(gentle music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got a great remote guest coming in. Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow hot startup in AI, computer vision. Really interesting topic in this wave of AI next gen hitting. Joseph, thanks for coming on this CUBE conversation. >> Thanks for having me. >> Yeah, I love the startup tsunami that's happening here in this wave. RoboFlow, you're in the middle of it. Exciting opportunities, you guys are in the cutting edge. I think computer vision's been talked about more as just as much as the large language models and these foundational models are merging. You're in the middle of it. What's it like right now as a startup and growing in this new wave hitting? >> It's kind of funny, it's, you know, I kind of describe it like sometimes you're in a garden of gnomes. It's like we feel like we've got this giant headstart with hundreds of thousands of people building with computer vision, training their own models, but that's a fraction of what it's going to be in six months, 12 months, 24 months. So, as you described it, a wave is a good way to think about it. And the wave is still building before it gets to its full size. So it's a ton of fun. >> Yeah, I think it's one of the most exciting areas in computer science. I wish I was in my twenties again, because I would be all over this. It's the intersection, there's so many disciplines, right? It's not just tech computer science, it's computer science, it's systems, it's software, it's data. There's so much aperture of things going on around your world. So, I mean, you got to be batting all the students away kind of trying to get hired in there, probably. I can only imagine you're hiring regiment. I'll ask that later, but first talk about what the company is that you're doing. How it's positioned, what's the market you're going after, and what's the origination story? How did you guys get here? How did you just say, hey, want to do this? What was the origination story? What do you do and how did you start the company? >> Yeah, yeah. I'll give you the what we do today and then I'll shift into the origin. RoboFlow builds tools for making the world programmable. Like anything that you see should be read write access if you think about it with a programmer's mind or legible. And computer vision is a technology that enables software to be added to these real world objects that we see. And so any sort of interface, any sort of object, any sort of scene, we can interact with it, we can make it more efficient, we can make it more entertaining by adding the ability for the tools that we use and the software that we write to understand those objects. And at RoboFlow, we've empowered a little over a hundred thousand developers, including those in half the Fortune 100 so far in that mission. Whether that's Walmart understanding the retail in their stores, Cardinal Health understanding the ways that they're helping their patients, or even electric vehicle manufacturers ensuring that they're making the right stuff at the right time. As you mentioned, it's early. Like I think maybe computer vision has touched one, maybe 2% of the whole economy and it'll be like everything in a very short period of time. And so we're focused on enabling that transformation. I think it's it, as far as I think about it, I've been fortunate to start companies before, start, sell these sorts of things. This is the last company I ever wanted to start and I think it will be, should we do it right, the world's largest in riding the wave of bringing together the disparate pieces of that technology. >> What was the motivating point of the formation? Was it, you know, you guys were hanging around? Was there some catalyst? What was the moment where it all kind of came together for you? >> You know what's funny is my co-founder, Brad and I, we were making computer vision apps for making board games more fun to play. So in 2017, Apple released AR kit, augmented reality kit for building augmented reality applications. And Brad and I are both sort of like hacker persona types. We feel like we don't really understand the technology until we build something with it and so we decided that we should make an app that if you point your phone at a Sudoku puzzle, it understands the state of the board and then it kind of magically fills in that experience with all the digits in real time, which totally ruins the game of Sudoku to be clear. But it also just creates this like aha moment of like, oh wow, like the ability for our pocket devices to understand and see the world as good or better than we can is possible. And so, you know, we actually did that as I mentioned in 2017, and the app went viral. It was, you know, top of some subreddits, top of Injure, Reddit, the hacker community as well as Product Hunt really liked it. So it actually won Product Hunt AR app of the year, which was the same year that the Tesla model three won the product of the year. So we joked that we share an award with Elon our shared (indistinct) But frankly, so that was 2017. RoboFlow wasn't incorporated as a business until 2019. And so, you know, when we made Magic Sudoku, I was running a different company at the time, Brad was running a different company at the time, and we kind of just put it out there and were excited by how many people liked it. And we assumed that other curious developers would see this inevitable future of, oh wow, you know. This is much more than just a pedestrian point your phone at a board game. This is everything can be seen and understood and rewritten in a different way. Things like, you know, maybe your fridge. Knowing what ingredients you have and suggesting recipes or auto ordering for you, or we were talking about some retail use cases of automated checkout. Like anything can be seen and observed and we presume that that would kick off a Cambrian explosion of applications. It didn't. So you fast forward to 2019, we said, well we might as well be the guys to start to tackle this sort of problem. And because of our success with board games before, we returned to making more board game solving applications. So we made one that solves Boggle, you know, the four by four word game, we made one that solves chess, you point your phone at a chess board and it understands the state of the board and then can make move recommendations. And each additional board game that we added, we realized that the tooling was really immature. The process of collecting images, knowing which images are actually going to be useful for improving model performance, training those models, deploying those models. And if we really wanted to make the world programmable, developers waiting for us to make an app for their thing of interest is a lot less efficient, less impactful than taking our tool chain and releasing that externally. And so, that's what RoboFlow became. RoboFlow became the internal tools that we used to make these game changing applications readily available. And as you know, when you give developers new tools, they create new billion dollar industries, let alone all sorts of fun hobbyist projects along the way. >> I love that story. Curious, inventive, little radical. Let's break the rules, see how we can push the envelope on the board games. That's how companies get started. It's a great story. I got to ask you, okay, what happens next? Now, okay, you realize this new tooling, but this is like how companies get built. Like they solve their own problem that they had 'cause they realized there's one, but then there has to be a market for it. So you actually guys knew that this was coming around the corner. So okay, you got your hacker mentality, you did that thing, you got the award and now you're like, okay, wow. Were you guys conscious of the wave coming? Was it one of those things where you said, look, if we do this, we solve our own problem, this will be big for everybody. Did you have that moment? Was that in 2019 or was that more of like, it kind of was obvious to you guys? >> Absolutely. I mean Brad puts this pretty effectively where he describes how we lived through the initial internet revolution, but we were kind of too young to really recognize and comprehend what was happening at the time. And then mobile happened and we were working on different companies that were not in the mobile space. And computer vision feels like the wave that we've caught. Like, this is a technology and capability that rewrites how we interact with the world, how everyone will interact with the world. And so we feel we've been kind of lucky this time, right place, right time of every enterprise will have the ability to improve their operations with computer vision. And so we've been very cognizant of the fact that computer vision is one of those groundbreaking technologies that every company will have as a part of their products and services and offerings, and we can provide the tooling to accelerate that future. >> Yeah, and the developer angle, by the way, I love that because I think, you know, as we've been saying in theCUBE all the time, developer's the new defacto standard bodies because what they adopt is pure, you know, meritocracy. And they pick the best. If it's sell service and it's good and it's got open source community around it, its all in. And they'll vote. They'll vote with their code and that is clear. Now I got to ask you, as you look at the market, we were just having this conversation on theCUBE in Barcelona at recent Mobile World Congress, now called MWC, around 5G versus wifi. And the debate was specifically computer vision, like facial recognition. We were talking about how the Cleveland Browns were using facial recognition for people coming into the stadium they were using it for ships in international ports. So the question was 5G versus wifi. My question is what infrastructure or what are the areas that need to be in place to make computer vision work? If you have developers building apps, apps got to run on stuff. So how do you sort that out in your mind? What's your reaction to that? >> A lot of the times when we see applications that need to run in real time and on video, they'll actually run at the edge without internet. And so a lot of our users will actually take their models and run it in a fully offline environment. Now to act on that information, you'll often need to have internet signal at some point 'cause you'll need to know how many people were in the stadium or what shipping crates are in my port at this point in time. You'll need to relay that information somewhere else, which will require connectivity. But actually using the model and creating the insights at the edge does not require internet. I mean we have users that deploy models on underwater submarines just as much as in outer space actually. And those are not very friendly environments to internet, let alone 5g. And so what you do is you use an edge device, like an Nvidia Jetson is common, mobile devices are common. Intel has some strong edge devices, the Movidius family of chips for example. And you use that compute that runs completely offline in real time to process those signals. Now again, what you do with those signals may require connectivity and that becomes a question of the problem you're solving of how soon you need to relay that information to another place. >> So, that's an architectural issue on the infrastructure. If you're a tactical edge war fighter for instance, you might want to have highly available and maybe high availability. I mean, these are words that mean something. You got storage, but it's not at the edge in real time. But you can trickle it back and pull it down. That's management. So that's more of a business by business decision or environment, right? >> That's right, that's right. Yeah. So I mean we can talk through some specifics. So for example, the RoboFlow actually powers the broadcaster that does the tennis ball tracking at Wimbledon. That runs completely at the edge in real time in, you know, technically to track the tennis ball and point the camera, you actually don't need internet. Now they do have internet of course to do the broadcasting and relay the signal and feeds and these sorts of things. And so that's a case where you have both edge deployment of running the model and high availability act on that model. We have other instances where customers will run their models on drones and the drone will go and do a flight and it'll say, you know, this many residential homes are in this given area, or this many cargo containers are in this given shipping yard. Or maybe we saw these environmental considerations of soil erosion along this riverbank. The model in that case can run on the drone during flight without internet, but then you only need internet once the drone lands and you're going to act on that information because for example, if you're doing like a study of soil erosion, you don't need to be real time. You just need to be able to process and make use of that information once the drone finishes its flight. >> Well I can imagine a zillion use cases. I heard of a use case interview at a company that does computer vision to help people see if anyone's jumping the fence on their company. Like, they know what a body looks like climbing a fence and they can spot it. Pretty easy use case compared to probably some of the other things, but this is the horizontal use cases, its so many use cases. So how do you guys talk to the marketplace when you say, hey, we have generative AI for commuter vision. You might know language models that's completely different animal because vision's like the world, right? So you got a lot more to do. What's the difference? How do you explain that to customers? What can I build and what's their reaction? >> Because we're such a developer centric company, developers are usually creative and show you the ways that they want to take advantage of new technologies. I mean, we've had people use things for identifying conveyor belt debris, doing gas leak detection, measuring the size of fish, airplane maintenance. We even had someone that like a hobby use case where they did like a specific sushi identifier. I dunno if you know this, but there's a specific type of whitefish that if you grew up in the western hemisphere and you eat it in the eastern hemisphere, you get very sick. And so there was someone that made an app that tells you if you happen to have that fish in the sushi that you're eating. But security camera analysis, transportation flows, plant disease detection, really, you know, smarter cities. We have people that are doing curb management identifying, and a lot of these use cases, the fantastic thing about building tools for developers is they're a creative bunch and they have these ideas that if you and I sat down for 15 minutes and said, let's guess every way computer vision can be used, we would need weeks to list all the example use cases. >> We'd miss everything. >> And we'd miss. And so having the community show us the ways that they're using computer vision is impactful. Now that said, there are of course commercial industries that have discovered the value and been able to be out of the gate. And that's where we have the Fortune 100 customers, like we do. Like the retail customers in the Walmart sector, healthcare providers like Medtronic, or vehicle manufacturers like Rivian who all have very difficult either supply chain, quality assurance, in stock, out of stock, anti-theft protection considerations that require successfully making sense of the real world. >> Let me ask you a question. This is maybe a little bit in the weeds, but it's more developer focused. What are some of the developer profiles that you're seeing right now in terms of low-hanging fruit applications? And can you talk about the academic impact? Because I imagine if I was in school right now, I'd be all over it. Are you seeing Master's thesis' being worked on with some of your stuff? Is the uptake in both areas of younger pre-graduates? And then inside the workforce, What are some of the devs like? Can you share just either what their makeup is, what they work on, give a little insight into the devs you're working with. >> Leading developers that want to be on state-of-the-art technology build with RoboFlow because they know they can use the best in class open source. They know that they can get the most out of their data. They know that they can deploy extremely quickly. That's true among students as you mentioned, just as much as as industries. So we welcome students and I mean, we have research grants that will regularly support for people to publish. I mean we actually have a channel inside our internal slack where every day, more student publications that cite building with RoboFlow pop up. And so, that helps inspire some of the use cases. Now what's interesting is that the use case is relatively, you know, useful or applicable for the business or the student. In other words, if a student does a thesis on how to do, we'll say like shingle damage detection from satellite imagery and they're just doing that as a master's thesis, in fact most insurance businesses would be interested in that sort of application. So, that's kind of how we see uptick and adoption both among researchers who want to be on the cutting edge and publish, both with RoboFlow and making use of open source tools in tandem with the tool that we provide, just as much as industry. And you know, I'm a big believer in the philosophy that kind of like what the hackers are doing nights and weekends, the Fortune 500 are doing in a pretty short order period of time and we're experiencing that transition. Computer vision used to be, you know, kind of like a PhD, multi-year investment endeavor. And now with some of the tooling that we're working on in open source technologies and the compute that's available, these science fiction ideas are possible in an afternoon. And so you have this idea of maybe doing asset management or the aerial observation of your shingles or things like this. You have a few hundred images and you can de-risk whether that's possible for your business today. So there's pretty broad-based adoption among both researchers that want to be on the state of the art, as much as companies that want to reduce the time to value. >> You know, Joseph, you guys and your partner have got a great front row seat, ground floor, presented creation wave here. I'm seeing a pattern emerging from all my conversations on theCUBE with founders that are successful, like yourselves, that there's two kind of real things going on. You got the enterprises grabbing the products and retrofitting into their legacy and rebuilding their business. And then you have startups coming out of the woodwork. Young, seeing greenfield or pick a specific niche or focus and making that the signature lever to move the market. >> That's right. >> So can you share your thoughts on the startup scene, other founders out there and talk about that? And then I have a couple questions for like the enterprises, the old school, the existing legacy. Little slower, but the startups are moving fast. What are some of the things you're seeing as startups are emerging in this field? >> I think you make a great point that independent of RoboFlow, very successful, especially developer focused businesses, kind of have three customer types. You have the startups and maybe like series A, series B startups that you're building a product as fast as you can to keep up with them, and they're really moving just as fast as as you are and pulling the product out at you for things that they need. The second segment that you have might be, call it SMB but not enterprise, who are able to purchase and aren't, you know, as fast of moving, but are stable and getting value and able to get to production. And then the third type is enterprise, and that's where you have typically larger contract value sizes, slower moving in terms of adoption and feedback for your product. And I think what you see is that successful companies balance having those three customer personas because you have the small startups, small fast moving upstarts that are discerning buyers who know the market and elect to build on tooling that is best in class. And so you basically kind of pass the smell test of companies who are quite discerning in their purchases, plus are moving so quick they're pulling their product out of you. Concurrently, you have a product that's enterprise ready to service the scalability, availability, and trust of enterprise buyers. And that's ultimately where a lot of companies will see tremendous commercial success. I mean I remember seeing the Twilio IPO, Uber being like a full 20% of their revenue, right? And so there's this very common pattern where you have the ability to find some of those upstarts that you make bets on, like the next Ubers of the world, the smaller companies that continue to get developed with the product and then the enterprise whom allows you to really fund the commercial success of the business, and validate the size of the opportunity in market that's being creative. >> It's interesting, there's so many things happening there. It's like, in a way it's a new category, but it's not a new category. It becomes a new category because of the capabilities, right? So, it's really interesting, 'cause that's what you're talking about is a category, creating. >> I think developer tools. So people often talk about B to B and B to C businesses. I think developer tools are in some ways a third way. I mean ultimately they're B to B, you're selling to other businesses and that's where your revenue's coming from. However, you look kind of like a B to C company in the ways that you measure product adoption and kind of go to market. In other words, you know, we're often tracking the leading indicators of commercial success in the form of usage, adoption, retention. Really consumer app, traditionally based metrics of how to know you're building the right stuff, and that's what product led growth companies do. And then you ultimately have commercial traction in a B to B way. And I think that that actually kind of looks like a third thing, right? Like you can do these sort of funny zany marketing examples that you might see historically from consumer businesses, but yet you ultimately make your money from the enterprise who has these de-risked high value problems you can solve for them. And I selfishly think that that's the best of both worlds because I don't have to be like Evan Spiegel, guessing the next consumer trend or maybe creating the next consumer trend and catching lightning in a bottle over and over again on the consumer side. But I still get to have fun in our marketing and make sort of fun, like we're launching the world's largest game of rock paper scissors being played with computer vision, right? Like that's sort of like a fun thing you can do, but then you can concurrently have the commercial validation and customers telling you the things that they need to be built for them next to solve commercial pain points for them. So I really do think that you're right by calling this a new category and it really is the best of both worlds. >> It's a great call out, it's a great call out. In fact, I always juggle with the VC. I'm like, it's so easy. Your job is so easy to pick the winners. What are you talking about its so easy? I go, just watch what the developers jump on. And it's not about who started, it could be someone in the dorm room to the boardroom person. You don't know because that B to C, the C, it's B to D you know? You know it's developer 'cause that's a human right? That's a consumer of the tool which influences the business that never was there before. So I think this direct business model evolution, whether it's media going direct or going direct to the developers rather than going to a gatekeeper, this is the reality. >> That's right. >> Well I got to ask you while we got some time left to describe, I want to get into this topic of multi-modality, okay? And can you describe what that means in computer vision? And what's the state of the growth of that portion of this piece? >> Multi modality refers to using multiple traditionally siloed problem types, meaning text, image, video, audio. So you could treat an audio problem as only processing audio signal. That is not multimodal, but you could use the audio signal at the same time as a video feed. Now you're talking about multi modality. In computer vision, multi modality is predominantly happening with images and text. And one of the biggest releases in this space is actually two years old now, was clip, contrastive language image pre-training, which took 400 million image text pairs and basically instead of previously when you do classification, you basically map every single image to a single class, right? Like here's a bunch of images of chairs, here's a bunch of images of dogs. What clip did is used, you can think about it like, the class for an image being the Instagram caption for the image. So it's not one single thing. And by training on understanding the corpora, you basically see which words, which concepts are associated with which pixels. And this opens up the aperture for the types of problems and generalizability of models. So what does this mean? This means that you can get to value more quickly from an existing trained model, or at least validate that what you want to tackle with a computer vision, you can get there more quickly. It also opens up the, I mean. Clip has been the bedrock of some of the generative image techniques that have come to bear, just as much as some of the LLMs. And increasingly we're going to see more and more of multi modality being a theme simply because at its core, you're including more context into what you're trying to understand about the world. I mean, in its most basic sense, you could ask yourself, if I have an image, can I know more about that image with just the pixels? Or if I have the image and the sound of when that image was captured or it had someone describe what they see in that image when the image was captured, which one's going to be able to get you more signal? And so multi modality helps expand the ability for us to understand signal processing. >> Awesome. And can you just real quick, define clip for the folks that don't know what that means? >> Yeah. Clip is a model architecture, it's an acronym for contrastive language image pre-training and like, you know, model architectures that have come before it captures the almost like, models are kind of like brands. So I guess it's a brand of a model where you've done these 400 million image text pairs to match up which visual concepts are associated with which text concepts. And there have been new releases of clip, just at bigger sizes of bigger encoding's, of longer strings of texture, or larger image windows. But it's been a really exciting advancement that OpenAI released in January, 2021. >> All right, well great stuff. We got a couple minutes left. Just I want to get into more of a company-specific question around culture. All startups have, you know, some sort of cultural vibe. You know, Intel has Moore's law doubles every whatever, six months. What's your culture like at RoboFlow? I mean, if you had to describe that culture, obviously love the hacking story, you and your partner with the games going number one on Product Hunt next to Elon and Tesla and then hey, we should start a company two years later. That's kind of like a curious, inventing, building, hard charging, but laid back. That's my take. How would you describe the culture? >> I think that you're right. The culture that we have is one of shipping, making things. So every week each team shares what they did for our customers on a weekly basis. And we have such a strong emphasis on being better week over week that those sorts of things compound. So one big emphasis in our culture is getting things done, shipping, doing things for our customers. The second is we're an incredibly transparent place to work. For example, how we think about giving decisions, where we're progressing against our goals, what problems are biggest and most important for the company is all open information for those that are inside the company to know and progress against. The third thing that I'd use to describe our culture is one that thrives with autonomy. So RoboFlow has a number of individuals who have founded companies before, some of which have sold their businesses for a hundred million plus upon exit. And the way that we've been able to attract talent like that is because the problems that we're tackling are so immense, yet individuals are able to charge at it with the way that they think is best. And this is what pairs well with transparency. If you have a strong sense of what the company's goals are, how we're progressing against it, and you have this ownership mentality of what can I do to change or drive progress against that given outcome, then you create a really healthy pairing of, okay cool, here's where the company's progressing. Here's where things are going really well, here's the places that we most need to improve and work on. And if you're inside that company as someone who has a preponderance to be a self-starter and even a history of building entire functions or companies yourself, then you're going to be a place where you can really thrive. You have the inputs of the things where we need to work on to progress the company's goals. And you have the background of someone that is just necessarily a fast moving and ambitious type of individual. So I think the best way to describe it is a transparent place with autonomy and an emphasis on getting things done. >> Getting shit done as they say. Getting stuff done. Great stuff. Hey, final question. Put a plug out there for the company. What are you going to hire? What's your pipeline look like for people? What jobs are open? I'm sure you got hiring all around. Give a quick plug for the company what you're looking for. >> I appreciate you asking. Basically you're either building the product or helping customers be successful with the product. So in the building product category, we have platform engineering roles, machine learning engineering roles, and we're solving some of the hardest and most impactful problems of bringing such a groundbreaking technology to the masses. And so it's a great place to be where you can kind of be your own user as an engineer. And then if you're enabling people to be successful with the products, I mean you're working in a place where there's already such a strong community around it and you can help shape, foster, cultivate, activate, and drive commercial success in that community. So those are roles that tend themselves to being those that build the product for developer advocacy, those that are account executives that are enabling our customers to realize commercial success, and even hybrid roles like we call it field engineering, where you are a technical resource to drive success within customer accounts. And so all this is listed on roboflow.com/careers. And one thing that I actually kind of want to mention John that's kind of novel about the thing that's working at RoboFlow. So there's been a lot of discussion around remote companies and there's been a lot of discussion around in-person companies and do you need to be in the office? And one thing that we've kind of recognized is you can actually chart a third way. You can create a third way which we call satellite, which basically means people can work from where they most like to work and there's clusters of people, regular onsite's. And at RoboFlow everyone gets, for example, $2,500 a year that they can use to spend on visiting coworkers. And so what's sort of organically happened is team numbers have started to pull together these resources and rent out like, lavish Airbnbs for like a week and then everyone kind of like descends in and works together for a week and makes and creates things. And we call this lighthouses because you know, a lighthouse kind of brings ships into harbor and we have an emphasis on shipping. >> Yeah, quality people that are creative and doers and builders. You give 'em some cash and let the self-governing begin, you know? And like, creativity goes through the roof. It's a great story. I think that sums up the culture right there, Joseph. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for this great conversation. I really appreciate it and it's very inspiring. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me, John. >> Joseph Nelson, co-founder and CEO of RoboFlow. Hot company, great culture in the right place in a hot area, computer vision. This is going to explode in value. The edge is exploding. More use cases, more development, and developers are driving the change. Check out RoboFlow. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> Hello and welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a variety of interviews across the gamut from topics, women in tech, mentoring, pipelining, developers, open source, executives. Stanford's having International Women's Day celebration with the women in data science, which we're streaming that live as well. Variety of programs. In this segment, Meagen Eisenberg, friend of theCUBE, she's the CMO of Laceworks, is an amazing executive, got a great journey story as a CMO but she's also actively advising startups, companies and really pays it forward. I want to say Meagen, thank you for coming on the program and thanks for sharing. >> Yeah, thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here. >> Well, we're going to get into some of the journey celebrations that you've gone through and best practice what you've learned is pay that forward. But I got to say, one of the things that really impresses me about you as an executive is you get stuff done. You're a great CMO but also you're advised a lot of companies, you have a lot of irons in the fires and you're advising companies and sometimes they're really small startups to bigger companies, and you're paying it forward, which I love. That's kind of the spirit of this day. >> Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. When I think about my career, a lot of it was looking to mentors women out in the field. This morning I was at a breakfast by Eileen and we had the CEO of General Motors on, and she was talking about her journey nine years as a CEO. And you know, and she's paying it forward with us. But I think about, you know, when you're advising startups, you know, I've gathered knowledge and pattern recognition and to be able to share that is, you know, I enjoy it. >> Yeah. And the startups are also fun too, but it's not always easy and it can get kind of messy as you know. Some startups don't make it some succeed and it's always like the origination story is kind of rewritten and then that's that messy middle. And then it's like that arrows that don't look like a straight line but everyone thinks it's great and you know, it's not for the faint of heart. And Teresa Carlson, who I've interviewed many times, former Amazon, now she's the president of Flexport, she always says, sometimes startups on certain industries aren't for the faint of heart so you got to have a little bit of metal, right? You got to be tough. And some cases that you don't need that, but startups, it's not always easy. What have you learned? >> Yeah, I mean, certainly in the startup world, grit, creativity. You know, when I was at TripActions travel company, pandemic hits, nobody's traveling. You cut budget, you cut heads, but you focus on the core, right? You focus on what you need to survive. And creativity, I think, wins. And, you know, as a CMO when you're marketing, how do you get through that noise? Even the security space, Lacework, it's a fragmented market. You've got to be differentiated and position yourself and you know, be talking to the right target audience and customers. >> Talk about your journey over the years. What have you learned? What's some observations? Can you share any stories and best practices that someone watching could learn from? I know there's a lot of people coming into the tech space with the generative AI things going on in Cloud computing, scaling to the edge, there's a lot more aperture for technical jobs as well as just new roles and new roles that haven't, you really don't go to college for anymore. You got cybersecurity you're in. What are some of the things that you've done over your career if you can share and some best practices? >> Yeah, I think number one, continual learning. When I look through my career, I was constantly reading, networking. Part of the journey is who you're meeting along the way. As you become more senior, your ability to hire and bring in talent matters a lot. I'm always trying to meet with new people. Yeah, if I look at my Amazon feed of books I've bought, right, it kind of chronicle of my history of things I was learning about. Right now I'm reading a lot about cybersecurity, how the, you know, how how they tell me the world ends is the one I'm reading most recently. But you've got to come up to speed and then know the product, get in there and talk to customers. Certainly on the marketing front, anytime I can talk with the customer and find out how they're using us, why they love us, that, you know, helps me better position and differentiate our company. >> By the way, that book is amazing. I saw Nicole speak on Tuesday night with John Markoff and Palo Alto here. What a great story she told there. I recommend that book to everyone. It goes in and she did eight years of research into that book around zero day marketplaces to all the actors involved in security. And it was very interesting. >> Yeah, I mean, it definitely wakes you up, makes you think about what's going on in the world. Very relevant. >> It's like, yeah, it was happening all the time, wasn't it. All the hacking. But this brings me, this brings up an interesting point though, because you're in a cybersecurity area, which by the way, it's changing very fast. It's becoming a bigger industry. It's not just male dominated, although it is now, it's still male dominated, but it's becoming much more and then just tech. >> Yeah, I mean it's a constantly evolving threat landscape and we're learning, and I think more than ever you need to be able to use the data that companies have and, you know, learn from it. That's one of the ways we position ourselves. We're not just about writing rules that won't help you with those zero day attacks. You've got to be able to understand your particular environment and at any moment if it changes. And that's how we help you detect a threat. >> How is, how are things going with you? Is there any new things you guys got going on? Initiatives or programs for women in tech and increasing the range of diversity inclusion in the industry? Because again, this industry's getting much wider too. It's not just specialized, it's also growing. >> Yes, actually I'm excited. We're launching secured by women, securedbywomen.com and it's very much focused on women in the industry, which some studies are showing it's about 25% of security professionals are women. And we're going to be taking nominations and sponsoring women to go to upcoming security events. And so excited to launch that this month and really celebrate women in security and help them, you know, part of that continual learning that I talked about, making sure they're there learning, having the conversations at the conferences, being able to network. >> I have to ask you, what inspired you to pursue the career in tech? What was the motivation? >> You know, if I think way back, originally I wanted to be on the art side and my dad said, "You can do anything as long as it's in the sciences." And so in undergrad I did computer science and MIS. Graduated with MIS and computer science minor. And when I came out I was a IT engineer at Cisco and you know, that kind of started my journey and decided to go back and get my MBA. And during that process I fell in love with marketing and I thought, okay, I understand the buyer, I can come out and market technology to the IT world and developers. And then from there went to several tech companies. >> I mean my father was an engineer. He had the same kind of thing. You got to be an engineer, it's a steady, stable job. But that time, computer science, I mean we've seen the evolution of computer science now it's the most popular degree at Berkeley we've heard and around the world and the education formats are changing. You're seeing a lot of people's self-training on YouTube. The field has really changed. What are some of the challenges you see for folks trying to get into the industry and how would you advise today if you were talking to your young self, what would you, what would be the narrative? >> Yeah, I mean my drawback then was HTML pages were coming out and I thought it would be fun to design, you know, webpages. So you find something you're passionate about in the space today, whether it's gaming or it's cybersecurity. Go and be excited about it and apply and don't give up, right? Do whatever you can to read and learn. And you're right, there are a ton of online self-help. I always try to hire women and people who are continual learners and are teaching themselves something. And I try to find that in an interview to know that they, because when you come to a business, you're there to solve problems and challenges. And the folks that can do that and be innovative and learn, those are the ones I want on my team. >> It's interesting, you know, technology is now impacting society and we need everyone involved to participate and give requirements. And that kind of leads my next question for you is, like, in your opinion, or let me just step back, let me rephrase. What are some of the things that you see technology being used for, for society right now that will impact people's lives? Because this is not a gender thing. We need everybody involved 'cause society is now digital. Technology's pervasive. The AI trends now we're seeing is clearly unmasking to the mainstream that there's some cool stuff happening. >> Yeah, I mean, I think ChatGPT, think about that. All the different ways we're using it we're writing content and marketing with it. We're, you know, I just read an article yesterday, folks are using it to write children's stories and then selling those stories on Amazon, right? And the amount that they can produce with it. But if you think about it, there's unlimited uses with that technology and you've got all the major players getting involved on it. That one major launch and piece of technology is going to transform us in the next six months to a year. And it's the ability to process so much data and then turn that into just assets that we use and the creativity that's building on top of it. Even TripActions has incorporated ChatGPT into your ability to figure out where you want when you're traveling, what's happening in that city. So it's just, you're going to see that incorporated everywhere. >> I mean we've done an interview before TripAction, your other company you were at. Interesting point you don't have to type in a box to say, I'm traveling, I want a hotel. You can just say, I'm going to Barcelona for Mobile World Congress, I want to have a good time. I want some tapas and a nice dinner out. >> Yes. Yeah. That easy. We're making it easy. >> It's efficiency. >> And actually I was going to say for women specifically, I think the reason why we can do so much today is all the technology and apps that we have. I think about DoorDash, I think about Waze you know, when I was younger you had to print out instructions. Now I get in the car real quick, I need to go to soccer practice, I enter it, I need to pick them up at someone's house. I enter it. It's everything's real time. And so it takes away all the things that I don't add value to and allows me to focus on what I want in business. And so there's a bunch of, you know, apps out there that have allowed me to be so much more efficient and productive that my mother didn't have for sure when I was growing up. >> That is an amazing, I think that actually illustrates, in my opinion, the best example of ChatGPT because the maps and GPS integration were two techs, technologies merged together that replace driving and looking at the map. You know, like how do you do that? Like now it's automatically. This is what's going to happen to creative, to writing, to ideation. I even heard Nicole from her book read said that they're using ChatGPT to write zero day exploits. So you seeing it... >> That's scary stuff. You're right. >> You're seeing it everywhere. Super exciting. Well, I got to ask you before you get into some of the Lacework things that you're involved with, cause I think you're doing great work over there is, what was the most exciting projects you've worked on in your career? You came in Cisco, very technical company, so got the technical chops, CSMIS which stands for Management of Information Science for all the young people out there, that was the state of the art back then. What are some of the exciting things you've done? >> Yeah, I mean, I think about, I think about MongoDB and learning to market to developers. Taking the company public in 2017. Launching Atlas database as a service. Now there's so much more of that, you know, the PLG motion, going to TripActions, you know, surviving a pandemic, still being able to come out of that and all the learnings that went with it. You know, they recently, I guess rebranded, so they're Navan now. And then now back in the security space, you know, 14 years ago I was at ArcSite and we were bought by HP. And so getting back into the security world is exciting and it's transformed a ton as you know, it's way more complicated than it was. And so just understanding the pain of our customers and how we protect them as is fun. And I like, you know, being there from a marketing standpoint. >> Well we really appreciate you coming on and sharing that. I got to ask you, for folks watching they might be interested in some advice that you might have for them and their career in tech. I know a lot of young people love the tech. It's becoming pervasive in our lives, as we mentioned. What advice would you give for folks watching that want to start a career in tech? >> Yeah, so work hard, right? Study, network, your first job, be the best at it because every job after that you get pulled into a network. And every time I move, I'm hiring people from the last job, two jobs before, three jobs before. And I'm looking for people that are working hard, care, you know, are continual learners and you know, add value. What can you do to solve problems at your work and add value? >> What's your secret networking hack or growth hack or tip that you can share? Because you're a great networker by the way. You're amazing and you do add a lot of value. I've seen you in action. >> Well, I try never to eat alone. I've got breakfast, I've got lunch, I've got coffee breaks and dinner. And so when I'm at work, I try and always sit and eat with a team member, new group. If I'm out on the road, I'm, you know, meeting people for lunch, going for dinner, just, you know, don't sit at your desk by yourself and don't sit in the hotel room. Get out and meet with people. >> What do you think about now that we're out of the pandemic or somewhat out of the pandemic so to speak, events are back. >> Yes. >> RSA is coming up. It's a big event. The bigger events are getting bigger and then the other events are kind of smaller being distributed. What's your vision of how events are evolving? >> Yeah, I mean, you've got to be in person. Those are the relationships. Right now more than ever people care about renewals and you are building that rapport. And if you're not meeting with your customers, your competitors are. So what I would say is get out there Lacework, we're going to be at RSA, we're going to be at re:Inforce, we're going to be at all of these events, building relationships, you know, coffee, lunch, and yeah, I think the future of events are here to stay and those that don't embrace in person are going to give up business. They're going to lose market share to us. >> And networking is obviously very key on events as well. >> Yes. >> A good opportunity as always get out to the events. What's the event networking trick or advice do you give folks that are going to get out to the networking world? >> Yeah, schedule ahead of time. Don't go to an event and expect people just to come by for great swag. You should be partnering with your sales team and scheduling ahead of time, getting on people's calendars. Don't go there without having 100 or 200 meetings already booked. >> Got it. All right. Let's talk about you, your career. You're currently at Lacework. It's a very hot company in a hot field, security, very male dominated, you're a leader there. What's it like? What's the strategies? How does a woman get in there and be successful? What are some tricks, observations, any data you can share? What's the best practice? What's the secret sauce from Meagen Eisenberg? >> Yes. Yeah, for Meagen Eisenberg. For Lacework, you know, we're focused on our customers. There's nothing better than getting, being close to them, solving their pain, showcasing them. So if you want to go into security, focus on their, the issues and their problems and make sure they're aware of what you're delivering. I mean, we're focused on cloud security and we go from build time to run time. And that's the draw for me here is we had a lot of, you know, happy, excited customers by what we were doing. And what we're doing is very different from legacy security providers. And it is tapping into the trend of really understanding how much data you have and what's happening in the data to detect the anomalies and the threats that are there. >> You know, one of the conversations that I was just having with a senior leader, she was amazing and I asked her what she thought of the current landscape, the job market, the how to get promoted through the careers, all those things. And the response was interesting. I want to get your reaction. She said interdisciplinary skills are critical. And now more than ever, the having that, having a set of skills, technical and social and emotional are super valuable. Do you agree? What's your reaction to that and what would, how would you reframe that? >> Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. You can't be a leader without balance. You've got to know your craft because you're developing and training your team, but you also need to know the, you know, how to build relationships. You're not going to be successful as a C-level exec if you're not partnering across the functions. As a CMO I need to partner with product, I need to partner with the head of sales, I need to partner with finance. So those relationships matter a ton. I also need to attract the right talent. I want to have solid people on the team. And what I will say in the security, cybersecurity space, there's a talent shortage and you cannot hire enough people to protect your company in that space. And that's kind of our part of it is we reduce the number of alerts that you're getting. So you don't need hundreds of people to detect an issue. You're using technology to show, you know, to highlight the issue and then your team can focus on those alerts that matter. >> Yeah, there's a lot of emerging markets where leveling up and you don't need pedigree. You can just level up skill-wise pretty quickly. Which brings me to the next question for you is how do you keep up with all the tech day-to-day and how should someone watching stay on top of it? Because I mean, you got to be on top of this stuff and you got to ride the wave. It's pretty turbulent, but it's still growing and changing. >> Yeah, it's true. I mean, there's a lot of reading. I'm watching the news. Anytime something comes out, you know, ChatGPT I'm playing with it. I've got a great network and sharing. I'm on, you know, LinkedIn reading articles all the time. I have a team, right? Every time I hire someone, they bring new information and knowledge in and I'm you know, Cal Poly had this learn by doing that was the philosophy at San Luis Obispo. So do it. Try it, don't be afraid of it. I think that's the advice. >> Well, I love some of the points you mentioned community and network. You mentioned networking. That brings up the community question, how could people get involved? What communities are out there? How should they approach communities? 'Cause communities are also networks, but also they're welcoming people in that form networks. So it's a network of networks. So what's your take on how to engage and work with communities? How do you find your tribe? If someone's getting into the business, they want support, they might want technology learnings, what's your approach? >> Yeah, so a few, a few different places. One, I'm part of the operator collective, which is a strong female investment group that's open and works a lot with operators and they're in on the newest technologies 'cause they're investing in it. Chief I think is a great organization as well. You've got a lot of, if you're in marketing, there's a ton of CMO networking events that you can go to. I would say any field, even for us at Lacework, we've got some strong CISO networks and we do dinners around you know, we have one coming up in the Bay area, in Boston, New York, and you can come and meet other CISOs and security leaders. So when I get an invite and you know we all do, I will go to it. I'll carve out the time and meet with others. So I think, you know, part of the community is get out there and, you know, join some of these different groups. >> Meagen, thank you so much for spending the time. Final question for you. How do you see the future of tech evolving and how do you see your role in it? >> Yeah, I mean, marketing's changing wildly. There's so many different channels. You think about all the social media channels that have changed over the last five years. So when I think about the future of tech, I'm looking at apps on my phone. I have three daughters, 13, 11, and 8. I'm telling you, they come to me with new apps and new technology all the time, and I'm paying attention what they're, you know, what they're participating in and what they want to be a part of. And certainly it's going to be a lot more around the data and AI. I think we're only at the beginning of that. So we will continue to, you know, learn from it and wield it and deal with the mass amount of data that's out there. >> Well, you saw TikTok just got banned by the European Commission today around their staff. Interesting times. >> It is. >> Meagen, thank you so much as always. You're a great tech athlete. Been following your career for a while, a long time. You're an amazing leader. Thank you for sharing your story here on theCUBE, celebration of International Women's Day. Every day is IWD and thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> Okay. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto. Thank you for watching, more to come stay with us. (bright music)

(bright music) (crowd talking indistinctly in the background) >> Hey guys, welcome back to Detroit, Michigan. theCUBE is live at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022. You might notice something really unique here. Lisa Martin with our newest co-host of theCUBE, Savannah Peterson! Savannah, it's great to see you. >> It's so good to be here with you (laughs). >> I know, I know. We have a great segment coming up. I always love talking couple things, cars, one, two, with companies that have been around for a hundred plus years and how they've actually transformed. >> Oh yeah. >> Ford is here. You have a great story about how you, about Ford. >> Ford brought me to Detroit the first time. I was here at the North American International Auto Show. Some of you may be familiar, and the fine folks from Ford brought me out to commentate just like this, as they were announcing the Ford Bronco. >> Satish: Oh wow. >> Which I am still lusting after. >> You don't have one yet? >> For the record. No, I don't. My next car's got to be an EV. Although, ironically, there's a Ford EV right behind us here on set today. >> I know, I know. >> Which we were both just contemplating before we went live. >> It's really shiny. >> We're going to have to go check it out. >> I have to check it out. Yep, we'll do that. Yeah. Well, please welcome our two guests from Ford, Satish Puranam, is here, The Technical Leader at Cloud and Rebecca Risk, Principal Architect, developer relations. We are so excited to have you guys on the program. >> Clearly. >> Thanks for joining us. (all laugh) >> Thank you for having us. >> I love you're Ford enthusiasts! Yeah, that's awesome. >> I drive a Ford. >> Oh, awesome! Thank you. >> I can only say that's one car company here. >> That's great. >> Yes, yes. >> Great! Thank you a lot. >> Thank you for your business! >> Absolutely. (all laugh) >> So, Satish, talk to us a little bit about- I mean I think of Cloud as a car company but it seems like it's a technology company that makes cars. >> Yes. Talk to us about Ford as a Cloud first, technology driven company, and then we're going to talk about what you're doing with Red Hat and Boston University. >> Yeah, I'm like everything that all these cars that you're seeing, beautiful right behind us it's all built on, around, and with technology, right? So there's so much code goes into these cars these days, it's probably, it's mind boggling to think that probably your iPhones might be having less code as opposed to these cars. Everything from control systems, everything is code. We don't do any more clay models. Everything is done digital, 3D, virtual reality and all that stuff. So all that takes code, all of that takes technology. And we have been in that journey for the last- since 2016 when we started our first mobile app and all that stuff. And of late we have been like, heavily invested in Google. Moving a lot of these experiences, data acquisition systems AI/ML modeling for like all the autonomous cars. It's all technology and like from the day it is conceived, to the day it is marketed, to the day when you show up for a servicing, and hopefully soon how you can buy and you know, provide feedback to us, is all technology that drives all of this stuff. So it's amazing for us to see everything that we go and immerse ourselves in the technology. There is a real life thing that we can see what we all do for it, right? So- >> Yes, we're only sorry that our audience can't actually see the car, >> Yep. >> but we'll get some B-roll for you later on. Rebecca, talk a little bit about your role. Here we are at KubeCon, Savannah and I and John were talking when we went live this morning, that this is huge. That the show floor is massive, a lot bigger than last year. The collaboration and the spirit of the community is not only alive and well, as we heard in the keynote this morning, it's thriving. >> Yeah. >> Talk about developer relations at Ford and what you are helping to drive in your role. >> Yeah, so my team is all about helping developers work faster with different platforms that my team curates and produces, so that our developers don't have to deal with all of the details of setting up their environments to actually code. And we have really great people, kind of the top software developers in the company, are part of my team to produce those products that other people can use, and accelerate their development. And we have a great relationship with the developers in the company and outside with the different vendor relationships that we have, to make sure that we're always producing the next platform with the next tech stack that our developers will want to continue to use to produce the really great products that we are all about making at Ford. >> Let's dig in there a little bit because I'm curious and I suspect you both had something to do with it. How did you approach your Cloud Native transformation and how do you evaluate new technologies for the team? >> It's sometimes- many a times I would say it's like dogfooding and like experimentation. >> Yeah. Isn't anything in innovation a lot of- >> Yeah, a lot of experimentation. We started our, as I said, the Cloud Native journey back in 2016 with Cloud Foundry and things, technologies around that. Soon realized, that there was like a lot of buzz around that time. Twelve-Factor was a thing, Stateless was a thing. And then all those Stateful needs to drive the Stateless. So where do we do that thing? And the next logical iteration was Kubernetes was bursting upon the scene at that time. So we started doing a lot of experimentation. >> Like the Kool-Aid man, burst on the Kubernetes scene- >> Exactly right. >> Through the wall. >> So, the question is like, why can't we do? I think we were like crazy enough to say that Kubernetes people are talking about our serverless or Twelve-Factor on Kubernetes. We are crazy enough to do Stateful on Kubernetes and we've been doing it successfully for five years. So it's a lot about experimentation. I think good chunk of experiments that we do do not yield the results that we get, but many a times, some of them are like Gangbusters. Like, other aspects that we've been doing of late is like partnering with Becky and rest of the organization, right? Because they are the people who are like closest to the developers. We are somewhat behind the scenes doing some things but it is Becky and the rest of the architecture teams who are actually front and center with the customers, right? So it is the collaborative effort that we've been working through past few years that has been really really been useful and coming around and helping us to make some of these products really beautiful. >> Yeah, well you make a lot of beautiful products. I think we've all, I think we've all seen them. Something that I think is really interesting and part of why I was so excited for this interview, and kind of nudged John out, was because you've been- Ford has been investing in technology in a committed way for decades and I don't think most people are aware of that. When I originally came out to Dearborn, I learned that you've had a head of VR who happens to be a female. For what it's worth, Elizabeth, who's been running VR for you for two and a half decades, for 25 years. >> Satish: Yep. >> That is an impressive commitment. What is that like from a culture perspective inside of Ford? What is the attitude around innovation and technology? >> So I've been a long time Ford employee. I just celebrated my 29th year. >> Oh, wow! >> Congratulations! >> Wow, congrats! That's a huge deal. >> Yeah, it's a huge deal. I'm so proud of my career and all that Ford has brought to me and it's just a testament. I have many colleagues like me who've been there for their whole career or have done other things and come to Ford and then spent another 20 years with us because we foster the culture that makes you want to stay. We have development programs to allow you to upscale and change your role and learn new things and play with the new technologies that people are interested in doing and really make an impact to our community of developers at Ford or the company itself and the results that we're delivering. So to have that, you know, culture for so many years that people really love to work. They love to work with the people that they're working with. They love to stay engaged and they love the fact that you can have many different careers within the same umbrella, which we call the "blue oval". And that's really why I've been there for so long. I think I probably had 13 very unique and different jobs along the way. It's as if I left, and you know shopped around my skills elsewhere. But I didn't ever have to leave the company. It's been fabulous. >> The cultural change and adoption of- embracing modern technology- Cloud Native automotive software is impressive because a lot of historied companies, you guys have been there a long time, have challenges with that because it's really hard to get an entire moving, you'll call it the blue oval, to change and adapt- >> Savannah: I love that. >> and be willing to experiment. So that that is impressive. Talk about, you go by Becky, so I'll call you Becky, >> Rebecca/Becky: Yeah. >> The developer culture in terms of the developers really being the center of the nucleus of influencing the direction in which the company's going. I imagine that they probably are fairly influential. >> Yeah, so I had a very- one of the unique positions I held was a culture change for our department, Information Technology in 2016. >> Satish: Yeah. >> As the teacher was involved with moving us to the cloud, I was responsible- >> You are the transformation team! This is beautiful. I love this. We've got the right people on the show. >> Yeah, we do. >> I was responsible for changing the culture to orient our employees to pay attention to what do we want to create for tomorrow? What are the kind of skills we need to trust each other to move quickly. And that was completely unique. >> Satish: Yeah. >> Like I had men in the trenches delivering software before that, and then plucked out because they wanted someone, you know who had authentic experience with our development team to be that voice. And it was such a great investment that Ford continues to do is invest in our culture transformation. Because with each step forward that we do, we have to refine what our priorities are. And you do that through culture transformation and culture management. And that's been, I think really, the key to our successful pivots that we've made over the last six years that we've been able to continue to refine and hone where we really want to go through that culture movement. >> Absolutely. I think if I could add another- >> Please. >> spotlight to it is like the biggest thing about Ford has been among various startup-like culture, right? So the idea is that we encourage people to think outside the box, right? >> Savannah: Or outside the oval? >> Right! (laughs) >> Lisa: Outside the oval, yes! >> Absolutely! Right. >> So the question is like, you can experiment with various things, new technologies and you will get all the leadership support to go along with it. I think that is very important too and like we can be in the trenches and talk about all of these nice little things but who the heck would've thought that, you know Kubernetes was announced in 2015, in late 2016, we have early dev Kubernetes clusters already running. 2017, we are live with workloads on Kubernetes! >> Savannah: Early adopters over here. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> I'm like all of this thing doesn't happen without lot of foresight and support from the leadership, but it's also the grassroot efforts that is encouraged all along to be on the front end of all of these things and try different things. Some of them may not work >> Savannah: Right. >> But that's okay. But how do we know we are doing something, if you're not failing? We have to fail in order to do something, right? >> Lisa: I always say- >> So I think that's been a great thing that is encouraged very often and otherwise I would not be doing, I've done a whole bunch of stuff at Ford. Without that kind of ability to support and have an appetite for, some of those things would not have been here at all. >> I always say failure is not a bad F-word. >> Satish: Yep. >> Savannah: I love that. >> But what you're talking about there is kind of like driving this hot wheel of experimentation. You have to have the right culture and the mindset- >> Satish: Absolutely. >> to do that. Try fail, move on, learn, iterate, go. >> Satish: Correct. >> You guys have a great partnership with Red Hat and Boston University. You're speaking about that later today. >> Satish: Yes. >> Unpack that for us. What, from a technical perspective, what are you doing and what's it resulting in? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is Becky was talking about as during this transformation journey, is lot has changed in very small amount of time. So we traditionally been like, "Hey, here's a spreadsheet of things I need you to deliver for me" to "Here is a catalog of things, you can get it today and be successful with it". That is frightening to several of our developers. The goal, one of the things that we've been working with Q By Example, Red Hat and all the thing, is that how can we lower the bar for the developers, right? Kubernetes is great. It's also a wall of YAML. >> It's extremely complex, number one complaint. >> The question is how can I zero on? I'm like, if we go back think like when we talk about in cars with human-machine interfaces, which parts do I need to know? Here's the steering wheel, here's the gas pedal, or here's the brake. As long as you know these two, three different things you should be fairly be okay to drive those things, right? So the idea of some of the things with enablementing we are trying to do is like reduce that barrier, right? Reduce- lower the bar so that more people can participate in it. >> One of the ways that you did that was Q By Example, right, QBE? >> Satish: Yes, Yes. >> Can you tell us a little bit more about that as you finish this answer? >> Yeah, I think the biggest thing with Q By Example is like Q By Example gives you the small bite-sized things about Kubernetes, right? >> Savannah: Great place to start. >> But what we wanted to do is that we wanted to reinforce that learning by turning into a real world living example app. We took part info, we said, Hey, what does it look like? How do I make sure that it is highly available? How do I make sure that it is secure? Here is an example YAML of it that you can literally verbatim copy and paste into your editor and click run and then you will get an instant gratification feedback loop >> I was going to say, yeah, they feel like you're learning too! >> Yes. Right. So the idea would be is like, and then instead of giving you just a boring prose text to read, we actually drop links to relevant blog posts saying that, hey you can just go there. And that has been inspirational in terms of like and reinforcing the learning. So that has been where we started working with the Boston University, Red Hat and the community around all of that stuff. >> Talk a little bit about, Becky, about some of the business outcomes. You mentioned things like upskilling the workforce which is really nice to hear that there's such a big focus on it. But I imagine too, there's more participation in the community, but also from an end customer perspective. Obviously, everything Ford's doing is to serve the end customers >> Becky: Right. How does this help the end customer have that experience that they really, these days, demand with patience being something that, I think, is gone because of the pandemic? >> Right? Right. So one of the things that my team does is we create the platforms that help Accelerate developers be successful and it helps educate them more quickly on appropriate use of the platforms and helps them by adopting the platforms to be more secure which inherently lead to the better results for our end customers because their data is secure because the products that they have are well created and they're tested thoroughly. So we catch all those things earlier in the cycle by using these platforms that we help curate and produce. And that's really important because, like you had mentioned, this steep learning curve associated with Kubernetes, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So my team is able to kind of help with that abstraction so that we solve kind of the higher complex problems for them so that developers can move faster and then we focus our education on what's important for them. We use things like Q By Example, as a source instead of creating that content ourselves, right? We are able to point them to that. So it's great that there's that community and we're definitely involved with that. But that's so important to help our developers be successful in moving as quickly as they want and not having 20,000 people solve the same problems. >> Satish: (chuckles) Yeah. >> Each individually- >> Savannah: you don't need to! >> and sometimes differently. >> Savannah: We're stronger together, you know? >> Exactly. >> The water level rises together and Ford is definitely a company that illustrates that by example. >> Yeah, I'm like, we can't make a better round wheel right? >> Yeah! So, we have to build upon what we have already been built ahead of us. And I think a lot of it is also about how can we give back and participate in the community, right? So I think that is paramount for us as like, here we are in Detroit so we're trying to recruit and show people that you know, everything that we do is not just old car and sheet metal >> Savannah: Combustion. >> and everything and right? There's a lot of tech goes and sometimes it is really, really cool to do that. And biggest thing for us is like how can we involve our community of developers sooner, earlier, faster without actually encumbering them and saying that, hey here is a book, go master it. We'll talk two months later. So I think that has been another journey. I think that has been a biggest uphill challenge for us is that how can we actually democratize all of these things for everybody. >> Yeah. Well no one better to try than you I would suspect. >> We can only try and hope everything turns out well, right? >> You know, as long as there's room for the bumpers on the lane for if you fail. >> Exactly. >> It sounds like you're driving the program in the right direction. Closing question for you, what's next? Is electric the future? Is Kubernetes the future? What's Ford all in on right now, looking forward? (crowd murmuring in the background) >> Data is the king, right? >> Savannah: Oh, okay, yes! >> Data is a new currency. We use that for several things to improve the cars improve the quality of autonomous driving Is Level 5 driving here? Maybe will be here soon, we'll see. But we are all working towards it, right? So machine learning, AI feedback. How do you actually post sale experience for example? So all of these are all areas that we are working to. We are, may not be getting like Kubernetes in a car but we are putting Kubernetes in plants. Like you order a Marquis or you order a Bronco, you see that here. Here's where in the assembly line your car is. It's taking pictures. It's actually taking pictures on Kubernetes platform. >> That's pretty cool. >> And it is tweeting for you on the Twitter and the social media platform. So there's a lot of that. So it is real and we are doing it. We need more help. A lot of the community efforts that we are seeing and a lot of the innovation that is happening on the floor here, it's phenomenal. The question is how we can incorporate those things into our workflows. >> Yeah, well you have the right audience for that here. You also have the right attitude, >> Exactly. >> the right appetite, and the right foundation. Becky, last question for you. Top three takeaways from your talk today. If you're talking to the developer community you want to inspire: Come work for us! What would you say? >> If you're ready to invest in yourself and upskill and be part of something that is pretty remarkable, come work for us! We have many, many different technical career paths that you can follow. We invest in our employees. When you master something, it's time for you to move on. We have career growth for you. It's been a wonderful gift to me and my family and I encourage everyone to check us out careers.ford.com or stop by our booth if you're happen to be here in person. >> Satish: Absolutely! >> We have our curated job openings that are specific for this community, available. >> Satish: Absolutely. >> Love it. Perfect close. Nailed pitch there. I'm sure you're all going to check out their job page. (all laugh) >> Exactly! And what you talked about, the developer experience, the customer experience are inextricably linked and you guys are really focused on that. Congratulations on all the work that you've done. We got to go get a selfie with that car girl. >> Yes, we do. >> Absolutely. >> We got to show them, we got to show the audience what it looks like on the inside too. We'll do a little IG video. (Lisa laughs) >> Absolutely. >> We will show you that for our guests and my cohost, Savannah Peterson. Lisa Martin here live in Detroit with theCUBE at KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2022. The one and only John Furrier, who you know gets FOMO, is going to be back with me next. So stick around. (all laugh) (bright music)

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has always been an unconventional company. You know it started with humble beginnings. It's essentially a software development shop. Then it caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology. It's really, it's simplification mantra and it created a very easy to deploy software robot system for bespoke departments so they could automate mundane tasks. You know the story. The company grew rapidly, was able to go public early this year. Now consistent with its out-of-the-ordinary approach, while other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UiPath is moving ahead with Forward IV, it's annual user conference next week with a live audience there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It's also fast forwarding as a company, determined to lead the charge beyond RPA and execute on a more all-encompassing Enterprise automation agenda. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Forward IV, we'll update you in the RPA market the progress that UiPath has made since its IPO and bringing some ETR customer survey data that's contextualized the company's position in the overall market and relative to the competition. Here's a quick rundown of today's agenda. First I want to tell you theCube is going to be at Forward IV at the Bellagio next week. UiPath, this is their big customer event. It's live, it's a physical event. It's primarily outdoors. You have to be vaccinated to attend. Now, this not completely out of the ordinary. John Furrier and theCube were at AWS Public Sector this past week and we were at Mobile World Congress in one of the first big hybrid events of the year at Barcelona. We thought that event would kick of the fall event season, live event in earnest but the COVID crisis has caused many tech firms, most tech firms actually, to hit pause button. Not UiPath, they're moving ahead. They're going forward and we see a growing trend for smaller VIP events with a virtual component, topic maybe for another day. Now we've talked extensively about the productivity challenges and the automation mandate the pandemic has thrust upon us. Now, we've seen pretty dramatic productivity improvements as remote work kicked in but its brought new stresses. For example, according to Qualtrics, 32% of working moms said their mental health has declined since the pandemic hit. 15% of working dads said the same by the way. So, one has to question the sustainability of this perpetual workday. And we're seeing a continuum of automation solutions emerging and we'll talk about that today. We're seeing tons of M&A as well but now, in that continuum, on the left-side of the spectrum, there's Microsoft who in some ways, they stand alone and their Azure is becoming ubiquitous as a SaaS-Cloud collaboration and productivity platform. Microsoft is everywhere and in virtually every market, whether video conferencing, security, database, cloud, CRM, analytics, you name it. Microsoft is pretty much there and RPA is no different. With the acquisition of Softomotive last year, Microsoft entered the RTA market in earnest and is penetrating very deeply into the space, particularly as it pertains to personal productivity building on its software stake. Now in the middle of that spectrum if you will, we're seeing more M&A and that's defined really by the big software giants. Think of this domain as integrated software place. SAP, they acquired Contextere. They also acquired a company called Process Insights, Service now acquired Inttellebot. Salesforce acquired Servicetrace, we see Infor entering the frame and I would put even Pega, Pega systems in this camp. Software companies focused on integrating RPA into their broader workflows, into their software platforms and this is important because these platforms are entrenched Their well guardants of thoughts and complicated with lots of touchpoints and integration points and frankly they are much harder to automate because of their entrenched legacy. Now, on the far side of that spectrum, are the horizontal automation players and that's been let by UiPath with automation anywhere as the number two player in this domain. And I even put a blue prism in there more M&A recently announced that Vista is going to acquire them Vista also owns Tibco, they are going to merge those two companies. You know Tibco is come up with the integration play. So again I would put them in that you know, horizontal piece of the spectrum. So with that as background, we're going to look at how UiPath has performed since we last covered them and IPO and I'm going to bring in some ETR survey data to get the spending view from customers and we'll wrap up. Now, just to emphasize the importance of automation and the automation mandate, we talk about it all the time in this program. We use this ETR chart. It's a two dimensional view with net score which is the measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share which is a proxy for pervasiveness in the data set that's on the horizontal axis. Now note that red dotted line, it signifies companies within elevated position on the net score vertical axis anything over that is considered pretty good. Very good. Now this shows every spending segment within the ETR taxonomy. And the four spending categories with the greatest velocity are AI, cloud, containers and RPA. And they have topped the charts for quite a while now. They are the only 4 categories which have sustained above that 40% line consistently throughout the pandemic and even before. Now the impressive thing about cloud of course is it has both spending momentum on the vertical axis and a very large market share or presence in the data set. The point is RPA is nascent still. It has an affinity with AI as a means of more intelligently identifying and streamlining process improvements. And so we expect those two to remain elevated and grow to the right together. UiPath pegs its TAM, total available market at 60 billion. And the reality is that could be understated. Okay, as we reported from the UiPath S1 analysis we did pre IPO, the company at that time had an ARR annual recurring revenue of $580 million and it was growing at 65% annually. And nearly 8000 customers at the time, a 1000 of which had an ARR in excess of a 100k. And the net revenue retention the company had was over 145%. So let's take a look at the pictures 6 months forward. We mentioned the $60 billion TAM, ARR now up over $726.5 million on its way to a billion ARR holding pretty steady at 60% growth as is NRR, net revenue retention and more then a 1000 new customers and 200 more with over a 100000 in ARR and a small operating profit which by the way exceeded the consensuses pretty substantially. Profitability is not shown here and no one seems to care anyway these days. It's all about growing into that TAM. Well that's a pretty good looking picture, isn't it? The company had a beat and a raise for the quarter earlier this month, so looking good right. Well you ask how come the stock is not doing better. That's an interesting question. So let's first look at the stocks performance on a relative basis. Here we show UiPath performance against Pega systems and blue prism, the other two publicly traded automation. Pure plays sort of in the case of Pega. So UiPath outperformed post its IPO but since the early summer Pega is been the big winner while UiPath slowly decelerated. You see Blue prism was at the lag until it was announced that it was in an acquisition talks with a couple of PE firms and the prospects of a bidding war sent that yellow line up as you can see. UiPath as you can see on the inset, has a much higher valuation than Pega and way higher than blue Prism. Pega interestingly is growing revenues nicely at around 40%. And I think what's happening is that the street simply wants more. Even though UiPath beat and raised, Wallstreet is still getting comfortable with management which is new to the public market game and the company just needs to demonstrate a track record and build trust. There's also some education around billings and multi-year contracts that the company addressed on its last earnings call. But the street was concerned about ARR for new logos. It appears to be slowing down sequentially and a notable decline in billings momentum which UiPath CFO addressed on the earnings call saying look they don't need the trade margin for prepaid multi year deals, given the strong cash position. Why give anything up. And even though I said nobody cares about profitability well, I guess that's true until you guide for an operating loss when you've been showing small profit in recent quarters what UiPath did. Then, obviously people start to care. So UiPath is in bit of an unknown territory to the street and it has a valuation, it's pretty rich. Very rich actually at 30 times revenue multiple or greater than 30 times revenue multiple. So that's why in my view, investors are being cautious. But I want to address a dynamic that we have seen with this high growth rocket chip companies. Something we talked about Snowflake and I think you are seeing some of that here with UiPath. Different model in the sense that Snowflake is pure cloud but I'm talking about concerns around ARR and from new logos and that growth in a sequential basis. And here's what's happening in my view with UiPath. You have a company that started within departments with a smaller average contract size, ACV maybe 25000, may be 50000 but not deep six figure deals. That wasn't UiPath's play. And because the company focused so heavily on simplicity and made it really easy to adapt, customers saw really fast ROI. I mean break-even in months. So we very quickly saw expansion into other departments. So when ACV started to rise and installations expanded within each customer, UiPath realized it had to move beyond a point product and it started thing about a platform and making acquisitions like Processgold and others and this marked a much deeper expansion into the customer base. And you can see that here in this UiPath chart that they shared at their investor deck, customers that bought in 2016 and 2017 expanded their spend 13, 15, 18, 20x So the LTV, life time value of the customer is growing dramatically and because UiPath is focused on simplicity, and has a very facile premium model much easier to try before you buy than its competitors it's CAC, Customer acquisition cost are likely much lower than some of its peers. And that's a key dynamic. So don't get freaked out by some of those concerns that we raised earlier because just like Snowflake what's happening is that the company for sure is gaining new customers, may be just not at the same rate but don't miss the forest through the trees I.e getting more money from their existing customers which means retention, loyalty and growth. Now speaking of forest, this chart is the dynamic I'm talking about, its an ETR graphic that shows the components of net score against spending momentum. Net score breaks down into 5 areas. That lime green at the top is new additions. Okay, so that's only 11% of the customer mentions. By the way we are talking about more than a 125 responses for UiPath. So it's meaningful, it's actually larger in this survey or certainly comparable to Microsoft. So that's just something right there. The next bar is the forest green. Forest green is what I want you to focus. That's customer spending 6% or more in the second half of the year relative to the first half. The gray is flat spending which is quite large. The pink or light red, that's spending customers spending 6% or worse, that's a 4% number. But look at the bottom bar. There is no bar, that's churn. 0% of the responders in the survey are churning. And Churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies. 0% defections. So you've got 46% spending more, nobody leaving. That's the dynamic powering UiPath right now and I would take this picture any day over a larger lime green and a smaller forest green and a bigger churn number. Okay, it's pretty good, not Snowflake good but it's solid. So how does this picture compare to UiPath's peers. Let's take a look at that. So this is ETR data, same data showing the granularity net score for Microsoft power automate, UiPath automation anywhere, Blue Prism and Pega. So as we said before, Microsoft is ubiquitous. What can we say about that. But UiPath is right there with a more robust platform. Not to overlook Microsoft, you can't but UiPath will you that the don't compete head to head for enterprise automation deals with Microsoft and may be they will over time. They do however compete head to head with automation anywhere. And their picture is quite strong as you can see here. You know as is Blue Prism's picture and even Pega. Although Blue Prism automation anywhere UiPtah and power automate all have net scores on this chart as you can see the tables in the upper right over 40%, Pega does not. But you can see Pega as a pure play RPA vendor it's a little bit of sort of apples and oranges there but they do sell RPA and ETR captures in their taxonomy so why not include them. Also note that UiPath has as I said before more mentions in the survey than power automate which is actually quite interesting given the ubiquity of Microsoft. Now, one other notable note is the bright red that's defections and only UiPath is showing zero defections Everybody else has at least little of the slims on defections. Okay, so take that as you will but its another data point, the one that is powerful nit only for UiPath but really for the entire sector. Now the last ETR data point that we want to share is the famous two dimensional view. Like the sector chart we showed earlier, this graphic shows the net score on the vertical axis that's against spending velocity and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. So as we said earlier, UiPath actually has a greater presence in the survey than the ever present Microsoft. Remember, this is the July survey. We don't have full results from the September-October survey yet and we can't release them until ETR is out of its quiet period but I expect the entire sector, like everything is going to be slightly down because as reported last week tech spending is moderated slightly in the second half of this year. But we don't expect the picture to change dramatically UiPath and power automate we think are going to lead in market presence and those two plus automation anywhere is going to show the strength in spending momentum as will most of the sector. We'll see who comes in above the 40% line. Okay, what to watch at Forward IV. So in summary I'll be looking for a few things. One, UiPath has hinted toward a big platform announcement that will deepen its capabilities to beyond being an RPA point tool into much more of an enterprise automation platform, rewriting a lot of the code Linux, cloud, better automation of the UI, you are going to hear all kind of new product announcements that are coming so I'll be listening for those details. I want to hear more from customers that further confirm what I've been hearing from them over the last couple of years and get more data especially on their ROI, on their land and expand, I want to understand that dynamic and that true enterprise automation. It's going to be good to get an update face to face and test some of our assumptions here and see where the gaps are and where UiPath can improve. Third, I want to talk to ecosystem players to see where they are in participating in the value chain here. What kind of partner has UiPath become since its IPO, are they investing more in the ecosystem, how do partners fit into that flywheel. Fourth, I want to hear from UiPath management Daniel Dines and other UiPath leaders, their exiting toddler wheel and coming into an adolescence phase or early adulthood. And what does that progression look like, how does it feel, what's the vibe at the show. And finally I'm very excited to participate in a live in-person event to see what's working, to see how hybrid events are evolving, we got to good glimpse at Mobile congress and this week in DC at public sector summit. As you know theCube is doing hybrid events for years and we intend to continue to lead in this regard and bring you the best real time information as possible. Okay, that's it for today. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search breaking analysis podcast. We publish each week on Wikibound.com and Siliconangle.com and you can always connect on twitter @dvellante or email me at David.vellante@siliconangle.com Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCube insights powered by ETR. Be well and will see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Welcome to theCUBE studios for another CUBE Conversation where we go in depth thought leaders driving business outcomes with technology. I'm your host, Peter Burris. Every organization is concerned about how they are going to generate greater value out of the networks by adding more people in more places and supporting more applications. Now we've effectively moved from a wired orientation into a wireless orientation but a lot of enterprises still envision and experience some limitations. What CIOs, business leaders and infrastructure people want is they want a modern wireless experience and the good news is we got a lot of technology coming down at us that are likely to get us there. Now to have that conversation we've got a couple of great guests today. Shrikant Shenwai is a CEO of the WBA and Matt MacPherson's the CTO of Cisco Wireless. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So let's start, what's WBA? >> WBA is Wireless Broadband Alliance. It's an industry consortium. And what we do is essentially look at wireless technology but from a perspective of how wi-fi together with other technologies can deliver the great experience and meet the requirements of enterprise as well as others, in particular service providers community. >> So we know what Cisco is Matt, so (laughing) We'll stay here and talk about this. I said upfront that we've got a lot of new technologies coming down the horizon. Specifically you've got Wi-fi 6 and we've got Gen5, we've got the next generation of cell service. A lot of people think there's a divergence on the horizon. You guys don't, explain why. >> I don't think it's we just don't. There are others in the industry, especially these people who are to make technology decisions, the CIOs, CTOs. What they are looking at is, I have a business problem, how do I solve that business problem? What technology makes me do my job better? Can it do it more cost effectively? And essentially what it boils down to is to say, if I have to use certain technologies, whether it's 5G, 4G or whatever that might be for certain use cases, I'll use it for that. But when it comes to wi-fi? The great thing about wi-fi is wi-fi has always been the technology in the indoors environment. It's the most successful wireless technology, almost similar to the 3G technologies. So what these are looking at is how to combine the power of the two together. How do you make them work together? And that's essentially where we find ourselves in a biy of a good position to help industry because we have players from the traditional cellular side working within WBA, with companies like Cisco to look at how do you actually make the experience work better by not choosing between either or but together these technologies. >> So it suggests to me that what you're looking to do is find the best of 5G or the cell G experience and the best of the wi-fi experience and bring 'em together so that you can achieve those new densities, higher performance, greater security, everything that folks want in that modern wireless experience. Cisco is going to be one of the companies that actually makes this happen. Matt when you think about bringing these things together and this notion of converging or let's call it unifying experiences. >> Mm-hmm. >> Because that's what's going to make it simpler. What types of things do we need to think about? What's the metaphor that folks need to worry about as they think about how this is all going to happen? >> Yeah I think a lot of times when you have these very distinct technologies and a very distinct use case, you had LTE and as that moves into 5G, 5GNR and you had the wifi world, it was very understood this was unlicensed, this was licensed. There was a segmentation. You expected to be going 80 miles and hour down the road and using this. You expected to use wi-fi when you were indoors and the corporate environment, right? And when these things start to come together and you see this overlap, right? You can read that two ways, right? You can say, hey one technology is threatening the other. Cisco doesn't see it that way. Cisco sees it as these technologies come together it produces an opportunity to use both to provide the best experience wherever you are. Unifying both axis's into common core infrastructure, right? So this means that the user, not caring which technology they're coming in on, will always get the experience that they're looking for or the IT department, the one that they want to provide or that airport, right? Wherever you are, indoor or outdoor. >> Well so let's talk about experience because I think the experience that most users are focused on, and by that I mean consumers and individuals who are actually doing work, and therefore pushing their service providers and pushing their IT departments to fix is that the LTE world allows me to roam and not lose a signal. The wi-fi world allows me to hop from network to network if I want to as long as I authenticate at each point. >> Exactly. >> How is that 5G experience going to be applied in a wi-fi world so that I don't have to constantly be giving up private information? Authenticating in new and various, sometimes over 5G kinds of ways? >> Again, it's a bit of a, I mean it's a great question in the sense that in one technology it's been solved for a long time. In the other technology there's a bit of back pressure just on how do you securely connect to that network, right? You know it's interesting, I was talking to one of the VPs of roaming at a very large operator and I asked him, I said, "How many roaming agreements "do you have to have in order to roam anywhere "in the world?" And he basically said, "Well, you know it's somewhere north "of 800 roaming agreements." >> Wow. >> Right? So there's actually that many operators around the planet that they have to negotiate these agreements with. They get the lawyers together, they talk about cost. They talk about service and quality, et cetera, right? Now in 2017 there was 124 million wi-fi networks-- >> Hotspots. >> Hotspots on the planet. >> 124 million? >> 124 million. By 2022 there'll over 500 million. Now if we want to be able to authenticate and onboard wherever you are? No offense to the legal community but I don't think we want to put a lawyer between every one of those negotiations. >> And you couldn't use a block chain. (laughing) >> Good point. (laughing) So what we're doing is we're working on a new technology that's called Open Roaming. It's based on Passpoint Hotspot 2.0 so that when you go into a particular environment it'll see the network, it'll discover the network. It'll understand how and where to authenticate and the connection will just happen. In fact it's almost interesting demonstrating the technology because you basically pick up your mobile device and say, oh look, see I'm connected, demo over, right? And that's really what you're trying to achieve. Different problem, different scale of problem for wi-fi but something that we definitely learned from the community over on the 4G/5G side is that in order to benefit from the network you have to be connected to the network. And that's why we're pursuing this type of work. >> Yes, if I could just add to what Matt said? I think the historical context here, because in the world of 4G/3G/5G the roaming was between carriers and he said there were 800 carriers and maybe there were a lot of them but there was a finite number of those providers, network providers. In the world of wi-fi, because wi-fi is wi-fi, anyone can deploy wi-fi. You just talked about a number which is half a billion hotspots around the world in 2022. Even today there are so many different types of hotspots all over the place. So the model that you applied for roaming between the carriers, which is clearly one model that has to be duplicated, in fact, that's where WBA started and we did have foundation work to help the carriers do roaming with each other. But having done that, what we're finding is that's enough in the world of wi-fi. What you need is more than that because it's a different world. You have venues, you have hotels, you have all kind of different providers, enterprises. They all want their networks to be connecting. So to apply the same model of interconnectivity that was done by the carriers to this environment, doesn't work. So what you need is a bit of, almost like a roaming consortium approach where anyone who is part of a consortium can automatically connect to the others who want to join the consortium. And that's essentially what Cisco has done with their Open Roaming. And from a WBA standpoint, as an industry body, we think there is a need to standardize that. There's a need to make it much more standards based so that anyone and everyone can get connected using the same protocols, same ways of connecting with each other and that's where we see a lot of work happening now as we speak to make all those things happen. >> Without diminishing the inherent value of Wi-fi 6 while sustaining the security, while sustaining the new densities, while sustain a new performance and I think you're right. I think that, you know 800 seems like a lot but those are service providers. They are economically incented. They're financially incented to put those relationships together. Versus in the wi-fi world where people buy their boxes to build their private networks and the transaction cost associated with trying to figure out how all that works together? It's overwhelming, there's no way to do it. So by introducing new technologies that just makes it a feature of how things can work together, it just facilitates the negotiation costs and the transaction costs associated with providing this experience. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, you absolutely have it right, and the interesting thing is that we look at it two ways. One, you want to make that user experience very seamless, right? Automatic, which we're doing. We've done it at big venues like Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Over 110,000 attendees, right? You want to give 'em an experience where they're just on the network and they're getting the tutor services that they need to reach. But what I also say about something like Open Roaming or Passpoint, is it also becomes a building block to some of these next generation technologies, right? In other words, if an operator wants to offload into a wi-fi network? They have to be on the wi-fi network. >> Mm-hmm. >> So if we're automatically connecting to wi-fi, the opportunity to offload becomes much higher and now we can apply next generation technologies like intelligent path selection. When do you go to wi-fi? When do you go to LTE or 5GNR? And even some of these technologies that we're seeing some of the device manufacturers doing today, like multi path. Maybe we use both? Maybe we use both because we're trying to optimize delay? Maybe as we go from voice to rich collaboration services and rich collaboration services go into things like AV/VR, where you need the bandwidth, where you need a better delay characteristic? Now we're enabling those and we're not enabling it just with wi-fi. We're not enabling it just with 5G. We're enabling it together, right? So that we can address that problem of making sure that we can provide connectivity wherever we are, given the services we have, the credentials that are already on the device, seamlessly. >> A user, whether it's a human being or an application effectively sees a network, even if it's physically instantiated, in a couple of different forms? >> Exactly. >> Human being, application, and IoT device, how do you get these billions of devices connected? And again, when you need to connect, for example, you just had this announcement in EU about vehicle to vehicle communication using wi-fi so you need roaming in a wider context here. Not just about connecting the carriers. Connecting the entire footprint or as much footprint as possible. Whether it's from the enterprise environment, from the carrier environment, other environment. Connecting devices, in fact IoT, as we know is another big thing and that's where we are seeing a lot of fraction again, especially with Wi-fi 6, there's a lot of work being done to support IoT based connectivity on wi-fi and part of that will be, of course, all with the roaming as well. There'll be a roaming component to that. >> Excellent. Very exciting stuff. Can see a lot of new use cases, a lot of new opportunities. Lot of discovery that people are going to have to go through but the bottom line here is we're talking about a new, modern wireless experience that's combining multiple technologies, unifying multiple technologies to provide it. Shrikant Shenwai, Matt MacPherson, thank you very much for joining us for another great CUBE Conversation. And I'm Peter Burris, see ya next time. (upbeat music)

(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪

>> From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AT&T Spark. Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at San Francisco, at the historic Palace of Fine Arts, it's a beautiful spot, it's redone, they moved Exploratorium out a couple years ago, so now it's in a really nice event space, and we're here for the AT&T Spark Event, and the conversation's all around 5G. But we're excited to have our first guest, and he's working on something that's a little bit tangential to 5G-related, but not absolutely connected, but really important work, it's Chris Sambar, he is the SVP of FirstNet at AT&T, Chris, great to see you. >> Thanks Jeff, great to be here, I appreciate it. >> Yeah, so you had a nice Keynote Presentation, talking about FirstNet. So for people I've missed, that aren't familiar, what is AT&T FirstNet? >> Sure, I'll give a quick background. As I was mentioning up there, tomorrow is the 17-year Anniversary of 9/11. So 17 years ago tomorrow, a big problem in New York City. Lots of first responders descended on the area. All of them were trying to communicate with each other, they were trying to use their radios, which they're you know, typically what you see a first responder using, the wireless networks in the area. Unfortunately challenges, it wasn't working. They were having trouble communicating with each other, their existing wireless networks were getting congested, and so the 9/11 Commission came out with a report years later, and they said we need a dedicated communications network, just for First Responders. So they spun all this up and they said, we're going to dedicate some Spectrum, 20 megahertz of D-Class Spectrum, which is really prime Spectrum. Seven billion dollars and we're going to set up this Federal entity, called the FirstNet Authority, and they're going to create a Public Safety Network across America. So FirstNet Authority spent a few years figuring out how to do it, and they landed on what we have today, which was a Public/Private Partnership, between AT&T, and Public Safety throughout America, and we're building them a terrific network across the country. It is literally a separate network so when I, I think of wireless in America, I think of four main commercial carriers, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint. This is the 5th carrier, this is Public Safety's Wireless Network just for them. >> So when you say an extra network, so it's a completely separate, obviously you're leveraging infrastructure, like towers and power and those types of things. But it's a completely separate network, than the existing four that you mentioned. >> Yeah, so if you walk into our data centers throughout the country, you're going to see separate hardware, physical infrastructure that is just for FirstNet, that's the core network just for this network. On the RAN, the Radio Access Network, we've got antennas that have Band 14 on them, that's Public Safety's Band, dedicated just for them when they need it. So yeah, it's literally a physically separate network. The SIM card that goes into a FirstNet device, is a different SIM card than our commercial users would use, because it's separate. >> So one of the really interesting things about 5G, and kind of the evolution of wireless is, is taking some of the load that has been taken by like WiFi, and other options for fast, always on connectivity. I would assume radio, and I don't know that much about radio frequencies that have been around forever with communications in, in First Responders. Is the vision that the 5G will eventually take over that type of communication as well? >> Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the evolution of First Responder, and Public Safety Communications, for many years now they've used radios. Relatively small, narrow Spectrum bands for Narrow Band Voice, right, just voice communications. It really doesn't do data, maybe a little bit, but really not much. Now they're going to expand to this Spectrum, the D-Class, the D-Block Spectrum, excuse me, which is 700 megahertz, it's a low-band Spectrum, that'll provide them with Dedicated Spectrum, and then the next step, as you say, is 5G, so take the load off as Public Safety comes into the, the new Public Safety Communications space, that they've really been wanting for years and years, they'll start to utilize 5G as well on our network. >> So where are you on the development of FirstNet, where are you on the rollout, what's the sequence of events? >> The first thing we did, the award was last year in March 2017. The first thing we did was we built out the core network. When I talked about all that physical infrastructure, that basically took a year to build out, and it was pretty extensive, and about a half a billion dollars so, that was the first thing we did, that completed earlier this year. >> Was that nationwide or major metro cities or how-- >> Nationwide, everywhere in the country. >> Nationwide, okay. >> So now what we're doing is, we are putting the Spectrum that we were given, or I should say we were leased for 25 years, we're putting that Spectrum up across our towers all over the country so, that will take five years, it's a five-year build-out, tens of thousands of towers across America, will get this Public Safety Spectrum, for Public Safety, and for their use. >> Right. Will you target by GEO, by Metro area, I mean, how's it going to actually happen? That's a huge global rollout, five years is a long time. How you kind of prioritize, how are you really going to market with this? >> The Band 14 Spectrum is being rolled out in the major, the major dense areas across the country. I will tell you that by the end of the rollout, five years from now, 99% of the population of America, will have Band 14 Spectrum, so the vast majority of the population. Other areas where we don't roll it out, rural areas for example, all of the features that Public Safety wants, we call them (mumbles) and priority, which is the features to allow them to always have access to the network whenever they need it. Those features will be on our regular commercial Spectrum. So if Band 14 isn't there, the network will function exactly as if it were there for them. >> Right. Then how do you roll it out to the agencies, all the First Responders, the Fire, the Police, the EMTs, et cetera? How do they start to take advantage of this opportunity? >> Sure, so we started that earlier this year. We really started in a March-April timeframe in earnest, signing up agencies, and the uptake's been phenomenal. It's over 2500 Public Safety Agencies across America, over 150,00, and that number grows by thousands every week. That's actually a pretty old number but, they are signing up in droves. In fact, one of the problems we were having initially is, handling the volume of First Responders that wanted to sign up, and the reason is they're seeing that, whether it's a fire out in Oregon, and they need connectivity in the middle of nowhere, in a forest where there's no wireless connectivity at all, we'll bring a vehicle out there, put up an antenna and provide them connectivity. Whether it's a Fourth of July show, or a parade, or an active shooter, wherever large groups of people, combined together and the network gets congested, they're seeing that wow, my device works no matter what. I can always send a text message, I can send a video, it just works. Where it didn't work before. So they love it, and they're really, they're really signing up in droves, it's great. >> It's really interesting because it's, it's interesting that this was triggered, as part of the post 9/11 activity to make things better, and make things safer. But there was a lot of buzz, especially out here in the West with, with First Responders in the news, who were running out of band width. As you said, the Firefighters, the fire's been burning out here, it seems like forever, and really nobody thinking about those, or obviously they're probably roaming on their traditional data plan, and they're probably out there, for weeks and weeks at a time, that wasn't part of their allocation, when they figured out what plan they should be. So the timing is pretty significant, and there's clearly a big demand for this. >> Absolutely. So that example that you sight is a really good one. Two weeks ago, there was a lot in the news about a fire agency in the West, that said they were throttled by their carrier. It was a commercial carrier, and commercial carriers have terms and conditions, that sometimes they need to throttle usage, if you get to a certain level. That's how commercial networks work. >> Right, right. >> FirstNet was built with not only different technology, hardware, software, but with different terms and conditions. Because we understand that, when a First Responder responds to your house, we don't want that to be the minute in time, when their network, their plan got maxed out, and now they're getting throttled. >> Right. >> So we don't have any throttling on the FirstNet Network. So it's not only the hardware, software, technical aspects of the network, but the terms and conditions are different. It's what you would expect that a First Responder would have and want on their device, and that's what we're providing for them. >> Right, and the other cool thing that you mentioned is, we see it all the time, we go to a lot of conferences. A lot of people probably experience it at, at big events right, is that still today, WiFi and traditional LTE, has hard times in super-dense environments, where there's just tons and tons and tons of bodies I imagine, absorbing all that signal, as much as anything else, so to have a separate Spectrum in those type of environments which are usually chaotic when you got First Responders, or some of these mass events that you outlined, is a pretty important feature, to not get just completely wiped out by everybody else happening to be there at the same time. >> Exactly. I'll give you two quick examples, that'll illustrate what you just said. The first one is, on the Fourth of July, in downtown Washington D.C. You can imagine that show. It's an awesome show, but there are hundreds of thousands of people that gather around that Washington Monument, to watch the show. And the expectation is at the peak of the show, when all those people are there, you're not really going to be sending text messages, or calling people, the network's probably just not going to work very well. That's, we've all gotten used to that. >> Right, right. >> This year, I had First Responders, who were there during the event, sending me videos of the fireworks going off. Something that never would've been possible before, and them saying oh my gosh. The actually works the way it's supposed to work, we can use our phones. Then the second example, which is a really sad example. There was a recent school shooting down in Florida. You had Sheriffs, Local Police, Ambulances. You even had some Federal Authorities that showed up. They couldn't communicate with each other, because they were on different radio networks. Imagine if they had that capability of FirstNet, where they could communicate with each other, and the network worked, even though there were thousands of people that were gathering around that scene, to see what was going on. So that's the capability we're bringing to Public Safety, and it's really good for all of us. >> Do you see that this is kind of the, the aggregator of the multi-disparate systems that exist now, as you mentioned in, in your Keynote, and again there's different agencies, they've got different frequencies, they've got Police, Fire, Ambulance, Federal Agencies, that now potentially this, as just kind of a unified First Responder network, becomes the defacto way, that I can get in touch with anyone regardless of of where they come from, or who they're associated with? >> That is exactly the vision of FirstNet. In major cities across America, Police, Fire, Emergency Medical typically, are on three different radio networks, and it's very difficult for them to communicate with each other. They may have a shared frequency or two between them, but it's very challenging for them. Our goal is to sign all of them up, put them on one LTE network, the FirstNet Network, customized for them, so they can all communicate with each other, regardless of how much congestion is on the network. So that's the vision of FirstNet. >> Then that's even before you get into the 5G impacts, which will be the data impacts, whereas I think again, you showed in some of your examples, the enhanced amount of data that they can bring to bear, on solving a problem, whether it's a layout of a building for the Fire Department or drone footage from up above. We talked to Menlo Park Fire, they're using drones more and more to give eyes over the fire to the guys down on the ground. So there's a lot of really interesting applications that you can get more better data, to drive more better applications through that network, to help these guys do their job. >> Yeah, you've got it, the smart city's cameras, don't you want that to be able to stream over the network, and give it to First Responders, so they know what they're going to encounter, when they show up to the scene of whatever issue's going on in the city, of course you do, and you need a really reliable, stable network to provide that on. >> Well Chris, this is not only an interesting work, but very noble, and an important work, so appreciate all of the efforts that you're putting in, and thanks for stopping by. >> I appreciate it Jeff, it's been great talking with you. >> Alright, he's Chris, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE, we're in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts, at AT&T Spark. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (bright music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's the Cube, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> Welcome back to the Cube, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is Cloud Foundry Summit 2018, in Boston. Talking a lot about digital transformation, and love when we get to talk to the users here, at the show. One of the great stories told on the keynote stage this morning was from T-Mobile. So, while Rob wasn't on the stage, he's involved in the activity. This is Rob Hansen, Director of Operations at T-Mobile. Thank you for joining me. >> Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. >> So, Rob, we were talking before and the twitters, there's lots of stuff that goes on, but everybody, there was a great story talking about 17 hundred developers and only 10 operators, underneath, making those work. So, maybe before we get into it, tell us a little bit about your role, your background, what you do at T-mobile. >> Sure, my role is, I lead a team on the operations side. So, we operate the software and when we look over the last 10 years or so, that software's been predominately large monoliths. Look at, use TIBCO as an example. We've been a heavy user of TIBCO BW for many many years and my environment supporting TIBCO BW accounts for about 2,000 physical servers across multiple data centers, and that carries a high operational cost. We're doing all our changes in the middle of the night. Things break, seeming randomly at times, causing customer impact, just a lot of paint and patching. One of my favorite topics is patching. >> (laughs) Oh, boy. Tuesday's your favorite day of the week, right? It's taco Tuesday and patch Tuesday. >> Oh, my god. Yes. Exactly Every quarter I get the list of servers, here's the list of servers that needs to be patched, and it's just a nightmare, right. >> So, Rob, can we talk a little bit about the developer and operator interaction at your company? I interviewed Solomon Hykes last year at DockerCon, and he said, "Believe it or not, "I created Docker mostly for the operators." That's his background in there, >> Oh, yeah. >> But everybody, they're, "This show, "it's developers, developers, developers." So, what's that dynamic inside T-Mobile? >> Historically, before we got into kind of the cloud-native space, it was really an us versus them, right. There's the mentality of, oh, it's an ops problem now. There's a great meme out there. It's one of my favorites, the little girl standing in front of the burning house, and it says, "Worked in dev, it's an ops problem now." (Stu laughs) So, as we've gone through this cloud-native journey, and we've moved into using like Pivotal, within our environment, we've seen that community within our organization come together, and really start working closer and closer together. Right now, we're going through a migration into the TIBCO Container Edition project, or application, and as we've been doing that, we literally have our ops base folks and the development base folks sitting in a room together, day and night, just working together. Historically, developers have a point of view, operators have a different point of view. It's really brought them together into a singular point of view and ownership of the software, and just providing business capabilities. >> Rob, could you give us a little bit of picture, kind of your application portfolio, how much have you been kind of moving onto the platforms, how much do you build new on the platform, those kind of things? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I mentioned earlier, legacy, we were about 2,000 physical servers. Right now, I'm trying to remember the actual application count, but I've taken, or we've taken one of our historical job applications, moved it completely into PCF, running a complete spring boot now. We're doing that with our TIBCO environment. We have a number of other applications that we've spun up, running in spring and whatnot. What we've been able to do is just explode the amount of stuff we're deploying, and just new functionality. We're able to develop it much faster. So, when we look at the developers, more people are coming on board, because you can just get the code out there so much faster, and really in smaller increments. So, a lot of times, when we've developed things and we've delivered functionality for the business, because you're dealing with large monoliths, you have to change, you know, one of the applications I mentioned, you've got 200 services, about 600 operations, bundled into the same ball of code. Now, we've separated that out into a bunch of microservices, so now, we can just implement this one thing, with very little to no impact to the business. I think one of the big fundamental shifts that we've seen, we have historically done the large Saturday night deployments, right. You show up Saturday night at 7:00 p.m. and you hope you get to go home Sunday. We've really shifted that model, so in Q1, in my space, we did 86 and a half percent of our changes in production, during the day, right in the middle of the business day. >> Stu: Is it scary? >> It was at first, in all honesty, because my biggest fear is having to explain things to leadership, you know why did it go wrong, the root cause, and all that kind of stuff. But because we're able to move so fast now, we're able to get the code out there. We're able to see, okay, is this working? Roll it back really quickly, leveraging blue-green. Scale is another thing. Every year, iPhone. iPhone is a scary time I think, for pretty much any wireless operator. And historically, we've had to go out and buy more physical servers. So, you're buying these servers, you're building em. It takes months to build em, stand em up, and you're doing that for a two-day event, a year. You end up carrying the costs of that hardware. Well, this last iPhone in September, you know the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X, because we were predominately running in our cloud-native environment, and our cloud foundry environment, spun up the containers. >> Does that live in a public cloud? >> That lives in a private cloud, On-Prem. >> Stu: Okay. So we just spun up the containers, got through the event, spun em down. >> Okay, you had enough infrastructure capacity, you just didn't need it to be kind of-- >> Yeah. Well, and we're able to target the specific services, right. In our TIBCO landscape, we operate, in the old BW environment we operated about 200 years, comes out to about 14 hundred services. So, when you're scaling up, you're having to do it, more or less, for everything, but running in the Pivotal environment, we're able to just target, okay this, you know, like a get customer info. It's like a basic call when you log into MyT-Mo. You're able to just take that, double it, triple it, whatever you need to do. Maybe this other call over here, you know, we don't have to touch that. So you're just being way more efficient with your resources. >> So, Rob, if you can do these updates all the time, do you still love patching as much as you used to? >> The patching is the devil. I actually, the 10 to 15 people that Chuck was talking about on stage today, those are the guys that actually operate the physical hardware, you know, the Diego cells and whatnot. I meet with them on a weekly basis, and we kind of go through the state of things, and planning, and all that kind of stuff. Almost every time, I end that meeting with, "I just don't want to patch anything, anymore." So, the more we get onto this environment, the easier it is for me As we're trying to do this dev/ops transformation at T-Mobile, we're getting there, and we're doing it. You know, one of the things we ask ourselves is, should a dev/ops team have to care about patching? Why is a developer going to say, "Oh, my OS is a version behind, "I need to take care of that." That's not useful to the business, right? That takes away time that that developer can be creating new things and adding value. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about, you know in a public cloud environment, I don't think about that, you know, what version of ah-jur-ware you're running isn't something that people ask. Private cloud, if it's going to live up to what we want it to, it should have a similar type of dynamic. >> Exactly, and our platform team is amazing. I mean, they take care of that stuff for us. I'm a heavy user. So I think Chuck talked about this a little. He didn't really talk about the volume, but we started on our Pivotal journey a couple years ago. I think first started dabbling 2015, but we really didn't start converting our large monolithic middleware until the beginning of 2017. So, right now, we are doing 250 million transactions a day, on our Pivotal platform, just with two, or, I'm sorry, three of my platforms running in there. >> Last thing I want to ask you, Rob. What key learnings have you had, going through this transformation? What do you say to your peers, that they could do better or look out for or plan, to help them? >> I think the main learning that we've had is just how important it is to partner together, with the hardware people, the developers, and the operations people. Coming together, it's a cultural shift in many respects. Like they say in dev/ops, a lot of people talk about it, they don't realize how hard it is to do, but hardware has to be a part of that. Coming together, luckily, we had a couple stumblings, in the beginning, but we were quickly able to huddle together between kind of these three core groups and really work together and overcome those challenges. I think the second thing that's really important is just to be open and honest with each other. Everybody makes mistakes. I think a lot of times, there's cases of, oh this is platform problem, oh it's a software problem. You know, there's a little finger-pointing here and there, from time to time, but getting through that, being open, honest, communicative with each other, it just makes the world so much easier and better for us. >> Well, Rob, my entire IT career, you know we've wanted everybody to hold hands (Rob laughs) and get in the circle together, bust through those silos, so, you know, making progress though. Thank you so much for sharing the story of T-Mobile. Watch more coverage here from the Cloud Foundry Summit, here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching the Cube.

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Minamin and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. Happy to welcome back to the program Chip Childers, who is the CTO of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Chip, you started off this morning saying the runners this morning got a taste of the Boston Marathon. >> They did, they did! >> It's raining, it's cold, it's miserable. >> Yesterday was beautiful. >> At least there was less wind. >> Yesterday was absolutely beautiful. So we kicked off the summit, beautiful sun, but then we had our Fun Run this morning. >> As a local, I do apologize for the weather. Normally April's a great time. We want more tech coverage here in the area. More tech shows. We're in the center of a great tech hub, here in the Boston Seaport. We've talked to a couple of Boston startups, you know, here at the show. And, you know, great ecosystem if you go there. Thank you for bringing your show here. >> Absolutely, happy to be here. >> All right, so, last time we caught up was year ago at the show. And I think it was, what, 213 working days or something? I think Molly said >> Something like that Something like that yeah. >> The good thing is in our industry, nothings changing, we can talk about the same stuff as last year. >> Leisurely pace >> No concern, let's just sit back and you know, talk about our favorite pop culture references. Chip what's hot on your plate? And what are you hearing from the users in the community? >> Sure. So this year the theme Our events team came up with a very fun pun, which is Running at Scale. It means two things. One, the Boston Marathon was on Monday, but two it really does represent the stories that we're getting from our users, the customers, and the distributions, those that use the open source directly. So not only are we seeing a broadening of adoption across new organizations, but they're getting really deep into using it. We filled a survey, user survey, just did our second run of it. In fact we didn't have this data back in Santa Clara last year. So it's been less than a year since the 2017 one. And what we found was that there was a 21 point swing in those companies that were using Cloud Foundry with more than 50 developers, alright. So 50 developers and higher When you really talk to the interesting, large scale Fortune 500 companies, they're talking thousands of developers, that are working on the platform, being productive, and that truly is kind of what this event is about for us. >> I grew up around the infrastructure stuff, and scale means a lot of things to a lot of people, but had a great discussion with Dr. Nick, just before talking about how if you were to build your kind of utopian environment You look at some of the hyper-scale companies, the Facebooks and Googles of the world, and thing is they're such a scale that if they don't have good automation, and don't have you know really the distributive architectures that we're all talking about and things like that, there's no way that they could run their businesses. >> Yeah and the reality is a lot of the businesses that aren't Google, aren't Facebook, they have to be able to think about that level of scale. To me it really boils down to three basic principles, and to me this is the best definition of what Cloud native means. Whether you're talking about a platform, whether you're talking about how you design your applications, it's simple patterns, highly automated, which can be scaled with ease, right? And through that you can do really amazing things with software, but it has to be easily scaled, it has be easily managed, and you do that through the simplicity of the patterns that you apply. >> Yeah, and being simple is difficult. >> Yes >> How much we have arguments in the industry it's like well, let's throw an abstraction layer in there, do an overlay or underlay, but you know really building kind of distributed systems, is a little bit different. >> It is a little bit different. So one of the things that the Cloud Foundry ecosystem has, is a rich history of iterating towards a better and better developer experience. At its heart, the Cloud Foundry ecosystem of distribution, and tools, and the different products we have, they're all about helping the developer be a better developer in the context of their organization. So we've been iterating on that experience and just doing incremental constant improvement and change and we're very proud of that productivity, right? And that's really what drive these organizations to say look, this is a platform that is operated very easily with small teams. I think you've spoken with a couple companies, and if you ever ask them hot many operators do you have to handle thousands of engineers, tens of thousands of applications, they say, well, maybe ten. >> The T-Mobile example is >> Great example >> Ten to fifteen operators with 17000 developers so >> Chip: Yep, yep >> It's funny cause I remember we used to talk about you know in the enterprise how many servers can a single admin handle and then if you go to the hyper-scale ones it was three orders magnitude different. But in the hyper-scale ones they didn't really have server people, they had people that brought in servers, and people threw them in the wood chipper when they were done >> Chip: Absolutely >> And they didn't manage them. It was the old cattle versus pets analogy that we talked about in the other room, It's just totally different mindsets is how we think about this. I love, For me, it was in the enterprise you know, we harden the hardware, we think about this, and in the software world it's you know, No no, I built it in the application layer, because One of my favorite lines I use is you know, Hardware will eventually fail, and software will eventually work right? >> Absolutely. I think that's the difference between, So application centric thinking leads you to Necessarily, you have to have infrastructure to run it right? My favorite thing is this whole server-less term is absolutely ridiculous if anybody understands it, but there's a little bit behind it, which is, in fact I'd argue Cloud Foundry's fundamentally server-less because when you push code into it, you don't care what operating system's underneath it, right? All you care about is the fact that you've written some code in Java or in Nojass or in Ruby, you're handing it to a platform it deals with all of the details of building a container image, scaling it, managing it, pulling independencies, you don't care what underlying operating systems there, and then that ten person platform operations team, in the Cloud Foundry world, they have the benefit of upstream projects actually producing the operating system image that they can consume, within hours of major vulnerabilities being announced. >> I love actually, at this show you've got a containers and server-less track >> We do >> And I'm an infrastructure guy by background and when we went to virtualization we went little bit up the stack, I don't think about servers I'm trying to get closer to that application. Love you to comment on is Cloud Foundry helps gives some stability and control at that infrastructure level, but it still involved with infrastructure, from in my own data center, >> Chip: Yep >> or hosted data center or I know what could I'm on. When I start going up to like server-less, I'm a little bit higher up the stack, and that's why they can live together, >> Yeah, yeah >> And its closer tied to the application than it is to the infrastructure, so maybe you can tease that out for us a little. >> Yeah, so I think one of the main things that we've heard from the user community and this is actually coming from users of a number of the different distributions. They're saying, look there are roughly, today, roughly two different modes that we care about, cloud native application workloads. And this might expand to include functions and service but predominantly there's two. There's the custom software that we write, which the past experience is great for, and then there's the ISV delivered software, which today increasingly the medium of software delivery is becoming the container image, whether it's an OCI container, whether it's a Docker image, ISV ships software as container images, and you need a great place to land that, so those two abstractions, that paths, just hand the system your code, or the container service just hand it a container image, both of them work really well together, and part of what we're trying to do as a community, a technical community, is we're evolving those integrations so that we can work really well with the Kubernetes ecosystem. There are different options for how these things might be stacked, depending on the vendor that you're talking to, I think mostly that's immaterial to the customers, I think mostly the customers care about having those two experiences be unified from their developer or app owner prospective. >> When you come to this show, there's more than just Cloud Foundry. There's a lot of other projects >> Chip: For sure >> That are coming on to the space Gives us a little viewpoint as to how the foundation looks at this. What's the charter which it fits under Linux foundation There's so many different pieces, Some kind of bleed into what the CNCF is doing, and just try to help map out >> Chip: Yeah how some of these pieces and it's this great toolbox that we've talked about in open source. I love like the zip car guy got up and he's like, I use all the peripheral stuff, and none of the core stuff >> Right >> And that's okay >> Absolutely, that's the fun of open source. So there's a couple ways to look at this. So first, the open source communities collectively. There's a lot of innovations going on in this space, obviously What the Cloud Foundry ecosystem generally does, historically has done, and will continue to do, is that we are focused on the user needs, first and foremost. And what our technical project teams do is they look at what's available in the broader open source ecosystem. They adopt and integrate what makes sense, where we have to build something ourselves, simply because there isn't an equivalent, or it's necessary for technical reasons. We'll build that software. But our architecture has changed many times. In fact, since 2015, right. It hasn't been that many years, as you said, we move slow in this industry (Stu laughs) We've changed this architecture constantly. The upstream projects releasing at minimum of twice a month. That's a pretty high velocity. And it's a big coordinated release. So we're going to continue to evolve the architecture, to bring in new components, this is where CNCF relates. We've integrated Envoy, which is a CNCF project. We're now bringing in Kubernetes, in a couple of different ways. We're working closely with Istio, which is not a CNCF project, yet. But it looks like it might head that way. Service mesh capabilities, We were an early adopter of the container networking interface. Another Linux foundation effort was the open container initiative, right. Seeded from some code from Docker, again one of the earliest platforms to adopt that, outside of Docker. So we really look at the entire spectrum of open source software as a rich market of componentry that can be brought together. And we bring it together so that all these great users that you're talking to, can go along this journey, and think of it almost as a rationalization of the innovative chaos that's occurring. So we rationalize that. Our job is to rationalize our distributions, use that rationalization, and then all of the users get to take advantage of new things that come up. But also we take what gets integrated very seriously, because it has to reach a point of maturity. T-Mobile again, running their whole business on Cloud Foundry. Comcast, running their whole business on Cloud Foundry. US Air Force, fundamentally running their air traffic control, right, how do they get fuel to the jets, on Cloud Foundry. So we take that seriously. And so it's this combination of, harvesting innovation from where we can harvest it, bring it all together, be very thoughtful about how we bring it together, and then the distributions get the advantage of saying, here's a stable core that's going to evolve and take us into the future. >> Chip I've loved the discussion with real customers, doing digital transformation. What that means for them. How they're moving their business forward. Want to give you the final word, for those that couldn't come to the show, I know a lot of the stuffs online, there's a lot of information out there, anything particular do you want to call out, or say hey this is cool, interesting, or exciting you that you'd want to point to. >> Yeah, I actually. There are a lot of things but the one thing that I'll point to is as a US citizen, I'm particularly proud of some of the work that's happening in the US Government. Through 18F, with cloud.gov as an example, but if I step back even further, Cloud Foundry is serving as a vehicle for collaboration across multiple nations right now. We're seeing Australia, we're seeing the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Canada, South Korea, all of these national governments, are trying to figure out how to change citizen engagement to follow the lead of the startups, which are the internet companies, at the same time that these large Fortune 500 companies, are also trying to digitally transform. Governments are trying to do the same thing. So we had a, we're almost done for the day here, but there was almost a full day track of governments talking about their use of the tech, talking about that same digital transformation journey. So to me that's actually really inspiring to see that happen >> Alright well Chip Childers. He was a dancing stick figure >> Chip: I was in the keynote this morning, but here with us on theCUBE. Thank you so much for joining once again, and thank you to the foundation for helping us bring this program to our audience. >> Chip: We're happy to have you here. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE. Thanks for watching (bright popping music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It's theCUBE, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. This is theCUBE, live here in Mountain View, California, heart of Silicon Valley for Cisco's DevNet Create. This is their Cloud developer event. It's not the main Cisco DevNet which is more of the Cisco developer, this is much more Cloud Native DevOps. I'm joined with my cohost, Lauren Cooney and our next guest is Christine Yen, who is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Honeycomb.io. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Great to have an entrepreneur and also Chief Product Officer because you blend in the entrepreneurial zeal, but also you got to build the product in the Cloud Native world. You guys done a few ventures before. First, take a minute and talk about what you guys do, what the company is built on, what's the mission? What's your vision? >> Absolutely, Honeycomb was built, we are an observability platform to help people find the unknown unknowns. Our whole thesis is that the world is getting more complicated. We have microservices and containers, and instead of having five application servers that we treated like pets in the past, we now have 500 containers running that are more like cattle and where any one of them might die at any given time. And we need our tools to be able to support us to figure out how and why. And when something happens, what happened and why, and how do we resolve it? We look around at the landscape and we feel like this dichotomy out there of, we have logging tools and we have metrics tools. And those really evolved from the fact that in 1995, we had to choose between grep or counters. And as technology evolved, those evolved to distribute grep or RDS. And then we have distribute grep with fancy UIs and well, fancy RDS with UIs. And Honeycomb, we were started a couple years ago. We really feel like what if you didn't have to choose? What if technology supported the power of having all the context there the way that you do with logs while still being able to provide instant analytics the way that you have with metrics? >> So the problem that you're solving is one, antiquated methodologies from old architectures and stacks if you will, to helping people save time, with the arcane tools. Is that the main premise? >> We want people to be able to debug their production systems. >> All right, so, beyond that now, the developer that you're targeting, can you take us through a day in the life of where you are helping them, vis a vis the old way? >> Absolutely, so I'll tell a story of when myself and my co-founder, Charity, were working together at PaaS. PaaS, for those who aren't familiar, used to be RD, a backend form of mobile apps. You can think of someone who just wants to build an iOS app, doesn't want to deal with data storage, user records, things like that. And PaaS started in 2011, got bought by Facebook in 2013, spun down very beginning of 2016. And in 2013, when the acquisition happened, we were supporting somewhere on the order of 60,000 different mobile apps. Each one of them could be totally different workload, totally different usage pattern, but any one of them might be experiencing problems. And again, in this old world, this pre-Honeycomb world, we had our top level metrics. We had latency, response, overall throughput, error rates, and we were very proud of them. We were very proud of these big dashboards on the wall that were green. And they were great, except when you had a customer write in being like, "Hey, PaaS is down." And we look at our dashboard we'd be like, "Nope, it's not down. "It must be network issues." >> John: That's on your end. >> Yeah, that's on your end. >> John: Not a good answer. >> Not a good answer, and especially not if that customer was Disney, right? When you're dealing with these high level metrics, and you're processing tens or hundreds of thousands of requests per second, when Disney comes in, they've got eight requests a second and they're seeing all of them fail. Even though those are really important, eight requests per second, you can't tease that out of your graphs. You can't figure out why they're failing, what's going on, how to fix it. You've got to dispatch an engineer to go add a bunch of if app ID equals Disney, track it down, figure out what's going on there. And it takes time. And when we got to Facebook, we were exposed to a type of tool that essentially inspired Honeycomb as it is today that let us capture all this data, capture a bunch of information about everything that was happening down to these eight requests per second. And when a customer complained, we could immediately isolate, oh, this one app, okay let's zoom in. For this one customer, this tiny customer, let's look at their throughput, error rates, latency. Oh, okay. Something looks funny there, let's break down by endpoint for this customer. And it's this iterative fast, highly granular investigation, that is where all of us are approaching today. With our systems getting more complicated you need to be able to isolate. Okay, I don't care about the 200s, I only care about the 500s, and within the 500s, then what's going on? What's going on with this server, with that set of containers? >> So this is basically an issue of data, unstructured data or have the ability to take this data in at the same time with your eye on the prize of instrumentation. And then having the ability to make that addressable and discoverable in real time, is that kind of? >> Yeah, we've been using the term observability to describe this feeling of, I need to be able to find unknown unknowns. And instrumentation is absolutely the tactic to observability of the strategy. It is how people will be able to get information out of their systems in a way that is relevant to their business. A common thing that we'll hear or people will ask, "Oh, can you ingest my nginx logs?" "Can you ingest my SQL logs?" Often, that's a great place to start, but really where are the problems in an application? Where are your problems in the system? Usually it's the places that are custom that the engineers wrote. And tools need to be able to support, providing information, providing graphs, providing analytics in a way that makes it easy for the folks who wrote the code to track down the problem and address them. >> It's a haystack of needles. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> They're all relevant but you don't know which needle you're going to need. >> Exactly. >> So, let me just get this. So I'm ducking out, just trying to understand 'cause this is super important because this is really the key to large scale Cloud ops, what we're talking about here. From a developer standpoint, and we just had a great guest on, talking about testing features and production which is really the important, people want to do that. And then, but for one person, but in production scale, huge problem, opportunity as well. So, if most people think of like, "Oh, I'll just ingest with Splunk," but that's a different, is that different? I mean, 'cause people think of Splunk and they think of Redshift and Kinesis on Amazon, they go, "Okay." Is that the solution? Are you guys different? Are you a tool? How do I understand you guys' context to those known solutions? >> First of all, explain the difference between ourselves and the Redshifts and big queries of the world, and then I'll talk about Splunk. We really view those tools as primarily things built for data scientists. They're in the big data realm, but they are very concerned with being 100% correct. They're concerned with fitting into big data tools and they often have an unfortunate delay in getting data in and making it acquirable. Honeycomb is 100% built for engineers. Engineers of people, the folks who are going to be on the hook for, "Hey, there's downtime, what's going on?" And in-- >> So once business benefits, more data warehouse like. >> Yeah. And what that means is that for Honeycomb, everything is real time. It's real time. We believe in recent data. If you're looking to get query data from a year ago we're not really the thing, but instead of waiting 20 minutes for a query over a huge volume of data, you wait 10 seconds, or it's 3:00 AM and you need to figure out what's happening right now, you can go from query to query, to query, to query, as you come up with hypotheses, validate them or invalidate them, and continue on your investigation path. So that's... >> That makes sense. >> Yeah. >> So data wrangling, doing queries, business intelligence, insights as a service, that's all that? >> Yeah. We almost, we played with and tossed the tagline BI for systems because we want that BI mentality of what's going on, let me investigate. But for the folks who need answers now, an approximate answer now is miles better than a perfect one-- >> And you can't keep large customers waiting, right? At the end of the day, you can't keep the large customers waiting. >> Well, it's also so complicated. The edge is very robust and diverse now. I mean, no-js is a lot of IO going on for instance. So let's just take an example. I had developer talking the other day with me about no-js. It's like, oh, someone's complaining but they're using Firefox. It's like, okay, different memory configuration. So the developer had to debug because the complaints were coming in. Everyone else was fine, but the one guy is complaining because he's on Firefox. Well, how many tabs does he have open? What's the memory look like? So like, this a weird thing, I mean, that's just a weird example, but that's just the kinds of diverse things that developers have to get on. And then where do they start? I mean. >> Absolutely. So, there's something we ran into or we saw our developers run into all the time at PaaS, right? These are mobile developers. They have to worry about not only which version of the app it is, they have to worry about which version of the app, using which version of RSDK on which version of the operating system, where any kind of strange combination of these could result in some terrible user experience. And these are things that don't really work well if you're relying on pre-aggregated 10 series system, like the evolution of the RDS, I mentioned. And for folks who are trying to address this, something like Splunk, these logging tools, frankly, a lot of these tools are built on storage engines that are intended for full text search. They're unstructured text, you're grepping over them, and then you're build indices and structure on top of that. >> There's some lag involved too in that. >> There's so much lag involved. And there's almost this negative feedback loop built in where if you want to add more data, if on each log line you want to start tracking browser user agent, you're going to incur not only extra storage costs, you're going to incur extra read time costs because you're reading that more data, even if you're don't even care about that on those queries. And you're probably incurring cost on the right time to maintain these indices. Honeycomb, we're a column store through and through. We do not care about your unstructured text logs, we really don't want them. We want you to structure your data-- >> John: Did you guys write your own column store or is that? >> We did write our own column store because ultimately there's nothing off the shelf that gave us the speed that we wanted. We wanted to be able to, Hey, sending us data blogs with 20, 50, 200 keys. But if you're running analysis and all you care about is a simple filter and account, you shouldn't have to pull in all this-- >> To become sort of like Ferrari, if you customize, it's really purpose built, is that what you guys did? >> That is. >> So talk about the dynamic, because now you're dealing with things like, I mean, I had a conversation with someone who's looking at say blockchain, where there's some costs involved, obviously writing to the blockchain. And this is not like a crypto thing it's more of a supply chain thing. They want visibility into latency and things of that nature. Does this sounds like you would fit there as a potential use case? Is that something that you guys thought of at all? >> It could absolutely be. I'm actually not super familiar with the blockchain or blockchain based applications but ultimately Honeycomb is intended for you to be able to answer questions about your system in a way that tends to stymie existing tools. So we see lots of people come to us from strange use cases who just want to be able to instrument, "Hey I have this custom logic. "I want to be able to look at what it's doing." And when a customer complains and my graphs are fine or when my graphs are complaining, being able to go in and figure out why. >> Take a minute to talk about the company you founded. How many employees funding, if you can talk about it. And use case customers you have now. And how do you guys engage? The service, is it, do I download code? Is it SaaS? I mean, you got all this great tech. What's the value proposition? >> I think I'll answer this-- >> John: Company first. >> All right. >> John: Status of the company. >> Sure. Honeycomb is about 25 people, 30 people. We raised a series A in January. We are about two and a half years old and we are very much SaaS of the future. We're very opinionated about a number of things and how we want customers to interact with us. So, we are SaaS only. We do offer a secure proxy option for folks who have PII concerns. We only take structured data. So, at our API, you can use whatever you want to slurp data from your system. But at our API, we want JSON. We do offer a wide variety of integrations, connectors, SDKs, to help you structure that data. But ultimately-- >> Do you provide SDKs to your customers? >> We do. So that if they want to instrument their application, we just have the niceties around like batching and doing things asynchronously so it doesn't block their application. But ultimately, so we try to meet folks where they're at, but it's 2016, it was 2017, 2018-- >> You have a hardened API, API pretty much defines your service from an inbound standpoint. Prices, cost, how does someone engage with you guys? When does someone know to engage? Where's the smoke signals? When is the house on fire? Is it like people are standing around? What's the problem? When does someone know to call you guys up at? >> People know to call us when they're having production problems that they can't solve. When it takes them way too long to go from there's an alert that went off or a customer complaint, to, "Oh, I found the problem, I can address it." We price based on storage. So we are a bunch of engineers, we try to keep the business side as simple as possible for better, for worse. And so, the more data you send us, the more it'll cost. If you want a lot of data, but stored for a short period of time, that will cost less than a lot of data stored for a long period of time. One of the things that we, another one of the approaches that is possibly more common in the big data world and less in the monitoring world is we talk a lot about sampling. Sampling as a way to control those costs. Say you are, Facebook, again, I'll return to that example. Facebook knew that in this world where lots and lots of things can go wrong at any point in time, you need to be able to store the actual context of a given event happening. Some unit of work, you want to keep track of all the pieces of metadata that make that piece of work unique. But at Facebook scale, you can't store every single one of them. So, all right, you start to develop these heuristics. What things are more interesting than others? Errors are probably more interesting than 200 okays. Okay. So we'll keep track of most errors, we'll store 1% of successful requests. Okay. Well, within that, what about errors? Okay. Well, things that time out are maybe more interesting than things that are permissioning errors. And you start to develop this sampling scheme that essentially maps to the interesting ness of the traffic that's flowing through your system. To throw out some numbers, I think-- >> Machine learning is perfect for that too. They can then use the sampling. >> Yeah. There's definitely some learning that can happen to determine what things should be dropped on the ground, what requests are perfectly representative of a large swath of things. And Instagram, used a tool like this inside Facebook. They stored something like 1/10 of a percent or a 1/100 of a percent of their requests. 'Cause simply, that was enough to give them a sketch of what representative traffic, what's going wrong, or what's weird that, and is worth digging into. >> Final question. What's your priorities for the product roadmap? What are you guys focused on now? Get some fresh funding, that's great. So expand the team, hiring probably. Like product, what's the focus on the product? >> Focus on the product is making this mindset of observability accessible to software engineers. Right, we're entering this world where more and more, it's the software engineers deploying their code, pushing things out in containers. And they're going to need to also develop this sense of, "Okay, well, how do I make sure "something's working in production? "How do I make sure something keeps working? "And how do I think about correctness "in this world where it's not just my component, "it's my component talking to these other folks' pieces?" We believe really strongly that the era of this single person in a room keeping everything up, is outdated. It's teams now, it's on call rotations. It's handing off the baton and sharing knowledge. One of the things that we're really trying to build into the product, that we're hoping that this is the year that we can really deliver on this, is this feeling of, I might not be the best debugger on the team or I might not be the best person, best constructor of graphs on the team, and John, you might be. But how can a tool help me as a new person on a team, learn from what you've done? How can a tool help me be like, Oh man, last week when John was on call, he ran into something around my SQL also. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. So how can I learn from the sequence of those things-- >> John: Something an expert system. >> Yeah. Like how can we help build experts? How can we raise entire teams to the level of the best debugger? >> And that's the beautiful thing with metadata, metadata is a wonderful thing. 'Cause Jeff Jonas said on the, he was a Cube alumni, entrepreneur, famous data entrepreneur, observation space is super critical for understanding how to make AI work. And that's to your point, having observation data, super important. And of course our observation space is all things. Here at DevNet Create, Christine, thanks for coming on theCUBE, spending the time. >> Thank you. >> Fascinating story, great new venture. Congratulations. >> Christine: Thank you. >> And tackling the world of making developers more productive in real time in production. Really making an impact to coders and sharing and learning. Here in theCUBE, we're doing our share, live coverage here in Mountain View, DevNet Create. We'll be back with more after this short break. (gentle music)

(energetic music) >> Narrator: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE, covering CoinAgenda. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE. >> Hello and welcome to our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here covering all the action at Restart, we've got a ton of events, all the thoughts leaders, influencers, decision makers, you name it, in the industry, pioneers making it happen. My next guest is Toni Lane, who's the founder of CoinGraph. She's a true influencer with a lot of impact in this market. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> We're so glad to have you on. Like the little joke at the beginning about being an influencer, you actually are an influencer. You've done such great work in the industry, well regarded in the community. You have publication and you do a lot of great content. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh, for sure, yeah, thanks for having me. >> So being the influencer, what does that mean these days? Because we were just talking before the camera on, we came on camera, influence changes. You can't be an influencer all the time. You can be super or expert at something, but your expertise could change, you move to a new topic, learn something. And there's a lot of people in the digital marketing world saying I'm an influencer. It's kind of half baked, and really, I mean, it's not about the followers, your thoughts? >> Well, I mean, most of those followers are purchased. So there's a big difference between being an influencer and having actual influence. Because if you're, you know, if you have a million followers on Twitter, that's nice. How much engagement do you have? And that's actually what you look for, it's like when you look at someone's, whether it's, you know, social media, their digital presence, it's not about followers, it's all about engagement. You know, I don't even have that many, like I don't spend a lot of time doing that, at least I haven't so far, it's something I'm getting more into. But I have people that are really engaged, and so I look at people that have 15 million followers and I'm like, you have just as many likes on your things as I do, right. Because these people aren't real people. And it's less about, having influence in general is in many ways about having authenticity. And so influence is your ability to get something done. Being an influencer is your ability to hold someone's attention for a fragment of time. But being an influencer is not the same as having influence. >> And this community here, certainly, with decentralization here, you get the decentralized applications coming up blockchain, you got ICOs booming. It's all about the network effect, if you look at network effect, that is a new concept that ad technology does not know because you can't cookie a network connection. The only way to measure someone's true network is through malware today, and that's not good, no one does that. Well, they do, they're-- >> Toni: Unfortunately, yeah. >> But you can't you do it at business price, not sustainable. So the point is, it's not about how many followers you have. It could be that one follower, maybe 200 or 2,000, that opens up more. This is the network effect. This is what this community is all about, so I want to get your thoughts on this community's vibe. A lot of mission-driven, impact-oriented, merged with tech. So you have a fusion of technology, artistry, craftsmanship and mission-driven societal change in one melting pot. This is your wheelhouse. Share your thoughts on this. >> Well, so all of the different digital currencies have different value systems and they attract a different breed. And there are different incentives for each of these based on how the technology is designed, each protocol, right? So if you look at Bitcoin, in Bitcoin, the incentives are, you know, mining is done by computers, so your only incentive is like having social influence? And this is, I think, why we've seen a lot of kind of I would call it a scarcity mentality in terms of the way, why we see even more trolls in Bitcoin is because social influence is a huge way that success is measured, because as a developer, you can't have, you can't achieve a level of status any other way as a developer or as an influencer in Bitcoin, because the Bitcoin network is so far removed from that. And that's actually a perverse incentive in and of itself, and not only that, but early days in Bitcoin, there were major organizations who would hire people to man 100 Reddit and Twitter accounts and go into the Bitcoin community and actually fragment the public opinion using a technique grassroots psychological insurgency. So buying Reddit accounts that had been active for the last 10 years and going through and, you know, essentially just stabbing at people and creating, even having conversations with themselves to empower the voice of trolls. And what happens is you start bringing out what we call, actually, what the former Assad called, after Henry Kissinger, there was a big move that happened in the Middle East, where Kissinger realized the Middle East was becoming too powerful, and he saw it as a threat to American democracy. And so Kissinger organized a deal that fragmented the Middle East. And Assad said to Kissinger that his actions would be, he played Assad, basically. And Assad said to Kissinger, "Your actions "will bring up demons hidden underneath "the surface of the Arab world." And that strategy is actually something used in the Bitcoin community to leverage the incentives that are created, which is why we have seen previously so much, even from our industry leaders, so much fragmentation and so much tension. But the network is the most secure and the least corruptible, hands down, fundamentally. It's real cryptography. >> But let's talk about that, I love this conversation, because with networks, you have the concept of self-heal, and this gets nerdy on the packets, how packets move, at that level, self-healing networks has been a paradigm that's been proven. So that's out there, that's got to go to a societal level. The other one is the incentive system, if you have an immune system, if you will, in a network, this is a cultural thing. So actions, the Reddit's obvious, right. Weaponizing content has been well-documented, it's coming now mainstream, people are getting it that this outcome was actually manufactured by bad behavior. Now, I argue that there's an exact opposite effect. You can actually weaponize for good, 'cause everything has a polar opposite. So what is your view on that, because this is something that we've been teasing out for the first time. How do you weaponize content for good, (mumbles) not the right word, but look for the opposite value? >> Right, yeah, I mean, it is in so many ways, right. So I think it's about, there's a professor at Stanford whose name is BJ Fogg, and he's a behavioral researcher and he talks about essentially, you know, he writes a lot about habits. But something that's even more interesting about his understanding of propaganda is I studied a lot of Edward Bernays, he's responsible, he created the theory of propaganda, right. And he's the nephew of Sigmund Freud, he's responsible for essentially every consumptive theory in like leading up to the last century, he's actually, I would say he's responsible for the state of advertising and the economy today, almost really single handedly. And what's fascinating about this theory is that you can use propaganda to get women to smoke by unearthing what it is unconsciously in men that makes them not want to smoke. You can also use propaganda to get people to invest in health and wellness. You can also use propaganda to get people to stop their bad habits. So it's understanding that a technique works in a cognitive capacity in a way that affects a large amount of people. And it's really about the intention behind why a person who has influence, as we were saying, is leveraging that relationship. So I would say it's more about-- >> So we have to reimagine influence. Because the signalings that are igniting the cognitive brain can be tweaked. So that's what you're getting at here, right, so that's what we have to do. >> And it's an illusion from almost every angle. It's even the idea that, in the United States, the level of influence the president has and who's running, you know, and who, yeah, and who's at the wheel, right. So it's, we live in a world that is built on manufactured consent, and manufactured consent is enabled through thinkers like Bernays and through what I call the illusion of things like our former construct of even American democracy. That these things we've imagined to be so, the foundation and the structure for the way that we live. All of those things have become so far removed from their theory that they're no longer serving the principles under which they were founded, and that disconnect is actually a huge, it's a gap, it's an inertia gap for exploitation or it's an inertia gap for growth, and usually what happens is you have the exploitation first. Someone says oh, here's a big gap of information asymmetry, so I'm going to exploit the information asymmetry. And then once people start realizing that that information asymmetry is being exploited, you experience a huge inversion of that and you have enough kind of, you have enough inertia behind that slingshot to launch it into something totally different. >> Yeah, this is a great concept, I interviewed the founder of the Halcyon HAL in Washington, DC, and she's an amazing woman. And she had a great conscious about this, and what she postulated was, bubbles that burst, exploitation's always, we've seen it in all trends. The underbelly, 'cause it's motivated, no dogma. They don't care about structural incentives, they just want to make cash. But she had an interesting theory, she was talking about you can let the air out of the bubble with community and data. So all the societal entrepreneurship activities now that are mission-driven, now getting back to mission-driven is interesting. There might be a way to actually avoid the pop. Because, depending upon what the backlash might be on the exploitation side, as we saw in the dotcom bubble, you can actually let the air out a little bit through things like data. I mean, how do you see, in your mind, just thinking out loud, how do you see that playing out, because we have community now. We have access to open data. Blockchain is all about immutability. It's all about power to the user's data. This is a mega trend. Your thoughts? >> So interdependence is huge in the blockchain community, and that's actually to touch back on the incentives in Bitcoin, I think that that's actually one of Bitcoin's, it's not that it's a wrong or a right, it just is, right, like sidechains will be launched eventually, but the idea that Ethereum created something that was adaptable and empowered people to be creative, and yet they're creating incentives for her people to launch products that are, I believe, 'causing, in some ways, could cause some serious harm to the ecosystem once the air is let out of that bubble. >> John: The data. >> The data, so data, yes yes yes. >> How do you let the air out of the bubble, because the pop will be massively implosion, it'll leave a crater. >> So data is a non-scarce resource. This is actually how I describe blockchain to people. And this is actually, I think, one of the, the challenge, if you want to look at it from the perspective of challenge, and then I'll talk about for the benefit, just between Bitcoin and Ethereum, there are obviously other blockchains, EOS is like coming out super soon, Holochain. There are tons, Steem has actually its own infrastructure, tons of other blockchains to speak about. But just to take these two main blockchains, which are not competitors. In Bitcoin, you have, it's really cryptography. Cryptography is not about, you know, like let's do some rapid prototyping, cryptography is about let's like put a lot of thought into this thing and have mathematical certainty that this is not exploitatable. And Ethereum is just kind of like, well, let's build a framework and then let people play as much as they can. And so there are challenges and benefits to both of those models, the challenge of Ethereum being that you've let all of this capital into the industry which is not actually, 46% of ICOs have already failed. Already failed. And then if you look at Bitcoin-- >> And a person with your industry (mumbles) at 1,200, so it's a 50% discount. >> Oh yeah, oh yeah. And then if you do the same thing and you're looking at the Bitcoin blockchain, we've seen that the capacity for innovation, Bitcoin could have done what, they could've been the first to market for what Ethereum is doing. And they chose a different route, and I think there are some pros and cons to both of those things, but I think there is an intentionality behind why the world played out in the way that it did. And I think it's the right strategy for both products. So the way I describe applications using blockchain technology to people and what I call the future of an infinite economy is that, if you think about why are Facebook and Google these multi billion dollars companies, it's really simple. It's because what do they own, right? The data, the data. And they're some of the last companies that are still stewarding these things in a way that is taking vast amount of aggregated ownership over an asset that people are generating every day that's extremely valuable to companies in the private sector. So the way that I describe blockchain is that, if we being to own our self-sovereign identity, then when we're owning our data, that's the foundation for universal basic income. If we take a non-scarce resource like data that's being generated every day, not just from us, right, but the data in the health of the ocean, right. The stewardship of the ocean, the health of the fish, actually saying okay, fish are thriving in this area, and so there's a healthy ecosystem, and so this coin is trading higher because we're stewarding this area of the ocean so we don't overfish. The quality of the air so that, when we're actually de-polluting the air collectively, everyone around us is creating and generating data to say we're making the air better. The air, actually, the health of our bodies, of our Earth, of our minds, of our planet, of even the health of our innovation. Right, what are the incentives behind our innovation, those are all forms of data. And that's a non-scarce resource, so if we take all of these different applications and make many different blockchains. Which I fundamentally believe that there's a powerful theory in having blockchains that are economically scarce, because I believe you're going to empower more diverse spectrums and also have a level of difficulty in creating the coin. You're going to have more innovation. And so-- >> Well, this is a key area. I mean, this is super important. Well, I mean, you step back for a second, you zoom out, you say okay, we have data, data's super valuable, if you take it to the individual's levels, which has not been, quite frankly, the individual's been exploited. Facebooks of the world, these siloed platforms, have been using the data for advertising. That's just what everyone knows, but there's other examples. The point is, when you put the data in the hands of the users, combine that with cloud computing and the Internet of Things when you can have an edge of the network high powered computer, the use cases have never been pushed before. The envelope that we're pushing now has never been in this configuration. You could never have a decentralized network, immutable, storing users' data, you've never had the ability to write the kind of software you can today, you've never had cloud computing, you've never had compute at the edge, which is where the users live, they are the edge. You have the ability where the user's role can enable a new kind of collective intelligence. This is like mind blowing. So I mean, just how would you explain that to a common person? I mean, 'cause this is the challenge, 'cause collective intelligence has been well documented in data science. User generated content is kind of the beginning of what we see in user wearables. But if you can control the data streaming into the network, with all the self-healing and all the geek stuff we're talking about, it's going to change structural things. How do you explain that to a normal person? >> You don't, you don't, right. So you show them. Because I can sit here all day and I can talk to you about, you know, I could talk to you about all of these things, but at the end of the day, with normal people, it's not something you want to explain. You want to show them, because with my, actually, my grandma gets Bitcoin. My grandma hit me up in like 2012 and she was like, "Do you know what that Bitcoin thing is?" I'm like, "Mimi," I'm like, "How do you know "what Bitcoin is, Mimi?" And she's just like, "I don't know, I read." You know, I was like, "This is, so what are you reading? "Like, are you hanging out on like libertarian forums, "like what's up?" And so-- >> What's going on in the club there, I mean, are they playing-- >> Yeah, but she is a really unique lady. So I would say that, for most people, they are not going to, when you explain things to people-- >> What would you show them, I mean, what's an example? >> The way that, so when I was, so I got into Bitcoin in 2011, and the way that I would explain Bitcoin to people is I would just send it to them. I would be like, "Here's Bitcoin, like take this Bitcoin, "here's some Bitcoin for you." And that was, people got it, because they were like, I have five dollars now in my hands that was not there. And this person just sent it to me. And for some people even still, you know, to be honest, even then, I remember how much energy it took for me to do that. Everywhere I go, I'd be like, in cabs, I'd be checking out grocery stores and I would try, I would essentially pitch Bitcoin to every person that I met. >> John: You were evangelizing a lot of it. >> It took so much energy though, and even after that, there was a period-- >> It was hard for people to receive it, they would have to do what at that time? Think about what the process was back then. >> Oh yeah. There were very few people who, even after doing that, really got it. But you know what happened. This is so much perspective for me, I remember doing that in 2013 and I remember, in 2018, actually, I think it was the end of 2017. I went to a gas station, it's the only gas station in San Francisco with a Bitcoin ATM. And I was like, I need to get some cash and I'm running on Bitcoin. >> John: You guys want a mountain view now. >> Yeah, yeah. And so I go in and these guys, I'm like frustrated, I'm like oh, the ATM is like the worst user experience ever, I'm like (groans). That's literally, I'm like, it's just, it was like eyes rolling in the back of my head, like just so frustrated because I'm a super privacy freak. And so it was just a super complex process, but the guys that, the guy's (mumbles) he looks at me and he goes, "Yo." And I was like, "What's up, man?" And he goes, "Are you trying to buy some Bitcoin?" I was like, "I'm trying to sell some Bitcoin right now." (John laughs) >> You're dispensing it, they're like yeah. >> Yeah, he's like, "Oh, word." And he's like, "How much are you trying to sell?" And I'm like, "I don't know, like 2K." And so he goes, "Aight." And he's like, "Let me hit up my friends," he literally calls three of his friends who come down and they just like, they're like, "Do you want to sell more?" They're like, all they just peer to peer. It's like we bypass the ATM and it was actually a peer to peer exchange. And I didn't have to explain anything. You know what made people get it? You showed them the money, you showed them the money. And sometimes people don't, you can explain these concepts that are world-changing, super high level or whatever. People are not actually going to get it until it's useful to them. And that's why a user interface is so important. Like, if you even look at the Internet. Who made the money on the Internet, right, it was the people who understood how to own the user interface. >> I had a conversation with Fred Kruger from WorkCoin, he's been around the block for a long time, great guy. We were riffing on the old days. But we talked about the killer app for the mini computer and the mainframe, the mini computer and then the PC, it was email, for 20 years, the killer app was email. We were like, what's the killer app for blockchain? It's money, the killer app is money. And it's going to be 50 year killer app. Now, the marketplace is certainly maybe tier two killer app, but the killer app is money. >> For sure, that's amazing. >> That's the killer app. Okay, so we're talking about money, let's talk about wallets and whatnot. There's a lot of people that I know personally that had been, wallets had been hacked. Double authentication (mumbles) news articles on this, but even early on, you got to protect yourself. It's something that you're an advocate of, I know recently, you've been sharing some stuff on Telegram. Share your thoughts on newbies coming in, be careful. Your wallet can be hacked, and you got to take care of yourself online. Is there a best practice, can you share some color commentary on when you get into the system, when you get Bitcoin or crypto, what are some of the best practices? >> It's not even, I think you need to remember a key principle of cryptography when you're dealing with digital currency, which was like don't really trust anything unless you call someone, you have like first hand verification from a person that you trust. Because these things are, I mean, I've had, literally last week, I had seven friends contact me, actually more than that once I posted about it, and they were like, "Is this you?" And I was like what, like people would literally just go online, they would scrape my Facebook photo, they'd go on Telegram and they would make, my name is @ToniLaneC, T-O-N-I-L-A-N-E-C, and so is my Twitter, and people would scrape my photos from my Twitter or my Telegram or my Facebook and they would create fake accounts. And they would start messaging people and say "Hey, like "what's up, how are you, that's cool, great, awesome. "So like, I need like 20 BTC for a loan. "Can you help me?" And all my friends were like, "I was just talking to you, is this you?" And I'm like no. And so I think that there's, the other thing you have to, it's not just security in terms of, and this is actually a problem Blockchain has to solve, right. It's not just security in terms of protecting your wallet and, you know, getting like a Ledger or a Trezor and making sure that you're keeping things like in cold storage, that you're going, there are so many, keeping your money in a hard wallet, not keeping your private keys on your computer, like keeping everything, storing your passwords in multiple places that you know are safe. Both handwritten, like in lock boxes, putting it in your safe deposit box or, you know, there are so many different ways that we can get into like the complexities of protecting yourself and security. Not using centralized cell networks is one of the big ways that I do this. Because if you are using two factor-- >> John: What's a centralized cell network? >> AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile. Because you are putting yourself in a situation where, if you're using a centralized system, those centralized systems are really easily exploitable. I know because my mom, when I was a kid one time, she put a password on my account so I couldn't buy games. I was not happy about it, it was my money that I was using, it was my money I was using to buy games, she was like, "You should just spend your money on better things." And so I remember going in when I was a kid, and I was like, this is my money, I totally want to buy this upgrade on this game. And so I went in and I essentially figured out how to hack into my own phone to be able to use my own money to buy the games that I wanted to buy-- >> Highly motivated learning opportunity there (laughs). >> But I realized that, in the same way we were talking about things that can be used for good can be used for bad, in the same way that someone can do something like that, you can also say, well, I'm in a call and say that I'm this person and take their phone and then get their two factor auth. So I don't use centralized cell networks, I don't use cell networks at all. >> John: What do you use? >> So, I mean, I have different kinds of like strategies or different things that mostly-- >> You might not want to say it here, okay, all right. >> Yeah yeah yeah, they're different, I'm happy to talk about those privately. The way that I've kind of handled that situation, and then the other thing that I would say is like, we really need hardcore reputation systems in our industry and for the world. And not social reputation systems like what is happening in China right now, where you can have someone leave you, like let's say I get into an Uber and I'm 30 seconds late. I can end up in a situation where I'm like not able to be admitted into a hospital or I'm not able to take a public train. Because someone rates me lower on this reputation system, I think that's a huge human rights issue. >> John: Yeah, that's a huge problem. >> And so not reputation systems like this, but reputations like the one we're working on at CULTU.RE that are really based more on the idea of restoration and humanization, rather than continued social exploitation to create some kind of collective norm, I think that kind of model is, it's not only a-- >> Well, the network should reject that by-- >> Toni: Exactly, exactly. >> All right, so let's talk about digital nations, we have China, so there's some bad behavior going on there. I mean, some will argue that there's really no R&D over there, and now they're trying to export the R&D that they stole into other countries, again, that's my personal rant. But the innovation there is clear, we chat and other things are happening. They finally turned the corner where they're driving a lot of, you know, mainly because of the mobile. But there's other nations out there that are kind of left behind. The UK just signed this week with Coinbase a pretty instrumental landmark licensing deal, which is a signal, 'cause I know Estonia, Armenia, you name every country wants to, Bahrain's got, you know, Dubai envy. So I mean, every country wants to be the crypto country. Every country wants to be the smart cities digital nation. I know this is something that you liked, and you and I were talking about 'cause we both are interested in. Your reaction, your thoughts on where that's going, I see, it's a good sign. What are the thresholds there, what are some of the keys things that they need to do to be a real digital nation? >> Well, I think it's less about digital nations in terms of like a nation is a series of borders, and more about first nations that we are, this is what we work on at CULTU.RE, that we are actually a nation of people and a lot of those nations have overlap and we should be able to participate in many different nations who have many different economies that are all really cooperating interdependently to create the best possible life for all human good, rather than just saying like I care about me and mine, because that strategy, the way government works now, it's a closed network with low trust that is extremely inefficient in management of resources. And the only way you can really-- >> That's the opposite, by the way, of what this movement's about. >> Yeah, exactly. And the only way you can have influence in government is to go in government and to work through government. All right. So it's the idea that, look at how much food we waste in the United States. If we took the food we wasted in the United States and repurposed it, we could literally cure world hunger. That is how bad it has gotten, right. And there are people starving in the US. There are people on food stamps in the US. >> Well, I mean, every institution, education, healthcare, you name it, it's all, you know, FUBAR, big time. >> Yeah, but we're throwing away tons of lettuce and all of this different kinds of produce because it like looks funky. Like this peach looks a little too much like a bottom. So we're like not able to sell it. >> Or lettuce got a little brown on it, throw the whole thing away. >> Yes, exactly, exactly, and that waste is unacceptable. So what we need to move toward is a model of open networks of governance where we have peer to peer distribution of finance and of resources in a way that allows people to aggregate around the marketplaces that are actually benefiting the way that they believe the world should work. So it's about creating a collective strategy of collective non-violence and eliminating harm, so obviously, you know, having a society that has enough proper incentives so that people are well off and that people are provided for, and I think blockchain will-- >> I noticed you're wearing a United Nations pin. >> Woo-hoo, yeah. And blockchain, I think, will also create this. >> John: I have one too. >> Let's up top. (slap) Yeah, I think blockchain will also help create universal basic income, but in addition to that, it's the idea that, if I'm living next door, I'll give two examples. So one is about the legality of the way that we contribute to the society. So let's say I have a next door neighbor. And let's say that this next door neighbor and I feel literally, we totally get along on everything, there's just one issue we feel we're like, I totally disagree with this, I totally disagree. And that issue is the use of, and I hope this isn't controversial to say, but anyway. So the use of medical marijuana, right. And it shouldn't be, because we can have two different opinions and the world can still work and that's the point. >> Well, in California, it's now legal to own marijuana. >> Yeah, for sure, it's legal here as well. So it's the idea that, if I, so let's say I'm a woman who, you know, I have someone in my life who was injured by a driver who was driving under the influence of marijuana. And so that's all I know about marijuana because I don't really do drugs, I've never been around drugs. So when I hear that word, I immediately think about the person in my life who was harmed because of, yes, and so immediately triggered, and I'm like, I don't want to support anything, I don't want to support anything to do with marijuana, I think marijuana is like the Devil's lettuce. And I have no interest in supporting marijuana. She never has to support marijuana, she doesn't have to. But her next door neighbor is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, her, me, whatever, is a veteran with Parkinson's disease, okay. And the only way that this man can move is, he's literally shaking, but when he smokes medical marijuana, he's actually able to, you watch and literally 30-45 minutes, he's upright, he looks like a normal healthy man. And so he says, "I believe that every, "after I fought in this, I believe every person "should have access to medical marijuana, "because this is the only way I'm able "to even operate my life." >> The different context. >> And I'm so, yes, exactly. And so what culture is really about is about understanding each other's context, that's even how reputation works. It's contextual awareness that provides greater understanding of who we are as individuals and the way we work together to make society work. So maybe they can mutually agree that he is not going to smoke while he's driving and he can pay to support everyone to have access who needs access to medical marijuana. >> Or he could finance Uber rides for them. You know, or whatever, I mean, these are mechanisms. >> Yes, yes, but it's the, yes, exactly, exactly. It's the idea that we are all, we're coming together to share context is a way that's not aggressive and not accusatory, so two people can believe two totally different things and still develop enough mutual respect to live together peacefully in a society. >> You know, the other too I'm riffing on that is that now KYC is a concept (mumbles) kicked around here, know your customer. I've been riffing on the notion of KYC for know your neighbor. And what we're seeing in these communities, even the analog world, people don't know who their neighbors are. Like, they don't actually even like care about them. >> Toni: For sure. >> You know, maybe I grew up in, you know, a different culture where, you know, everyone played freely, the parents were on the porch having their cocktail or socializing and watching the kids from the porch play on the lawn. Now I call that Snapchat, right. So I can see my kids Snapchat, so I'm not involved, but I have peripheral view. >> Toni: For sure. >> But we took care of each other. That doesn't happen much anymore, and I think one of the things that's interesting in some of these community dynamics that's been successful is this empathy about respect. They kind of get to know people in a non-judgmental way. And I think that is something that you see in some of these fragmented communities, where it's just like, if they just did things a little bit different. Do you agree, I see you're shaking your head, your thoughts on this? This super interesting social science thing that's, now you can measure it with digital or you can measure that kind of-- >> We can incentivize it. We can incentivize it. And that's the difference, measurement is one thing. Incentive is a behavior changer. Incentive is a behavior changer. And that is what we actually have to do in the way we think about the foundation of these systems, is it's not incentivizing competitive marketplaces that are like my way of thinking about this is right and your way of thinking about this thing is wrong, and like ah, it's not about that. At the end of the day like, I think we forget or misquote so much of, so many of the great thinkers of the last generation, like if you think about Darwin. What does everyone know about Darwin, right, it's like survival of the fittest. It's not what Darwin said, okay. It's misquoted and it's used, it's like one of those things where people who want to exploit-- >> It's a meme, basically. >> Yeah, people who want to exploit someone else's knowledge for their own ends will use that to, in some way, uplift the kind of like strategy of, you know, incentives of the time. What Darwin actually said was that human beings with the highest capacity for sympathy, qualities we now identify as altruism, compassion, empathy, reciprocity, will be the most likely to survive during hardship. Fundamentally, I mean, look at the state of the world today. It doesn't look good, it's like, you look at the way people interact with each other, it's like a virus that's attacking itself in an ecosystem that is our planet Earth, and we need to be, you know what is the antibody, our own sense of consideration for our fellow man. That is the antibody to violence. And so we can incentivize this, and we're going to have to because we're going to, AI, automation, these will fundamentally transform the way we think about jobs in a way that will liberate us like we've never known before. And once given the freedom, I think that we'll see the world start to change. >> Toni, I really appreciate you spending the time in this thought leadership conversation, riffing back and forth. Feels great and it's a great productive conversation. I got to ask you, how did you get there? I mean, who are you? I mean, you're amazing. Like, how did you get here, you obviously, Coin Telegraph's one of the projects you're running, great content. You're wearing the UN pin, I'm aligning with that. Got a great perspective. What's your story? Where did you come from originally, I mean... How did you get here? >> I think, you know, I don't know. I'm really connected to Saturn, I don't know where my home planet is. >> Which spaceship did you come in on? No, I mean, seriously, what's your background? How did you weave into this? 'Cause you have a holistic view on things, it's impressive. But you also can get down and dirty on the tech, and you have a good, strong network. Did you kind of back into this by accident on purpose, or was it something that you studied? What's the evolution that you have? >> Yeah, you know. I studied performance art and I was an artist all of my life. And I had a really big existential crisis, because I realized, as I was looking around, that technology was replacing every form. I remember the first time I watched an AI generate, this was maybe in like, I don't remember how, this was a long time ago, but I was essentially watching, before like the deep dream stuff, maybe like 2009 or 10. And I remember watching computers generate art. And I just was like, I was like mic drop, I was like anything that could ever be created can and will be created by computers, because these are, you are looking at this data, you can scan every art piece in the world and create an amalgamation of this in a way that extends so far beyond team and capacity that the form that we have used to express artistic integrity, all forms will, in some way, become obsolete as a form of creative expression. And I had this huge existential crisis as a performer, realizing that the value of my work was essentially, like, how long would the value of my work live on if no one is, I am not alive to continue singing the song. You don't remember the people who played Carmen, you remember Bizet who wrote the opera, you remember Carmen the character, but the life of the performer is like that of a butterfly. It's like you emerge from the cocoon, you fly around the world beautifully for a very short amount of time. And then you just, you know, stardust again. And so I had this huge existential moment, and it was a really big awakening call. It was as though the gravity of the universe came into the entire dimension of my being and said these, what you have learned has given you a skill, but this is not your path. So I went okay, I just need some time to like process that and so, 'cause this is my entire life, it's the only thing I ever imagined I would ever do. And so I ended up spending three months in silence meditating. And people are like whoa, like how did you do that? And I don't think people, I don't know, not that people don't understand, but I'm not certain that a lot of people have the level of this kind of existential moment that I experienced. And I couldn't have done anything else, I really just needed to take that time to process that I was actually reformulating every construct at the foundation of my own reality. And that was going to take, that's not something you just do overnight, right, like some people can do it more fluidly, but this was a real shift, a conscious shift. And so I asked myself three questions in that meditation, it was what is my purpose, what is the paradigm shift and where is my love. And so I just meditated on these three questions and started to, I don't know how deeply you've studied lucid dreaming or out of body experiences, but that's another, a conversation we can get into in another time, that was my area of study during that period. And so I ended up leaving the three months in silence and I just kind of, I started following my intuition. So I would just, essentially, sometimes I'd walk into a library and I would just shut my eyes and I would just walk around and I would touch books. And I would just feel what they felt like to me, like the density of their knowledge. And I would just feel something that I felt called to, and I would just pull it out of the shelf and just read it. And I don't know how to explain it-- >> (mumbles) Energy, basically-- >> I was guided, I was guided to this. This was in 2011. And so what I started getting into was propaganda theory, the dissolution of Aristotelian politics as an idea of citizen and state when we're really all consumers in a Keynesian economy structured by Edward Bernays, the inventor of propaganda, who essentially based our entire attitude of economic health on, you know, a dissolving human well being. Like, the evolution of our economic well being and our human well being were fundamentally at odds, and not only was that system non-sustainable, but it was a complete illusion. At every touch, point and turn, that the systems we lived in were illusions. And so is all of the world, right, like this whole world is an illusion, but these illusions in particular have some serious implications in terms of people who don't have the capacity, or not the capacity, everyone has the capacity, but who have not explored that deeply, right, who haven't gone that deep with themselves. >> And one of those books was like a tech book or was like-- >> It was just multiple, no, it was multiple books. And it's not that I would even read all of the books all of the way through. Sometimes I would just pick up a book and I would just open it to a certain page and I would read like a passage or a couple pages, and I'd just feel like that's all I need to read out of that book. It's, you just tune into it. >> When was your first trade on Bitcoin, first buy, 2011? >> You want to know something nuts? People always, people are like, "When did you first buy Bitcoin?" I was not, I didn't. So after I started, once you know, all this knowledge came to me, I just started talking about it, I was like, I've been given some wisdom, I just have to share it. So I started going out into the world and finding podiums and sharing. And that was when someone put a USB full of Bitcoin into my hands. I very rarely, I don't necessarily buy, I've just been gifted a lot. >> Good gifts. >> Toni: They've been great gifts, yeah. >> And then when did you start Coin Telegraph, when did that come online? >> So that was in 2013. I joined, the property had been operable for I think like three or four months. And some guys called me and they said, "We're just really impressed with you "and we want to work with you." And I said, "Well, that's nice," I was like, "But you don't have a business, right?" And they were like, "What do you mean?" And I was like, "Well, you have a blog, right?" And so I went in and I said, essentially like, here's, to scale the property, I was like, "Here's a plan for the next three years. "If we really want to get this property to where "it needs to be." I'm like, "Here are the programs that we need "to institute, here's like this entire, "countries we can be operable in "and then other acquisitions of other properties." I essentially went in and said like, "Here's the business model and the plan at scale," and they were just like, I think they were a little like, the first call that we had, I think they were just like, "We just called you to," it was a bold move, like, "We just called you to offer you something, "and you countered our offer by saying "we don't have a business?" It was one of those things, but they-- >> Well, it was the labor of love for them, right, I mean-- >> Well, for all of us, yeah, for all of us. >> When all you do is you're blogging, you're just sharing. And then you start thinking about, you know, how to grow, and you got to nurture it, you need cash. >> Yes, and so I essentially came in and then started, I was both editor in chief and CEO and co-founder of the property who helped bring in a lot of the network, build the reputation for the brand, create a scaling strategy. A lot of mergers and acquisitions, a lot of franchises and-- >> How many properties did you buy roughly, handful, six, less than six? >> So I would also say that-- >> Little blogs and kind of (mumbles) them together, bring people together, was that the thinking? >> Yeah, you know, what's interesting is media from all shapes and sizes, 15 to 20 offices in 25 different countries. I always say this when I talk about this, a very important lesson that I learned. How do you manage a team of 40 anarchists? You don't, you don't, that's the answer, you don't, you don't even like, you're like oh. I remember when I was like, "We're a team!" And someone was like, "No, we're not, "I don't believe in teams, I work for myself "and I don't need," I was like oh, wow. I was like oh-- >> John: The power of we, no. >> I was just like, all right, but it was a good learning experience, because I was like well, this is the way, these are your needs. So if that's your, I was like, well, let's embrace that, let's embrace the idea-- >> But that's the culture, you can't change it. >> And let's create the economy around that, let's actually do direct incentive for it, if you think that you're, if you want to be in this on your own, then let's say okay, we're going to make this fully free market economics and we're going to have a matter of consensus on whether or not someone who's exploiting the system, you write an article, you send it out, the number of views and shares that it gets from accounts that are, you know, proven verified, that is how much you get out of the bounty that's created from our ad sales, and if the community comes together in a consensus and says that someone wrote an article that was basically exploiting the system, like beer, guns, tits and weed plus Bitcoin and then they just shared it with everyone, then obviously, they would be weighted differently because the community would reach consensus so-- >> Change the incentive system. >> We just, I started, yeah, I started redesigning, essentially, once I had that moment, I was like okay, I was like, well, we really got to change the incentives here then because the incentives are not going to work like that. If that's the, if there's a consensus that that is the way you guys want to do things, then I got to change things around that. All right, cool, and so yeah, it was a really interesting awesome learning experience from like, you know, a team of like, maybe like 20 to 40 into, probably took it up 40, and then with all of the other, you know, companies and franchises, to about 435 people. And then just took the revenue from, yeah, just took, it was like skating revenue and then rocketing revenue. So that was really my role in the growth of the business and we're all, you know, it's amazing to see how these kind of blockchain holacracies work, you know, at a micro scale and at a macro scale. And what it really takes to build a movement, right. And then, in some ways, I guess it'd either become or create a meme. >> Well, I really appreciate the movement you've been supporting, we're here to bring theCUBE to the movement, our second show, third show we've been doing. And getting a lot more this year, as the ecosystem is coming together, the norms are forming, they're storming, they're forming, it's great stuff. You've been a great thought leader, and thanks for sharing the awesome range of topics here for theCUBE. >> For sure. >> Toni Lane here inside theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage of CoinAgenda, we'll be right back. (energetic music)

Jeff Rick here with the kubera in Mountain View California had a really cool startup phantom they're coming at this autonomous vehicle thing from a very different direction they're not a car company it's a pure software play but it really has a huge impact on the autonomous vehicle industry autonomous vehicles are met for no driver you guys have a driver but you're really assisted driving from a remote location a third party who can provide a safety solution for a number of AV operators right let's say if it's a you know one of the big OMS of ride-sharing companies they can connect to vehicle remotely and when they move the steering wheel or press the gas or brake it would actually happen in real time right we think we have the ultimate fallback mechanism at this point which is actually still a human right the machine is very very good but for these edge case scenarios you still need to bring a human back into the loop road construction areas severe weather conditions all this stuff happen all the time ok an autonomous vehicles may struggle with the situation so phantom Otto provides a solution whatever the situation is get you around an obstruction pull you over to the side of the road so you're not blocking traffic and in a much safer situation and a human's cognitive ability to process information on the fly we think that's the hidden key to making autonomous vehicles a reality it's in life-saving technologies you use a lot of off-the-shelf really simple hardware to execute this there's logitech little steering wheels over there at the big curve sam sunscreens basic cameras on the car so i get in it right we just work regardless of the kind of vehicle that a company might utilize we have to be able to control that vehicle smoothly and safely how do you guys deal with the ladies issue obviously that's our secret sauce but we've been able to get that very very low we connect multiple network at the same time a PMT horizon you know and t-mobile and a few networks right once they're bonded to get a much stronger connection these are life-saving vehicles everyone wants these deployed as rapidly as possible but we also want that deployment itself to be as safe as possible triple A's did a survey recently issued 75% of consumers are afraid of trusting the Machine and that's on this vehicle if you take a step back and look at the forest and not the trees you have 1.2 million people dying every year worldwide due to traffic accident fatalities 40,000 in the u.s. in 2016 and 94% is due to human error if we had that happen even just for two weeks in aviation in the u.s. aviation wouldn't exist right it doesn't know it so if you eliminate the human for the most part from that equation you can save a lot of lives we do view there's going to be you know a big consumer adoption kind of hurdle to overcome and a piece of that is having the passengers in the car comfortable and feeling that someone it has their back right I saw somewhat of an awakening in the government like we're really scared of this being deployed but in reality we should be scared of this not being deployed right we are working with a variety of cybersecurity firms for making sure that our solution is extremely secure from the hardware that we can offer in the car to the software to the actual control center the operation center where the drivers driving you making sure that we have ended in security the a I would say it's about 97 98 percent of the way then a reality of having autonomous vehicles interacting with other autonomous vehicles might create new edge case scenarios that don't exist yet I think the regulators are coming to the realization at this point that if we want to get these vehicles deployed right now we need to have some sort of bridge to that technological gap to get us from 98 percent to a hundred percent right now it's a relatively small number of cars a small number of players but we see a huge opportunity and huge growth in the sector of the next five years it's okay I'll go take a drive yeah sure okay we're gonna check out we're gonna take a drive we'll see you in the car [Music] we are driving a Lincoln MKZ 2017 and the reason this vehicle is so good for autonomous vehicle development is because a lot of the driving steering gas and brakes is enabled through some a system called drive-by-wire okay that means it's an electronic signal that goes through the canvas and initiates these features locomotions in the vehicle electronically we can create an artificial electronic signal and inject it where it processes that information and artificially move the steering wheel or the brakes or the gas light that way [Music] [Music] getting ready check ready three two one there we go besides operating is our safety driver we haven't started going yet so you you are on call we look both ways now this is kind of interesting as I can see what then can't see who you can see what I can see so it's kind of an infinite loop you can see almost 360 degrees around the park dan can hear everything that we can hear in the vehicle if someone is haunting that and making a right-hand turn and you think not a very good right seat driver if I complain about people getting too close to the curb but good job then stand nice and wide for every latitude longitude coordinate we would get data points such as bandwidth and latency and if there's ever some sort of dead zone he or she would know that in advance and know that they could not engage to be able you give a geofence that off and to write if there's a dead zone correct make the car go around it even if it's something looked at this is good crap how consistent is the coverage the mobile cover do you find say t-mobile is not good in a certain area but AT&T is good okay then we would use AT&T service it's the latency of shifting we're always going to make sure that you can steer that you can have breaks and other stuff that isn't as high of a priority Falls lower down the list we're now going to go into gas station gas stations obviously don't have lane markings you're doing with pedestrians different vehicles coming in and out but for us obviously since we're being driven by a human we'll be able to go through just as though it was a human in the driver seat it's really just about a human being able to read the motions of the car right take a few inches forward then you pause it's understanding that or they give a scenario so that you understand when you can move forward or one you might need to peel back but at the end of the day you hope that at some point the autonomous vehicles will be able to handle an increase moon remember of easy choices well gathering data critical data right edge case scenario data so that we can feed that back to our customers so that they can have the data that they need to further train these vehicles [Music] that was fun great job out there thank you what does it feel like a driving this thing driving remotely is actually very different from driving a car normally and I know might sound obvious but there's a lot of things we take for granted driving the car for example you don't actually understand the momentum shifts that are happening in the vehicle so you don't know how hard you're braking or you might have a dip different depth perception because the optics on the cameras all these things kind of add up into completely different driving experience as I'm developing the system I'm testing it and seeing exactly the information that I need in order to create that safe and smooth driving experience and so I'm looking at what's difficult for me as a remote operator or what information am i lacking and then I go back and develop those things so at the federal level there's a bill in the house and the bill in the Senate neither of which have been passed but we expect that one will go the distance this year so you might actually have the rare scenario where the regulation outpaces the technology which is a good problem to have right it's not a problem at all I mean a human who's going to intervene on your behalf will be really important right on the business standpoint we have several deals are already closed some pilots planned over the next few months so you'll be seeing a lot more I think of us very soon out in the market thanks for sharing the right and taking care of us appreciate it thank you we're at phantom Auto in Mountain View California thanks for watching we'll catch you next time [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for our CUBE Conversation, taking a little break from the shows as we get ready, actually, for the winter break which will be a nice little break for us and the crews and the gear. This is different, exciting. It's a little bit more intimate. We're really excited to have our next guest. He's Sunil Khandekar. He's the founder and CEO of Nuage Networks which is part of Nokia, a CUBE alumni. I think we last saw you at DockerCon 2016. >> That's right. >> Jeff: So, great to see you. >> Good to see you again. >> Absolutely, so, been a little more than a year. >> Sunil: That's right. >> So, what do you see as the evolution since we last spoke at DockerCon? >> Sure, it's been great. I couldn't be more pleased with the momentum that we have garnered in the industry: more adoption of our solution, more validation, more events, more customers. >> Jeff: (chuckling) >> Which is great, that's all good stuff. And really, more specifically, in terms of adoption, large service providers across the globe like BT, Telefonica, TELUS, Exponential-e, they're all adopted and launched with our SDN solution. We have had breakthrough wins in terms of public cloud whether it's Fujitsu or whether it's an NTD Data like China Mobile. And of course, you know we continue to have a solid momentum in financial services companies, for private cloud automation, as well as to provide them security software to find security in addition to the private cloud automation. And we had another breakthrough win in China Pacific Insurance Company. So, that continues, and of course it's great always to receive some good validation. So we've won award at MEF on the best SDN solution recently. We won the Right Stuff Award, Innovation Award at ONUG for software-defined security. And every leading analyst firm, Gartner, Forrester, IDC, IHS Markit, ACG, and recently Global Data, they've all put us in the top two as the inventors for doing automation of networking end-to-end. >> Right, because automation in networking was the last piece of kind of the virtualization stack, right, in the automation. So, what is it that you think that you guys are doing special that's allowing you to win? >> Right, so if you remember when we talked, when we started Nuage, we started Nuage to automate networking end-to-end with a software-based approach at the heart of which is a declarative policy and analytics engine. And what that means is we were doing intent-based networking before it was even a thing. >> Jeff: Right. >> And we were doing software-defined networking but in a way that allowed us to do software-defined networking not only in the data center, between the data centers to the public cloud across the wide area and to the enterprise branches. What that means is you're not providing a siloed automation, but we are doing automation end-to-end because ultimately it's about connecting users to the applications. >> Right, right, you had a great quote. I picked it up in doing some research. You know, the metaproblem is you said, "Connect users everywhere to applications everywhere," a really simple kind of statement of purpose but not very simple to execute. >> Sunil: You got it. >> A lot of complexity behind that statement. >> That's right, that's right, incredible amount of complexity, but it's important to construct the metaproblem, look at what it is that enterprises have pain with. They have, let's look at it, right? They have users everywhere, and they want to connect to applications anywhere whether it's private or public cloud. How do they want to do it? Quickly, securely, in a self-service manner, but they want this agility without sacrificing safety and security. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> So what you have is you've got to solve this network automation problem for brownfield or greenfield, because there is nothing like just greenfields. >> Right. >> And we are to do it in their private data centers. You've got to help them burst into the public cloud securely. And you've got to connect all their branch sites together. And what we've seen in the industry and our competitors, they are taking a very narrow view of the problem. So what they have is an automation for only the data centers and automation for just the wide area. And that's only solving half the problem. >> Right, right, and then you've got these pesky things that have just reestablished the expected behavior, the expected access, and oh, by the way, added significantly more attack surfaces and really changed the game in terms of what people want from their applications, what they expect from their applications. And it's tough for businesses to deliver to this level of promise. >> Indeed, and you know, the wall is about instant gratification. You want access to your data quickly, instantly wherever you are. >> Right. >> And what that means is, as consumers, we have everything at our fingertips. But as soon as you step into the business environment, that's completely not true. And so, it's all about consumerization of IT on how do you make IT that agile, how do you actually modernize IT. Because enterprises, their high-order problem is what? To innovate faster by having massive automation across all aspects of their business. What underpins that is a modern IT and cloud architecture. And what underpins modern IT and cloud architecture is three clear things that we are seeing in the industry: software-defined data centers, software-defined wide area network, and software-defined security. So, we like and our customers love that we've thought the problem end-to-end and provide all these three, which is absolutely unique in the industry. No one does this. >> So, I'm curious to get your perspective cause you've been doing this for awhile. >> Sunil: Yes. >> As the security landscape has changed. >> Sunil: That's right. >> Everyone is getting, we get reports every day, we're numb to it now. You know, basically everyone at Yahoo got hacked. >> Sunil: That's right. >> And Equifax got hacked, so everyone's getting hacked. So it's really not about the big wall anymore. There's no such thing as the big wall. >> Sunil: That's right. >> The wall's about crumbled. So it's evolving. We've also seen an increase in state-sponsored attacks as opposed to just kids having fun in the basement. >> Sunil: Yeah. >> How have you seen the evolution of the attacks change and how have you responded within your solutions over this period of time to kind of evolve to the modern security stance that you have to have? >> Look every CXO I meet, the absolute thing that's top of mind is how do you make us go from where we are, a traditional environment, to a higher edge automated environment but make it more secure than what we have. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> And as you noted, the attack surface has increased thanks to the mobility. And you have a lot more surface area because you have applications in public cloud, you have applications in private cloud, you have more mobile users. So, the industry term that often gets used is microsegmentation. Now, what that means is, and that's in response to the fact that, as you noted again, that perimeter security just doesn't cut it anymore. And not only that, but it's also very complex and very manual. So what you've got to do is, while you're automating the data centers, while you're automating the wide area, you've got to bring the security along. You've got to make it as agile. And again, what we have done is we do microsegmentation from the branch all the way to where the application is for that particular user. So in other words, finance users can only access finance applications. And that's a microsegment end-to-end. No one in the industry does that today. What they do is they do microsegmentation only for the applications within the data center or they prevent just the users to communicate between each other but not users to the applications. So, that is very important for our customers to know that we have that capability. But then it's all about also understanding what's going on in the network. >> Jeff: Right. >> And that's where the rich analytics that we have just really help them understand who's talking to who at application level, and being able to then have that domain-wide view and be able to very quickly respond to CERT alerts. So, because today, when a CERT alert comes in, they don't know what to do. They take a brute force approach because they simply don't know where and how to react. But now, because you have this centralized intelligence and you have domain-wide view, and you're able to do microsegmentation end-to-end, you are able to push a button and be as course or as granular but be very surgical and take action very quickly. >> Alright, so, hard to believe that we're almost to the end of 2017 which I can't believe. So as we turn the calendar, what are some of your priorities for 2018? You've been doing this for awhile. What are you working on? What's kind of top of mind as we enter this new calendar year? >> Right, and what we are noticing is we're going from beachheads to mainstream. So, we are getting deployed. The solid deployments is not only as I noted in data centers, in public cloud, private cloud, but also in the wide area. We are collaborating with our customers to really make this mainstream because it is super-important in terms of not only providing that automation and agility but also the security. So that's what we are focused on. We continue to do that, not only for what we call the virtualized security services solution that we have and not only the telco clouds, but also the virtualized services, cloud services. We're going to cover the gamut and that's what we're after. We are really excited to be leading the charge here. >> Alright, well, Sunil, thanks for taking a few minutes. Hopefully it won't be 18 months before we sit down again. And we look forward to watching the progress. >> Great, thank you. Thank you for having me. >> It's a pleasure. He's Sunil. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios for CUBE Conversations. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas It's theCube covering AWS re:Invent 2017 presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back to our live coverage. theCube here at AWS re:Invent 2017 Our fifth year covering Amazon Web Services and their massive growth. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Lisa Martin. Here our next guest is CTO of WANdisco, Jugane Sundar. Welcome back to theCube. >> Thank you John. >> You guys are everywhere. WANdisco around the table and all these deals so you guys have been doing extremely well with (indistinct talking) property. What's new? You got some news? >> Yes we do, we recently announced integration with Amazon's AWS Snowball device which gives you the ability to do migration of on-premises workload into the Cloud without down time, and then the end result is a hybrid cloud environment that you can have an active for right environment on both sides. That's a unique capability, nobody else can do that today. >> What does it mean for AWS and their customers 'cause they're very customer focused. What are you guys bringing to the table? >> We bring a whole lot of big data workloads, analytics workloads, IoT workloads into their Cloud. And the beauty of the cloud is that you may have a 20 node cluster on-premises but you can run analytics with a 1000 nodes up in the Cloud on demand and pay just for that use. We think it's a very powerful value proposition. >> Where are you seeing the most traction? We've talking about the massive growth at 18 billion dollar annual runway that fit AWS and Andy's conversation with you John the other day said we haven't gotten that big on startups alone. So even some of the things like the advertising that AWS is now starting to do suggests they're going up the stack to the Enterprise and to the Sea Suites. Where are you guys seeing the most traction with AWS? Is it in the Enterprise space, is it in the start up space, both? >> So somewhat because of our route, what we're finding is that the large majority of Big Data customers and analytics customers from the last two, three years are all considering some form of addition of a cloud to their environment. If it's not a wholesale migration, it's a hybrid environment. It's bursting out into the cloud type of use case and what you're finding is that growth of on-premise Big Data and analytics systems is slowing down because once you get to the Cloud, the plethora of tools you have, the facilities that the scale brings to you is just unmatched. That's the trend we really see in the market. >> We've seen a lot of people go and use it in the marketplace. Juniper Networks for instance, are seeing some activity at the network. Who would have thought a network player is gonna to pick it in the Cloud, but this is what industrial-strength cloud looks like. You guys have the active active. Where does that fit in for the customers who wanna leverage the apps, and don't wanna worry about the networks? >> Exactly, the traditional model of thinking was use the Cloud for back up. You have your on-premise stuff. The cheapest way to back it up is into the Cloud. But that's really just scratching the tip of the iceberg. Once you put your data up in the Cloud, you have the ability to have it strongly consistently replicated then you can do amazing things from the Cloud. You can do a whole new analytics system. Perhaps you want to experiment with Spark in the Cloud and have it on on high on-premise that works very well. Now that both sides are actively writeable, you can create partitions of your data that are dynamically generated written to both sides. These are things that people did not consider. Once they stumble upon it, it just opens their mind to a whole new way of operating. >> Business Park, I've heard some rumors and rumblings in the developer community here that they're running Spark on Lando. People always hacking with new stuff. So Lando server list I think is coming down. How does that relate to some of things that are driving WANdisco's, how do you relate to that? Does that help you? Does that hurt you guys? >> It helps us, the way we look at it. We're all about strong replication of storage. Lando is no storage, you talk to the underlying storage of some kind. It's S3, it's EBS volumes whatever. So long as the storage comes through our system. Any growth, any simple easy way for applications to be written is hugely positive for us. >> What are the start ups out there? We've seen a lot of start ups really missed the mark. They misfired on the Cloud and you seen some stars that have played it well. They've got in the tornadoes as we say. In fact, Geoffrey Moore, I think is rewriting his book Inside the Tornado, which is a management paradigm. But there really seems to be a new business model. You guys are like ever green at WANdisco because you're unique (indistinct talking) property. How are you guys working with that business model and what are some of the things you're seeing with start ups and companies who are trying to play the cloud but are misfiring? >> Right so WANdisco as you know stands for Wide Area Network Distributed Computing, and the Cloud is like a huge bonus to it. It's all about the Wide Area Network. We are now consolidating a bunch of work in the cloud, but guess what? It's gonna go back to going to go into the edge in some way 'cause the edges are getting smarter. You need replication between those. We see a lot of that coming up in the next two, three, five years. IoT workloads and use cases all involve somewhat of edge smart computing. We replicate between those really well. >> Lisa, we always talk about the trend is your friend. In your case, Cloud is your friend. >> Indeed, it is. The Cloud is all about wide area network computing and we are the ones who can really replicate-- >> How does a customer know what to do when it comes down to getting involved with WANdisco? It's not obvious. Spell it out, why do they need you guys? When do you get involved? What specific things should be red flags to a potential customer or a customer who says I'm gonna go in on the Cloud. Unpack that. >> Let me give you a simple example. We look at Amazon S3, it's a Cloud service storage. But do you know that it's actually on a per region basis. When you create a bucket to put objects into the bucket, it's located in one region. If you want it replicated elsewhere, they have cross-region replication which is an eventually consistent replication system that doesn't give you the consistent results that you want. If you have such a situation employing our technology immediately gives you consistent replication. Be it Cloud regions, Cloud to Cloud or on-premise to Cloud. The end result is the minute you step into replication across the land, every solution out there doesn't do it consistently and that's our core-- >> And that's your unique IP. >> Indeed, it is. >> Okay so I'm seeing Amazon racing their roll out regions. They got one coming in China, one in the Middle East. That's a big part of the strategy. Does that help you or what does that do? >> Absolutely it helps us a great deal, partly because customers now do not look at their applications as a single region applications. That doesn't fly anymore. The the notion that my banking app cannot work because a data center went down is just not acceptable in the modern world anymore. The fact that we depend so much on the services means they need to be up all the time. More regions, more data replication. That's why we step in. >> So that sounds like a lot of symbiosis here. You talk about S3 and replication challenges. So tell us how WANdisco is actually helping AWS. That's one example but help you us understand the symbiosis with your relationship with AWS. >> The best example I can give you is a large travel service company in the internet. They had to Adobe infrastructure that was growing out of control. They wanted to manage costs by moving some workloads to Amazon but didn't really know where to start, because you can't do such a thing as take a copy of the data, ship it off on a Snowball into the Cloud and tell the users of that data, stop writing to it now. It's gonna be available in the Cloud, a week, 10 days from now. Then you can start writing again. That's just not acceptable. This is live data problem. The problem here is that you need to be able to ship out your data on Snowballs, continue to write the on-premise storage. When it shows up in the Cloud, start writing that. Both are consistently replicated, you have a proper hybrid Cloud environment. So this was a great bonus to them. As for AWS, they watched this and they look at it as a easy way to move vast majority of data from on-premise big Data analytics systems. >> Have they been a fuel to your fire, in a sense that they've been on this incredible acceleration of their innovation and as Andy Joci said many times to you John. It's speed and customer focus. So how has their accelerated pace of innovation helped fuel WANdisco's so that like you were saying the unique value. How have they really ignited that? >> So they started off with just plain Snowball two years ago. Last year they announced Snowball Edge which is a pretty improved device. Now they have in the works, capability to do some compute on those boxes. That's very interesting to us. Now our services can decide on the Snowball, It arrives at a customer site. He plugs it in, turns it on instant replication capabilities Those are fueled both by Amazon's drive and extreme speed and our own capabilities. So Amazon is a wonderful partner for us partly because their charge to us innovation is quite amazing. >> Snowball, snow mobile, it's gonna be a white Christmas for you guys. Business is good. >> Business is great. >> Okay, final question. What's the conversations you're having here this year, share with us some of the quick conversations you're having in the hallways, meetings, Amazon got execs, partners. >> So most of the conversation are about moving workloads from on-premise into the Cloud. I personally am very interested in IoT use cases because I see the volume of data and the ability for us to do some interesting replications at being critical. That's where our focus is right now. >> Jugane Sundar, CTO of WANdisco. Big announcement, partnership with Amazon Web Services and Snowball replication active active. Great solution for replication. You got regions across regions. Check out WANdisco. Thanks for coming by, great to see you again. Congratulations on all your success. This is theCube, live coverage day one. It's coming down to an end. The halls open, we got two more days of packed two Cubes. Stay tuned for more, we got some great guest coming up, stay with us. (uptempo techno music)

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