>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Interconnect, 2017. Brought to you by, IBM. >> Hey welcome back everybody, live here in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay IMB Interconnect 2017, it's The Cube's exclusive coverage, I'm Jon Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Ramesh Gopinath who's the VP of Block Chain Solutions and Research, welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you. >> Block chain front and center, super exciting, it's been trending pretty much throughout the conference, really is an amazing story, big props from the CEO and (mumbles) and a variety of the executives. Watching is instrumental in the future of business, we had Don Tapscott on yesterday really talking about the revolution of what this is all about and he's the author of the book, The Blockchain Revolution, but if blockchain is a game changer shift to how the business will be operating in the future, so just to level step, just give us the one on one blochchain, versus bitcoin, and why IBM is going in this direction and where it came from. >> So blockchain is all about increasing a trust in business transactions. This is something we recognize about a couple of years ago when a small team of us started playing around with, you know, the technology behind bitcoin, right. And we look at it and said hey look, here's an opportunity for the first time for companies to share some information in a secure fashion with each other and, in addition, run some workflows or business processes on top. That was an eye opener for us, it immediately told us this could have applications in all industries, right. And so what do we do first? So we said let's play around with this a little bit. We looked at existing technologies out there for blockchain and to pick the platform you tried a few use cases and realize, oh my god, there is a whole lot to be done to get a blockchain for business, right. And that's how we started this journey, almost a year and a half, two years ago. And we decided to explore that. >> And the key distinction Ramesh, and we know from just highlighting it here for the folks, is bitcoin is a currency that has a blockchain, so it's powering bitcoin. You're talking about something more fundamental for business which is using the blockchain technology for businesses and what bitcoin is to blockchain, business is to blockchain from your standpoint. >> That's right, and also I think the blockchain is really, the inspiration for it comes from bitcoin perhaps, that's a good way of thinking about it. But today for example, the hyperledger version one that was announced earlier this week at this conference is dramatically different from the underlying blockchain and bitcoin in other platforms out there, right. Because it's really built primarily based on requirements that we have gathered by working with hundreds of clients in financial services and supply chain, in public sector, et cetera, and realizing what levels of confidentiality, what levels of privacy, what level of permissioning, you know, who participates in the transaction. All of that is what has led to, what we call the (mumbles)- >> John: Okay somebody's got a question. >> John: I got a follow up on that, but go ahead. >> Uh, just one more point on this but you can follow up on my point. Give us the status of blockchain today for IBM. Lay out the solution because you move from research now to the exclusions group, you have customer action going on, sales motions, solutions motions. What is the architecture, what does it look like, what is the solution today from a blockchain standpoint? >> So, just, you asked what are you doing at a high level, essentially we have three broad, big investments. One is everything to do with you know, opensource in a hyperledger project, I mentioned that. Then there is you package that into a platform, IBM blockchain, high security business network, that was also announced earlier this week. And the third layer is again what you asked about solutions. What we have been doing over the last year, year plus is, in fact, it's an interesting journey, we started out with what I call blockchain tourism, there were a whole bunch of POC's if you want to call it that, starting with financial services initially, but in gradually other areas, like supply chain, in healthcare, et cetera. Towards the middle of 2016 we saw a transition, at least on the financial service side people were started to talk about, hey now I understand this technology and what it's capable of, let's talk about production deployments, right now I'll give you a few examples as we go along. >> Dave: So, I want to go back if I can a little bit and just get somewhat didactic for a moment. My understanding is there's three attributes, I'm sure there are many more of blockchain which are really relevant, and especially as it relates to the security if I may, it's distributed obviously, and it's been said it's virtually unhackable unless 50% of the stakeholders agree to collude, and then there's no need for a trusted third party so it reduces the threat space. Are those sort of accurate statements and when somebody says, well it's virtually unhackable, you know you tweet that and somebody says, well everything's hackable, help us understand sort of those fundaments of blockchain and why they're relevant. >> That's right, so the way I think about it is a blockchain is a trusted database. Now why is it trusted? There are three properties, I'll get to it, kind of overlaps with what you mentioned. The first one is, any transaction you do onto the database, anything that goes in it basically is done in a nonreputiable fashion. If I do something I can't say, "I didn't do that," so that helps. What goes in, you know you have that property. The second piece is, whatever goes in goes in through a vetting process, we will call it the consensus. There is some sort of a chat between parties before something goes in. Therefore, I can't unilaterally do something onto the blockchain, right, I can't, somebody else vetted what I did, that increases trust. And the third piece is, once it gets in there it cannot be tampered with. We say it's immutable sometimes, and what is that based on? There's a whole lot of topographic math behind it, but at a high level there are two aspects to it. One is, there are multiple copies. So if I change something, if I hack into mine, I'm inconsistent with what others have, so that's one. The second is, the transactions are chained together, blocks of transactions are chained together where a fingerprint of one block is put into the next. What that means is, if I tamper with the block say 15, a long blockchain, all transactions after that are invalid, I have to do a lot of work to fix it, so it's very very hard to tamper with. Of course, as with security, there's no such thing as nothing that is hackable, right, so collusions et cetera, potentially can happen. But the key is, significant increase in the level of trust is the way I would put it. >> Dave: Great, okay, and so now if we can get into sort of how people are specifically applying this technology, you guys started with the hyperledger, you know, open project, but can we get more specific in terms of how say organizations are actually deploying blockchain? >> Ramesh: So we are still running a blockchain in productions since September 6th, right, so it's been only four months. In fact that blockchain is more than a half a million blocks today, so let me tell you what that solution is so you get a sense of, and it's very prototypical in terms of, you know, all solutions that I've dealt with so far across industries. The use case is a following, so you have a buyer, you have a seller and you have a financer, that's IBM. We basically finance, shotgun financing of, think of it as channel financing or inventory finance. What happens typically is, the buyer basically orders something and the seller essentially gets approval from us to say, okay, yeah we can basically send it to the buyer. A few days go by, IBM has already paid the seller basically, just like credit cards (mumbles) consumers. A month later basically we go in, say hey look, guys, time for you to pay up and they say, look, we didn't even receive the goods. So this entire process, what I just described you can think of as a workflow where these three parties are sending messages back and forth. The way we do it in a blockchain is, this entire workflow is captured as a sequence of transactions that are registered on the blockchain. Now how does this help us? Take the example I gave, proof of delivery. If when the logistics company delivers it at the buyer's site, it's recorded on the blockchain. There is no need for a dispute. And typically disputes, basically puts a lot of capital, you know, it holds up a lot of capital right. Capital inefficiency is the problem we're after. In fact, after six months of deployment I can tell you essentially a significant improvement in terms of the time savings as well as elimination of disputes. >> John: That's a great efficiency. Who's buying, who's actually implementing it customers-wise. Can you name names? >> Ramesh: Yeah, so, examples are the, let me give you a few in financial services. So we are working with Salus Bank which does, you now, five trillion dollars worth of foreign transactions every day. They are building a netting engine called Salusnet a solution called Salusnet, and we're working with them on that. Another example is the work that we are doing with Northern Trust, where basically they have a private equity administration blockchain. In fact, it's a very interesting one because it also involves the regulator as a part of the blockchain, so that's a second example. A third one is the one we announced in January with the Depository, Trading and Clearing Corporation DTCC, and that one is for credit debitors, life cycle management, in fact all the examples if you notice, there is a life cycle like I gave in that example earlier of buying till all your goods are delivered, payment is made, those life cycles, those processes are captured as trusted processes on a trusted data store. That's basically blockchain for you, right, that's financial services. Maybe I'll touch upon two more examples to complete the story. Supply chain. I walk into a store and buy some sliced mangos at Walmart, is it safe to eat? To answer that question you need to know the provinence. Which farm in Mexico did it come from, who all touched it, who washed it, who processed it, et cetera, all the way till it got to the store. That sort of information sharing does not happen today in the supply chain. We believe with the block chain that is possible, that allow us to get a good sense of where things came from, making consumers more comfortable. Similar story can deal with pharma too. I pop a pill, I want to be sure that it's safe to have. In fact, as you know the World Health Organization says in Africa, every year a hundred thousand kids die of counterfeit malaria drugs alone, right, so imagine if you could capture these sorts of supply chain flows on a blockchain you could make dramatic improvements. >> Dave: Diamonds provenience is another one, and it's not just blood diamonds. >> Ramesh: I'm more excited by the providence of food and pharma, but diamonds- >> But there's tons of fraud in the diamond supply chain. >> Ramesh: Absolutely. >> And that's really where they're, you know- >> John: Well this brings up the whole business model disruptions, so, what are you guys seeing for the kids of conversations? Because you're getting at the business model impact significantly one, you're reducing costs of transactional costs for new measurement systems, aka blockchain, and you have all the methodology behind it, but everything from music to art to content, I mean, payments, this is like a game changer. >> Absolutely, and I think from the point of view, you know, in all of the use cases I've seen, the sort of value to the ecosystem is clean and obvious, and so you can immediately say, aha, this is going to happen overnight. But the reality is basically, it's a complex ecosystem play though. So, for example, in the supply chain use case, food safety, you need to have the farmers, the entire value chain involved, participating in some fashion on the blockchain. That is not easy to do. So there is, how do you sort of set up ecosystems is a key part of- >> John: What's your strategy there? I'm going to ask Marie when she comes on, but what's the strategy with ecosystem? Because you want to jump start this, you got to prime the pump big time. >> Ramesh: Absolutely, so there are many ways to solve this, but one approach we have taken so far, and it's obvious in all the sort of partnerships that we're working on. Take for example food safety. One way to start with it is to start with a big retailer, like a Walmart. They bring in the suppliers, and the suppliers bring in the farmers. Take the case of what we are doing in container shipping. So basically, movement of containers from point A to point B, we're trying to completely digitize that process, this is a project that we're doing with Maersk. Why Maersk? They are 20% of the container shipping market, right? But in all of these cases I got to be very clear, we are not building a solution for Maersk or for Walmart. We're really building something for the industry, because food safety, you want to solve it for the industry. Just by helping Walmart along. >> John: That's why the open source thing is critical here. >> That's right. >> John: And the update on that, it's all open source on which components, or is it all open source? >> Ramesh: So the open source is all about at the platform layer. The solution itself, you know not everything in the solution is going to be open source. But the key point I was trying to make is that you go off the sort of significant anchor tenants in the ecosystem that draws others into the picture, but that's still not enough, you need to make sure there are economic incentives for others to join in. >> John: So to put it together, tie it together, the ecosystem strategy is, take an industry scope and try the rising tides floats all boats kind of approach. So adoption's critical. >> Absolutely correct, absolutely correct, and I think again I can use food safety to make that point. Think about it, right? So there is, let's say, a spinach problem, we had it in 2006. So you find a problem, you trace it back to a source. Let's say Walmart is the store in which somebody bought it and it was traced from there. That's not good enough. From the source it went to many other retailers. So you need to be able to track down and pull all of them off the shelves. Therefore you have to go for an industry solution. >> John: I can imagine the healthcare thing would be even more impactful too, I mean, financial services pretty obvious, transactional stuff there, but healthcare, so many different variations of supply chain and transactions. >> Ramesh: Absolutely, so in a way, the way I think about it is in a financial service everybody had a hunch this could be big, but supply chain, we've come a really long way, I think this is going to be the space which will have the most destruction, and its interesting considering when we started my first conversation with folks, whether it be a Walmart or Maersk, first question is, "what is blockchain?" We've come a long way in the last say eight, nine months. >> John: You guys get so excited where you're kind of pinching yourselves because you can get kind of euphoric about some of the disruption impact. It's just mind blowing to think when you're talking about food, the food industry and healthcare. You got to get tampered down a little bit in some realism, is there that IBM excitement internally share some color internally within IBM the excitement, and then you got to be getting realistic, a lot of the clients rolling it out to kind of got to walk before they can run. >> Ramesh: Yeah, so, the way I would state it is if you had asked me a year ago do you expect to be in the shape we are in today, I would have said no way. I've been shocked at the pace at which this has been moving both from the point of view of the technology itself, maturing of the technology, and in fact when we say blockchain is here now, so that's at the technology layer level, but in terms of use cases, think about it, there are a number of financial services institutions that are talking about production deployments late this year, early next year. In fact, when we did our own IBM Institute for Business Values survey, came back with fully 15% of those who were surveyed, there were like 400-odd banks plus capital market institutions are going to be in production by end of this year. When I heard that in September I still didn't believe it, but I am beginning to believe it now. >> Well it's interesting I think, the cultural shift is that technologists from computer scientists to practitioners that are technologists, they get it. They can see what blockchain does, so I think as people get more and more momentum, that's the fly wheel that you guys are open for and it's happening. >> That's right, in fact I'm also a techie at heart, but in terms of conversation (mumbles) I never talk about technology anymore because the thing is, there are only two concepts in blockchain. It's trusted data across companies, trusted business process. Everything else is detail. >> John: Got it, Ramesh, thanks so much for sharing, great conversation, formerly with IBM research, now Vice-President of Blockchain Solutions at IBM, great to interview, great insight, blockchain revolution is here, check out our interview yesterday with Dom Tapscott yesterday on YouTube, The Blockchain Revolution, his book really kind of lays out some of the big disruptive game changers. This is The Cube, doing our share of blockchain right now, bringing content in blocks and chunks, not yet blockchain enabled. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, be back with more after this short break. (synthesized music)