(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)

>> 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. (futuristic buzzing) (futuristic electronic music)

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to the cube's coverage here at IBM Think 2018. We are in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay, for IBM Think. Six shows are coming into one packed house. We have two great guests here, Brian Wallace, who's the CTO of Insurance for DXC technologies, and we have, Bala, The Bala, but goes by Bala, banking and capital markets CTO for DXC technologies. Guys, welcome to the cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It's our pleasure, yeah, thanks. >> So, the innovation sandwich, I'm calling it IBM strategy. You've got in the middle, the meat, is data. And the bread is blockchain and AI. Two really fundamental technologies powered by cloud and a variety of other things. Obviously, AI is disrupted, we know what that looks like. Block Chain now emerging as a viable infrastructure enabler that's creating token economics, a lot of cool things, certainly on the banking side, seeing a lot of controversy. Block Chain really is driving it. You guys are out on the front lines. You're doing a lot crowd chats, been following your digital transformation story that you guys have been putting out there. Really you're on this. So, what's the conversations like that you guys are having with block chain and AI; Share? >> Bala: So, let me begin with a couple of quick points on block chain. DXC has done some fantastic work around the world leveraging both the trust capability that block chain brings to bear in financial banking industry use cases, like KYC for instance, institutional KYC in particular, but also, in simplification of entire value chains such as lending. And we're doing very interesting work in lending where not only are we looking at the up-front origination process of lending but also the downstream securitization. Which is where the tokenization of principle and interest payments and those type of things happen. >> John: Energy too? >> Oh yes, absolutely. So there are a number of these creating type use cases that follow into securitization. And with that, we're doing some very interesting work. >> John: Bala, talk about the globalization because one of the things we're seeing in the US a shrinking middle class, but outside the US in emerging markets, a growing middle class. Thanks to mobile technology, thanks to data, thanks to block chain, you're seeing, you know, countries that "hey, we have infrastructure but we don't have the core and modern infrastructure but you throw in a decentralized capability, You've got all these capabilities, and the killer app in all this is money. You're in, that's your vertical. >> Bala: Yes. >> That's your industry. The killer app is money and marketplaces. Your thoughts? >> Bala: I think, the beauty of what these technologies are doing, is for the first time creating financial inclusion to happen and the very first case of where financial inclusion is enabled, is in payments. So, when we open up the banking system predominantly from a payment perspective, which is what things like blockchain and others enable, if we succeed in doing that, then for the first time we've enabled, that's 2 billion people unbanked or underbanked-2 billion. >> John: Yeah. >> Bringing them into this financial system allows for. >> And some people are discriminated against too because they don't have a track record. Banks can't handle some of the things that others are now filling the void with crypto and blockchain. >> Bala: Right, or they can't service them profitably. But for the first time now, you're looking at the economics that cloud, and AI, and blockchain, these technologies bring, not just into banking and capital markets areas but into insurance and I'd love to have my colleague, Brian, talk with the insurance cases are enabled as well. >> John: Brian, insurance- go. >> Yeah, so it's a slightly different dynamic. There it's the, if you think about the fundamental pattern of blockchain it's around eliminating a central or a middle-man or a central, you know, gatekeeper, if you will. And the entire insurance industry is largely made up of middle-men, right? You've got people with risk at one end and you've got sources of capital at the other end and everybody's playing a role between a broker, and a carrier, and a re-insurer. In sort of facilitating that management and that transfer of risk. >> John: So you've got to extract some efficiencies out of that. Business model opportunity. >> So efficiencies, there's a lot of conversations around efficiencies, around automation, but interestingly, it's around the disruptive business model, right? The technology is mildly interesting but it's the new business models that blockchain will enable. >> John: Yeah, I see banking picking up. The early adopter on blockchain but I see, maybe it lagging a bit in insurance but I definitely see some opportunity there. But short term, data is driving insurance because, you know, I don't have a Tesla but my friend has a Tesla. The insurance company will know exactly who is rolling through those stop signs. They know everything that he's doing, All the data is there, so AI becomes really the low hanging fruit for insurance in that industry. Do you agree with that? Comment, reaction? >> Brian: Yeah, and we're just at the beginning, right? Because as you say, data is the asset that we manage. So we have a lot of data in terms of transactional data, the traditional operational data. What we're discovering, and what we're sort of licking our lips over almost is all of this new unstructured data, whether it's sensor data, behavioral data, and you're right, 'cause the challenge that we had around automation and cognitive computing, if you will. We're here at IBM with the Watson tech, was enough data, and the consistency and quality of that data. So we have that now, and we're making tremendous strides around in particular here, with the Watson brand, and the Watson cognitive. >> John: You know, one of the things I wish, was Dan Hutches was here, he's not, he's the CTO in charge. You've guys have been doing all these crowd chats our software that we wrote. That's pretty interesting. I've personally enjoyed all the conversations and give a shout out to Dan and you guys for really great conversation. You guys know what you're talking about. It's clear in the data you guys are taking an outside-in approach and collaborating. But your topics are on target. You're talking about digital transformation kind of holistically, but then you start to dive down into specific use cases. So, Bala, what is the favorite, or the most popular digital disruptive topic that's being discussed within DXC and your clients and in the marketplace? >> So, at the outset, within DXC, as digital transformation takes hold with our customers and we aim to be the premier provider of that enablement, what we've realized ourselves is that we provide a lot of services to our clients across many industries but there are commonalities across what we provide in terms of service delivery. And so it made sense for us to, number one: look at the commonalities and create a platform that was common across industries, across offerings that we bring to the marketplace. That commonality is what we call internally, and externally now, as bionics. And it's a platform that we are bringing forward that for the first time ties together what we are talking about both here at this event but also with our clients. Ties together intelligence, orchestration, and automation which are the fundamental, >> John: It's called bionics? >> Bionics. And internally we call it platform DXC upon which all of our offerings and services are brought to market. >> John: Well there's disruption going on in your business. So, I want to talk about, double-down on that for a second. I'm seeing a trend, certainly in the public sector market where the use cases are well enough defined. So you're seeing automatic code generation becoming a real part of the delivery process. Now, what that's going to do is essentially, think of provisioning and configuration management in cloud. If you could apply actual process code that you've done before in the commonalities, this is going to change the delivery timeframe. So you're looking at essentially auto-provisioning software. Not just like, configuration management resources. No, I'm saying here's a value chain, here's a block chain, here's some AI, just configure it like a LEGO block, push. That could take months to deliver the old way. >> Bala: Right. >> Your thoughts to that? Are you guys on that? Do you guys see that as something that's going to be an opportunity for you? Some companies, I've seen, Global system integrator, is being disrupted by this, cause they don't have this. New SI's, new system integrators, are thinking this way and that's a DevOps mindset. Are you prepared for that, do you see it coming? And what's your answer to that? >> So we saw that coming about 3 and a half plus years ago. And our shift away from being a pure SI began then. And so we are an SI, but we are a service integrator rather than a systems integrator. And we began that trend in our journey, 3 plus years ago. And the reason we began that trend was what you pointed out. Today, infrastructure is delivered as a code. So not even as a service but as a code, and so imagine provisioning infrastructure and all the capabilities that ride on it, just as code. And that's where this is headed. In that model, we become provider and provisioner of services, rather than just a system. >> John: And the cost structure is completely changed because the services, Amazon has proven, and now IBM is following suit with their power platform and other things, that you can actually have the kind of compute but it's a catalog of services. So this is going to change the price competitiveness. So you know, big bids, that used to be billions of dollars, you guys can compete. I mean, am I seeing it right? >> Brian: That transition's already, that ship's sailed, so to speak, in terms of the large outsourcing deals the large, where there's apps or infrastructure, it's all moving to digital transformation consumption based commercial models. And it's really bionics that Bala mentioned a minute ago, that is our answer to the threat you described a minute ago. It's really about automating and digitizing and building intelligence into the entire, if you will, build, deliver, operate value chain of our business. >> John: Talk about the multi-vendor, multi-choice, technology-choice, as your customers and people in general on this journey of digital transformation. They have to make, they used to make technology decisions. Now they're making business logic decisions around how to reconfigure their value chains to optimize for new efficiencies and extract away inefficiencies. Blockchain is a great example, AI is another, automation is in the middle, all the cloud. So you have now business logic as the risk, technology not so much because infrastructure as code has proven that you can have server-less, you can have all kinds of coolness that can be managed in an agile way. So the business model aspect is key. How are you guys dealing with that, cause I know you're here at the IBM Think Show, their partner. I see you at the Amazon shows. We see you guys everywhere. So you're horizontally scaling. By design, is that what customers want? What is the DXC view on this? >> So our value proposition has always had partners as the key element of what we do. And so if you look at what we do, you can look at it from two perspectives. One, proprietary ways of thinking, proprietary systems are long since gone. >> And waterfall methodologies, gone, dead. >> Yes, those are all long since gone. >> If you're still doing that, note to self: you're going to be out of business. >> Exactly, so we've actually hinged a lot of what we do on our offerings, our capabilities, and so on around openness, around open source, and so forth. So that's number one. Number Two: In this world, it's no longer about just DXC or just IBM or just somebody, one person bringing everything to our clients. It's about how do you engage proactively and build co-innovation and co-services with our partners and bring that to our clients. >> I mean, IBM just announced that a deal with Google. They've got tensorflow and their deal. So you have all kinds of melting pot. Okay, let's talk about blockchain again. Go back to my favorite topic. So, if you look up that stack, you've got blockchain, you've got cryptocurrency, protocols, and what-not, mentioned securitization, you've got security tokens, you've got utility tokens. You can almost see where this is going. And then you've got on top of that, what's coming, is a mass in-migration of decentralized application developers. Okay, kind of cloud plus. You know, they know cloud, they know DevOps, infrastructure as code, but they're looking at it from a decentralization standpoint, different makeup. And you see, ICOs, initial coin offerings, I think this is an application of you know, inefficiencies around capital markets but that's, you know, put that aside for a second. But blockchain, crypto currency, and decentralized applications, how do you guys see that trend? What are you guys doing? Are you integrating it in? You mentioned token economics, you're in the banking field. Your thoughts on that? >> Bala: Sure, on the blockchain front, as I mentioned to you, there are a number of platforms that are out there. There is the R3 Corda platform. There's a platform that JPMorgan initiated that we're leveraging as well. >> John: Yeah, so they pooh-poohed Bitcoin but then they're back in the game again. (laughter) >> Bala: Yes, that's right. And then there is the Hyperledger Fabric as well. So these platforms are going to take their course of evolution and we are working across all of those platforms. Now, the more interesting thing that you mentioned is people and skills. What we've find today in the marketplace is with our clients is a dramatic shortage of skills in these areas. And so internally, what we have done at DXC is actually open our own service delivery to a vast pool of developers that you talked about earlier as being freelance, independent folks. We open our entire service delivery to them as well. And we look at that global talent pool for our own service delivery. >> Using community as a way to scale. >> Bala: Using communities, yes. And that's exactly what we're doing in our talent process. It's not just about our people, our employees, but our partners as well as what exists in the open marketplace. >> Brian, talk about the insurance area as a way to tease out other trends. Specifically, the question is What is the biggest things that people know they're walking into? What's the tail-wind that they see, that's going to give them hope? And then, What's the head-winds? What are the blockers? And what should they be aware of? What are some of the marketplace dynamics that translate into other industries? >> Brian: Well, let's start with the obvious blocker is legacy debt, right? So you talked about the risk of all that business knowledge, that domain expertise, that's all today encapsulated in existing, what you may call legacy systems, right? So that's the head-wind by far. The tail-wind is that unlike, say 15 years ago, and we were in the last sort of, dot-com boom, when it was all about the front office and customer experience, the customer is way ahead of us. So culturally, the customer is challenging industry to catch up. So that's the tail-wind in my mind. And the real opportunity is to think about it in terms of a dual agenda. So think about it in terms as progressively, simultaneously building new digital capability, whilst ultimately beginning to unbundle and tackle that legacy debt. And I think customers now are starting to see a path forward. We're in the market in both banking and insurance with digital platforms, with industry resource models, API fabrics that can go back in, modernize legacy systems. So there's a real fast time to market. >> And it changes your engagement with clients. It's not a one and done, you're sticking through the service layer. >> Brian: Oh it's a journey, but the difference, I think, between DXC and a lot of other people is that we are in the market, in production, with real assets. And you can show that journey. So it just becomes a conversation around what's your pain point? Where are you starting from? Where do you want to go? >> And you're bringing the community in to help on the delivery side, everyone wins. >> Brian: And that community is a combination of three things. That's our own employees, obviously within the industry, and within our offerings that know banking, that know insurance. It's all of the DXC people in the horizontals. Because we're bringing everything now. These platforms encapsulate infrastructure, security, service management, analytics, mobility, all of that is built into these platforms. And then, it's going out into our partner community. And then, it's going out into the open community. And we're tapping into all of those. >> John: Brian and Bala, thanks so much. 2 power CTOs here on the Cube, having a CTO conversation around how scale, cloud, AI, blockchain, new technologies are enabling new business models at a faster pace of change, with a lower cost structure, and more time to value. Again, it's all about the value creation. The killer app is money and marketplaces and community. Guys, thanks so much for sharing. I'm John Furrier here at IBM Think 2018 Cube Studios. More after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Live from Los Angeles, it's theCube covering Open Source Summit North America 2017 brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Hey welcome back everyone, live here at Los Angeles, California it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit in North America. I'm John Furrier, your host with my co-host Stu Miniman with Wikibon, and our next two guests, Alan Dickenson who is the program director of the blockchain platform at IBM and Shaun Frankson, who's the co-founder and TED speaker at a company called The Plastic Bank doing some truly amazing things with technology for the betterment of society and communities. We'll get this out in a second. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> So two important things honestly. IBM, well-known in the history books that's being written. Real proponent of Linux, they were one of the early guys in during that movement, with a billion dollars in cash. That's a big number. You guys went all in on Linux, good bet, Linux was successful, it's now the standard so congratulations. Now you have the same thing going on with Blockchain. IBM's got the big bet, the company's best brains at work working on blockchain, kind of reminds me of the Linux move back in the day. Pretty impressive. >> Yeah I mean, there's a lot going on with Blockchain and one of the reasons we're here is that this is a developer event. We really want to help accelerate technology adoption and with our platform we launched two weeks ago, we have a whole suite of capabilities that developers can use that's complimentary, that's free and they can use that to go and try blockchain with a Hyperledger Composer and they can experiment and work on blockchain projects. >> You know I love the IBM marketing department, they always have the best commercials. To me I also love the Smarter Planet and I think Shaun, I would like to give you a chance to talk about your amazing project you have going on. Take a minute to explain, you're up on stage here at the event, pretty compelling, great social good, real value. What's some tech behind it. Take a minute to talk about your work. >> At The Plastic Bank we make plastic waste a currency so in developing countries it can be too valuable to enter the ocean. So the mission to use technology to stop ocean plastic. So we create a recycling ecosystems all around the world where people can go out, recycle the plastic that's abundant in the environment, they can earn enough value to provide for their families, send their kids to school and we have this entire ecosystem where we gather the plastic, we have these incentive programs to sort it, recycle, then we actually sell it back to some of the world's largest corporations who can use that recycled social plastic in their products instead of using new plastic. Which means that every single product tells a story of stopping ocean plastic, reducing global poverty and this really allows just a responsible consumer to make a choice that's helping to stop ocean plastic in the end. >> Well great story I just want to drill down because this highlights couple of big trends we've seen in the Internet business as it got into Big Data. And certainly you guys know a lot about that at IBM. The collective intelligence idea of having these self-forming communities, you think of any problem. Recycling plastic, which is not that hard to do, you go to the placement. How do you get it institutionalized? Is the collective intelligence problem. So you got a clever idea to do this but you also have to support it. There's a lot of cost involved so how did you pull this together? What were some of the nuance to keep the incentives, to keep the motivation, to create the payouts. We all recycle our cans for five cents at some points in our lives, I remember when I was in college it helped me a lot. But it's a whole other scale here. Take a minute to talk about the technology. >> For sure. So we're starting in developing countries that essentially have almost no existing waste management systems so we're really starting from the ground and looking at the way of how do we remove the dangers of the cash-based systems, instead have an asset-backed token that we can safely distribute and create new abilities. So really we're dealing with the unbankable who can now for the first time, save and earn through recycling. So it's not really not looking of how do we go back to you know, what's been done in the past, it's how do we take an area and start with the best technology that exists to safely bring in these new systems. >> When you say unbankable, what does that mean? >> I mean sadly, but most of the world does not qualify for a bank account. They don't have the identity, they don't have the credit history, so it's simple concept of how do you save 200 dollars to send your kid to school. You essentially hide it under a mattress and hope that nothing happens in between. But when you can safely have a digital wallet, it's just instant savings. >> Mobile phone penetration is pretty high in these areas, so they might have mobility but no actual institutional credit bank account, am I getting that right? >> Oh exactly. It's amazing when we think there's countries with no power but who have phones. So that means the education of the mobile payments is still there, it's not a foreign concept, but now you can earn the tokens which can then even be converted into mobile payment. Again where recycling is the equal opportunity. >> So are you using the blockchain component, IBM blockchain, or are you guys using a derivatives, what's the tech? >> So we use IBM blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric and LinuxOne and you know it's a system designed to scale around the world without any interruptions and just it's a go big go at home and do it right. >> You mentioned LinuxOne and I believe there's some announcements week around how to secure containers even more and we've been trying LinuxOne, Linux on the mainframe for quite a few years. Give us the update on what's new. >> One of the new things that we're announcing at this year's show is Emperor II. It's a new Linux platform and it's the technology that's underpinning The Plastic Bank's blockchain. The other thing that we're announcing is the beta for Secure Services Containers. Around the globe we have a lot of cases where data is stolen and blockchain's another type of data, we don't want it to get stolen even though there's a lot of encryption in blockchain. We still don't want the data stolen and people trying to get at it. So we have this idea of Secure Service Containers that kind of wraps around the application and protects it from malware, protects it from insiders, can't see it, insider credentials get compromised, goes into the main ways, data gets stolen. You have to do it that way. Even if IBM gets a court order for us to reveal your blockchain data, we can't do it. It's protected and encrypted in this area, and only you have the encryption keys. So the beta for that is something we also announced today. And then two weeks ago we announced the blockchain platform, it's kind of a technology that we put in place to accelerate and help people. >> Security is a huge issue, I mean the ICO marker for instance, remind me of the old stagecoach robberies, right. You literally do like a multimillion dollar ICO, completely a secured, when you're getting your wallet getting snatched, you're getting hijacked, is that something that is related to that? Or is that just a point of the security is still an open book? I mean you can have secure transactions on the blockchain but you still got your wallets out there, so you got to have a wallet strategy. >> Most of the Secure Container technology can be used for any Linux application that you run when it's out of beta. Right now it's in beta. So we're looking for users that want to have a very secure application environment, running on Linux and sign then up for our beta. >> Shaun can you tell us, what led you to this solution? I'm sure security has got to be high on your list, the kind of financial transactions that are involved in it, but I have to say a young small company, mainframe is not the initial thing that we think of. >> Again, the only way to solve the global problems is really go on such a scale that we can have hundreds of millions of pounds provided to the world's largest companies. Which just means it's got to be large scale, no interruptions and for us, trust is the biggest thing. Investor trust, client trust, and just even everyone's trust that not only the financial side, but you know we're delivering a promise of social good, environmental justice, that if we get an irrefutable trust that it's just the right system, and to me, blockchain's a trust stamp, IBM's a trust stamp, LinuxOne is a trust stamp that just it's the right way to do it on a global scale. And for us it was global was the only way to go. >> And now of course, the supply chain is a channel that you're dealing with that blockchain is a good fit for. A lot of these early use cases, their supply chain like, well you got to keep track of a lot of moving parts and who's contributing to what. >> You can have a digital token that represents the physical asset and you can kind of track it through that way and blockchain can keep the information safe and documented so that you don't lose track of the value. >> Well we're super excited. As you know, we're looking at blockchain for our audience and our world, so it's interesting, a lot of the blockchain, certainly people see the hype and the scams out there and the ICO stuff, which is natural, they're early market, the underbelly kind of shows itself, we've seen that movie before. But, here's the thing that I've never seen in my career ever. Very often, when you have alpha geeks getting super excited, we're talking CTOs, really strong technical people, and A plus entrepreneurs, they're salivating at the blockchain opportunity because they're the canaries in the coal mines in my opinion on disruption opportunities. You seeing use cases where I can solve that problem, people with passion are going after these new opportunities that were ungettable before because you'd have to roll out this complex software product, all these costs to get started. Same pattern. >> We're seeing a lot of technology people get excited about it. But they understand the technology relatively quickly and they can get it. What seems to be slowing down a lot of blockchain adoption is more the linkages with other organizations because when you're exchanging value, you're passing it between one organization and another, and another and a value chain. And getting that value chain where you can articulate who it is, and codifying the ways that you work with the people in the value chain and create a smart contract around that, that's what we see slowing down the progress of blockchain. >> We had Brian Behlendorf on yesterday, he runs the SmartLedger project for the group and we talked about decentralizations versus distributive, we all know what distributive computing is, we've seen that. But now with decentralizations, he had a good quote, he said, minimum viable decentralization and 'cause if people think that you have to have a completely decentralized environment which I thought was a really good observation. >> I agree, I heard him say that and it reminded me of one of the steps we see in blockchain progression is we have to get a minimum viable ecosystem together. We see people sometimes biting off too big of a problem and one thing I like about The Plastic Bank's approach is that they try to get it working right somewhere first and then scale from there. And then the same thing with blockchain. You have to get your ecosystem defined, you have to get that working and then expand from there. And that's one of the things that we've designed into our blockchain platform, is the ability to govern a group of folks that are trying to exchange value and then also how to operate a blockchain once it's exchanging value with a group of folks. Things like, lets say you have a new version of Hyperledger Fabric, you want to take down your blockchain that's operating while you install the new version, but we've made sure that you can do that in a smooth way that keeps on running. >> You know Alan, that is a super smart observation. I hundred percent agree with you. I've always said this, and Stu and I and Dave, we talked about this. Blockchain is a community win. The community could win this together as the community participants increase in that kind of philosophy, the value increases. If it's a winner take all, it doesn't work, clearly. So what do you guys with the ecosystem? That's a good question. Are you guys investing in the ecosystem? Can you give some examples. Obviously you're supporting great projects. >> We've built a lot of technology but one of the things that is unique about IBM's approach to blockchain is the governance tools that we've created to help manage the ecosystem. We're the only blockchain partner out there right now that has these kind of ecosystem partner tools that can kind of speed the creation of bringing multi parties together and helping them think through how they should govern the creation and then also the operation of the blockchain. What if you want to add a few more members after your blockchain is running? That's a technology problem, but it's also a business problem. And will your blockchain keep running? >> Well we'll keep in touch, we definitely want to do a lot more coverage on what you guys are doing. I think it's instrumental, we're doing a lot of coverage as well on the ICO side, tracking that business side of it, but down on the enterprise it's a lot of activity coming and I think Accenture is going to do very well. Shaun, get back to you for a second. Want to ask you a quick question. On a personal note, what has been a learning from your process? You're doing, what seems to be probably an exciting and intoxicating job where you're making social good happen, using some tech. I mean, it's a cool project. Assuming there's been some bumps along the road like any other entrepreneurial venture. What are some of the learnings you've taken away from where you are today, where you've come from and what you achieved? What are some personal learnings? >> I think really the two biggest things is one, especially coming from just a entrepreneurial nature, it's not what you know, it's what you can figure out. There's always a how. And for us, when it was when you come up with such a giant idea and you just know where it's going and where it can go past there. Mentally just becoming the person capable of achieving what you are trying to achieve as compared to getting caught up on all the things you don't know, I mean the more you know, the more you know how much you don't know and it's really just getting inspired by the fact that whatever the next answer, whatever the next hiccup, whatever the next how, we'll figure it out. I might now know the answer, but I'm committed to figuring it out and committed to becoming the person capable of figuring it out. And you know it's a journey and process and an inspiring journey to be on. >> You got to dream the future to create it. What you're saying is it's a growth mindset, I love that growth mindset, say hey we're going to go after it, we're going to see some things and have to figure it out, that's a great mindset. Versus nervousness and insecurity. Good job, well done. Well congratulations on your success and thanks for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. Alan, we look forward to chatting with you in the future and talking blockchain. IBM here on theCUBE with the great projects they're doing on blockchain and also they had an announcement a couple weeks ago around some really cutting edge value around food distribution and value chain so again, Smarter Planet, I know you guys do a lot of investments early on but congratulations, and continued success Shaun. Live coverage here from the Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, California. It's theCube, I'm John Furrier, Stu Minniman, be right back with more after this short break.