>> Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE covering VeeamON 2019 brought to you by Veeam! >> Welcome back to Miami, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. We're here at the Fontainebleau Hotel. VeeamON day one of two-day coverage of the Veeam conference, very swaggy hotel. Dave Russell is here. He's the Vice President of NFI Strategy at Veeam. David, good to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> Thanks so much for coming onto theCUBE. >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. >> You're very welcome. So let's see, you're well over, let's see, a year out, just about a year out of Gartner. Right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> And so okay you've been injected with the Kool-Aid fully, I presume, right? >> There you go, in the green, yes. >> But we're still going to talk a little bit about the magic water, but before we get into that, talk about your first year here. >> Yeah. >> Your impressions. Do they meet, exceed your expectations? >> It exceeded my expectations, but I can honestly say I'm not doing what I thought I was going to be doing here, but it actually turned out to be better. The other thing I will honestly tell you is I'm now on Pacific Coast time at the moment. Arizona, we're too unsophisticated for Daylights Saving, right so I'm either Mountain or Pacific but I'm Pacific now. But by 10 a.m. my time, I pretty much what I thought I was going to do that day is out the window and I'm doing something else and it's fun though. I mean now especially with the investment that we had earlier in the year and the cash reserves we ended last year with, looking at a lot of partnership capabilities, looking at ecosystem activities, certainly involved with customer activity. We're redoing our marketing and how we're focusing our go-to-market so it's a whole variety of things that sort of change hourly. >> So on the, I think we just talked about the M&A side. You've always been a dot connector in your, right? Because you talk to all the vendors, you talk to all the customers and you could see the picture. You have a huge observation space so part of your job on strategy is to try to what? Figure out where the gaps are. >> Yeah. >> And then drive strategy around do we build, do we buy? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah and it really does net down to what you said. It's a build/buy decision. It's an acceleration to market kind of decision and then the hard part is what are you willing to trade off and of course the real answer is as little as humanly possible. But you have to decide, just because you can do it, just 'cause you have the money doesn't necessarily mean you should pull the trigger. So if anything, it's curious because people like myself and a couple of my colleagues, we almost are more discerning. So we look at, okay, the technology, is it really viable? Do our due diligence, right? But then we also look at well, does this fit culturally? Is the integration point really there? Is the customer value really going to be significantly improved and if you cannot answer that very favorably, then keep the money. >> So you worked at IBM for a number of years, you worked at Gartner for a number of years. Now you're back working for a vendor. >> Yeah. >> Compare and contrast those roles. I mean Gartner, you do a lot of writing, you do a lot of traveling, you talk to a zillion people. I'm sure you talk to a lot of people here too, but you're coming at it from a very biased perspective whereas Gartner of course you're unbiased. You're serving the end customer. So talk about the difference in those two roles. >> So I approach it a little uniquely in that I'm biased. I mean I'm paid by a vendor, right? And so there's a certain inherent bias in there, but I go into a customer conversation and say "Maybe you shouldn't be using Veeam for certain things." So I'll give you an example. We have Unix capabilities with Solaris AIX. There are other vendors that do that even better than we do. They have rich application integration. If someone says that's my number one problem, honestly we're not your best choice. Now the reality is most of the world is moving towards more physical and virtual Windows and Linux. So I'll come in, say, a large enterprise and I'll say, "Okay, if you're like most shops," and I'll always undersell it. "Like probably 85% of your workload "is physical virtual Windows Linux." and they always interrupt me and go, "No, no, no, it's 92%." Like, "Okay, well we can help with that 92%." >> Yeah, yeah. >> The other 7%, I'm honestly going to tell you, we're not best of breed. >> Yeah that's a safe balance view that the AIX Solaris piece. >> Series. (Dave laughs) There's certain things. >> Yeah. >> We want to stick to our swim lane. We think it's a pretty wide lane, but there's no reason to come out of it. >> So your role as strategy, talk a little bit about how you're turning that strategy into action and specifics at Veeam. >> Yeah a big part of it has to do with cloud. >> I know that's the word that we've been talking about for a long, long time. So there's the aspirational aspect of Cloud and the operational. The aspirational is I want to be able to move in and out. I want mobility, I want the ability to exit. The operational is I want to be able to do this efficiently, meaning I want to be able to either send data to the cloud, my on-prem backup or I want to be able to protect SAAS-based workloads or infrastructure as a service workload so cloud-native workloads and then over time, I might want to be able to leverage that for something other than availability. So how can you rapidly make the data and only the portion of data that I need available to me when I need it? >> I was taking some notes during the key notes and I was just doing like a little, not really a tag cloud, but I was trying to identify as I heard them and grabbed them, the attributes of cloud data protection. I want to throw some out to you. You tell me. We'll play kind of word association, I guess. So I have fast recovery, API-based, open, simple, transparent, data-oriented, automated, cloud pricing, federated to accomodate the edge. Are these some of the attributes that we should associate with cloud data protection, maybe some of the things that I'm missing. How do you look at the attributes of a company and its products providing cloud data protection? >> Yeah so a big part of it, I actually like the phrase hybrid cloud even better than people say multi-cloud. The reason I like that is because hybrid presumes that you can have on premises as well. So like if it was the Dave and Dave company tomorrow, we'd probably be born in the cloud. Everything would be software as a service. We'd get some public cloud space. Now if we'd been in business for 20 years, we've got investments that we've made and we don't want to get rid of that any sooner than we have to. So hybrid cloud I like, but I think you nailed it in that what do every one of those attributes have in common? It's trying to get your most precious resource to you in a way that you want to consume it with as least amount of friction as possible. We want to reduce the aggravation associated with being able to access that rapidly. >> When you think about the customer conversations that you've had at Veeam and even going back to your Gartner days, I've always felt this notion of not hybrid, I see hybrid and multi-cloud as different. I've always looked at multi-cloud as multi-vendor. >> Yeah. >> Yeah I've got line of business, I've got shadow IT, I've got different IT projects and I've got multiple clouds and it's just, to me it was always less of a strategy than sort of this is where we are and now people need to put together a hybrid strategy. So IT's been asked to come clean up this mess as it always is. What's your take on the hybrid landscape and how we got here but more specifically, customer strategies when you consult with your customers? >> Yeah you're right that there's a lot of departmental buying, there's a lot of, in some cases, it's best of breed so I'm very willing to go look at multiple providers because I didn't sign up to go deploy the third best solution. Everyone wants what they think will be the most appropriate tool for them and rightfully so. So I think that's how we got, to your point, we didn't have a strategy that said I want 10 vendors. We arrived at an implementation choice that resulted in 10 vendors being deployed and then to your point further, then we had to layer on something on top of that. That's really where we come in and simple as it sounds, we really want to promote choice, choice of infrastructure, choice of cloud, choice of hypervisor, choice of operating system. >> So great discussion vector is the best of breed versus sort of integration. >> Yeah. >> And my question is that's been a decades-long. >> Yeah. >> Sort of trade-off that people have made. You see it in the software business, the hardware business and all through the industry. Is the API economy changing that. Can you be both, I mean Veeam, let's agree. Veeam is a best-of-breed provider. While your portfolio's growing, you're a billion-dollar company, you take a company like Dell who's got this ridiculously large portfolio. They can come into a customer and say well even with services or at IBM, we can wrap the big blue blanket around you and integrate everything. With the API economy, does that change the game on that argument of best of breed versus integration and convenience? >> It's a nuanced answer. The answer is a little yes and a little no. >> It depends, right? >> Let me decompose that because that's a cop-out, but the "it depends" aspect is really, APIs are wonderful to create an ecosystem and other integration points. If that's about offering your expandability to do something, that's a positive. If that really means that well because I can't deliver what you need, you got to go and write it yourself, that is a negative. So if the API is leveraging something for even greater value but beyond what the tools are originally designed to do, I think that's net positive, but if you have to exploit the API to just to get the product to work, why did I buy your product when I have to go hire someone to write code to work on your product? That's, you don't want that business. >> Okay so the last Gartner Magic Quadrant that came out was one that you sort of spearheaded back in 2017. It was like this perfect storm of backup analysts leaving Gartner and so there's been a little bit of delay in terms of the new one coming out which is coming our shortly as I understand it, but one of the observations that you can make if you look at the 2016-2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant is that Veeam moved from lower right to upper right which is rare. Can you explain that a little bit? You were saying that it usually goes in a different pattern. Elucidate, please. >> Yeah. Yeah so the magic in the Magic Quadrant is if you could actually jump from one quadrant to straight to leaders and that would be a very atypical progression. Usually it's a backwards Z. You come into the lower left, probably get over to the lower right, fall back, but go up to the upper left and then maybe you get to leaders in the upper right. The magic part in Veeam, the thing that they were able to do is go from visionary lower right to leader upper right. >> Okay and why do you think they were able to do that? I mean there are numerous attributes, but presumably 350,000 I think is the number of customers helped and so you've got a lot of references and proof points, the technology itself, but it's rare. Why do you think Veeam has been able to succeed in that regard? >> I think it's because Veeam has been good about getting answers to the most pressing problems. Again Veeam doesn't do everything. It doesn't support every single operating system, but the vast majority of the concentration of where customer issues are and where customer environments are getting deployed at, we can address very well and actually this weekend, I got here Friday night. So all day Saturday, all day Sunday and yesterday 'til 5 p.m. I took our SE training and so I've deployed Veeam, worked with active directories, all kinds of things for 72 hours basically and it was really that easy to use. In fact, my most difficult thing is I stayed in class until 6:30 at night because I'd never done active directory. I've never been an exchange admin before so I had to kind of come up to speed on those tools a little bit, but once I got that, the product was incredibly powerful, but also very intuitive. So you still have a little bit of that independent analyst DNA in you so I'm going to ask you to try to put that independent hat on. When you think about Veeam's traditional base of SMB, they're very successful there, obviously superglued itself to the virtualization trend. The last couple of years, Veeam has tried to move up-market, develop some relationships with some large players and has had some success there. Is the product well-suited for that larger enterprise and where do you see that going in terms of the up-market progression? >> Yeah so in theory, that's what I'm here to drive, the enterprise word is in my title, but in reality I focus more broadly than that. But if I just think about enterprise, I ran the numbers last week and company inception to date, we've actually derived over $2 billion of software-only revenue from the enterprise market and that's been accelerating. Now in 2017-18 and the first quarter of this year, almost $1 billion. So we're moving and we're moving fast. We had our sales kick off like most companies do. January, go to sales kick off and Ratmir says, "Hey don't chase just the big deals, the $2 million deals. "We've never sold a $2 million "without having a $200,000 deal first." The very next week, we got a $2 million deal on the first paper so he shot low. He should've said five million, but the interesting thing about Veeam and to answer your question, I think we resonate with the kind of challenges a large enterprise has. We allow them to move at their own scale if they want to move in a very large fashion, they can with Veeam. I would honestly tell them move as appropriate for you. As assets age, as you're willing to take on the change in an environment, do so, but I think Veeam is interesting. It's the same piece of software that I installed on my laptop this weekend that can also go to a Fortune 100 company. The same piece of software that manages 50,000 agents, we have at one shop, 50,000 Windows agents. We can do that with same code base and the only thing that's different is we just horizontally scale out how we deploy the capacity and then how we deploy the mover agents. >> I tweeted out this morning, Ratmir was standing in front of a chart with all these features and over the time and that's been part of the hallmark of Veeam is not checkbox features but real substantive features and you've had a consistent progression. Even Ratmir said, we don't have a big long-term roadmap that we share with our customers even internally. Yeah we have a direction and a vision, but very focused, almost like a bit of an Agile development methodology but the point is that, and you see that some companies are really good at this, some companies, not so good at this, but just consistently delivering features that are in-demand, that customers want, listening to their customers and just nailing it and that seems to be the hallmark of Veeam and as they say, some companies just don't have that in their DNA. Your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I think what it really comes down to is at the end of the day, every developer thinks like a customer and they do that because they spend a lot of time on our Veeam forums and I'll be honest, when I was a mainframe backup developer, I didn't talk to that many customers. I was just writing code and I didn't know how people were actually putting the product to use in production. I didn't always know what feature might be most helpful for them. >> You were guessing. >> I was trying to think of the art of the possible, hopefully an educated guess, but I was really just trying to say what might be good, what might be of resonance versus actually having someone goes on a forum and says Veeam, what I would like you to do is X. That's one of the reasons why we do have, to your point, we don't have a 10-year roadmap where we say this feature is coming in 12 months, this feature is coming in 24 months. It's fluid and in some cases, we actually moved up delivering our physical agent management by a year because we started selling more and more of those and people said I need that feature functionality faster. We're willing to trade-off some of our other feature functionality. So if we can be, as long as we can continue to respond to the market, I think we're well-positioned. >> How does a capability like that surface itself? Obviously by talking to customers, but how does it get into the development pipeline so quickly? >> Yeah well in some cases, we've got a huge amount of not just, our part of R&D. It's the research, it's experimentation, it's incubation of new things. So when we find that sweet intersection point, then we can quickly operationalize that. In other cases, we just have to be nimble. We have to react fast. >> Is it a command and control culture though where somebody says okay this is what we're doing or is it more sort of the team gets together and says oh this really makes sense based on what the customers are telling us, let's go. How does that decision get made? >> Yeah well ultimately it is a command and control in the sense that our co-founder, one of our co-founders runs sales and marketing. Our other co-founders runs R&D and they ultimately get sign-off on their respective areas, but it is collaborative in the sense of we do bring forward, here's what we see in market, here's what see in our customer forums. Here's what our ecosystem of partners are telling us, here's our view of the top five things we ought to go do. >> I was struck by the other slide that Ratmir had. It was the $15 billion slide and it was probably, backup and recover was maybe I don't know seven out of the 15 if I remember, but there were all these other segments. It was sort of analytics and disaster recovery and data management, all new pockets of opportunity. $15 billion today, obviously growing with especially the cloud. How do you see that landscape and how does that affect the way you look at strategy? >> Yeah so I actually put that bubble chart together. >> Oh, I like it. >> The rationale between the bubbles, we have core, we put backup in the middle because that's what we do but also that's how we ingest data and now we can do other things around it. So the reason for those bubbles and they were of varying sizes and the bubbles were sort of in and out of to varying degrees the main backup bubble according to how much intersection we thought as a company we could have with that. Where we thought we could add value, where we thought there was an ecosystem potential. So for example, analytics. We're not going to become the next best analytics company tomorrow, not even years from now. We could partner and we can provide data and we get better access to data to be able to do that. So we'd want to facilitate that. In other cases, maybe we really do want to go own and acquire. >> Well and so to your earlier comments there, I didn't use the term, the phrase land and expand, but that's clearly what you guys are doing starting with the $200,000 sale and growing it to a $2 million sale. So those bubbles are potentially cohort sales. >> Yes. >> That you can sell sort of like bananas in bunches I like to say, right? >> Yeah. And part of that is who do you sell that to. And so if you're able to go and address some of those ancillary bubbles or markets, now you've got a different entree point into the organization. If you're already involved with an organization, now you can offer more value because you can get more out of your data that you've already protected. So it opens up new conversations for us to have. It opens up entirely new buying centers for us too. >> Well how is the role of whom you sell to changing? I mean it was backup admin historically, right or maybe a Veeamware admin. Veeam admin. How is that changing? >> So greatest example I would tell you are events. So we acquired a company last January or a year ago January called N2W Software. So they're predominantly at Amazon re:Invent conferences. You go to Amazon re:Invent and no one's heard of Veeam and if anyone's heard of either of the two companies, it's definitely N2WS and someone's seen it in the marketplace. That demographic tends to be totally different from the demographic if you go to the on-premises data center type of conference where they have heard of Veeam and it's a very different sort of mindset. To your point, they grew up in a very different landscape. Now instead of someone who's well-steeped in server storage and networking and maybe majored in one, possibly two of those things, now you've got a generalist where he or she is probably in their 20s, has a very different point of view of what it should take to get something working and has a very different view of how they want to be sold to, how you can go and reach them. >> So at the cloud show, there might be a development persona. >> Yes. >> That you're selling to. Obviously VMWare, VMWorld, we know what that is. It's IT guys, right, is the predominant and how do you see cloud changing that? Is it cloud architects or sort of cloud leaders? CTOs increasingly? Data Protection becomes more and more important to digital business. So how are you seeing that role change due to cloud? >> So right now we have to basically have more touchpoints. Our typical legacy fan of our customer, our customer base, our product's sweet spot still remains and it's in some cases will pull us into the cloud. In other cases, we have to go talk to someone that's entirely different. But again, that's more of an administrative view. But to your point, going up the stack now, if you go to the not even Vice President of Infrastructure, you go to the CIO, he or she says, "I am tired of thinking about boxes. "I am tired of thinking about where this resides. "I want to think business outcome." So for us that's actually a great conversation because it all comes back to data. That's what we're in the business of doing. We capture, protect and move data. >> So that brings it back to strategy. We got to run, but summarize in your words, just sort of the strategy of Veeam and where you see this whole thing going. >> Yeah I will simplistically say it's more of the same. We want to continue to offer what we think is a best of breed solution for on-prem and increasingly cloud availability, but also we want to offer real customer value in terms of now being able to leverage that data, get more value out of that whether that's DevOps, running analytics against that, security test patch, whatever it may be, we want to be able to give you just the data you need, so have granularity, and offer speed and ease of use to do that. >> So as data becomes more and more important, you're seeing companies go beyond backup, trying to get more out of there, their backup, moving to data protection, data management, not just an insurance policy anymore. Dave Russell, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Thank you so much. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with Peter Burris as my cohost. We're at VeeamON Live from Miami. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering food IT: Fork to Farm, brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back here and ready, Jeffrey Frick with theCUBE. We are in Silicon Valley at the Computer History Museum at a really unique event. It's food IT: Fork to farm, not the other way around, which you might think, "Hm, that doesn't make sense," but actually it does, really by the consumer-driven world that's hitting everything including the food and agriculture and we're really excited to have the guys running this show, representing The Mixing Bowl. Rob Trice is the founder and Michael Rose, partner, of The Mixing Bowl. Gentlemen, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So, first off, a little history on this event, it's the first time we've been here. I think you said there's about 350 people, really a broad spectrum: academe, technology, farmers, from New Zealand, I think was the one I heard from the furthest place. What's kind of the genesis of this show? >> So, my background is 15 years in mobile internet, telecom venture capital and my wife, actually, a couple of years ago, started running a cattle ranch out on the Pacific Coast and through that I saw how little technology was being used on the ranch and amongst local food producers. I came back to Silicon Valley and none of the big food or ag. players were here then, four years ago. Monsanto just had up a venture group, Unilever and Nestle had one person each here, but by and large, Silicon Valley's IT innovation ecosystem was not focused on food and agriculture. So I started The Mixing Bowl as a little bit more than just a Meetup group and we did it a couple of times and then somebody said, "You know, we should do a conference on this topic." So the first year we did it at Stanford with a partner of ours, and we thought might have 150 people come. We had over 300 people come and it was this kind of audience, kind of cross-section of technologists, food and agriculturalists. So that's when I said, "You know, I'm done with telecom. I want to go ride this food tech, ag. tech wave and see where the heck this comes to roost." So, it's been four years now and I'm pleased to be working not only with Michael, but then our colleagues Seana and Brita, and having a blast, learning a lot. >> Okay, so that's the conference. What about for The Mixing Bowl specifically, what is your charter as an organization? >> Well we've got three aspects of our business, so the first one is information sharing, so doing events like this. We do themed events, we did a water-tech for agricultural event down in Fresno. And then we also are contributing writers for Forbes. We also have an advisory business where we work with large corporates who are seeking innovation and trying to bring innovation to the food and ag. Sector, trying to bring technology and innovation. And then we have an investment side of our business, out of the brand Better Food Ventures. So we invest in the space as well, we have about 12 companies in our portfolio. >> That's interesting that you said there wasn't a lot of tech in ag. here and yet, we talked to Paul from Ford, we talked about their conference that they have at Salinas and of course, Sacramento Valley, San Fernando Valley, or not San Fernando Valley, San Joaquin Valley is a huge producer of food. So why do you think it was so late to come here? >> Well, I think that there have been other opportunities and I think that there's a misperception that agriculture doesn't need IT and I think what we've now realized is there's a huge opportunity, whether it is Internet of Things or looking at tracking and transparency, there's a lot of inefficiencies in our food production system and there also are a lot of societal challenges that we have. Everyone talks about feeding nine billion people by 2050, but then also we look at food safety, we look at what the consumer wants, which is why we're here today, talking about the fork to the farm. Consumers want change in food. They want different kinds of food. They want it delivered to them in different ways. All of these are opportunities for tech to be applied to food and agriculture. >> So we love being here. Go ahead, Michael. >> No, I was just going to say, I think it's like any other vertical in any other sector that starts to adopt technology over time. And even in the ag. sector, you've seen in the commodity crops in the Midwest with the automation that they adopted technology early but you've got other sectors, whether it's the specialty crops down in Salinas or people who are doing almonds, etc. Those people are starting to adopt technology, they're just a little further behind than you are with commodity crops. >> Right. It's funny, we interviewed the guy from Caterpillar a few weeks ago, and they are already running huge fleets of autonomous vehicles in mining. Obviously they have a lot of equipment involved in agriculture as well, so it seems kind of start and stop depending on the vendors that you're talking about. But one of the big themes we talk about, we go to a lot of platform shows, right? It's Cloud, it's edge, it's connectivity, it's big data, drones, I mean, as you look at some of these big classifications of technology that are now being applied in ag. are there any particular ones that kind of jump out as either the catalyst or the leading edge of adoption that's really helping drive this revolution? >> I guess, if you think about the fact that we're kind of looking at this staircase of adoption. One thing that we need to do is actually digitize information and that's one of the challenges that we have. Once we digitize, then we can start to manage operations based on that data, then we can start to optimize, and then we can automate. So it's a four-step staircase that we look at and I think in a lot of cases, even at restaurants, a lot of them are still placing orders via fax and telephone. We need to get off of that and start getting them to order online through online platforms and so forth. So, at any rate, one area that I'm particularly excited about is aerial imaging for agriculture because I think you are instantaneously, by just doing a flyover, providing farmers with more information than they've ever had. In some cases, I think you could actually argue, you're going from a data desert to a data flood. Now the challenge is moving up that staircase to go make sense of that data and then ultimately be able to give prescriptive machine-learning or artificial intelligence-based recommendations to that farmer on how to do a better job, whether that is increasing sustainability, maximizing yield, looking at pricing, any of those kind of things. >> Right, one of the things you hear real often in every industry, is kind of the old guy using intuition versus becoming really a data-driven organization. Are you seeing that classic conflict, or do people get it pretty quickly when you can provide the data to show them things that they could never really see before? >> I was going to say, one of the biggest challenges that's also dictating the market timing is the fact that average American farmer is about 65, so we now are having this turn as the kids are coming back who are tech-enabled back to the production point, back to the farm and starting to take over farms from their parents. And their parents, of course, have just been maybe a little slower to adopt new technology. So it's just a timing issue. I think the other thing is, there are all the different pieces, whether it's the sensors or whether it's the connectivity of data or whether it's the storage of data, there needs to be a solution and they need to be integrated. And so we see this on the farm, getting that data off and then getting it stored and then how to use it. But then you also see this in restaurants. In restaurants, you have all of the delivery services coming in, so a restaurant can have seven different delivery services picking up from the restaurant. And they have seven different iPads that they have to manage with their point of sales system and very few of them currently will integrate with a POS, right? >> Right. And I think whether it's in a restaurant or on a farm, this lack of integration, API integration, making it a usable solution as opposed to a number of features, is where we're probably going to see a lot more tech innovation. I think unfortunately what you're probably also going to see is a lot of consolidation because you've had venture capital-backed companies with solutions for food and agriculture that have their own proprietary solution, their own OS. And we know that, from other tech sectors, that's not a long-term viable strategy. Ultimately, the data will be free, it will open up, it will interconnect, and we just need to happen in food and in agriculture. >> And are they getting that? Because the classic farmer dilemma that you learn in economics 101 is they have a great crop, crap prices go in the toilet. They have a crappy crop, price is up but they don't have enough quantity to share and gaming the system, and who's going to plant what? Do they start to see the value of sharing some level of data aggregation for the benefit of all? >> I think there's a misperception out there that farmers won't share their data. The reality is they're willing to share their data, if it's providing some value to them. A lot of people want to charge these farmers for their data without any demonstrable benefit to using that data. And I think where you can find a solution, I think the farmers are, speaking generally here, I think the other thing is, farmers know, if you're not paying for the data, you probably are the product, right? And they're smart enough to figure that out, so they don't want people misusing their data for reasons that aren't clear to them. And they've had bad experiences with that in the past. >> It's not any different than any other sector. I mean, go back seven years ago when people said, "Well, we're going to mix your data up with somebody else's data, but it's not a problem, right? Zeros and ones, it's bits." And they were both like, "Nooo," and they got over it, right? >> Right, but the other thing I'll say is I think that the challenges are changing and this is not just standard commodity ups and downs, particularly if you look at here in California, the specialty crops. We have lost access to what has been a cheap labor pool historically and we need to automate. So now we need to go where northern Europe has already gone, in terms of automating production for specialty crops and then things like climate change are causing different crops to grow in different seasons and we need to be able to predict that, we need to take more of it indoors as a nice complement to outdoor growing. So there's a lot of different things that farmers are dealing with now that they really haven't had to deal with in the future. And I think the same is true on the restaurant side. >> Yeah, and the predictability of understanding what your needs are going to be is going to be so important here, particularly because we need to see more automation, both on the farm and production and the restaurants. I know a lot of people talk about being concerned about losing their jobs to automation or robotics, but the reality is, the National Restaurant Association says in the next 10 years, we have a shortage of 200,000 line cooks. >> Jeff: Just line cooks? >> Just line cooks, right. So when you see someone like Chowbotics who's here showing the automated customized salad maker, there's clearly a need in the market place for these kind of approaches. >> The other thing too is you touch on such big, global societal issues. Obviously we're in California here, water. We had a really wet winter, but you know, I'm looking for the water track, I mean that's got to be a huge piece of this whole thing. You have the environmental concern, again, in California, there's always the fight between the farmers that want the water in the rivers and the environmentalists who want to keep the salmon swimming upstream. These are not simple problems that have an obvious solution, and as I think somebody said in they keynote, there's no free trade-off. You've got to make decisions based on values and they're not simple problems. So you guys are right in the middle of a lot of big society changes. >> Yeah, and I think that's one of the things. This is not just a US or a California thing. Globally, things are changing. And whether it is China having more disposable income available to eat more meat and what the ramifications of that are versus other societies with more environmental challenges moving front and center to them, the labor challenge. There's a lot of different things that are happening globally and we don't really have that connectivity layer globally to share this innovation to find the right solutions and get them addressing these market challenges. >> Right. >> Yeah, I would say the thing is, it is complex, so they're going to be talking about tomato growth later on today, and the example somebody was giving is we went to precision watering instead of spray, well, when you go to drip irrigation, you actually have to pressurize an entire system so you actually use more energy. So we use less water but we burn more coal, more oil, whatever it may be, to pressurize the system. And then if it produces a product that has more water content, you spend more energy drying it on the backend. So there's trade-offs. I would say the other thing that we found is really interesting is people ask us if we're social impact investors and we aren't but we have a social impact consideration about what we do, but pretty much everything that you see in this space right now from an innovative side is moving the ball forward, either it's better nutrition, it's less input, it's less chemicals, less water. So this innovation in food and ag. is just by its nature having a very positive impact. >> Right, two years ago, we called food IT macro to micro, and fundamentally what we believe at The Mixing Bowl is, as Michael said, at Better Food Ventures, we don't consider ourselves social impact investors, first and foremost, we want to keep financial grounding. However, I think at a core level, we all believe that harnessing IT to go address these societal challenges in food and agriculture is the biggest thing that we can make. So the reality is we're not going to be able to do much more with the chemical era, we've maximized the yield that we can get there. So now we are going to be looking at IT and how can we actually apply IT to these different challenges and I'm going to cough now. (Jeff laughs) (Rob coughs) >> Well, even something, people think IT and they think highly technical and they think of Cloud, they think of data connections, well look at food waste. The bulk of food waste that happens in our society happens at the home to the restaurant. So even if it's an iPhone app that's teaching our children how to deal with food waste in their home, it's a technical approach, it's hugely impactful. And it's those kind of touch points that will make a difference. >> Right, right. Well, Rob, Michael, thanks for inviting us, it's really fun to come to more of an application-centered show than an infrastructure show and see how the impact of Cloud and big data and sensors and IOT and drones and all of these things are having material impact on us day by day. So congratulations on the event and we'll let you go back to the keynote stage, they're waiting for you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE. We are at the Food IT show in Mountain View, California. We'll be right back with the next guest after this short break. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)