>>Yeah. >>Hello. Welcome to the Special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John for a host of the Cube. We have a conversation around a I for the enterprise. What this means I got two great guests. John Finelli, Vice President, virtual GPU at NVIDIA and Maurizio D V D C T o University of Pisa in Italy. Uh, Practitioner, customer partner, um, got VM world coming up. A lot of action happening in the enterprise. John. Great to see you. Nice to meet you. Remotely coming in from Italy for this remote. >>John. Thanks for having us on again. >>Yeah. Nice to meet >>you. I wish we could be in person face to face, but that's coming soon. Hopefully, John, you were talking. We were just talking about before we came on camera about AI for the enterprise. And the last time I saw you in person was in Cuba interview. We were talking about some of the work you guys were doing in AI. It's gotten so much stronger and broader and the execution of an video, the success you're having set the table for us. What is the ai for the enterprise conversation frame? >>Sure. So, um, we, uh we've been working with enterprises today on how they can deliver a I or explore AI or get involved in a I, um uh, in a standard way in the way that they're used to managing and operating their data centre. Um, writing on top of you know, they're Dell servers with B M or V sphere. Um, so that AI feels like a standard workload that night organisation can deliver to their engineers and data scientists. And then the flip side of that, of course, is ensuring that engineers and data scientists get the workloads position to them or have access to them in the way that they need them. So it's no longer a trouble ticket that you have to submit to, I t and you know, count the hours or days or weeks until you you can get new hardware, right By being able to pull it into the mainstream data centre. I can enable self service provisioning for those folks. So we actually we make a I more consumable or easier to manage for I t administrators and then for the engineers and the data scientists, etcetera. We make it easy for them to get access to those resources so they can get to their work right away. >>Quite progress in the past two years. Congratulations on that and looking. It's only the beginning is Day one Mercy. I want to ask you about what's going on as the CTO University piece of what's happening down there. Tell us a little bit about what's going on. You have the centre of excellence there. What does that mean? What does that include? >>Uh, you know, uh, University of Peace. Are you one of one of the biggest and oldest in Italy? Uh, if you have to give you some numbers is around 50 K students and 3000 staff between, uh, professors resurgence and that cabinet receive staff. So I we are looking into data operation of the centres and especially supports for scientific computing. And, uh, this is our our daily work. Let's say this, uh, taking us a lot of times, but, you know, we are able to, uh, reserve a merchant percentage of our time, Uh, for r and D, And this is where the centre of excellence is, Uh, is coming out. Uh, so we are always looking into new kinds of technologies that we can put together to build new solutions to do next generation computing gas. We always say we are looking for the right partners to do things together. And at the end of the day is the work that is good for us is good for our partners and typically, uh, ends in a production system for our university. So is the evolution of the scientific computing environment that we have. >>Yeah. And you guys have a great track record and reputation of, you know, R and D, testing software, hardware combinations and sharing those best practises, you know, with covid impact in the world. Certainly we see it on the supply chain side. Uh, and John, we heard Jensen, your CEO and video talk multiple keynotes. Now about software, uh, and video being a software company. Dell, you mentioned Dale and VM Ware. You know, Covid has brought this virtualisation world back. And now hybrid. Those are words that we used basically in the text industry. Now it's you're hearing hybrid and virtualisation kicked around in real world. So it's ironic that vm ware and El, uh, and the Cube eventually all of us together doing more virtual stuff. So with covid impacting the world, how does that change you guys? Because software is more important. You gotta leverage the hardware you got, Whether it's Dell or in the cloud, this is a huge change. >>Yeah. So, uh, as you mentioned organisations and enterprises, you know, they're looking at things differently now, Um, you know, the idea of hybrid. You know, when you talk to tech folks and we think about hybrid, we always think about you know, how the different technology works. Um, what we're hearing from customers is hybrid, you know, effectively translates into, you know, two days in the office, three days remote, you know, in the future when they actually start going back to the office. So hybrid work is actually driving the need for hybrid I t. Or or the ability to share resources more effectively. Um, And to think about having resources wherever you are, whether you're working from home or you're in the office that day, you need to have access to the same resources. And that's where you know the the ability to virtualize those resources and provide that access makes that hybrid part seamless >>mercy What's your world has really changed. You have students and faculty. You know, Things used to be easy in the old days. Physical in this network. That network now virtual there. You must really be having him having impact. >>Yeah, we have. We have. Of course. As you can imagine, a big impact, Uh, in any kind of the i t offering, uh, from, uh, design new networking technologies, deploying new networking technologies, uh, new kind of operation we find. We found it at them. We were not able anymore to do burr metal operations directly, but, uh, from the i t point of view, uh, we were how can I say prepared in the sense that, uh, we ran from three or four years parallel, uh, environment. We have bare metal and virtual. So as you can imagine, traditional bare metal HPC cluster D g d g X machines, uh, multi GPU s and so on. But in parallel, we have developed, uh, visual environment that at the beginning was, as you can imagine, used, uh, for traditional enterprise application, or VD. I, uh, we have a significant significant arise on a farm with the grid for remote desktop remote pull station that we are using for, for example, uh, developing a virtual classroom or visual go stations. And so this is was typical the typical operation that we did the individual world. But in the same infrastructure, we were able to develop first HPC individual borders of utilisation of the HPC resources for our researchers and, uh, at the end, ai ai offering and ai, uh, software for our for our researchers, you can imagine our vehicle infrastructure as a sort of white board where we are able to design new solution, uh, in a fast way without losing too much performance. And in the case of the AI, we will see that we the performance are almost the same at the bare metal. But with all the flexibility that we needed in the covid 19 world and in the future world, too. >>So a couple things that I want to get John's thoughts as well performance you mentioned you mentioned hybrid virtual. How does VM Ware and NVIDIA fit into all this as you put this together, okay, because you bring up performance. That's now table stakes. He's leading scale and performance are really on the table. everyone's looking at it. How does VM ware an NVIDIA John fit in with the university's work? >>Sure. So, um, I think you're right when it comes to, uh, you know, enterprises or mainstream enterprises beginning their initial foray into into a I, um there are, of course, as performance in scale and also kind of ease of use and familiarity are all kind of things that come into play in terms of when an enterprise starts to think about it. And, um, we have a history with VM Ware working on this technology. So in 2019, we introduced our virtual compute server with VM Ware, which allowed us to effectively virtual is the Cuda Compute driver at last year's VM World in 2020 the CEOs of both companies got together and made an announcement that we were going to bring a I R entire video AI platform to the Enterprise on top of the sphere. And we did that, Um, starting in March this year, we we we finalise that with the introduction of GM wears V, Sphere seven, update two and the early access at the time of NVIDIA ai Enterprise. And, um, we have now gone to production with both of those products. And so customers, Um, like the University of Pisa are now using our production capabilities. And, um, whenever you virtualize in particular and in something like a I where performances is really important. Um, the first question that comes up is, uh doesn't work and And how quickly does it work Or or, you know, from an I t audience? A lot of times you get the How much did it slow down? And and and so we We've worked really closely from an NVIDIA software perspective and a bm wear perspective. And we really talk about in media enterprise with these fair seven as optimist, certified and supported. And the net of that is, we've been able to run the standard industry benchmarks for single node as well as multi note performance, with about maybe potentially a 2% degradation in performance, depending on the workload. Of course, it's very different, but but effectively being able to trade that performance for the accessibility, the ease of use, um, and even using things like we realise, automation for self service for the data scientists, Um and so that's kind of how we've been pulling it together for the market. >>Great stuff. Well, I got to ask you. I mean, people have that reaction of about the performance. I think you're being polite. Um, around how you said that shows the expectation. It's kind of sceptical, uh, and so I got to ask you, the impact of this is pretty significant. What is it now that customers can do that? They couldn't or couldn't feel they had before? Because if the expectations as well as it worked well, I mean, there's a fast means. It works, but like performance is always concerned. What's different now? What what's the bottom line impact on what country do now that they couldn't do before. >>So the bottom line impact is that AI is now accessible for the enterprise across there. Called their mainstream data centre, enterprises typically use consistent building blocks like the Dell VX rail products, right where they have to use servers that are common standard across the data centre. And now, with NVIDIA Enterprise and B M R V sphere, they're able to manage their AI in the same way that they're used to managing their data centre today. So there's no retraining. There's no separate clusters. There isn't like a shadow I t. So this really allows an enterprise to efficiently deploy um, and cost effectively Deploy it, uh, it without because there's no performance degradation without compromising what their their their data scientists and researchers are looking for. And then the flip side is for the data science and researcher, um, using some of the self service automation that I spoke about earlier, they're able to get a virtual machine today that maybe as a half a GPU as their models grow, they do more exploring. They might get a full GPU or or to GPS in a virtual machine. And their environment doesn't change because it's all connected to the back end storage. And so for the for the developer and the researcher, um, it makes it seamless. So it's really kind of a win for both Nike and for the user. And again, University of Pisa is doing some amazing things in terms of the workloads that they're doing, Um, and, uh and, uh, and are validating that performance. >>Weigh in on this. Share your opinion on or your reaction to that, What you can do now that you couldn't do before. Could you share your experience? >>Our experience is, uh, of course, if you if you go to your, uh, data scientists or researchers, the idea of, uh, sacrificing four months to flexibility at the beginning is not so well accepted. It's okay for, uh, for the Eid management, As John was saying, you have people that is know how to deal with the virtual infrastructure, so nothing changed for them. But at the end of the day, we were able to, uh, uh, test with our data. Scientists are researchers veteran The performance of us almost similar around really 95% of the performance for the internal developer developer to our work clothes. So we are not dealing with benchmarks. We have some, uh, work clothes that are internally developed and apply to healthcare music generator or some other strange project that we have inside and were able to show that the performance on the beautiful and their metal world were almost the same. We, the addition that individual world, you are much more flexible. You are able to reconfigure every finger very fast. You are able to design solution for your researcher, uh, in a more flexible way. An effective way we are. We were able to use the latest technologies from Dell Technologies and Vidia. You can imagine from the latest power edge the latest cuts from NVIDIA. The latest network cards from NVIDIA, like the blue Field to the latest, uh, switches to set up an infrastructure that at the end of the day is our winning platform for our that aside, >>a great collaboration. Congratulations. Exciting. Um, get the latest and greatest and and get the new benchmarks out their new playbooks. New best practises. I do have to ask you marriage, if you don't mind me asking why Look at virtualizing ai workloads. What's the motivation? Why did you look at virtualizing ai work clothes? >>Oh, for the sake of flexibility Because, you know, uh, in the latest couple of years, the ai resources are never enough. So we are. If you go after the bare metal, uh, installation, you are going into, uh, a world that is developing very fastly. But of course, you can afford all the bare metal, uh, infrastructure that your data scientists are asking for. So, uh, we decided to integrate our view. Dual infrastructure with AI, uh, resources in order to be able to, uh, use in different ways in a more flexible way. Of course. Uh, we have a We have a two parallels world. We still have a bare metal infrastructure. We are growing the bare metal infrastructure. But at the same time, we are growing our vehicle infrastructure because it's flexible, because we because our our stuff, people are happy about how the platform behaviour and they know how to deal them so they don't have to learn anything new. So it's a sort of comfort zone for everybody. >>I mean, no one ever got hurt virtualizing things that makes it makes things go better faster building on on that workloads. John, I gotta ask you, you're on the end video side. You You see this real up close than video? Why do people look at virtualizing ai workloads is the unification benefit. I mean, ai implies a lot of things, implies you have access to data. It implies that silos don't exist. I mean, that doesn't mean that's hard. I mean, is this real people actually looking at this? How is it working? >>Yeah. So? So again, um you know for all the benefits and activity today AI brings a I can be pretty complex, right? It's complex software to set up and to manage. And, um, within the day I enterprise, we're really focusing in on ensuring that it's easier for organisations to use. For example Um, you know, I mentioned you know, we we had introduced a virtual compute server bcs, um uh, two years ago and and that that has seen some some really interesting adoption. Some, uh, enterprise use cases. But what we found is that at the driver level, um, it still wasn't accessible for the majority of enterprises. And so what we've done is we've built upon that with NVIDIA Enterprise and we're bringing in pre built containers that remove some of the complexities. You know, AI has a lot of open source components and trying to ensure that all the open source dependencies are resolved so you can get the AI developers and researchers and data scientists. Actually doing their work can be complex. And so what we've done is we've brought these pre built containers that allow you to do everything from your initial data preparation data science, using things like video rapids, um, to do your training, using pytorch and tensorflow to optimise those models using tensor rt and then to deploy them using what we call in video Triton Server Inference in server. Really helping that ai loop become accessible, that ai workflow as something that an enterprise can manage as part of their common core infrastructure >>having the performance and the tools available? It's just a huge godsend people love. That only makes them more productive and again scales of existing stuff. Okay, great stuff. Great insight. I have to ask, What's next one's collaboration? This is one of those better together situations. It's working. Um, Mauricio, what's next for your collaboration with Dell VM Ware and video? >>We will not be for sure. We will not stop here. Uh, we are just starting working on new things, looking for new development, uh, looking for the next beast. Come, uh, you know, the digital world is something that is moving very fast. Uh, and we are We will not We will not stop here because because they, um the outcome of this work has been a very big for for our research group. And what John was saying This the fact that all the software stock for AI are simplified is something that has been, uh, accepted. Very well, of course you can imagine researching is developing new things. But for people that needs, uh, integrated workflow. The work that NVIDIA has done in the development of software package in developing containers, that gives the end user, uh, the capabilities of running their workloads is really something that some years ago it was unbelievable. Now, everything is really is really easy to manage. >>John mentioned open source, obviously a big part of this. What are you going to? Quick, Quick follow if you don't mind. Are you going to share your results so people can can look at this so they can have an easier path to AI? >>Oh, yes, of course. All the all the work, The work that is done at an ideal level from University of Visa is here to be shared. So we we as, uh, as much as we have time to write down we are. We are trying to find a way to share the results of the work that we're doing with our partner, Dell and NVIDIA. So for sure will be shared >>well, except we'll get that link in the comments, John, your thoughts. Final thoughts on the on the on the collaboration, uh, with the University of Pisa and Delvian, where in the video is is all go next? >>Sure. So So with University of Pisa, We're you know, we're absolutely, uh, you know, grateful to Morocco and his team for the work they're doing and the feedback they're sharing with us. Um, we're learning a lot from them in terms of things we can do better and things that we can add to the product. So that's a fantastic collaboration. Um, I believe that Mauricio has a session at the M World. So if you want to actually learn about some of the workloads, um, you know, they're doing, like, music generation. They're doing, you know, covid 19 research. They're doing deep, multi level, uh, deep learning training. So there's some really interesting work there, and so we want to continue that partnership. University of Pisa, um, again, across all four of us, uh, university, NVIDIA, Dell and VM Ware. And then on the tech side, you know, for our enterprise customers, um, you know, one of the things that we actually didn't speak much about was, um I mentioned that the product is optimised certified and supported, and I think that support cannot be understated. Right? So as enterprises start to move into these new areas, they want to know that they can pick up the phone and call in video or VM ware. Adele, and they're going to get support for these new workloads as they're running them. Um, we were also continuing, uh, you know, to to think about we spent a lot of time today on, like, the developer side of things and developing ai. But the flip side of that, of course, is that when those ai apps are available or ai enhanced apps, right, Pretty much every enterprise app today is adding a I capabilities all of our partners in the enterprise software space and so you can think of a beady eye enterprises having a runtime component so that as you deploy your applications into the data centre, they're going to be automatically take advantage of the GPS that you have there. And so we're seeing this, uh, future as you're talking about the collaboration going forward, where the standard data centre building block still maintains and is going to be something like a VX rail two U server. But instead of just being CPU storage and RAM, they're all going to go with CPU, GPU, storage and RAM. And that's going to be the norm. And every enterprise application is going to be infused with AI and be able to take advantage of GPS in that scenario. >>Great stuff, ai for the enterprise. This is a great QB conversation. Just the beginning. We'll be having more of these virtualizing ai workloads is real impacts data scientists impacts that compute the edge, all aspects of the new environment we're all living in. John. Great to see you, Maurizio here to meet you and all the way in Italy looking for the meeting in person and good luck in your session. I just got a note here on the session. It's at VM World. Uh, it's session 22 63 I believe, um And so if anyone's watching, Want to check that out? Um, love to hear more. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Thanks for having us. Thanks to >>its acute conversation. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We'll talk to you soon. Yeah,

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to the CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm talking next with Sanzio Bassini, the Head of High Performance Computing at Cineca, at DELL technologies customer. Sanzio, welcome to the CUBE. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure, it's a pleasure. >> Likewise, nice to see you. So tell us a little bit about Cineca. This is a large computing center, but a very large Italian nonprofit consortium. Tell us about it. >> Yes, Cineca been founded 50 years ago, from the university systems in Italy. For a statutory mission, which is to support, the scientific discovery, and the industry innovations, using the High Performance Computing and the correlated methodologies like a, Artificial Intelligence, which is one of the, you see the more, in a, in a adopted in those days, but together with the big data processing and and simulation. Yes, we are a consortium, which means that this is a private not-for-profit organizations. Currently, our member of the consortium, almost all the universities in Italy and also all the national agencies for those selected structures. Uh. The main quarter of Cineca is in Bologna, which is in the heart Nation, with the bunch of presence in Milan, in Rome and in Naples, so we are a consultation organization. >> And I also read that you were, are the top 10 out of the top 500 of the world's fastest super computers. That's a pretty big accomplishment. >> Yes. That is a part of our institutional missions, the last 10 to 15 years we have been to say, frequent flyers in the top 10. There been at least two, three systems that have been ranked at the top 10. Apart, the.., whatever would be the meaning of such an advance market, there's a lot of its criticalities. We are well aware. The idea is that we're enabling the scientific discovery, by means of providing the most advanced systems and the co-designing, the most advanced HPC systems to promote and support the, what is the, excellence in science. And that being part of European high-performance computing IT system. That is the case. >> Excellent. Now, talk to me about some of the challenges that Cineca is trying to solve in particular, the Human Brain Project. Talk to us a little bit about that and how you're leveraging high-performance computing to accelerate scientific discovery. >> Um, The Human Brain Project is one of the flagship project that has been co-founded by the European commission and that the participating member states. Is not as another situations that are undertaking, it's definitely a joint collaboration between members states and the European commission. There are two different right now, flagships together with another, that is in progress, which is that the quantum of flagship, the first two flagship abroad that that has been lost. The commission for operation with the participating states has been one on the digraph vein on which also we are participating in directly together with the CNR, is the national business counselor. And the second for which we are core partners of the HPC that is, the Human Brain Project. That, that is a big flagship, one million offer, of newer investment, co-founded by the participating states and that the European commission. The project it's going to set up, in what to do be the, third strategic grant agreement that they will go over the next three years, the good, the complete that the, the whole process. Then we see what is going to happen at Africa. We thought that their would be some others progress offer these big projects. It's project that would combine both the technology issues, like the designing the off high-performance computing systems that meet the requirements of the community and the big challenge, scientific challenges correlated to the physiological functions of the human brain center, including the different farm show survey to do with the behavior of the human brain. A from the pathological point of view, from the physiological point of view, that better understand the could be the way for, for a facing that. Let's say the pathology, some of those are very much correlated with respect to aging, and that it would impact the, the health, the public health systems. Some other that are correlating with what would be the support for the physiological knowledge of the, of the human brains. And finally that they, let me say, technological transfer stuff that represented the knowing off at the physiological, behavior of the human brain. Just to use a sort of metaphor to have happen from the point of view of there computational performance, the human brain is a, a, a, more than Exoscale systems, but with a energy consumption, which is very low, we are talking about some hundreds of Watts. So some hundreds of watts of energy, would provide a an extreme and computational performance. So if would could organized the technology of the high-performance computing in terms of interconnections now we're morphing the computing systems and exploitations of that kind of technologies, in I build a system that it might provide the computational power that would represent a tremendous and tremendous step ahead, in order to facing the big challenges of our base, like energies, personalized medicine, try not to change food for all those kinds of big socioeconomic challenges that we are facing. >> Yes I was reading that besides, sorry Sanzio I was reading that besides the Human Brain Project, there are other projects going on, such as that you mentioned, I'd like to understand how Cineca is working with Dell technologies. You have to translate, as you've mentioned a minute ago, the scientific requirements for discovery into high-performance computing requirements. Talk to me about how you've been doing that with partners like Dell technologies. >> Yes, in particularly in our computing architectures, we had the need to address the capability to facing the data processing involved with backed off the Human Brain Project and general speaking that is backed off the science vendor, that would combine the capability also to provide the cloud access to the system. So by main soft containers technologies and the capability also, to address what would be the creation of a Federation. So Piper problems with people proceeded in a new world. So at the end that the requirements and the terms of reference of the would matter will decline and the terms of a system that would be capable to manage, let's say, in a holistic approach, the data processing, the cloud computing services and the opportunity before for being integrated that in a Federation of HSBC system in Europe's, and with this backed off, that kind of thing, we manage a competitive dialogue procurement processor, I think I the sentence would share together with the different potential technology providers, what would be the visuals and those are the constraints (inaudible) and those other kinds of constraints like, I don't want to say, I mean, environmental kind of constraints and uh, sharing with this back of the technology provider what would it be the vision for this solution, in a very, let's say hard, the competitive dialogue, and at the end, results in a sort of, I don't want to say Darwinian processes, okay. So I mean, the survivors in terms of the different technology providers being Dell that shown the characteristics of the solution that it will be more, let's say compliant. And at the same time are flexible with respect of the combinations of very different constraints and requirements that has been the, the process that has been the outcomes of such a process. >> I like that you mentioned that Darwinian survival of the fittest and that Dell technologies has been, it sounds like a pretty flexible partner because you've got so many different needs and scientific needs to meet for different researchers. Talk to me about how you mentioned that this is a multi-national effort. How does Cineca serve and work with teams not only in Italy, but in other countries and from other institutes? >> Definitely the volume commitment that together with the, European member states is that by means of scientific merits and the peer review process, roughly speaking the arc of the production capacity, would be shared at the European level. That it's a commitment that, that there's been, that there's been a shared of that together with France, Germany, Spain, and, and with the London. So, I mean, our, half of our production capacity, it's a share of that at the European level, where also of course the Italian scientist can apply in the participates, but in a sort of offer emulations and the advanced competition for addressing what it would be the excellence in science. The remaining 50% of our production capacity is for, for the national community and, somehow to prepare and support the Italian community to be competitive on the worldwide scenario on the European and international scenario, uh that setting up would lead also to the agreement at the international level, with respect of some of the options that, that are promoted the progress in a US and in Japan also. So from this point of view, that mean that in some cases also the, access that it would come from researchers the best collaborations and the sharing options with the US researchers their or Japanese researchers in an open space. >> Open space for, it sounds like the Human Brain Project, which the HPC is powering, which has been around since 2013 is really facilitating global collaboration. Talk to me about some of the results that the high-performance computing environment has helped the Human Brain Project to achieve so far. >> The main outcomes that it will be consolidated in the next phase that will be need the by rural SPC that is the Jared undertaking um entities, that has been created for consolidating and for progressing the high-performance computing ecosystem in Europe. It represented by the Federations of high-performance computing systems at European level, there is a, a, an option that, that has been encapsulated and the elaborated inside the human brain flagship project which is called the FEHIPCSE that stand for Federation of a High-Performance Computing System in Europe. That uh provide the open service based on the two concepts on one, one is the sharing of the Heidi at a European level, so it means that the, the high demand of the users or researchers more properly. It's unique and Universal at the European level. That didn't mean better the same, we see identity management, education management with the open, and the access to the Cineca system, to the SARS system in France, to the unique system in, uh Germany to the, Diocese system in a Switzerland, to the Morocco System in a Spain. That is the part related to what will be the federated, the ID management, the others, et cetera, related to what will be the Federation off the data access. So from the point of view, again, the scientific community, mostly the community of Human Brain Project, but that will be open at other domains and other community, make sure that data in a seamless mode after European language, from the technological point of view, or let's say from the infrastructure point of view, very strong up, from the scientific point of view, uh what they think they may not, will be the most of the options is being supported by Cineca has to do with the two specific target. One is the elaboration of the data that are provided by the lands. The laws are a laboratory facility in that Florence. That is one of the four parts, and from the bottom view of the provisions of the data that is for the scattering, the, the data that would come from the mouse brains, that are use for, for (inaudible) And then the second part is for the Mayor scale studies of the cortex of the of the human brain, and that got add-on by a couple of groups that are believing that action from a European level their group of the National Researcher Counsel the CNR, that are the two main outcome on which we are in some out reference high-performance computing facilities for supporting that kind of research. Then their is in some situations they combinations of the performance a, capability of the Federation systems for addressing what will be the simulations of the overall human brain would take a lot of performance challenge simulation with bacteria that they would happen combining that they SPC facility as at European level. >> Right! So I was reading there's a case study by the way, on Cynic that Dell technologies has published. And some of the results you talked about, those that the HPC is facilitating research and results on epilepsy, spinal cord injury, brain prostheses for the blind, as well as new insights into autism. So incredibly important work that you're doing here for the Human Brain Project. One last question Sanzio, for you, what advice would you give to your peers who might be in similar situations that need to, to build and deploy and maintain high-performance computing environments? Where should they start? >> (coughs laughs) I think that at, at a certain point, that specific know how would became sort of a know how that is been, I mean, accumulated and then by some facilities and institutions around the world. There are the, the federal labs in US, the main nation model centers in Europe, the big facilities in Japan. And of course the, the big university facilities in China that are becoming, how do you say, evident and our progressively occupied increasing the space, that to say that that is somehow it, that, that, that the, those institutions would continues collaborate and sharing that there are periods I would expect off what to do, be the top level systems. Then there is a continuous sharing of uh knowledge, the experience best practices with respect off, let's say the technologies transfers towards productions and services and boosterism. Where the situation is big parenta, in the sense that, their are focused what it would be, uh the integration of the high-performance computing technology into their production workflow. And from the point of view, there is the sharing of the experience in order to provide the, a sort of, let's say, spreads and amplifications of the opportunity for supporting innovation. That is part of are solution means, in a Italy but it also, eh, er sort of um, see objective, that is addressed by the European options er supported by the European commission. I think that that sort of (inaudible) supply that in US, the, that will be coming there, sort of you see the max practice for the technology transfer to support the innovation. >> Excellent, that sharing and that knowledge transfer and collaboration. It seems to be absolutely fundamental and the environment that you've built, facilitates that. Sanzio thank you so much for sharing with us, what Cineca is doing and the great research that's going on there, and across a lot of disciplines, we appreciate you joining the program today. Thank you. >> Thank you, it's been a pleasure, thank you very much for the opportunity. >> Likewise, for Sanzio Bassini. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (calming music)

(bright music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to "theCUBE" coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE". We're here with Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. Topic here is AI Powered Business Automation as he leads the team, the Business Automation offering management team driving the automation platform altering multicloud and built in AI and low code tools. Ed, thanks for joining me on "theCUBE" today. >> Thank you John. Thanks for having me. >> So, automation is really the focus of this event. If you peel back all the announcements and automation which is data process, transformation, innovation scale, all kind of points to eigth automation. How has the past year changed the automation market? >> It's been a fascinating ride. Fascinating ride more than just the COVID part, but some interesting, interesting observations as we look back over the year. I called this the AD for BC before COVID and AD, the Anno, not the Anno Domini, but Anno Damum meaning year of the house, living in the house. The thing that we really learned is that clients are engaging differently with their, let's say the companies that they work with. They're engaging digitally. Not a big surprise. You look at all of the big digital brands. You look at the way that we engage. We buy things from home. We don't go to the store anymore. We get delivery at home. Work from home completely different. If you think about what happened to the business on the business side, work from home changed everything. And the real bottom line is companies that invested ahead of time in automation technology, they've flourished. The companies that didn't, they're not so flourishing. So, we're seeing, right now we're seeing skyrocketing demand. That's bonus for us. Skyrocketing demand and also that this demand on the supply side we're seeing competition. More competition in the automation space. And I believe any company that's got more than two guys in a go in the back in a basement are entering the automation space. So, it's a fun time. It's a really fun time to be in this space. >> Great validation on the market. Great call out there on the whole competition thing. Cause you really look at this competition from you know, two guys in the garage or you know, early stage startup but the valuations are an indicator. It's a hot market. Most of those startups have massive valuations. Even the pre IPO ones are just like enormous valuations. This is a tell sign. That process automation and digital supply chains, value chains, business is being rewritten with software right? So, you know, there's an underlying hybrid cloud kind of model that's been standardized. Now you have all these things now on top thousand flowers, blooming or apps, if you will more apps and more apps, more apps, less of the kind of like CRM, like the... you're going to have sub systems large subsystems, but you're going to have apps everywhere. Everything's an app now. So this means things have to be re-automated. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice for companies trying to figure this out? >> So my advice is start small. Like one of the big temptations is that you can jump in and say, God mighty we've got this perfect opportunity for rejiggering, rebuilding the entire company from scratch. That's a definition of insanity. Like you don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to start small and then you want to prove. Second big thing is you want to make sure that you start with the data. Just like any, any good management system you have to start with the facts. You have to discover what's going on. You have to decide which piece you're going to focus on. And then you have to act. And then act leads to optimization. Optimization allows them to say, I'm looking at a dashboard I'm making progress or I'm heading in the wrong direction. Stop. Those kinds of things. So start small, start with the data and make sure that you line up your allies. You have to have, this is a culture change that you have to have your CEO lined up from the top and you have to have buy-in from the bottom. If any of those pieces are missing you're asking for trouble. >> Can you share an example of a customer of yours that's using intelligent automation. Take me through that process. And what's the drivers behind. >> Yeah, sure. A good example. There's a, there's a client of ours in Morocco and it's not a big country but it's a very interesting story. They, the company is called CDG Prevoyance. CDG Prevoyance, this is a, it's a French company, obviously. That was my French accent. But there they are a company that does pension benefits. So think of this as you're putting money away, you're in in the US you have, 401ks. In Canada we have RSPs. You're putting money away for the future. And the company that you're putting money into has to manage your account along with millions of other accounts. And this is where CDG started. It was a very paper-based business. Extremely paper-based. Like the forms that you had to fill out. The way that you engage with, with CDG was was a very form-based thing. Like document based thing. They, the onboarding time to actually enter a new account for a new employee, looking to get their pension plan done was weeks. With automation they changed from being a paper-based thing to being an electronic based thing. They changed the workflow associated with gathering information, getting on onboarded. They onboard now in minutes, as opposed to weeks. This is an example of the kind of thing. Now, if you go back to the first question that you asked, Old companies change. The companies that you engage with digitally are the ones that give you that kind of experience where it doesn't, you know you don't have to crawl through broken glass in order to engage with them. That's what CDG did. And they managed to really ring out some of the human labor out of that onboarding process. >> Great, great stuff. You know, this Mayflower is an exciting story. I've been checking out the, using this decisioning together with you guys with automation. Can you tell me about that? >> Mayflower is really exciting. This is one of those things that just jazzes me. It jazzes me because I think to myself how the heck did they do that? So the Mayflower is a boat. It's like a sailing vessel, like any other sailing vessel. It's 15 meters long. It's powered entirely by solar. It's making a voyage from England to Plymouth. The landing place, you know, where the pilgrims landed, and this, this, this whole voyage is going to be done without human interaction. It's all going to be powered by the machine. So you think about autonomous vehicles. You think about this whole story of autonomous vehicles piloting across the ocean is way different than piloting the car down a highway. >> So this is an autonomous ship, then. >> This is an autonomous ship. Exactly. So think of this as there is there's nobody piloting this thing. It's all piloted by software. The software is, is my business software, interestingly. It has all these sensors that allow you to say, Oh there's a boat over there, steer clear of the boat. But more importantly, when you come to the Harbor you have to negotiate the marks. You have to, you know, steer in the lanes. Different from steering a car you steer a car between the two white lines. You know, you might have a dashed line here and a white line here. You steer the car to come in the middle. Very easy. Steering a boat, that's really hard. Steering a boat in the middle of the ocean when you've got monstrous waves and you've got, you know, potential this, potential that. Like this, this thing is really exciting. I find this whole data, AI decisioning, fascinating. >> Dave, Dave Alonzo is going to love this next question I'm going to ask you. He's my co-host of theCUBE. You always talk about data lakes. How about data ocean? Now we have a data ocean out here which I've always used the metaphor ocean so much more dynamic, but here literally the data is the ocean. You got to factor in conditions that are going to be completely dynamic, wave height, countermeasures on, on navigation. All this is being done. Is that, how does it all work? I mean, has it all been driven by data scenarios? I mean... >> No, it's so it's all driven so it starts with the sensors, the sensor, you have a vision sensor that tells you what it sees. So it sees boats and it sees marks. It sees big waves coming. It's all powered by weather data. So there is a weather feed, but more importantly like the sailing across the ocean part you don't have to worry other than when you know a boat comes or a whale comes. You steer clear of it, fine. That part's relatively easy. When you come close to the shore then you have to make decisions about where to go. And the decisions are all informed by data. So you gather all this data you run machine learning algorithms against the data. You run a decision priorities mechanism. And then you have to, you have to confer with the rules. Like, what are the rules of navigation? I don't know if you're a sailor, but the rules of navigation on the open sea are actually really simple to understand because it's, you know the person on the left has the, has the priority. If you're overtaking, you have to steer clear. All those kind of things. In a Harbor it's way different. And so you have to be able to demonstrate to the government that you have open decisions an open decision-making mechanism to steer around the marks. The government wants to know that you can do that. Otherwise they say, stay out of my Harbor. Very interesting. >> It actually is. It actually encapsulates a lot of business challenges too. You have a lot of data mashing up going on. I mean, you've got navigation, what's under the water. What's on top of the water. You got weather data over the top. It's good to own the weather company for IBM. That helps probably a lot. Then you've got policies, you know? And policy based decision-making. It sounds like a data center and multicloud opportunity. >> It is exactly. That's why I love this opportunity because it's, it's it's almost the, the complete stall from being a business problem to being an experiment problem. Because the way that these, these guys, these engineers built this thing, they're, they're looking for research. They're looking for the ability to really press that edge of where AI and uh you know, machine learning and decisioning come together with ocean research, because what they're doing is social research. They're looking for water temperature and whales and that kind of stuff. >> Unmanned vehicles, unmanned drones is another another big thing we're seeing that with, with, from from managing this. This brings up the point I see about leaders in the industry, and I know we don't have a lot of time. I want to get back to the the announcement that you guys made a while back but I want to stay on this point real quick. If you can just comment. Business leaders that are curious around automation, really the ones that have to invent this. Think about the autonomous ship. On top of the autonomous business I mean, here at theCUBE, we have a studio. What about autonomous studio work? So the notion of automation if you're not thinking about it, you can't do it. What's your advice to people? >> So, so I think the, the advice is that you look for areas of opportunity, like be, be discreet and be like just choose the thing that you want to go after. In the, in the Mayflower case what they were doing was they were looking for a way to navigate in the Harbor. Opens, you've got this big wide ocean. You can go wherever you want to. Navigating in the Harbor is much trickier. And so what they did was they applied technology very specific pieces of technology to that specific problem. That's the advice that I would give to a business. Don't look to turn everything upside down. That's craziness. Like, you're in business for a reason. What you want to do is you want to pick a specific thing to go after and go and fix that. Then pick adjacent things, go fix that. And eventually it gets to the point where you have straight through processing, which is where everybody wants to get. >> I can imagine great opportunities for you guys and your team. Congratulations on all that work. 'Cause there's certainly more to do. I can see so much happening as you guys are building out the stack and acquiring companies. You know, last month you guys had announced to acquire process mining company, myInvenio. what does that announcement mean for IBM and the AI powered automation? Because you guys also have business deals with others in the industry. Take, take us through the, the what this acquisition means for IBM. >> Sure. So myInvenio is a, is a business. First, just get the facts. myInvenio is a business and it's a it's a company that's based in Italy. They do what's called process mining. Process mining is a tool that does what I was just talking about. It allows you to identify places where you have weakness in your workflows. Workflows, like big macro workflows like procure to pay the ability to go all the way from buying something to paying for. Companies spend noodles of money on procure to pay as an example. But inevitably there are humans in that, in that process humans means that there are ways to become more efficient. You could change a person's job. You can change a person's profile. All of that is what this tool is about. This, this tool gives us an excellent addition to our portfolio, our automation portfolio which allows clients to understand where the weaknesses are. And then we can apply specific automations to fix those weaknesses. That's what myInvenio means to us. It puts us in a position of having a complete set of technologies that match up with Gartner's hyper automation market texture. That gives us a very powerful advantage in the marketplace. So I'm very, very happy about this acquisition. >> Yeah. Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Final word. I'd love to get you spend the last minute just talking about IBM's commitment to open and also integration um, integrating with other companies. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, sure. So the, the, the open part is something that we've understood for very, very long time. One of the jobs that I had a long time ago was open source and bringing open source into IBM. I'm a very strong proponent of open source. Open means no barriers to entry no barriers to substitution. And what it means is you have a fair fight. You have, we all have proprietary technology. We all have intellectual property. Sure. But if you have an open base then what that gives you is the ability to inter-operate with other people, other, you know other competitors, frankly, that to me is goodness for the client, because at the end of the day, the client doesn't get locked in. That's the thing that they are really looking for. They want to have the flexibility to move. They want to have the flexibility to put the best, you know best technology in place. So we are strong proponents of open. >> All right. Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. AI powered business automation is coming. Autonomous vehicles, autonomous ships, autonomous business. Everything's going automation soon. We're going to have the autonomous cube. And so, Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Okay, John. Thank you. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021, virtual launch. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to "theCUBE" coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE". We're here with Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. Topic here is AI Powered Business Automation as he leads the team, the Business Automation offering management team driving the automation platform altering multicloud and built in AI and low code tools. Ed, thanks for joining me on "theCUBE" today. >> Thank you John. Thanks for having me. >> So, automation is really the focus of this event. If you peel back all the announcements and automation which is data process, transformation, innovation scale, all kind of points to automation. How has the past year changed the automation market? >> It's been a fascinating ride. Fascinating ride more than just the COVID part, but some interesting, interesting observations as we look back over the year. I called this the AD for BC before COVID and AD, the Anno, not the Anno Domini, but Anno Domuo meaning year of the house, living in the house. The thing that we really learned is that clients are engaging differently with their, let's say the companies that they work with. They're engaging digitally. Not a big surprise. You look at all of the big digital brands. You look at the way that we engage. We buy things from home. We don't go to the store anymore. We get delivery at home. Work from home completely different. If you think about what happened to the business on the business side, work from home changed everything. And the real bottom line is companies that invested ahead of time in automation technology, they've flourished. The companies that didn't, they're not so flourishing. So, we're seeing, right now we're seeing skyrocketing demand. That's bonus for us. Skyrocketing demand and also that this demand on the supply side we're seeing competition. More competition in the automation space. And I believe any company that's got more than two guys in a go in the back in a basement are entering the automation space. So, it's a fun time. It's a really fun time to be in this space. >> Great validation on the market. Great call out there on the whole competition thing. Cause you really look at this competition from you know, two guys in the garage or you know, early stage startup but the valuations are an indicator. It's a hot market. Most of those startups have massive valuations. Even the pre IPO ones are just like enormous valuations. This is a tell sign. That process automation and digital supply chains, value chains, business is being rewritten with software right? So, you know, there's an underlying hybrid cloud kind of model that's been standardized. Now you have all these things now on top thousand flowers, blooming or apps, if you will more apps and more apps, more apps, less of the kind of like CRM, like the... you're going to have sub systems large subsystems, but you're going to have apps everywhere. Everything's an app now. So this means things have to be re-automated. >> Yeah. >> What's your advice for companies trying to figure this out? >> So my advice is start small. Like one of the big temptations is that you can jump in and say, God almighty we've got this perfect opportunity for rejiggering, rebuilding the entire company from scratch. That's a definition of insanity. Like you don't want to do that. What you want to do is you want to start small and then you want to prove. Second big thing is you want to make sure that you start with the data. Just like any, any good management system you have to start with the facts. You have to discover what's going on. You have to decide which piece you're going to focus on. And then you have to act. And then act leads to optimization. Optimization allows them to say, I'm looking at a dashboard I'm making progress or I'm heading in the wrong direction. Stop. Those kinds of things. So start small, start with the data and make sure that you line up your allies. You have to have, this is a culture change that you have to have your CEO lined up from the top and you have to have buy-in from the bottom. If any of those pieces are missing you're asking for trouble. >> Can you share an example of a customer of yours that's using intelligent automation. Take me through that process. And what's the drivers behind. >> Yeah, sure. A good example. There's a, there's a client of ours in Morocco and it's not a big country but it's a very interesting story. They, the company is called CDG Prevoyance. CDG Prevoyance, this is a, it's a French company, obviously. That was my French accent. But there they are a company that does pension benefits. So think of this as you're putting money away, you're in in the US you have, 401ks. In Canada we have RSPs. You're putting money away for the future. And the company that you're putting money into has to manage your account along with millions of other accounts. And this is where CDG started. It was a very paper-based business. Extremely paper-based. Like the forms that you had to fill out. The way that you engage with, with CDG was was a very form-based thing. Like document based thing. They, the onboarding time to actually enter a new account for a new employee, looking to get their pension plan done was weeks. With automation they changed from being a paper-based thing to being an electronic based thing. They changed the workflow associated with gathering information, getting on onboarded. They onboard now in minutes, as opposed to weeks. This is an example of the kind of thing. Now, if you go back to the first question that you asked, Old companies change. The companies that you engage with digitally are the ones that give you that kind of experience where it doesn't, you know you don't have to crawl through broken glass in order to engage with them. That's what CDG did. And they managed to really ring out some of the human labor out of that onboarding process. >> Great, great stuff. You know, this Mayflower is an exciting story. I've been checking out the, using this decisioning together with you guys with automation. Can you tell me about that? >> Mayflower is really exciting. This is one of those things that just jazzes me. It jazzes me because I think to myself how the heck did they do that? So the Mayflower is a boat. It's like a sailing vessel, like any other sailing vessel. It's 15 meters long. It's powered entirely by solar. It's making a voyage from England to Plymouth. The landing place, you know, where the pilgrims landed, and this, this, this whole voyage is going to be done without human interaction. It's all going to be powered by the machine. So you think about autonomous vehicles. You think about this whole story of autonomous vehicles piloting across the ocean is way different than piloting the car down a highway. >> So this is an autonomous ship, then. >> This is an autonomous ship. Exactly. So think of this as there is there's nobody piloting this thing. It's all piloted by software. The software is, is my business software, interestingly. It has all these sensors that allow you to say, Oh there's a boat over there, steer clear of the boat. But more importantly, when you come to the Harbor you have to negotiate the marks. You have to, you know, steer in the lanes. Different from steering a car you steer a car between the two white lines. You know, you might have a dashed line here and a white line here. You steer the car to come in the middle. Very easy. Steering a boat, that's really hard. Steering a boat in the middle of the ocean when you've got monstrous waves and you've got, you know, potential this, potential that. Like this, this thing is really exciting. I find this whole data, AI decisioning, fascinating. >> Dave, Dave Alonzo is going to love this next question I'm going to ask you. He's my co-host of theCUBE. You always talk about data lakes. How about data ocean? Now we have a data ocean out here which I've always used the metaphor ocean so much more dynamic, but here literally the data is the ocean. You got to factor in conditions that are going to be completely dynamic, wave height, countermeasures on, on navigation. All this is being done. Is that, how does it all work? I mean, has it all been driven by data scenarios? I mean... >> No, it's so it's all driven so it starts with the sensors, the sensor, you have a vision sensor that tells you what it sees. So it sees boats and it sees marks. It sees big waves coming. It's all powered by weather data. So there is a weather feed, but more importantly like the sailing across the ocean part you don't have to worry other than when you know a boat comes or a whale comes. You steer clear of it, fine. That part's relatively easy. When you come close to the shore then you have to make decisions about where to go. And the decisions are all informed by data. So you gather all this data you run machine learning algorithms against the data. You run a decision priorities mechanism. And then you have to, you have to confer with the rules. Like, what are the rules of navigation? I don't know if you're a sailor, but the rules of navigation on the open sea are actually really simple to understand because it's, you know the person on the left has the, has the priority. If you're overtaking, you have to steer clear. All those kind of things. In a Harbor it's way different. And so you have to be able to demonstrate to the government that you have open decisions an open decision-making mechanism to steer around the marks. The government wants to know that you can do that. Otherwise they say, stay out of my Harbor. Very interesting. >> It actually is. It actually encapsulates a lot of business challenges too. You have a lot of data mashing up going on. I mean, you've got navigation, what's under the water. What's on top of the water. You got weather data over the top. It's good to own the weather company for IBM. That helps probably a lot. Then you've got policies, you know? And policy based decision-making. It sounds like a data center and multicloud opportunity. >> It is exactly. That's why I love this opportunity because it's, it's it's almost the, the complete stall from being a business problem to being an experiment problem. Because the way that these, these guys, these engineers built this thing, they're, they're looking for research. They're looking for the ability to really press that edge of where AI and uh you know, machine learning and decisioning come together with ocean research, because what they're doing is social research. They're looking for water temperature and whales and that kind of stuff. >> Unmanned vehicles, unmanned drones is another another big thing we're seeing that with, with, from from managing this. This brings up the point I see about leaders in the industry, and I know we don't have a lot of time. I want to get back to the the announcement that you guys made a while back but I want to stay on this point real quick. If you can just comment. Business leaders that are curious around automation, really the ones that have to invent this. Think about the autonomous ship. On top of the autonomous business I mean, here at theCUBE, we have a studio. What about autonomous studio work? So the notion of automation if you're not thinking about it, you can't do it. What's your advice to people? >> So, so I think the, the advice is that you look for areas of opportunity, like be, be discreet and be like just choose the thing that you want to go after. In the, in the Mayflower case what they were doing was they were looking for a way to navigate in the Harbor. Opens, you've got this big wide ocean. You can go wherever you want to. Navigating in the Harbor is much trickier. And so what they did was they applied technology very specific pieces of technology to that specific problem. That's the advice that I would give to a business. Don't look to turn everything upside down. That's craziness. Like, you're in business for a reason. What you want to do is you want to pick a specific thing to go after and go and fix that. Then pick adjacent things, go fix that. And eventually it gets to the point where you have straight through processing, which is where everybody wants to get. >> I can imagine great opportunities for you guys and your team. Congratulations on all that work. 'Cause there's certainly more to do. I can see so much happening as you guys are building out the stack and acquiring companies. You know, last month you guys had announced to acquire process mining company, myInvenio. what does that announcement mean for IBM and the AI powered automation? Because you guys also have business deals with others in the industry. Take, take us through the, the what this acquisition means for IBM. >> Sure. So myInvenio is a, is a business. First, just get the facts. myInvenio is a business and it's a it's a company that's based in Italy. They do what's called process mining. Process mining is a tool that does what I was just talking about. It allows you to identify places where you have weakness in your workflows. Workflows, like big macro workflows like procure to pay the ability to go all the way from buying something to paying for. Companies spend noodles of money on procure to pay as an example. But inevitably there are humans in that, in that process humans means that there are ways to become more efficient. You could change a person's job. You can change a person's profile. All of that is what this tool is about. This, this tool gives us an excellent addition to our portfolio, our automation portfolio which allows clients to understand where the weaknesses are. And then we can apply specific automations to fix those weaknesses. That's what myInvenio means to us. It puts us in a position of having a complete set of technologies that match up with Gartner's hyper automation market texture. That gives us a very powerful advantage in the marketplace. So I'm very, very happy about this acquisition. >> Yeah. Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Final word. I'd love to get you spend the last minute just talking about IBM's commitment to open and also integration um, integrating with other companies. Take a minute to explain that. >> Yeah, sure. So the, the, the open part is something that we've understood for very, very long time. One of the jobs that I had a long time ago was open source and bringing open source into IBM. I'm a very strong proponent of open source. Open means no barriers to entry no barriers to substitution. And what it means is you have a fair fight. You have, we all have proprietary technology. We all have intellectual property. Sure. But if you have an open base then what that gives you is the ability to inter-operate with other people, other, you know other competitors, frankly, that to me is goodness for the client, because at the end of the day, the client doesn't get locked in. That's the thing that they are really looking for. They want to have the flexibility to move. They want to have the flexibility to put the best, you know best technology in place. So we are strong proponents of open. >> All right. Ed Lynch, vice president of IBM Business Automation. AI powered business automation is coming. Autonomous vehicles, autonomous ships, autonomous business. Everything's going automation soon. We're going to have the autonomous cube. And so, Ed, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. >> Okay, John. Thank you. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021, virtual launch. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q covering AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> over and welcome back to the Cube. Special coverage here in by rain in the Middle East for Amazon Web service is eight of US Summit. I'm John for the Cube our second year, where cloud computing has changed in the landscape. It's changing the entrepreneur equation. It's changing the money equation, and Fintech is very popular. Next guest. Special guests. Ideal worrying. Who's the Deputy Group? CEO Bank, ABC. A legend in the industry. Also the founder. The Fintech Forum Coming up on your fourth big event, But you're keynoting here at Teresa Carlson and A W s Summit car on digital only bank. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you, John. Thank you. Pleasure to speak to you today, so I got a lot to talk about, but digital only bank. This is a really special time in history. Now we're living in a digital error and the digital is driving business change and digital business is on the on the plate of every major executive in the world. How are you enabling digital business, >> John? The way, The way I look at things that two years ago I have went to my board. I said, I wanna disrupt the bank. I want to develop a business digital strategy. And to do that, we have three pictures. We have to run the band first and transform the back. To do that, we have to continue investing on modernizing the bank. Then you evolve the bank investment by creating new product. And finally you just hop the back and how you disrupt the bank. And she's using the digital highway and introducing the cloud computing on bringing a new tools wishes changed the framework and changed the mechanics of the bank. So we created way are not a digital only bank which will be going live in two months time. We launch a wallet on all that sitting on our eco systems it in the cloud the very brave and bold move. But I can tell you, without that you will lose the transformation. Banking today is different than they're gonna be banking of tomorrow. Yeah, we have to start getting into the journey of transformation. >> Bold moves require bold leadership obscenity. You are that this is hard. It sounds easy on paper. You got people to convince. I agree. Changes hard people. Cultural change. How did you do it? What >> was the great question? John are started that in December 2016 I went to my board when the frantic start moving heating our partnership. Look, I want to be on the transformation. Jr and I worked for about 6 to 9 months in greeting our niche with the board unit. Explain to them frantic abroad. Them actually a special fintech speakers guidelines. So I invested heavily. I would always take holder board level people, groups Vo and tell him about the impact of digitization. New cannot afford distant idea. Feel distant. I didn't do nothing. He parked the chain was moved. We'll go without you. So what you're saying is that investment is awareness. You have to explain to him why you cannot treat fintech with the threat. You have to embrace it. >> I love that. I love that leadership. It takes time to nurture and unset the table. Absolutely. And then understand the cloud only strategy. And then you got to sell it and then you gotta implement. These are the new dynamic >> fears fears. John is that most of the stakeholder. They think of cloud as secure and the spending of times They're not security. Instead, he was spending the time questioning spend their time to improve the security with Amazon. We are partners Now we sit with them and doing a demon years. And I tell you, I'm putting all my critical banking system on the ground. >> When you talk to Amazon, you're a bank. Thanks. Have money. Thanks can be act. There were people who worried about all this. Trust is important opportunity. What made you decide to go a W s? >> There's a very first of all. When I decided to individuals with my decision, I looked at you guys, the investment you made it in security, the investment you make or not. Indeed, I looked you committed to the region. I was someone my neighbor you guys have invested that made a bold move to be in Bahrain That did a lot, picked a lot of boxes for me and that was an important move from AWS. And I tell you many regulators today they were going to cloud eventually. So it's very important that anybody is Bridget himself in the >> region. But we love a W s because we covered them. And in depth is part of our media business. And we look at disruptions to and I want to get your thoughts on fintech disruption. We were talking before we came on camera about some key times in history where disruption happened in trade. That is a tale sign for what's happening in that. Tell the story. >> All right, let me tell you the story. In 1953 the first word cargo ship sent from New York to Houston. That chip change the word made history. Why? Because it has the container. So you could supplier trade, sending through the container to different destinations. You know, before how you used to be put them in the trade through It was a nightmare. That disruption have actually improved the globalization of increased trade business. Today all this equipment here comes Chicago comes through container and each container is labelled through computer. So we re vision today Fintech made the same making same disruption in banking on my notions, everything >> and wears a similarity. Scale >> matter, united disruption. This came a volume betrayed should become disrupted. Everybody start using your container. The business the globalization fintech, globalization, skin awareness. So what? The way I see similar to that we had a disruption. Trade become more familiar. Lifestyle has improved. You can now put your house. Your TV is coming From where? From? Your Maybe >> all the cargo containers have changed. Shipping fintech is changing banking, banking >> and lifestyle. You got it. You got a job. >> And so now, well, ironically, two containers or changing the cloud Because containers and kubernetes and frustration, This is about software. That's right. Software money has been a term kicked around. When you hear the word software defined currency software to find money, what do you think of? >> Look, at the end of the day, who writes software people? Human. So basically, the thinking has become from you and I for the people that sit and think about the codes. Yeah, programmer the corner. But there's somebody behind it thinking So you have a thinker on this thing? Got Arjun you the word not the coda. >> Big moves and Finn ticker happening. I want to get your thoughts on leadership in this world where cloud has pretty much instant benefits if you execute properly. Absolutely. There's also architectural thinking. So the word business architecture is not something that they teach in business school or sometimes has to be learned over time to operate a business and go have a growth strategy in changing technological landscapes requires a business. Architecture has to have a ballistic systems thinking this is hard. You've done that for multiple years. What if you learned what were some of the challenges that you came? >> You have to look at when you're running a big enterprise. You have a lot of investment around the world, and a lot of duplication are out of inefficiency at the leader. Money to show my steak stakeholder efficiency. I want our own better shop. Now, if technology can help me to do that, why not? You'll have to jump onto the wagon? Yeah, yeah, I cannot sit idle, and I see a better efficient shop but bank running more efficiently. So I looked with technology addition to disrupt the way I work, but positive disruption. Yeah. The main thing is that the disruption should be a catalyst for a positive change. So what I learned I learned efficiency would the digital disruption with the cloud today and instead of putting 25,000 servants to serve my 18 countries. I put in the cloud. You done it. You know the economy is Ken Jordan and the shaving >> the flywheels. Amazing. The operational efficiency are amazing. As an executive, you managed to results at the end of the day. Business is business. Results matter. How are your results? You gotta make money >> at the bank. It I have a good show. Uh, results. >> Got to make some money. How do you see that? Evolving digital only business. What's your strategy? What's your roadmap? For? How you see the money making kicking >> in, John, that our clients becoming sophisticated. My corporate client today if I don't deliver in a digital solution through his statement, give the payment, Foster. He's gonna go for a fintech company because today, front companies are competing with me eating my lunch. So I have to prove, if my client becoming digital Chevy more sophisticated, I cannot sit and watch. So I have to invest heavily. You make sure my client is satisfied giving the right cash management to transaction banking. All this the book payments or this have to be alternated. So I have to be continue looking after my client. That's where the money >> are you happy where you are, Where you're at right now? Are you happy with work? >> There's always room for improvement. I will continue. Invest on Are we innovate because you cannot stop. I mean, look, I'm a zone today. Would they stop? >> No, no, they're not stopping >> way. We need to continue. >> What's your areas that you think about for the next five years? Fintech. What are an important area? >> You know what? I think Joe's gonna affect our lifestyle. A I artificial intel. I feel way only seen the beginning. We have seen nothing out of the way. A bank, ABC. We just lost our first digital employees. Uh, her name is Fatima, and we will be coming live in November. I tell you, this is the beginning. I feel artificial intelligence is gonna affect our work force in the world. >> Tell me more about this digital employees concept. >> Well, that until passionate about what we worked with a company called So machine in you Zeeland on there are the same people who actually invented you've seen the movie of it all. Yeah. So the same people actually design movie and avatar work. We work with them to create a footman. Fatma is already being trained. Do help a new Crying Toe Bank, ABC. The Tissue Bank Open account. Two shoes. A correct credit cards for you Help you and also to be able to have a chat with her to be able to ask you a question. Jerry. A question about the Bahrain about the population but banking. It's a journey on. The journey's so far being successful, and I continue. If you ask me the question in a year's time, I would tell you probably thought it would be somebody else. >> This is helping augment the experience for your customers. That's the goal, >> absolutely. And from experience with my consumer. >> Okay, I want to change the subject and talk about the fact you're the founder of the Fintech Forum. You've had your third edition for the coming up. Talk about the event. What's the purpose? >> Uh, in in about 2016 December, I went to them sentimental by rain Governor and I said, We want to sponsor a frantic conference so self like impressed that immediately and British idea. And then I went back to my board my good CEO, I said, We want to sponsor the fish interconference on my papers at the time, the warning Because at that time in nearly 2017 we hear different around the region. Nobody actually sat there and say, Was the interactive printed on banking? You see, other victim. So I launched the first winter conference Was its success 2nd 1 also a sex. And the 3rd 1 was a kook because we put the top speaker on the world. And now people are judging me for the 4th 1 event business Now. No way about Responsive Bank. NBC's was the sole sponsor. >> That's exciting. And I think these events are changing, too. The fact that you're getting into events, you're contributing your knowledge, your also sponsoring providing some working capital >> contribution as a bank. International bank. At least I can do to support my reign infrastructure in the vision in a fintech. Sorry, >> no problem. Think out of the water. I want to say I want to get your thoughts on something. I feels important. I said this last year and the year before, when Amazon launches a new region, yeah, it creates a revitalisation. It has computing power has all those things. It's a center point of innovation. How do you see that same thing? And what's, um, things that people might not know about the Amazon relationship to the area? Because all this innovation and enablement fintech societal change the government ministries are coming online here by rain. Entrepreneurs are creating value. They're getting funded this liquidity banks, air going fintech A modernization wave is happening with a new generation of young people and existing businesses. This is a digital complete modernisation. Your thoughts on on all this digital transformation Societal at a societal level with Amazon >> Amazon already contributed to the digital economy was in it in the world. And I've seen already the impact this part of the world. The fact that this conference is summer today I can't answer your question. Look at the contribution. You have about 2000 people here look the excitement of what to bring into the region. I have seen people today from Chaudhary from Kuwait, from Morocco, from Amman, from Egypt here. So you are actually building the knowledge excitement and you also have been people to understand the ecosystem and what was missing. So what you doing any bill Us now actually investing heavily on educating awareness of the digital destruction and digital economy. You are participating in the digital economy. I mean, also today I heard from Malaysia. Very good. Exactly. Sponsoring a program a degree with University of Bahrain doesn't pass just free. So this is basically you Continue doing that. And you find AWS is already effective. Life like the clock is gonna be so I think it's body is already contributing the digital economy worldwide. >> You know, I'm fascinated. I'd love to have more conversations with you on this, Maybe at your forum. But one thing I want to get your thoughts on is with digital collaboration is not just face to face. You meet people here from different countries, but then we go back to our place is but we're still together digitally. So the scale of cloud computing and digital is impacting not just money collaboration. What's your vision on how collaboration and the role of people are going to play in this new dynamic? John, >> if you have asked me three years ago our video I was a threat with winter company with your banker. They're gonna eat my lunch. But today you realize with time the only way you can move on trust through collaborating with the company. That's why today I'm sitting with AWS sitting with other victim basically breaking people. I know my banks, but I don't know how to build a clock ticking. So I caught a break. I don't know how to move on a new Sophia or so I go with. I want to use it to get that. You see what I mean? >> Yeah, I think you have another good point that we reported on many times. And that is that when you collaborate with these technologies, it makes the domain expertise and the data that you >> have >> more intellectual, more emotional property because, you know, banking intimately. You have data, you have customers. That's your intellectual property. You could use that faster with the resource. This is a new competitive advantage >> with analytics would get the science. The data is the new order, if you should, but you need the tours. You need another unique data scientist. And when you have the distant scientist dental become than yours. >> So he'll thank you for sharing your awesome insights here and let you hear about rain. Really appreciated. Congratulations. Tino speaking. Bank, ABC. Thank you. Going all digital. Bold moves. Bold leadership. Thank you. Thank you very much. We're here in the Cube. We're live broadcasting here and by rain. 80. This summit. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching.

>> live from Mountain View, California. It's the queue covering definite create twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Welcome back to the cave. Lisa Martin with John Barrier on our first day of two days of coverage of Cisco Definite Create twenty nineteen at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. John Eyre. Please welcome to iniquitous and directors solutions, architecture and Devil Box from Liberty Technology. Tony, Welcome. >> How are you? >> Good, thanks for Thanks for having us tell our audience a little bit about liberty technology before we get into the community. What you doing your breakout session? >> Not a problem. The re technology is a company. Where? MSP company down in Griffin, Georgia. And so we handle a lot of a lot of clients are either public sector cities, all different types of all the different verticals. So well. And so do you have a client? A customer out there that needs needs an extra arm into it. We're there for them. >> So your basement of Georgia, Which means that how warm it is in here today Outside should be nothing for you right >> now. Tell me about >> well outside >> now, since there is no humanity I like it back home in few minutes, >> Californians were babies. >> Yeah, Joni, Public Sector. We've done a lot of interviews of public sector folks with their towns and cities, air, ground rules, municipalities, cities, their I t light. And then they don't have the Dev ops expertise, but clouds a perfect fit for them. But they have a lot of certain characters. Whether it's email is very ephemeral. People come and go, So getting people collaborating in these distinct user groups that have different roles and responsibilities is a challenge. How are you guys solving that? Because there's something I know you guys have worked on. There's a challenge that's only Republicans for enterprises do. How do you bring people that are distinct user populations that have an application or roll or use case into a collaborative, horizontally scaleable >> system? We show Be honest way. Go in there and we go in there and we discover as to what they're doing now, what are their pain points? What do they want? Change where they want to go and then we show them the collaboration started. We shone like what makes team's way? Show him all of the, uh, meetings room devices, things like that. And then not just on the collaboration side, but also if there helping with three, six, five their security than Rocky. That's how we bring. That's how we bring collaboration intothe public >> about the Cisco dynamic we've been covering definite create since it started. Definite. Now it's just go live couple years, seeing kind of a new vibe and new mojo going on with that within the Cisco ecosystem of actually coding stuff up, whether it's slinging AP eyes together or creating new ones. New capabilities. How is it changed the delivery in performance of the customers? Because this is not just your old school Cisco networking company. Yeah, they got APS. Things are connected. Date is moving from Point A to point B. All right, but he's kind of integration challenges. Kind of seamless program ability is the core theme here. What's your reaction? Thoughts on all this? >> No. >> Well, first off, this is my first definite create. I've been to other Siskel lives have not been too. Don't think great yet so so far, I'm enjoying this a lot. It's I like the tight niche, the community style of this of this event I'm sorry. Go back, >> Tio. Go live a little creations that are going on here. Very community already. Kind of be open source projects. Yeah, people talking to each other, a lot of hallway conversations. But it's a kind of a new kind of collaborative model that customers are now getting exposed to write. This is something >> new. I mean, it is. It's new, and I'm finding a lot times where a lot of customers and clients they've heard about it, but they don't know yet. So it's our job to actually get them to adopt to it and and also adapt to it as well. So it's almost like how we have our own like community here. For definite. It's almost how can we take that structure and show it to our clients >> and translation involved Kind of kind of taper down the excitement, maybe, or keeping up questions for you people watching that aren't here. A definite what's that? What's the vibe here? Like, what's some of the cools? Things you've seen and heard are something Well, the keynote was >> great either. Was amazing Kino how they actually showed how, especially with the Iraqi had when Mandy went while I was out there talking about from the small campus to the festival and to an actual >> there's a radio >> that was a great use of incredible, especially with like big Stadium and how John McDonough came out and showed about how there was a fight on the field with you. Yet no one saw it, but yet then, when they went through the actual demonstrate, the actual video were like, Oh, yeah, this's amazing how it's almost like it was like the minority report way. You're already >> exactly Dan. Yes, the data out there, >> all that data and they just machine learning A I just watching people, seeing what they're doing, kind of almost like predicting what they're going to do >> and every little bit, actually, a little bit. I agree with you. I thought they did a great job with that, Especially coming off the heels of Coachella and showing how they can enable Cisco enable developers for social folks to set up secure networks of different sizes and also be able to use in real time machine learning a eye to evaluate what's going on the offensive. And that was a very cool, real world example of what they showed. Leveraging machine learning, identifying. There's there's an issue here. There's an altercation. They surprised at a sports event, right? And deploying those. It has a lot security, many sports events, though I thought it was all that the security was just casually walking up to fight. That's another thing >> that you would slow >> down. But you don't know what >> you're right. >> And it is so many more etiquette rules now at events, whether it's, you know, hate crimes or just, you know, just violent language fights. Also, everyone sees those that write that events. But this actual now, surveillance tech out there. You know, you could tell the guys that how many beers he's had kicks in, You know, >> we're gonna have something where they can actually check out someone like Heat signature. They can't tell how >> much he's going to explode. Is the Red Sox going to blow the lead again? A. Having a good year? Well, you know, they wanted last year Yankee fans, so you would be off the charts now. Philly fans, a whole other story. I don't. Okay. My digress. You've >> got a breakout session. Sorry, John. A lightning session that's tomorrow Any time tomorrow. Tell us the title and what you're going to be talking about. >> Keisha, my title is orchestrate forty five percent. So >> we'LL just read the forty five percent correct Alright, Digging >> again tonight a little >> bit. I have a sly where we was actually Suzy. We actually did a presentation awhile back where she put up a slider, says where she talked about how fifty five percent of partners are creating APS and developing their own naps. So, way of liberty we saw that we were like, OK, what about the other forty five percent? So that's where that the idea came out too. Okay, let's I'll do a talk about how we orchestrate forty, forty five, forty five percent. So entails What I'm doing with that is that we actually have a platform called Consulate. Where there were that platform has the ability to integrate with multiple business processes. So we're connecting. We're integrating with connect allies with Iraqi doing eight about and so that I have it where that there'll be a trigger or Web hook from one my rocky cameras like emotion which will trigger which will create a ticket and connect allies so they can help out some help tasks service desk and then that which will also they get thrown into teams and click on the ticket and then also run commands and grab a snapshot from the camera. The right of the team's six teams >> fell by the Iraqi for a minute because we get a lot of hearing a lot of buzz about Muraki. It's not just wireless. It's not just what you might think it is, it seems to be connected tissue you meant. There's a great demo that added to she's showing around. They are with looking at network configuration. We're obviously to be connecting all of this together. What's your view on this? What's that? >> I for one, I love muraki. I run Rocky at home, so five the viol. Although the wireless is switching cameras and just that, it's it's one. Really. They have, like their own room platform that connects has all their devices connecting into the dashboard, and you could do so much with it that they're actually they're open up Now. The eyes, the web hooks this so much things that you can actually integrate with it. It's it's great, and it's the analytics that you get from it. >> And this is what you're talking about really about bringing these teams together through Webb Hooks for AP, eyes in through Morocco, the connected to direct and then allow the APS to be valuable, cross different groups >> very valuable, but then so that then you don't have it on. Engineer doesn't have have to touch different applications or devices. They get it all from one and from that one application, click and go to where you need to get got. >> So we're only on halfway through Day one of your first up that crate. But it sounds like you've already been exposed to so many things that I could see the wheels turning us without anticipating that you're going to be able to bring back to liberty. And that will really help drive. What you guys doing driving forward toward that customer engagement only, eh? Educate >> well, since it is, you know, it's like half day already on day one. There's still so much to see here. There's so much to see about Coyote. There's a bunch of workshops here about form Iraqi and the AP ice, which I want to join in and see what I can take out of that and bring it back. Um, you know, there's a bunch of stuff get on. So I want to gather all that and just be a sponge and then bring it back to liberty and say, Hey, this is what we can do. How can they fit into our business model? >> Awesome. Well, Tony, thank you so much for stopping by and talking with Jonah me on the program this afternoon. We appreciate it. Best of luck in your lightning session tomorrow as well. >> Thank you so much >> for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching us on the Cube. Live from Cisco. Definite great. Twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching. >> No.

prepare for the extraction point we've been briefed on all the important stories and events in the world of emerging information now it's time to extract the data and turn it into action live from the silicon angle studios in the heart of Silicon Valley this is extraction point with John furrier okay we're live back in the palo alto studios i'm john furrier for the extraction point we extract the signal from the noise and my special guest today i'm excited to have here is Paul Martino who is the founder of aggregate knowledge and also storied entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who now lives in Philly with his family comes out here Paul is known for among other things being a great entrepreneur tech geek loves tech loves to build build startups started one of the first social networks with Mark Pincus called tribe started his own company funded by Kleiner Perkins with his partner Chris law called aggregate knowledge which is booming and doing great and now more famous for being the first round investor in zynga company that is exploding with revenue as Kleiner Perkins said is the of all their portfolio comes in the history more than Google's made more money faster than anybody Paul Martino welcome to the extraction point great to see you John as always awesome to see you first I got to start with your now I forgot to mention that you're actually running a venture firm so in addition to being famous with Zynga you're running bullpen capital so first give the folks out there an update and first confirm or deny you were in the first round of Zynga or not yes the the first round of Zynga there were several institutional investors and several individual investors Morocco me Reid Hoffman were individual investors Avalon Union Square accelerator ventures and foundry where the institutional investors in that first round Peter was Peter Thiel yeah Peter was also an individual investor in the first round so that's officially the first round investors of Zynga we have clarified that and that is now hot on the books but now you're you've been successfully founded aggregate knowledge you know have a CEO running that what's the update with aggregate knowledge yeah so great guy runs that company as a guy you need to meet and have on this show Dave jakubowski aggregate knowledge really went in a direction where all of the focus was on providing data and analytics to the major ad agencies and John John Nelson who started organic one of the first agencies is now the CEO of Omnicom digital joined the board and I said look we got to get a guy who's an ad heavy in here and jakubowski was previously the GM of microsoft adcenter and had a senior position at specific media and we brought him in and he's just been kickin butt our greek knowledge has really really made a significant significant contribution in the area of data and analytics for these major agencies and he was very able to bring in a crew of people know exactly how to run that business so you're a big fan of big data then mm-hmm oh yeah we just had a big special yesterday on Big Data mentioned about it so that's cool we're going to get into a lobbyist I was just kind of get the small talk out of the way here your current role is the founder of bullpen capital right so bullpen to me I'm a baseball not I love baseball bullpen means you go the bullpen for relief right yep thank God close the game out hopefully or mid-innings relief so tell us about what bullpen is it's a special fund as I know from reading talk to you to target an expansion of this new seed and explosive new funding environment Bryce plain force right I'll tell you how we got the name at the end too so here's what happened I've been investing with a lot of the so-called super angels and that's kind of a misnomer because they really are actually in some cases actual small venture firms to I've been investing with a lot of them since they got off the ground Josh Kopelman from first round is one of the first investors in aggregate knowledge mike maples was an early advisor to the company I've known Jeff claw be a who run soft tech since he was at Reuters and with the late 90s and so I've worked with these guys done a lot of investing and we were me and my buddies Duncan Davidson rich Melman were sitting around over summer of 09 doing a little bit data analysis right another big data assignment we realized that as more and more these seed funds got created they were creating an inventory of companies that weren't quite ready to go to the traditional venture guy but we're also difficult to bridge from just the seed guys because the see guys at that time didn't have really big funds so wait a minute you've got some really good companies here is to clarify the for the folks out there seed funds don't traditionally have follow-on big funds like a VC firm right that's what you're referring to yeah they tend not to have as bigger reserve so if a big fun writes you a five-million-dollar check and you stub your toe you can probably get some more money to get through the hardships but a lot of the the new super angel funds or smaller funds and you get a five hundred thousand dollar check and if you need another five hundred thousand dollars it can frequently be very difficult because they make so many investments with smaller reserves yeah and so you've got dave McClure clavey a maples first round capital true ventures made the first round truevision more traditional VC then say dave McClure and mike maples and claw VA they're out doing some really good work out their funding really good company spending a lot of time I know I've seen them working their butt off yeah they need some air support right they need some cover the little bullpen is that that's you come in and say hey for your stars they're going to rise up yep and so that's exactly right so what happens is here's what the analysis we did turned out of their portfolio thirty percent of their portfolios in aggregate quickly are really exciting companies you know and they quickly go up to a venture auction and the guys and sandhill rotor excited about it about twenty percent of their deals you know that they don't like too much it's kind of just floating there yeah that you know the entrepreneur wasn't a fit that team didn't execute that left fifty percent of their deals in the middle which they kind of were too early to tell as Mike maple sometimes says they were in an extended learning and discovery phase they hadn't quite figured out what their models yeah and this de pivoting stuff's going on right now the Marcus changes turbulence so these guys are right and so you look you look at some examples and you go well wait a minute for every zynga that goes up into the right immediately go look at the stories of chegg and modcloth and etsy and quite frankly the in-between round on twitter and for everyone Zynga that you find that just hits it out of the park the right way there were four to five companies that went through that hard intermediate round that it was difficult in the environment where you have only a potentially thinly capitalized seed fund in front of you go get through that difficult point I said guys you need a bull pen and way we came up with the name is I'm involved in a deal with Chad Durbin who used to pitch for the Phillies and now as a relief pitcher for the cleveland indians and he was in our office and we were talking about this idea and Chad said yeah it's kind of like you're building a bullpen for the seed guys I'm like that's exactly right that's the name we got to go with and so fortunately I was involved in in this company called showcase you which is actually cool cited suppose for recruiting for college scholarships for a collegiate athletes right you're a high school student you throw 80 miles an hour left hand it and you're in 10th grade how do you figure out where the right scholarships are so Durbin and some of the Phillies where the original investors in this company called showcase you it's actually a cool company as the combine work out online basically fries for the high school kids and because the high school kids sometimes are in tough geographies to get to you're in you're in a small rural area in Nebraska how do they find out that you're the guy who can throw 89 miles an hour great so I mean this VC market so basically you're referring to with bullpen right now is an innie and you've been in our sprayer so you live through classic you know classic financing your last company financed by kleiner perkins and a tribe i forget who financed tribe yet Mayfield was the lead investor may feel again another traditional VC firm all tier 1 VCS although may feel people are you now is slipped a little bit that's some of their key partners who have slipped away but they've all moved on what you're really referring to is there's a new dynamic of entrepreneurship going on now we're now there are some break outcomes that just need a little bit more time to mature in the old model they just be kind of closed down the VC guy would be on the Bora has just a pain in the ass and you know really not growing and do another round it's they get kind of lazy in a way if they got 10 10 boards are on so with the super angels and the fact that does take a lot of cash to start a company you've got more deals getting done so the the Y Combinator the Dave McClure's and chef claw va's in the mike maples and sometimes SiliconANGLE labs which we're doing here is telling you about right we're funding companies the more [ __ ] is funded a better will you come in as you keep them alive longer just wreck the pivot possibly that's right and so what happens is right now the venture industry is being disrupted the same way the venture industry has funded companies that have rupted other industries they are being disrupted in the exact same way and the disruption happened from below as always happens it started in seed stage now in order for the disruption to go all the way through there need to be companies that come after seed stage investors that have the same philosophy and mentality pro entrepreneur easy terms operating people who get their hands dirty to get deals done you need that in the B stage and in the sea stage and here's what our prediction is John our prediction is a few years from now there'll be a company that comes after bullpen that does series c and series d financing or mezzanine financing but the same philosophy is bullpen and then DST s at the end of that chain and you can imagine building companies that go all the way to liquidity that you got money from maples first bullpen second this unnamed company third and you went quasi-public with DST and you've bypassed the entire venture scheme entirely and the entire institutional public markets complete liquidity wealth creation companies creating jobs I mean this is new paradigm I mean this isn't amazing I mean this is a potentially amazing point in the history of us finance the idea that you could go two billion dollar outcomes by passing not only the public markets on the back side but the traditional venture ecosystem on the front side I mean that is a disruption if ever there was one amen I mean hi and with you a hundred percent the other some people who will argue regulation is if market forces first of all I'm a big believer in market forces so I think what you're doing is clearly identifying an opportunity that dynamics are all lying lining up entrepreneurs are validating it and so but the questions are regulations I mean first of all I'm anti-regulation but as you start to get to that liquidity and some are arguing I even wrote a blog post about saying hey you know basically Facebook's public merry go buddy what do you say to those guys this is the change in the history of this financial asustor we want the government regulating this yeah so my co-founder of both i started bullpen with two really good guys Duncan Davison who was the founder covad was advantage point for years asking them to buy government regulation would go bad i mean what happened then because of the I lack warsi like Wars but only that the some extent covet doesn't exist unless the telco 1994 happens through in some ways a creation of the government to good point it's social right but but think about it the arbitrariness of government as opposed to a well-thought-out centralized plan so anyway so Duncan sometimes uses that phrase you know he talks a lot about the way in which the government you know that the worst thing you can ever hear is I'm with the government I'm here to help right i mean that's about the way it goes but his point around the the the new quasi public markets is money we'll find a way yeah and when sarbanes-oxley happens and it's tough to go public and you're a CEO like Pincus who's running one of the great all-time companies in Silicon Valley at Zynga he says you know going public is not an entrance is not an exit it's an entrance that's that's this quote what why would I why do I need that headache I mean I was just talking with Charles beeler who sold for the hell dorado he sold to compel in one of his investments to dell for over a billion dollars and and 3 para nother firm he wasn't on that one that was sold to HP during storage wars he's talking about the lawsuits literally this shakedown of immediately filed lawsuits you know you could have got more money so this is this public markets brutal no doubt no doubt i think what you're doing is a revolution I'm all excited about this new environment again anything with his liquidity wealth creation with the engine of innovation can be powered that's fantastic look back the startups okay get back to where you're playing yeah the history of Silicon Valley was built on the notion of value add some have said over the past 10 years venture capital has not been truly value add and some were arguing value subtract and then just money so what you're talking about here is getting in and helping me stay alive what's the value added side of the equation mean I know that a lot of these folks like like like ourselves here it's looking angle McClure Xavier and maples and true ventures they roll their sleeves up first round capital right before we can only provide so much it kind of expands right you guys are filling in the capital market side right how are you guys helping out on the value add because a lot of those companies may be the next Twitter right you've got a bridge to finance that's right allow them to do the pivot or get the creative energy to grow and they hit that market if they hit that hit it going vertical you got it kind of sometimes nurture it you guys have a strategy for that talk about the so let me let me give you my perspective on that so I think 10 years ago when you're starting a company the name of the venture firm was more important than potentially the partner on your board ten years later the name of the firm matters much less and it's the name of the partner and it's the operating experience that that partner partner brought to bear and you go talk to the 24 year old entrepreneur verse the 34 year old entrepreneur the 24 entrepreneur 24 year old entrepreneur wants a guy like you or a guy like me on his board he wants have been there done that started a company was a CEO exited it got fired hired people fired other people scar tissue scars knowledge experience exactly and if a good friend of mine who's in the traditional business I'll leave his name out of it he sometimes says the following phrase the era of the gentleman VC is over and what he means by the era of the gentleman VC is over is you know if your background is you were a junior associate who came in with a finance degree in an MBA and it never started a company you're not going to get picked by the entrepreneur anymore in 10 years from now almost everyone in the business is going to have a resume that looks more like a Cristal Paul Martino a mark pincus that you name all the people who we've started our companies with if there's a lot more hochberg with track record certainly with with the kind of big companies in the valley just in our generation yet started with netscape google paypal right now i want to see facebook is and then now's inga either the ecosystem is just entered intertwined I mean for every failure that spawns more success right so that's right that's a Silicon Valley way yeah well a tribe was tribe was a perfect example of a successful failure tribe was not a successful outcome but it was in many ways a very successful way to actually pioneer what became social networking you know investments got made into Facebook as a result of that Zynga in aggregate knowledge were both the outcrops of what was learned to some extent the original business case of Zynga was remarkably simple there is a ton of time being spent on social networks and after you get done finding your buddies and looking at photos what do you do and Pincus is original vision to some extent was let's have games to play and that insight doesn't happen that way unless you don't do tribe and go into the trenches and get the scars on your back and your in your your second venture of our adventure right at the tribe was aggregate knowledge was similar concept people are connected I mean you got to be excited though I mean you know you were involved in tribes very early on all the stuff that you dealt with activity streams newsfeed connections the social science you know the one that one of the nicest pieces of validation of this recently was over in q4 of 2010 seven of the patents that me Chris law Elliot low and Brian Waller wrote got issued now they're all owned by Cisco Cisco bought tribe in the end they bought the assets in the and the patent filings but there are patent filings that go back to 2002 on the corner stones and hallmarks of what social networking really is that we wrote back then that have now issued order granted or sitting in the cisco portfolio and well that's kind of like a consolation prize and that there wasn't a big outcome for tribe it is very validating to see that those original claims on really cutting-edge stuff have been had been issued and I'm excited about that you should be proud i'm proud to know your great guy you have great integrity you're going to do well as a venture capitalist i think you people will trust you and you're fair and there's two types of people in this world people who help people people who screw people so you know you really on one side of the other you're you're not in between you're truly on the on the good side I really enjoy you know having chatting with you but let's talk about entrepreneurship from that perspective about patents you know I'm try was an outcome that we all can relate to the peplum with Facebook of what Zuckerberg and and those guys are doing over there that's entrepreneurship so talk to the entrepreneurs out there yeah hey you know what you do some good work it all comes back to you talk about the the Karma of entrepreneurship a failure is not a bad thing it's kind of a punch line these days I'll failures are stepping stone to the next thing but talk about your experience and lets you and i talk about how to deal with faith for those first-time entrepreneurs out there in their 20s what just give them a sense of how to approach their venture and if it fails or succeeds what advice would you give them yeah well like winning and losing is important part of the game I mean certain companies are going to be successful in certain ones art and if you go and start ten unsuccessful companies maybe this isn't exactly the business for you but that said how you the game is important as well and if you're a high integrity guy who gets good investors and you make quality decisions and let's say the market wasn't a fit you're going to get the money the second time because people said you know I work with that guy that guy really did a good job you know they never got it quite right but this is a guy learn the right lessons so when I'm coaching a first-time CEO and i'm the CEO coach of a couple guys now you know i'm looking for someone who's sitting there going hey i not only want to do this to win and be successful but i want to learn i I want to do this better than no one no one walks in and says I learn from my failure I hope I'm successful I mean you let it go and say hey I'm gonna be successful I want to win failure is not an option but failure happens right i mean you know it's bad breaks that mean but but here is the key less I tell this to all of the entrepreneurs I work with you will not be successful if you're making mistakes that were made by those before you if you make novel mistakes you're in good company right and so only ever make a novel mistake I made a good example this is one claw and I started Chris law and I started aggregate knowledge aggregate knowledge was the original business model was around recommendations and there were dead bodies in front of us there was net perceptions there was fire fly and she was in the office this morning with Yazdi one of the founders of [ __ ] cast with it man yeah so predictive analytics residi what did we do we went out and we I flew out and met John riedle University of Minnesota who was the founder of net perceptions I dug up yes d i got these guys on my advisory board and while aggregate knowledge was not successful in the recommendation business and pivoted into the data management thing we made novel mistakes we did not repeat the mistakes of met perceptions and firefly and so i think that's an important important lesson to an entrepreneur if you're going into an area that has dead bodies in front of you you better research them you better know who they are you better know what happened and you better make sure that if you screw it up you at least screw it up in a way which none of us could have predicted yeah that's the only way you're going to get a hall pass on that well let's talk about talk about some of the hot Renisha of activity saw so you're in that sector where you're feeding the seed the super angels in the first rounds early stage guys and it's a good fit what about some of the philosophies on like the firms out there there's of this to this two philosophies I just taught us to an entrepreneur here you met on the way out a street speaker text and there at seven you know under a million dollars in financing hmm series a yeah and then you got in the news yesterday color 41 million dollars building to win magnin flipboard a hundred million dollars i got this is these guys that we know i mean there are yep our generation and a little bit around the same time and certainly they have pedigree so remember the old days the arms race mentality right when the sector at all costs right that's kind of what's going on here i mean some of the command that kind of money there's actually an auction going on what do you make of that I mean bubble is an arms race so so rich Melman inside a bullpen de tu fascinating analysis he looked at the full portfolio of 28 took about 20 of the best super angels by the way the super angles are all different some are micro vc summer buying options etc so so first off super angel is a weird word but it's everybody from Union Square and foundry on one side first round and flooding but any take the top 20 or so of these guys and look at their portfolios what's amazing about their portfolios is the unlike 10 and 20 years ago in prior tech bubbles there are not 20 companies doing the same thing when you categorize them yeah ten percent are in ad tech ten percent our direct-to-consumer consider but like forty percent are one-offs that is this is I think one of the first times in the history of venture that forty percent of the deal flow is a one-off unique business idea that there aren't 30 guys going to do and I think that the importance of that to what happens in this next stage of the tech boom we don't know what that means yet because back in the day well we need to just we're venture firm we need to disk drive company okay so your venture firm you've got your disk drive companies and I'll 20 venture friend knows if drive out and created the herd mentality everyone talks about with venture yep mean I was an opponent on a talk on here in the cube and I don't think I actually put in a blog post but I called the era of entrepreneurship like with open sores and low cost of entry with cloud computing and now mobility the manure of innovation where you know in the manure that's being out in the mark place mushrooms are growing out of it right and these you don't know what's going to be all look the same in a way so how do you tell the good ones from the bad ones so it's hard right so you have a lot of one you have a lot more activity hence angel list hence the super in rice so so the economics and the deal flow are all there the question is how do you get them from being just a one-off looked good on paper flame out the reality yeah well look in my opinion seed stage investing is about investing in people and I think when big firms trying to seed stage investing there's an impedance mismatch a lot of times because they want more evidence they want to know did the market work to the management then this is this is an early stage venture and am I going to want to go in a foxhole with this person and in many ways the good super angels are instinctive investors who are betting on people that they want to be in the foxhole with and yeah did they do it before do they know how to hire people is the market reasonably interesting but guess what they're probably gonna pivot three times so wait a minute at the end of the day you got to invest in people later stage venture is not you can look at discounted cash flows you can look at mezzanine financing you can do traditional measures but if you're going to invest in two people who have a prototype and need five hundred thousand dollars you're investing in people at that point what do you think about the OC angel is I'm a big fan of and recently was added thanks to maybe out there but even though i'm not i don't really co-invest with anyone else other than myself maybe you guys would bullpen but but if that's a phenomenon you don't have angel list which is opening up doors for deal flow companies are getting funded navales getting yeah a ton of activity nivea doing great job with venture hacks i get y combinator which I called the community college of startups they bring in like they open the door and I mean that an actually good way don't mean that negatively I mean they're giving access to entrepreneurs that never had access to the market right and now you have Paul Graham kind of giving the halo effect or thrown the holy water on certain stars and they get magically funded but yesterday at an event and they're they're packed right I've heard from VC saying I'm not invited because I didn't wasn't part of the original investment class so it seems that Y comma day is getting full yeah so do you see that you agree is there will be an over lo y combinator you know kind of like I've TED Conference has you know Ted they'll be you know y combinator Boston little franchises will be like barcamp for sure I mean look and look at techstars they franchise they'd I was over there with Dave Tisch in New York there's TechStars New York after those TechStars older in techstars seattle there is no doubt in my mind that right now there is an over investment in the seed stage meaning that there is a little bit of a seed bubble going on that's not necessarily bad though because in terms of raw dollars there's not a bubble yet Rory who's over at rafi it smells like a bubble it looks like a bubble but when you look at the mechanic when you look at the actual total dollars it's not a bubble rory who has a hinge recent Horowitz been said that that it's a boom not a bubble yeah so don't be confused it looks like bubbles and booms kind of look together the same right I actually I'm not quite sure I had the exact data right but here's the quick summary if you take a look at venture capital investment as a percent of GDP historically it's been something like point one percent of GDP in the bubble back in 99 it went to one percent something like it went 10x higher right now we're still at point one percent but since it's very much centered around the seed stage investing you see this frothiness in the sea but until that number goes from point 1 percent of GDP back up to one percent there's no real bubble because the tonnage of money hasn't come in yet and so so it's starting but this is what a tech boom feels like the early stages are excitement and lots of ideas and lots of flowers blooming and then the big money comes in because John I'll bet you're your brother and your sister and your mom haven't invested in a tech startup back in 99 video there's no public market that supports seven in a way that's a good and bad star basement yeah there's no fraud going on and most of the companies that are out there whether their lifestyle business or seed or bullpen funded are actually generating income the entrepreneur he has any earlier Mike was saying that he could a business deal so people are kind of like saw the old bubble and said shoot I don't want to do that again I gotta have at least revenue right and so companies didn't seem to start out with cash so you know that because you invested it but you know Pincus was getting some cash flow in the door from day one that's right that company was company was profitable the first day it started basically so talk about you know so I'm with Paul Martino by the way with bullpen capital entrepreneur wrote the patents on social networking which he sold the cisco when they sold the company now with bullpen capital huge dynamic you're a company out there this is exactly the positive dynamic you want to see because mainly you know dave mcclure jeff clavier mike maples have been kind of getting their butts handed to them in the press about super angels not having the juice to kind of go anywhere and it's been kind of a negative press there so you know this is the kind of void that's been filled by you guys to show the market that look at this there's a road map here so even though that the McClure's and clubs don't have big funds that there's a path to follow on financing so that the vc's can't shut them down and i've heard some pc say that so a lot of traditional venture guys would like to say that you know this little disruption we nipped it in the butt and it stopped after the seed stage but that's not the history of disruptions the history of disruptions are they start from the bottom then they get ecosystem support and then they grow and they disrupt the incumbents and I think we're halfway there so so the Angel gate thing that Arrington reported on was interesting because you know essentially what happened there it was a lot of him fighting Ron Conway I was not happy you can't be happy about competition I mean this is competition that increases prices right so you know in the short term prices have been inflated on valuations true or false that's true but but but I think I think the whole way angel gate was reported was absurd the most Pro entrepreneurial venture people perhaps in the history of the business are the guys who were supposedly at those tables I mean mike maples Jeff claw VA josh cop and Ron Conway fired his guy that was there I I understand suppose again suppose a key are right these are the most Pro entrepreneurial venture guys in the history of the business so I think that turned into something that it never was yeah well I mean that's the thing you know good for content producers who want page views I got to create some drama and you know as you know SiliconANGLE doesn't have any banner ads on our site quick plug for us we are motivated by content not page views so thanks for coming in today no but seriously I mean there's a there's a black cloud over the super angels has been since Angel gate I've heard privately from VCS that super angels it's been kind of a scuttlebutt they're misaligned just rumors I completely overblown and you know their business model threatens the incumbents and you know someone needed someone needed a piece of fodder to start a you know start a techcrunch discussion right there's no doubt that the market is need in need of a new ecosystem for the early stage because individual angels traditionally were wealthy individuals but now you have people with more experience like yourselves and entrepreneurs from google and facebook etc coming out and doing some things okay so next topic more on a personal kind of professional note k last final question is I know you got to run appreciate your time you're a technologist a lot of folks don't know that you're hardcore computer science guy and our model southern angles computer science meet social science right in your wheelhouse so with that just kind of final parting question what gets you excited technically right now I mean I'll see you have roots in both comps I and social Iran Zynga's early investor roster you got a bullpen capital you're looking at a lot of deals outside of that you as a computer scientist geek mm-hmm what gets you jazz what do you see in the horizon that's not yet on the mega trend roster that kind of you can't put your finger on it truly we might really get a good feeling well so I think you'll be disappointed with this answer because I think it's now cross the chasm to start being one of those mega trends it's called consumerization of enterprise and that's now the buzz word for it but what is it really mean and why do I think it's for real look you've got cool self-service applications for everything you can go do home banking by logging into a portal you can go to an ATM you can go do these things but you know go bring a new laptop into your big stodgy fortune 500 company and you know it's like getting a rectal exam right you know we got to install this we got to give you this private key yet that's TSA it writes like going through TSA exact idea that IT inside of big fortune 500 companies is going to stop being this gatekeeper to new technology I think look how long do you think it'll be until pick your favorite fortune 500 company the IT people know how to deal with the ipad 2 but how many people bought an ipad 2 into the off already everyone and so this to me is going to be the big next deck the next decade are going to be self service offerings for the enterprise getting around a very frustrating gatekeepers inside of you know the IT department etc and that's going to lead to an awesome boom of everything from security to auditing to compliance etc that's the convergence question Paul Martino my friend entrepreneur great guy venture capitals now on the good side helping the seed Super Angel micro VCS great to have you consumerization of IT that hits the cloud mobile social it's everything so that I was buzzword compliant on that great job great to have you know you're busy got to have you in again thanks so much for time that's a wrap thank you very much great thank you John