>>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.