(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCube's presentation of the "AWS Startup Showcase." The topic this episode is AI and machine learning, top startups building foundational model infrastructure. This is season three, episode one of the ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. And this time we're talking about AI and machine learning. I'm your host, John Furrier. I'm excited I'm joined today by Robert Nishihara, who's the co-founder and CEO of a hot startup called Anyscale. He's here to talk about Ray, the open source project, Anyscale's infrastructure for foundation as well. Robert, thank you for joining us today. >> Yeah, thanks so much as well. >> I've been following your company since the founding pre pandemic and you guys really had a great vision scaled up and in a perfect position for this big wave that we all see with ChatGPT and OpenAI that's gone mainstream. Finally, AI has broken out through the ropes and now gone mainstream, so I think you guys are really well positioned. I'm looking forward to to talking with you today. But before we get into it, introduce the core mission for Anyscale. Why do you guys exist? What is the North Star for Anyscale? >> Yeah, like you mentioned, there's a tremendous amount of excitement about AI right now. You know, I think a lot of us believe that AI can transform just every different industry. So one of the things that was clear to us when we started this company was that the amount of compute needed to do AI was just exploding. Like to actually succeed with AI, companies like OpenAI or Google or you know, these companies getting a lot of value from AI, were not just running these machine learning models on their laptops or on a single machine. They were scaling these applications across hundreds or thousands or more machines and GPUs and other resources in the Cloud. And so to actually succeed with AI, and this has been one of the biggest trends in computing, maybe the biggest trend in computing in, you know, in recent history, the amount of compute has been exploding. And so to actually succeed with that AI, to actually build these scalable applications and scale the AI applications, there's a tremendous software engineering lift to build the infrastructure to actually run these scalable applications. And that's very hard to do. So one of the reasons many AI projects and initiatives fail is that, or don't make it to production, is the need for this scale, the infrastructure lift, to actually make it happen. So our goal here with Anyscale and Ray, is to make that easy, is to make scalable computing easy. So that as a developer or as a business, if you want to do AI, if you want to get value out of AI, all you need to know is how to program on your laptop. Like, all you need to know is how to program in Python. And if you can do that, then you're good to go. Then you can do what companies like OpenAI or Google do and get value out of machine learning. >> That programming example of how easy it is with Python reminds me of the early days of Cloud, when infrastructure as code was talked about was, it was just code the infrastructure programmable. That's super important. That's what AI people wanted, first program AI. That's the new trend. And I want to understand, if you don't mind explaining, the relationship that Anyscale has to these foundational models and particular the large language models, also called LLMs, was seen with like OpenAI and ChatGPT. Before you get into the relationship that you have with them, can you explain why the hype around foundational models? Why are people going crazy over foundational models? What is it and why is it so important? >> Yeah, so foundational models and foundation models are incredibly important because they enable businesses and developers to get value out of machine learning, to use machine learning off the shelf with these large models that have been trained on tons of data and that are useful out of the box. And then, of course, you know, as a business or as a developer, you can take those foundational models and repurpose them or fine tune them or adapt them to your specific use case and what you want to achieve. But it's much easier to do that than to train them from scratch. And I think there are three, for people to actually use foundation models, there are three main types of workloads or problems that need to be solved. One is training these foundation models in the first place, like actually creating them. The second is fine tuning them and adapting them to your use case. And the third is serving them and actually deploying them. Okay, so Ray and Anyscale are used for all of these three different workloads. Companies like OpenAI or Cohere that train large language models. Or open source versions like GPTJ are done on top of Ray. There are many startups and other businesses that fine tune, that, you know, don't want to train the large underlying foundation models, but that do want to fine tune them, do want to adapt them to their purposes, and build products around them and serve them, those are also using Ray and Anyscale for that fine tuning and that serving. And so the reason that Ray and Anyscale are important here is that, you know, building and using foundation models requires a huge scale. It requires a lot of data. It requires a lot of compute, GPUs, TPUs, other resources. And to actually take advantage of that and actually build these scalable applications, there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to happen under the hood. And so you can either use Ray and Anyscale to take care of that and manage the infrastructure and solve those infrastructure problems. Or you can build the infrastructure and manage the infrastructure yourself, which you can do, but it's going to slow your team down. It's going to, you know, many of the businesses we work with simply don't want to be in the business of managing infrastructure and building infrastructure. They want to focus on product development and move faster. >> I know you got a keynote presentation we're going to go to in a second, but I think you hit on something I think is the real tipping point, doing it yourself, hard to do. These are things where opportunities are and the Cloud did that with data centers. Turned a data center and made it an API. The heavy lifting went away and went to the Cloud so people could be more creative and build their product. In this case, build their creativity. Is that kind of what's the big deal? Is that kind of a big deal happening that you guys are taking the learnings and making that available so people don't have to do that? >> That's exactly right. So today, if you want to succeed with AI, if you want to use AI in your business, infrastructure work is on the critical path for doing that. To do AI, you have to build infrastructure. You have to figure out how to scale your applications. That's going to change. We're going to get to the point, and you know, with Ray and Anyscale, we're going to remove the infrastructure from the critical path so that as a developer or as a business, all you need to focus on is your application logic, what you want the the program to do, what you want your application to do, how you want the AI to actually interface with the rest of your product. Now the way that will happen is that Ray and Anyscale will still, the infrastructure work will still happen. It'll just be under the hood and taken care of by Ray in Anyscale. And so I think something like this is really necessary for AI to reach its potential, for AI to have the impact and the reach that we think it will, you have to make it easier to do. >> And just for clarification to point out, if you don't mind explaining the relationship of Ray and Anyscale real quick just before we get into the presentation. >> So Ray is an open source project. We created it. We were at Berkeley doing machine learning. We started Ray so that, in order to provide an easy, a simple open source tool for building and running scalable applications. And Anyscale is the managed version of Ray, basically we will run Ray for you in the Cloud, provide a lot of tools around the developer experience and managing the infrastructure and providing more performance and superior infrastructure. >> Awesome. I know you got a presentation on Ray and Anyscale and you guys are positioning as the infrastructure for foundational models. So I'll let you take it away and then when you're done presenting, we'll come back, I'll probably grill you with a few questions and then we'll close it out so take it away. >> Robert: Sounds great. So I'll say a little bit about how companies are using Ray and Anyscale for foundation models. The first thing I want to mention is just why we're doing this in the first place. And the underlying observation, the underlying trend here, and this is a plot from OpenAI, is that the amount of compute needed to do machine learning has been exploding. It's been growing at something like 35 times every 18 months. This is absolutely enormous. And other people have written papers measuring this trend and you get different numbers. But the point is, no matter how you slice and dice it, it' a astronomical rate. Now if you compare that to something we're all familiar with, like Moore's Law, which says that, you know, the processor performance doubles every roughly 18 months, you can see that there's just a tremendous gap between the needs, the compute needs of machine learning applications, and what you can do with a single chip, right. So even if Moore's Law were continuing strong and you know, doing what it used to be doing, even if that were the case, there would still be a tremendous gap between what you can do with the chip and what you need in order to do machine learning. And so given this graph, what we've seen, and what has been clear to us since we started this company, is that doing AI requires scaling. There's no way around it. It's not a nice to have, it's really a requirement. And so that led us to start Ray, which is the open source project that we started to make it easy to build these scalable Python applications and scalable machine learning applications. And since we started the project, it's been adopted by a tremendous number of companies. Companies like OpenAI, which use Ray to train their large models like ChatGPT, companies like Uber, which run all of their deep learning and classical machine learning on top of Ray, companies like Shopify or Spotify or Instacart or Lyft or Netflix, ByteDance, which use Ray for their machine learning infrastructure. Companies like Ant Group, which makes Alipay, you know, they use Ray across the board for fraud detection, for online learning, for detecting money laundering, you know, for graph processing, stream processing. Companies like Amazon, you know, run Ray at a tremendous scale and just petabytes of data every single day. And so the project has seen just enormous adoption since, over the past few years. And one of the most exciting use cases is really providing the infrastructure for building training, fine tuning, and serving foundation models. So I'll say a little bit about, you know, here are some examples of companies using Ray for foundation models. Cohere trains large language models. OpenAI also trains large language models. You can think about the workloads required there are things like supervised pre-training, also reinforcement learning from human feedback. So this is not only the regular supervised learning, but actually more complex reinforcement learning workloads that take human input about what response to a particular question, you know is better than a certain other response. And incorporating that into the learning. There's open source versions as well, like GPTJ also built on top of Ray as well as projects like Alpa coming out of UC Berkeley. So these are some of the examples of exciting projects in organizations, training and creating these large language models and serving them using Ray. Okay, so what actually is Ray? Well, there are two layers to Ray. At the lowest level, there's the core Ray system. This is essentially low level primitives for building scalable Python applications. Things like taking a Python function or a Python class and executing them in the cluster setting. So Ray core is extremely flexible and you can build arbitrary scalable applications on top of Ray. So on top of Ray, on top of the core system, what really gives Ray a lot of its power is this ecosystem of scalable libraries. So on top of the core system you have libraries, scalable libraries for ingesting and pre-processing data, for training your models, for fine tuning those models, for hyper parameter tuning, for doing batch processing and batch inference, for doing model serving and deployment, right. And a lot of the Ray users, the reason they like Ray is that they want to run multiple workloads. They want to train and serve their models, right. They want to load their data and feed that into training. And Ray provides common infrastructure for all of these different workloads. So this is a little overview of what Ray, the different components of Ray. So why do people choose to go with Ray? I think there are three main reasons. The first is the unified nature. The fact that it is common infrastructure for scaling arbitrary workloads, from data ingest to pre-processing to training to inference and serving, right. This also includes the fact that it's future proof. AI is incredibly fast moving. And so many people, many companies that have built their own machine learning infrastructure and standardized on particular workflows for doing machine learning have found that their workflows are too rigid to enable new capabilities. If they want to do reinforcement learning, if they want to use graph neural networks, they don't have a way of doing that with their standard tooling. And so Ray, being future proof and being flexible and general gives them that ability. Another reason people choose Ray in Anyscale is the scalability. This is really our bread and butter. This is the reason, the whole point of Ray, you know, making it easy to go from your laptop to running on thousands of GPUs, making it easy to scale your development workloads and run them in production, making it easy to scale, you know, training to scale data ingest, pre-processing and so on. So scalability and performance, you know, are critical for doing machine learning and that is something that Ray provides out of the box. And lastly, Ray is an open ecosystem. You can run it anywhere. You can run it on any Cloud provider. Google, you know, Google Cloud, AWS, Asure. You can run it on your Kubernetes cluster. You can run it on your laptop. It's extremely portable. And not only that, it's framework agnostic. You can use Ray to scale arbitrary Python workloads. You can use it to scale and it integrates with libraries like TensorFlow or PyTorch or JAX or XG Boost or Hugging Face or PyTorch Lightning, right, or Scikit-learn or just your own arbitrary Python code. It's open source. And in addition to integrating with the rest of the machine learning ecosystem and these machine learning frameworks, you can use Ray along with all of the other tooling in the machine learning ecosystem. That's things like weights and biases or ML flow, right. Or you know, different data platforms like Databricks, you know, Delta Lake or Snowflake or tools for model monitoring for feature stores, all of these integrate with Ray. And that's, you know, Ray provides that kind of flexibility so that you can integrate it into the rest of your workflow. And then Anyscale is the scalable compute platform that's built on top, you know, that provides Ray. So Anyscale is a managed Ray service that runs in the Cloud. And what Anyscale does is it offers the best way to run Ray. And if you think about what you get with Anyscale, there are fundamentally two things. One is about moving faster, accelerating the time to market. And you get that by having the managed service so that as a developer you don't have to worry about managing infrastructure, you don't have to worry about configuring infrastructure. You also, it provides, you know, optimized developer workflows. Things like easily moving from development to production, things like having the observability tooling, the debug ability to actually easily diagnose what's going wrong in a distributed application. So things like the dashboards and the other other kinds of tooling for collaboration, for monitoring and so on. And then on top of that, so that's the first bucket, developer productivity, moving faster, faster experimentation and iteration. The second reason that people choose Anyscale is superior infrastructure. So this is things like, you know, cost deficiency, being able to easily take advantage of spot instances, being able to get higher GPU utilization, things like faster cluster startup times and auto scaling. Things like just overall better performance and faster scheduling. And so these are the kinds of things that Anyscale provides on top of Ray. It's the managed infrastructure. It's fast, it's like the developer productivity and velocity as well as performance. So this is what I wanted to share about Ray in Anyscale. >> John: Awesome. >> Provide that context. But John, I'm curious what you think. >> I love it. I love the, so first of all, it's a platform because that's the platform architecture right there. So just to clarify, this is an Anyscale platform, not- >> That's right. >> Tools. So you got tools in the platform. Okay, that's key. Love that managed service. Just curious, you mentioned Python multiple times, is that because of PyTorch and TensorFlow or Python's the most friendly with machine learning or it's because it's very common amongst all developers? >> That's a great question. Python is the language that people are using to do machine learning. So it's the natural starting point. Now, of course, Ray is actually designed in a language agnostic way and there are companies out there that use Ray to build scalable Java applications. But for the most part right now we're focused on Python and being the best way to build these scalable Python and machine learning applications. But, of course, down the road there always is that potential. >> So if you're slinging Python code out there and you're watching that, you're watching this video, get on Anyscale bus quickly. Also, I just, while you were giving the presentation, I couldn't help, since you mentioned OpenAI, which by the way, congratulations 'cause they've had great scale, I've noticed in their rapid growth 'cause they were the fastest company to the number of users than anyone in the history of the computer industry, so major successor, OpenAI and ChatGPT, huge fan. I'm not a skeptic at all. I think it's just the beginning, so congratulations. But I actually typed into ChatGPT, what are the top three benefits of Anyscale and came up with scalability, flexibility, and ease of use. Obviously, scalability is what you guys are called. >> That's pretty good. >> So that's what they came up with. So they nailed it. Did you have an inside prompt training, buy it there? Only kidding. (Robert laughs) >> Yeah, we hard coded that one. >> But that's the kind of thing that came up really, really quickly if I asked it to write a sales document, it probably will, but this is the future interface. This is why people are getting excited about the foundational models and the large language models because it's allowing the interface with the user, the consumer, to be more human, more natural. And this is clearly will be in every application in the future. >> Absolutely. This is how people are going to interface with software, how they're going to interface with products in the future. It's not just something, you know, not just a chat bot that you talk to. This is going to be how you get things done, right. How you use your web browser or how you use, you know, how you use Photoshop or how you use other products. Like you're not going to spend hours learning all the APIs and how to use them. You're going to talk to it and tell it what you want it to do. And of course, you know, if it doesn't understand it, it's going to ask clarifying questions. You're going to have a conversation and then it'll figure it out. >> This is going to be one of those things, we're going to look back at this time Robert and saying, "Yeah, from that company, that was the beginning of that wave." And just like AWS and Cloud Computing, the folks who got in early really were in position when say the pandemic came. So getting in early is a good thing and that's what everyone's talking about is getting in early and playing around, maybe replatforming or even picking one or few apps to refactor with some staff and managed services. So people are definitely jumping in. So I have to ask you the ROI cost question. You mentioned some of those, Moore's Law versus what's going on in the industry. When you look at that kind of scale, the first thing that jumps out at people is, "Okay, I love it. Let's go play around." But what's it going to cost me? Am I going to be tied to certain GPUs? What's the landscape look like from an operational standpoint, from the customer? Are they locked in and the benefit was flexibility, are you flexible to handle any Cloud? What is the customers, what are they looking at? Basically, that's my question. What's the customer looking at? >> Cost is super important here and many of the companies, I mean, companies are spending a huge amount on their Cloud computing, on AWS, and on doing AI, right. And I think a lot of the advantage of Anyscale, what we can provide here is not only better performance, but cost efficiency. Because if we can run something faster and more efficiently, it can also use less resources and you can lower your Cloud spending, right. We've seen companies go from, you know, 20% GPU utilization with their current setup and the current tools they're using to running on Anyscale and getting more like 95, you know, 100% GPU utilization. That's something like a five x improvement right there. So depending on the kind of application you're running, you know, it's a significant cost savings. We've seen companies that have, you know, processing petabytes of data every single day with Ray going from, you know, getting order of magnitude cost savings by switching from what they were previously doing to running their application on Ray. And when you have applications that are spending, you know, potentially $100 million a year and getting a 10 X cost savings is just absolutely enormous. So these are some of the kinds of- >> Data infrastructure is super important. Again, if the customer, if you're a prospect to this and thinking about going in here, just like the Cloud, you got infrastructure, you got the platform, you got SaaS, same kind of thing's going to go on in AI. So I want to get into that, you know, ROI discussion and some of the impact with your customers that are leveraging the platform. But first I hear you got a demo. >> Robert: Yeah, so let me show you, let me give you a quick run through here. So what I have open here is the Anyscale UI. I've started a little Anyscale Workspace. So Workspaces are the Anyscale concept for interactive developments, right. So here, imagine I'm just, you want to have a familiar experience like you're developing on your laptop. And here I have a terminal. It's not on my laptop. It's actually in the cloud running on Anyscale. And I'm just going to kick this off. This is going to train a large language model, so OPT. And it's doing this on 32 GPUs. We've got a cluster here with a bunch of CPU cores, bunch of memory. And as that's running, and by the way, if I wanted to run this on instead of 32 GPUs, 64, 128, this is just a one line change when I launch the Workspace. And what I can do is I can pull up VS code, right. Remember this is the interactive development experience. I can look at the actual code. Here it's using Ray train to train the torch model. We've got the training loop and we're saying that each worker gets access to one GPU and four CPU cores. And, of course, as I make the model larger, this is using deep speed, as I make the model larger, I could increase the number of GPUs that each worker gets access to, right. And how that is distributed across the cluster. And if I wanted to run on CPUs instead of GPUs or a different, you know, accelerator type, again, this is just a one line change. And here we're using Ray train to train the models, just taking my vanilla PyTorch model using Hugging Face and then scaling that across a bunch of GPUs. And, of course, if I want to look at the dashboard, I can go to the Ray dashboard. There are a bunch of different visualizations I can look at. I can look at the GPU utilization. I can look at, you know, the CPU utilization here where I think we're currently loading the model and running that actual application to start the training. And some of the things that are really convenient here about Anyscale, both I can get that interactive development experience with VS code. You know, I can look at the dashboards. I can monitor what's going on. It feels, I have a terminal, it feels like my laptop, but it's actually running on a large cluster. And I can, with however many GPUs or other resources that I want. And so it's really trying to combine the best of having the familiar experience of programming on your laptop, but with the benefits, you know, being able to take advantage of all the resources in the Cloud to scale. And it's like when, you know, you're talking about cost efficiency. One of the biggest reasons that people waste money, one of the silly reasons for wasting money is just forgetting to turn off your GPUs. And what you can do here is, of course, things will auto terminate if they're idle. But imagine you go to sleep, I have this big cluster. You can turn it off, shut off the cluster, come back tomorrow, restart the Workspace, and you know, your big cluster is back up and all of your code changes are still there. All of your local file edits. It's like you just closed your laptop and came back and opened it up again. And so this is the kind of experience we want to provide for our users. So that's what I wanted to share with you. >> Well, I think that whole, couple of things, lines of code change, single line of code change, that's game changing. And then the cost thing, I mean human error is a big deal. People pass out at their computer. They've been coding all night or they just forget about it. I mean, and then it's just like leaving the lights on or your water running in your house. It's just, at the scale that it is, the numbers will add up. That's a huge deal. So I think, you know, compute back in the old days, there's no compute. Okay, it's just compute sitting there idle. But you know, data cranking the models is doing, that's a big point. >> Another thing I want to add there about cost efficiency is that we make it really easy to use, if you're running on Anyscale, to use spot instances and these preemptable instances that can just be significantly cheaper than the on-demand instances. And so when we see our customers go from what they're doing before to using Anyscale and they go from not using these spot instances 'cause they don't have the infrastructure around it, the fault tolerance to handle the preemption and things like that, to being able to just check a box and use spot instances and save a bunch of money. >> You know, this was my whole, my feature article at Reinvent last year when I met with Adam Selipsky, this next gen Cloud is here. I mean, it's not auto scale, it's infrastructure scale. It's agility. It's flexibility. I think this is where the world needs to go. Almost what DevOps did for Cloud and what you were showing me that demo had this whole SRE vibe. And remember Google had site reliability engines to manage all those servers. This is kind of like an SRE vibe for data at scale. I mean, a similar kind of order of magnitude. I mean, I might be a little bit off base there, but how would you explain it? >> It's a nice analogy. I mean, what we are trying to do here is get to the point where developers don't think about infrastructure. Where developers only think about their application logic. And where businesses can do AI, can succeed with AI, and build these scalable applications, but they don't have to build, you know, an infrastructure team. They don't have to develop that expertise. They don't have to invest years in building their internal machine learning infrastructure. They can just focus on the Python code, on their application logic, and run the stuff out of the box. >> Awesome. Well, I appreciate the time. Before we wrap up here, give a plug for the company. I know you got a couple websites. Again, go, Ray's got its own website. You got Anyscale. You got an event coming up. Give a plug for the company looking to hire. Put a plug in for the company. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. So first of all, you know, we think AI is really going to transform every industry and the opportunity is there, right. We can be the infrastructure that enables all of that to happen, that makes it easy for companies to succeed with AI, and get value out of AI. Now we have, if you're interested in learning more about Ray, Ray has been emerging as the standard way to build scalable applications. Our adoption has been exploding. I mentioned companies like OpenAI using Ray to train their models. But really across the board companies like Netflix and Cruise and Instacart and Lyft and Uber, you know, just among tech companies. It's across every industry. You know, gaming companies, agriculture, you know, farming, robotics, drug discovery, you know, FinTech, we see it across the board. And all of these companies can get value out of AI, can really use AI to improve their businesses. So if you're interested in learning more about Ray and Anyscale, we have our Ray Summit coming up in September. This is going to highlight a lot of the most impressive use cases and stories across the industry. And if your business, if you want to use LLMs, you want to train these LLMs, these large language models, you want to fine tune them with your data, you want to deploy them, serve them, and build applications and products around them, give us a call, talk to us. You know, we can really take the infrastructure piece, you know, off the critical path and make that easy for you. So that's what I would say. And, you know, like you mentioned, we're hiring across the board, you know, engineering, product, go-to-market, and it's an exciting time. >> Robert Nishihara, co-founder and CEO of Anyscale, congratulations on a great company you've built and continuing to iterate on and you got growth ahead of you, you got a tailwind. I mean, the AI wave is here. I think OpenAI and ChatGPT, a customer of yours, have really opened up the mainstream visibility into this new generation of applications, user interface, roll of data, large scale, how to make that programmable so we're going to need that infrastructure. So thanks for coming on this season three, episode one of the ongoing series of the hot startups. In this case, this episode is the top startups building foundational model infrastructure for AI and ML. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Okay, up next in the Lightning Talk Session is Brian Galligan; Mgr, Security and Operations at Brookfield Properties. Brian, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So unified visibility across extended asset surface area is key these days. You can't secure what you can't see. So tell me more about how you were able to centralize your view of network assets with Armis and what impact that had on your business. >> Yeah, that's been a really key component of ours where we've actually owned multiple companies with them and are always acquiring companies from time to time. So it's always a question. What is actually out there and what do we need to be worried about. So from an inventory perspective it's definitely something that we've been looking into. Armis was a great partner in being able to get us the visibility into a lot of the IoT that we have out in the environment. And then also trying to find what we have and what's actually installed on those devices. What's running, who's talking to who. So that's definitely been a key component with our partnership with Armis. >> You know, we interview a lot of practitioners and companies and one things we found is vulnerability Management programs. There's a lot of gaps. You know, vulnerability management comes across more sometimes just IT devices, but not all assets. How has Armis Vulnerability Management made things better for your business? And what can you see now that you couldn't see before? >> Yeah, again, because we own multiple companies and they actually use different tools for vulnerability management. It's been a challenge to be able to compare apples to apples on when we have vulnerability. When we have risk out there, how do you put a single number to it? How do you prioritize different initiatives across those sectors? And being able to use Armis and have that one score, have that one visibility and also that one platform that you can query across all of those different companies, has been huge because we just haven't had the ability to say are we vulnerable to X, Y and Z across the board in these different companies? >> You know, it's interesting when you have a lot of different assets and companies, as you mentioned. It kind of increases the complexity and yeah we love the enterprise. You solve complexity by more complexity but that's not the playbook anymore. We want simplicity. We want to have a better solution. So when you take into account, the criticality of these businesses as you're integrating in, in real time and the assets within those business operations you got to keep focused on the right solutions. What has Armis done for you that's been correct and right for you guys? >> Yeah, so being able to see the different like be able to actually drill down into the nitty gritty on what devices are connecting to what. Being able to enforce policies that way, I think has been a huge win that we've been able to see from Armis. It's one of those things where we were able to see north-south traffic. No problem with our typical SIM tools, firewall tools and different logging sources but we haven't been able to see anything east-west and that's where we're going to be most vulnerable. That's where we've been actually found. We found some gaps in our coverage from a pen test perspective where we've found that where we don't have that visibility. Armis has allowed us to get into that communication to better fine tune the rules that we have across devices across sectors, across the data center to properties. Properties of the data center and then also to the cloud. >> Yeah, visibility into the assets is huge. But as you're in operations you got to operationalize these tools. I mean, some people sound like they've got a great sales pitch and all sounds like, "Wait a minute, I got to re-configure my entire operations." At the end of the day, you want to have an easy to use, but effective capability. So you're not taxed either personnel or operations. How easy has it been with Armis to implement from an ease of use, simplicity, plug and play? In other words, how quickly did you get to the time to value? Can you share your thoughts? >> This honestly is the biggest value that we've seen in Armis. I think a, a big kudos goes to the professional services group for getting us stood up being able to explain the tool, be able to dig into it and then get us to that time to value. Honestly, we've only scratched the surface on what Armis can give us which is great because they've given us so much already. So definitely taking that model of let's crawl, walk, run with what we're able to do. But the professional services team has given us so much assistance in getting from one collector to now many collectors. And we're in that deployment phase where we're able to gather more data and find those anomalies that are out there. I again, big props to the, the professional services team. >> Yeah, you know one of we'd add an old expression when you know when the whole democratization happened on the web here comes all the people, you know social media and whatnot now with IoT here comes all the devices. Here comes all the things- >> Yeah. >> Things >> More things are being attached to the network. So Armis has this global asset knowledge base that crowd-sources the asset intelligence. How has that been a game changer for you? And were you shocked when you discovered how many assets they were able to discover and what impact did that have for you? >> We have a large wifi footprint for guests, vendors, contractors that are working on site along with our corporate side, which has a lot of devices on it as well. And being able to see what devices are using what services on there and then be able to fingerprint them easily has been huge. I would say one of the best stories that I can tell is actually with a pen test that we ran recently. We were able to determine what the pen test device was and how it was acting anomalous and then fingerprint that device within five minutes opposed to getting on the phone with probably four or five different groups to figure out what is this device? It's not one of our normal devices. It's not one of our normal builds or anything. We were able to find that device within probably three to five minutes with Armis and the fingerprinting capability. >> Yeah, nothing's going to get by you with these port scans or any kind of activity, so to speak, jumping on the wifi. Great stuff. Anything else you'd like to share about Armis while I got you here? >> Yeah, I would say that something recently, we actually have an open position on our team currently. And one of the most exciting things is being able to share our journey that we've had with Armis over the last year, year and a half, and their eyes light up when they hear the capabilities of what Armis can do, what Armis can offer. And you see a little bit of jealousy of, you know, "Hey I really wish my current organization had that." And it's one of those selling tools that you're able to give to security engineers, security analysts saying, "Here's what you're going to have on the team to be able to do your job, right." So that you don't have to worry about necessarily the normal mundane things. You get to actually go do the cool hunting stuff, which Armis allows you to do. >> Well. Brian, thanks for the time here on this Lightning Talk, appreciate your insight. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE the leader in enterprise tech coverage. Up next in the Lightning Talk Session is Alex Schuchman. He's the CISO of Colgate-Palmolive Thanks for watching.

>> Okay, up next in the Lightning Talk Session is Brian Galligan; Mgr, Security and Operations at Brookfield Properties. Brian, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So unified visibility across extended asset surface area is key these days. You can't secure what you can't see. So tell me more about how you were able to centralize your view of network assets with Armis and what impact that had on your business. >> Yeah, that's been a really key component of ours where we've actually owned multiple companies with them and are always acquiring companies from time to time. So it's always a question. What is actually out there and what do we need to be worried about. So from an inventory perspective it's definitely something that we've been looking into. Armis was a great partner in being able to get us the visibility into a lot of the IoT that we have out in the environment. And then also trying to find what we have and what's actually installed on those devices. What's running, who's talking to who. So that's definitely been a key component with our partnership with Armis. >> You know, we interview a lot of practitioners and companies and one things we found is vulnerability Management programs. There's a lot of gaps. You know, vulnerability management comes across more sometimes just IT devices, but not all assets. How has Armis Vulnerability Management made things better for your business? And what can you see now that you couldn't see before? >> Yeah, again, because we own multiple companies and they actually use different tools for vulnerability management. It's been a challenge to be able to compare apples to apples on when we have vulnerability. When we have risk out there, how do you put a single number to it? How do you prioritize different initiatives across those sectors? And being able to use Armis and have that one score, have that one visibility and also that one platform that you can query across all of those different companies, has been huge because we just haven't had the ability to say are we vulnerable to X, Y and Z across the board in these different companies? >> You know, it's interesting when you have a lot of different assets and companies, as you mentioned. It kind of increases the complexity and yeah we love the enterprise. You solve complexity by more complexity but that's not the playbook anymore. We want simplicity. We want to have a better solution. So when you take into account, the criticality of these businesses as you're integrating in, in real time and the assets within those business operations you got to keep focused on the right solutions. What has Armis done for you that's been correct and right for you guys? >> Yeah, so being able to see the different like be able to actually drill down into the nitty gritty on what devices are connecting to what. Being able to enforce policies that way, I think has been a huge win that we've been able to see from Armis. It's one of those things where we were able to see north-south traffic. No problem with our typical SIM tools, firewall tools and different logging sources but we haven't been able to see anything east-west and that's where we're going to be most vulnerable. That's where we've been actually found. We found some gaps in our coverage from a pen test perspective where we've found that where we don't have that visibility. Armis has allowed us to get into that communication to better fine tune the rules that we have across devices across sectors, across the data center to properties. Properties of the data center and then also to the cloud. >> Yeah, visibility into the assets is huge. But as you're in operations you got to operationalize these tools. I mean, some people sound like they've got a great sales pitch and all sounds like, "Wait a minute, I got to re-configure my entire operations." At the end of the day, you want to have an easy to use, but effective capability. So you're not taxed either personnel or operations. How easy has it been with Armis to implement from an ease of use, simplicity, plug and play? In other words, how quickly did you get to the time to value? Can you share your thoughts? >> This honestly is the biggest value that we've seen in Armis. I think a, a big kudos goes to the professional services group for getting us stood up being able to explain the tool, be able to dig into it and then get us to that time to value. Honestly, we've only scratched the surface on what Armis can give us which is great because they've given us so much already. So definitely taking that model of let's crawl, walk, run with what we're able to do. But the professional services team has given us so much assistance in getting from one collector to now many collectors. And we're in that deployment phase where we're able to gather more data and find those anomalies that are out there. I again, big props to the, the professional services team. >> Yeah, you know one of we'd add an old expression when you know when the whole democratization happened on the web here comes all the people, you know social media and whatnot now with IoT here comes all the devices. Here comes all the things- >> Yeah. >> Things >> More things are being attached to the network. So Armis has this global asset knowledge base that crowd-sources the asset intelligence. How has that been a game changer for you? And were you shocked when you discovered how many assets they were able to discover and what impact did that have for you? >> We have a large wifi footprint for guests, vendors, contractors that are working on site along with our corporate side, which has a lot of devices on it as well. And being able to see what devices are using what services on there and then be able to fingerprint them easily has been huge. I would say one of the best stories that I can tell is actually with a pen test that we ran recently. We were able to determine what the pen test device was and how it was acting anomalous and then fingerprint that device within five minutes opposed to getting on the phone with probably four or five different groups to figure out what is this device? It's not one of our normal devices. It's not one of our normal builds or anything. We were able to find that device within probably three to five minutes with Armis and the fingerprinting capability. >> Yeah, nothing's going to get by you with these port scans or any kind of activity, so to speak, jumping on the wifi. Great stuff. Anything else you'd like to share about Armis while I got you here? >> Yeah, I would say that something recently, we actually have an open position on our team currently. And one of the most exciting things is being able to share our journey that we've had with Armis over the last year, year and a half, and their eyes light up when they hear the capabilities of what Armis can do, what Armis can offer. And you see a little bit of jealousy of, you know, "Hey I really wish my current organization had that." And it's one of those selling tools that you're able to give to security engineers, security analysts saying, "Here's what you're going to have on the team to be able to do your job, right." So that you don't have to worry about necessarily the normal mundane things. You get to actually go do the cool hunting stuff, which Armis allows you to do. >> Well. Brian, thanks for the time here on this Lightning Talk, appreciate your insight. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE the leader in enterprise tech coverage. Up next in the Lightning Talk Session is Alex Schuchman. He's the CISO of Colgate-Palmolive Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this Cube Conversion here in the Palo Alto Cube Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Vicki Cheung who's the engineering manager at Lyft, and also the co-chair of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, part of the CNCF, part of the awesome community that's doing all the Cloud Native, been there from the beginning, you guys have been driving it, Vicki welcome, to the Cube Conversation. >> Thank you. >> So I got to ask you this year, more than ever, Cloud Native is the biggest wave, you're starting to everything emerge, hybrid cloud, multicloud right around the corner, all the stuff we were talking about is playing out, it really is pretty exciting. >> Yeah, I'm super excited, 'cause I remember last time we talked about a lot of the enterprise stuff, more complicated use cases and developer productivity, and we're really seeing an uptick in all the talks in those areas so I'm super excited to actually see what everyone else is doing. And yeah, more sophisticated, at-scale use cases, how to run efficiently, how to run in data centers, hybrid situations. >> The industry is growing up right in front of our eyes. >> Vicki: Yeah I know. (both laughing) >> It's exciting. Well I want to just get the news out there, it's in Amsterdam, it's in a couple of weeks, last week of March and going into April, the conference is happening. So in all the anxiety around the Corona virus, you guys are having the policy of no shaking hands, cough in your elbow, be sensitive, what are some of the things you guys are talking about? I'm sure you're fielding a lot of questions. >> Yeah, I think a lot of people are worried, the message is generally just don't panic and be reasonable in how you interact with people and know the context. So, stay a little bit, respect personal space, don't shake hands, which I know will be awkward for a lot of people, 'cause we're trained to do that, but, yeah. >> I was just at the RSA Conference and I tried to go with the fist bump, the elbow bump, or like this, I was still shaking hands, people stuck their hands out, and I'm like, okay, I'll shake their hand and wash it real quick. >> I always feel bad, I always carry hand sanitizer, but I think the conference is going to have hand sanitizing stations, so that's going to help a lot. >> Well I'm looking forward to hearing all the great stories, more importantly, really to me again, the big story we've talked about is the industry's growing up and you're starting to see visibility into the technology trend, where it's really applying it to operations, you seeing the business benefits start to unfold, as well as excitement still for the next journey. So I got to ask you, what are the most exciting talks you're seeing? What are some of the themes that we'll be expecting to hear? >> I continue to be pretty excited about the latest state of security as people start adopting more sensitive or critical applications, developer productivity is very near and dear to my heart 'cause why change the next generation of software if you're not going to be more productive? But I also am very interested in seeing the combination of all these considerations coming together and just people running large-scale clusters, trying to run them efficiently while handling business isolation needs, compliance, how to handle multi-tenant when they have different needs, and you have one ops team that's doing all of that. So I think all the combination is really what I want to see. >> And there's a lot of Day Zero activities happening which has always been popular, so you guys are recommending that people come in if they want to enjoy some of the Day Zero activities, come in a day early. >> Yeah, more and more I have been recommending people to just go to Day Zero, there's a lot of good stuff there, I'm personally super interested in all the Lightning talks, I think people always, especially first timers to the conferences, they miss the Lightning talks because they're like, "Oh, it's Day Zero, I start at one," and yeah. >> So I was going to ask you the next question, what's your advice for the new attendees? Because you guys do have a good in-migration of new first timers, as well as the mature people growing with the industry together, what's your advice for new attendees? >> Yeah, I would say definitely come in for Day Zero, go to all the Lightning talks. There's going to be a new 101 track this time, based on the feedback from last time, a lot of people said it was very overwhelming and so we put together a one day, 101 track, for people to have talks that help them navigate, both the conference itself, and also the community. CNCF projects can also be very intimidating 'cause there's a lot of them now. So I would definitely go and check out the 101 track. Also, the advice that I give to most people is actually take your time, because a lot of the talks are recorded and you can watch them later, so try not to jam pack your schedule all day because otherwise you're not going to last. >> Don't overdose, don't try to hit everything, pace yourself, pick a groove, and then identify talks you want to watch. >> Yeah, exactly. Also I think the value of these conferences is in the people, so the content obviously is great, but the strategy I take is I identify the topics that I am interested in and also the speakers that I want to get to know and I go to their talks and I talk to the speakers afterwards. Start building out your conference network. >> So you guys get a lot of feedback, I know you guys take it seriously and you look at it, what are some of the new things or tracks that are coming this year in Amsterdam that was either part of the learnings or just new interest levels? >> So the 101 track is probably the biggest change we've made, but another thing is because the community is growing up, we've had a lot of feedback about the distribution of beginners versus intermediate versus advanced topics. I think the feedback for last time was people wanted to see more intense, deep technical dives into hard topics for people who've been using Kubernetes for a few years and so we've adjusted that a little bit this time so you should see some more interesting-- >> John: Hardcore track. >> Yes, exactly. >> It's a hardcore track. So even on the board we're saying, it's too lightweight, you can pick your spectrum or where you want to jump in. >> I think it is like the conference is growing, so there's the audience demographics is also diversifying. >> Obviously theCUBE will be there, we'll be broadcasting live. So obviously the keynotes, you'll be streaming live as well, the keynotes, is that going to happen? >> Yeah, I think so. >> So I think you guys are, so I'm going to double check that. In terms of Amsterdam, I know obviously you have the US, North America one, this is Amsterdam, what do you guys plan there, any local flavor there? Is there any twists to the event being in Amsterdam? >> Well, usually-- >> John: More fun? >> Usually all the side social events are themed to whatever region we're hosted in, so yeah, I think we'll see definitely Amsterdam flavors there. I think we also try very hard to make sure to showcase the coolest speakers or technology or projects coming from that area, so definitely, I think a lot of the talks will be from-- >> Definitely the buzz, certainly on Twitter and the scuttlebutt and chatter is, more fun, people love Amsterdam, it's a fun city. >> I know. Yeah, just like generally people when they show up to the conference, they've traveled from elsewhere, so they're just like, the vibe is like. >> There's certainly a good vibe, looking forward to it. So in the 2020 year, a lot's going on with CNCF, there's a lot of different things happening, you're in the machinery, you're in the room talking about all the plans, what's the big picture this year inside the community in terms of figuring out the tracks, the events, I mean obviously there's growth there, how are you guys handling that? What's the conversation like? >> Yeah, I think definitely there's a shift happening, actually the tracks for KubeCon has been pretty stable since the inception of the conference, and this is I think the first year where we've started talking about maybe adjusting the tracks or splitting them because of how use cases have started shifting, for example, application development has always been a really large track, and it's intentionally vague, there's a lot of things that people are building on Kubernetes so we didn't want to be too prescriptive. But because there is an explosion of use cases, we're thinking of potentially splitting that, I'll leave that up to the co-chairs for next conference, but that sort of conversation is happening. >> What are some of the use cases that are exploding, obviously there's a diverse, broad set of new use cases, is there are pattern in what you're seeing? >> Yeah, for example, for HPC, high performance computing, that's always been a topic that we see from time to time, but really for the last couple of conferences, that's been very consistent in quite a few of them, and that ties into how people are using GPUs and even more exotic networking options. We're seeing some of that this time as well, so that's it's own category. I think another thing is application development, sort of, right now, encompasses both the application side, which is your HPC use case, or development, which is developer productivity or developer experience, they're very different and so right now they're lumped together. >> I have a confession for you because one of the reasons why I love KubeCon so much, because it's really the perfect blend of geeking out and nerding out on the tech, so kind of the open-source software. When you say HPC, it's like up and down the stack, a lot of geekiness going on where you can you dig in. Then you've got the entrepreneurial vibe, so you've got open-source devs who are standing up, startups, and I've been there and they are there, and there's a lot more entrepreneurs. And then you've got the big companies who have the big wallets, and they're either buying companies. And so you have that confluence of the down and dirty, getting with the tech, open-source, startups, and big companies, so it just makes for a real fun event. So I have to ask you as you look at trying to balance all the stakeholders, what's it like? You guys see that same kind of dynamic because everyone's playing well right now in the sandbox so to speak. >> Yeah, I think it's been okay trying to balance it just because everyone is still, I think there's still more in common that people are trying to solve than they are different. And so there are a lot of topics that yes, people are solving this problem for their specific use case but actually, there's a lot of things in common for people in small companies as well as large enterprises as well. I think the interesting thing is a lot of cloud providers, they give a lot of talks as well, and you'd think, that might be too vendor specific, but actually what we're seeing is that they have a lot of experience operating many, many clusters and large infrastructure and their experience in scaling that out is helpful to companies like Lyft or other startups that are just trying to scale their deployments. >> Yeah, what's interesting, I looked at Amazon, Azure, and say, Google for instance, each one of those beg tech companies, has a commercial interest and they do have large power, but all of the people that were running these clouds, they've been at the open-source community, they know the contract that they have with the culture and plus it's so early. So I think there's a nice, I mean I see Adrian there, I see all the Google folks there, all awesome people, they're not like the greedy big bad guys, and I think that's what people don't understand about that part of it, although their validation in the business side can really help pull through a lot of these great projects. >> Yeah, for sure, I see them contributing a lot to the community as well, and they definitely are very open to initiating collaboration and I see that a lot in KubeCon, in the vendor booth area, people are talking about like, "Oh, let's start a new project," or like, "That could be open-sourced," that's the type of conversation that's happening in the sponsorship area and not like, "Oh, do you want to buy our stuff?" So, yeah. >> Yeah, I definitely think all three of those clouds I mentioned, all have awesome people over there when it comes to this community, and again, everyone's playing well, but I think that the unification around Kubernetes and what's going with Cloud Native is so powerful because I think everyone agrees that there's a bigger win beyond the short term, there's a bigger defacto standard thing going on here around hybrid and multicloud. And all the conversations we have on theCUBE these days is about hardcore hybrid and then the promise of multicloud, so I got to ask you, is there any multicloud in here, or is that too off the radar on the hype side for you guys? >> I don't think it's too off, yeah there are definitely talks about hybrid and multicloud. And I've come from companies that have done that with Kubernetes and so I don't think it's that far fetched. >> So right now it's happening, there's good conversations happening there? >> I think obviously it depends on the use cause because it does come with its own complexity, but I think the demand on infrastructure teams just keeps growing and so we get to a place where we need to be multicloud because availability reasons or because of regional issues, whatever. So yeah, it's no that far fetched. >> You're hitting the sweet spot there, because you're talking about the scale that's going on, and the operations and everyone's always worried about, change is going to make this happen, the fact of the matter is, one you have large scale and growth, skills gap and skills shortages going on, so the only way to solve that problem, and by the way, and a huge data tsunami, you got cybersecurity, the only way to solve that is automation, I mean software, that's the whole big picture. >> Yeah I think everyone's seeing the benefit of sharing the problems we're solving on the infrastructure layer because that's not our business, we're not selling infrastructure, we just want to get that in a good place, so we can actually do our business. So I think that's what's also fueling all the community and open source efforts. >> Vicki, final question, what's going to be the theme for you guys as you give your talks, and you're in the hallways, talking to folks, what's the posture this year from the group, what do you hope people walk away with from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon this year? >> Oh, that's a good question. Well personally I think a lot of what's on my mind right now, coming into this conference is, a lot of talks from San Diego were about, okay now that we're actually putting this into production, a lot of teams are realizing how much complexity there is, and how we can abstract the complexity away from the rest of engineering team outside of infrastructure and since then I think people have made a lot of contributions and have thought a lot more about that topic, so that's what's on my mind is like, okay that's what we were talking about a few months ago, let's see where we're at now. >> Let's see the proof. >> Yeah. >> Let's see the use cases, let's see the results, it's a prudent world when you start talking about operations. >> Yeah. >> Rubber's hitting the road. Okay, Vicki's here inside theCUBE, giving us a break down of the upcoming KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, she's the co-chair, puts it all together, the great team over there, and also a great community. Again, as it continues to grow, and there's a lot more to go, Cloud Native and Kubernetes is really the center of what I see is a defacto standardization around a whole new cloud operating model that's going to create a lot of benefits and a lot of great stuff for the community. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering Google Club next nineteen Rock Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem Partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for cubes coverage of Google next twenty nineteen. I'm suffering my coast, David. Want to many men also doing interviews out, getting, reporting and collecting all the data. And we're gonna bring it back on the Q R. Next to gas mark in l. A. Who's a senior technical account manager? AccuWeather at enough was the director product manager. Google Cloud Platform. Now welcome back to the Cube and >> thank you for >> coming on. Thank you. >> You got a customer. Big customer focus here this year. Step function of just logo's growth. New announcements. Technical. Really good stuff. Yeah. What's going on? Give us the update. AP economies here, full throttle. >> I mean, you know, the great thing is it's a pea eye's on all fronts. So what you saw this morning was about standardizing the AP eyes that cloud infrastructure is based on. You saw, You know, how do we build applications with AP eyes at a finer grained level? Micro services, you know, And we've had a lot of great customer examples of people using, and that's what you know with AC. You weather here talking about how do you use a P ice to service and build business models reached developer ecosystems. So you know. So I look at everything today. It's every aspect of it brings it back home tape. Yas. >> It's just things that's so exciting because we think about the service model of cloud and on premise. And now cloud, it's integration and AP Eyes or Ki ki and all and only getting more functional. Talk about your implementation. Aki weather. What do you guys do with Apogee? Google clouds just chair. What >> would implementation is so accurate? There's been running an AP I service for the past ten years, and we have lots of enterprise clients, but we started to realize we're missing a whole business opportunity. So we partnered with Apogee, and we created a new self survey P developer portal that allows developers to go in there, sign up on their own and get started. And it's been great for us as far as like basically unlocking new revenue opportunities with the FBI's because, as he said, everything is a p i cz. We also say everything is impacted by the weather. So why not have everyone used ac you other empty eyes to fulfill their weather needs? >> It wasn't like early on when you guys were making this call, was it more like experimenting? Did men even have a clue where they're like You's a p I I was gonna start grass Roots >> Way knew right >> away like we were working very heavily with the enterprise clients. But we wanted to really cater to the small business Is the individual developers to weather enthusiasts are students. Even so, we wanted to have this easy interface that instead of talking to a sales rep, you could just go through this portal and sign upon your own. It get started and we knew right away there is money to be left or money to be had money left on the table. So we knew right away with by working with apogee and creating this portal, it would run itself. Everyone uses a P eyes and everyone needs to weather, so to make it easier to find and use >> and what was it like? Now let's see how >> it we've been using it now for about two years, and it's been very successful. We've we've seen great, rather revenue growth. And more importantly, it's worked as a great sales channel for us because now, instead of just going directly to an enterprise agreement and talking about legal terms and contracts, you can go through this incremental steps of signed up on your own. Do a free trial. Then you could buy a package. You can potentially increase your package, and we can then monitor that. Let them do it on their own, and it allows us ability to reach out to them and see could just be a new partner that we want to work with, or is there a greater opportunity there? So it's been great for us as faras elite generator in the sales channel to really more revenue, more opportunities and just more aware these'LL process a whole new business model. It's amore awareness, actually replies. Instead, people were trying to find us. Now it's out there and people see great Now it Khun, use it, Get started >> Admission in the back end. The National Weather Service, obviously the government's putting up balloons taking data and presumably and input to your models. How are they connecting in to the AP eyes? Maybe described that whole process. Yeah. Tilak, You other works >> of multiple weather providers and government agencies from around the world. It's actually one of our strengths because we are a global company, and we have those agreements with all kinds of countries around the world. So we ingest all of that data into our back and database, and then we surface it through our story and users. >> Okay, so they're not directly sort of plugging into that ap economy yet? Not yet. So we have to be right there. Well, I >> mean, for now we have the direct data feeds that were ingesting that data, and we make it available through the AC you other service, and we kind of unjust that data with some of our own. Augur those to kind of create our own AccuWeather forecast to >> That's actually a barrier to entry for you guys. The fact that you've built those pipelines from the back end and then you expose it at the front end and that's your business model. So okay, >> tell about that. We're where it goes from here because this is a great example of how silly the old way papering legal contracts. Now you go. It was supposed to maybe eyes exposing the data. Where does it go from here? Because now you've got, as were close, get more complex. This is part of the whole announcement of the new rebranding. The new capabilities around Antos, which is around Hey, you know, you could move complex work clothes. Certainly the service piece. We saw great news around that because it gets more complex with sap. Ichi, go from here. How did these guys go? The next level. >> So, you know, I think that the interesting thing is you look at some of the themes here that we've talked about. It's been about unlocking innovation. It's about providing ways that developers in a self service way Khun, get at the data. The resource is that they need ask. They need them to build these types of new types of applications and vacuum weather experience and their journey on. That's a great example of it. Look, you know, moving from from a set of enterprise customers that they were serving very well to the fact that really ah, whole ecosystem of applications need act needs access to weather data, and they knew that if they could just unlock that, that would be an incredibly powerful things. So we see a lot of variants of that. And in fact, a lot of what you see it's on announcements this morning with Google Cloud is part of that. You know, Google Cloud is very much about taking these resource is that Google is built that were available to a select few and unlocking those in a self service fashion, but in a standard way that developers anywhere and now with andthe oh, switches hybrid a multi cloud wherever they are being able to unlock those capabilities. So why've you? This is a continuation of a P. I promise. You know, we're very excited about this because what we're seeing is more and more applications that are being built across using AP eyes and more more environments. The great thing for Apogee is that any time people are trying to consume AP eyes in a self service fashion agile way, we're able to add value. >> So Allison Wagner earlier was we asked her about the brand promise, and she said, We want our customers, customers they're not help them innovate all the way down our customers customers level. So I'm thinking about whether whether it gets a bad rap, right? I mean, >> look at it >> for years and we make make jokes about the weather. But the weather has been looked uncannily accurate. These they used to be art. Now it's becoming more silent. So in the spirit of innovation, talk about what's happening just in terms of predicting whether it's, you know, big events, hurricanes, tornadoes and some of the innovation that's occurring on that end. >> Well, I mean, look at from a broader standpoint to weather impacts everything. I mean, as we say, you look at all the different products out there in the marketplace that use whether to enhance that. So there's things you can do for actionable decisions, too. It's not just what is the weather, it is. How can whether impact what I'm doing next, what I'm doing, where I go, what I wear, how I feel even said every day you make a conscious and subconscious decision based on the weather. So when you can put that into products and tools and services that help make those actionable decisions for the users. That makes it a very, very powerful products. That's why a lot of people are always seeking out whether data to use it to enhance their product. >> Give us an example. >> What So a famous story I even told Justin my session earlier. Connected Inhaler Company named co hero they use are FBI's by calling our current conditions every time a user had a respiratory attack over time, it started to build a database as the user is using your inhaler. Then use machine learning to kind of find potential weather triggers and learn pattern recognition to find in the future. Based on our forecast, a p I When white might that user have another attack? So buy this. It's a connected health product that's helping them monitor their own health and keep them safe and keep them prepared as opposed to being reactive. >> The inhaler is instrumented. Yeah, and he stated that the cloud >> and that's just that's just one product. I mean, there's all kinds of things connected, thermostats and connect that >> talks about the creativity of the application developer. I think this highlights to me what Deva is all about and what cloud and FBI's all about because you're exposing your resource products. You don't have to have a deaf guy going. Hey, let's car get the pollen application, Martin. Well, what the hell does that mean? You put the creativity of the in the edge, data gets integrated to the application. This kind of kind of hits on the core cloud value problems, which is let the data drive the value from the APP developer. Without your data, that APP doesn't have the value right. And there's multiple instances of weird what it could mean the most viable in golf Africa and Lightning. Abbott could be whatever. Exactly. So this is kind of the the notion of cloud productivity. >> Well, it's a notion of club activity. It's also this idea of a digital value change. So, you know, Data's products and AP Icer products. And and so now we see the emergence of a P I product managers. You know, you know this idea that we're going to go and build a whole ecosystem of products and applications, that meat, the whole set of customer needs that you might not even initially or ever imagine. I'm sure you folks see all the time new applications, new use cases. The idea is, you know, can I I take this capability or can I take this set of data, package it up us an a p I that any developer can use in anyway that they want to innovate on DH, build new functionality around, and it's a very exciting time in makes developers way more productive than they could have been in >> this talks about the C I C pipeline and and programmable bramble AP eyes. But you said something interesting. I wanna unpack real quick talk about this rise of a pipe product managers because, yes, this is really I think, a statement that not only is the FBI's around for a long time to stay, but this is instrumental value. Yes. What is it? A byproduct. Men and okay, what they do. >> So it's a new concept that has Well, I should say a totally new concept. If you talk to companies that have provided a P eyes, you go back to the the early days of you know, folks like eBay or flicker. All of these idea was that you can completely reinvent your business in the way that you partner with other companies by using AP eyes to tie these businesses together. And what you've now seen has been really, I'd say, over the last five years become a mainstream thing. You've got thousands of people out there and enterprises and Internet companies and all sorts of industries that are a P I product managers who are going in looking at how doe I packet a package up, the capabilities the business processes, the data that my business has built and enable other companies, other developers, to go on, package these and embed them in the products and services that they're building. And, uh, that's the job of a P A. Product measures just like a product manager that you would have for any other product. But what they're thinking about is how do they make their A P? I success >> had to Mark's point there. He saw money being left on the table. Small little tweak now opens up a new product line at an economic model. The constructor that's it's pretty *** good. >> It's shifting to this idea platform business models, and it's a super exciting thing that we're seeing the companies that successfully do it, they see huge growth way. Think that every business is goingto have to transition into this AP I product model eventually. >> Mark, what's the what's the role of the data scientist? Obviously very important in your organization and the relationship between the data scientists and the developers. And it specifically What is Google doing, Tio? Help them coordinate, Collaborate better instead of wrangling data all day. Yeah, I mean, >> so far, a data scientists when we actually have multiple areas. Obviously, we're studying the weather data itself. But then we're studying the use case of data how they're actually ingesting it itself, but incorporating that into our products and services. I mean I mean, that's kind of >> mean date is every where the key is the applications have the data built in. This is to your point about >> unnecessarily incorporating it in, but to collaborate on creating products, right? I mean, you're doing a lot of data science. You got application developers. All right? You're talking about tooling, right? R, are they just sort of separate silos or they >> I mean, we obviously have to have an understanding of what day it is going to be successful. What's gonna be adjusted and the easiest way to adjust it a swell so way obviously are analyzing it from that sense is, >> I say step back for a second. Thiss Google Next mark. What's your impression of the show this year? What's the vibe? What's this day? One storyline in your mind. Yet a session you were in earlier. What's been some of the feedback? What's what's it like >> for me personally? It's that AP eyes, power, everything. So that's obviously what we've been very focused on, and that's what the messaging I've been hearing. But yeah, I mean, divide has been incredible here. Obviously be around so many different great minds and the creativity. It's it's definitely >> talk. What was the session that you did? What was the talk about? Outside? Maybe I was some >> of the feedback. Yeah, I mean, so the session I gave was how wacky weather unlock new business opportunities with the FBI's on way. Got great feedback was a full house, had lots of questions afterwards that followed me out to the hallway. It's was actually running here, being held up, but lots people are interested in learning about this. How can they unlock their own opportunity? How can they take what they have existing on and bring it to a new audience? For >> some of the questions that that was kind of the thematic kind of weaken stack rank, the categorical questions were mean point. The >> biggest thing was like trying to make decisions about how for us, for example, having an enterprise model already transitioning that toe a self serve model that actually worked before we're kind of engaging clients directly. So having something that users could look at and on their own, immediately engage with and connect with and find ways that they can utilize it for their own business models and purposes. >> And you gotta be psychic, FBI as a business model, You got FBI product managers, you got you got the cloud and those spanning now multiple domain spaces on Prem Hybrid Multi. >> Well, that last points are very exciting to us. So, you know, if you look at it, you know, it was about two and a half years ago that apogee became part of Google and G C P got into hybrid of multi cloud with aptitude that we were, you know, the definitive AP I infrastructure for AP eyes. Wherever they live. And what we saw this morning was DCP doubling down in a very big way on hybrid of multi clap. And so this is fantastic four. This message of AP eyes everywhere. Apogee is going to be able Teo sit on top of Antos and really, wherever people are looking at either producing are consuming AP eyes. We'LL be able to sit on top of that and make it a lot easier to do. Capture that data and build new business models. On top of it, >> we'LL make a prediction here in the Cube. That happens. He's going to be the center. The value proposition. As those abs get built, people go to the business model. Connecting them under the covers is going to be a very interesting opportunity with you guys. It's >> a very exciting, very exciting for us to >> get hurt here first in the queue, of course. The cubes looking for product manager a p I to handle our cube database. So if you're interested, we're always looking for a product manager. FBI economies here I'm Jeopardy Volante here The Cube Day one coverage Google Next stay with us for more of this short break

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Conga Connect West 2018, brought to you by Conga. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Salesforce Dreamforce, they're saying it's 170,000 people. Take public transit, do not bring your car, do not take Uber, grab a line, grab a BART, whatever you need. So we're excited to have a practitioner. We love to get customers on, we love to talk to people that are out here actually using all these tools, and our next guest, we're excited to have Becky Bastien. She's a senior force.com developer for BD, which is Becton Dicksinson-- >> Dickinson. >> Becky, welcome. >> Thank you. >> So, what type of products do you work on? >> So, I mean primarily we're a Salesforce.com platform, right? And we have a lot of add-ons with Conga, DocuSign, you name it, we're doing it. Apttus CLM, and we also use Oracle CPQ. Anything that connects to the Salesforce.com platform, you can imagine we probably use it. >> And you've been developing on Salesforce for a number of years, looking at your LinkedIn history, so you've got a lot of experience with the platform. Just a little bit of perspective, how this conference has changed, how Salesforce is a platform from just a pure play kind of Salesforce management system, which is what it started at CRM, to what kind of it is today? >> Yeah, I mean the conference has changed astronomically obviously over the years. What you said, it was 170 thousand, right? It's crazy. >> That's crazy. >> Logistically, it's a little tough to get around but it's so much fun and there's so much that you can learn here. It's just increased over the years. The content has gotten better, there's more focused areas, which I really like. I'm a developer at heart so I really focus on that. But as far as the platform itself, it's really grown. You can do anything with it. At BD, we even have done things that are completely custom, like our entire implementation team for one of our business units runs out of Salesforce.com as a project management application. We don't just use it for sales, right? >> Right. >> Or marketing, even. We use it across the board for implementation and now we're getting into the service aspect as well. >> Right, we're here at the Conga event and we talked before we turned the cameras on, you're using the Conga tool set in kind of a unique and slightly different way than some of the applications we've heard. I wonder if you could share some of the applications that you use and how you use them? >> Sure, so one of our primary uses of Conga is actually generating documents that are customer facing, that really educate our clients, our end clients and then also helps us with some of the data that we're gathering for our product development. But what we do is we go out to the client's site and we're actually sometimes in an operating room, or at a catheter injection or a blood draw, multiple things that we actually gather data on via another application called Fulcrum. We pull all that data back into Salesforce and then we use Conga to generate the documents that are customer facing. With that, it really empowers our business as well because they have full control over that Conga document, so they can make the changes that they need to, without involving IT, and we just kind of hook it all up in the back end for them. >> Right, right. It's really a new kind of world in terms of the opportunity to go gather data on your products, whether it's connected via an application or different things, as opposed to back in the old day, you made it, you shipped it, you sent it out through your distributor and you had no idea how end users are using it, how the doctors are using it in this case. >> Yeah. >> But now, you've got this opportunity to do more of a closed loop feedback, back into the product development. >> Yeah and it's not only a product development, but we're actually educating the hospitals on, are you using the product to what we actually manufactured it for? Are you using it for something entirely different? Are you using it the wrong way? It's actually an education tool back to our end customer and saying, "Hey, this is where you can improve "operating procedures," basically. >> Another hot topic that we hear about all the time, we go to all these conferences, is bots. You talked about, you guys are doing something interesting with bots, again, leveraging the Conga application probably not necessarily the way that's it's, I didn't see Bots on their product sheet. >> Yeah. >> Tell us a little bit about that application? >> Yeah, We have a bot where our sales reps can basically enter some information into an Excel spreadsheet. It's for a quick quote for a customer, and the bot will crawl that spreadsheet and feed it back into SAP. What we've found is that our sales reps are having a hard time getting the right customer number, getting the right contact information and things like that, where the Bot would fail if they didn't have the right information. What we've done with Conga is we generate that Excel spreadsheet from Salesforce.com so the sales rep is on an opportunity, and they generate the bot, they generate the spreadsheet, they fill out the rest of the information and then it gets sent along its way and it creates the order and SAP eventually. It's really cutting out some human error. >> Right, so does the Bot fill in the missing data? Or it just flags that you've got some incomplete stuff you have to fill in? >> Yeah so, we're passing it as much as we can for the rep. They're having to manually enter some things like what product, what quantity, and things like that, and then the bot crawls it and throws it into SAP. It's just an easier way for a rep when they're sitting out on-site with a client. They can actually put it in an Excel spreadsheet, which they love. >> Right. Of course we're trying to get 'em away from Excel spreadsheets anyway, but let's go ahead and automate some of it for them so it cuts out that error. >> It's a really interesting story because it's often a battle to get the sales people to work in Salesforce. >> Yeah. >> As opposed to report in Salesforce. >> Right. >> You're really kind of bridging that gap, letting 'em work in Excel, which isn't necessarily their preferred solution but if that's what they're doing and then integrating that back into the automated system. >> It's hard to change that behavior, for sure. >> Yes it is. >> But yeah, by giving them the bot, we're actually making them go into Salesforce. It gets them more comfortable with it and a way to drive user adoption. >> Right and I'm sure you can see a future where AI is going to enable more and more automation of all the little bits and pieces of that process going forward. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, too, what we talked about with gathering all that data, that's one of the things with Einstein that we're really interested in, especially at Dreamforce this year, is learning more about Einstein and what we can do on the platform with all the data that we have gathered. >> Right, right. The other thing you mentioned before we turn on the cameras, it's again, kind of a new technology, is voice. Obviously with the proliferation of Alexa and Google Home and OK Siri, and all these things, voice is going to be an increasingly important way that people interact with applications. As you look forward, down the road, what are some of the opportunities you see there, where you can start to integrate more potential voice control into the applications? >> I think it kind of goes back to our sales reps, again. Where they're on on-site. If they can talk into their phone really quickly and say, "Update this opportunity amount." I mean, that's great. It gets them, again, into Salesforce, it's going to drive that user adoption. I saw a session on it earlier today and I thought it was pretty cool. I think they'll be excited about that. We're also implementing field service for Lightning. We have our actual texts that get dispatched out on-site, so I can really see them using that on the mobile experience as well. >> The dispatch is going out through Lightning and then the management of the service call is also happening inside of Lightning? >> Yeah, we're implementing Service Cloud right now. The next phase will be implementing field service for Lightning. We're now dispatching out of SAP, but we're looking to move it entirely to Salesforce. >> Wow. >> Yeah. >> Okay, if Marc Benioff came in and sat down, there was a guy that looked just like his brother here earlier, what would you ask him? What kind of magic wand you've been developing in this thing for a number of years, would you say, Marc, love it, love it, but could you just give me a little of this and and a little of that? >> I'd say, show me the road map and no safe harbor, tell me it's actually going to happen. No, I think mobile is where we're always really trying to figure out where Salesforce is going, and I think they've really improved. But I offline capability is something that has struggled with Salesforce. We have to rely on other apps that write back into Salesforce. >> Right. >> It'd be nice to eliminate those other offline applications and just use Salesforce.com for that offline power train. Because a lot of times we're at the hospital, and there's no wifi, there's no connection. >> Right, right. >> So we have to have that offline capability. >> Still kind of the soft underbelly of cloud-based things but 5G is coming, we were just at the AT&T show and we'll have 5G 10x the speed, 100x the speed. >> Bring it on, yeah. >> So good stuff. Alright, Becky, thanks for taking a few minutes. >> Absolutely. >> And keep coding away. >> Thank you. >> Alright. >> She's Becky, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at the Conga Connect West at Salesforce Dreamforce at the Thirsty Bear, downtown San Francisco, come on by. (upbeat techno music)

>> From San Francisco, it's The Cube Covering Conga Connect West 2018. Brought to you by Conga. Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are at Salesforce Dreamforce, they say a hundred and seventy thousand people have descended into downtown San Francisco, it's absolutely bananas. We found a little respite, a little oasis if you will. Couple doors down to the Thirsty Bear's, the Conga Connect West event, come on down they've rented out The Thirsty Bear for three days of, I just was told, free food, free drink and a lot of entertainment, also a lot of great Conga people as well, and The Cube's here, so come on by. We're excited to have, for our next segment, people that are really getting close to the customer because at the end of the day, it's really about the customer. So we've got Natasha Reid, she is the senior product management for Conga, good to see you. And also Justin Mongroo, the VP of sales excellence from Conga, also great to see you. >> Thanks. Before we get in I got to ask you, Justin, that is a great title, VP of sales excellence. I mean there really, it says something about what you think is important which is being good at selling, not a used car sales approach at all. How did you come up with that title and what does that personify for your team? >> Yeah, well I didn't come up the title but I think for us, Conga, what it means, sales excellence is about selling with integrity, our product provides real benefits to customers and so unlike a lot of products where they can't talk about the full set, sales excellence to us is being able really let the product shine and identify how it's going to help the businesses we work with. >> Right, and Natasha that's what I hear you spend a lot of your time with customers on. You know, you're product management, but you're using a lot of customer input to drive what you prioritize how you're kind of setting out your road map, what you're working on. >> Yes, absolutely. So, from a customer perspective, we really pride ourselves on customer interviews. There's really nothing that helps you understand what customers are doing and using with your products than watching them firsthand in their own environment, and it really just provides invaluable feedback to help drive where we take our products in the future. >> It's funny, we did the Intuit Quickbooks Connect show a couple years ago, we had Scott Cook on, and he used to talk about it at Intuit, they would just go, like you said, and sit and watch people engage with the application, not even surveys but actually see how users use it and it's interesting even if you watch someone else just use Excel, we all use it in a very different way, so that must be incredibly valuable feedback. >> Yes, I mean you really see the good parts of the application, you see the parts that maybe need improvement as well, but it's feedback that you really can't gather in any way except watching somebody. >> Right, I think it also is the philosophy that's very very different than kind of looking at the competitors all the time, if you listen to Andy Jassy or Jeff Bezos at Amazon who are just kicking tail and taking names, they're maniacally focused on what the customer wants. They don't really look at the competition, they don't really talk about the competition, they're always looking at that customer. What do they need, what do they need next, and you guys continuing to evolve your product line to kind of continue to go down that path. >> Well, and the reality is is the customer defines the product in a lot of cases, right? What better way to understand your market than to talk to the people who are already working with you and finding out what they want to buy next? >> Right, right. So you guys have some exciting announcements here at Salesforce this year, Salesforce is now integrating some of the Conga functionality inside of some of their core applications if you could give us a little bit more color on that. >> Sure, so we just launched Conga invoice generation for Salesforce billing, and Conga quote generation for Salesforce CPQ. So, these two products are taking the power of the flagship document generation product Conga Composer, and we're leveraging that functionality for very purpose-specific built document generation with Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce billing. >> That's pretty awesome. >> Yes, that is pretty awesome. >> So why did pick you guys? What were some of the feature sets, or working with Conga that helped Salesforce come to this decision? >> Sure, so Conga Composer, well known for best in class document generation, pixel perfect documents, so when you need to get your formatting just right, when you need very sharp, clean lines, et cetera, leveraging things like the ability to provide more information or merge more product line items into your documents, as well as supporting the formats that people want, things like Word and PDF. >> Yeah, and I would say in addition to the functionality, Salesforce also is able to trust just by seeing our customer experience through our net promoter score and our reviews online knowing that they could partner with us and that we would take care of our joint customers they way they want them to be. >> That's a pretty significant move by them to adopt your guys' technology as part of the core within some of their offerings >> It is, it's not something that Salesforce does often, so we're very proud and we're very grateful that they looked to us to help provide these solutions. I think another component of this is just ease of use. So very easy to install, Lightning-ready, very forward thinking in that capacity. >> Yeah, the Lightning thing is interesting, you get used to the old, "Who moved my cheese?" I was the old school front end on Salesforce and they finally made me jump over to Lightning, but I'm sure that opened up all types of new opportunities for you to deliver new functionality in that. >> It does, and I'll empathize with that sentiment. I think change is always hard, right? People always struggle a little bit when they're used to doing something one way and Lightning is a very different look and feel from Salesforce Classic. I will say though that once you move to Lightning, Salesforce has done a really great job of, Lightning is more than just a CRM, It helps you do your job better. It makes suggestions, they put a lot of work into UI, user interface and user experience, you don't have to think about how to do your job better, it actually just helps you do your job better. >> Right. >> So being able to build and develop on the Lightning framework is actually a tremendous benefit. >> It has been, and in the last piece you guys are sitting on a bunch of different pieces in this document life cycle, if you will. You don't call it that, but you're into the contracts, you're into the document generation, you're into the life cycle management, so all these things too, I imagine now are coming together in a more kind of synchronized, cohesive way. >> Well I mean it's really if you think about the customer's story they need a generated document to communicate with their customers before they are a customer, and then they need to do a quote to show them how much it's going to cost, and they may or may not need to negotiate that and then they need to sign it, and every business has this sort of interaction with their customers, from, "Here's what we do." to "Do you like it "enough to buy it from us?" To, "Here's how we make it legally binding". I mean that's business, and Conga has met our customers along every stage of that journey that they go through in making a customer a customer, and doing that in a visually stimulating, professional way. >> So, fun fact about Conga Sign, our e-signature product we launched in February of this year. E-signature was the #1 feature request, or problem to solve that the conga customer base has provided in the last couple of years. So, everybody wanted e-signature. We listened, we heard, and we built you e-signature. >> So how long did it take you to get it out, from the time you decided, okay we'll go ahead? >> Well, as the original product manager I can actually answer that very specifically. So, we started building in July of last year and we launched on February thirteenth of this year. >> So, less than a year? >> Yes. >> Definitely less than a year. >> Okay, great. And just final thoughts on this event? Dreamforce, obviously a huge event for you guys, big investment in this Thirsty Bear celebration at Connect West. What do you hope to get out of this week, what are you excited to see from both the Salesforce folks across the street, as well as this kind of gathering with all your customers? >> You know, for me I hope to learn. I want to learn what our customers are interested in, I want to learn what our reps are seeing in the market as they walk around, and what other businesses are doing, and then learn from the ecosystem and what tools are available that we can use ourselves to better help our customer which is our employees. >> My favorite part of Dreamforce is actually the Conga booth at the Moscone main hall. So we actually get lots of our customers who come to find us, who come to find specific people. They'll come and ask for, "Hey, this support person "helped us", and they'll actually identify that person by name, or "Hey, this professional "service person helped us, can I meet them? "Are they here?" And it's just incredibly gratifying, like it's very difficult to describe. You have literally hundreds of people coming to find you to just say, "Thank you, we love your products, "it makes my life so much easier, "what else are you guys doing?" >> That's great, and it's always so gratifying to know that there's always someone on the other side that appreciates the work and it's always fun when you get some kind of an electronic relationship, to cement that with a face and a voice and a name and a handshake. Well, thanks again for stopping by and congratulations on the big announcement. >> [Natasha And Justin] Thank you. >> Alright, he's Justin, she's Natasha, I'm Jeff, you're watching The Cube. We're here at Conga Connect West at Salesforce at Thirsty bear, see you next time.

>> Live, from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by theCUBE. >> So, welcome to the Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit. I'm about to hand you over to John Furrier, who is the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of SiliconANGLE Media and Executive Editor at theCUBE, he's about to do a Fireside Chat with Al and Mathew, I'll let him introduce you to them as well. He's also involved in a major blockchain project himself, so he's going to get into that with those guys as well. So, and tomorrow we start at nine, in the meantime, enjoy the evening, enjoy the food, enjoy the chat, and I'll let you go. >> Okay. Hello? Thank you Ruth, appreciate it, thanks everyone for being part of this panel, Fireside Chat, want to make it loose, but high impact for you guys, I know, having some cocktails, having a good time. If there's any questions during, then at the end we'll pass the mic around, but. We want to have a conversation, kind of like we always do down in the lobby bar, just talking about crypto and cloud, and we ended up talking about cloud computing and crypto a lot because those are two areas that are kind of converging, and the purpose of this event. So we really wanted to share some thoughts around those two massively growing markets, one is already growing, it's continuing to be great: the cloud, and blockchain certainly is changing everything. These two important topics, we want to flesh them out, Al Burgio is the Serial Entrepreneur/Founder of DigitalBits, he's founded companies both in cloud and blockchain, so he brings a great perspective. And Matt Roszak, leading crypto investor, entrepreneur and advocate, well known in the crypto space for goin' way back, I think you gave a couple bitcoins to some very famous people early on, we'll get into that a little bit later. So guys, thanks for being part of the panel and Fireside. First question is: we know how big the money is, I mean the money is crypto is is flowin' around the world, and cloud computing we've seen specifically, and certainly in coverage now with Amazon's success, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft and others. Trillions of dollars being disrupted in the traditional kind of the enterprise, data center area, and blockchain is doing that too, so we want to get into that. But first, before we get into it, I want you guys to take a minute to explain for the folks, just to set the context, the kinds of projects you're working on. Now Al, you have DigitalBits, Matt you're investing and you're finding a lot of interesting token dynamics. So just take a minute. Al, start. >> (mic off) So-- Everybody hear me okay? Alright, perfect. Well thanks for that lovely intro. Yes, my name is Al Burgio, I'm, I've founded a few companies, as John mentioned. Before the cloud there was internet, (light laugh) and so it started for me in the late '90s in the e-commerce era. But more recently I pioneered what's known as Interconnection 2.0, and I did that with the company called Console, for those that may know PCCW, recently it was acquired by PCCW. And with that we disrupted the way networks at the core of the internet were connected together More recently I've founded the DigitalBits project, and now DigitalBits blockchain network, and with that, you can kind of think of that as the trading and transaction layer for the points economy and other digital assets, and you can do a lot of really interesting thing with that, it's really about bringing blockchain to the masses. >> Matt, what're you workin' on? >> So, Matthew Roszak, Co-Founder and Chairman of Bloq. Bloq is a enterprise software company, we do two things, the premise is the tokenization of things, so we think the money identity, new layers of the internet are going to be tokenized. And so, we go to market in two ways, one is through Bloq Enterprise, and these are all the software layers you need to to connect to tokenized networks, so think a wallet, a node, a router, etc. And then Bloq Labs we build, and partner with, some of the leading tokenize networks and applications, so we build a connective tissue and then we actually build these new networks. I started this space as an investor over five/six years ago, investing in some of the best entrepreneurs and technologists in the space build a great network. But I love building companies, and so my Co-Founder and I, Jeff Garzik, built Bloq two and a half years ago. And then lastly, also serve of Chairman of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, so, so if you believe in these new tokenized money layers, identity layers, etc, regulation comes into play. Certainly today from an institutional adoption level, and so if you care about this space, you need to spend time to kind of help that dialogue improve; this technology moves way faster than folks in DC and elsewhere, so. >> And the project that we're workin' on at SiliconANGLE, is we've tokenized our media platform, and we're opening it up to a token model, and have kind of changed the game. So all three of us have projects, want to put those in context, we build everything on Amazon Web Services, so, the view of the cloud, we also cover it. The cloud computing market is booming, we see that Amazon Web Services numbers empower the earnings for Amazon's company, obviously Apple's trillion dollar evaluation those are clear case studies; but blockchain could potentially disrupt it all, and Al, I want to get your thoughts, because even today in the news at Microsoft Azure, which is their big cloud provider, announced blockchain as a service. And folks that are in either the data center business or in cloud know the shift that's happening in the IT world, but no ones really connected the dots on where blockchain intersects, and also, is it an opportunity for the cloud guys, what's the landscape look like, so. What's your thoughts on that, how are they connected, what does it mean, how does a cloud company maintain their relevance and competitiveness with blockchain? >> Well, just pointing on the fact that, you know, today we had that new Microsoft, the Azure cloud, their support and evangelism for blockchain. You know, a company, I think it's very important that this isn't an ICO, two kids in a garage saying their doing something blockchain this is a massive, multi-billion dollar company; and making a decision like that is not trivial, it's many, many departments, a lot of resources, before such a thing's announced. So, that's, not only is it validation, but it's a leading indicator as to this trend, that this is clearly something that's important. And a lot of people, if you're not paying attention, you need to be paying attention, including if you're in the cloud industry, 'cause many companies obviously do compete with, with Microsoft and AWS, so. It may be still early, but it's not that early, in light of the news that we saw today. With that, I would say that, a lot of the parallels I like to kind of, if I was an infrastructure provider I'd look at this from the standpoint of the emergence of Linux when it first came on the scene. What was important for companies like Red Hat to be successful, they had competition at the time, and you had shortages of Linux, let's say engineers, and what have you. And so, a company like Red Hat built a business around that, and they did that by how they kind of surfaced and validated themselves to the enterprise of that era, was partnering with hardware companies, so, it was Intel, IBM, and then Dell, HP, and they all followed, and then all of a sudden, which version of Linux do you want to use? It's Red Hat, you're paying for that support, you're paying Red Hat. And, you know, then they had their hockey stick moment. Today, you know, it's not about hardware companies per se, it's about the cloud, right? So cloud is the new hardware per se, and many enterprises obviously are looking at cloud computing companies and cloud computing providers, infrastructure providers, as the company that they need to support them with the infrastructure that they use, or sorry the technologies that they use, right? Because they're not necessarily supporting these things and making sure that they're always on within the basement of that enterprise, they're depending, or outsourcing, to depending on these managed IT providers. This was very important that whatever technologies they're using in the lab, that ultimately their infrastructure partners are able to support the implementation, the integration, the ongoing support of these technologies. So if you think of blockchain like an operating system or a database technology, or whatever you want to call it, it's important that you're able to really identify these key trends, and be able to support your customer and what they're going to need, and ultimately for them, they can't have a clog in their digital supply chain, right? So, it's clearly emerging. Microsoft is validating that today, you know, clearly they have the data, that they're seeing for their existing enterprise customers, and they don't want to lose them. >> Yeah, but remember when cloud came out; you and I have talked about this many times Al that it wasn't easy to use, I remember when Amazon Web Services came out, it was just basically, it was hard to command line, basically you had to use it, so, it became easier now, it's so easy and consumable. Blockchain, similar growing pains, but, we don't want to judge it too early with the opportunity that it has, it's going to get easier, what're your thoughts? And it has to scale by the way, Amazon, at a large scale. >> Yeah, I mean-- >> So blockchain has to scale and be easier, your thoughts? >> Another kind of way to think of it is, to not necessarily think of cloud computing, but the evolution the internet went, you know, in Internet 1.0, you know, we went through this dial-up modem era, things were very raw back then; great visions we had of the future, like, it's going to be amazing for video one day! But, not during dial-up modem era, and eventually, you know, it eventually happened. And user interfaces improved, and tool sets improved and so forth. You know, fast forward to today, we have all of that innovation to leverage, so things will move a lot faster with blockchain, it did start very raw, but it's, it's moving much faster than anything we've seen definitely in the '90s and in the last decade, so. It's just, you know, it's a matter of moments, not years. >> And I think Al brings up a great point on leverage, because Amazon leverages infrastructure to a point where it's larger than Google, Azure, and IBM's public cloud combined, and so yeah, massive leverage there. And so, when these big cloud providers provide this blockchain as a service, it is instrumented and built on top of their existing infrastructure, not necessarily on blockchain infrastructure. So, it's an interesting dynamic where they're putting it on top of existing infrastructure that's there, but what's being build right now is the decentralized Amazon Web Services. So you have every layer of Amazon being re-imagined, like, and incentivized so you have distributed compute and access and storage and database. And so, what will be interesting to see is that, given this massive opportunity, will Amazon and some of these other incumbent cloud providers become the provisioning networks of the future? Of all this new decentralized resources that get, again, if you want storage, you have to start having smarts to say: if I'm going to go to Sia or Filecoin or Genaro or Storj, compute, etc; you have to start being a provisioning layer on top of that to kind of, you know, make that blockchain essentially work. So, it'll be interesting to see the transition 'cause today the lightweight versions to say yeah, I have a blockchain as a service strategy, and that's like, well done, and check the box. Now, the question is how far in this new world will they go down? And, as it gets more decentralized, as universities and governments, corporations, plug their access utility into these networks, and to see how that changes. That is much bigger than the Amazon of today. >> I think that's an interesting point, I want to just drill down on that if you don't mind, 'cause I think that's a fundamental observation that every layer's going to be decentralized. The questions I think I'm asking and I'm seeing is: How does it all work together? And then what's the priorities? And the old model was easy; got to get the infrastructure, got to get servers, (laughs lightly) and you know, work your way up to the top of the stack. What cloud brings also is that: a software developer can whip up an application, maybe a dApp on a test network and go viral, and the next thing you know they have a great opportunity, and then they got to build down. So the question is: What are you seeing in terms of priorities on stacks, portions of the stack that are being decentralized and tokenized, do you see patterns, trends, as an investor, is there a hotter (laughs) area than others, how do you look at that? >> Well, I think it's, it's in motion right now it's, like I said, every layer of AWS is getting thought through in how to create these digital cooperatives, I have excess storage, I'm going to contribute it to this network, and I'm going to get paid in tokens when a user uses that storage network, and pays for it in those native tokens and so that, coupled with all the other layers, is happening. From a user perspective, we may not want to be going to pick a database provider, a storage, a compute, etc, we're likely going to say: I want a provisioning layer, and provision this and execute this, much like if we, you know, there'll be new provisioning layers for moving money, I don't care if routes through Lightning or Litecoin or Doge or whatever, as long as the value gets across the pond or the app gets provisioned appropriately based on you know, time, security, and cost, and whatever other tendance are important, that's all I care about, but; given the depth and the market for all that, I think it'll be interesting to see how these are developed with the provisioning layers, and I would think Amazon or Azure, the future of that is, is more provisioning than actually going and doing all that at the end of the day. >> That's great. I want to get your thoughts guys on innovation. My good friend Andy Kessler wrote an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal around, an article around the government, the US government getting involved. You know, there's Twitter, Facebook, the big platforms, in terms of how they're handling their media, but it brings up a good point that with more regulation, there's less innovation. You mentioned some things outside the United States, it's a global cloud, cloud's operating globally with regions, it's a global fabric. Startups are really hot in this area so; how do you view the ecosystems of startups, in terms of being innovative, things happening that you think that're good, and things that aren't good, obviously I'm not a big of the government getting involved, and managing startups, the ecosystems but, blockchain has a lot of alpha entrepreneurs jumping in, you've looked at all the top ventures, the legit ventures, they're all alpha entrepreneurs, multi-time serial entrepreneurs, they see the opportunity and they go for it. Is the startup environment good, is there enough innovation opportunities, what're you thoughts on the opportunity to be innovative? >> Yeah, Al and I were just talking about this before the panel here, and were talking about our travels in Asia, and when we go there it is 10, 100 X of energy and get-it factor, and capital, and the markets are just wildly more vibrant than you know, going to some typical markets here in San Fran and New York in North America, and, so it's interesting to see that when you heat map the world, what's really happening. And you know, people are always saying: oh well this, this FinTech, or InsurTech, or whatever tech, is going to make a dent in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. This technology, this new frontier, is definitely going to do that. I think some of that will get put into more focus based on regulation, and there's two things that will happen; there's obviously a lot of whippersnapper countries that are promoting a safe place to innovate with crypto, I think Malta, Gibraltar, Barbados, etc, and there were-- >> Even Bermuda's getting in on the mix now. >> Yeah! I mean so there's no shortage of that, and so, and obviously this ecosystem outpaces the pace of regulation and then we'll see like the US doing something, or you know, other fast followers to try and catch up, and say hey, we're going to do the cryptocurrency act of 2022, miners get free power, tax-free, you know crypto trading, you know just try and play catch up. 'Cause it's kind of hard in the last year or 18 months we've seen this ecosystem go from this groundswell to this now institutional discussion; and how do you back end the the banking, the custody, all these form factors that are still relatively absent. And so, you know, we're right in the middle of it. >> It's a whole new way, you got to follow the money, right? Al, you and I talked about this; capital markets, you know entrepreneurs need to raise money and that's a good thing, you need to get capital to do stuff. >> Yeah, this is a new phenomenon that the world has never experienced before, it's awesomeness when it comes to capital formation; you know, without capital formation there is no innovation. And so the fact that more capital can be raised, it's the ultimate crowd sourcing in such an efficient period of time, capital being able, the ability to track capital from various different corners of the world, and deploy that capital to try to fuel innovation. Of course, you know, not all startups or what have you succeed, but that was true yesterday, right? You know, 90% of startups fail, but they all will give it some meaningful amounts of checks, people were employed and innovation was tried; and every once in a while something emerges that's amazing. If you can do that faster, right, when you have the opportunity to produce more and more innovation. And, of course with something so new as cryptocurrency, things like ICOs and what have you, people may kind of refer to it as the wild wild West, it's not, it's an evolution. And you have-- >> It's still the wild west though, you got to admit. (laughs) >> Well, it is but, we're getting better at it, right? As a world, this isn't the Silicon Valley community getting better at venture capital or some other part of the United States or Canada getting better at venture capital; this is the world as a whole getting better at capital formation. >> Yeah, that's a great point. >> In the new way of capital formation. >> And I wanted to just get an observation on that. I moved to Silicon Valley 20 years ago, and I love it there, for venture capital and new startups, it's the best place in the world. And I've seen people try to replicate Silicon Valley, we're the Silicon Valley of Canada, we're the Silicon Valley of the East or Europe, and it's always been hard to replicate, because it was a venture model, and you needed venture capitalists and you need money, you need a community, the culture, the failure, the starting over, and just, you know, gettin' back on the horse kind of thing. Crypto is the first time that I've seen the replica of that Silicon Valley dynamic, in a new way, because the money's flowing, (laughs) and there's community involved in crypto, crypto has a big community aspect to it. Do you guys see that as well? I mean I'm seeing, outside the United States, a lot of activity. Is that something that you're seeing? >> So, the first time we saw, well, last time we saw everybody trying to replicate Silicon Valley was first internet, you know, there was Silicon Swamp, there was Silicon Alley, there was silicon this-- >> Prairie. >> Every city was >> Silicon Beach. >> A silicon version of something, and then the capital evaporated, right? We had a mass correction happen. What wasn't being disrupted was value exchange, right, and so this is being created now, it is now possible for this to happen, and it's happening, we're seeing amazing things, Matt said, you know, in Asia. It's a truly awesome force, if anybody has an opportunity to go, they should go, it's unbelievable to experience it, and it really opens your eyes. >> And you've lived through a lot of investments during those .com days and through history now, you've seen a lot of different things. Your observations with the current state of the capital formation, startup landscapes, the global ecosystem around crypto and how it's different from say venture or classic rolling up companies and those kinds of things? >> Yeah, you hear a lot of this, you know, we're in a bubble, it's speculative, etc. And I think that when you look back at history of infrastructure, whether it's railroads, telephony, internet, and now crypto and blockchain, it's interesting, like, if you said: it would take this amount of money to innovate and come out the other end of internet with this kind of infrastructure, these kinds of applications, with these kinds of lessons learned, nobody would sign up for that number, right? It needs this fear, and greed, and all the other effervescence of markets to kind of come out the other end and have innovation. I think we're going through a very similar dynamic here with crypto and blockchain where you know, everything's getting tokenized, everything's getting decentralized. We're talking about fundamental things like money, you know, it's not like we're talking about pet food and women's shoes and airline tickets, we are talking about money, identity, things that will enable like other curves to really come into focus like in and out of things and the kind of compounding of intersections when some of these things get right is pretty extraordinary. And so, but I like what Al said in terms of capital formation and that friction to get from, you know, idea to capital to building, is getting compressed Yes, there will be edge cases of people taking advantage of that, but at the other end of this flow will be some amazing innovation. >> What do you guys think about the, if you had to answer the question with one answer, of what is the high order bit of why blockchain's so important? For me, I see it, from my standpoint, I'll just start, I see it making inefficient things more efficient for any use case, and that's being re-imagined, which is everything from IOT or whatever. Efficiency is a big thing, at least I see that. What do you guys see as a high order bit in terms of you know, the one thing that you'd say blockchain really impacts the world in terms of you know, impact, financial, etc? >> Well, I think with decentralization and all these things that we're seeing it's kind of evened the playing field. It's allowing for participation where parts of the world were unable to participate. And it's doing a whole lot of things in that area. And that's truly awesome, to really grow the economy, grow the global market, and the number of participants in that market in all areas. That's the ultimate trend at what's happening here. >> And your information? >> Absolutely, and I think there's two things, there's this blockchain dialogue, and then there's this crypto decentralization, tokenization dialogue, and on the blockchain side you have lots of companies engaging in blockchain and trying to figure out how it applies to their business, and you hear everything from McKinsey and Goldman saying financial services will save 100 billion dollars in operating expenses by applying blockchain technology, and that's great. That is probably low in terms of what they'll save, it's, to me, is just not the point of the technology, I think that when you kind of distill that down to say hey, for a group of folks to use this technology as a shared services thing to lower opex a trading settlement and decrease that, that's great, that is a step stone to creating these tokenized economies, these digital cooperatives. Meaning you contribute something and then you get something back, and it's measured in the value that this token is, like a barometric kind of value of how healthy that ecosystem is. And so, regulated public enterprises, and EC consortiums around insurance and financial services and banking, that is all fantastic, and that gets them in the pool, gets them exercising on what blockchain is, what it isn't, how they apply it, but it's, at the end of the day for them it's cost reduction The minute there's growth or IP, or disruption on the table, they're all going back to their boardrooms to say: hey let's do this, this, or that, but, if there's a way, my favorite class in college was industrial organization, and it sounds weird but, it was, it kind of told ya like how to dissect an industry, you know, what makes them competitive, who the market leaders are, and then, if you overlay like blockchain networks with tokens, with incentives, interesting things could happen, right? And so that future is going to be real interesting to see how market leaders think about how to tokenize their network, how to be, how to say: no I don't want to own this whole industrial network, I have to engage with some other participants and make sure everybody is incentivized to climb on board. So that I think is going to be more of the interesting part than just blockchain-ifying a workflow. >> Well let's just quickly drill down on that, token economics, what you're getting to. So let's assume blockchain just happens, as evolution of technology, let's just assume for a second that it's going to happen in a big way, it's private, public, hybrid chains, with all that good stuff happening, but the token economics is where the business value starts to be extracted, so the question for you is: How do you describe that to someone to look for, what are the key elements of token economics? When does it matter, when is it in play, and how should they be thinking about it? >> Yeah, I mean token economic design and getting a flywheel going to create a network and network effects is really important. You could have great technology, but Al could be a better marketer, and he gets tokens adopted better, and his network will do better because, you know, he was better able to get people to adopt and market a particular, you know, layer application. And so, it's really important to think about how you get that flywheel going, and how you get that kindling going on a particularly new ecosystem, and get users adoption and growth. That is really hard to do these days because some people don't even know what Bitcoin is, let alone to say I'm going to tokenize this layer, and every time you contribute, every time you take an action, you're going to get rewarded for it, and you're share the value of this network. >> Can you give me a good example of what's happening today that you can point to and say: that's a great example of token economics? >> Well, you see, I mean the most basic one is shared file storage, right? You know, it's like the Filecoin, Sia, Genaro model where, you know, you contribute you know, the unused storage in your laptop or your university data center or a corporate data center, and you say I'm going to contribute this, and when it's used I get these tokens and, you know at the end of the day or week or year you see what these tokens are worth, and was that worth your contribution? And so as these markets develop, and as utility develops, we'll see what that holds. >> Al, you got an example you could share? DigitalBits is a good use case obviously. >> Actually, I'm not going to use DigitalBits (John laughs) just to be neutral. This is one that Matt will know very well, definitely better than I, but one that I've-- the simpler something is, the easier it is for people to understand, and its like oh that makes sense, you know. You know, Binance is one that's very simple, you know it's a payment token, if you pay with some other currency, you pay, you know, Pricex, if you pay in the next few years with their token, you'll get the service at a discount. And in addition to that, they're using a percentage of profits, I think it's every quarter, to buy back up to, ultimately up to, 50% of tokens that are in circulation. So, you know, it's driving value, and driving return, in essence, if I can use that word. So for a user it's simple to understand, for someone that likes to speculate it's easy for someone to understand in terms of how the whole model works, so it's not some insanely complicated mathematical equation, that we can yes we can trust the math. And so in some cases, some adoption is going to just be, you know, attract participants based on simplicity. In other cases the math is important, and people will care about that, so, you know not all things are necessarily equal, and not necessarily one method is right, but there are some simple examples out there that that have proven to be successful. >> That's awesome, one last question, before we open it up if anyone has any questions. If anyone has any questions, if they want to come up, grab the microphone, and ask the three of us if you've got anything on your mind. And while you're thinking about that I'll get the final question for these guys is: A lot of people ask me hey, I want to be on the right side of history, what side of the street should I be on when the reality comes down that decentralization, blockchain, token economics, decentralized applications, becomes the norm, and that re-imagining actually happens? I don't want to be on the wrong side of history. What should I be doing, how should I be thinking differently, who should I be following, what should I be paying attention to? How do you answer that question? >> I think, at the basic level, you know, turn off your phone, lock your door, and study this technology for a day, it's the best advice I could give. Two: buy some crypto. Once you kind of have crypto on your phone, in your wallet, something changes in your brain, I think you just feel like you-- >> You check the prices every day. (all laugh) >> You lose a lot of sleep. And then after that, you know, I think you start engaging in this space in a very different way. So I think starting small, starting basic, is an important tenet. And then, what's amazing about this space is that it attracts the best and brightest out of industry, and law, and government, and technology, and you name it, and I'm always fascinated the people that show up and they're like yeah, I'm in a 20 year, you know, veteran in this space and I want to get into blockchain, it just attracts some of the best and brightest. And, I think we're going to see a lot of experience coming into the space, you know, this has been a, what I'd say a bottoms up groundswell of crypto and blockchain and the evolution of the space. And I think we're starting to see more some more mature folks come in the space to to add some history and perspective and helpin' the build out of this, and to build a lot of these networks. I think that the kind of intersection of both is going to be very healthy for the space. >> Al, your thoughts? >> Definitely agree with Matt. Definitely to lock yourself up and just try to absorb information, everyone has access to the internet, there's plenty of information. If you don't like to read go watch a few YouTube videos, just people explaining the stuff, it's really fascinating, the various different use cases and so forth. You definitely have to buy some, and, you know, whether it's five dollars worth, just go through the whole experience of being able to trade something of value that a few years ago didn't exist, and be able to trade it for something else of value is a pretty phenomenal experience. Then trying to go buy something with it, it's even more of a fascinating experience, I just bought something that used, again, something that didn't exist a few years ago. But, what I would add to that as well, you really have to get out there; if you keep surrounding yourself with people saying aw, this is, eh, whatever, >> It's never going to work. >> It's crazy, it's for criminals, and all that fun stuff. You're going to be last place. So coming to conferences, obviously future's conference you're going to meet a lot of interesting, great people, and that consistent experience, you'll learn something every time. You know, at the end of the day, I remember, I'm sure all three of us remember, with the birth of the internet there was many people that said you know the internet thing, it's crap, it's for kids, you know. And we had first movers, we had willing followers, and then the unwilling followed, you don't want to end up being-- >> The unwilling followers. >> Yeah, the unwilling. >> Alright. Does anyone have any questions they'd like to ask? Come on up. Yeah. We're recording, so we want to get it on film. >> So I have two questions. The first one is for you, Al: Two years ago I interviewed with IIX before it was Console, and I want to know why you didn't hire me? (Sparse laughs) No I'm kidding! That was a joke. Actually, I thought each of you brought up some good points, minus you Al. (chuckles) I'm just kidding. But what I really wanted to ask you guys is: so you talk a lot about this, the tokenized economy and kind of the roadmap and the things to get there, you talk about sediment layer, right, Fiat to crypto, sediment layer, your identity protocols, your dApps, X, Y, Z, right? The whole web 3.0 stack, I want each of you, or I want at least input from both of you or all of you, what are the hurdles to getting to a full adoption of web 3.0 stack, and make a bold prediction on the timing before we have a full web 3.0 stack that we use every day. >> That is a awesome question actually, timelines. You could be, being in technology, being in venture, you could be right, and you could be off by three, five, seven, 10 years, and be so wrong, right? And then at your retirement dinner you could say: I was right, but Tommy wasn't right. So, this is really hard technology, in terms of building systems that are distributed, creating the economic models, the incentive models, it takes a lot to go right in the intersection of all this. But it's not a question like is this happening? No, this is happening, this is like, it's in motion. The timelines are going to be a little elusive, I'm way more pragmatic, I was one of the early guys in the early internet, and you know everything was going to be .com and awesome and fantastic. But the timelines were a little elusive then, right? You know, it's like when was, people are thinking of today's Amazon was going to be the 2005 Amazon, you know, it's like, that took about another decade to get there, right? And people could easily just buy stuff and a drone or a UPS guy would just deliver it, and so, similar things apply today. And you know at the same time we all have a super computer in our pocket, and so it's a lot different. At the same time we're dealing with trusted mediums right? The medium of money, the medium of identity, all these different things they're, they're things that you know if I say download Instagram, and let's share cat pictures or whatever, it's not a big deal, our trust is really low for that, let's do it. For money, it's a different mental state, it's a different dynamic, especially if you're an individual, a government, or an enterprise, you go through a whole different adoption curve on that, so, you know, it is at grand scale five to 10 years, right? In any meaningful way. And so we still have a lot of work to do. >> My answer to that question, it's a good one, your question was a good one, my answer's a little bit weird because it's multi-generational. The first generation pivot was when the internet was born was because of standards, right? The government had investment. The OSI model, open system interconnect, actually never happened, the seven layers didn't get standardized, only a few key ones did; that created a lot of great things. And then when the we came out, that was very interesting protocol development there, the TCP/IP stuff, I mean HTP stuff. I don't see the standardization happening, because cloud flipped the stack model upside down because Amazon and these guys let the software developers drive the value. It used to be infrastructure drove the value of what software could do, then software became so proliferated that that drove the value of the infrastructure, so the whole cloud computing equation is making the infrastructure programmable for the first time, not the other way around, so. The cloud phenomenon's all about software driving the value, and that's happening, so. It's interesting because with blockchain you can almost do levels of services in a cloud-like way with crypto, I mean with blockchain and token economics, and have a partial stack. So think that this whole web 3.0 might be something that no one's every seen before. So, that's kind of my answer, I don't really know if that's going to be right or not, but just looking at the future, connecting the dots, it's probably not going to look like what we've seen before, and if the cloud's an indicator it's probably going to be some weird looking stack where certain sections are working, and then evolution might fill in the other ones, so. I mean, that's my take, I mean, but standards will play a role, the communities will have to get involved around certain things, and I think that's a timeless concept. >> Timing. >> Oh, timing. I think it's going to be pretty quick, I think if you look at the years it took for internet, and then the web, everything's being compressed down, but I think it's going to be much shorter. If it was a 20 year cycle in the past, that gets shortened down to 15 with the internet, and this could be five years. So five to 10 years, that could be the impact in my mind. The question I always ask is: what year will banks no longer be involved in anything? Is that 20 years or 10 years? (laughs) Exactly, so, yeah, follow the money. >> So I would say that in terms of trying to keep your finger on the pulse with things and how you kind of things, see things evolve; things are definitely moving a lot faster, you know in the past you would probably say seven to 10, I'm not sure if I would say five, sorry five to 10, it definitely feels to me that it's five max til we could start to see some of these key things fall into place, so. >> So could you answer the first question? >> What was the first question? >> Why didn't you hire me? (audience cringes) >> We've met before? Sorry. (all laugh) >> I have a question, this is Dave Vellante, Co-Host of theCUBE. And I want to pick up on something John you just said, and Matt you were talking about Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, it's not about them saving hundreds of millions of dollars, it's really about them transforming business, so. And John, you just asked the question about banks, I want to actually get your answer to this: Will traditional banks, in your opinion, lose control of payment systems? Not withstanding your bias. (laughter) >> Yeah, I am definitely biased on this. But, I mean, I've been in front of the C-suite of banks, credit card companies, etc, and I said, you know, in about a decade, the center of what you do and how you make money is going to be zero. And, 'cause there'll be networks, and ways to transmit money that'll be by far cheaper, or will be subsidized by other networks, meaning, and those networks are Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, you know, Tencent, whatever networks that're out there, that're engaging in collaboration and commerce and everything else, they will give away payments as just a courtesy, like people give away messaging or email or something, as a courtesy to that network, and will harden that network, and it'll be built and based on blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, so they don't necessarily have to worry about, you know, kind of subtle payments. But these new networks will start to encroach on banks, the banks are not worried about other banks today, the banks should be worried about these new networks that're being developed. >> How many people still have a home phone line? >> That was elegant, I like that. >> You know, I mean there's a generation of people that still like going to banks, they'll keep them in business for a while. But I think that comes to an end. >> I mean, when we covered a lot of the big data market when it started, the argument was mobile will kill the banks outlets, and now with ATMs there's more bank, more baking branches than ever before, so I think the services piece is interesting. >> And also, if you look at even the cloud basis, the software as a service, SaaS space, a decade, decade and a half ago, you would ask SAP, Oracle, what have you, what's your cloud strategy? And they'd be like cloud? That's just more efficient delivery model, not interested. 90 some billion dollars of M and A later, SAP, Oracle, etc, are cloud companies, right? And so, if banks kind of get into that same mode to say well, yeah, we need to play catch up and buy digital currency exchanges and multi-currency wallets, and this infrastructure and plumbing to be relevant in the next world, that would be interesting. But I think technology companies have as much an advantage to do that as as financial services companies, so it'll be interesting to see who kind of goes into that, goes into the crypto ecosystem to make that their own. >> It's interesting. We were talking before we came on and the OSS market, operational support systems is booming, and that's traditionally been these big operational outsource companies would manage big projects, but, if you look at in the first half of 2018, there's been a greater than 20 billion dollar commercial exits of companies through private equity merchants, IPOs, around OSS, and that's where we see operational things happening, CoreOS, Alfresco, MuleSoft, Pivotal went public, Magneto, GitHub, Treasure Data, Fastly, Elastic, DataStax, they're all in the pipeline. These are all companies that aren't cloud, they're like running stuff in cloud, so, this could be a tell sign that potentially the the blockchain operating market is going to be potentially a big one. >> Yeah, and then even look at BitMate, the world's largest miner in crypto. So, they did about a billion dollars in profit last year, did about a billion dollars in profit just in the first quarter going public, just raised a billion dollars last month, at a reportedly 50 to 70 billion dollar evaluation in Hong Kong in the next month, and the amount of money they'll raise will eclipse what Facebook raised. And so I think the institutional, the hardware, the cloud computing, the whole ecosystem starts to like resonate and think about this space a lot differently, and we need these milestones, we need these, whether they're room huddles or data points to kind of like think about how this is going to affect your business and what you do tomorrow morning. >> Any more questions from the crowd? Audience? Okay, great, well thanks for attending, appreciate you guys watching and listening, and guys thanks for the conversation; cloud and blockchain convergence. Collision course, or is it going to happen nicely, Al? >> Yeah, I think it's going to be a convergence, I don't see it necessarily as a collision course. >> And a lot of money to be made on this opportunity these days, and cloud convergence with blockchain. >> I concur with Al, I think there's going to be convergence, I think us most smarter players will engage and figure out their models in this new crypto and tokenized era. >> Thanks so much guys, appreciate it, give these guys a round of applause. (audience applause) Thank you very much. (bubbly music)

Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico. It's the Cube. Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you by, Blockchain Industries. >> Welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage in Puerto Rico. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of the Cube, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. In Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound, this is a global conference. Going to the next level in industry migration up and growth, and blockchain, decentralized internet and obviously cryptocurrency, changing the world up and down the stack. I have an industry veteran here. My next guest Salim is founding CEO, Singularity University and author of the best-selling book, Exponential Organizations. He's seen many waves, friend, known him for years. Haven't seen you in a while, you look great. You haven't changed. >> (laughs) The hair has changed a lot. >> (laughs) I've still got mine. Hey great to see you. Bumping into you in Puerto Rico is really compelling because you have a nose for the future, and I've always respected that about you. You have the ability to understand at the root level what's going on but also pull back and see the big picture. Puerto Rico is the center of all the action because the killer wrap in this is money. So money is driving a lot of change, but there's some fundamental infrastructure, stack upgrades going on. Blockchain has been highly discussed, crypto is highly hyped, ICO's are-- Scammers out there but now some legits. What's your take? What's your view right now on the current situation? >> Well I think what's happening with a place like Puerto Rico is. When you get kind of wiped out of the old, you have the chance to leap-frog. When you think about any of our traditional environments, laying down Blockchain technologies, et cetera. It's really, really hard because you have to get the Supreme Court, the Constitution to approve blockchain based land titles, and then you build a stack there from a legal perspective. Here they can basically start from scratch and do it completely from the ground up. Which is what's exciting for everybody here. >> The top story that we've been reporting here is that Puerto Rico is rebooting. The hurricane obviously, I won't say a forcing function, but in general when you get wiped out, that is certainly an opportunity to rebuild. If there's any kind of silver lining in that. >> There's a long history of that. Japan got wiped out during World War II, so did Germany and they rebounded incredibly. We've seen that recently with Rwanda. We do a lot of work in Medillin, in Colombia, and that's just been one of the worst cities in the world, is now the most innovative city in the world. So this is the transition that we've seen a pattern for. >> One of the things I'm really excited about decentralization and blockchain is all the conversations have the same pattern. Efficiency is getting wired into things. So if you see slack in the system or inefficiencies, entrepreneurs are feeling the void. The entrepreneurial eye of the tiger goes that to that opportunity to reset, reduce steps, save time and make things easier. Classic value proposition in these new markets. You run a great university but also author of Exponential Organizations. A lot of people are scared, they're like, "Whoa, hold on. Slow down, this is bullshit, "we're not going to prove it." And then the other half saying, "No this is the future." So you have two competing forces colliding. You have the new guard saying, "We got to do this, this is the future." Old guard saying, "Blocks, Road blocks, blockers" You covered this in your book in a way, so how do you win, who wins? How do you create a win win? >> You can create a win win. What you have to do is leap-frog to the newest, fast as possible. The only question is, how can you get to the new? And the problem that you have is, as you rightly pointed out is. When you try disruptive innovation in any large organization or institution, the immune system attacks. I saw this at Yahoo running Brickhouse. Yahoo is supposedly a super advanced organization, and yet the minute you try to do something really radical, you spend all your time fighting the mother ship. So I've been focusing a lot of time the last few years focused on that particular problem, and we're pretty excited, we believe we've cracked it. >> How does someone crack that code? If I'm Puerto Rico, obviously the government officials are here at Blockchain Unbound. This is not just a tech conference. It's like a tech conference, investor conference, kind of world economic form rolled into one. >> Sure >> There's some serious players here. What's your advice to them? >> So what we do, and let me describe what we do in the private sector and what we do in the public sector. A couple of years ago, the global CI of Procter & Gamble came to me and said, "Hey, we'd like to work with you." And what we typically see is, some executive from a big company will come to Singularity. They'll go back headquarters with their hair on fire going, "Oh my god!" If they're from BMW for example. They go back going, "Drones, autonomous cars, hyperloop, VR." Back in Munich, they'll be given a white coat and some medicine and be put in a corner. "You're too crazy, now stand over there." And that's the tension that you are talking about. And then somebody else will come six months later then they'll do the Silicon Valley tour, then they'll have one of our people go over there, and it takes about three years for the big company to get up to speed, just the C-Suite to get up to speed. Forget transmitting that down. So I was talking to Linda Clement-Holmes and I said, "Look we're about to start this three year dance "I've been thinking about this, "let's shrink it to 10 weeks." So we designed what we now call an ExO Sprint. Which is how you get a leadership, culture and management thinking of a legacy organization, three years ahead in a 10 week process. And the way we do it is, we're in an opening workshop, that's really shock and awe. Freaks out all the incumbent management. And then young leaders and future lieutenants of the business do the thinking of what should come next. And they report back. Some thing about that opening workshop suppresses the immune system, and when the new ideas arrive they don't attack them in the same way. >> It's like a transplant if you will. >> It's like when you do a kidney transplant. You suppress the immune system, right? It's that same idea. So we've now run that like a dozen times. We just finished TD Ameritrade, HP, Visa, Black & Decker, et cetera. We're open-sourcing it. We're writing a manual on how to do it so that anybody can self-provision that process and run it. Because, every one of the Global 5000 has to go through that process with or without us. So then we said, "Okay, could we apply it to the public sector?" Where the existing policy is the immune system. You try and update transportation and you're fighting the taxis. Or education and you're fighting the teacher's unions. We have a 16 week process that we run in cities. We do it through a non-profit called the Fastrack Institute based out of Miami. We've run it four times in Medillin, in Colombia and we just finished four months with the mayor of Miami on the future of transportation. We're talking to the officials here about running a similar process here in Puerto Rico. >> Are they serious about that? Because they throw money at projects, it kind of sits on the vine, dies on the vine. Because there is an accelerated movement right now. I mean, exponential change is here. I'll give you an example. We're seeing and reporting that this digital nation trend is on fire. Suddenly everyone wants digital cities, IoT is out there. But now what cryptocurrency, the money being the killer app. It's flowing everywhere, out of Colombia, out of everywhere. Every country is moving money around with crypto it's easier, faster. So everyone is trying to be the crypto, ICO city. Saw it on Telegram today, France wants to be, Paris wants to be the ICO city. Puerto Rico, Bahrain, Armenia, Estonia. U.K. just signed a deal with Coinbase. What the hell is going on? How do you rationalize this and what do you see as a future of state here? >> Well I think, couple of thoughts. And you're hitting into some of the things I've been thinking about a lot recently. Number one is, that when you have a regulatory blockage, it's a huge economic developing opportunity for anybody that can leap-frog it. Nevada authorized autonomous cars early and now a lot of testing is done there. So the cities that have appreciated-- >> So you're saying regulatory is an opportunity to have a competitive advantage? >> Huge, because look at Zug in Switzerland. Nobody had ever heard of the place. You pass through there on the way to Zermatt. But now it's like a destination that everybody needs to get to because they were earlier. This is the traditional advantage of places like Hong Kong or Dubai or whatever. They're open and they're hungry. So we're going to see a lot of that going on. I think there's a bigger trend though, which is that we're seeing more and more action happen at the city level and very, very little happen at the national or global level. The world is moving too fast today for a big country to keep up. It's all going to happen this next century at the city level. >> Or smaller countries. >> Or small countries. >> So what's going on here at Blockchain Unbound for you? Why are you here? What are you doing? What's your story? >> I have this kind of sprint that we run in the private sector and in the public sector and then a community of about 200 consultants. And I have to pay 200 people in 40 countries and it's and unholy mess. Withholding taxes and concerns around money transfer costs-- >> It's a hassle. >> It's a nightmare. And so I've been thinking about an internal cryptocurrency just to pay our network. All of a sudden now, three or four countries have said, "Hey we want to buy that thing, "to have access to your network." So I've got all this demand over here, and I need to figure out how to design this thing properly. So I've been working with some of the folks like Brock and DNA and others to help think through it. But what I'm really excited about here is that, there's a-- You know what I love is the spectrum of dress. You got the radical, Burning Man, hippie guy, all the way to a three-piece suit. And that diversity is very, very rich and really, real creativity comes from it. This feels like the web in '96, '95. It's just starting, people know there's something really magical. They don't quite know what to do. >> Well what I'm impressed about is that there's no real bad vibe from either sets of groups. There's definitely some posturing, I've noticed some things. Obviously I'm wearing a jacket, so those guys aren't giving me hugs like they're giving Brock a hug. I get that, but the thing is, the coexistence is impressive. I'm not seeing any real mud-slinging, again I didn't like how Brock got handled with John Oliver. I thought that was unacceptable because he's done a lot of good work. I don't know him personally, I've never met him, but I like what he's doing, I like his message. His keynote here, at d10e, was awesome. Really the right messaging, I thought. That's something that I want to get behind and I think everyone should. But he just got trashed. Outside of that, welcoming culture. And they're like, "Hey if you don't like it, "just go somewhere else." They're not giving people a lot of shit for what they do. It's really accepting on all sides. >> Here's my take on the whole decentralization thing. We run the world today on a series of very top down hierarchical structures. The corporation, the military industrial complex, Judeo-Christian religions, et cetera. That are very hierarchical-- Designed for managing scarcity, right? We're moving the world very, very quickly to abundance. We now have an abundance of information, we'll soon have an abundance of energy, we'll soon have an abundance of money, et cetera. And when you do these new structures, you need very decentralized structures. Burning Man, the maker movement, the open-source movement, et cetera. It's a very nurturing, participatory, female type of archetype and we're moving very quickly to that. What we're seeing in the world today is the tension going from A to B. >> And also when you have that next level, you usually have entrepreneurs and sponsorships. People who sponsor entrepreneurs the promotion side of it, PR and that starts the industry. Then when it hits that level it's like, "Wow it's going to the next level." Then it gets capital markets to come in. Then you have new stake holders coming in now with government officials. This thing is just rocket-shipping big time. >> Yes >> And so, that's going to change the dynamics. Your thoughts and reaction to that dynamic. >> Completely, for example... When we do these public sprints we end up usually with a decentralized architecture that needs to built. For example, we're working with the justice system in Colombia. And the Supreme Court has asked us to come in and re-do the entire justice system. Now you think about all the court filings and court dates, and briefs, and papers all should be digitized and put on a blockchain type structure because it's all public filing. We have an opportunity to completely re-do that stack and then make that available to the rest of the world. I think that trend is irreversible for anything that previously had centered-- I mean, most government services are yes, ratifying this and ratifying that. They all disappear. >> Well Salim, I want to tap your brain for a second. Since you're here, get it out there, I want to throw a problem at you, quick real time riff with you. So one of the things that I've been thinking about is obviously look at what cloud computing did, no one saw Amazon web services early, except some of the insiders like us. Who saw it's easy to host and build a data center. "I have no money, I'm a start-up or whatever." You use AWS, EC2 and S3... They were misunderstood, now it's clear what they're doing. But that generated the DevOps movement. So question for you is, I want to riff with you on is, "Okay that created programmable infrastructure, "the notion of server-less now going mainstream." Meaning, I don't have to talk about the server, I need resource so I can just make software, make it happen. That's flipped around the old model, where it used to be the network would dictate to the applications what they could do. How is that DevOps ethos, certainly it's driven by open-source, get applied to this cryptocurrency? Because now you have blockchain, cryptocurrency, ICO is kind of an application if you will, capital market. How does that model get flipped? Is there a DevOps model, a blockchain ops model, where the decentralized apps are programming the blockchain? Because the plumbing is the moving chain right now. You got, Hashgraph's got traction, then you got Etherium, Lightning's just got 2.5 million dollars. I mean, anyone who's technical knows it's a moving train in the plumbing. But the business logic is pretty well-defined. I'm like, "I want to innovate this process. "I'm going to eliminate the efficiency." So this dynamic. Does the business model drive infrastructure? Does the plumbing drive the business model? Your thoughts on this new dynamic and how that plays out. >> I suspect you and in violent agreement here. It's always going to be lead by the business model because you need something to act as the power of pull to pull the thing along, right? The real reason for the success of Etherium right now is all the ICOs and it was a money driven thing. Today we're going to see these new stacks, now we're on version three of these new types of stacks coming along, and I think they're all looking for a business model. Once we find some new killer ops for this decentralized structure, then you'll see things happen. But the business model is where it's at. >> So basically I agree with you. I think we're on the same page here. But then advice would be to the entrepreneurs, don't fret about the infrastructure, just nail your business model because the switching cost might not be as high as you think. Where in the old days, when we grew up, you made a bad technical assess and you're out of business. So it's kind of flipped around. >> Yeah, just hearing about this term, atomic swaps. Where you can just, essentially once you have a tokenized structure, you can just move it to something else pretty quickly. Therefore, all the effort should be on that. I think finding the really compelling use cases for this world is going to be fascinating to see. >> So software-defined money, software-defined business, software defined society is coming. >> Yes >> Okay, software defined, that's the world Salim thanks for coming on, sharing your awesome expert opinon. Congratulations on your awesome book. How many countries is your book, Exponential Organizations-- >> It's now about a quarter of a million copies in 15 languages. >> Required reading in all MBA programs, and the C-Suite. Congratulations, it's like the TANEx Engineering that Mark Dandriso put out. A whole new paradigm of management is happening. Digital transformation. >> We now have the ability to scale an organization structure as fast as we can scale technology. >> Blockchain you know, the nature of the firm was all about having people in one spot. So centralized, you can manage stuff. Now with blockchain you have a decentralized organization. That's your new book, the Decentralized Organization. >> Although, I'm not sure I have another book in me. >> There's a book out there for somebody, Decentralized Organizations. Salim, thank you for joining us. The Cube here, I'm John Furrier the co-host. Day two coverage of Blockchain Unbound more coverage after this short break. (electronic music)