a big shakeout, like a big dip, and then I think it's going to power back. I think the crypto is here to stay. And it's very, very hard to time these markets, so my advice is just buy, trickle buys on the way down and hold. HODL, as they say in this world. And I think 10 years from now it's going to be worth a lot. >> Alright, you got it here, theCUBE. We are in Toronto for the first inaugural Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit. Of course, part of the big event here in Toronto, Futurist Conference, which we'll be there live. Wednesday and Thursday, the kickoff is Tuesday night for the opening reception. It's theCUBE coverage continuing for blockchain and crypto markets. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more live coverage here in Toronto.

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. (light, upbeat music) Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier. We're here on the ground in New York City for consensus 2018's Blockchain Week. I'm here with David Siegel who's the CEO of the Pillar Project, also the author of the Token Economics Handbooks, entrepreneur, mentor to companies. Thanks for coming on. >> Sure. Thank you John. Great to be here. >> So, I'm excited to talk with you, because I've been saying all week I love token economics. It's a core part of the business model, disruption. >> Right. >> It's part of the key formula where Blockchain shines. It's where the rubber meets the road as some say. So, let's jump in. >> Sure. >> In a, how much is being discussed here about that. I mean, obviously ICOs are well known and people are looking at that road, but token economics, the importance of it. >> First, I think it's important to understand we're at the very beginning of this. It's a steep learning curve. We have these old model T tokens called the ERC20 Token, which we will get rid of and build better things. We have models that are mostly based on old, you know whenever there's a new technology, we first imitate the old stuff until we see what the new. So one of the really exciting new things that's come out of this is effectively the Ethereum model, where you raise some money. You build a system, and it's open source. It's free. Anyone can take it and do anything with it, but it requires its own token to work. And the people who sell those tokens, you sell about 70% to your funders. And that creates the economy, but you hold about 30% back, and as the value goes up, as the network affect kicks in, and as these things rise in value, your 30% funds the project indefinitely after you run out of the first. So that's a pretty exciting model. That's what I call sort of basic Tokenomics. You have no business model. You have no income model. You're totally open source, but your token powers your platform, and you have some tokens in your back pocket. >> Yeah, and the general form that you see is 70 30, roughly. Is that just a pattern? >> That's about, that's normal. Now, that in a single sale, and what we see now in ICO land is pre-sale and then the big sale. I think we'll go to a more staged model, because I think too many companies are over-funded, too many projects are over-funded. 240 million dollars for status, maybe we don't need that much to start a project with a white paper. So, I think we're, I hope we'll go to a staged model. >> Explain stage model. >> You might sell 20% and raise what do you need to get to first base, three million to show a minimum viable product and get traction. >> Yeah, it makes sense. >> You know, what projects need more than three, maybe four? I mean, you don't need 20 million. And then you do that, but now you've got 80% of tokens in reserve. so now things are going well. Your token has gone for let's say five cents to 20 cents. You can sell another 20%. >> So the funding of the platform is that token economics kick in, per your other example, that 30% 70 goes raise and 30% funds the platform indefinitely. >> Yeah, that's typical. >> If you do the staged approach, what you're saying is there's more power in reserve to fund the platform. Cause if you can, if you get to first base, you might get to second. >> I think investors have been too gullible. And they're looking at these 50, 80, hundred million dollar raises and going oh me too. I have fear of missing out. I want to get in on that too. That's the big deal of the day. That is the one that's probably going to have lousy returns, right. These things are over-funded and not, there's no real give and take with the market. >> Yep. >> You know to get, like, nothing ever really works the way you plan. No business plan is ever worth anything. Think of, you know, Google, Apple, Microsoft. Their first business plans are for something else. (John laughs) So, find groups of people that you can give money to, not too much, get to first base, get some traction. Make something, listen to the market, continue to, you know, build what people want. And then your token will rise, and then you sell the next-- >> So I got to ask you. >> You know what. It's very much like venture capital, right. We do it in stages. >> It's pragmatic. It's the right way, I think an investor and the entrepreneur, by the way, your point is also valid, because like in venture capital, if you take on too much money, you could actually fail. You're not optimized, and we've seen that before. >> It's not good allocation of capital now. We've got a lot of innovation to do. Wouldn't it be great if we could do a thousand projects at like two or three, four million dollar level and see which ones come out of that? And then give them more. >> David, let's walk through a use case. So I'm a entrepreneur or I'm a growing business, and I maybe bootstrapped it or maybe took a little bit of the seed funding and did some cloud technology, open source, and whoa I've got a product. And I go, you know what, the growth strategy for me as a company is use token economics, because I got to decentralize use fit there. >> Sure. >> And I see a way to scale and grow with tokens. How should I set up my token economics? I got security tokens. I got utility tokens. Do I do a (crosstalking) purpose vehicle? It just sounds so complicated. >> I'm making funny faces John, because I see too many tokens, where you know, we always say, and I'm a token designer, well, what does a token do. Well the answer is it raises money. That is the number one answer. It raises money. Well, does it actually do anything for the token holders? Well, I'm not sure. >> Maybe down the road. >> It gives you access to the system. Is that a good answer? So, I think actually we should be turning most of these token sales into equity sales. And that's a different kettle of fish. So, I honestly think people misunderstand the ICO concept. And they should, we should think of ICOs as we know them today as project finance, not corporate finance, not company, not start up finance. Start up finance should be done with equity. >> That's a great point. >> Equity is something you hold very dear. There's only a hundred percent of it. You sell it only if you need to to get to the next level. And equity means your shareholders are along for the ride. They may have to vote you out of your job at some point. >> it's happened to me before. Happened to me before. That's venture capital. >> You may be acquired. You may, any number of things can happen to equity. And project finance is different. So, the Pillar Project is an open source project. It's a non-profit foundation in Switzerland. No one owns it. It can't be bought. Our goal is to do one project that we said in the white paper. We are on track to do that, but if for some reason we couldn't do that, I think the money should go back to the people who funded your white paper, not some random ride off in the hay. >> David, take a minute to talk about the Pillar Project. I was going to get to that. Let's go to that. What's the Pillar Project about? How did this come to life? >> Sure. >> What's the current status? >> So the Pillar Project is a good example of an open source non-profit project that uses Tokenomics and is not a company and has no equity. We have a token that will give you access to our wallet, which is coming this summer. And the wallet's meant to be, initially just a cryptocurrency wallet, like many others, but with so many differences John. So, for example there will be a name look up, an address book, and you'll find me by name, and you'll send me tokens, currencies by name, or you'll trade with me by name. You'll never see an ether address. You'll never see a Bitcoin address, no fishing, no hacking, no whacky cut and paste errors and mistakes. For example, the Blockchain Explorer will be built into our wallet, so as you send me something or trade something, you'll be getting status information all the time. You'll never go to a Blockchain Explorer. All these nice things are built in. We have lots of features for your mom to make it easy for her to understand and keep it very simple. >> So you've abstracted away some of the complexities. >> We've added complexity on the back end to do the services that make the front end very simple. >> Okay, got it, and what's current status of the project funding wise. >> We'll be shipping the first. Well, we raised money last July. We had a 20 million dollar funding last July. That has gone up, because ether has gone up. We got about 50 people full time. We're in London. >> So you're at first base or second base? >> We'll be on first base in July. We've got to get our product out the door. >> It's the wallet. >> It's a wallet to start with, but also it will help you manage your personal data. It will help you be GDPR compliant. We'll have an exchange, and we'll be doing equity ICOs. We'll be doing, in the wallet, we'll be doing, for example, with the utility ICO, you'll issue your token, you'll sell it to people. They'll buy it in the wallet, and then trading will be immediate. You'll be listed, everything right there. Don't move stuff around. We're trying to create a place that's safe for consumers. >> Got it. Alright, I love this concept about open source. And, it's kind of threaded. Some people are open source guys, like me and you who have seen that movie go from in a radical second tier citizen to primary tier power in the world. As Blockchain takes a community focus, we're seeing the same business model that made Red Hat very famous, that's powering the Linux Foundation. This notion of projects. >> Yeah. >> And in open source, it's a distinction between project and product, upstream projects, a community, downstream products. Downstream activity is where people productize the project. >> Yes. >> I see a pattern happening in this world where we're starting to see some of that. >> Interesting, okay. >> Your thoughts on this, because that's Ethos has proven, this world has got a lot of growth to it. Are we seeing this open source ethos and principles, architecting in some of the successful crypto projects? >> I would take this productization analogy pretty far, because it's true in the profit world too. It's true with startups often do this as well. It's a service. You get better at it. You productize it. That's pretty common. So I think that's part and parcel of just solving customer needs and then scaling, right. The non-profit thing or the open source thing is different, because you can't make money on your open source thing. You've got to find another way, right. And here in Blockchain world, we're using scaling effects and tokens. So let's go to Tokenomics, where you can start an ecosystem fresh with a token that has no value. And Ether had no value on day one, right, almost no value. And through network effect and use and the fact that it's a limited number. The limited number's important. The limited number makes it so that it's scarcity, right. It's got value to people who can see oh later it might be worth more. So you got both natural buyers and speculators coming into a system. And this is what's giving the SEC a hard time, because they can't see whether it's... >> They don't understand it. >> Is it a security or is it a gym membership? >> It's a serious problem, because they don't understand it. And they're causing a lot of, they're stunting a lot of growth in my opinion. But the thing about token economics is what you're getting at, and this is where I trying to squint through the noise. I understand in an infrastructure web one dot O. You got URLs. You got DNS. You have infrastructure. >> Yeah. >> Google has cost per click. All that apparatus doesn't work for network effects. So if you look at network effects as being the main value proposition in most of these opportunities, why were we using E-commerce stack, an old model, because how do you measure networks? Tokens are becoming and wallets are becoming a key infrastructure. I see this coming. >> Yes. >> And I see the network effect tokens becoming both an instrumentation vehicle and a transactional currency opportunity. So, this is a dynamic that Blockchain could really and tokens... >> So I think the huge opportunity John is that instead of fake news and fake everything and fragile DNS systems and things that are centralized, we can decentralize things now with a token at the center that puts skin in the game. And a great example is science. You know we do science pretty badly. It's whoever can get budget for whatever whacky project. And if we had a betting, a side bet system, where people could bet on the outcome of projects, even when you propose them, the people who make the decisions of whether to fund these things could look at the odds first of what the crowd thinks. And if the crowd is right about the outcome, the winners take the money from the losers. And this skin in the game concept is being used... >> Yeah, it's a marketplace. The market dynamics of what you just said I think is very important. This changes the evaluation structure based upon new information. >> So, the price of fake news is almost zero. And we saw that in the last election. We see that in Facebook everyday. We see that on the front page of the New York Times. The price of fake news is close to zero. If it costs you money that it, when it, turns out your stuff is fake, if you have to put up money alongside your news, and then we find out it's fake, and you lose it, that will change things. >> Yes. >> So the skin in the game tokens, and you can actually google skin in the game tokens and learn a bunch of interesting models is what's coming next. >> Well, we have to bring you on board theCube project that we're starting. We're tokenizing our platforms, and we think about this all the time. >> Yeah. >> It's very cutting edge. David, really great to have you on. Talk about the book. Where can we find it? Are you on Medium? >> One quick thing. You know, we're going to have token camp coming up in Lithuania. We've got a one week workshop and un-conference in Vilnius, Lithuania. I know that sounds like nowhere. >> What is that? What's the date? >> It's July 15th to 22nd. It's free. Pillar's paying for it. It's at a resort. We're taking over a resort with crazy crypto people, skin in the game tokens, token camp. We've got a business agility camp for entrepreneurs, for investors, for coders. We're going to do, in fact we're, I can just announce right now that we're doing a hackathon with Radix, an incredible new Blockchain and a bunch of interesting people. Lex Okland will be there, Venay Gupta. We're going to have learning, learning for seven days. >> That's at a resort. >> It's at a resort in Lithuania. >> So it's all one compound. >> Yeah, we're taking it over. And there will be a little golf. But it's good for families. We did it last year. >> I checked it out. It's got a lot of lake there too. You got a lake. You got golf courses. >> It's going to be really fun. And we did it last year, and people were learning until one o'clock in the morning. >> What's the capacity you're looking at for that event? >> 500 people. >> So intimate. It's a very intimate event. >> It should be perfect. We're going to be blasting out. You should come. We're going to be blasting out on 4K. We've got enough bandwidth to send to YouTube and to wherever else you want to distribute video. You could be part of the media center. >> Awesome, well David Siegel, great to have you on. Final question, your take away from Blockchain Week. Obviously, new entrants are going to, new actors are coming into the system, community's booming. It's still tight knit, but now you have finance. You have tech and you have developers all coming together. Your thoughts of the show this week, Blockchain Week. >> Yeah, one thing, the demos are pretty lame in general, I think. We still aren't paying much attention to user experience at all. >> Yep. >> I think the enterprise guys have a lot to learn, because they're kind of playing their normal enterprise game. And it doesn't look so good here. >> Yeah, Jace was talking about the Blockchain washing. (David laughs) Basically, putting a Blockchain-- >> We added Blockchain to this enterprise project and look. >> Yeah, is that a real dynamic in your opinion? >> I think they're figuring it out. I think some of the academic and some of the white paper stuff I've seen is okay and commercializing it. They're on the path to learning how to commercialize it. But they're not part of us. They're not, they'll never be crypto-anarchists, okay fine. But they don't really seem to get us and to be part of it. They're, it's amazing to see a conference where IBM, Microsoft, you know these other big names, are deloyed, are, like, in their own little pockets on the side, and no one's paying. >> John: It's a toe in the water for them. >> They're not paying much attention, because you go in there, and it's the normal marketing jargon and brochures. And it doesn't feel like they're really engaging. >> Yeah. >> I'd love to see more engagement with our community. >> And I think they got to really get engaged in. The good news is, for IBM at least, they're part of the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger Project. So, we're seeing some open sourcedness there, I mean. >> I'd like to see more thought leadership, more real, you know, publish some papers. Come to our conferences and give us some substance. >> Well, I mean, I talked to Michael Dell and Pat Gelsing for instance, and, you know, they are into Blockchain. Michael Dell's watched watched Oslo's videos. He'll probably watch this video. They're learning. And the statement is what they're doing is they're giving it to their R and D teams, so office of the CT. They're not really, so it's very academic, to your point. They haven't really operationalized the ethos and product. >> You know what? >> It's time for experiments. There's no way you're going to blockchain your whole company, your whole supply chain. It is time for experiments, and it is time for guys like Michael Dell to jump in and say we are-- >> What's your advice to Michael? What would you tell him to do? >> It's time for experiments. We're going to do some things. We're going to try some things. We're going to partner up. The Hyperledger stuff, you know, try more than that. Don't just be, go into meetings and summits and top down. Try some bottom up stuff of empower your employees, Michael. You're not Michael, but I'm telling you (John laughs) Michael empower people to try some things. They might even not be... They might be quasi-legal, but if it's an experiment, you're going to learn something. And then you can talk to the lawyers. Don't have the lawyers and the management say what the program is. >> Cause that'll put it in a box. >> They won't get it. >> They won't get it. They'll stop the action. >> They won't find that-- >> Ask for forgiveness, not permission. >> Ask for, go do it. Go build. Get, hire some crazy crypto people, and tell them to look for inefficiencies in your whole operation and cut them down by 90%. >> David, great conversation. We could go for another hour. You're going to be a regular, I can tell, on theCUBE. When we do our live format, we're going to certainly have you back. Keep in touch. >> Sure. >> I'm John Furrier here at Blockchain Week in Consensus as wrapping up the day three of coverage. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Be right back. (light, upbeat music)