(uplifting music) >> Welcome to this CUBE conversation. In this segment, we're going to talk about the future of IoT and the critical role semiconductor technology plays in shaping this exciting space. As we've reported on our Breaking Analysis segments, the fabulous chip company enabled by the ARM ecosystem has permanently changed the semiconductor industry. Intel's fateful decision in the mid-2000s to pass on the chip design for the Apple iPhone was an ironic reminder of IBM's decision to outsource the microprocessor for the original IBM PC to Intel. In both cases, the market leader didn't appreciate the tectonic industry shifts that were possible, and importantly, the impact that volume economics would have on the power structure of the entire industry. Now fast forward today, and we believe ARM wafer volumes are 10X those of the general purpose x86. This means that the ARM ecosystem is on a cost curve that is unmatched in the business. Moreover, as we've reported, the ARM ecosystem is blowing away the historical performance curves that we've seen in the chip industry, AKA Moore's law. Whereas for years, the x86 performance curve grew roughly at 40% per annum has now moderated to the low thirties. Over the past five years, as evidenced by the progression of Apple's A series chip, based on ARM, when you observe the combined performance of the CPU, the GPU, the NPU, the XPU, DSPs, accelerators, et cetera, the alternative processors in combination have driven the average annual performance improvement to over a hundred percent per year. This is an astounding achievement. Why is this so important to IoT? Well, the edge is projected to be the next trillion dollar market. We believe we'll see a world with more than a trillion devices. And as we've reported, IoT use cases are going to require specialized and distributed processing power. And lots of it. AI Inference at the edge will enable real-time action and embedding intelligence in the chips that when the edge will be high performance, low power, inexpensive, and programmable with a much faster time to market profile than historical semiconductor cycles. We're already seeing that with companies like AWS, Apple, Tesla, and peer, and others going from design to tape out and under two years versus the historical norm of let's say four years to be generous. And with me to discuss innovation in IoT and some big news from the 2021 ARM's summit is Mohamed Awad, who is the vice president of IoT and embedded at ARM Mohamed. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Thanks. I really appreciate the opportunity to have you. >> So, You're welcome. So tell us about your, your role at ARM. I know you were responsible for infrastructure previously and now sort of extended to, to IoT and embedded. Tell us more about. >> Yeah, sure. So I've been with ARM for a little over three years now. I started working with the infrastructure team when I was, we worked on a lot of different initiatives and one of the things that we launched was on Neo verse. And we went on to do some interesting things there, as, as I mentioned, we're making some great traction in the infrastructure space, but a year ago I took on the role to you ought to head up arms IOT and embedded business. And, you know, it's, it's interesting because my, my career really started in IOT and embedded. I was in the Boston area working for companies like Lucent Nortel, and then eventually I remembered very early IOT startup. So that was, that was 25 years ago now. But, but I still got roots in the Boston area. So I like your, like your hat in the back now. >> Yeah. Right. Go, go Sox. >> Go Sox. >> So how did we get here, you mean, you've had a lot of experience in embedded IOT, which is relatively new term to most people. It sort of evolved from a period of, you know, you had instrumentation for at least some components of, of the system. And then we focused on conductivity. But as I was saying in my upfront narrative, we're really now embedding AI and it's it's intelligence, but so there's phases. How do you see the progression in terms of how we got to where ARM is today in IOT? >> Yeah, it's really interesting because if you think about, if you think about ARM, then you really just think about IOT, you know, as you said, IOT started off with, Hey, let's, let's stick a microcontroller in everyday devices, you know, stick a micro controller to something like a vending machine, and then we went on and said, well, hey, what if we could remotely control that device for gathering data from that device, and then we, so we entered this phase of, you know, what we like to call interconnectivity, right, And that was all about, you know, connecting these devices with, with things like, you know, low power Bluetooth, or, you know, even now low latency 5G. And what's interesting is that, you know, together the work of the Arm ecosystem has done over the years has really solved the problems of how to add microcontrollers that connects the devices. I mean, that those problems have largely been solved for a lot of the reasons that you described earlier, which is, you know, we focused on lowering the barrier for folks to come in and innovate around sort of a core technology and, and lots of innovation happened as a result of that. We're entering this new phase now, which is really about, you know, you've got all these devices out there which can easily be connected, they've got microcontrollers or, or, or technology in them, which allows them to, to be intelligent. But how do we really extract the level of kind of AI intelligence out of those devices? Ultimately, what we're trying to do is, is, you know, the industry needs to figure out how to derive intelligence from the smallest sensor, all the way up to the largest cloud data center, you know, and, and, and that means local intelligence. It means regional intelligence, and it means global intelligence, you know, the potential is enormous, but the challenge is pretty enormous as well because of all those diversified use cases, all the diversified devices, all the, all of the sort of scale sort of number of platforms that we're talking about, and that that's really what, we're, what we're excited to kind of go work on, work on that. >> It is exciting. I mean, just the it's mind boggling the, the capabilities, the processing capabilities of this distributed world that we're, we're, we're evolving towards. Let's talk about the hard news of why are you announcing what you're announcing, I mean, what are the trends that are sort of informing that maybe you could hit some of the highlights of the announcement and give us a key details? >> Yeah, sure. So, so when we announced his ARM, total solutions for IOT, and that's really made up of three things, my favorite part is on virtual hardware. Our virtual hardware is all about making available a virtual representation of, of devices in the cloud for lots of developers to use. And I'll, I'll get to that in a minute, but I think, you know, in order to understand that you have to kind of understand the broader context of what ARM total solutions are. It starts with pre-integrated pre verified IP package. You talked earlier about how design cycles we're looking to accelerate people were looking to develop a Silicon much faster. Part of what we were doing at ARM is we're actually taking, you know, pre-integrated pre verified IP packages and call those ARM corstone. We're making those available to the market. So we give those to our Silicon partners, and then they can use that. They might include an neuro processing unit, a CPU. They might include the interconnect, all the, kind of the base IP. And then our Silicon partners can use that as a jumping off point so that they can quickly get Silicon to market. That's the first part of the news, which is, you know, we're doubling down on that too. Now, you know, in the last three years, we've had over 150 different designs, which have used our ARM core stone products. So moving forward, we're going to make that foundational to how we deliver IOT technology to the market. But the second part of it, which is, which is super exciting, is that not only are we going to accelerate the time to market for our Silicon partners, we're also making a virtual representation of that underlying core stone design available in the cloud for software developers all around the world to use at the same time that IP is ready. So at the same time, we hand IP to our Silicon partners. We're making a virtual representation in the cloud. So software developers can start. Now, let me just take a step back here and make sure that, you know, everyone kind of understands how, how big of a deal this is, right before the way this used to work, I would hand the IP to a Silicon partner. It would take them, you know, 18 months, maybe two years to get a piece of Silicon in market. And then a board manufacturer would have to go off. And then only maybe three or four years later, could the software developers start five years to get a product to market what we're doing here with ARM total solutions. We cut that five years down to three years, so we can massively accelerate time to market. And then the third part of what ARM total solution is, is something we call projects Centaury Project Centaury is about putting in place a set of standards to it's an ecosystem initiative, which puts in place a set of standards, reference software and, and specifications around things like security and how devices should communicate with, with, you know, the operating system or cloud service providers that allows that allows software developers to get a level of reuse and leverage. So, you know, today in the IOT, every time you develop a piece of software, you're going to develop it over and over again. But what we're talking about here is they can develop it once and, and be able to apply. And we use a lot of that software over and over again, the same way they do in other markets like infrastructure. >> Love it. So, okay. I want to ask you if that, if there's a blueprint there that we can, we can learn from, but before we do that. So if I, if I go back to the three items that you mentioned, so for example, one of your licensees can say, okay, I want to take just the standard components, the CPU, whatever, but I might want to customize the neural processing unit, as you said, and they have the flexibility to do that at the same time when they, when they bring it to the Foundry, because it's a standard platform that, you know, what's going to work, that's kind of a nuance that maybe people maybe don't fully appreciate, but am I getting that right? That standard platform has dramatically changed the industry. >> Yeah, that's right. I mean, the idea is, is that, you know, we take these, these IPS, we integrate them together. We verify them, we designed it as a subsystem. We target specific use cases, and then we make them available. Our partners are certainly free to go off and make modifications to it. They see fit. But when we hand it to them, it's ready to go. And that's the idea. >> Yeah. And then the point about the being able to, to give developers access in the cloud, and we've often said that, you know, the developers are going to shape IOT. And so I think what you're saying is essentially instead of this linear process, where you can get dependent on the previous one being done, you're actually parallelizing. If you will, the innovation. >> Yeah. That's exactly right. And I, and I'd actually take it one step forward. There's a, there's a subtlety there, which I didn't comment on, which I think it's important to call out, which is not only are we parallelize them, but we're enabling what I'll call modern development methodology. Right. You know, the way that development is done in areas like mobile and the cloud data centers, they use agile workflows, things like continuous integration, you know, broad-based testing as they go along. That's very different than the way that embedded development is done today. Embedded development today is done the same way. It was 25 years ago. You get a board on your desk, you mess around with a bunch of jumpers and cables and wires, hope you did it right. And then you write your software and you hope the hardware guy doesn't want to revise the hardware because then you're going to start all over again. Right. You know, the last thing that you'd want to do is set up a hardware form, right? Lots and lots of different hardware to go off and test over and over again. Now with virtual hardware, you can move all of that to the cloud. All that complexity goes away and you've massively reduced the investment required for software developers to get going and allow them to take on these more modern techniques. >> Well, Mohammed, thank you for clarity clarifying that, that nuance, because we're going to see a Renaissance in the way that that embedded development occurs. And I'm curious as to how you think about that in terms of you, because you're going to have a whole new breed of developers come in with, you know, the cloud developers, if you will. They have, they see IOT as a massive opportunity as well. You're going to see the, I would presume the embedded ecosystem. Up-skill a much in the same way you're seeing, you know, ops dev or dev ops or IT people, you know, learn Python to you know, to up-skill. And so you're going to see like a two vectors of innovation in terms of developers coming together. How do you see that? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's exactly what we're driving to. And when we talk about this, we talk about changing the economics of IOT. That's exactly why, because what we, what we're saying is that, Hey, you can have all this massive innovation that can be unleashed from all these developers that didn't have access to these devices before. And you can also take all these embedded devices, embedded developers and make them so much more efficient with these new modern, modern development methodologies. A combination of those two things is going to, you know, not only is it going to lower the cost of development, but it's going to spur a massive amount of new innovation and all, you know, all new products and services, right. We really think can unleash the potential of IoT. >> So step back a little bit, help us understand kind of how you came to this, your strategy. You mean, what were the friction points or what are the friction points that you see in IOT and embedded in terms of being able to, to, to, to scale this capability? >> Yeah. Yeah. It's a good, it's a great question. And I got to tell you, we, we, when so when we, when I came, when I came into this role, you know, the first thing you do is you go off and talk to customers and partners, and you try to understand how people are using. But most of the time, when people think of ARM, they think of us as, Hey, they're the guys that are off talking to the Silicon partners are talking to the hardware guys. And we absolutely do. We have strong relationships with all of the Silicon partners, but because of our place in the ecosystem, you know, as a, as a company, which, you know, we've got shipped over 70 billion cortex spend devices today, you know, we underpinned, you know, the IOT basically runs on us. And so a lot of what we do too, is we talked to the software ecosystem. We talked to OEMs, and we talked to service providers looking to capitalize on all of that, you know, on the, on the depth and breadth of our ecosystem. And when I talked to OEMs, and when I talked to software service providers, two things became really clear. The OEM is wanting to find a faster path to market. They're like, it just takes too long for us to get our products to market. We need to figure out how to streamline it. So that was one. When I talked to the software service providers, they came to us with a little bit of a different problem. What they said is like, Hey, we really want to deploy software and services across this, this IOT edge space, but it's just so diverse. And so massively complex, you know, everybody's got a different view on thing. Can you help us, like, where's the, your, the common denominator, can you help us figure out how to attack this problem? And that's really what drove, what drove us. Right. >> Awesome. Let's talk a little bit more about some of the announcement, details, project Centaury particular, what are some of the things that you want people to really appreciate, and specifically, what does it mean to the ecosystem? I mean, you touched on it a little bit, but I don't know if you have any examples or customers and, and, and maybe also Mohamed, if you could help us understand how it relates to other arm projects like Cassini. >> Yeah, sure. So project, so, so, so two things. So first of all, let me just talk to what, what, what projects Centaury. So project Centaury is really looking to, you know, help enable a level of, of software leverage across that diverse M class devices that are out there in class with our microcontroller devices that are out there. And so it's really made up of 3, 3, 3 parts. One part is, is all about security. So it uses a PSA and our PSA certified framework, including TFM trusted firmware. So this is our security framework that we've put forward. And then our, the PSA standards initiative that's out there in the marketplace, you know, in all of the efforts that we bring to bear on that, the second part of it is, is around open CMSIS, and, and open CDI CMSIS, which is really, which is really about standardizing aspects about how software is delivered to an IOT device packaged and delivered. It's also about things like how any our thoughts. So any real-time operating system or any cloud service provider, you know, can be accessed from the device. So the idea is, is that a, you know, today, if you think about the way that this works, if you're a Silicon provider, you're a fiber manufacturer, you have to go off and support multiple different clubs, service providers. You may want to support multiple different operating systems, depending on you know, which, which, you know, which particular OS you're interested in. And, and what we're trying to do with, with, with, with projects Centaury is to specify key attributes of the services that exist down on your, on your Silicon, so that you can more easily integrate with, you know, whatever OS you want, whatever service provider you want on whatever hardware you want. It's still allowing plenty of differentiation. So it's not like we're saying, Hey, this is how you actually do over the air updates. For example, rather, what it's saying is that, Hey, this device supports over the updates. If you're going to ask for that service, here's how you present yourself. And that allows a level of software portability that you just didn't have in the IOT space previously. >> Right. And then the licensee can tune that to their specific use case and add their own value. Right. And so, again, go back to the thing we talked about before they, they know what's going to work and they can give it to the, Foundry and say, make this according to the spec and the Foundry's ready for it. That's how we've seen such massive volumes. I want to ask you about security. You, you touched on that. Do you leverage realms in this, or is that not in scope? Is that like. >> No, that's more of a, that right now, that's more focused on our A-class and V9 stuff. And you actually asked about project Cassini a little bit earlier. You know, project Cassini is really our initiative, which is focused on our A-class devices. So our A-class devices typically run a, you know, what I'll call a rich OS like a Linux or whatever. And it's really designed for allowing the level of virtualization and allowing a level of, of, of, of, of shared resources between different containers on, on an A-class type system that you can easily deploy and, and leverage the A-class device resources from, by, by different, by different workloads. >> The reason I asked, I'm trying to Mohamed connect the dots between mobile as kind of a blueprint, which can occur for IOT. I think that's maybe, but even some of the stuff that's going on in the data center, it's particularly as it relates to data intensive workloads, some of the work that we've seen that, you know, AWS do, and, you know, offloads, we're seeing, you know, all the new, like all the modern storage and networking and security offloads in the data center are moving to ARM. And it just seems like the use cases for ARM are exploding. And I'm wonder if he can help us connect the dots into IOT, which could, which could do or follow all of these markets. >> Yeah. I mean, what's interesting what we saw happen in mobile and what we saw happen in the infrastructure, what we see happening in both of those markets is that by creating a level of consistency in how software can be deployed on these devices, whether that's with the, you know, with the mobile phone and the ARM ecosystem and a mobile phone, or all the way through to the data center, what you've done is you unleashed a tremendous amount of innovation, you know, in the mobile space. There's something like 3 million apps out there today, right. And thousands of different smartphone models, you know, could you imagine if every one of those app developers had to test their application on every mobile phone in order to be sure that it worked, you know, you'd have a lot less innovation, a lot less, you know, a lot less, a lot less scale and a lot less, a lot less applications. So what we're talking about here is trying to unleash that same amount of value by creating that consistent. So that's a clear lesson we learned from, from both mobile and from, from infrastructure. The other thing that's clear is that a lot of these markets you've got, back to the idea of, of parallelized development flows and, and subsystems, and that's directly kind of what we're seeing in, in what we're putting forth in, with, ARM total solutions. >> Yeah. You know, it's kind of buzz wordy and people who watch my program know I'm a kind of a fan of the R model, but, but you talk about the new IOT economy. In my view, you're actually an underpinning of that economy. I mean, everybody talks about it, this multi-trillion dollar opportunity, but, but how do you think about this, this new economy? And we've obviously touched on it, but IOT, the edge it's really taking, taking shape now and becoming real. >> Yeah. I, I think that the idea here, when we talk about a new IOT economy, very clearly what I'm referring to is this idea that, you know, you've got today, you've got a lot of potential, which is lost because, you know, your you're limited to just the, a vertically integrated solution. Software is vertically integrated on the, on the specific hardware and the, the barriers and the cost to investing in that hardware from a software perspective is just, it's just too high given, given the sort of scale that you get with that software after the fact. So we're addressing that in two vectors or simplifying it, so that lots of different developers, you know, that developer that's sitting at the coffee shop can spin up an AWS instance with our ARM virtual hardware on it and write an app while they're sitting there. And at the same time, they can access a much broader set of devices than they would've been able to otherwise, if it's not, you know, it's not dissimilar, you know, I hate to keep going back to mobile, but it's not dissimilar from the mobile space where if you think about 15 years ago, when all of the applications that were written on your mobile phone were written by the phone manufacturer, you had a limited number of applications, and sure a phones were a great thing, but it was nothing like it is today. It was a mobile phone economy. Today, when you think about mobile, you know, mobile really underpins the financial economy. It underpins, you know, transport, the transportation economy. It underpins how we communicate with everybody, with social networks and it, and it's really taken a sort of life of its own in lots of different ways. It's not really a mobile economy. It is the economy. And we think IOT can be even larger than that. Right? >> Yeah. You know what I mean? Our industry has a tendency to hype a lot of new waves, but they certainly didn't, over-hype mobile. I mean, everybody, you know, migrated toward mobile. That's why I think it's such a relevant conversation. And so adaptable to IOT at the cloud as well, data as well. You know, they, they were probably under hyped. If anything, social, maybe we can put over here in a bucket, there's a lot, a lot of Friction. But those other three in terms of sort of enterprise and the edge. And I think, you know, from, from what we can see ARM has really in the ecosystem has, has completely and permanently altered the shape of the industry. It's a very exciting time. And I think the best is yet to come Mohamed. I really appreciate you coming to the cube. Thanks so much. >> No, I, I really, I really appreciate, I think thanks for taking the time. All right. >> Thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (casual uplifting music)

>> From Bahrain, it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to the Cube coverage here in Bahrain, the Middle East, with AWS Summit celebrating the opening of their new region and all the economic development going on around it. A lot of change, cloud computing changing the landscape for startups, businesses, and the government for Cloud First. Mohamed Khalifa, senior manager, Economic Development Board for ICT. Welcome to the Cube, good to see you. >> John, it's a pleasure to see you again, and be here on the Cube with you all. >> You know, we're excited, second year the Cube's been here. What a stark contrast. Now, it's not just talk of the Amazon region being open, it's operational, startup scene is more dynamic, you guys are a big anchor in all of this. >> Absolutely. >> Give us the update. >> So, in the last year, the startup scene in Bahrain has grown by about 100% of where it previously was. Part of that's driven by the fact that Amazon is here, and the region is changing as a whole. You have Microsoft and Google and other companies all realizing the potential in this region. That's driven by the fact that there's a 40% year on year growth in cloud businesses, and uptake of those businesses as well. So, the talent pool as a result, is increasing in scope, and people are popping out of these companies and government ministries, and are energized to now start their own businesses. Aside to that, what you've started to see in Bahrain and the region as a whole, is a firm interest in governments in introducing regulations that are meaningful to these companies. Now, the way the governments work in these regions, especially in a country as small as Bahrain, is that we're able to legislate very fast on shore, and we're able to do that with a very close ear to the ground on what businesses need, and what they're requesting. So, it almost functions as a corporation and a enterprise that wants to do best for its subsidiary corporations. >> And you guys want to take care of the citizens as well, you guys listen to the societal impacts, the demographics a lot of young people. >> Absolutely. >> So the news around a cloud computing degree, bachelors degree, four years, or one years, that's going to help. >> Yeah. >> The entrepreneurial equation, you guys have been really the stewards of that. >> Mhmm. >> How is that going, is there any plans to have entrepreneurship being more formally taught in the universities, how do you guys think about the entrepreneurship equation? >> So, there are definitely thousands of people right now going through cloud training courses, because we see that as being the future. We ourselves, as a government, offer to make all of that training free. So, insofar as a person wants to attain a certification or a company wants to train one of their employees, that whole process is 100% free, granted by the governments of Bahrain. The reason why we do that, is because the human capital in the country, is seen as our single greatest asset, more so than anything else. We're not a heavy oil economy, oil is 17 and a half percent of GDP, financial services is similar level, tourism is a similar level, manufacturing is a similar level. So for us, if it's not oil, it's people. And people are what will generate everything in those subsectors that's relevant. So for us, the training programs that we're instituting with the universities, or the vocational training providers, et cetera, are all key to this. >> The insourcing strategy is something you're seeing that technology's enabling. I mean, we're seeing with corporations, they're building their own stacks. >> Yeah. >> They're building developers in house, you guys as a country saying, "hey, you know what, "we're not going to outsource to others, "we're going to build our sovereignty with the people." >> Yeah. >> This is about talent. >> Yeah. >> Now the younger generation, they want to move fast. (laughing) >> Yeah. >> They don't want anything passed down from the old guard, older folks like my age. >> Absolutely. >> They want speed, they want freedom to develop, and build something. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Absolutely. >> What's your take on that? What's the sentiment around that culture, the younger generation, in terms of app developing technology and all them. >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit split. You have a government that's very interested in insourcing. A lot of the private sector still does a lot of outsourcing. So, there's a happy middle between them. We try to make the visa policy quite straightforward for they guys that want to bring talent from abroad, where they can't fill that talent up locally. And there is a place for companies like Systems Integrators, et cetera, to fill those gaps up. But at the same time, insourcing remains key. As I mentioned, government is fully developing their own capability, and is primarily doing that by pulling students out of universities, and through those programs, and advising universities on what those programs should look like, to make sure that there's a match, and a synergy, between where we see the future of technology and the future of the services we're building with, you know, what the youth are learning. And the reason I talk about government, and it's typically not nice to talk about government as a fast mover, but in this part of the world, government tends to move faster than business when it comes down to innovation. >> Yeah. >> It's just, it's a weird flip that's happened between what you see in parts of the west, and what you see in this part of the world. So, what the changes that we make on the government side. >> Mhmm. >> End up being flags that indicate to the private sector some of the changes they're going to start seeing. >> So, that's the regulate fast piece. >> Yeah. >> So moving fast, set the pace for business, but not meddle in the startups world. >> Absolutely. >> We had a good chat with the central bank. >> Yeah. >> Same thing, they did some quick things, they got a sandbox, they do quick certifications. So I got to ask you the next question, startups. Nurturing them, attracting them, getting people excited by them, any new plans? You guys have any new programs? >> Yeah. So, right now, we've made the cloud crediting for businesses that are setting up in Bahrain, up to a certain cap, 100% free for them to use cloud credits on any cloud hosting provider basing operations in Bahrain. So, the reason we do that, is because we think, we already have a series of incentives, that already pay up to 50% of their capex and opex, we just increased the cloud side because it actually made more financial sense for us as a government. >> Yeah. >> And it drove innovation across these sectors and these industries. Aside from that, and aside from the capacity building, we've changed a series of laws, that resolve a couple of things. One is, the safety of investors in these companies, and the safety of their founders. Which include things like, including chapter 11 protection under the law, introducing laws against anti-competitive behavior at the governments level, and a few other sectors. But the more interesting thing for me, aside from those, I mean, that's obvious, right? >> Yeah. >> You want to help people fail, and you want to help remove friction from the investment environment, and you want people to build up capacity in training. But aside from that, the more interesting things that we're doing around open banking, APIs, so we're the first country in the region that has now set up a process for opening up all our banks APIs. That basically means at an infrastructure level, financial services companies can now build on top of banks, and create value added services. It's the same thing with the government, where the governments has now started building API bridges, using Amazon, and I'll give you one example of the first value added product that's come out of that. We've just released a product called EKYC, electronic KYC, entirely built out on the block chain, it's the first of its kind, globally. And in real terms, what that does, is it lowers the lifetime costs of doing electronic KYC from about $8,000 to a per-transaction cost of about $2 per transaction. So, it's a real meaningful difference for these companies, and the reason why you could deploy something like that so quickly and so effectively is because of the fact that the governments building on APIs and opening up some of that infrastructure, and the central bank is asking banks to do so as well. >> API standards, money, software innovation, kind of interesting fintech innovation strategy. >> Yeah. >> Kind of a data control plane, but the banks are protected, 'cause they're just exposing APIs. >> Yeah. >> Entrepreneurs can innovate right custom applications. >> Absolutely. >> Is that the thinking? >> Absolutely, so that combined with the fintech sandbox, which I think the central MAT bank must have talked you about. >> Yeah, it's phenomenal. >> Allows us to kind of regulate the licensing of the fintech products. So, it's safe for consumers, and it's safe for banks as well. Along side the fact that we're opening up the technical layer of the banks into these companies. >> You know, I think they got that right, I think you guys have a great collaboration equation, balancing regulatory and innovation. And the startups are going to take advantage of that. When the region's up and running, which it is, and starts humming along, you're going to start to see a flywheel of startups. >> Absolutely. >> The question that is on my mind, that I'd love to get your thoughts on is, the ecosystem support, because you said trust, and you guys have telegraphed and postured very trustfully as a country. >> Yeah. >> To entrepreneurs, that's clear. Can that ecosystem get localized? The service providers, the law firms, the angel investors, you know, the stakeholders that are always around. 'Cause people got to fall and they got to fail. >> Yeah. >> But they got to get back up again. They need that system of nurturing. >> Yeah. >> What's your take on all-- >> We spent a lot of time, my role as an economic developing board, is very much focused around keeping our ears close to the ground with respect to companies. And we listen to what both younger companies and smaller companies and large companies need. And the way we've looked at it, is why try to legislate along the lines of the fastest growing, most innovative companies, which tend to be these startups and SMEs in the country. And we tend to work, our role, is really what we call team Bahrain, and that strategy is to nurture a combination of all the regulators, >> Uh-huh. >> All the universities, all the schools, every single player, all the private sector players, students, into a collectivized understanding of where we want to go. And based on that, we constantly have an ongoing conversation with everybody, including the VCs about how we can meaningfully make impacts. >> Yeah. >> So just on the VC point, we recently set up and will have fund to funds, which is $100 million fund of funds, it puts money directly into venture capital funds, which then can redeploy that investment back into startups. The only request that we typically have for that fund, is that they set up a presence in Bahrain. In so far as they're going to receive capital. What that means is that there's going to be a critical mass in the country of venture capital funds that are now closer to those startups, and in a direct conversation with every part of society, whether it is government regulation all the way down to private sector. >> So you got some capital enablement there. >> Absolutely. >> That's awesome. >> We'll see about the capital markets, and you guys some developments goin' on there. >> Yeah. >> Final question I want to get your thoughts. From last year to this year, in looking forward, Mohamed, what are you most excited about right now? >> I'm excited about a whole lot. >> Come on, give me the top two, top three. >> So, the top three, there's stuff I can't talk about to be honest. >> Oh come on! (laughing) >> And you're going to see it come out in the next month. So there's stuff that's going to come out with respect to capital markets, and simplifying the investment. >> Yeah. >> Removing friction from the investment environment, and introducing greater amounts of volume. The other thing that I'm very excited about continues to be the capacity building that we're doing in universities with the AWS Educate program, that's continuing to expand in Bahrain. >> Mhmm. >> As well as other programs beyond AWS Educate, run by companies like Microsoft, >> Mhmm. >> Google with their development program. So there's a lot of fantastic capacity building work going on. And then I would also say, it's back to what I was saying earlier, it's just excited to see what companies are going to start building as we're opening up the infrastructure. We're working very closely with them and the regulators to make sure that as they build on top, they're not stopped by regulation, that the regulation constantly understands what they're trying to achieve. >> I like what you talk about, you got an ear to the ground, you're listening to what's going on in the marketplace, it's going to be, I think a lot of software surprises are going to come. >> Absolutely. >> You're going to start to see some, you know, what look like weird ideas turn into the best thing. Who would have thought that Airbnb would be successful. >> Yeah. >> Their original business plan was putting cots on the ground and selling cereal. >> Yeah. >> Now, they've changed the hotel industry. We're looking forward to seeing you guys do a great job, and we appreciate you supporting the Cube, to come here, it's awesome. >> Thanks for having me. >> And we hope to have the Cube in Bahrain next year as the team, covering you guys, and documenting what's going on. >> We look forward to continue to work with the team. >> Well, thank you very much, the Cube coverage at AWS Summit, Bahrain, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. Be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante. >> The term Supercloud is somewhat new, but the concepts behind it have been bubbling for years, early last decade when NIST put forth a definition of cloud computing it said services had to be accessible over a public network essentially cutting the on-prem crowd out of the cloud conversation. Now a guy named Chuck Hollis, who was a field CTO at EMC at the time and a prolific blogger objected to that criterion and laid out his vision for what he termed a private cloud. Now, in that post, he showed a workload running both on premises and in a public cloud sharing the underlying resources in an automated and seamless manner. What later became known more broadly as hybrid cloud that vision as we now know, really never materialized, and we were left with multi-cloud sets of largely incompatible and disconnected cloud services running in separate silos. The point is what Hollis laid out, IE the ability to abstract underlying infrastructure complexity and run workloads across multiple heterogeneous estates with an identical experience is what super cloud is all about. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon cube insights powered by ETR and this breaking analysis. We share what we hope to learn from super cloud 22 next week, next Tuesday at 9:00 AM Pacific. The community is gathering for Supercloud 22 an inclusive pilot symposium hosted by theCUBE and made possible by VMware and other founding partners. It's a one day single track event with more than 25 speakers digging into the architectural, the technical, structural and business aspects of Supercloud. This is a hybrid event with a live program in the morning running out of our Palo Alto studio and pre-recorded content in the afternoon featuring industry leaders, technologists, analysts and investors up and down the technology stack. Now, as I said up front the seeds of super cloud were sewn early last decade. After the very first reinvent we published our Amazon gorilla post, that scene in the upper right corner here. And we talked about how to differentiate from Amazon and form ecosystems around industries and data and how the cloud would change IT permanently. And then up in the upper left we put up a post on the old Wikibon Wiki. Yeah, it used to be a Wiki. Check out my hair by the way way no gray, that's how long ago this was. And we talked about in that post how to compete in the Amazon economy. And we showed a graph of how IT economics were changing. And cloud services had marginal economics that looked more like software than hardware at scale. And this would reset, we said opportunities for both technology sellers and buyers for the next 20 years. And this came into sharper focus in the ensuing years culminating in a milestone post by Greylock's Jerry Chen called Castles in the Cloud. It was an inspiration and catalyst for us using the term Supercloud in John Furrier's post prior to reinvent 2021. So we started to flesh out this idea of Supercloud where companies of all types build services on top of hyperscale infrastructure and across multiple clouds, going beyond multicloud 1.0, if you will, which was really a symptom, as we said, many times of multi-vendor at least that's what we argued. And despite its fuzzy definition, it resonated with people because they knew something was brewing, Keith Townsend the CTO advisor, even though he frankly, wasn't a big fan of the buzzy nature of the term Supercloud posted this awesome Blackboard on Twitter take a listen to how he framed it. Please play the clip. >> Is VMware the right company to make the super cloud work, term that Wikibon came up with to describe the taking of discreet services. So it says RDS from AWS, cloud compute engines from GCP and authentication from Azure to build SaaS applications or enterprise applications that connect back to your data center, is VMware's cross cloud vision 'cause it is just a vision today, the right approach. Or should you be looking towards companies like HashiCorp to provide this overall capability that we all agree, or maybe you don't that we need in an enterprise comment below your thoughts. >> So I really like that Keith has deep practitioner knowledge and lays out a couple of options. I especially like the examples he uses of cloud services. He recognizes the need for cross cloud services and he notes this capability is aspirational today. Remember this was eight or nine months ago and he brings HashiCorp into the conversation as they're one of the speakers at Supercloud 22 and he asks the community, what they think, the thing is we're trying to really test out this concept and people like Keith are instrumental as collaborators. Now I'm sure you're not surprised to hear that mot everyone is on board with the Supercloud meme, in particular Charles Fitzgerald has been a wonderful collaborator just by his hilarious criticisms of the concept. After a couple of super cloud posts, Charles put up his second rendition of "Supercloudifragilisticexpialidoucious". I mean, it's just beautiful, but to boot, he put up this picture of Baghdad Bob asking us to just stop, Bob's real name is Mohamed Said al-Sahaf. He was the minister of propaganda for Sadam Husein during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he made these outrageous claims of, you know US troops running in fear and putting down their arms and so forth. So anyway, Charles laid out several frankly very helpful critiques of Supercloud which has led us to really advance the definition and catalyze the community's thinking on the topic. Now, one of his issues and there are many is we said a prerequisite of super cloud was a super PaaS layer. Gartner's Lydia Leong chimed in saying there were many examples of successful PaaS vendors built on top of a hyperscaler some having the option to run in more than one cloud provider. But the key point we're trying to explore is the degree to which that PaaS layer is purpose built for a specific super cloud function. And not only runs in more than one cloud provider, Lydia but runs across multiple clouds simultaneously creating an identical developer experience irrespective of a state. Now, maybe that's what Lydia meant. It's hard to say from just a tweet and she's a sharp lady, so, and knows more about that market, that PaaS market, than I do. But to the former point at Supercloud 22, we have several examples. We're going to test. One is Oracle and Microsoft's recent announcement to run database services on OCI and Azure, making them appear as one rather than use an off the shelf platform. Oracle claims to have developed a capability for developers specifically built to ensure high performance low latency, and a common experience for developers across clouds. Another example we're going to test is Snowflake. I'll be interviewing Benoit Dageville co-founder of Snowflake to understand the degree to which Snowflake's recent announcement of an application development platform is perfect built, purpose built for the Snowflake data cloud. Is it just a plain old pass, big whoop as Lydia claims or is it something new and innovative, by the way we invited Charles Fitz to participate in Supercloud 22 and he decline saying in addition to a few other somewhat insulting things there's definitely interesting new stuff brewing that isn't traditional cloud or SaaS but branding at all super cloud doesn't help either. Well, indeed, we agree with part of that and we'll see if it helps advanced thinking and helps customers really plan for the future. And that's why Supercloud 22 has going to feature some of the best analysts in the business in The Great Supercloud Debate. In addition to Keith Townsend and Maribel Lopez of Lopez research and Sanjeev Mohan from former Gartner analyst and principal at SanjMo participated in this session. Now we don't want to mislead you. We don't want to imply that these analysts are hopping on the super cloud bandwagon but they're more than willing to go through the thought experiment and mental exercise. And, we had a great conversation that you don't want to miss. Maribel Lopez had what I thought was a really excellent way to think about this. She used TCP/IP as an historical example, listen to what she said. >> And Sanjeev Mohan has some excellent thoughts on the feasibility of an open versus de facto standard getting us to the vision of Supercloud, what's possible and what's likely now, again, I don't want to imply that these analysts are out banging the Supercloud drum. They're not necessarily doing that, but they do I think it's fair to say believe that something new is bubbling and whether it's called Supercloud or multicloud 2.0 or cross cloud services or whatever name you choose it's not multicloud of the 2010s and we chose Supercloud. So our goal here is to advance the discussion on what's next in cloud and Supercloud is meant to be a term to describe that future of cloud and specifically the cloud opportunities that can be built on top of hyperscale, compute, storage, networking machine learning, and other services at scale. And that is why we posted this piece on Answering the top 10 questions about Supercloud. Many of which were floated by Charles Fitzgerald and others in the community. Why does the industry need another term what's really new and different? And what is hype? What specific problems does Supercloud solve? What are the salient characteristics of Supercloud? What's different beyond multicloud? What is a super pass? Is it necessary to have a Supercloud? How will applications evolve on superclouds? What workloads will run? All these questions will be addressed in detail as a way to advance the discussion and help practitioners and business people understand what's real today. And what's possible with cloud in the near future. And one other question we'll address is who will build super clouds? And what new entrance we can expect. This is an ETR graphic that we showed in a previous episode of breaking analysis, and it lays out some of the companies we think are building super clouds or in a position to do so, by the way the Y axis shows net score or spending velocity and the X axis depicts presence in the ETR survey of more than 1200 respondents. But the key callouts to this slide in addition to some of the smaller firms that aren't yet showing up in the ETR data like Chaossearch and Starburst and Aviatrix and Clumio but the really interesting additions are industry players Walmart with Azure, Capital one and Goldman Sachs with AWS, Oracle, with Cerner. These we think are early examples, bubbling up of industry clouds that will eventually become super clouds. So we'll explore these and other trends to get the community's input on how this will all play out. These are the things we hope you'll take away from Supercloud 22. And we have an amazing lineup of experts to answer your question. Technologists like Kit Colbert, Adrian Cockcroft, Mariana Tessel, Chris Hoff, Will DeForest, Ali Ghodsi, Benoit Dageville, Muddu Sudhakar and many other tech athletes, investors like Jerry Chen and In Sik Rhee the analyst we featured earlier, Paula Hansen talking about go to market in a multi-cloud world Gee Rittenhouse talking about cloud security, David McJannet, Bhaskar Gorti of Platform9 and many, many more. And of course you, so please go to theCUBE.net and register for Supercloud 22, really lightweight reg. We're not doing this for lead gen. We're doing it for collaboration. If you sign in you can get the chat and ask questions in real time. So don't miss this inaugural event Supercloud 22 on August 9th at 9:00 AM Pacific. We'll see you there. Okay. That's it for today. Thanks for watching. Thank you to Alex Myerson who's on production and manages the podcast. Kristen Martin and Cheryl Knight. They help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at SiliconANGLE. Does some really wonderful editing. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, just search breaking analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and Siliconangle.com. And you can email me at David.Vellantesiliconangle.com or DM me at Dvellante, comment on my LinkedIn post. Please do check out ETR.AI for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you next week in Palo Alto at Supercloud 22 or next time on breaking analysis. (calm music)