(techno music) >> Live, from Washington DC, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Public Sector Summit, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone, this is the live CUBE coverage here in Washington DC for AWS Public Sector Summit 2018. This is the, kind of like the reinvent for Public Sector. I'm John Furrier, f my co-host Stu Miniman, our next guest is Hardik Bhatt, Smart Cities Vertical Lead for Amazon Web Services, been a former CIO, knows the state and local governments cold. This is a very key area around Internet of Things and technology with cloud, because smart cities have to do not only technology roll outs for some of the new capabilities, but all manage some of the societal changes, like self-driving cars and a variety of other things, from instrumenting sensors and traffic lights and video cam ... I mean, this is a little, just a little ... Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. Good to see you, Stu, good morning. Looking forward to having a great conversation. >> So, smart cities obviously is really hot, but we love it, because it brings life, and work, life, and play together, because we all live in towns, and we live in cities, and the cities provide services to the residents, transportation, sidewalks, and things that we take for granted in the analog world. Now there's a whole digital set of services coming big time. So, are they prepared? (laughs) It used to be buy a mainframe, then move it to a minicomputer, get a Local Area Network, buy some PCs, buy some network tablets, now the cloud's here. What's your assessment of the smart cities landscape for state and local governments? Because it really is something that's on the front burner, in terms of figuring it out. What's the architecture? Lot of questions. What's your, what's the state of the union, if you will, for-- >> You know it has been, like, how the governments have been for many years, right? Governments exist so that they can provide better services, they can provide better quality of life, they can create an environment where businesses thrive, jobs can be created, education can be given, and you can build a workforce and talent, et cetera. And smart cities is just, I'd say, a trend where, you know, you're using multitudes of technology to kind of help the government get its mission accomplished in a smoother, faster, better, cheaper manner. And a lot of times, I've seen, because how smart cities movement started a decade ago, we kind of compare smart cities with the Internet of Things or the sensors, but smart cities is much more than just the IoT, or the Internet of Things, I mean if you're talking about creating a new stream of data that is real-time, whether coming in from sensors, coming from video, you already as a government, I used to be a CIO for the City of Chicago, we used petabytes of data that was already sitting in my data center, and then there's also this whole third-party data. So smart cities is a lot about how do you as a city are aggregating this different sources of data and then making some action from it, so that ultimately, going back to the city's priorities, you are giving better public safety, or you're providing better public health, or you're providing better education or you're providing, better providing government services. So that's what we are seeing. Our customers are, when we say smart cities, they jump right into, "What problems are you solving?" And that, to me, is the core for Amazon, core for Amazon Web Services. We want to know our customers' problems and then work backwards to solve them. >> What are some of the problems right now that are low-hanging fruit? Because obviously it's an evolution. You set the architecture up, but ultimately governments would love to have some revenue coming in from businesses. You mention that. Education is certainly there. What are some of the challenges there? Is it pre-existing stuff, or is it new opportunities? What are some of the trends you're seeing for use cases? It is actually both pre-existing stuff that they are trying to solve, as well the new stuff, the new opportunities that are getting created, because the technology is much different than what it used to be 10 years ago. The cloud, especially, is creating a lot more new opportunities, because of the nimbleness it brings, the agility it brings. So, in transportation side, we are seeing on one hand, multiple departments, multi-jurisdictional, so state transportation department, as well as a local transportation department, working together to create kind of a virtual information sharing environment or a virtual command center, so that they can detect an accident, a traffic incident, much quicker and respond to that, because now they can aggregate this data. And they're also now adding to that some public safety information. So whether it is a police department, fire department, EMS, so that they can address that incident quickly and then not only clear the traffic and clear the congestion, or reduce the congestion time, but they can also address the, any public safety issue that may have arisen out of that incident that has happened. So, the Department of Transportation, the USDOT, through the Federal Highway Administration, has been giving out $60 million worth of grants to six to ten recipients. The grant, this year's grant period, just closed on Monday, and we worked with multiple customers who are looking to kind of respond to that. So on one hand, it is that. So this is an age-old problem, but new technology can help you solve that. On the other hand, another customer that we worked with is looking for on-demand micro-transit solutions. As you can see, all the ride-sharing applications are making easier to jump in a car and move to one place to the other. It is causing a dip in transit ridership. So the public transit agents, they are looking for solutions to that. So they are looking at, "Can we build an on-demand microtransit "so you can pool your friends and jump into a transit van, as opposed to a private car?" And then you can go from point A to point B in a much more affordable manner. So they are looking at that. On the public health side, you know, we have the DC Benefits Exchange, Health Benefits Exchange, is on AWS, and they have seen significant savings. They have seen $1.8 million of annual savings because they are using cloud and cloud services. On the other hand, you have State of Georgia, which is using Alexa. So they have built Alexa Skills where you can ask, as a resident of State of Georgia getting SNAP benefit, the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance, the food-stamp program, you can say, "Alexa, what's my SNAP balance?" So based on the answer then, based on the balance you know, you can plan your, you know, where you're going to use that money. So we are seeing large volume of data now coming on the cloud where the governments are looking to move kind of the needle. We are also seeing this nimble, quick solutions that can start going out. And we are seeing a lot of driver behind the innovation is our City on a Cloud challenge. So we have seen the City on a Cloud winners, since last so many years, are kind of the ones who are driving innovation and they're also driving a lot of collaboration. So I can, there are three trends that I can jump into as we kind of talk more. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I think back a decade ago, when you talk smarter cities, you'd see this video, and it would look like something out of a science fiction. It's like, you know, "Oh, the flying taxi'll come, "and it will get you and everything." But what I, the stories I have when I talk to CIOs in cities and the like, it's usually more about, it's about data. It's about the underlying data, and maybe it's a mobile app, maybe it's a thing like Alexa Skills. So help us understand a little bit, what does the average citizen, what do they see? How does their, you know, greater transparency and sharing of information and collaboration between what the agencies are doing and, you know, the citizenship. >> I think that's a great question. I mean that is what, as a former CIO, I always had to balance between, what I do creates internal government efficiency, but the citizens don't feel it, don't see it, they don't, it doesn't get in the news media. And on the other hand, I also have to, to my governor, to my mayor, to the agency directors, have to give them visible wins. So, I'll give you an example, so City of Chicago, back in the day, in 2010 when I was the CIO. We did a contract with our AWS, currently AWS Partner Socrata, to open up the data. So that was kind of the beginning of the Open Data Movement, and eventually, I left the city, I went work for Cisco, and the city government continued to kind of build on top of Socrata. And they build what they called the Windy Grid, which is basically bringing all of their various sets of data, so 311, code violations, inspections, crime, traffic, and they built an internal data analytics engine. So now, agencies can use that data. And now, what they did, two years ago, they were one of the City on a Cloud Challenge winners, and they, Uturn Data Solutions is our partner that was the winner of that, and they built Chicago Open Grid. So they basically opened that up on a map-based platform. So now as a citizen of Chicago, I can go on Chicago Open Grid, and I can see which restaurants in, surrounding my area, have failed inspections. Have they failed inspection because of a mice infestation, or was it something very minor, so I can decide whether I want to go to that restaurant or not. I can also look at the crime patterns in my area, I can look at the property values, I can look at the education kind of quality in the schools in my neighborhood. So, we have seen kind of now, and it's all on AWS cloud. >> This open data is interesting to me. Let's take that to another level. That's just the user side of it, there's also a delivery value. I saw use cases in Chicago around Health and Human Services, around being more efficient with either vaccines, or delivery of services based on demographics and other profile, all because of open data. So this brings up a question that comes up a lot, and we're seeing here is a trend, is Amazon Web Services public sector has been really good. Teresa Carlson has done an amazing job leaning on partners to be successful. Meaning it's a collaboration. What's that like in the state and local government? What's the partner landscape look like? What are the benefits for partners to work with AWS? Because it seems obvious to me, it might not be obvious to them. But if they have an innovative idea, whether it's to innovate something on the edge of the network in their business, they can do it, and they can scale with Amazon. What is the real benefits of partnering with AWS? >> You hit a key point on there. Teresa has done a fantastic job in customer management as well as building our partners. Similarly, we have a great leader within the state and local government, Kim Majerus. She leads all of our state and local government business. And her focus is exactly like Teresa: How can we help the customers, and also how can we enable partners to help customers? So I'll give you and example. The City of Louisville in Kentucky. They were a City on a Cloud winner, and they, basically what they're building with a partner of ours, Slingshot, they (laughs) get, I was, I used to be in Traffic Management Authority, back in my days, and we used to do traffic studies. So, basically, they send an intern out with clicker or have those black strips to count the number of cars, and based on that, we can plan whether we want to increase the signal timing on this approach, or we can plan the detours if we close the street, what's the, and it's all manual. It used to take, cost us anywhere from 10 to 50 thousand dollars, every traffic study. So what Louisville did with Slingshot is they got the free Waze data that they get gives all of the raw traffic information. Slingshot brought that on to a AWS platform, and now they are building a traffic analysis tool, which now you can do like a snap of a finger, get the analysis and you can manage the signal-approach timing. The cool thing about this is, they're building it in open source code. And the code's available on GitHub, and I was talking to the Chief Data Officer of Louisville, who's actually going to be speaking at this event later today. 12 other cities have already looked into this. They've started to download the code, and they are starting to use it. So, collaboration through partners also enables collaboration amongst all of our customers. >> And also, I'd just point out, that's a great example, love that, and that's new for me to hear that. But also, to me the observation is, it's new data. So being able to be responsive, to look at that opportunity. Now, it used to be in the old world, and I'm sure you can attest to this, being a CIO back in the day, is okay, just say there's new data available, you have to provision IT. >> Oh my God, yeah. >> I mean, what, old way, new way. I mean, compare and contrast the time it would take to do that with what you can do today. >> It's a big, huge difference. I'll tell you as the CIO for the State of Illinois, when I started in early 2015, in my first performance management session, I asked my Infrastructure Management Team to give me the average days it takes to build a server, 49 days. I mean, you're talking seven weeks or maybe, if you talk, 10 business weeks. It's not acceptable. I mean the way the pace of innovation is going, with AWS on cloud, you are talking about minutes you can spin up that server. And that's what we are seeing, a significant change, and that's why Louisville-- >> And I think you got to think it's even worse when you think about integration, personnel requirements, the meetings that have to get involved. It's a nightmare. Okay, so obviously cloud, we know cloud, we love cloud, we use cloud ourselves. So I got to ask you this could, City in a Cloud program, which we've covered in the past, so last year had some really powerful winners. This has been a very successful program. You're involved in it, you have unique insights, you've been on both sides of the table. How is that going? How is it inspiring other cities? What's the camaraderie like? What's the peer review? Is there a peer, is there a network building? How is that spreading? >> That is actually enabling collaboration in a significant manner. Because, you know, you are openly telling what you want to do, and then you are doing that. Everybody is watching you. Like Louisville is a perfect example where they built this, they're building this, and they're going to share it through open source code to all the cities. 12 is just the beginning. I'd not be surprised if there are 120 cities that are going to do this. Because who doesn't want to save two hundred, three hundred thousand dollars a year? And also lots of time to do the traffic studies. Same thing we have seen with, as Virginia Beach is building their Early Flood Warning System. There are other cities who are looking into, like how do we, New Orleans? And others are looking at, "How do we take what Virginia Beach has built? "And how can we use it for us?" And yesterday, they announced this year of the winners that includes Las Vegas, that includes LA Information Technology Department, that includes the City of Philadelphia, and I've been in conversations with all of the CIOs, CDOs, and the leaders of these agencies. The other thing, John, I have seen is, there's a phenomenal leadership that's out there right now in the cities and states that they want to innovate, they want to collaborate, and they want to kind of make a big difference. >> Hold on, hold on, so one more question, this is a really good question, want to get, follow-up on that. But this, what you're talking about to me signifies really the big trend going on right now in this modern era. You've got large cloud scale. You have open source, open sharing, and collaboration happening. This is the new network effect. This is the flywheel. This is uniquely different. This kind of categorizes cloud. And this wasn't available when IT systems and processes were built, 20, 30 years ago. I mean, this is the big shift, you, I mean do you agree? >> Absolutely, this is the big shift, the availability of the cloud, the ubiquitous nature of mobile platform that people have. The newer way of, like, the natural language processing, use of Alexa is becoming so prevalent in government. I mean, in City of Chicago, 50% of the 311 calls that we used to get in 2010, 3 1/2 million of those were informational in nature. If I could offload that on to my Alexa Skills, I can free up my workforce, the 311 call-takers, to do much better, higher-level, you know, call-taking, as opposed to this. So you're absolutely right. I've seen the trends we are seeing is, there is lots of collaboration going on between the governments and partners. I'm also seeing the governments are going at modernization from different points based on their pain points. And I'm also seeing a definite acceleration in modernization. Government, because the technology, AWS, the cloud, our services that we are seeing. And the pace of innovation that AWS brings is also enabling the acceleration in governments. >> Yeah, to help put a point on the, on the conversation here, there's been for years discussion about, "Well, what is the changing role of the CIO?" You've sat on that side of the table, you know, worked with lots of COs, what do you see is the role of the future for the CIO when, specifically when you talk state and local governments? >> I would say CIO is the kind of has to be an enabler of government services. Because if I go back to my city days and working with a mayor, or my state days, working with a governor, at the end of the day, the governor or the mayor is looking at creating better quality of life, providing better health, better education, better safety, et cetera. And CIO is kind of the key partner in that metrics to enable what the governor, what the mayor, the agency directors want to do. And because now data enables the CIO to kind of quickly give solutions, or AI services, Alexa and Polly and Rekog ... All of these things give you, give me as a CIO, ability to provide quick wins to the mayor, to the governor, and also very visible wins. We are seeing that, you know, CIO is becoming a uniquely positioned individual and leader to kind of enable the government. >> All right, thanks so much for comin' on theCUBE. Love the insight, love to follow up. You bring a great perspective and great insight and Amazon's lucky to have you on the team. Lot of great stuff goin' on in the cities and local governments. It's a good opportunity for you guys. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> It's theCUBE live here in Washington DC for AWS, Amazon Web Services Public Sector Summit, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, again second year of live coverage. It's a packed house, a lot of great cloud action. Again, the game has changed. It's a whole new world, cloud scale, open source, collaboration, mobile, all this new data's here. This is the opportunity, this is what theCUBE's doing. We're doin' our part, sharing the data with you. Stay with us, more coverage from day two, here in Washington, after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's The Cube, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone and welcome back, I'm John Furrier, co-host of The Cube. We're here on the ground, in the middle of all the action. Consensus 2018, I'm here with Andrew Prell, with Convergence. Cube alumni, we met in Puerto Rico, industry legend, veteran, been around, welcome back. >> Thank you, like to be here. >> So Convergence, you guys got a unique opportunity, we did a deep dive on YouTube, check Andrew Prell, Convergence, youtube.com/siliconangle, great video to watch from Puerto Rico. Quickly, one minute, explain what you guys do, and then we'll get into the new hot news. >> All right, so we're reimagining the whole video game space. We marry the consumer game industry to the out of home entertainment industry, into one operating layer, where all devices get to play against each other, in the same game space. Then we put our virtual currency on the Blockchain, to eliminate all the fraud and theft that happens when people try to convert their digital assets to actual cash. >> Okay, so what's the news real quick? Give us the update, what's going on, what's the update? >> Well see the update, we had initially named our token, back in September of 2014, while we're building everything out. We had named it Nano. Raiblocks, put it out on the Blockchain, just what a month ago, month and a half ago, as Nano, so we had to rename the token. So we announced, and we've already burnt them, put them on the Blockchain, they're in our wallets right now, on May the fourth, we announced our new token, as the Droid coin. So May the fourth be with you. (laughter) These are the Droids your looking for. So we have the Droid coin now in twenty different wallets ready to start deploying them as our white paper states. >> And you get the big momentum going on. Team updates, any new personnel, what's going on, what's the progress? >> Well the personnel actually, we just had a major event, called run for the unicorns, we had it in Louisville, Kentucky, derby week. And we took all the VIP's and press and that to the derby at the end of the week. It was a really great event. There's when we rolled out the coin, we had the team up on day two talking through all of it. It was really an awesome event then, we're now here at Consensus talking with Ledger. What they're doing right now really works well with our investment funds. 'Cause we did the, we talked last about the virtuous circle of a token based investment fund, and where we're breaking up ten funds allowing the VC's to have nine of them, and go up against the DOW on the Blockchain. Well the vault that the Ledger has, we're starting to walk through with them because we'll bring it to it's limits and it really seems like something awesome for, you know, just the whole Blockchain industry in general, in having that security at a industrial level or a institutional investor level. >> Andrew I would literally appreciate you coming back on. Real quick, what are you learning here at the show? What are doing, any business deals? Let's get the update on the ground here for you. >> On the ground here for me, we're actually have several major deals in the works that we're trying to close right now. If all goes well, by the end of this week, if not next, we will be done closing our funding rounds, period. And then from that point on, the only way you'll be able to get our tokens is to buy them from some of the startups that we're investing in, so. >> Great model. Check out our YouTube video with Andrew, deep dive, changing the gaming industry a whole nother level, really innovative solution and business model. And the tech underneath is all cutting edge. Andrew thanks for coming on The Cube again, giving us a quick update, I'm John Furrier here on the ground at Consensus 2018, in Manhattan at the Hilton Midtown for Blockchain week, New York City. >> But did we tell them where they can find our stuff? >> Go get, give the URL plug. >> Yeah, ico.silicanexus.com and fund.silicanexus.com that's where you can find all of our information on everything we're doing. >> All right, good luck with the progress, we'll be right back with more coverage after this break. >> Thank you.

>> Narrator: From New York, it's the CUBE. Covering Blockchain Week. Now here's John Furrier. >> Hello everyone, welcome back. This is the CUBE here in New York City on the ground for Consensus 2018. Part of Blockchain Week New York City. I'm John Furrier your cohost of the CUBE and Enrique Rodriguez is here with me. He's a blockchain guru and he's part of the Crypto Consulting Group. Welcome to the CUBE. >> Nice to be here. Thanks for having me. >> So love that big coin little thing there. >> Yeah. >> Come on are you holding som bitcoin right now? >> Yeah yeah. >> So tell me about your project says in the hallways here and checking in on what's going on. You're working with Andrew Prell the alumni. >> Yeah. So. >> On a cool project, so explain what that is. >> So the project with Andre or what we do? >> What you guys do first. >> Yeah so essentially you know there's a big problem right now with people trying to get into the space. There's a lot of pitfalls new comers fall victim to and there's not a lot of education out there. It's really fragmented across the internet. So what we're really trying to do is provide you know really great resources to people that are looking to get into the space. We essentially want to be the on ramp for people looking to get into the crypto space. >> Where you located? >> Louisville, Kentucky. Yeah so it's a different location. I think that's why we stand out quite a bit cause we're trying to bring such a new and disruptive technology to a place that's not so on the leading edge of technology sometimes. >> And you know it's cool about it too is I live in Silicon Valley. It's good to be the epicenter, everyone's got to go to Silicon Valley. The blockchain phenomenon and crypto in general is a global thing. >> It is. >> It is not one place. You can be anywhere. >> Absolutely. >> What are you doing, what are you working on with people? What are some of the things that your projects attacking. >> Yeah so right now we're really working on our educational events. We're really putting together just great content for people to come and join us and really just learn about the tech. We're also working with Andrew Prell from Silica Nexus project. He's having ICO soon and one of the things we're doing for them is really auditing the accounts that they have their tokens in. So they have in their tokenomics they have funds set aside for the team, for the advisors. All these different things and they also have ten investment funds that they're going to be using to essentially get more developers to develop on their project. So we'll be auditing those transactions that they send out just to ensure the transparency and that people know the investors that are putting their money into this project. Know where those funds are going. >> So basically it's an audit trail but it's not code review. So when you do smart contracts, there's one aspect which is code review. >> Yeah. >> And the other side of this, the coin so to speak is the transactional efficiency and affectiveness. >> Yeah no absolutely so if out of this wallet they send ten thousand droids to this developer or this project. We are essentially going to be putting together reports for that. So it's all about auditing and the transparency available. >> So you're automating his system end to end so he can manage it. >> Absolutely. >> Cause alternative is what? What's his alternative. Andrew's in particular. >> Yeah I think he went to the big four and they really didn't know. I guess display enough knowledge about the blockchain, the blockchain explorers and all those things and really came at a high price and so instead of do it themselves. It's something that we do on a regular basis. You know blockchain exploring, just looking up transaction. Second nature to us so I mean it's really good fit and it's an industry first. So really could be a break through for ICOs to come so we're hoping it works out well. >> Enrique how did you get here? What's your journey and tell your story. >> It has been awhile so. So I'm 23 years old, around the age of 20 I started hearing about bitcoin and blockchain. I worked at UPS in the international department in Louisville which if you're not familiar. We have the world port, the biggest automated hub in the world but we were having a lot of problems with the supply chain. You know packages going missing, invoices being fraudulent. A lot of manual paperwork. So really just looking into some of these problems and trying to find a solution. Stumbled into blockchain and really went down the rabbit hole and haven't came up since. I started telling people about it, meeting with people. >> So you became an enthusiast, evangelist. >> Yeah and so I mean it's really grown from me meeting people in restaurants, coffee shops and now we have office. We have eight consultants working with us and really trying to make a national network of people that can just educate. You know investors and individuals on the technology. >> Are you happy you made the move? >> Oh so happy, you know I work for myself now. It's really the happiest I've ever been. I'm passionate about something that could potentially change the world. And so I love the space I'm in. Just being here with so many like minded individuals you know from so many different backgrounds. It really is a beautiful thing that CoinDesk was able to put together here. >> And it's also cool, a lot of new people are coming in. Both old and young. I mean old guys like me and so Dan Bates on just before. We're kindred spirits, we're the old dogs. He's doing real business but the young guns are making it happen too. >> Absolutely. >> So it's not about ageism. Lot of us old system guys know this is all one big operating system. >> Even with our clients, we have people as young as 15 coming in like hey how do I figure this out and 85 people that don't even have email set up. You know want to get involved in this space. I mean we have a wide spectrum of people. >> If you got an AOL account we're ignoring you. Although I just try to turn my on that instead have the throwback. >> That's what it is. >> I got to ask you because one of the things I've really been apart of in my whole life in computer science is open source. Even when I was renegade back in the old days now it's tier one. Open source, cloud computing, has really and open source particular. Really built the idea of a community. >> Absolutely. >> The blockchain community is very small still young tight knit and growing. So as people come in, what's your advice to people entering the community. How thy should align, what should they do? >> Yeah this is something that we have to deal with a lot and so whenever because a lot of the headlines that go around. You know the bitcoin bubble all the crazy gains the lambos. People come in with this mindset that it's a get rick quick thing. You know they want to dump money into the newest ICO or the next big bitcoin and well you really have to educate them on is that this is a long term play. We're still very early in this space. Never invest anything that you're not willing to lose and so a lot of these. We call them the commandments actually just in a podcast episode on them. So there's a lot of just base level things that we try and enlighten our newcomers in. It's been a really great because a lot of people whenever they learn about this technology under the surface. It's just enlightening and so it's been great the community grows. >> A lot of businesses are growing into the community. A lot of people are joining the community but also a big trend is that big business and small medium sized businesses are looking at as an opportunity. So I got to ask you the question right which is I see a lot of people out there that are passing themselves off as code gurus because they bought bitcoin in 2013. >> Oh absolutely. >> They don't, but they haven't actually built anything. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of people are hiring fraudsters. So I'm not saying, there's nothing wrong with trading bitcoin and being involved in the currency. >> Absolutely. >> But the difference between someone who buys currency and builds the next generation with the community. How does someone vet that person? How does some a business owner how do you figure out the pretenders from the players? >> Yeah I think it's really about getting to know the person that you're talking to about this. Seeing how transparent they are, their ideologies, why they're in this space. Why they bought bitcoin a lot of these fundamental questions that you could tell a lot about a person from their answers. Because we've come across that a lot. Whenever reason I started this company is because you know over the past three years or so it's been a lot of trail and error really trying to figure this stuff out. >> I always ask too, what have you built. >> Yeah no absolutely and so we're currently actually in the beta version of a platform that we want to build that's essentially going to allow us to connect these consultants as well as a portfolio tracker but. >> I got to ask you the question. What's the coolest thing you've done? >> The coolest thing I've done, probably getting my pilots license a month after my drivers license in high school. Just in general you'll be able to leave school and go fly planes. All of my best friends were in a class. You know it was really, it was amazing. >> Surreal, Enrique great chatting with you. >> You as well. >> Awesome voice. So glad to have you on the CUBE and good luck with your venture with Andrew Prell. That's cool project and on the things you work on. Best success to you. Enrique Rodriguez here on the CUBE breaking it down. Lot of new action going on, lot of great voices. Lot of talent coming into the community of course it is a community. It's tight knit, it's early growing super fast and as the crypto action. This is the CUBE bringing it all to you. I'm John Furrier we're watching after this short break. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE presentation here in the studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, this special segment's experiencing the future of networking with the extend the SD-WAN to Wireless LAN segment conversation with Bruce Miller, Vice President of Product Marketing at Riverbed Xirrus, thanks for joining me today. Thanks for coming in. >> Great, thanks for having me. >> So, we had a whole segment on experiencing the future of networking with SD-WAN in action, but this is a dedicated segment really addressing the hottest area in the planet right now, relative to networking, that's wireless. >> Mmmhmm. >> Known as Wireless LAN, local area networking, or WiFi, is pervasive, it's everywhere, most everyone knows about WiFi if they have a device, they've had connections, large stadiums, large events, a lot of use cases, for it. But there's also the use case of Internet of Things. This certainly is a topic of conversation for the future -- >> Absolutely. >> of networking. >> Yeah, and you know, WiFi is pervasive like you said, >> It's the connection to the Internet for most people. In fact, a lot of people equate that, WiFi equals the Internet for a lot of teenagers for example, so, and as you mention the IoT, and where we are moving forward, it's all about growth and scale, I mean, we only had maybe one or two WiFi devices five or six years ago, now we're walking around with three, sometimes four, we have college students showing up with 15 sometimes, in their dorms. So it's very pervasive, and then the IoT as you mentioned, billions and billions of devices coming online. So, what we've seen is very much a scale and the need to scale these WiFi networks. >> Yeah, and folks watching that are in the business of IT, we're all consumers too. We've all been to stadiums or places where there's plenty of WiFi, but you just can't get the page to load. That's a backhaul issue, or, in some cases, there's not enough WiFi frequency around. So it's been a dense challenge, it's been scale challenges, and then on the IoT side for large enterprises, they have requirements that have to meet the network configurations. >> Right. >> So, there's complexity and scale on many fronts. This is the top priority of companies -- >> Yeah. >> How are you, how do you see that evolving, because, WiFi wasn't really kind of built for that -- >> Yeah. >> in the old days. How has it evolved today? >> This is actually a topic that Xirrus kind of solved very early on, so if you go back 10, 12 years, when we first put the company together, it was foreshadowing or foreseeing that this was going to happen. There was a lot of money going into the WiFi devices, if you actually think about it, the WiFi devices we're carrying around, but not the infrastructure. So, we've set out to solve that problem, and really the market kind of eventually came to us, in the sense of, "Hey, how do I get 10,000 people online at a convention center?", for example, or 20,000 people, 80,000 people in a stadium? Those are the extreme examples, but in general, it's just pervasive everywhere. You know, you need WiFi indoors, outdoors, in the elevator shafts, in the bathrooms, we're called to cover any kind of scenario, from that perspective. And so, Xirrus, that was a challenge that we took on, and today, I believe we solve it very very well, because we can scale into these scenarios. It keeps on going, up and to the right. I mean, there's more traffic, there's more devices on the network every single day. Millions of devices in fact, are provisioned to connect to WiFi every single day that are new, and that keeps on, like I said, going up, and up and up. >> So, scale and density has been your forte at Xirrus, now part of Riverbed through the acquisition. Translate that to the end user, customer for you, which is the person in IT, or someone in operational technologies that has to deploy network fast. >> Right. >> And they're going to use wireless and WiFi for that. >> Mmmhmm. >> What's in it for them? >> Yeah, and that's very key part of it is deploying and getting this out there very simply and it's scale. And provisioning the WiFi network, deploying something that is now basically a utility, you know, think about it, water, gas, water, electric, all these things are utilities, WiFi is basically the same thing. In fact, I was just visiting a higher ed customer of ours, who made that statement, if the power goes out, the students are asking for WiFi, they expect it to still work, right? It's more important in fact, almost to them, if they don't have that. >> God forbid they lose the Internet, but they're happy to live without power. >> Yeah, yeah. Or water, or whatever. So, we see it that way, WiFi is a utility. You need to make it utility grade, you need to make it enterprise grade so it can scale and support those things. So, you hit on a couple of those key things, how do you do it at scale, and then how do you provision and make that very ubiquitous and be able to roll that out in a broad fashion. That's key to what we do. >> I know you got a demo we're going to get to that shortly, so, stay tuned, stay with us for the demo, we'll walk through a use case, let's talk about the integration with Riverbed. Why is it now important? Because I think we all can imagine and see how WiFi is relevant. No doubt about it. Scale is a huge thing happening as more devices come online, people, and machines. But when it has to connect into the network, that's a big conversation point with IT practitioners and people in these large companies, they want more WiFi, they want it secure, they want it at scale, they want it with all the policies, where's that integration with Riverbed, can you explain how that works? >> Right, and that's key to where the acquisition came from. So we kind of talked about scale and then complexity and how you deploy these things. The integration with Riverbed is really focused on the second one, where, there's the SD-WAN, story that we've been talking about, and the vision for running common policies across the WAN, the LAN, the WLAN, into the datacenter, all managed through the cloud. And Xirrus fulfills that WLAN piece of that equation where it can deployed at the wireless edge, connecting all those devices in an enterprise, or in whatever deployment you're talking about. And now the policies that are actually deployed are common with what is being put into the SD-WAN portion of it, so in the Riverbed side of things that's the SteelConnect solution. So, we're integrating in as part of the SteelConnect solution to support the software defined LAN, so to speak, at the edge of the network, with switches and WiFi access points that will support that. So, the synergies are very much there in terms of, providing that vision across the entire network. >> So full integration into SteelConnect, from a managing and provisioning standpoint, demo perspective -- >> Right. Yeah, configuration and the policies, especially the application layer policies where you can say, "Hey, I have a new CRM application that I'm rolling out", or database application. Then that policy to prioritize that, and ensure a good user experience could be rolled out across the entire network. >> Give some quick use cases of customer industries that you guys are successful in. >> Sure. So, probably the one we're best known for is what we call large public venues or LPVs, this could be for example, Louisville Pro Football Club, which is a great name for us, Microsoft is another customer, so these are places where you have literally 10,000, 20,000 people connecting at once, or 80,000 people in the stadium for example, a portion of those are connected to WiFi. That is a very very difficult scenario to actually solve. We did some things that are very unique in the industry to support those kind of situations. Another big one for us is education. That is actually the biggest WiFi market in general, if you look at how many people are buying it, or what kind of organizations are buying WiFi. And we have some very large customers there, Brigham Young University for example in Idaho. Columbus State University, these are scenarios where they've rolled ubiquitous WiFi across campus, stadiums, basketball arenas, all the way to the dorms, to the offices, to the auditoriums, to the libraries, indoor, outdoor, I mean, very broad use cases. And that's what you see in higher ed. >> WiFi really kind of redefines, it doesn't reimagine, but it redefines what a campus is. I mean college -- >> Yeah. >> You know what a campus is, hospitals, large venues like public -- >> Right. >> Flash mob contained campus. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Problem there is different. >> Yeah. >> Too many people trying to get into the -- >> All at the same time. >> Spectrum. >> Yeah, we call that flash traffic, like when you see like at halftime maybe of a game, or some event happens -- >> Touchdown all the videos -- >> Yeah everybody wants to do it at the same time, and those are very challenging to support. Those kind of scenarios, and that's something that we have really defined a solution that can handle very well. >> Well, congratulations, thank you for building that, because I love to get my WiFi at Stanford Stadium, and all the other places that need to have that. And when I go to Liverpool to watch a soccer game, I'll think about you guys. Okay, let's get into the demo, let's take a real life in action of extending SD-WAN into wireless LANs with WiFi. >> Right. >> Show us what you got here. Sure. So, the first thing I want to talk about is provisioning the network. So, we have a solution called CommandCenter that makes that very fast, and easy. This is actually a view of a dashboard that shows multiple tenants in a cloud management system. Okay? So, imagine each of these as a separate customer, or, if I'm a large organization, this could be separate sites or locations. So, I'm going to just do an example here and say, let's create a new customer. And, say theCUBE is that customer. >> John: Alright, we like that. >> Bruce: I will say that we're enabling you with WiFi, so I'll create theCUBE. And what this is actually doing is just with literally a few mouse clicks I've actually created a new cloud instance that is theCUBE, and then what I can come down here and do, is edit that location, and let's just say that let's see here, Joe is going to be the administrator of that, so he's going to have access to manage that network. And then I have identified a couple access points here, I'm just going to drag and drop those in there. And these are now provisioned to theCUBE. And then, the last thing I'm going to do is, let's take a profile, so let's say, I have a configuration template or whatever, maybe I'll just call you, you have a business profile, and I'm going to deploy that, to your location as well. Hit deploy, and basically just that quickly what I've done is actually spun up a new customer, so you can imagine if you're a service provider in fact, then that means you're quicker to revenue. I'm actually able to turn on a customer and start charging 'em for WiFi, right? >> John: Let's stay on this example with theCUBE, because I think this is really important to the dense cloud problem. So we go to Moscone Center all the time. >> Bruce: Sure. >> And they have WiFi, they have large crowds come in, and we're still doing a live broadcast, there. >> Right, sure. >> So, I'd love to have my own WiFi provisioned. Is that what that happened there? Could they potentially say, dedicate this access point, or this subnet of the network to theCUBE? >> It could, it'd be a variation on this, but absolutely. One of the things that we do very well is taking a WiFi device, or a AP, and segment it out for use cases like that. >> John: AP being access point. >> Access point, exactly. So, in a convention environment like that, those are actually quite challenging, cause you have so many people on the network and what you need to do is carve out a resource that might be dedicated to that. So, if you can't get WiFi, >> Like a video -- >> We can do that. >> We do video production, so we want to actually prioritize the video traffic. >> Absolutely, and we'll show that a little bit later in the demo -- >> or the recreational... >> Yeah, you separate it out and make sure that you're -- >> Okay, continue. So that onramping there -- >> Bruce: Yeah, so basically this was just showing you how quickly you can create theCUBE. This is the environment that I basically set up. It's got a couple APs, it's ready to go. I can now start, I can plug in those access points, and that site is up and running. So that's the provisioning aspect. The second aspect of WiFi that we're going to talk about is access to the network itself. This is actually a challenge with a lot of environments, that's, you know, how do I get all these people onto the network, at the same time, and do that very easily without IT getting a phone call saying, "Hey, help me. I dunno what the password is," >> John: So onboarding users and stuff like that? >> Bruce: Yeah, onboarding. So, what we have for a solution there is called EasyPass. That solution allows you to create the portals that you see when you log into the network. >> John: Like going through the toll booths. >> Bruce: Yeah, and it basically provides a very easy way of doing that. So let's just say this is theCUBE guest, and I'll create a new portal, and this is a guest network, right? So I know when I came in here today, I connected to the WiFi network, I had to figure out how to do that, and what was the password? So let's just say we're creating a WiFi network here, this just shows how easy and quick that interface is. I can customize a page, let's select an image, we'll select a background image here, and then actually use Facebook and Google can be optionally used to log in. So just that quickly, I've created a portal that says, "This is what you're going to see when you log in." Now, obviously, if it's theCUBE you'd put your own logos and data there, but the idea here is that a user can come in here and either register with his email, or use Facebook or Google, for example, you get on the network. >> John: Is that OAuthing in, through the pre-existing credentials? >> Bruce: This is using, in this case, yeah with Facebook you're using the credential that they have to get onto their system, and you're basically using that for WiFi as well. So that the username and password is now providing access. >> John: So it's seamless to the user what their choice is. >> Bruce: Yeah, and some people use Facebook, others will just connect with their email. >> John: Some people want to register, but most people just want to connect with Twitter, LinkedIn, or whatever they have. >> Bruce: Yeah, and so this basically shows how quick and easy it is to set up a guest page, that gets somebody on the network, very simple to use, and so IT administers love this because it simplifies their job significantly. The other thing I wanted to show real quick is just the Microsoft Azure and Google integration. We actually have integration directly with these two ecosystems, where, if you're already are in an Office 365 shop, or a Google Apps shop, as a lot of schools are, they can just use those credentials, the student, the user logs in with their laptop, with their username password and it gets them access to WiFi at the same time. >> So if it's connected -- >> Kill two birds with one stone. >> So if it's active directory you got your Microsoft, if it's Google and what they use, you can do that. >> Bruce: Yeah, so it's all in the cloud. So now, this is again, moving everything to the cloud as opposed to using some local resource to do authentication, and maintaining those resources. >> John: That seems to be the theme with Riverbed. Simplify. >> Bruce: Right, absolutely. And that's, those are the two big things here. We're scaling the WiFi network to support these broad use cases, and then we're simplifying it with the tools to enable that to roll out very smoothly. >> Well that's, all the research points to that manual task that don't add value, will be automated away, and those tasks will be shifted to more value activities. Okay, so take us to monitoring. Now what happens when I'm doing my SnapChats, or Instagram, or my Facebook Lives, you go, Woah! >> Bruce: Right. >> John: Or, I'm interested in knowing if someone is downloading the latest movie on BitTorrent. >> Bruce: Yeah, that's very key. So, if I go back to our solution here, the dashboard actually shows what's going on in the network, right? So, this is actually a very flexible interface, you can move things around, create widgets, do different things, and in fact, we have a map function where you would lay all this stuff out on a map, and then I can actually show what the coverage is, for example, that WiFi had a floorplan. This happens to be my house. >> John: That's an RF map right there? >> Bruce: This is actually RF coverage within this location of these access points. >> John: That's very cool. >> Bruce: Then I can jump in here and troubleshoot from there. But to your point in terms of what's going on -- >> John: So it shows overlaying clouds and channels and all that, kind of deep configuration stuff? >> Bruce: All the information If you need to go there. >> John: And you just don't need to get involved in that. >> Bruce: Most of this stuff is automated. There's the auto button for a lot of this when you hook up the WiFi the first time. You don't want to have to tweak all those things, so we have the auto button that 90% of the users would use, or more, and then if you need to tune it we can go from there. But yeah, to your point on in terms of application policies and controls, here's an example of what we do here. For example, I can see what types of traffic is on this network here. So, let's look at, for example, YouTube, and we see that there's actually a couple users here that are using a lot of YouTube traffic, I can click on any of these applications and see what the amount of traffic is associated with that. But what's more interesting then, is doing something about it. So, what we have is a policy engine that recognizes 1600 different applications, and allows me to create policies on them. So, I can create rules, and say, okay, let's look at YouTube specifically. Which is a streaming media application, and you can see we have hundreds in here, in fact 1600 in total, and I can block YouTube if I so desire from the network, or maybe I allow it in there, but I limit that traffic per user, to say, 500K or something like that, so they maybe can't watch a 4K video or something like that. So, enterprises -- >> Make it crawl for 'em. >> Bruce: Yeah, you can do it, but you can't overload the network. So, enterprises, hospitals. Schools love this, because they can get that granular control of the network. Maybe this happens to be instead of an enterprise that's using a database, maybe they're an Oracle shop, and so they want to raise the quality of service on that, and put that high priority. So you can do that just the same. >> John: And so whatever the priority is, they can give bandwidth to it. So, if it's live gaming, if I want to have that game be -- >> Yeah. >> John: That's what I want. >> Bruce: Exactly. >> John: Or minimize it. >> Bruce: So this really, what this map ends up doing is mapping the wireless to the business needs of the organization that's deploying it, so -- >> John: So, the optimization of the network, you can look at, much more clearly with the visualization, and make decisions. On the network map there with the RF, is that for placement of access points, or is that more for understanding propagation, or -- >> Bruce: It's, yeah, we have a separate design tool that allows you to design those heat maps, and then when you actually have a live network what you were looking at was actually the coverage estimation based on what's actually deployed. >> John: So that's kind of -- >> So if an AP goes down it turns red and then you'll see a hole in your coverage, and you know that you have a problem that you have to go and solve. >> Okay great, so it's a little... because you handle it. Okay, analytics. What other analytics do you have in the demo that you can share? >> Bruce: Right. So analytics is an interesting one. We have a lot data that we pull into the network from the WiFi. If you think about it, we know, who is on the network, we know what they're doing, what applications they're going to, we know where they are, because we actually calculate the location of those users, and that information is all pulled into this central location here. So if I pull in a couple of these analytics charts, you actually see now, what is going on in that location over time. Here we have users and how long they're actually in the network. >> John: Can you see the URL path that they're using? >> Bruce: That's in the application portion, right? This is just kind of showing bulk, like, how many users are showing on the network, and how long are they there. And how many are there, and how many are repeat or new. So a retail customer might be interested in that, it's like I'm getting 40% existing customers coming back, but maybe there's 60% on a given day. And then that could change over time depending on location. So, the bottom line is, WiFi is turning for us into a big data challenge or solutional, where I can take all that data on who, what, where, why, that they're doing, and turn that into business intelligence that the retailer, that's a big one, can use for making more intelligent decisions about how they run their business. >> Okay, so, bottom line for the folks watching, with respect to wireless, what's the future state that they need to be thinking about in terms of planning for WiFi and to experience the future of networking, by extending SD-WAN to the wireless LAN. >> Right, so there's a lot of things to consider when you look at WiFi, what you're doing today is probably not going to be the same as what you do next year, and certainly not five years from now. This is actually a big challenge for a lot of our customers to kind of get that future view of what's going to happen, because they're making a purchase decision today, that's going to last them for a while. So, what we look at is solving the problems that those users might run into, which could be scale, you might be using, and seeing double or triple the number of users and traffic in the next few years. So you have to solve that. You have to solve the security problems, which we didn't talk about too much today, but EasyPass is one of the solutions for that. I want to ensure those users can get on, but make sure that they're secure, my corporate data is going to be protected. And then finally, the simplicity of doing that. So, I know my WiFi is going to change, I know the network requirements are going to change, how I can a simply go into an interface through this cloud management solution we provide, and make those changes that are needed, and adapt to that dynamic that we're talking about. Then all of that folds into the broader picture of the SD-WAN story that we talked about with Riverbed where now I can do some of those things across the LAN and the WAN holistically, through a common control point. >> And the common control point is key, because users don't view things as LAN and WAN, they just want their stuff, wherever they are. >> Yeah, they don't care, right. So, you know they might be connected to the WiFi, so that's pretty visible, but in the end, the WiFi could work fine, but if that WAN connection is down, or compromised, or anywhere in between the datacenter, all these things have to be working. >> And the tools to make the integration easier, whether it's Microsoft 365, and Google on Premise, or Google login, or Facebook. >> Right, right. All those ecosystems, I mean, this is a big part of what we're trying to do, is tap into those systems that everybody is using anyway, and make it all seamless. Everyone knows how to login to their Google or, Facebook account, so now let's make that part of the WiFi experience. >> And security is all solid. >> Yeah, security is solid if you use it. And that's the big thing about WiFi, is there's a lot of open guest networks still, out there, and little by little, you're seeing those become secure, but what tends to happen is that security and simplicity, are kind of, er, complexity, and security are kind of at odds with each other. The more secure you make a network, the more complex. >> And here you're making it easier. >> That's why EasyPass, I mean in the name, that's what we do to make that as simple as possible, because security is very important. >> Bruce Miller, extending the SD-WAN to the Wireless LAN, in our segment experiencing the future of networking, thanks so much for sharing, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)