>> Hello everyone. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier host like you here in our Palo Alto studio here in Palo Alto. Here with Dominic Wilde, known as Dom, CEO of SnapRoute, a hot new startup. A great venture. Backers don. Welcome to skip conversation. So love having to start ups. And so talk about Snape route the company because you're doing something interesting that we've been covering your pretty aggressively the convergence between Dev Ops and Networking. We've known you for many, many years. You were a former Hewlett Packard than you woodpecker enterprise running the networking group over there. You know, networking. And you're an operator. Snap rows. Interesting, because, um, great names back behind it. Big venture backers. Lightspeed Norwest, among others. Yes. Take a minute. Explain what? A SnapRoute. >> So SnapRoute was founded to really address one of the big, big problems we see in infrastructure, which is that, you know, essentially the network gets in the way of the deployment the rapid and angel deployment of applications. And so in the modern environment that we're in, you know, the business environment, highly competitive environment of disruption, continuous disruption going on in our industry, every company out there is constantly looking over their shoulder is, you know, making sure that they're moving fast enough there innovating fast enough that they don't want to be disrupted. They don't want to be overrun by, you know, a new upstart. And in order to do that, you know the application is is actually the work product that you really want to deploy, that you you want to roll out, and you want to be able to do that on a continuous basis. You want to be really agile about how you do it. And, quite frankly, when it comes to infrastructure, networking has been fifteen years behind the rest of the infrastructure and enabling that it's, ah, it's a big roadblock. It's obviously, you know, some of the innovations and developments and networking of lag behind other areas on what we snap Brown set out to do was to say, You know, look, if we're if we're going to bring networking forward and we're going to try and solve some of these problems, how do we do that? In a way, architecturally, that will enable networking to become not just a part of Ah, you know a cloud native infrastructure but actually enable those those organizations to drive forward. And so what we did was we took all of our sort of devops principles and Dev ups tools, and we built a network operating system from the ground up using devops principles, devops architectures and devops tools. And so what we're delivering is a cloud native network operating system that is built entirely on containers and is delivered is a micro services architecture on the big...one of the big value propositions that we deliver is what we call see a CD for networking, which is your continuous integration. Continuous deployment is obviously, you know, Big devops principal there. But doing that for networking, allowing a network to be constantly up enabling network Teo adapt to immutable infrastructure principles. You know we're just replacing pieces that need to be replaced. Different pieces of the operating system can be replaced If there's a security vulnerability, for instance, or if there's ah, bugger and you feature needed so you know we can innovate quicker. We can enable the network to be more reliable, allow it to be more agile, more responsive to the needs of the organization on all of this, fundamentally means that your Operation shins model now becomes ah, lot more unified. A lot more simple. You. Now, we now enable the net ox teams to become a sort of more native part of the conversation with devils. Reduce the tension there, eliminate any conflicts and everything. And we do that through this. You know, this innovative offices. >> Classically, the infrastructure is code ethos. >> Yeah, exactly right. I mean, it's you know, a lot of people have been talking about infrastructure is code for a long, long time. But what we really do, I mean, if if you deploy our network operating system you employ onto the bare metal switching, then you really enable Dev ops to hang have, you know, I take control and to drive the network in the way they want using their native tool chains. So, you know, Cuba Netease, for instance, ears. You know that the big growing dev ops orchestration to all of the moment. In fact, we think it's more than of the moment. You know, I've never seen in the industry that sort of, you know, this kind of momentum behind on open source initiative like there is behind Cuba. Netease. And we've taken communities and baked it natively into the operating system. Such that now our network operating system that runs on a physical switch can be a native part off that communities and develops tool >> Dom, I want to get to the marketplace, dynamics. Kind of what's different. Why now? But I think what's interesting about SnapRoute you're the chief of is that it's a venture back with big names? Yeah. Lightspeed, Norwest, among others. It's a signal of a wave that we've been covering people are interested in. How do you make developers deploy faster, more agility at scale, on premises and in clouds. But I want you to before we get there, want to talk about the origin story of company? Yeah. Why does it exist? How did it come to bear you mentioned? Operation is a big part of cloud to cloud is about operating model so much a company. Yes. This is the big trend. That's the big way. But how did it all get started? What's the SnapRoute story? >> Yeah, it's an interesting story. Our founders were actually operators at at Apple back in the day, and they were responsible for building out some of Apple's biggest. You know, data centers for their sort of customer facing services, like, you know, like loud iTunes, all those good things and you know they would. They were tasked with, sort of, you know, sort of modernizing the operational model with with those data centers and, you know, and then they, like many other operators, do you know, had a sense of community and worked with their peers. You know, another big organizations, even you know, other hyper scale organizations and wanted to learn from what they did on DH. What they recognised was that, you know, cos like, you know, Google and Facebook and Microsoft is urine things. They had done some incredible things and some incredible innovations around infrastructure and particularly in networking, that enabled them to Dr Thie infrastructure from A from a Devil ops perspective and make it more native. But those words that if you know, fairly tailored for there, if you know, for their organizations and so what they saw was the opportunity to say, Well, you know, there's there's many other organizations who are delivering, you know, infrastructure is a service or SAS, or you know, who are just very large enterprises who are acting as these new cloud service providers. And they would have a need to, you know, to also have, you know, tools and capabilities, particularly in the network, to enable the network to be more responsive, more to the devil apps like. And so, you know, they they they founded SnapRoute on that principle that, you know, here's the problem that we know we can solve. It's been solved, you know, some degree, but it's an architectural problem, and it's not about taking, You know, all of the, you know, the last twenty five years of networking knowledge and just incrementally doing a sort of, you know, dot upgrade and, you know, trying to sort of say, Hey, we're just add on some AP eyes and things. You really needed to start from the ground up and rethink this entirely from an architectural perspective and design the network operating system as on with Dev ups, tools and principles. So they started the company, you know, been around just very late two thousand fifteen early two thousand sixteen. >> And how much money have you read >> The last around. We are Siri's, eh? We took in twenty five million. >> And who were the venture? >> It was Lightspeed Ventures on DH Norwest. And we also had some strategic investment from Microsoft Ventures and from teams >> from great name blue chips. What was their interest? What was their thesis? Well, and you mentioned the problem. What was the core problem that you're solving that they were attracted to? Why would that why was the thirst with such big name VCs? >> Yeah, I mean, I think it was, you know, a zip said, I think it's the the opportunity to change the operational more. And I think one of the big things that was very different about our company is and, you know, we like to say, you know, we're building for effort. Operators, by operators, you know, I've found is, as I said, well, more operators from Apple, they have lived and breathed what it is to be woken up at three. A. M. On Christmas Eve toe. You know, some outage and have to, you know, try and figure that out and fight your way through a legacy kind of network and figure out what's going on. So you know, so they empathize with what that means and having that DNA and our company is incredibly meaningful in terms of how we build that you know the product on how we engage with customers. We're not just a bunch of vendors who you know we're coming from, you know, previous spender backgrounds. Although I do, you know, I bring to the table the ability to, you know, to deliver a package and you know, So there's just a cloud scale its clouds, Gail. It's it's but it's It's enabling a bridge if you like. If you look at what the hyper scales have done, what they're achieving and the operational models they have, where a if you like a bridge to enable that capability for a much broader set of operators and C. S. P s and as a service companies and dry forward a an aggressive Angela innovation agenda for companies, >> businesses. You know, we always discussing the Cuban. Everyone who watches the Kiev knows I'm always ranting about how cloud providers make their market share numbers, and lot of people include sass, right? I think everyone will be in the SAS business, so I kind of look at the SAS numbers on, say, it's really infrastructures service platform to service Amazon, Google, Microsoft and then, you know, Ali Baba in China. Others. Then you got IBM or one of it's kind of in the big kind of cluster there top. That is a whole nother set of business requirements that sass driven this cloud based. Yeah, this seems to be a really growing market. Is that what you're targeting? And the question is, how do you relate Visa? Visa Cooper? Netease trend? Because communities and these abstraction layers, you're starting to hear things like service mesh, policy based state Full application states up. Is that you trying to that trend explain. >> We're very complimentary, Teo. Those trends, we're, you know, we're not looking to replace any of that, really. And and my big philosophy is, if you're not simplifying something, then you're not really adding back here, you know, what you're doing is complicating matters or adding another layer on top. So so yeah, I mean, we are of value to those companies who are looking at hybrid approaches or have some on prime asset. Our operating system will land on a physical, bare metal switch So you know what? What we do is when you look at it, you know, service most is your message measures and all the other, You know, technologies you talked about with very, very complimentary to those approaches because we're delivering the on underlying network infrastructure on network fabric. Whatever you'd like to call it, that can be managed natively with class native tools, squeezing the alliteration there. But but, you know, it means that you don't need toe add overlays. We don't need to sort of say, Hey, look, the network is this static, archaic thing that's really fragile. And And I mean, if we touch it, it's going to break. So let's just leave it alone and let's let's put some kind of overlay over the top of it on do you know, run over the top? What we're saying is you can collapse that down. Now what you can say, what you can do is you can say, Well, let's make the network dynamic responsive. Let's build a network operating system out of micro services so you can replace parts of it. You can, you know, fix bugs. You can fix security vulnerabilities and you can do all that on the fly without having to schedule outage windows, which is, you know, for a cloud native company or a sass or infrastructure service company. I mean, that's your business. You can't take outage windows. Your business depends on being available all the time. And so we were really changing that fundamentals of a principle of networking and saying, You know, networking is now dynamic, you know, in a very, very native way, but it also integrates very closely with Dev ops. Operational model >> is a lot of innovation that network. We're seeing that clearly around the industry. No doubt everyone sees late and see that comes into multi Cloud was saying that the trend moving the data to the compute coyote again that's a network issue network is now an innovation opportunity. So I gotta ask you, where do you guys see that happening? And I want to ask you specifically talking about the cloud architects out in the marketplace in these enterprises who were trying to figure out about the architecture of clowns. So they know on premises there, moving that into a cloud operations. We see Amazon, they see Google and Microsoft has clouds that might want to engage with have cloud native presence in a hybrid and multi cloud fashion for those cloud architects. What are the things that you like to see them doing? More of that relates to your value problems. In other words, if they're using containers or they're using micro services, is this good or bad? What? What you should enterprise to be working on that ties into your value proposition. >> So I think about this the other way around, actually, if I can kind of turn that turn that question. But on his head, I think what you know, enterprises, you know, organization C, S. P s. I think what they should be doing is focusing on their business and what their business needs. They shouldn't be looking at their infrastructure architecture and saying, you know, okay, how can we, you know, build all these pieces? And then you know what can the business and do on top of that infrastructure? You wanna look at it the other way around? I need to deploy applications rapidly. I need to innovate those applications. I need to, you know, upgrade, change whatever you need to do with those applications. And I need an infrastructure that can be responsive. I need an infrastructure that can be hybrid. I need infrastructure that can be, you know, orchestrated in the hybrid manner on DH. Therefore, I want to go and look for the building blocks out there of those those architectural and infrastructure building blocks out there that can service that application in the most appropriate way to enable the velocity of my business and the innovation from my business. Because at the end of the day, I mean, you know, when we talk to customers, the most important thing T customers, you know, is the velocity of their business. It is keeping ahead in the highly competitive environment and staying so far ahead that you're not going to be disrupted. And, you know, if any element of your infrastructure is holding you back and even you know, you know the most mild way it's a problem. It's something you should address. And we now have the capability to do that for, you know, for many, many years. In fact, you know, I would claim up to today without snap route that you know, you you do not have the ability to remove the network problem. The network is always going to be a boat anchor on your business. It introduces extra cycles. It introduces big security, of underplaying >> the problems of the network and the consequences that prior to snap her out that you guys saw. >> So I take the security issue right? I mean, everybody is very concerned about security today. One of the biggest attack vectors in the security world world today is the infrastructure. It's it's it's so vulnerable. A lot of infrastructure is is built on sort of proprietary software and operating systems. You know, it's very complex. There's a lot of, you know, operations, operational, moves out and change it. So there's there's a lot of opportunity for mistakes to be made. There's a lot of opportunity for, you know, for vulnerabilities to be exposed. And so what you want to do is you want to reduce the threat surface of, you know, your your infrastructure. So one of the things that we can do it SnapRoute that was never possible before is when you look at a traditional network operating system. Andreas, A traditional. I mean, any operating system is out there, other you know, Other >> than our own. >> It's basically a monolithic Lennox blob. It is one blob of code that contains all of the features. And it could be, you know, architect in in a way that it Sze chopped up nicely. But if you're not using certain features, they're still there. And that increases the threat surface with our sat proud plant native network operating system. Because it is a micro services are key picture. If you are not using certain services or features, you can destroy and remove the containers that contain those features and reduce the threat surface of the operating system. And then beyond that, if you do become aware ofthe vulnerability or a threat that you know is somewhere in there, you can replace it in seconds on the fly without taking the infrastructure. Damn, without having to completely replace that whole blob of software causing, you know, an outage window. So that's just one example of, you know, the things we can do. But even when it comes to simple things, like, you know, adding in new services or things because we're containerized service is a ll boot together. It's no, eh? You know it doesn't. It doesn't have a one after the other. It it's all in parallel. So you know this this operating system comes up faster. It's more reliable. It eliminates the risk factors, the security, you know, the issues that you have. It provides native automation capabilities. It natively integrates with, You know, your Dev Ops tool chain. It brings networking into the cloud. Native >> really, really isn't in frustrations. Code is an operating system, so it sounds like your solution is a cloud native operating system. That's correct. That's pretty much the solution. That's it. How do customers engage with you guys? And what do you say? That cloud architect this is Don't tell me what to do. What's the playbook, right? How you guys advice? Because I see this is a new solution. Talk about the solution and your recommendation to architects as they start thinking about building that elastic in that flexible environment. >> Yeah. I mean, I think you know, Ah, big recommendation is, you know, is to embrace, you know, that all the all of the cloud native principles and most of the companies that were talking to, you know, definitely doing that and moving very quickly. But, you know, my recommendation. You know, engaging with us is you should be looking for the network to in naval, your your goals and your you know your applications rather than limiting. I mean, that's that's the big difference that, you know, the people who really see the value in what we do recognize that, you know, the network should be Andi is an asset. It should be enabling new innovation, new capabilities in the business rather than looking at the network as necessary evil where we you know, where we have to get over its limitations or it's holding us back. And so, you know, for any organization that is, you know, is looking at deploying, you know, new switching infrastructure in any way, shape or form. I think, you know, you should be looking at Well, how am I going to integrate this into a dev ops? You know, world, how may going to integrate this into a cloud native world. So as my business moves forward, I'm actually servicing the application in enabling a faster time to service for the application for the business. At the end of the day, that's that's everybody's going, >> you know, we've been seeing in reporting this consistently, and it's even more mainstream now that cloud computing has opened up the aperture of the value and the economics and also the technical innovation around application developers coding faster having the kind of resource is. But it also created a CZ creating a renaissance and networking. So the value of networking and application development that collision is coming together very quickly. So the intersection you guys play. So I'm sure this will resonate well with customers Will as they try to figure out the role the network because against security number one analytics all the things that go into what Sadiq they care about share data, shared coat all this is kind of coming together. So if someone hears this story, they'll go, OK, love this snap around store. I gotta I gotta dig in. How do they engage you? What do you guys sell to them? What's the pitch? Give the quick plug for the company real >> quick. Engaging with us is, you know, is a simple issue. No, come to www snapper out dot com. And you know, you know contacts are up there. You know, we were currently obviously we're a small company. We sell direct, more engaged with, you know, our first customers and deploying our product, you know, right now, and it's going very, very well, and, you know, it's a PSE faras. You know how you know what and when to engage us. I would say you can engage us at any stage and and value whether or not your architect ing a whole new network deploying a new data center. Obviously. Which is, you know, it is an ideal is built from the ground up, but we add value to the >> data center preexisting data saying that wants >> the modernizing data centers. I mean, very want >> to modernize my data center, my candidate. >> So one of the biggest challenges in an existing data center in when one of the biggest areas of tension is at the top of rack switch the top of racks, which is where you connect in your you know, your your application assets, your servers are connected. You're connecting into the into the, you know, first leap into the network. One of the challenges there is. You know, Dev ops engineers, They want Teo, you know, deploy containers. They want to deploy virtual machines they wantto and stuff move stuff, change stuff and they need network engineers to help them to do that. For a network engineer, the least interesting part of the infrastructure is the top Arax. Which it is a constant barrage day in, day, out of request. Hey, can I have a villain? Can have an i p address. Can we move this? And it's not interesting. It just chews up time we alleviate that tension. What we enable you to do is network engineer can you know, deploy the network, get it up and running, and then control what needs to be controlled natively from their box from debits tool chains and allow the devil ups engineers to take control as infrastructure. So the >> Taelon is taking the stress out of the top of racks. Wedge, take the drama out of this. >> Take that arm around the network. Right. >> So okay, you have the soul from a customer. What am I buying? What do you guys offering? Is that a professional services package? Is it software? Is it a sad solution? Itself is the product. >> It is software, you know. We are. We're selling a network operating system. It lands on, you know, bare metal. He liked white box switching. Ah, nde. We offer that as both perpetual licenses or as a subscription. We also office, um, you know, the value and services around that as well. You know, Andre, right now that is, you know, that is our approach to market. You know, we may expand that, you know, two other services in the future, but that is what we're selling right now. It is a network operating >> system down. Thanks for coming and sharing this story of SnapRoute. Final question for you is you've been in this century. While we've had many conversations we'd love to talk about gear, speeds and feeds. I'll see softwares eating. The world was seeing that we're seeing cloud create massive amounts. Opportunity. You're in a big wave, right? What is this wave look like for the next couple of years? How do you see this? Playing out as Cloud continues to go global and you start to Seymour networking becoming much more innovative. Part of the equation with Mohr developers coming onboard. Faster, more scale. How do you see? It's all playing out in the industry. >> Yeah. So I think the next sort of, you know, big wave of things is really around the operational. But I mean, we've we've we've concentrated for many years in the networking industry on speeds and feeds. And then it was, you know, it's all about protocols and you know how protocol stacks of building stuff. That's all noise. It's really about How do you engage with the network? How do you how do you operate your network to service your business? Quite frankly, you know, you should not even know the network is there. If we're doing a really good job of network, you shouldn't even know about it. And that's where we need to get to is an industry. And you know that's that's my belief is where, where we can take >> it. Low latent. See programmable networks. Great stuff. SnapRoute Dominic. While no one is dominant industry friend of the Cube also keep alumni CEO of Snapper Out. Hot new start up with some big backers. Interesting signal. Programmable networks software Cloud Global all kind of big Party innovation equation. Here in Silicon Valley, I'm showing for with cube conversations. Thanks for watching

>> Male Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering InterConnect 2017. Brought to you by, IBM. >> Welcome back, we're live here in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE's coverage of InterConnect, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante my co-host. Our next guest is Deon Newman, CMO of IBM Watson IoT, and Slava Rubin, the founder and Chief Business Officer of Indiegogo, great keynote today, you're on stage. Welcome to theCUBE. Deon, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I got to first set the context. Indiegogo, very successful crowd-funder, you guys pioneered. It's pretty obvious now looking back, this has created so much opportunity for people starting companies, whether it's a labor of love or growing into a great business, so congratulations on your success. What's the IBM connection? Because I don't want, you know, there was some stuff on the tweets, I don't want to break the news, but you guys are here. Share the connection. What's the packaging, why is IMB and Indigogo working together? >> Yeah, so back up to 2008. We launched to be able to get people access to funding. And over the last several years, we've done a pretty good job of that. Sending over a billion dollars to over half a million entrepreneurs around the world. And more recently, we've had a lot more requests of Indiegogo can you do more? And we knew that we couldn't do it all on our own. So we partnered first with Arrow to be able to bring these ideas more into reality around components and engineering and supply chain. And we knew we needed more in terms of these IoT products, so they need to be smart and they need software. So we were really excited to be able to announce today, the partnership with IBM, around everything IoT Cloud, security, and being able to provide all the block chain and any other elements that we need. >> Deon I want to ask you, get your thoughts on, we had the Watson data platform guys on earlier in the segment, and the composability is now the norm around data. This brings the hacker-maker culture to IoT. Which if you think about it as a sweet-spot for some of the innovations. They can start small and grow big. Is that part of the plan? >> Yeah, I mean, if you look at what's going on we have about 6000 clients already with us in the IoT space. They tend to be the big end of town, you know whether it be a Daimler or an Airbus or whether it be a Kone, the world's biggest elevator company. Or ISS, the world's biggest facilities management company. So we were doing a lot of work up there really around optimizing their operations, connecting products, wrapping services around them so they can create new revenue streams. But where we didn't have an offering that was being used extensively, was in the start-up space. And you know when we saw what Indiegogo had been doing in the marketplace, and when our partner Arrow, who as Slava has said, has really built up an engineering capability and a component capability to support these makers. It was just a match made in heaven. You know, for an entrepreneur who needs to find a way to capture data, make that data valuable, you know, we can do that. We have the Cloud platform, we have the AI, et cetera. >> It's interesting, we just hit the stride of dude, we have our big data Silicon Valley event just last week, and the big thing that come out of that event is finally the revelation, this is probably not new to Slava and what you're doing, it that, the production under-the-hood hard stuff that's being done is some ways stunting the creativity around some of the cooler stuff. Like whether it's data analytics or in this case, starting a company. So, Slava I want to get your thought on, your views on how the world is becoming democratized. Because if you think about the entrepreneurship trend that you're riding, is the democratization of invention. Alright, there's a democracy, this is the creative, it's the innovation, but yet it's all this hard stuff, like what's called production or under-the-hood that IBM's bringing in. What do you expect that to fuel up? What's your vision of this democratization culture? >> I mean, it's my favorite thing that's happening. I think whether it's YouTube democratizing access to content or Indiegogo democratizing access to capital. The idea of democratizing access to entrepreneurship between our partnership, just really makes me smile. I think that capital is just one of those first points and now they're starting to get the money but lots of other things are hard. When you can actually get artificial intelligence, get Cloud capabilities, get security capabilities, put it into a service so you don't need to figure all those things out on your own so you can go from a small little idea to actually start scaling pretty rapidly, that's super exciting. When you can be on Indiegogo and in four weeks get 30,000 backers of demand across 100 countries, and people are saying, we want this, you know it's good to know you don't need to start ramping up your own dev team to figure out how to create a Cloud on your own, or create your own AI, you can tap right into a server that's provided. Which is really revolutionizing how quickly a small company can scale. So it proliferates more entrepreneurs starting because they know there's more accessibility. Plus it improves their potential for success, which in the long run just means there's more swings at the bat to be able to have and entrepreneur succeed, which I think all of us want. >> Explain to the audience how it works a little bit. You got the global platform that you built up. Arrow brings it's resources and ideation. IBM brings the IoT, the cognitive platform. Talk about how that all comes together and how people take advantage of it? >> Sure, I mean you can look at it as one example, like Water Buy. So Water Buy is an actual sensor that you can deploy against your water system to be able to detect whether or not your water that you're drinking is healthy. You're getting real-time data across your system and for some reason it's telling you that you have issues, you can react accordingly. So that was an idea. You go on Indiegogo, they post that idea and they're able to get the world to start funding it. You get customer engagement. You get actual market validation. And you get funding. Well now you actually need to make these sensors, you need to make these products, so now you get the partnership with Arrow which is really helpful cause they're helping you with the engineering, the design, the components. Now you want to be able to figure out how you can store all that data. So it's not just your own house, maybe you're evaluating across an entire neighborhood. Or as a State you want to see how the water is for the whole entire State. You put all of that data up into the Cloud, you want to be able to analyze the data rapidly through AI, and similarly this is highly sensitive data so you want it to be secure. If Water Buy on their own, had to build out all of this infrastructure, we're talking about dozens, hundreds, who knows how many people they would need? But here through the partnership you get the benefit of Indiegogo to get the brilliant idea to actually get validated, Arrow to bring your idea from the back of a napkin into reality, and then you get IBM Watson to help with all the software components and Cloud that we just talked about. >> And how did this get started? How did you guys, you know, fall into this, and how did it manifest itself? >> So can I tell the story? >> Go for it. >> So I love this story, so as Slava's explained at the front end of this it was really a partnership of Arrow and Indiegogo that came out of the need of entrepreneurs to actually build their stuff. You know, you get it funded and then you say, oh boy, now I've got a bunch of orders how do I now make this stuff? And so Arrow had a capability of looking at the way you designed, you know looking at it deeply with their engineers, sourcing the components, putting it together, maybe white-boxing it even for you. So they put that together. Now, we're all seeing that IoT and the connective products are moving for disconnection, which is actually generating data and that data having value. And so Arrow didn't have that capability, we were great partners with Arrow, you know when we all looked at it, the need for AI coming into all these products, the need for security around the connection, the platform that could actually do that connection, we were a logical map here. So we're another set of components, not the physical. You know, we're the Cloud-based components and services that enable these connected devices. >> If you think about like the impact, and it's mind-boggling what the alternative is. You mentioned that the example you gave, they probably might have abandoned the project. So if you think about the scale of these opportunities what the alternative would have been without an Indiegogo, you probably have some anecdotal kind of feeling on this. But any thoughts on what data you can share around, do you have kind of reference point of, okay, we've funded all this and 90% wouldn't have been done or 70% wouldn't have been done. Do you have any flavor for? >> It's hard to know exactly. Obviously many of these folks that come to Indiegogo, if they could've gotten funded on another path earlier in the process, they would have. Indiegogo became really a great choice. Now you're seeing instead of being the last resort, Indiegogo is becoming the first resort because they're getting so much validation and market data. The incredible thing is not to think about it at scale when you think about 500 or 700 thousand entrepreneurs, or over a billion dollars, and it's in virtually every country in the world. If you really just look at it as one product. So like, Flow Hive is just one example. They've revolutionized how honey gets harvested. That product was bought in almost 170 countries around the world and it's something that hadn't been changed in over 150 years. And it's just so interesting to see that if it wasn't for Indiegogo that idea would not go from the back of a napkin to getting funded. And now through these partnerships they're able to realize so much more of their potential. >> So it's interesting, the machine learning piece is interesting to me because you take the seed-funding which is great product-market fit as they say in the entrepreneurial culture, is validated. So that's cool. But it could be in some cases, small amounts of cash before the next milestone. But if you think about the creativity impact that machine learning can give the entrepreneur, with through in their discovery process, early stage, that's an added benefit to the entrepreneur. >> Absolutely. Yeah, a great example there is against SmartPlate. SmartPlate is trying to use a combination of a weight-sensing plate as well with photo-detection, image detection software. The more data it can feed its image detection, the more qualified it can know, is that a strawberry or a cherry, or is that beef? And we take that for granted that our eyes can detect all that, but it's really remarkable to think about instead of having to journal everything by hand or make sure you pick with your finger what's the right product and how many ounces, you can take a photo of something and now you'll know what you're eating, how much you're eating and what is the food composition? And this all requires significant data, significant processing. >> I'm really pumped about that, congratulations to you on a great deal. I love the creativity and I think the impact to the globe is just phenomenal. Thinking about the game-changing things that are coming up, Slava I've got to ask you, and Deon if you could weigh in too, maybe you have some, your favorites. You're craziest thing that you've seen funded and the coolest thing you've seen funded. (laughter) >> I mean, who is hard because it's kind of like asking well who's your favorite child? I have like 700,000 children, I'm not even Wilt Chamberlain (laughter) and I like them all. But you know it's everything from an activity tracker to security devices, to being able to see what the trend is 24, 36 months ahead. Before things become mainstream today, we're seeing these things 3, 5 years ago. Things are showing up at CES, and you know these are things we get to see in advance. In terms of something crazy, it's not quite IoT but I remember when a young woman tried to raise $200,000 to be able to get enough money for her and Justin Bieber to fly to the moon. (laughter) >> That's crazy. >> That didn't quite get enough funding. But something that's fresh right now is Nimuno Loops is getting funded right now on Indiegogo live. And they just posted less than seven days ago and they have Lego-compatible tape. So it's something that you can tape onto any surface and the other side is actually Lego-compatible so you actually put Legos onto that tape. So imagine instead of only a flat surface to do Legos, you could do Legos on any surface even your jacket. It's not the most IoT-esque product right now but you just asked for something creative. >> That's the creative. >> I think once you got Wilt Chamberlain and Justin Bieber in the conversation, I'm out. (laughter) (crosstalk) >> Well now, how does Indiegogo sustain itself? Does it take a piece of the action? Does it have other funding mechanisms for? >> Yeah, and that's the beautiful thing about Indiegogo. It's a platform and it's all about supply and demand. So supply is the ideas and the entrepreneurs and the demand is the funders. It's totally free to use the website and as long as you're able to get money in your pocket, then we take a percentage. If you're not taking any money into your pocket, then we get no money. As part of the process, you might benefit from actually not receiving money. You might try to raise a hundred grand, only raise thirty-one and learn that your price-point is wrong, your target audience is wrong, your color is wrong, you're bottom cost it too high. All this feedback is super valuable. You just saved yourself a lot of pain. So really it's about building the marketplace we're a platform, we started out just with funding, we're really becoming now a springboard for entrepreneurs. We can't do it all ourselves which is why we're bringing on these great partners. >> You know we've done, just to add to that, I think it's a relevant part here too. We've actually announced a premium-based service for the entrepreneurs to get onto the Cloud, to access the AI, to access the services as a starting point to the complete premium model so they can get started very low barrier to entry and overseeing scale as they grow. >> What do you call that? Is it IBM IoT Premium or? >> It hasn't got a name specifically to the premium element of the, it's just the Watson IoT platform. Available on Blue Mist. >> So it's a Watson sort of, right. So it's like a community edition of Watson. So Deon, new chapter for you. You know I saw a good quarter for mainframes, last quarter. It's still drafting off your great work and now you've shifted to this whole new IoT role, what's that been like? Relatively new initiative for IBM, building on some historical expertise. But give us the update on your business. >> Yes, so about 15 months ago, we announced a global headquarters that we were going to open in Munich, and we announced the Watson IT business. Which brought together a lot of IBM's expertise and a lot of our experience over the years through smarter cities, through the smarter planet initiative. You know we've been working The Internet Of Things, but we made a 3-billion dollar commitment to that marketplace, that we were going to go big and go strong. We've built out a horizontal platform, the Watson IoT platform. On top of that we've got market-leading enterprise asset management software, the Maximo portfolio, TRIRIGA for facilities management. And then we have a whole set of engineering software for designing connected products as well. So we've built out a very comprehensive industry-vertical-aligned IoT business. We added last year, we went from about 4000 to about 6000 clients. So we had a very good year in terms of real enterprises getting real outcomes. We continue to bring out new industry solutions around both connected products and then operations like retail, manufacturing, building management, telco, transportation. We're building out solutions and use-cases to leverage all that software. So business is going well. We officially the Watson IoT headquarters three weeks ago in Munich. And we're jam packed with clients coming through that building, building with us. We've got a lot of clients who've actually taken space in the building. And their using it as a co-laboratory with us to work on PSE's and see the outcomes they can drive. >> Alright, Deon Newman with IoT Watson, and IoT platforms. Slava Rubin, founder of Indiegogo, collective intelligence is cultural shift happening. Congratulations outsourcing and using all that crowdfunding. It's real good data, not just getting the entrepreneur innovations funded but really using that data and your wheelhouse IoT. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you John. >> More live coverage after this short break, with theCUBE live in Las Vegas for IBM InterConnect. We'll be right back, stay with us. (upbeat music)