>> from Santa Clara, California It's the Cube covering techno ovation World Pitch Summit 2019 Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media Now here's Sonia to Gari >> Hi and welcome to the Cube. I'm your host, Sonia to Gari. And we're here at Oracle's Agnew's campus in Santa Clara, California covering techno vacations World Pitch Summit 2019. Ah, pitch competition in which girls from around the world developed mobile lapse in order to create positive change in the world with us. Today we have Team Coco from Kazakhstan. Welcome. The members are, um Dilma as camel Over and Mallika Bree by Ava Uh, Donna Ulanova and Lube of do Chen Kuo Welcome. And congratulations on being finalists. Thank you. So your app is called tech Go. Can you tell us more about it? >> Yes. Uh so so techo in three d mobile application, which has a minute reality and as connected to the hardware which has dedicated for the behavioral change of people for so that they can become more conscious and like a friendly. >> And can you tell us more about how it works? Yes, >> of course there is. Luba, who can explain this? Okay. S >> o r application is about an astronaut who needs to save the planet. S O Firstly is there is a game in which a person needs to save your hair. Virtual airs by selling some ecological problems in it so that he or she wrote, be educated to both real life scenarios. And I also have a step counter which tracks your carbon footprint and encourages people to trust Morgan Friend the transportation options And that's a rare make really impact is that we connect our application with a special trash boxes in our city. All those locations are shown on the map, and coming to this place is user received trash box. And since Rosa Garbage and then because he has restaurants carriage here, she will get some points and your impact will be realized in the eventuality. Yeah, >> So what impact in society do you hope that this app will help change >> Rapids three t mobile application and it's a game. That is why Gamification and theater magic reality, which is a r which is inside this game a cz more visually in psychological attractive to people and those challenges that we provide a game are intensified so that most of the people. When they accomplish their goals, they might get, like, have a certain profit out of it so that they can become worker friendly and gain benefits. This is how we want to make sure that people might gain my changed a behavior for the sake of ecology. >> That's awesome. So you're using essentially a game incentivize people to make better choices in their everyday lives. That's great. And so how >> did you >> come up with this idea? >> So look, I will explain >> this. Actually, there were before some eco trash boxes in our school because like the thing off, ecological problems and recycling is one of the most talked about topics in Kazakhstan nowadays. And like in our school, the students try. Thio make this echo charge boxes, but they were always empty because students wasn't incent ified to recycle the garbage. And we tested our up in our school and we already launched it in our school and this ups incentivize our students. And now this I could trash boxes with our hard way always full. So >> that's awesome. See, you already found some success with your app. Thank you. Do you think that that this is a problem in the bigger community. >> Oh, maybe Donna Comptel. >> So we're saying that we started locally, but we got to go globally within that, uh, a pollution, like a pollution global problem and we trying to solve all over the world. So in our game, we have the whole world that you become an astronaut. So you should be aware for hold the problem that was happening in the earth. So we are trying to engage and educate people to be more global on to be more responsible for our final for our home. >> It sounds like everyone in the world should download that app. Yes, I do hope Thio uh, expand if you get the funding. >> Yes, um, we plan to expand not only in our country, Kazakhstan on only locally, but also globally. And we would like to create the eco friendly community across Central Asia since we want to make sure that consciousness is global in our area. >> And what struggles have you faced trying to create this app? >> Um, probably there were some struggles and off course in the realization and, uh, the realization of technical part of this project and creating a business model, since we are not very experienced in this kind of things. But since we have participated in techno vacation and we were immersed in this protest and were modified Thio motivated. Yeah, and we're motivated to learn all this things and acquire those skills. And this is why we became more experienced in this stuff. So right now, uh, those struggles that we face before not longer problem for us. So yeah, this what we faced? >> So techno vacation has definitely helped. Do you improve your app and yes, right houses. Tech innovation Helped you? >> Yeah, Um, probably someone else wants to ask you this question. >> How is SECNAV ation help? You were What skills have you learned from this journey? For >> example, one of the most important skills, I guess iss a teamwork. Like after we started to work on the one project, we started to listen each other excavation actually helped us too. Um, I understand the opinions off other people and like to understand the problems in our society. We start to dream bigger to think bigger, wider kind of that >> That's amazing. And also take Novation helping us >> to explore new companies to be more like open a person to come to The company's asked about the help on not like B just like see the problems and trying to solve trying to find a solution and be the people of the world and be responsible for our planet for what's happening in our local community on be aware of everything. >> And, um So I heard you guys had an amazing week. Um, you you went to whoever You went some other places. So can you tell us more about your week >> you want? So we went to amazing places in a Silicon Valley in a San Francisco San Jose and we so, like it'd, for example, Golden Gate Bridge. And also the Alcatraz so were so impressed by their architecture by the people by the nature on DDE. We just expected a lot of Onda. We just got this old expectations come to the reality on dhe. We hope that that kind of dream will come true in our future, and we gonna to work in a one of the big companies that were located here. I know all the universities. So >> how is it like going to the different tech companies and seeing it in real life. >> So we >> visited Uber Company and Google Ventures, and both we I have seen people who work is there, and we're really impressive on. And we really like it. It? Yeah. And, uh, I think so. Before, like in my childhood, I dreaming to be to be in Silicon Valley, to goes there and, like, meet people who are work already working you And now, like my dream came through. >> That's awesome. And you get to see California And you you might be able to win today. So thank you so much for being on. I wish you all the best. And I hope you haven't amazing pitch tonight. Thank you. This has been Team Coco from Kazakhstan. I'm your host, Sonia to Garey. This is the Cube. Stay tuned for more

(upbeat music) >> Back the cube here. I'm John Furrier with the cube. Thanks Adam in the studio. We've got two entrepreneurs here. Co-founders of LastMileXchange, Andrew Hoskin and James Grant. Guys, thanks for coming on the cube, >> John. Good to be here. >> Love to get the entrepreneur, both co-founders making it happen. I mean, the pandemic was either a tailwind or a headwind for companies and certainly the internet didn't break. Everything worked out great. So, let's just jump in, why don't we get into some of the questions. What does LMX do? Who are you guys? Take a quick minute to explain what you guys do. >> Sure. So, we're a software provider. We have a cloud-based SAS platform, which effectively it's a bit like a Skyscanner or an Expedia for networks. Carriers need to buy and sell networks from each other and we help them do that. And we have been in the cloud since day one. And so, that's what we do while we're here and it's a good place for us to tell you about it. >> I got it. I got to ask you, because one of the things being entrepreneur, you've got to read the tea leaves. One of the secrets of being a co-founder and doing anything entrepreneurial these days is you got to see the future, but then you've got to come back to the present and convince everybody, what's going on. >> Entrepreneurs: Yeah. >> What is the core value proposition? What's the day in the life of a conversation? I mean you're talking to Martians now, like, huh? What's the public cloud it's like, is it like, isn't it just the internet? It's changing. What's the value proposition? What's the conversation like? >> So, the value position for us is that we, you know, we work with our customers to accelerate the sales cycle through cloud based services. So, a lot of our customers are global tier one carriers. So, we're looking to automate their connectivity pricing, and we do that via a cloud-based solution. So it is vital to us. And particularly with having customers all across the globe, being able to sort of deploy cloud-based services makes life much easier. >> I got to ask you, one of the things that we love about cloud is the agilities. >> Yeah. >> Can you talk about the impact of what you guys are offering for the agility side. What's the impact of the consumer, the application developer, what's the impact? >> Clouds have a big play for us, big impact for our customers. So we provide our solution effectively, almost a plug and play for them. So, we do quoting really, really well. You want to know where a network is, you want to know the connectivity, we'll sort that out for you, and we can give you a solution that they can plug into their systems really quickly. In terms of, for us, when we first started, we had servers in data centers and managing software on that, but we moved to Amazon pretty early. And what we now have is, we can spin up a new customer environment in a day, which you know, from previously two, three weeks. So, cloud has been transformational for us and hopefully for our customers as well. >> And you guys target mainly carriers? >> Very much so, yeah. We're very much in the big carrier Telco space. The people that provide the fabric upon which all of this sits. >> Yeah. And then by the way, it's magic and this, it's robust. It's what we need, utilities, it's important. Last mile, obviously, as we all, some people look at it and say, go back decades, rug ban, you know, last mile is always that last nut to crack. 5G's here, the mobile sector is looking at massive growth. You're starting to see the cloud providers recognize that the edge is just another network connection. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> How do you guys see that evolving? What's going on? How do you see that affecting your business, the customers on the market? >> Well, so network, I mean, access is all about getting onto the network, whether you're talking cloud or whatever. So, if you can't get into the network, cloud is nothing. If you can't sort of back haul your 5G, you're stuck. So, what we're seeing is, even with 5G, as it rolls out, as people look to densify their networks, they still need to get all that voice stuff, all that data traffic onto fiber. So, we're seeing a lot of interest there still in knowing where connectivity options are, knowing where the network is. With James also, I mean, that other aspect of access, 10 years ago was all about fiber. But you were just telling me before about how increasingly carriers are using 5G as effectively a router in a box, ship it in by a DPD or FedEx out to a customer. >> Yeah. So typically we'll think about mobile as connecting your mobile phone, but now we're looking at sort of, mobile connecting buildings. And one of the key challenges when you're connecting a building with mobile is what the actual connectivity within the building is. So, often we will see mobile maps that show you that sort of connectivity at sort of, the outside level. But of course, you're actually going to have your infrastructure in the building. So, you need to know what the straight signal strength is there. So, we're actually working with a partner at the moment so that we can identify within a building, what the quality of the signal is. >> I mean, that's class, if you think about like, most people think of, oh, it just drops to the end point and then you've got more network behind it, wireless. You got now to work at home dynamics, IOT devices. So, you guys have the buy-sell side of things going on, you got the carriers buying and selling there. >> Entrepreneurs: Yeah, absolutely. >> And then, SD WAN is a huge market, >> Andrew: Absolutely. >> That's growing and, as well. >> And all of that relies on access. Do you know what I mean? Like, you can talk 5G, you can talk IOT. And of course, those are the exciting, sexy things in the industry. But underpinning all of that is a network. And you mentioned the word before and it's right, utility, you know, maybe it's not the sexy side of things, but you've got to have it, otherwise, nothing else works. >> You know, one of the things we do a lot of cloud cover, we cover all of Amazon shows here coming into Telco, the Telco, digital revolution that's going on here, you can see it. And some people aren't ready for it. Almost like, reminds me of the mainframe days back when I was growing up in college, it's like, oh, I'm not, I don't want to do the mainframe. I'm the new guy, I'm the young kid. I love this, a PC and mini computers. Here, it's the same thing. It's kind of like, okay, I see the cloud, but when you have infrastructure as code, >> Yeah. >> Everything gets fuzzy. >> Yeah. >> I mean, now you're talking about programmability. So, that edge at the application level, some say it's going to be a massive innovation enabler, which is going to change that infrastructure's code, which means that guys like you guys got to be able to provide programmable routes, programmable and, >> Yeah. And APR is our, and the programmability of the network, the whole interplay from whether it's quoting, whether it's ordering, whether it's delivering services, whether it's kind of somebody going into somewhere and saying, "I'd like a, a hundred gig into this building", pressing a button and 15 minutes later, everything rolls together to turn it up, is where the whole industry is going. >> Let's take that for a second. >> Sure. >> Just a mind blowing scenario right there. Sounds simple. >> Yeah. >> Compared to where we were just 15 years ago. >> Yeah. >> That scenario didn't exist. >> No. >> And it's hard. It's not trivial. >> No. >> It's not non-trivial. All right. So what's this mean for customers? Are they like buying this level now, like, are they like, where are they on the spectrum of, you know, buying and the progression of operationalizing their business to be fully robust, network end to end, visibility on workloads to network? >> I would say it often depends where the customer is. So, obviously we deal with global customers and that's one of our big selling points is that, you know, a lot of people are focusing on the US, the Western European market, you know, and the connectivity challenges that they're trying to solve there. Our customers have global customers who are looking for connectivity all throughout world. And often there'll be things like mining companies who don't have fiber going into them. And so, we need to be able to work with our customers and their suppliers to be able to automate everything, because you can only fully quote a network when you've got all the locations back. And if you're waiting for information coming back from Africa or from the former CIS, then you know, you're going to have a problem. And we're working with companies in Africa and Russia, Kazakhstan, at the moment to help them automate everything. >> You know what's interesting, I just, my mind just goes nuts here when thinking about what you guys do, because as people start rolling their own with applications, they're going to need to have this programmability, like almost on demand, they're going to need to have, I want to do a digital TV network, I want to provision something or something's hybrid or at the edge. >> You've got a football game, or you've got something like this where you need capacity, you need it quickly. You need it for an event. >> Yeah, exactly. And 5G's perfect. I mean, how many times we've all been at a soccer game or a football game. It's like, I got bars but I have no back haul. Like we all been there. >> Yeah. >> Why, oh? >> Saturated the network and everyone's doing the same thing. >> The radios working, the back haul's choking. I mean, this is real. >> Absolutely. >> How does, does 5G solve that? I mean, where does that get, how does that get solved? I mean, is it going to be ubiquitous? Truly 5G going to make us all work better? I mean, certainly for the end use of 5G is it provides speed, it provides capacity. And also for the operators it provides being able to get more people onto it. And so, and 5G is not my core strength, but it absolutely will be transformative. What I can comment on is, like you say, for an event like this or the football or anything, the Euros, it ultimately goes into a pipe. So, you've got to make sure that you've got to have the right connectivity there and the right capacity there, from the user's phone, through the towers, all the way into the network, all the way to the data center and back again. So the edge, everything, has to play together to do that, and probably, rolling it out quickly and making sure it's agile and making sure it's fast and making sure it's quick and reliable. That's what needs to all work together. I liked how you said you know, the Expedia of the networks. >> Andrew: Yeah. >> That immediately in my mind says, okay, ease of use. >> Andrew: Yeah. >> From consumption standpoint, what's the next level of growth for you guys? I'm almost imagining is programmability or cloudifying or amplifying it, make it rain. >> Yeah, certainly we are going to continue to push into, yeah, effectively digital transformation in fact, across telecoms is happening. You would think there would be a lot further ahead than it is. It's not. There are a lot of people still quoting, ordering manually. So, we're very much part of that, but certainly the ordering and the provisioning, like we've mentioned, that's a big part, but for the industry, and we're going to hopefully be part of that, or we expect to be part of that. So that's, and making sure that connectivity is there when you need it. You know, I'm here, what's there? A bit like flights, I'd like to fly to New York. Who can do it, how much will it cost? I'll buy that one please. And that's what networks should be as well. >> James, what's your vision on how the customers are progressing in their mindset? Obviously, you've got the blocking and tackling to do, you're in the market. Where are they going with the use case and the application? >> The customers are getting to the stage where they're expecting to be able to go into a portal and turn up services. So, as with many things that we're seeing throughout life today, you can go into an app, you can press a couple of buttons and you can, you can order something. So, that's what they're expecting is to be able to just go and say, I need a hundred mg here, press a few buttons. And in 10 minutes time, the circuit's not only quoted, but it's provisioned. At the moment, there's this sort of a digital divide between those that have the digitization in place and those that don't. And that's the sort of the key that we're trying to sort of help the industry with is the sort of the, the outliers and, and also the main carriers to make sure that it's not a sort of, a digital haves and a digital have-nots. >> I was just going to say that. So, if you have the digital haves and have-nots, is that a function of them just not being operationalized in their digitization? Or is it they're not set up for it or they don't have you guys? What's that have-not side of it? How do they become the haves? >> One of the biggest challenges is actually around the sort of, identifying the connectivity at a particular location. So, in some countries it's very easy to do, like the US, UK, Netherlands. We have nice sort of standard address formatting, and you can identify a building at roof level. And when it comes to turning up connectivity straight away, you want to make sure that you turn up the connectivity to the right building. And that's one of the challenges that we're seeing throughout sort of, some of the Eastern European and the LatAm, the Asian and the African markets. >> I mean, we saw what happened with Amazon instances. You've got spot instances, you get reserved instances, you're starting to see that mindset. That's a SAS mindset. >> Yeah. >> That's kind of where things are going. Is that, you guys see the same thing here or is it different? >> Yeah. Well, certainly at the enterprise space, they tend to make decisions over a longer scale. So there, maybe not so much that you sign contracts in a year's term et cetera, but yeah, certainly as a provider, a SAS provider, using all those things, the ability to to tune your expenses, tune your costs, even your resource, you know, you're turning up servers by the hour, by the minute is a big thing. And it takes a mindset change for us and our customers. >> If you don't mind me asking, how long have you guys been doing business as co-founders, when did it start? What was the guiding principle? How do you guys look back now? >> James and I met working for Verizon many years ago. You might've heard of them. And, we sort of did what we do now, in as much as James ran the commercial side of things, I ran the software side of things and we saw that connectivity was a universal problem. And so we saw our opportunity. We went out, we started LastMileXchange. We pivoted once or twice, still in the same space, but we eventually realized that where we are now was what the industry needed. And that's where we've been pushing now for quite a few years. >> I want to give you guys a lot of credit and a lot of props, congratulations. I think, you know, the digital divide has been a broadband challenge for many, many years and decades. Now, you've got that urban divide where people don't have access. And I heard stories during the pandemic that people had access in the region, but couldn't get it to the home, affordability, access, devices. These are new issues, the digital divide, they have connectivity options. >> Andrew: Yeah. >> But it's not really clear yet. So, you're starting to see a lot more of that going on. Of course, the rural areas. >> Andrew: Yeah. >> I live out in the countryside on a farm. So, I'm quite used to their challenges of connectivity. You know, when I first moved into my house, I ended up having to get to way satellite broadband and things have improved now. But when we're talking about 5G, you have people in London, they have 5G. 5G is something that I'm not going to see for three, four years probably. >> Globally, it'll democratize access because like we were saying, we're sitting in an enterprise. You can send out a rooter or a router with a SIM card in it. I mean, you can give a kid a mobile phone in the middle of, you know, Kenya, and he can have access to the world through the internet. So, you know, that increased capacity, that increased densification of networks. Okay, they're not all going to be on 5G today. James hasn't got 5G and he only lives 30 minutes out of London. But 3G, 4G, I think the gentlemen on one of the keynotes was talking there about 3G Plus. You know, effectively, that's going to roll out. The 5G's are going to be in New Yorks and London, but, >> Like, it's going to be bring your own G to your house soon. And I think this space ops is going to be great. And I think overall, just overall, the challenges and the topologies, you're going to start to see diversity in the network topology, and actually it's going to explode. >> Andrew: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. >> Going to be super exciting. Well, again, I think you guys are under something big. I think this idea of sasifying, making things programmable, infrastructure as code is going to be pretty big. So, thanks for coming on. And what's your take, real quick, of Cloud City. >> It's been great. We've just walked in. We both said, as we came in, we came in yesterday to set up and we were really blown away and the rest of our team arrived today and they were very impressed as well. I was going to say Telco D on the team, have done a really impressive job. >> I think you have to come here and see it to believe it because when we walked in, it was just like, this place is stunning. >> Awesome. Well that's the cube coverage, we're rocking and rolling here. We're going back to the studio to see Adam and the team. Back to you.

(upbeat jazzy music) >> Announcer: From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE conversation. Here where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm Donald Klein, today I'm here with Tom Stepien, CEO of Primus Power. We're going to talk about the state of clean tech. Tom, welcome to the show. >> Great to be here, thank you very much, Don. >> Okay, great, well look, we're going to kind of get into the state of climate change, and what's happening and why the solutions that you provide are kind of important, but first just why don't you just give a quick overview of Primus Power and what you guys do. >> Sure, so Primus Power is a stationary energy storage company. Our flow batteries work on both sides of the meter, the utility side, the guys who are supplying electricity, and the behind the meter side, the folks who use electricity, like this studio. And what we do is offer a solution that allows that allows you to optimize your electricity use. You charge the batteries typically when the price of electricity is low, and the usage is low, and then you pull from those batteries, instead of the grid, when the grid prices are high, and the cost is high. >> Donald: Okay. >> And that allows our customers to save money on both sides. >> Excellent, and so just quickly, who's the you, who's the customers here, who are the primary focus that you're selling to? >> Sure, sure, so the utilities are PG&E, the utility that's putting electrons to this studio, to smaller utilities, there's several thousand utilities in the US and then worldwide, of course. Folks who are supplying electricity. Also think about renewable plants, right, Solar-Plus storage, wind farms have curtailment problems because wind is gusty, tends to show up at the wrong time sometimes. You can save wind when it's extra, and then dispatch it when timers low. So renewables projects are customers. And then homeowners are customers. I lost power on the way here this morning, if I had a battery in my garage or by the side of my house I would have been able to keep the lights on and the garage door open. >> Okay, excellent, okay, all right. Well, lets, lets talk about kind of clean tech, right? So everybody's interested in what's happening with climate change, it's kind of front and center in the news cycle these days. California's actually been a real leader in implementing legislation to accelerate the adoption of Grid-tied storage solutions to make better use of renewable energy, correct? >> They sure have, absolutely. The California Energy Commission has been a leader in this space, the CPUC that governs the three investor owned utilities in California, initially 8-10 years ago put out a very important law that Nancy Skinner lead, relative to using storage and mandating storage in chunks for the three IOU's over the next 10 years. >> Interesting. >> We have exceeded those goals, I think it has helped drive down the cost of storage. It's helped companies like Primus blossom because it's created a market. Other states have jumped on that bandwagon, New York has, you know, done that, Oregon has storage goals, and many other states also, and it's helped improve the technology for sure. >> Interest, but so California's really been leading the charge since 2010 in this area? >> Yes, yes, I travel a lot, I've been to China, and Europe, and Kazakhstan, and all places. Everyone asks me, "What's happening in California?" If you look at Bloomberg numbers about energy storage, California is broken out and often the leader. South Korea did a lot last year, but within the US, California leads for sure, and will continue to do so. >> Interesting, and then they doubled up on those numbers again back in 2016, is that right? >> They are, they're continuing to up the goals, right? As a state we now have a carbon free goal. Wisconsin just this morning I read is also moving to carbon free goals under Energy Mix. So California has led for sure, but other cities, Chicago has a goal, other states are following, but it all has started here, for sure. >> And just talk about this connection between, kind of, a carbon free energy solution and grid-tied battery solutions, what is the connection? How do the batteries help with making states carbon free? >> Yeah, for sure, so solar is the least expensive way of generating electricity, full stop, right? What Germany did years ago with Feed-in Tariff and has driven down the cost is actually somewhat similar to what California did and helped drive down the cost and improve the technology. It is now at a point where it is the cheapest form, it is less expensive to put in a new solar plant than to run some of these gas plants. >> Interesting. >> California has no coal, got rid of that years ago, but has a lot of gas. Point in fact, in earlier this year in the Southern California Edison district the California Public Utility Commission, the guys who rule the utilities, said, "No, no, no, lets not put a couple hundred million dollars "to update and refurbish some of these gas plants, stop, "instead lets move that toward energy storage." >> Interesting. >> So here's how it's going to look in the future, you have solar, right? And we all know the low, low cost of that, right? Next Era Energy, using some of their numbers, because their the largest, one of the largest developers in the US, has the 20 year power purchase agreement price of solar by itself, is $25 to $35 a megawatt hour, right? Really low, so two and a half cents a kilowatt hour, right? I pay 10, 12, 18 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity at my home, depending on the uses. So, wow, right, it's an order of magnitude less than that. And then we all know what solar looks like, right? It's great during the day, but there's two dynamics that are important with solar. One are clouds, right? If you lose power because clouds go over, that intermittency is a problem. Quick acting batteries can take that out. The second one that everyone knows is the solar parabola tends to fall down when the sun sets, well what do you do for the other, either 12 or 18 hours of the day? And that's where batteries of a different type come in that gets charged in the middle of the day with that extra electricity from the peak and dissipated at night. >> Okay. >> That is the grid of the future, for sure. >> And you can do this both at a residential level, right? But also at a distribution center, replacing an older, kind of, you know, peak generation plant? >> Absolutely, right, and if you look at the refurbishments that are happening up and down the coast here in California, that's exactly what they're moving towards, and here in California we have a utility that got into a bit of trouble because of some of the wildfires and not maintaining some of the lines as we all have read about. Now they are publishing and turning off parts of the grid, if there are wildfire concerns. That is going to drive the use of storage at home, and the tariffs also are going to encourage that, right? Where you are encouraged economically to save extra electricity if you have panels on your roof, and then use that at night. So it's helping drive that market, and it's the right way to go. >> Interesting, so both in terms of houses that are in, sort of, forested areas, right, they're going to need this type of local energy storage solution. You've also got replacing the, kind of, peaker plants with using grid-tied storage to be able to push out energy over the grid, right? So these are going to be increasing use cases, so we're going to see battery installations both at plants and also in homes, but all of these battery solutions they're all tied to the cloud, correct? They're all tied to the internet, they're effectively functioning as IOT devices at the edge. Maybe talk a little bit about how that works and how, what the benefits are from a leveraging those types of technologies. >> Sure, yeah, so yes you're absolutely right, they are at all points of the grid, and different types of batteries for different functions. And it's fascinating, there is a whole class of companies that, of course, are emerging on the battery scene, right? Lithium-ion batteries, flow batteries like Primus, etc., and other types, really long thermal batteries are going to be coming, but then there's the class of the software companies that are helping manage these assets because you need to smartly charge and discharge. Sometimes driven by weather signals. Okay, it's going to be really windy tonight so I want to enter tonight with an empty battery if I'm a wind farm down in Palm Springs so I can take that extra wind and put it into the battery. Sometimes they're driven by economic signals, right? Because it's a really hot day and the prices of producing electricity are going to be high, so therefore I can take a different type of action. >> Interesting. >> And they will control those assets, batteries, on either side of the grid and make intelligent choices, driven by economics to provide the best outcome for, again, either the utility or the homeowner, maybe even the neighbors, right? At some point we're going to be able to share electricity. Why can't I use my neighbors panels if they're out of town for two weeks, and they can do the same when I'm out of town? So that will all come here over time. >> And that's all being enabled by a new class of software companies that are really treating these energy solutions as, kind of, you know, IOT devices. >> Absolutely, and they, it's a great model because it's just another IP address, right, and there's some attributes that it has and you understand the batteries and you can make economic decision. So think of it like a trading platform if you will. So those are emerging, you know, there's some really fascinating companies that are young and starting but off to a great start on those tasks. >> Excellent, okay, so why don't we just talk a little bit about Primus Power itself for a second. So you're in particular type of energy solution. Why don't you talk about that, and how you differ from some of the other providers that are out there? >> Sure, so there's lots of different types of batteries, right, and one thing to mention, that there's no perfect battery. There's always trade offs on batteries, right?. You always, of course, get less out than you put in, because you can't create energy. So there's efficiency differences. We're probably all familiar, the audience here is, with lithium ion batteries, with the Powerwall and Sonin and some, you know famous companies. SolarEdge has done a great job putting batteries with solar, or just having batteries by themselves. Those batteries today, most of the market is lithium ion. Lithium ion is 20-30 years old, first showed up on the Sony Handycam, very bankable, very proven, but like all batteries, have trade offs. We know the fade that we've experienced with our laptops and our cell phones-- >> Absolutely. >> Which is lithium ion. That's okay, because you can buy a new iPhone every three years, but if you have that on the grid, not so good, you don't want to go out to the substation every three years with a new set of batteries. Well, there's also fire concerns. There were 30-40 fires in South Korea last year, lithium ion based, and there was a big one earlier this year in Surprise, Arizona, bit of a Surprise down there, it sent some firefighters to the hospital. So that's some of the strengths and weaknesses of lithium ion. A flow battery, like ours, gets its name because we flow a liquid electrolyte, and a typical flow battery has two tanks and you're moving liquid from one tank to the other take through a reaction chamber, that's a stack of electrodes, and you plate a metal, we plate Zinc, other people plate iron, or you're playing tennis with electrons. This is high school chemistry coming back to haunt all of us, you're changing valance states of Vanadium, for example, Primus, if I talk about that difference, is unique in that it only has a single tank because we exploit the density differences in our electrolyte, kind of got a oil and vinegar separation going on, and we don't have a membrane in our stack of electrodes, so it's about half the cost, half of the price compared to other batteries. It's earlier, right? That's our biggest detriment is that we're not quite at bankable scale yet, we'll get there, right? As a young company you have to earn your stripes and get the UL certification and get enough things out there to do that. But there will be a number of winners in this space. Lithium ion is really good for certain applications, flow generally is good for daily discharges, think solar plus storage, deep discharge, multiple hour 4, 5, 6, 8 hour storage, and then there's going to be week long batteries that might be thermal based. There's a company that's moving, got a nice round of funding last week that's blocks of concrete around because you can, just like the pumped hydro you can move water up and down depending on the price of electricity and the use, you can move concrete blocks up and down. Spend energy moving it up, and then use gravity as your friend when you need electricity from the concrete battery. >> So, so in terms of future battery economy, like with multiple types of solutions for different sort of use cases right? >> Exactly. >> Whether sort of transportation or handheld, right, to residential, to grid-tied, etc.-- >> Absolutely, sure, and it will be drive by economics and then, you can't have a concrete battery in downtown San Francisco but you could in the middle of the Mojave-- >> Understood. >> So it would be-- >> Understood-- >> Absolutely-- >> Okay, so in order to kind of let you go here why don't you just talk a little bit about Primus, how you, where you guys are at in terms of your own evolution. How much deploy battery pods do you have out there in the world today? >> Sure, so Primus is at a stage now where we are growing. We're trying to grow at the right rate, because you don't want to get too far ahead of yourselves. We have systems up and down California, at some projects that have been put at waste water treatment centers, right, where we can help optimize the economics of the waste water treatment centers. They have components that are spending electricity they have solar, okay, batteries can help improve those economics. We have them at utilities that are testing them to see, "Okay, how well do these work?" Many of these new battery companies are where we are, where our customers are a try before you buy or a test before you invest type of a situation. We have a battery in China at one of China's largest wind turbine provider. Wind curtailment is acute in certain provinces in China. In fact in one of the provinces, Qinghai, in northwest China they passed a law a couple years ago that said "every new wind turbine has to have "a battery with it," so that's created a market there. >> Okay. >> There's also, we will be coming out with a residential version for some of the same reasons we mentioned about the wildfire concerns. >> Excellent, and so just give a sense how big, you talked about your pipeline and how many kind of quoted sales you've got out there. Just give us, the audience, a rough idea of what kind of pipeline you're looking at. >> Sure, so as a company we're moving from single digit million type of revenue that we did last year, to double digit million that we want to do next year. That translates into roughly 200-300 of our systems. Our systems, by the way, are think of a large washing machine, two meters, by two meters, by two meters. We have, in our pipeline of projects that we've quoted, more than a billion dollars worth of projects, a lot of solar-plus storage, a couple years from now. We won't get them all, for sure, but it shows the really strong interest in solutions like ours. >> Excellent, well exciting stuff Tom. Thank you for coming into TheCUBE and having a conversation with us. Appreciate you taking the time. >> Don, thank you very much, it was wonderful, really appreciate it! >> Donald Klein, thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation, we'll see you next time. (upbeat jazzy music)

>> Live from San Francisco. Its The Cube. Covering IBM Think 2019. Brought to you by, IBM. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, live here in The Cube here in San Francisco, exclusive coverage of IBM Think 2019. I'm John Furrier and Stu meeting next guest is Calline Sanchez, Vice President of IBM Systems Labs Services. New role for you, welcome back to the cube. >> Yes. Thank you for asking me back. >> So the new role, Vice President of the Systems Lab Services. Sounds super cool, sounds like you got a little lab in there, a little experimentation >> yeah think of it as a sandbox for geeks worldwide. And what that means is we enable high performance computing deployments as well as what we do with blockchain and also artificial intelligence. >> So its a play ground for people that want to do some big things, solve big problems, what are some of the things that you offer, just take us through how it works. Do I just jump in online, is it a physical location? What's it like ? In 2018 9000 plus engagements worldwide in 123 countries. So to net it out is, it's not necessarily a single lab or a single garage, we have multiple locations and skills worldwide to enable these engagements. >> How big is the organization roughly? Its over a thousand folks, consultants who are smart and capable. >> We had a conversation yesterday with Jamie Thomas, talking about, from a super computer stand point, now IBM's reclaimed the top couple of positions there and from a research stand point, David Floyer from our team has been talking for years about how HPC architectures are really going to permeate what happens in the industry and I think about distributed architectures, it all seems to go back to what people in the HPC environment lived in. You've got background in that, you worked for one of the big labs, explain how this has come from something some government lab used to do to something that now many more companies around the globe are leveraging. >> Before IBM I worked at Sandia National Laboratories and the reason why I chose to work with these awesome skills worldwide in lab services is that I wanted to be part of the cool group, so to speak. So they were doing work in deployments with Oak Ridge National Laboratories and also Laurence Lilvermore. So you'll hear (inaudible) with Laurence Livermore speak on stage about some of the relevance associated with high performance computing and why were number 1. So, to get to our question it's cool to be back online with what I could say, high performance computing deployment. We are the mechanics so to speak in this organization. Similar to what we do with formula 1, people who put on the tires, add the air and also enable the cars to move around. Well without them, guess what? Things don't move around. >> So you guys work on the high performance systems, you got quantum coming around the corner, you got AI front and center so you guys are like the hot shots. You come in, you build solutions with what's in the tool chest, if you will with IBM, is that right ? >> correct You're 100% correct. I will say it in my mind, we make things real. We deploy and implement strategic technologies worldwide for the benefit of our end users and we do that also with our partners. >> Give an example of an engagement you guys have had that's notable, that's worth sharing. >> Recently, this was a really exciting area a Smarter Cities with Kazakhstan. And so heres this independent city that works on basically AI for filming things whether its a security thing recognizing certain faces, deployments associated with weapons etc. And they were able to secure safety based on the film, films that they've taken, those assets. Now the other aspect is managing safer traffic. So even the president of Kazakhstan felt it was extremely relevant that we helped him deploy and he comes back to one of our European leaders saying, hey we need more of this and we want it to be extensive, we want to scale this opportunity. >> Talk about the philosophy's you guys are deploying because it sounds like its a... you said sandbox, when I think sandbox I think you do prototypes, I'm thinking about cool stuff, building solutions and that kind of brings this whole entrepreneurial creation mindset. Do you guys have like a design thinking methodology, is there things you're bringing to the table what else is involved besides the sandbox? >> You are correct. We have a very key component of design thinking. There's a CTO that reports to me directly who leads our overall design thinking and so that's a key component of what we do worldwide. Now as far as... We also enable incubation of technologies. So it's like what we intend to do with IBM Cube, What we intend to do with blockchain on system Z. So with these things we have garages worldwide to deploy or incubate the technology. >> What's the coolest thing you've worked on so far? Or the team's worked on? >> That's really hard to say 'cause there's so much. >> It's like picking a favorite child. >> Yeah, it's like I have way too many. So I was - >> You mention blockchain. I like blockchain. Blockchain, are you in healthcare, is it more, is there certain industries that are popping out for you guys? >> So healthcare is an example but I have seen it in the telecom area as well as other industries in general. So we have 11 industries in which we serve. >> How about AI? We're always trying to understand where customers are, how they're really moving things forward, to understand that that HPC architecture is a foundational layer for many customers to help deploy AI. Where are customers starting to make progress ? Give us some of the vibe you're feeling from customers out there. >> So its exciting with AI right now because we have Power Vision that allows us as any of us to actually exploit, utilize and play with, so to speak. So from my perspective that is what's nice, is that you can enable opportunities with the consumer market and learn. Similar to what we do with, and for instance, I am jumping around here, IMB Cube. Where users can actually become a user and start evaluating algorithms in order to enable this really amazing technology as in IB Cube. >> That was always the promise of big date, is that we should be able to leverage our data and get the average business user to do it. So it sounds like AI will continue that trend. >> Correct. So in prior rule, I talked to all of you about big data storage, right and replication. So now what's amazing about the conversations is that they've transcended. Its like, here you're looking to manage these large data warehouses, when, what do you do with the data? How's it monetized, how is it used in order to solution what's possible. >> What is the goal of the organization, next 6 months, year, what's the charter, what's your key performance indicators, how do you guys measure success, client engagements, onboarding people, what is the business objectives? >> So we look at the number of engagements, we also look at educational services worldwide for instance I will be in Cairo, Egypt next week to work on specific things that are going on in Mia in order to enable this next growth market so to speak. What in addition we do to measure ourselves, utilization, classic services organization view of the world. So we also evaluate what we can do with revenue, profit and our understanding of growth and we really believe the focus is these growth technologies. >> Is there a criteria if I wanted to get involved, just say I am a customer, prospect, wow, I really want to get into this design thinking, got these labs, coolest labs services, I want to play with the cutting edge technologies, how do I get involved? Is there a criteria open to all or how does it work? >> In addition to IBM Systems Labs Services, I have technical universities and we actually run technical universities worldwide for end users, clients as well as what we do with partners and IBMers. And this is important because we're able to then discuss, talk, collaborate with SME's across multiple areas of technology. So its a very good question and very important that I mention the technical universities. >> Are there certifications along that line? What are some of the hot skill sets that people are looking to learn about ? >> It circles right back to your last question, AI. With regards to how we certify folks as well as we, in essence, they get enough training in boot camps in order to get badges. >> So their certification, they just pass the touring test and then they're okay. >> correct. Well. (laughs) I don't know about the touring test so to speak. >> So is there a website on IBM.com, is there like a URL as in like labservices.ibm.com? >> I personally like the look at twitter where you can do a search on IBM Lab Services or Tech U. >> Tech U. And screening, how big is that focus, used a lot of video, is it collaborative tooling is it face to face, virtual, how do you guys do the training, all the above? >> Unfair, I was going to say all of the above. (laughs) It depends. (laughs) Giving that classic response, our favorite is video blogs. What we can do in social media with the YouTube channels etc. to get our opinions or our voice out with regards to key technologies. >> Well great, make sure you let us know what those channels are and we'll promote them, get that metadata out there, of course The Cube loves to collaborate. And thanks for coming on and sharing. >> I appreciate it and I will definitely take a sticker and put it on my laptop. >> Calline Sanchez, Vice President of the new IBM Systems Lab Services. A lot of opportunities to get in the worldwide sandbox and put the sluices together from blockchain to cutting edge AI. Your live coverage here at San Francisco at IBM Think, I'm (inaudible) stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (lively music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Madrid, Spain, it's theCUBE. Covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017, brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> We're back in Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Peter Burris. And many-time Cube guest Xavier Poisson is back. He's the vice president of Cloud28+ and service providers worldwide for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And he's joined by Eugene Viskovic, who is the chief business officer at Veon, a Cloud28+ partner. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Welcome back, Xavier, it's good to see you again. >> Thank you, hi. >> Hi. So give us the update on Cloud 28. It started out as sort of this focused European effort. It has exploded now globally. What's the update? >> So I don't remember, I don't know if you remember it. It was last year, the same event. We were in London, I believe. And we were saying, "Okay, we are 300. "How many will be next year?" I took that back. It will be 700. We are 700. >> Dave: Wow, congratulations. >> 700 members. We have been expanding in the different geographies. So also in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, but we expanded in North America, in A-Pac, Latin America, and Caribbean. So now we are present in 60 countries. We are proposing 24,000 cloud services, so the catalog has been expanding dramatically. We are offering capabilities, data center capabilities from all partners in 33 countries. And we can offer from 400 data centers already. So average we have 40,000 hits per month on the platform, acquiring members and so on. And, yes, it has been a delight to launch that everywhere. It's really taking off very, very quickly. >> And the basic value proposition, you are essentially enabling cloud partners to create cloud-like business capabilities. >> Yeah, so what we do is, first of all, we enable the partners to get known on the market on this side, to publish all their services built and consume also. So it's not only IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, but also integration services as well because it's a comprehensive value chain. Then, what we do, we're not a marketplace where people go and leave. In the center, they can speak everyday. So they publish articles, full leadership articles around security, big data, manufacturing, and so on and so on. This year, only this year, they have published 600 articles. So when you're a customer, you go to this platform. You can see the offering, but you can see how the vendor is positioning himself around the market, his value-add, and what they are doing. So digital marketing a lot, also for them. We have been increasing the value on the market of many of our partners with social media because we are very good activity in this area, and also lead-generation engine because now we have so much offerings that we can target specific campaigns for our partners in specific geographies and generate a lot of leads on the market. Last, but not least, the market is evolving. We have a lot of partners, so we create platform-connected offerings. Example we have done is a specific cloud-in-a-box for manufacturing for plants where, in six clicks, you can provision from Cloud28+ all your information system for a plant. So this is also the kind of things that we do. >> Great, okay, Eugene, tell us about Veon. Why are you in business? What's your story? >> Okay, yes. Just talk a few minutes about Veon because it's not a very well-known name around the world, and don't be ashamed if you don't know Veon because it still is the seventh largest mobile operator in the world. It's significant. We are, today, around 42,000 employees, over 12 different countries. I have to say, very unusual countries. Not the type of countries you may choose to go for holidays, but it would be a shame because, honestly, some of them are good like, you know, all Eurasia, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Russia. We have also emerging market, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Algeria, and one, only one European market, which is Italy with WIND, WIND Three. Which means it's a very large region. We are dealing with 10, more than 10% of the total population of the globe, 235 million customers, which is significant. And within this organization, there is an enterprise division, which I'm leading, which is around 4,500 people dedicated for enterprise and wholesales. Full revenue around $3 billion, just to give you a scale on who we are. Again, not very well-known, but definitely within our footprint we are the number one in this particular region of the world. >> It's sizable, substantial business. >> Eugene: Exactly, yes. >> So what's driving your business today? Obviously mobile is exploding. >> Yes, it's clear we came from the mobile business. We are number one mobile operator in the majority of these countries. We are what we call some fixed business. And since the last two, three years when I joined the organization, we completely reorganized our business model and moving more into the what we call value added services, ICT services. And one of the components, definitely, was to try to find a partner for our cloud proposition. You need to understand that we're in a very emerging market for this type of subject. We are sitting in a very traditional way, you know, how enterprise operating. They own the infrastructure, they own data center, they own the servers, the management platform, and their own people. And they have not yet shifted to this new model, which is to try to outsource some of the infrastructure. And this is where we came into the game as a global provider in order to have enterprise really to operate the shift. There is also another interesting situation is every time we bid a cloud proposition, usually we try to centerize it and have different country. In our part of the world is not possible. We have to set up a cloud platform in every single of our countries for regulatory constraints, which is not very economical, but definitely it's an opportunity for us to lead this market especially with HP Enterprise. >> Well, it allows you to differentiate, as well, from some of the mega-cloud providers that everybody knows, everybody talks about. So is that a primary way in which you compete? >> Oh, completely. It's clear the big players today are not very well-implemented in this part of the world because of this particular constraint, outside of Italy which is a little bit different game. But it's clear in Russia and Eurasia, yes. Today there is a opportunity. We believe that we want to be the single provider within this region operating across different market segments because we're covering from SO up to multinational accounts, even government. And having a set of value propositions we can offer across every single of our countries. >> Xavier, is it common that, amongst the Cloud28+ partners, there's that theme of local presence, of course, but is there also a differential in terms of what the partners will do, the types of work they'll do, customizations? >> Yeah, typically the case of Veon is very specific because they address very specific markets. Some other players will ask different things. But what is very important in the case of Veon is, first of all, to have a ready-to-deploy solution that you can industrialize in different countries. So this is the reason why we played with one of the technology partners of Cloud28+, with Ormuco, who has a cloud-in-a-box solution that can be deployed and managed remotely if needed. But that was fitting the needs of the market. Then, what we need to do is really to engage locally. So, in this particular case, what we're going to do is to engage with the HP organization in order that when we have the needs for our customers to go for cloud computing kind of workloads, we say, "Okay, we have the solution. "We have a partner, a Cloud28+ partner, "who took the decision to go with us, "and we trust each other. "So you, Mr. Customer, you want to do "backup as a service, disaster recovery "as a service, compute, storage as a service, "or security as a service, Veon is there." And the good point is Veon is there on very qualified hardware of HP synergy with a very good solution, which is one of the solution ready for service providers of HPE and operated by a very serious tech operator with the number six on the market, this is Veon. And we go together. So in this particular case, what was interesting was to have a solution that can be deployed everywhere the same with workloads that may fit with the different expectations of the market, engage the HP people to play with and, then, we market and with Cloud28+ we'll amplify their message. We will be able to drive lead generation campaigns. We'll be able to onboard our resellers because one thing I believe is that in this kind of regions, people don't go, as you say, Eugene, directly to the cloud. They continue to go to their resellers and, "What do I need to do?" And here, you know that we have the largest reseller network in the industry. So we will introduce this solution to our resellers in order that when a reseller of HPE is in front of such a case, it can have the mind to say, "Okay, let's engage with Veon." So this is the way we are going to operate. >> So when I think of many of the Akistan countries, I think of natural resources, challenging topography, challenging terrain. How does the physical reality and the industries that typify that region impact the way you're providing cloud services? >> It's clear, we're talking sometime a very, very large geography in terms of country size. When you take only in Russia. >> Mountainous. >> Eleven time zones you have in one single country. And when we operate, yes we have to spread our capability in order to be able to touch every single country, including in some infrastructure. Especially as a carrier, I like to imagine how much we need to pull fiber, cable, across the country and have these different set up of infrastructure, cloud propositions, to make sure we can serve better in term latency especially when we're talking about financial sections and so on, which brings some level of complexity and, as I said earlier, also some level of efficiency in term investment because we are not in a perfect world, especially when we talk about the regulatory constraints, which, yes, we need to find some middle way. How we can have a better, being still competitive, but as sometimes still delivering the expected quality. But you are right. This particular part of the world require a lot of work in term of physical infrastructure and also in our team. Our people are spread across these different countries, and for that reason yes, it's not an easy situation. >> Does it drive, are you likely to see a higher demand? HPE talks about the intelligent edge. Are you likely to see a higher demand for things like the intelligent edge because of the nature of the natural resource industry's petrochemical, et cetera, mountainous regions and a lot of communities that you serve, is that going to be a driver of new services or is it going to be something else? What do you think? >> Well, I think there would be two aspects. The first one, there is, definitely, a requirement driven, very often, by very large, multinational corporations. You'll be surprised how this multinational corporations are covering this part of the world. You have natural resources. All the western industry is present. And because they are present, they need to bring their standard in term of infrastructure they are using within this particular country. That the reason, yes, the demand is coming from there. At the same time, you have the rest of the market in term of large, local businesses where it's clear. They are moving. If you're looking in our part of the world, we are exactly where we were 10 years ago in Europe, in North America, and in Asia. We are really into emerging in face, in adopting this type of infrastructure. It's clear it's going to go much more quicker because, on top of that, enterprises have big pressure to reduce costs, but at the same time not to sacrifice the quality, what they're looking. Which, again, together we're capable and we can demonstrate they can get better for less. And this is a big work, and that's the reason when Xavier was mentioning about working together in each of the countries, this was one of the critical element in choosing with HP Enterprise because I'm a mobile operator and fixed. I'm not yet organized as an ICT services or cloud. It was very important for me, if we wanted to go very quickly to associate a brand with a leading organization like HP. And I have to say, I have tested several times. Every time we say, "Okay, we are in "partnership with HP Enterprise. "We are partnered with Cloud28+." This ring immediately the bell of the enterprise we are meeting, and it's easier for us to move quicker. But, definitely, I think we have a big, big opportunity. Large market to address, but definitely something interesting to go after. >> And it's early days, it's only been two years now, what do you want from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and what are you guys going to deliver? Let's talk road map a little bit. First, from the partner/customer. What are you driving HPE and Xavier to deliver? >> For me there would be three axes in term of development. The first one in term of value proposition. We want to be able, over the next 12, 18 months to be able to offer to the market a full set of propositions, as you mentioned earlier. But Xavier, in term of public, private, hybrid cloud, and moving to different solution, we're talking about security. And, also, we're moving into more vertical market approach. We're talking about IUT where will also be some direction. This is the first ax. The second one, it's in term of countries. We're not going to launch a platform in every single, as I said earlier. We need to do it country by country. We are starting with Russia, Ukraine, Pakistan will come behind, Algeria. Very quickly, over the next 12 months, we are going to launch one by one these different countries. And the last element for us, which is also very key, is market segment. We are organized, as I said, by market segment. SO, small-medium enterprise, large key account, multinational corporation, and government. And each of these segments have different requirements. And we need to customize our approach. This is where where working with HP and Ormuco, we want to have a very customized, bi-market segment from highly customized to off-the-shelf type proposition. But, for me, these would be the three key axes in term of development working with HP Enterprise. >> And Xavier, how does that align with your roadmap? >> Well, you know, it's fully alligned in the sense that, first of all, we are expanding a lot the value prop of Cloud28+ with ISV software vendors. And the problems of telcos and service providers moving to the cloud, that's correct there is ICT branding, and there we can help. But this is the content because one day or another, they will face what the others have been facing, even in these countries, meaning yes is not enough. So if you have a portfolio of applications, verticals, horizontal applications, that they can use to continue to satisfy the demand of the market, so it will be great for them, and we are investing a lot in this order. The other thing is today I believe that we have now reached a maturity on digital marketing with Cloud28+, which is impressive. We had a big event yesterday. I will not give to you the number of impression we had only in four hours. It has been massive. If we take that, we put this at the disposal of this partner in every single country, we will speed them on the market. So these are the two big elements. The third element is what I said about this platform connected solutions because the more we go, the more we see that our outside-in approach with Cloud28+, thinking customers first, is excellent. We need to continue on that. But, as you were mentioning, the move to the edge, we see more and more solutions for energy, for manufacturing, oil and gas, environment, that we need pure hybrid because you cannot put everything into a cloud. And where we are lucky with Veon is that they have the network. So you can imagine, they have their big cloud in a country that they could deploy also some private cloud very, very quickly in specific area within an oil and gas land or I don't know where in energy, mining, or where you have not that. And you cannot, because of latency issues you cannot go directly to the cloud, but you need to handle at the edge, send back to the cloud for analytics or AI or so on, and this will be at the disposal for them. And I believe the combination of the two for that will be for the benefit of the customer. So this is my opinion. >> I completely agree. I think they approach, in term of the partnership, as I said, I think when we're going to deal with very large organizations is going to be very infrastructure-type discussion driven. But when we're going to cool down, it's purely, definitely Sowasis, content. I want to be able to address, for example, the marketing department, how we can help them to understand the behavior of a consumer by using data, big data, you know, analytics. In term of delivery for an organization, using fleet management. In term of manufacturing, using more IUT. But when you look at these different solutions, what is below is a type of infrastructure. Is to have a cloud infrastructure where we can rely on a strong partnership, bringing this solution, and offering to our customer definitely a very cost-effective but also agile, very, you know, able to move with the market demand in a very vertical way, but definitely this is a way we want to work together. >> Excellent. All right, we have to leave it there, gentlemen. Cloud is exploding. Cloud is going to be local. We've talked about this a lot. Hybrid IT, intelligence edge with a local flavor. Gentlemen, thanks very much for coming. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> And congratulations for all the success. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering Spark Summit East 2017. Brought to you by Databricks. Now, here are your hosts Dave Vellante and George Gilbert. >> Welcome back to snowy Boston, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at Spark Summit East, hashtag SparkSummit. Manish Gupta is here, he's the CMO at Redis Labs. Manish, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So, you know, 10 years ago you say you're in the database business and everybody would yawn. Now you're the life of the party. >> Yeah, the world has changed. I think the party has lots and lots of players. We are happy to be on the top of that heap. >> It is a crowded space, so how does Redis Labs differentiate? >> Redis Labs is the company behind the massively popular open source Redis, and Redis became popular because of its performance primarily, and then simplicity. Developers could very easily run up an instance of Redis, solve some very hairy problems, and time to market was a big issue for them. Redis Enterprise took that forward and enabled it to be mission critical, ready for the largest workloads, ready for things that the enterprises need in a highly distributed clustered environment. So they have resilience and they benefit from the performance of Redis. >> And your claim to fame, as you say, is that top-gun performance, you guys will talk about some of the benchmarks later. We're talking about use cases like fraud detection, as example. Obviously ad serving would be another one. But add some color to that if you would. >> Redis is whatever you need to make real time real, Redis plays a very important role. It is able to deliver millions of operations per second with sub-millisecond latency, and that's the hallmark. With data structures that comprise Redis, you can solve the problems in a way, and the reason you can get that performance is because the data structures take some very complex issues and simplify the operation. Depending on the use case, you could use one of the data structures, you can mix and match the data structures, so that's the power of a Redis. We're used for ITO, for machine learning, for metering of billing and telecommunications environment, for personalization, for ad serving with companies like Groupon and others, and the list goes on and on. >> Yeah, you've got a big list on your website of all your customers, so you can check that out. Let's get the business model piece out of the way. Everybody's always fascinated. Okay, you got open source, how do you make money? How does Redis make money? >> Yeah, you know, we believe strategically fostering the growth of open source is foundational in our business model, and we invest heavily both R&D and marketing to do that. On top of that, to enable enterprise success and deployment of Redis, we have the mission critical, highly available Redis Enterprise offerings. Our monetization is entirely based on the Redis Enterprise platform, which takes advantage of the data structures and performance of core Redis, but layers on top management and the capabilities that make things like auto-recovery, auto-sorting, management much, much easier for the enterprise. We make that available in four deployment models. The enterprise can select us as Redis cloud, which runs on a public infrastructure on any of the four major platforms. We also allow for the enterprise to select a VPC environment in their own private clouds. They can also get software and self-manage that, or get our software and we can manage it for them. Four deployment options are the modalities in other ways where the enterprise customers help us monetize. >> When you said four major platforms, you meant cloud platforms? >> That's right. AWS, >> So, AWS, Azure >> Azure, Google, and IBM. >> Is IBM software, got there in the fourth, alright. >> That's right, all four. >> Go to the whip IBM. Go ahead, George. >> Along the lines of the business model, and we were sort of starting to talk about this earlier offline, you're just one component in building an application, and there's always this challenge of, well, I can manage my component better than anyone else, but it's got to fit with a bunch of other vendors' components. How do you make that seamless to the customer so that it's not defaulting over to a cloud vendor who has to build all the components themselves to make it work together? >> Certainly, you know, database is an integral part of your stack, of your application stack, but it is a stack, so there are other components. Redis and Redis Labs has a very, very large ecosystem within which we operate. We work closely with others for interfaces, for connectors, for interoperability, and that's a sustained environment that we invest in on a continuous basis. >> How do handle application consistency? A lot of in the no-SQL world, even in the AWS world, you hear about eventual consistency, but in the real-time world, there's a need for more rigorous, what's your philosophy there, how do you approach that? >> I think that's an issue that many no-SQL vendors have not been able to crack. Redis Labs has been at the forefront of that. We are taking an approach, and we are offering what we call tuneable consistency. Depending on the economics and the business model and the use case, the needs of consistency vary. In some cases, you do need immediate consistency. In other cases, you don't ever need consistency. And to give that flexibility to the customer is very important, so we've taken the approach where you can go from loose consistency to what we call strong eventual consistency. That approach is based on a fairly well trusted architecture and approach called CRDT, Conflict-free Replication Data Type. That approach allows us to, regardless of what the cluster magnitude or the distribution looks like geographically, we can deliver strong eventual consistency which meets the needs of majority of the customers. >> What are you seeing in terms of, you know, also in that a discussion about acid properties, and how many workloads really need acid properties. What are seeing now as you get more cloud native workloads and more no-SQL oriented workloads in terms of the requirement for those acid properties? >> First of all, we truly believe and agree that not all environments required acid support. Having said that, to be a truly credible database, you must support acid, and we do. Redis is acid-compli, supports acid, and Redis Labs certainly supports that. >> I remember on a stage once with Curt Monash, I'm sure you know Curt, right? Very famous database person. And he basically had a similar answer. But you would say that increasingly there are workloads that, the growth workloads don't necessarily require that, is that fair statement? >> That's a fair statement I would say. >> Dave: Great, good. >> There's a trade-off, though, when you talked about strong eventual consistency, potentially you have to wait for, presumably, a quorum of the partitions, I'm getting really technical here, but in other words, you've got a copy of the data here-- >> Dave: Good CMO question. (laughing) >> But your value proposition to the customers, we get this stuff done fast, but if you have to wait for a couple other servers to make sure that they've got the update, that can slow things way down. How does that trade-off work? >> I think that's part of the power of our architecture. We have a nothing shared, single proxy architecture where all of the replication, the disaster recovery, and the consistency management of the back end is handled by the proxy, and we ensure that the performance is not degraded when you are working through the consistency challenges, and that's where significant amount of IP is in the development of that proxy. >> I'll take that as a, let's go into it even more offline. >> Manish: Sounds good. >> And I have some other CMO questions, if I may. A lot of young companies like yours, especially in open source world, when they go to get the word out, they rely on their community, their open source community, and that's the core, and that makes a lot of sense, it's their peeps. As you become, grow more into enterprise grade apps and workloads, how do you extend beyond that? What is Redis Labs doing to sort of reach that C-Suite, are you even trying to reach that C-Suite up level to messaging? How do you as a CMO deal with those challenges? >> Maybe I'll begin by talking about our personas that matter to us in the ecosystem. The enterprise level, the architects, the developers, are the primary target, which we try to influence in early part of the decision cycle, it's at the architectural level. The ultimate teams that manage, run, and operate the infrastructure is certainly the DevOps, or the operations teams, and we spend time there. All along for some of the enterprise engagements, CIOs, chief data officers, and CTOs tend to play a very important role in the decisions and the selection process, and so, we do influence and interact with the C-Suite quite heavily. What the power of the open source gives us is that groundswell of love for Redis. Literally you can walk around a developer environment, such as the Spark Summit here, and you'll find people wearing Redis Geek shirts. And we get emails from Kazakhstan and strange, places from all over the world where we don't necessarily have salesforce, and requesting t-shirts, "send us stickers." Because people love Redis, and the word of mouth, that ground level love for the technology enables the decisions to be so much easier and smoother. We're not convincing, it's not a philosophical battle anymore. It's simply about the use case and the solution where Redis Enterprise fits or doesn't fit. >> Okay, so it really is that core developer community that are your advocates, and they're able to internally sell to the C-Suite. A lot of times the C-Suite, not the CTO so much, but certainly the CIO, CDO are like, "Yeah, yeah, they're geekin' out on some new hot thing. "What's the business impact?" Do you get that question a lot, and how do address it? >> I think then you get to some of the very basic tools, ROI calculators and the value proposition. For the C-level, the message is very simple. We are the least risky bet. We are the best long-term proposition, and we are the best cost answer for their implementation. Particularly as the needs are increasingly becoming more real-time in nature, they are not batch processed. Yes, there will always be some of that, but as the workloads are becoming, there is a need for faster processing, there is a need for quick insights, and real-time is not a moniker anymore, right. Real-time truly needs to be delivered today. And so, I think those three propositions for the C-Suite are resonating very well. >> Let's talk about ROI calculators for a second. I love talking about it because it underscores what a company feels as though its core value proposition is. I would think with Redis Labs part of the value proposition is you are enabling new types of workloads and new types of, whether it's sources of revenue or productivity. And these are generally telephone numbers as compared to some of the cost savings head to head to your competition, which of course you want to stress as well because the CFO cares about the cap-backs. What do you emphasize in that, and we don't have to get into the calculator itself, but in the conceptual model, what's the emphasis? Is it on those sort of business value attributes, is it on the sort of cost-savings? How do you translate performance into that business value? A lot of questions there, but if you could summarize, that'd be great. >> Well, I think you can think of it in three dimensions. The very first one is, does the performance support the use case or the solution that is required? That's the very first one. The second piece that fits in it, and that's in our books, that's operations per second and the latency. The second piece is the cost side, and that has two components to it. The first component is, what are the compute requirements? So, what is the infrastructure underneath that has to support it? And the efficiency that Redis and Redis Enterprise has is dramatically superior to the alternatives. And so, the economics show up. To run a million operations per second, we can do that on two nodes as opposed to alternative, which might need 50 nodes or 300 nodes. >> You can utilize your assets on the floor much better than maybe the competition can. >> This is where the data structures come into play quite a bit. That's one part of-- >> Dave: That's one part of the cost. >> Yeah. The other part of the cost is the human cost. >> Dave: People, yeah. >> And because, and this goes back to the open source, because the people available with the talent and the competency and appreciation for Redis, it's easy to procure those people, and your cost of acquisition and deploying goes down quite a bit. So, there's a human cost to it. The third dimension to this whole equation is time to market. And time to market is measured in many ways. Is it lost revenue if it takes you longer to get there? And Redis consistently from multiple analysts' reports gets top ranking for fastest way to get to market because of how simple it is. Beyond performance, simplicity is a second hallmark. >> That's a benefit acceleration, and you can quantify that. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And that's a revenue parameter, right. >> For years, people have been saying this Cambrian explosion of databases is unsustainable, and sort of in response we've gotten a squaring of the Cambrian explosion. The question is, with your sort of very flexible, I don't want to get too geeky, 'cause Dave'll cut me off, but the idea that you can accommodate time series and all these different ways of, all these different types of data, are we approaching a situation where customers can start consolidating their database choices and have fewer vendors, fewer products in their landscape? >> I think not only are we getting there, but we must get there. You've got over 300 databases in the marketplace, and imagine a CIO or an architect trying to have to sort through that to make a decision, it's difficult, and you certainly cannot support it from a trading standpoint or from an investment, cap-backs, and all that standpoint. What we have done with Redis is introduce something called Redis Modules. We released that at the last RedisConf in May in San Francisco. And the Redis Module is a very simple concept but a very powerful concept. It's an API which can be utilized to take an existing development effort, written as CC++, that can be ported onto the Redis data structures. This gives you the flexibility without having to reinvent the wheel every single time to take that investment, port it on top of Redis, and you get the performance, and you can make now Redis becomes a multi-model database. And I'm going to get to your answer of how do you address the multiple needs so you don't need multiple databases. To give you some examples, since the introduction of Redis Modules, we have now over 50 modules that have been published by a variety of places, not just Redis Labs. To indicate how simple and how powerful this model is. We took Lucene and developed the world's fastest full-text search engine as a module. We have very recently introduced Redis machine learning as a module that works with Spark ML and serves as a great serving layer in the machine learning domain. Just two very simple examples, but work that's being done ported over onto Redis data structures and now you have ability to do some very powerful things because of what Redis is. And this is the way future's going to be. I think every database is trying to offer multi-functionality to be multi-model in nature, but instead of doing it one step at a time, this approach gives us the ability to leverage the entire ecosystem. >> Your point being consolidation's inevitable in this business as well. >> Manish: Architectural consolidation. >> Yes, but also you would think, company consolidation, isn't that going to follow? What do you make of the market, and tell me, if you look back on the database market and what Oracle was able to achieve in the face of, maybe not as many players, but you had Sybase and Informix, and certainly DB2's still around, and SQL Server's still around, but Oracle won, and maybe it was SQL standards that. It's great to be lucky and good. Can we learn from that, or is this a whole different world? Are there similarities, and how do you, how do you see that consolidation potentially shaking out, if you agree that there will be consolidation? >> Yeah, there has to be, first and foremost, an architectural approach that solves the OPEX, CAPEX challenge for the enterprise. But beyond that, no industry can sustain the diversity and the fragmentation that exists in database world. I think there will always be new things coming out, of universities particularly. There's great innovation and research happening, and that is required to augment. But at the end of the day, the commercial enterprises cannot be of the fragmented volume that we have today in the database world, so there is going to be some consolidation, and it's not unnatural. I think it's natural, it's expected, time will tell what that looks like. We've seen some of our competitors acquire smaller companies to add graph functionality, to add search functionality. We just don't think that's the level of consolidation that really moves the needle for the industry. It's got to be at a higher level of consolidation. >> I don't want to, don't take this the wrong way, don't hate me for saying it, but is Oracle sort of the enemy, if I can say that. I mean, it's like, no, okay. >> Depends how you define enemy. >> I'm not going to go do many of the workloads that you're talking about on Oracle, despite what Larry tells me at Oracle OpenWorld. And I'm not going to make Oracle my choice for any of the workloads that you guys are working on. I guess in terms, I mean, everybody who's in the database business looks at that and say, "Hey, we can do it cheaper, better, "more productively," but, could you respond to that, and what do you make of Amazon's moves in the database world? Does that concern you? >> We think of Amazon and Oracle as two very different philosophies, if you can use that word. The approach we have taken is really a forward-looking approach and philosophy. We believe that the needs of the market need to be solved in new ways, and new ways should not be encumbered by old approaches. We're not trying to go and replicate what was done in the SQL world or in a relational database world. Our approach is how do you deliver a multi-model database that has the real-time attribute attached to it in a way that requires very limited computer force power and very few resources to manage? You take all of those things as kind of the core philosophy, which is a forward-looking philosophy. We are definitely not trying to replicate what an Oracle used to be. AWS I think is a very different animal. >> Dave: Interesting, though. >> They have defined the cloud, and I think play a very important role. We are a strong partner of theirs, much of our traffic runs on AWS infrastructure, certainly also on other clouds. I think AWS is one to watch in how they evolve. They have database offerings, including Redis offerings. However, we fully recognize, and the industry recognizes that that's not to the same capability as Redis Enterprise. It's open sourced Redis managed by AWS, and that's fine as a cache, but you cannot persist, and you really cannot have a multi-model capability that's a full database in that approach. >> And you're in the marketplace. >> Manish: We are in the marketplace. >> Obviously. >> And actually, we announced earlier, a few weeks ago, that you can buy and get Redis cloud access, which is Redis Enterprise cloud, on AWS through the integrated billing approach on their marketplace. You can have an AWS account and get our service, the true Redis Enterprise service. >> And as a software company, you'd figure, okay, the cloud infrastructures are service, we don't care what infrastructure it runs on. Whatever the customer wants, but you see AWS making these moves up-market, you got to obviously be paying attention to that. >> Manish: Certainly, certainly. >> Go ahead, last question. >> Interesting that you were saying that to solve this problem of proliferation of choice it has to be multi-model with speed and low resource requirement. If I were to interpret that from an old-style database perspective, it would be you're going to get, the multi-model is something you are addressing now, with the extensibility, but the speed means taking out that abstraction layer that was the query optimizer sort of and working almost at the storage layer, or having an option to do that. Would that be a fair way to say? >> No, I don't think that necessarily needs to be the case. For us, speed translates from the simplicity and the power of the data structures. Instead of having to serialize, deserialize before you process data in a Spark context, or instead of having to look for data that is perhaps not put in sorted sets for a use case that you might be doing, running a query on, if the data is already handled through one of the data structures, you now have a much faster query time, you now have the ability to reach the data in the right approach. And again, this is no-SQL, right, so it's a schema lesson write and it sets your scheme as you want it be on read. We marry that with the data structures, and that gives you the ultimate speed. >> We have to leave it there, but Manish, I'll give you the last word. Things we should be paying attention to for Redis Labs this year, events, announcements? >> I think the big thing I would leave the audience with is RedisConf 2017. It's May 31 to June 2 in San Francisco. We are expecting over 1,000 people. The brightest minds around Redis of the database world will be there, and anybody who is considering deploying the next generation database should attend. >> Dave: Where are you doing that? >> It's the Marriott Marquis in San Franciso. >> Great, is that on Howard Street, across from the--? >> It is right across from Moscone. >> Great, awesome location. People know it, easy to get to. Well, congratulations on the success. We'll be lookin' for outputs from that event, and hope to see you again on theCUBE. >> Thank you, enjoyed the conversation. >> Alright, good. Keep it right there, everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Spark Summit East. Be right back. (upbeat electronic rock music)