>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City It's theCube covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Inforum. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Inforum 2017 here in New York City. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Ballante. We're joined by Mike Rodgers. He is the CSIO of Pilot Flying J. Thanks so much for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Pilot Flying J and your relationship with Inforum. >> So Pilot Flying J is a travel center. We cater to basically over the road truckers and we do have a big gas business too. We operate about 700 locations. Most of them are owned fully by Pilot Flying J. Some of them are dealers where they have a relationship with us. They're in our network but we don't know them. So we run the majority of the locations and we own about 40% of the overall road diesel market. >> Rebecca: In the US and Canada? >> In the US and Canada. >> Okay and talk about your relationship with Inforum. >> So our relationship with Inforum really goes back to Lawson. I've been with the company for about two years. We run Lawson. David Clo-thy will tell you probably 25 years. The company has very rapidly. Started off as a small little Tennessee company. Well now it's a rather large company and we felt we knew we had to make a change relative to our human capital management and our financial systems is because we basically outgrew it. And we like to write a lot of things so we wrote a lot of applications out of our desperate sylo. And of course it's a lot of technical debt that goes along with them. So when I start with the company. We started on valuation process and picked for as the partner to replace all of our financial systems, and all of our human capital management systems. >> And so you migrating from traditional legacy lawson to the cloud suite. >> Pretty much, I would characterize it as a migration but we had very little in the vein of human capital management. And what we did have, we wrote ourselves. For example, we wrote our own applicant tracking system, which we'll of course have to integrate into lawson. So we have an integration layer that we have to support there and that's just one. There was a slide put up this morning that showed that we're going to eliminate 26 systems that we either bought as the best of breed type of application or we wrote ourselves. >> So how painful is that? Is that why you-- >> It's extremely painful. >> They brought you in for this task and you obviously knew this coming in or just-- >> Oh I knew this coming in. >> Dave: No surprise. >> No surprise and by the way, pilot is no different than a lot of other retailers in other companies out there. We've got a lot of technical there and I will tell you the more I see about Inforum. The more I think we made the right decision. I really like the cloud strategy. I'd like the integration associated with all the different functions specifically within the HCM suite. It's not a roll up like some of the other guys have rolled up. They bought but whether it's PeopleSoft or whatever and they many talk about it being integrated, bit it's not as integrated as the Inforum suite. >> So if I may, sorry. We want to stay on the migrations for a second because it's non-trivial and people. The conundrum of migrations is nobody wants to do them because it's just such a heavy lift. But the longer you wait, the more technical debt you accrue. >> I use to say you have to get off the treadmill. You have to stop and say we're not going to keep digging ourself in this ditch and it's going to be painful. It's going to be expensive. It's going to be disruptive and I use to say the (indistinct speaking) usually get fired. That really is, I might say that laughingly but-- >> Dave: You got a got attitude about-- >> It's hard, okay. It's a hard thing not just for the IT guys. It's a hard thing for the organization with respect to change management. >> So incredible amount of planning obviously. You knew your freezing code. >> Pretty much because why would we continue to develop something. I wouldn't say we were 100% frozen. Things come out especially in HR where there's a regulation thing. >> Dave: Compliance, right. >> Right compliance and you got to do it so we got pretty good at saying we're not going to, we're going to wait for Inforum. And we've got a lot of it implemented. We're continuing. We got a nice plan. An iterative plan, we're not trying to blow the ocean and convert everything all at once. Very good engagement from the business. We have a lot of business partners here with us. Like the IT representation at this conference. It's the smallest compared to the business. >> So I would think a key there though is because when you freeze code. It slows your business down, but then when you actually go to the new platform. You want to be able to move faster and leap frog your competition. >> I would argue that really, because we really didn't have much. It really hasn't slow much down. Where we had to do something from a compliance perspective, we've done it. But it hasn't really slowed us down. The leap frog that we're going to do when we implement the whole cloud suite is going to be enormous. >> Sorry about. >> I wanted you to step back a little bit and tell our viewers about some of the specific HCM challenges you have and what you, talk about the pain, I guess is what I want you to describe. >> We run travel service. We're open 365 days a year, 24/7. They never close. They're all on food operations. >> Rebecca: Of the three quick services food operations. >> It could be up to three. If we don't have three in every stores someone said that. We may have one in every store plus a deli operation that we run ourselves and we actually create the food. Whether it's pizza, meatloaf whatever the truck drivers really want with respect to our food offering. They want something different, more variety. So yeah, it's a very complex business. It's hard and we're very spread out throughout the country. We're not necessarily in a big cities like New York. you're not going to see a pilot in New York City. You're going to see a pilot or a flying J on major interstates throughout the country. So there were spread out. So connecting with our team members has been a challenge for us. And our owner Jimmy Haslam will tell you that we probably have not any give himself a vibe. And we are connecting with the team member so we're doing a lot to facilitate that connection. We'd actually partner with the Disney Institute to help us with that. And we've actually called Inforum for project connect. So it's going to provide that connection platform to those team members that are spread throughout the country and Canada for that matter. That we don't get to see that very often, if ever. >> We're hearing a lot at the keynote retail has been highlighted a lot and Pilot J is a form of retail in that sense. And talking about how important it is for the customer experience. The trucker themselves who come in to apply at Pilot Flying J. >> Our strategy is focused on making it a great place to work. In other words, doing the right things for our team member and the investment at Inforum is really going to provide that platform. The other part is making it a great place to shop, and we want our customer to come back. Okay we sell a commodity, let's face it. We sell diesel. You can buy it down the road. We want the experience when they come into our store. We want to take care of our guest like nobody else takes care of them. We got a truck driver. There was an article written in New York Times but you don't throw away people. These guys, you got it, you're wearing it. Your tie, your shirt, whatever came on a truck, and these guys, they're great people. I've talked to a million of them. We want to be the place where they come that feels like home and we want to make a better day for the truck or the driver. It's a tough job. They work hard. They're waking their families. When they come into a pilot. It should feel like somewhat of an oasis. >> Right so, it's super clean I understand. >> Yeah, we try to make them clean. Remember If you're a truck driver and you're away for week's on end. You're going to shower at our locations and so the showers are cleaned and maintained after every shower. Nobody gets in a dirty shower. The rest it's challenging. We have 3000 people come through our doors every day at every location so it's challenging to keep the rest rooms in particular clean. But the showers are cleaned before anybody gets in them. >> And you own the real estate or you lease it? >> We own. >> Dave: Really. >> I'm sure we lease some of this. I've got a question for Dave. We own most of our-- >> But your in the real estate business too. >> Oh yeah. We're definitely in the real estate business. >> What about the data? How is the way in which you use data evolving? >> It's evolving very rapidly and we are a data rich company especially with respect to the professional driver which is the majority of our profitable business. They scan their loyalty card whenever they come. We have a 92% swipe rate and that's because they use those points to buy food, buy showers. >> Rebecca: They're rewarded. >> They're rewarded and it's lucrative to them. They're managing a business so they use that as currency. So that data provides us with the ability to solve. We needed utility along the customer journey. For example, we may know when a guy needs a shower and we may have a fuel buying advantage at a certain location. Offer them a free shower if he fuels at location X because it's beneficial for him and us. Okay we're going to give him a free shower or a free slice of pizza if we feel we have an advantage with respect to purchasing petroleum. >> You're building loyalty. >> Right and builds loyalty so that's on the customer side. >> Rebecca: That's the nudge they need to walk in-- >> To be able to use our digital platforms, our digital properties to take the data and drive behavior, and loyalty. It's really about loyalty. We want to give good things to our loyal customers, take good care of them and solve the problems they have. 'Cause they'll come back. And Jimmy says we want them to come back. He says it and we do things that are going to solve the problem they have. They're going to come back because it's the least friction. >> Are you using data for the logistics in any way, for these truckers in other ways? >> Yeah, that's not Inforum, however well for the truckers. We're using logistics with respect to how we procure petroleum. And I'm probably not going to get into a lot of that because we feel it's a competitive thing there with respect to how we do it. And we are investing a good bit of money into how we procure and manage how we distribute petroleum to our various locations. >> That's a data lever. You got advantage better than-- >> That's where a lot of data reach and we can use data very effectively. >> So data literally is oil. We had a guest on. >> Well data is abundant insights aren't necessarily so that's where you're making money. You've mentioned before Mike that you said you are more confident after you go through this migration, but Inforum was the right decision. What gives you that confidence? Can you double click on that? >> Yeah, it's a couple of things. Number one, and we talked about the technical debt right. So lifting everything to the cloud give me a unique opportunity to eliminate the technical debt 'cause we're not going to write it. We're going to stay current on the latest release of the software. Whereas if you looked around here, everybody will tell you they're behind releases, releases, releases on enterprise software that they've purchased from somebody else that's not in the cloud. So number one elimination of technical debt and staying current on the existing platforms. You really can't customize it. You can customize it within the tool so with the customization or configuration or extensibility carries along as they operate the software. That's the biggest events and I think being in the cloud. I was showing some data to my boss the other day regarding how our infrastructure investment has gone up. Really been able to manage the actual investment with the number of servers, VMware and all that we're running has grown exponentially. That's 'cause we hadn't retire anything. We're going to, with Inforum we're retire 26 platforms. They're going away. They'll be out of the infrastructure and it will be in the cloud. I don't have to manage anymore. >> You're getting rid of stuff, wow. >> Mike: Getting rid of it. >> GRS recall, that never happens in IT. >> I took personal responsibility for the decommissioning aspect of the project. >> I'm going to ask you another IT question is that latest release because you're in the cloud and you're multi-tenet, you have to go essentially into the next release. Does that create down stream problems for you. How do you plan for that? >> Well we're new into it, okay. We're working with Inforum on that and it's perfect now but they get it. We got to be careful when we make the release so we can be prepared for it. So far there have been upgrades and it's been nerve racking. A new release of code that we hadn't really tested or whatever but I think we'll get that route resolved. I said it's new, we got to become efficient in how that happens. We need a little bit of prior notice. >> Dave: Forced agile. >> Yeah, forced agile. Here it comes. (laughing) >> There's a lot of buzz about artificial intelligence here at Inforum. Where would you say Pilot Flying J is with regard to using artificial intelligence as part of your workforce. Giving your workers access to it and also more tools to make the right decision at the right time. >> I think it's at the stage now where it's really cool and it's somewhat of a buzz thing. AI when machine learning. I think it's going to be very relevant and probably not the too distant future. It's not on my immediate road map to worry about artificial intelligence. We thought about doing a project with IBM on fuel procurement and pricing with Lawson. It's just really not quite ready yet. What we can develop is deep insights with the data we have to make better decisions, and put power in the hands of our pricing team or our logistics team to make really good decisions. I think that's for us. Let's get that perfected and then we talked about the voice recognition that we heard yesterday. That I think is imminent and I think it's important for us and it's going to be on our road map because as a truck driver. I'm driving and if I can have the ability to ask questions of our app and purvey information back to that driver, without him having to touch his phone. There's a value of that. Most that has to be architected through the right type of data. How we structure our data to be able to access via natural speech but it is something that is on our road map. >> How large is your IT organization? Roughly. >> In number of people? >> Dave: Yeah. We have about 250 people in our IT organization but we do have a significant use of partners. >> And they're distributed or? >> No, they're in Tennessee. And for the notes popping now we use offshore resources with certain integration partners. We have a couple primary integration partners that we're using. >> So reason I'm asking so as you move to this cloud sass platform. How are you thinking about protecting your data and is it changing. >> It's a good question. And all of a sudden, for awhile there I think we do a great as securing it. We invested a significant amount of money protecting our data. I think I'd be naive to say that we could do a better job than Amazon web services. >> Dave: I would agree, no offense. >> And I think one of the gentleman was speaking yesterday said the same thing. And one of my guys looked at me says that's what we've been saying. I think there's always a risk. Security is a big deal especially with what's happened with one-acry and the subsequent problem. There's going to be more. I think that Amazon could be on top of it. I think together we can do a good job on security. It doesn't worry me anymore than it worries me everyday with respect to my own infrastructure. And it does worry me just not anymore. >> Great, well Mike, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a really enlightening conversation. >> Okay, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Ballante. We'll have more from Inforum in a little bit. (uptempo piano music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity. >> Hello, and happy taco Tuesday CUBE viewers! You are watching theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft's Ignite here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with Stu Miniman. We're joined by Scott Hanselman, he is the partner program manager at Microsoft. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE! >> Absolutely, my pleasure! >> Rebecca: And happy taco Tuesday to you! Will code for tacos. >> Will code for tacos. >> I'm digging it, I'm digging it >> I'm a very inexpensive coder. >> So you are the partner program manager, but you're really the people's programmer at Microsoft. Satya Nadella up on the main stage yesterday, talking about programming for everyone, empowering ordinary citizen developers, and you yourself were on the main stage this morning, "App Development for All", why is this such a priority for Microsoft at this point in time? >> Well there's the priority for Microsoft, and then I'll also speak selfishly as a priority for me, because when we talk about inclusion, what does that really mean? Well it is the opposite of exclusion. So when we mean inclusion, we need to mean everyone, we need to include everyone. So what can we do to make technology, to make programming possible, to make everyone enabled, whether that be something like drag and drop, and PowerApps, and the Power platform, all the way down to doing things like we did in the keynote this morning with C# on a tiny micro-controller, and the entire spectrum in between, whether it be citizen programmers in Excel using Power BI to go and do machine learning, or the silly things that we did in the keynote with rock, paper scissors that we might be able to talk about. All of that means including everyone and if the site isn't accessible, if Visual Studio as a tool isn't accessible, if you're training your AI in a non-ethical way, you are consciously excluding people. So back to what Satya thinks is why can't everyone do this? SatyaSacha thinks is why can't everyone do this? Why are we as programmers having any gate keeping, or you know, "You can't do that you're not a programmer, "you know, I'm a programmer, you can't have that." >> So what does the future look like, >> Rebecca: So what does the future look like, if everyone knows how to do it? I mean, do some imagining, visioning right now about if everyone does know how to do this, or at least can learn the building blocks for it, what does technology look like? >> Well hopefully it will be ethical, and it'll be democratized so that everyone can do it. I think that the things that are interesting, or innovative today will become commoditized tomorrow, like, something as simple as a webcam detecting your face, and putting a square around it and then you move around, and the square, we were like, "Oh my God, that was amazing!" And now it's just a library that you can download. What is amazing and interesting today, like AR and VR, where it's like, "Oh wow, I've never seen augmented reality work like that!" My eight-year-old will be able to do it in five years, and they'll be older than eight. >> So Scott, one of the big takeaways I had from the app dev keynote that you did this morning was in the past it was trying to get everybody on the same page, let's move them to our stack, let's move them to our cloud, let's move them on this programming language, and you really talked about how the example of Chipotle is different parts of the organization will write in a different language, and there needs to be, it's almost, you know, that service bus that you have between all of these environments, because we've spent, a lot of us, I know in my career I've spent decades trying to help break down those silos, and get everybody to work together, but we're never going to have everybody doing the same jobs, so we need to meet them where they are, they need to allow them to use the tools, the languages, the platforms that they want, but they need to all be able to work together, and this is not the Microsoft that I grew up with that is now an enabler of that environment. The word we keep coming back to is trust at the keynote. I know there's some awesome, cool new stuff about .net which is a piece of it, but it's all of the things together. >> Right, you know I was teaching a class at Mesa Community College down in San Diego a couple of days ago and they were trying, they were all people who wanted jobs, just community college people, I went to community college and it's like, I just want to know how to get a job, what is the thing that I can do? What language should I learn? And that's a tough question. They wonder, do I learn Java, do I learn C#? And someone had a really funny analogy, and I'll share it with you. They said, well you know English is the language, right? Why don't the other languages just give up? They said, you know, Finland, they're not going to win, right? Their language didn't win, so they should just give up, and they should all speak English, and I said, What an awful thing! They like their language! I'm not going to go to people who do Haskell, or Rust, or Scala, or F#, and say, you should give up! You're not going to win because C won, or Java won, or C# won. So instead, why don't we focus on standards where we can inter-operate, where we can accept that the reality is a hybrid cloud things like Azure Arc that allows us to connect multiple clouds, multi-vendor clouds together. That is all encompassing the concept of inclusion, including everyone means including every language, and as many standards as you can. So it might sound a little bit like a Tower of Babel, but we do have standards and the standards are HTTP, REST, JSON, JavaScript. It may not be the web we deserve, but it's the web that we have, so we'll use those building block technologies, and then let people do their own thing. >> So speaking of the keynote this morning, one of the cool things you were doing was talking about the rock, paper, scissors game, and how it's expanding. Tell our viewers a little bit more about the new elements to rock, paper, scissors. >> So folks named Sam Kass, a gentleman named Sam Kass many, many years ago on the internet, when the internet was much simpler web pages, created a game called Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock, and a lot of people will know that from a popular TV show on CBS, and they'll give credit to that show, in fact it was Sam Kass and Karen Bryla who created that, and we sent them a note and said, "Hey can I write a game about this?" And we basically built a Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock game in the cloud containerized at scale with multiple languages, and then we also put it on a tiny device, and what's fun about the game from a complexity perspective is that rock, paper, scissors is easy. There's only three rules, right? Paper covers rock, which makes no sense, but when you have five, it's hard! Spock shoots the Rock with his phaser, and then the lizard poisons Spock, and the paper disproves, and it gets really hard and complicated, but it's also super fun and nerdy. So we went and created a containerized app where we had all different bots, we had node, Python, Java, C#, and PHP, and then you can say, I'm going to pick Spock and .net, or node and paper, and have them fight, and then we added in some AI, and some machine learning, and some custom vision such that if you sign in with Twitter in this game, it will learn your patterns, and try to defeat you using your patterns and then, clicking on your choices and fun, snd then, clicking on your choices and fun, because we all want to go, "Rock, Paper, Scissors shoot!" So we made a custom vision model that would go, and detect your hand or whatever that is saying, this is Spock and then it would select it and play the game. So it was just great fun, and it was a lot more fun than a lot of the corporate demos that you see these days. >> All right Scott, you're doing a lot of different things at the show here. We said there's just a barrage of different announcements that were made. Love if you could share some of the things that might have flown under the radar. You know, Arc, everyone's talking about, but some cool things or things that you're geeking out on that you'd want to share with others? >> Two of the things that I'm most excited, one is an announcement that's specific to Ignite, and one's a community thing, the announcement is that .net Core 3.1 is coming. .net Core 3 has been a long time coming as we have began to mature, and create a cross platform open source .net runtime, but .net Core 3.1 LTS Long Term Support means that that's a version of .net core that you can put on a system for three years and be supported. Because a lot of people are saying, "All this open source is moving so fast! "I just upgraded to this, "and I don't want to upgrade to that". LTS releases are going to happen every November in the odd numbered years. So that means 2019, 2021, 2023, there's going to be a version of .net you can count on for three years, and then if you want to follow that train, the safe train, you can do that. In the even numbered years we're going to come out with a version of .net that will push the envelope, maybe introduce a new version of C#, it'll do something interesting and new, then we tighten the screws and then the following year that becomes a long term support version of .net. >> A question for you on that. One of the challenges I hear from customers is, when you talk about hybrid cloud, they're starting to get pulled apart a little bit, because in the public cloud, if I'm running Azure, I'm always on the latest version, but in my data center, often as you said, I want longer term support, I'm not ready to be able to take that CICD push all of the time, so it feels like I live, maybe call it bimodal if you want, but I'm being pulled with the am I always on the latest, getting the latest security, and it's all tested by them? Or am I on my own there? How do you help customers with that, when Microsoft's developing things, how do you live in both of those worlds or pull them together? >> Well, we're really just working on this idea of side-by-side, whether it be different versions of Visual Studio that are side-by-side, the stable one that your company is paying for, and then the preview version that you can go have side-by-side, or whether you could have .net Core 3, 3.1, or the next version, a preview version, and a safe version side-by-side. We want to enable people to experiment without fear of us messing up their machine, which is really, really important. >> One of the other things you were talking about is a cool community announcement. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? >> So this is a really cool product from a very, very small company out of Oregon, from a company called Wilderness Labs, and Wilderness Labs makes a micro-controller, not a micro-processor, not a raspberry pie, it doesn't run Linux, what it runs is .net, so we're actually playing Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock on this device. We've wired it all up, this is a screen from our friends at Adafruit, and I can write .net, so somehow if someone is working at, I don't know, the IT department at Little Debbie Snack Cakes, and they're making WinForms applications, they're suddenly now an IOT developer, 'cause they can go and write C# code, and control a device like this. And when you have a micro-controller, this will run for weeks on a battery, not hours. You go and 3D print a case, make this really tiny, it could become a sensor, it could become an IOT device, or one of thousands of devices that could check crops, check humidity, moisture wetness, whatever you want, and we're going to enable all kinds of things. This is just a commodity device here, this screen, it's not special. The actual device, this is the development version, size of my finger, it could be even smaller if we wanted to make it that way, and these are our friends at Wilderness Labs. and they had a successful Kickstarter, and I just wanted to give them a shout out, and I just wanted to give them a shoutout, I don't have any relationship with them, I just think they're great. >> Very cool, very cool. So you are a busy guy, and as Stu said, you're in a lot of different things within Microsoft, and yet you still have time to teach at community college. I'm interested in your perspective of why you do that? Why do you think it's so important to democratize learning about how to do this stuff? >> I am very fortunate and I think that we people, who have achieved some amount of success in our space, need to recognize that luck played a factor in that. That privilege played a factor in that. But, why can't we be the luck for somebody else, the luck can be as simple as a warm introduction. I believe very strongly in what I call the transitive value of friendship, so if we're friends, and you're friends, then the hypotenuse can be friends as well. A warm intro, a LinkedIn, a note that like, "Hey, I met this person, you should talk to them!" Non-transactional networking is really important. So I can go to a community college, and talk to a person that maybe wanted to quit, and give a speech and give them, I don't know, a week, three months, six months, more whatever, chutzpah, moxie, something that will keep them to finish their degree and then succeed, then I'm going to put good karma out into the world. >> Paying it forward. >> Exactly. >> So Scott, you mentioned that when people ask for advice, it's not about what language they do, is to, you know, is to,q you know, we talk in general about intellectual curiosity of course is good, being part of a community is a great way to participate, and Microsoft has a phenomenal one, any other tips you'd give for our listeners out there today? >> The fundamentals will never go out of style, and rather than thinking about learning how to code, why not think about learning how to think, and learning about systems thinking. One of my friends, Kishau Rogers, talked about systems thinking, I've hade her on my podcast a number of times, and we were giving a presentation at Black Girls Code, and I was talking to a fifteen-year-old young woman, and we were giving a presentation. It was clear that her mom wanted her to be there, and she's like, "Why are we here?" And I said, "All right, let's talk about programming "everybody, we're talking about programming. "My toaster is broken and the toast is not working. "What do you think is wrong?" Big, long, awkward pause and someone says, "Well is the power on?" I was like, "Well, I plugged a light in, "and nothing came on" and they were like, "Well is the fuse blown?" and then one little girl said "Well did the neighbors have power?", And I said, "You're debugging, we are debugging right?" This is the thing, you're a systems thinker, I don't know what's going on with the computer when my dad calls, I'm just figuring it out like, "Oh, I'm so happy, you work for Microsoft, "you're able to figure it out." >> Rebecca: He has his own IT guy now in you! >> Yeah, I don't know, I unplug the router, right? But that ability to think about things in the context of a larger system. I want toast, power is out in the neighborhood, drawing that line, that makes you a programmer, the language is secondary. >> Finally, the YouTube videos. Tell our viewers a little bit about those. you can go to D-O-T.net, so dot.net, the word dot, you can go to d-o-t.net, so dot.net, the word dot, slash videos and we went, and we made a 100 YouTube videos on everything from C# 101, .net, all the way up to database access, and putting things in the cloud. A very gentle, "Mr. Rodgers' Neighborhood" on-ramp. A lot of things, if you've ever seen that cartoon that says, "Want to draw an owl? "Well draw two circles, "and then draw the rest of the fricking owl." A lot of tutorials feel like that, and we don't want to do that, you know. We've got to have an on-ramp before we get on the freeway. So we've made those at dot.net/videos. >> Excellent, well that's a great plug! Thank you so much for coming on the show, Scott. >> Absolutely my pleasure! >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman., stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>> from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering active eo 2019. Data driven you by activity. >> Welcome back to Boston, Everybody. Money >> belong here with my co host, a student of John >> Kerry's. Also here today You watching the Cuban leader and on the ground tech coverage. This is day one of active fio 19 data driven content Conference hashtag data driven 19 red cara minuses. Here is the senior vice president of fantasy Sports A draftkings Greg. Thanks for coming on. What a cool title. >> Yeah, it's It's, you know, I was joking with my wife. Anytime you could be working fantasy sports, it's a great place to be. Everybody's a little bit jealous. >> So the formula is easy, right? Offer big giant prizes and everybody comes And that's all there is suing. Anybody can come >> in. I just have the dream job right now. >> So hugely competitive market. You guys, you become the >> leader. We were in the radio. Check out your websites. I mean, take us through the draft kings and your ascendancy. How you got here? >> So, you know, company started in 2012 initially around sort of the major big American sports on DH. Then really a CZ. We started scale that we saw there was a huge consumer interest in the product players that would come on. We're very, very, very sticky. Um, and we've just been kind of, you know, pushing, pushing on growing that using these. So the initial founders are three former analyst. So come on. It's always been sort of a very analytically driven company. So they looked at what we were dealing with, and it was we had L TVs that were way higher than our cracks. So let's keep marketing and growing and growing and growing and finding out ways to offer a better product. So, over 2015 we did a major marketing blitz, blew up the company Absolutely huge. Um, and since then we've been just constantly innovating, adding new sports, adding new features on DH, adding ways toe on the product. And then even more recently, just about a year ago, we expanded also into online sports betting over New Jersey has that's become a legal product across the U. S. So it's been a great time to be at the company a lot of fun. >> What what was your first sport was like Amazon started in books and then, you know, scaled out what was your first sport. So it's actually the first sport was >> baseball because of the time that they actually launched. So is the middle of April. Sporting calendar is a little bit thin. Right then, so is it was baseball to start, and then once football season started, that's really when things take on >> 2015 is when you started the marketing blitz and I remember just here in the ads and it was just intense, like a while. This company's going for it. So you sort of took >> all the chips I went >> all in and it worked. Yeah, I mean, it's part of the, you know, the lifeblood of the company. It's We're a company that ends up being taking risks, but we take calculated risks. So at any given point, you sort of say, like, Hey, what is the what is the range of outcomes over here? We're not playing for second place. We want to be a market leader, so you have to take risks in order, be a market leader. So let's take calculated risks. Let's make sure we're not being insane, but you know we did the math. We figured out what? This is A This is a worthwhile shot. We pushed him for it. Andi really took off from their love to bet on >> sure things. Yeah, well, Greg, we know the people that play the fantasy for it feel that data is what differentiates whether they're going to live in, you know, winner lose. Talk to us a little bit about the data journey inside your business And how that helped differentiate draftkings in the market. Yes. So we think Death draftkings >> is one of the most analytically based companies in the, you know, definitely in the market, but also into sort of like General Cos right now we use our analytics platform to inform pretty much everything we dio on. Go to your point. You're joking. You know, it seems like fantasy sports is easy throughout some giant prizes there, and everything will take care of itself. You know, running a fantasy sports car company. If you throw out a contest that's too big, you lose a ton of money. There's a lot of asymmetric risk in the business where if we're right, we make a little bit more. But if we're wrong. We lose a ton very, very, very fast. So our ability to be very, very sound analytically is what allows us to sort of pushed the envelope and grow, grow, grow but not, you know, lose our heads along the way. You know, some of the fun of that is really, you know, when we first ran, I think one of the most game changing contest we ran was actually back in October of 2014. It was the very first millionaire maker contest I could still remember. It was Week five of the 2020 14 NFL season where we said, Hey, this it's crazy. We need crazy things that happen in order for it to work. But if we're on a $20 contest to enter with $1,000,000 top prize and 2,000,000 of total prizes, it could go viral, go absolutely crazy. And if it loses, here's how it'll losing. Here's how much will hurt us. It's a worthwhile risk. Let's go for it. So that sort of energy of, you know, doing discipline analysis and constantly sort of them. Taking the risk on the back of it is what allowed us to build >> up the brand value that you would have got out of that was sort of worth that risk in part anyway. And you wouldn't have to hurt presumably. >> Exactly. We knew our downside. As long as you know your downside, you're normally in a pretty good spot to take those risks. >> So where do you >> see this All going mean? So the company has grown. You're at this kind of critical mass now, Like we said, highly competitive, you know, knock down. You know, if you take your eye off the ball. So how do you guys keep this going? >> So we have a huge challenge ahead of us over the next couple of years, as sports betting becomes legal across the US, we need to make sure that we are one of the top competitors in that market. Sports betting in the US, we expect to be an absolutely enormous market. It will probably be significantly larger than the fantasy sports market in terms of absolute revenue and even, you know, on order of magnitude more competitive. So we need to be executing each step along the way a CZ markets open up. We need to be able to get into getting two market very, very fast. And that means our tech team needs to be working feverishly to make sure that we can hit the requirements that each legislator and each regulator puts on market entry in their state. We didn't mean making sure we're constantly figuring out what are the product elements that are absolutely critical for our for our users. Is it Maura around the live betting experiences that around the different markets that you offer? It's around pricing. And how do we find these things, these different lovers and told them to make sure that we're putting out a great product for users. And if we do that and throw a great product after users were pretty sure we can make you want >> to be one stop shopping presumably, right? I mean, all sports, right? But But then you've got these niche sports betting. I mean eggs, invest. Example. I could think of this horse racing. You know where it is alive. It's gonna video. It's got commentators on the ground that you know the business really well. Is >> that Is that the strategy to go sort of horizontal and so be a one stop shop or you >> gonna sort of pick your spots? What is the day to tell you? >> You know, I think we're constantly talking about it. One of the things that allowed our fantasy sports business to grow so fast was going a little bit more horizontal. So we offered Gulf in Mass at a time period when the primary competitors and the space vandal did not. On DH, we built that product into one of our largest sports. It's, you know, right up there with MLB in terms of the actual size that that comes in a Z have gone also horizontal, we pulled in other places, like NASCAR. Mm, a great sports that people are interested in. It gets more users into our platform. And honestly, if uses are interested in a product, we don't want them to have to go elsewhere. We want to be able to have the offerings that any sort of, you know, critical mass type environment is going toe is gonna have >> Well, it's that experience, right? Well, I like to shop in Amazon. You do, too, because I >> trusted. And it's the same user experience. So, Greg, one of things >> I'm hearing from you is something that everybody tries for, but it's really challenging that speed. How do you react that fast and move the company into new markets and new offerings and keep innovating? You know, culturally technology wise, you know, How does Draftkings do that? You know, I think a za company, you know, from really every single person that we recruit in higher We've been actually execution Aly disciplined throughout the company's history. It's It's something that our founders did a great job of instilling in the culture right at the gates. I mean, we've tried to foster all the way along the way, which is all the best strategies of the world. They're going to fail if you can't execute well and every single person down the company knows that. And we try to, you know, enable each person to be as autonomous as possible in their ability to execute their their portion of the business that allows us to move really, really, really fast. You know, we disseminate that responsibility quickly, and each leader and sort of each person knows what they have to do to execute. There's a high degree of accountability behind that, you know, I'd like to say there's some. There's some magic recipe that's, um, secret sauce, but it's a lot of just great people doing great work everyday. Well, Greg, you know it's any your competitors that they look at, You know, Boston's been been doing pretty well in Draftkings era, you know, for the last few years. ES o Boston's been a great market for us. We've expanded Conover here on DH. The sports teams have been fantastic, although the Bruins it was a little bit sad about Game seven over there, but it happens. >> So his m o be the flagship news that no, I wouldn't say >> that MLB was first, primarily just of the time of the year when we launched. NFL is always going to go, are not always going to be, but for the for the foreseeable future is the dominant US sport on will remain the dominant US for >> no reason. I mean, kids there watch MLB anymore. Maybe the maybe the playoffs and the games. It was a game. I think I'm some Father's day was like almost five hours long, you know, gets called. You can come in and out. But you know what some of the trends. You see soccer. Is that growing NFL? Obviously huge. Do you see so niche sports like lax coming on. >> So, uh, you know, starting point NFL has been huge. We actually launched a new product Ah, little over a year ago called Showdown, which allowed you start to do fantasy for a single game as opposed to the combination of games that's taken off fantastically because that's tapping into more of the I'm going to sit down and watch this game, and I would love to have a fantasy team on that on this game. That's really expanded the audience like that. That >> was genius because, look, if you're >> out of the running, it doesn't matter because I'm weak. On top of that N b A and NHL on fire. The embassy put out a great product is an actual sport league. You know, the Finals were great. You hate to see the injuries, but it was a great final. Siri's very competitive. The NHL Finals has been very, very competitive. Golf is growing phenomenally as a sport, way farm or interesting golf than I ever anticipated when I first started with the company and it's one of the most exciting things. When the Masters comes each year, every screen has turned to it and we see a huge player. Player number is kind of coming into that one. Beyond that, you know NASCAR. What's been interesting? NASCAR's been having a tough couple years, but the Truck series for us? We launched it this year and the trucks have been great. I don't know if you've watched NASCAR Trucks. They're wildly entertaining. Uh, you know, Emma, you got the big fighter. So every sport sort of has its moments. It's a matter of like picking those moments and figuring out how to make >> the most of them. Do you see boxing at all making a comeback? >> So we have thought about how to get boxing into a into a fantasy. We don't have it at the moment. We're putting a lot of thought into it, so we are actually seeing through. We've seen, you know, we've been in the M M A space and we've seen the growth out from there where that sports doing great and you look at places like Bela Tor. The Professional Fighters league is other leagues, and then boxing is the next step. There's a lot of interest there. I don't think they have the right products yet to be able to kind of engage with that extra way. So that's one of things we're working on. Also, you need a marquee fighter. You always need a marquee fighter. Kind of helped bring in the interest over on that side. So, um, be interesting to see with Taki on sort of the downside of his career. At this point on DH, Mayweather hasn't been fighting much. Will be interesting to see. Who's that next meeting with Adam. But >> I grew up in an era >> of Marquis fighters. What? They would fight, you know, they literally fight 6 70 times a year, you know, and you had used huge names on DSO, and then mm comes along and he's really hurt, >> but it feels like it's tryingto so to resuscitate. Yeah. I mean, I think these things could >> be a little bit cyclical. Like you get one Marquis fighter out there like so my wife, this Filipino. So I'm a huge backing out fan now way watch every fight. Even when we were living in remote locations that forces watching at weird hours. He's a type of athlete that could bring popularity of the sport. So if there was a major U. S. Fighter that gains that degree of sort of, you know that that degree of fame people will be into it, I think >> Do do do your analytics sort of have a probe into the activity at the at the fan level at the sports level, not just the fantasy level or the betting level? Is that a sort of ah ah predictor for you? Yet we >> see a lot of correlations between how many people play our sport are fantasy game, and how many people actually follow the underlying sport. Way can also see trends in terms of If I'm from Boston, I probably pick more patriots in my fantasy lineups than, uh, normal on DH. You can actually see that as people play different sports that you know, the number one Q. Be drafted in in Boston is almost always gonna be Tom Brady. And once you leave that you start seeing Aaron Rodgers pop up. Let's really, really fast. So you see these little micro trends where it's like you are still a sports fan of your local team in your local environment, but it manifest itself in the fantasy. >> So what you think that is? Do you think it's fan affinity >> or do you think it's just the sort of lack of knowledge out inside? You're sort of a circle of trust. >> I think it's probably a combination. I mean, I could say is, you know, following the Celtics in the mid to thousands, I knew the depth of the Celtics pension, how they would use their rotation better than anybody else, Probably better than anybody else in the coaches would probably disagree. But it's like I knew that James Posey was a huge value play on Saturday nights. I knew. I kind of with I feel the Eddie House nights. Uh, so, you know, on your local team, you probably know those players at the not the top top echelon All Stars, but the guy's right beneath. You know them a little bit better and probably more comfortable using >> what's your favorite sport. >> So my favorite sport, from a fantasy perspective, is I play all the basket. I play all football, played basketball just during play offs, and I played baseball. But baseball I'm strictly a fantasy player. I don't really follow the sport to play. I'm just playing fantasy. Okay, >> That's great. So, what do you think? The conference. Here. >> You have you Have you had any timeto interact? I know you were swamped after coming off the stage. >> You know, it looks like a great turnout over here. There's a lot of enthusiasm amongst them from people. I was a little bit late to the late to show up this morning, so I got a bit Swanson eager to go and be able to catch up a bit more. >> Okay, Well, Greg, thanks so much for coming on. The Cuba's great to have your every pleasure meeting you. >> All right, people. Right there. Still, when I >> was back with our next guest, John for it is also in the house. You wanted The Cube from active field data driven 19. Right back

>> Live, from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe, 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE at KubeCon CloudNativeCon 2019 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Corey Quinn and welcoming back to the program, friend of the program, Brian Gracely who is the Director of Product Strategy at Red Hat. Brian, great to see you again. >> I've been, I feel like I've been in the desert. It's three years, I'm finally back, it's good to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah well, I feel like we've been traveling parallel paths a lot. TheCUBE goes to a lot of events. We do a lot of interviews but I think when you go to shows, you actually have more back-to-back meetings than we even do, so we feel you in the jet lag and a little bit of exhaustion. Thanks for making time. >> Yeah, it's great. I had dinner with you two weeks ago, I did a podcast with Corey a week ago, and now, due to the magic of the internet, we're all here together in one place. It's good. >> Absolutely. Well Brian, as we know at a show like this we all want to hold hands and sing Kubernetes Kumbaya. It's wonderful to see that all of the old fights of the past have all been solved by software in the cloud. >> They're all good, it's all good. Yeah, somebody said it's a cult. I think I heard Owen Rodgers said it's now officially a cult. Corey, you called it the Greek word for spending lots of money. >> Uh yeah, it was named after the Kubernetes, the Greek god of spending money on cloud services. >> So, Brian, you talk to a lot of customers here. As they look at this space, how do they look at it? There's still times that I hear them, "I'm using this technology and I'm using this technology, "and gosh darn it vendor, "you better get together and make this work." So, open-source, we'd love to say is the panacea, but maybe not yet. >> I don't think we hear that as much anymore because there is no more barrier to getting the technology. It's no longer I get this technology from vendor A and I wish somebody else would support the standard. It's like, I can get it if I want it. I think the conversations we typically have aren't about features anymore, they're simply, my business is driven by software, that's the way I interact with my customer, that's the way I collect data from my customers, whatever that is. I need to do that faster and I need to teach my people to do that stuff. So the technology becomes secondary. I have this saying and it frustrates people sometimes, but I'm like, there's not a CEO, a CIO, a CTO that you would talk to that wakes up and says, "I have a Kubernetes problem." They all go, "I have a, I have this business problem, "I have that problem, it happens to be software." Kubernetes is a detail. >> Yeah Brian, those are the same people 10 years ago had a convergent problem, I never ran across them. >> If you screw up a Kubernetes roll-out, then you have a Kubernetes problem. But it's entertaining though. I mean, you are the Director of Product Strategy, which is usually a very hard job with the notable exception of one very large cloud company, where that role is filled by a post-it note that says simply, yes. So as you talk to the community and you look at what's going on, how are you having these conversations inform what you're building in terms of Openshift? >> Yeah, I mean, strategy you can be one of two things. You can either be really good at listening, or you can have a great crystal ball. I think Red Hat has essentially said, we're not going to be in the crystal ball business. Our business model is there's a lot of options, we will go get actively involved with them, we will go scratch our knees and get scars and stuff. Our biggest thing is, I have to spend a lot of time talking to customers going, what do you want to do? Usually there's some menu that you can offer them right now and it's really a matter of, do you want it sort of half-baked? Are you willing to sort of go through the learning process? Do you need something that's a little more finalized? We can help you do that. And our big thing is, we want to put as many of those things kind of together in one stew, so that you're not having-- Not you Stu, but other stews, thinking about like, I don't want to really think about them, I just want it to be monitored, I want the network to just work, I want scalability built in. So for us it's not so much a matter of making big, strategic bets, it's a matter of going, are we listening enough and piecing things together so they go, yeah, it's pretty close and it's the right level of baked for what I want to do right now. >> Yeah, so Brian, an interesting thing there. There's still quite a bit of complexity in this ecosystem. Red Hat does a good job of giving adult supervision to the environment, but, you know, when I used to think when row came out, it was like, okay, great. Back in the day, I get a CD and I know I can run this. Today here, if I talk to every Kubernetes customer that I run across and say okay, tell me your stack and tell me what service measure you're using, tell me which one of these projects you're doing and how you put them together. There's a lot of variation, so how do you manage that, the scale and growth with the individual configurations that everybody still can do, even if they're starting to do public clouds and all those other things? >> So, it's always interesting to me. I watch the different Keynotes and people will talk about all the things in their stack and why they had problems and this, that, and the other, and I kind of look at it and I'm like, we've solved that problem for you. Our thing is always, and I don't mean that sort of boastfully, but like, we put things together in what we think are pretty good defaults. It's the one probably big difference between Openshift and a lot of these other ones that are here is that we've put all those things together as sort of what we think are pretty good defaults. We allow some flexibility. So, you don't like the monitoring, you don't like Prometheus plugin splunk, that's fine. But we don't make you stand on your head. So for us, a lot of these problems that, our customers don't go, well, we can't figure out the stack, we can't do these things, they're kind of built in. And then their problem becomes okay, can I highly automate that? Did I try and make too many choices where you let me plug things in? And for us, what we've done, is I think if we went back a few years, people could say you guys are too modular, you're too plugable. We had to do that to kind of adapt to the market. Now we've sort of learned over time, you want to be immutable, you want to give them a little less choice. You want to really, no, if you're going to deploy an AWS, you got to know AWS really well. And that's, you know, not to make this a commercial, but that's basically what Openshift four became, was much more opinions about what we think are best practices based on about a thousand customers having done this. So we don't run into as many of pick your stack things, we run into that next level thing. Are we automating it enough? Do we scale it? How do we do statefulness? Stuff like that. >> Yeah, I'm curious in the Keynote this morning they called, you know, Kubernetes is a platform of platforms. Did that messaging resonate with you and your customers? >> Yeah, I think so, I mean, Kubernetes by itself doesn't really do anything, you need all this other stuff. So when I hear people say we deployed Kubernetes, I'm like, no you don't. You know, it's the engine of what you do, but you do a bunch of other stuff. So yeah, we like to think of it as like, we're platform builders, you should be a platform consumer, just like you're a consumer of Salesforce. They're a platform, you consume that. >> Yeah, one of the points made in the Keynote was how one provider, I believe it was IBM, please yell at me if I got that one wrong, talks about using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. Which on the one hand, is super cool and a testament to the flexibility of how this is really working. On the other, it's-- and thus the serpent devours itself, and it becomes a very strange question of, okay, then we're starting to see some weird things. Where do we start, where do we look? Indeed.com for a better job. And it's one of those problems that at some point you just can't manage a head around complexities inside of complexities, but we've been dealing with that for 40 years. >> Yeah, Kubernetes managing Kubernetes is kind of one of those weird words like serverless, you're like what does that mean? I don't, it doesn't seem to, I don't think you mean what you want it to mean. The simplest way we explain that stuff, so... A couple of years ago there was a guy named Brandon Philips who had started a company called CoreOS. He stood up at Kube-- >> I believe you'll find it's pronounce CoreOS, but please, continue. >> CoreOS, exactly. Um, he stood up in the Seattle one when there was a thousand people at this event or 700, and he said, "I've created this pattern, "or we think there's a pattern that's going to be useful." The simplest way to think of it is, there's stuff that you just want to run, and I want essentially something monitoring it and keep it in a loop, if you will. Kubernetes just has that built in. I mean, it's kind of built in to the concept because originally Google said, "I can't manage it all myself." So that thing that he originally came up with or codified became what's now called operators. Operators is that thing now that's like okay, I have a stateful application. It needs to do certain things all the time, that's the best practice. Why don't we just build that around it? And so I think you heard in a lot of the Keynotes, if you're going to run storage, run it as an operator. If you're going to run a database, run it as an operator. It sounds like inception, Kubernetes running-- It's really just, it's a health loop that's going on all the time with a little bit of smarts that say hey, if you fail, fail this way. I always use the example like if I go to Amazon and get RDS, I don't get a DVA, there's no guy that shows up and says, "Hey, I'm your DVA." You just get some software that runs it for you. That's all this stuff is, it just never existed in Kubernetes before. Kubernetes has now matured enough to where they go, oh, I can play in that world, I can make that part of what I do. So it's less scary, it sounds sort of weird, inception-y. It's really just kind of what you've already gotten out of the public cloud now brought to wherever you want it. >> Well, one of the concerns that I'm starting to see as well is there's a level of hype around this. We've had a lot of conversations around Kubernetes today and yesterday, to the point where you can almost call this Kubernetes and friends instead of CloudNativeCon. And everyone has described it slightly differently. You see people describing it as systemd, as a kernel, sometimes as the way and the light, and someone on stage yesterday said that we all are familiar with the value that Kubernetes has brought to our jobs and our lives, is I think was the follow-up to that, which is a little strange. And I got to thinking about that. I don't deny that it has brought value, but what's interesting to me about this is I don't think I've heard two people define its value in the same terminology at all, and we've had kind of a lot of these conversations. >> So obviously not a cult because they would all be on message if it was a cult. >> Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. >> It's a cult with very crappy brand control, maybe. We don't know. >> I always just explain it that like, you know, if I went back 10 years or something, people... Any enterprise said hey, I would love to run like Google or like Amazon. Apparently for every one admin, I can manage a thousand servers and in their own data centers it's like well, I have one guy and he manages five, so I have cloud envy. >> We tried to add a sixth and he was crushed to death. Turns out those racks have size and weight limits. >> That's right, that's right. And so, people, they wanted this thing, they would've paid an arm and a leg for it. You move forward five years from that and it's like oh, Google just gave you their software, it's now available for free. Now what are you going to do with it? I gave you a bunch of power. So yeah, depending on how much you want to drink the Kool-Aid you're like, this is awesome, but at the end of the day you're just like, I just want the stuff that is available to, that's freely, publicly available, but for whatever reason, I can't be all in on one cloud, or I can't be all in on a public cloud, which, you believe in that there's tons of economic value about it, there's just some companies that can't do that. >> And I fully accept that. My argument has always been that it is, I think it's a poor best practice. When you have a constraint that forces you to be in multiple cloud providers, yes, do it! That makes absolute perfect sense. >> Right, if it makes sense, do it. And that's kind of what we've always said look, we're agnostic to that. If you want to run it, if you want to run it in a disconnected mode on a cruise ship, great, if it makes sense for you. If you need to run, you know, like... The other thing that we see-- >> That cruise ship becomes a container ship. >> Becomes a container ship. I had an interesting conversation with the bank last night. I had dinner with the bank. We were talking, they said, look, I run some stuff locally where I'm at, 'cause I have to, and then, we put a ton of stuff in AWS. He told me this story about a batch processing job that cost him like $4 or $5 million today. He does a variant of it in Lambda, and it cost him like $50 a month. So we had this conversation and it's going like, I love AWS, I want to be all in at AWS. And he said, here's my problem. I wake up every morning worried that I'm going to open the newspaper and Amazon, not AWS, Amazon is going to have moved closer into the banking industry than they are today. And so I have to have this kind of backup plan if you will. Backup's the wrong word, but sort of contingency plan of if they stop being my technology partner and they start becoming my competitor, which, there's arguments-- >> And for most of us I'd say that's not a matter of if, but when. >> Right, right. And some people live with it great. Like, Netflix lives with it, right? Others struggle. That guy's not doing multi-cloud in the future, he's just going, I would like to have the technology that allows me if that comes along. I'm not doing it to do it, I'd like the bag built in. >> So Brian, just want to shift a little bit off of kind of the mutli-cloud discussion. The thing that's interest me a lot, especially I've talked to a number of the Openshift customers, it is historically, infrastructure was the thing that slowed me down. We understand, oh, I want to modernize that. No, no wait. The back in thing or you know, provisioning, these kind of things take forever. The lever of this platform has been, I can move faster, I can really modernize my environment, and, whether that's in my data center or in one public cloud and a couple of others, it is that you know, great lever to help me be able to do that. Is that the right way to think about this? You've talked to a lot of customers. Is that a commonality between them? >> I think we see, I hate to give you a vendor answer, but we tend to see different entry points. So for the infrastructure people, I mean the infrastructure people realize in some cases they're slow, and a lot of cases the ones that are still slow, it's 'cause of some compliance thing. I can give you a VM in an hour, but I got to go through a process. They're the ones that are saying, look, my developers are putting stuff in containers or we're downloading, I just need to be able to support that. The developers obviously are the ones who are saying, look, business need, business problem, have budget to do something, That's usually the more important lever. Just faster infrastructure doesn't do a whole lot. But we find more and more where those two people have to be in the room. They're not making choices independently. But the ones that are successful, the ones that you hear case studies about, none of them are like, we're great at building containers. They're great at building software. Development drives it, infrastructure still tends to have a lot of the budget so they play a role in it, but they're not dictating where it goes or what it does. >> Yeah, any patterns you're seeing or things that customers can do to kind of move further along that spectrum? >> I think, I mean there's a couple of things, and whether you fit in this or not, number one, nobody has a container problem. Start with a business problem. That's always good for technology in general, but this isn't a refresh thing, this is some business problem. That business problem typically should be, I have to build software faster. We always say... I've seen enough of these go well and I've seen enough go poorly. There's, these events are great. They're great in the sense of people see that there's progress, there's innovation. They're also terrible because if you walk into this new, you feel like, man, everybody understands this, it must be pretty simple. And what'll happen is they start working on it and they realize, I don't know what I'm doing. Even if they're using Openshift and we made it easy, they don't know what they're doing. And then they go, I'm embarrassed to ask for help. Which is crazy because if you get into open source the community's all there to help. So it's always like, business problem, ask for help early and often, even if it embarrasses you. Don't go after low-hanging fruit, especially if you're trying to get further investment. Spinning up a bunch of web clusters or hello worlds doesn't, nobody cares anymore. Go after something big. It basically forces your organization to be all in. And then the other thing, and this is the thing that's never intuitive to IT teams, is you, at the point where you actually made something work, you have to look more like my organization than yours, which is basically you have to look like a software marketing company, because internally, you're trying to convince developers to come use your platform or to build faster or whatever, you actually have to have internal evangelist and for a lot of them, they're like, dude, marketing, eh, I don't want anything to do with that. But it's like, that's the way you're going to get people to come to your new way of doing things. >> Great points, Brian. I remember 15 years ago, it was the first time I was like wait, the CIO has a marketing person under him to help with some of those transformations? Some of the software roles to do. >> Yeah, it's the reason they all want to come and speak at Keynotes and they get at the end and they go, we're hiring. It's like, I got to make what I'm doing sound cool and attract 8,000 people to it. >> Well absolutely it's cool here. We really appreciate Brian, you sharing all the updates here. >> Great to see you guys again. It's good to be back. >> Definitely don't be a stranger. So for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman. Getting towards the end. Two days live, wall-to-wall coverage here at KubeCon, CloudNativeCon 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (rhythmic music)

>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE! >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference put on by Untraceable, Tracy and her team doing a fantastic job, so shout out to the team at Untraceable for another great event. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost's Dave Vellante, and we're here with CUBE's friend, CUBE alumni, from the CryptoChicks, Nataliya Hearn, director, good to see you, great to have you back. >> Thank you. (laughs) >> Okay, good to see you, we're laughing, we've got some great funny stories we've been telling, since PolyCon, but really, some great things going on, so give us the update, you had a hackathon recently, you got new things happening here in your organization, take a quick minute to explain what it is for the folks that don't know, what do you guys do, and what's going on? >> Good, well, CryptoChicks is a organization focused on educating women in blockchain and cryptospace. We started because at meetups there would be one or two women out of hundreds of men, who would be afraid to ask stupid questions, so we said, Oh, okay, there's no stupid questions, come and join us, and we'll show you how to open a wallet, what blockchain is all about, so we've been doing that. We've actually grew quite a bit, we are now have chapters in all over the world, in Pakistan, in Bahamas, in Moscow, we just teamed up with She Codes in Israel, which is 50,000 women, so, we're doing really well. >> Congratulations, a great mission, we totally support it, and, you know, I'm proud to say that I love my shirt that says, Satoshi is Female, thanks to Nyla Rodgers, who gave it to me, at Consensus in Blockchain Week in New York, but this is really beyond women in tech, it's beyond that, it's a really, you're doing some innovative things around onboarding, new talent and education, this is a really important, because the Internet is bounded on discovery, learning. >> Absolutely. >> What's the new thing? >> Well, you know when you hear, when you go to the blockchain conference and events, and we hear again and again about the chasm. How do we bridge the chasm, right? That's just the, like, big word that you hear like every third presentation, because the blockchain community needs it. But I think globally, blockchain represents something that's quite unique, and it's an opportunity not just to make money and speculate, or to develop new technology, it's technology that can liberate. But how do we get that message across? And I think we have to start with kids. Kids are our future, but they're also the ones who spend most of their time on social media, so that's a good thing, but if you ask their parents, that's not such a good thing necessarily. So how do we convert them, some of their time from social media to learning? So we've put, we're putting together this program that focuses on children to earn to learn. >> Earn to learn, like they earn coins or money, or? >> That's right, basically they can earn swag, so basically we're creating the marketplace that rewards children for learning. >> All kids, right? >> All kids, well we're focusing on -- >> On girls. >> No, not on girls, we're going to high schools, so immediate next generation. >> So girls, boys, everybody's welcome? >> Absolutely. Yep. >> Awesome. >> Next generation, and they're the next generation that has to solve the problems that we, and opportunities that can be captured, that's coming right to their front door. >> Absolutely, we have a lot of question marks in the blockchain community. Which blockchain, how do we do it, there is going to be multi-chain tokens, we're talking about, next generation is the one who's going to provide solutions for us. So we got to open their minds, and to show that blockchain is a tool like potentially calculus is a tool. To create something that hasn't been there before. >> You know, I have a lot of conversations in Silicon Valley and Nataliya, recently at the Google Cloud event, Google's been very much a great change agent, especially with women in tech and underrepresented minorities, but Aparna Sinha, who's one of the senior people there, dual degrees from Stanford, she's got a PhD, she said we're losing the girls early, and what came out of it was a conversation that, when you have these new market movements like blockchain, AI, these are new skills that you can level up, so the ability to come from behind and level up is an opportunity for people who have traditionally been behind, whether it's women or other minorities, to level up. So it's a huge opportunity now to put the naysayers down to rest, and saying, Screw you, we're going to level up and learn. >> Absolutely, and it's global, the thing is -- >> There's nothing stopping anyone from learning. >> Absolutely, and trust, and the borderless system that blockchain potentially can provide is at a global advantage. As long as you have a cell phone, you can be in a village, an old village, like at our last hackathon, we actually were streaming women hackers from Zimbabwe. So there you go, it's doable. >> So how are you, how are you scaling your message globally? >> So we're starting, one thing is that education today, is basically the bill is being paid either by the government or by parents. The reason I would call that a marketplace, I would like companies to be involved. And it could be local companies, or it could be global. What about creating ARVR classrooms, and providing the information to kids, via a completely new way that they would actually move away from swiping or just looking on some random YouTube videos, to something that they can get a phone, some shoes, mascara, focusing on girls, right? And to understand what that borderless economy really means by experiencing, what does it mean to have tokens that you can trade globally? You are used to your parents giving you some dollars, you go to a corner store. What about if you learn something, you go to a bakery, in Kenya, and for the work that you've done, you get a bun, right, or a meal? >> So this democratizing access, it's bringing education to the masses? >> And it's also uniting the blockchain community, 'cause we would be building this governance platform on blockchain, we would tokenize it, and there will be many elements of it, reward programs, smart contracts that reward content, some level of AI in terms of analysis of what we're doing, so I think this is why I was looking at multi-chain tokens. Maybe that would be a solution to kind of, to deal with -- >> Explain that, what does that mean? >> Well, we've got different chains right now, right? You've got Hyperledger, you've got Ethereum, and all this good stuff. How do you bridge all this, right, instead of having to choose one, you're now saying, I can work in all of them, because each one potentially can offer something unique. Maybe you don't have to choose one. We don't know. Only time will tell, as this, this is such a young industry, and this is why it's so exciting. >> Well, Nataliya -- >> It -- >> Oh, go ahead. >> No, I was going to say, and you're giving the kids examples, so a lot of times kids ask me, Well, what's the difference between crypto and Venmo? I'm like, okay, you know, let's talk about the different things you can do with crypto that you can't do, but they're closer than the older generations are to transferring, you know, money, at least, so now you're applying different use cases and expanding their minds in ways that, perhaps -- >> Absolutely, and I'll give you my example. I mean, I got into blockchain early before Ethereum was launched, and partly I was into public markets, and then I kind of stopped because that project ended, or I stopped and I actually reentered it, because my fifteen-year-old who started mining. But he started mining because I was in that field already, so there you go, it kind of, you know, what comes around. >> Good job. I hope he gets all his Bitcoin. >> Yeah, he did. (laughs) >> So, I want you to tell a story, of what you've seen that's been high impact from your work you've done. You had, again, that whole Pakistan thing going on, you've got all these hackathons, what is a good story you could share? >> You know, the good story we can share, I think the part that we were able to do, the hackathons that we are doing are local, but they're also global, it really is, there's this sense of empowerment, and you know what I think the best story, this is the best story: best story was, at the hackathon that we ran, it was women, over 100 women, that participated. But all our mentors were young, geeky programming guys. Sorry guys. But you really knew they really knew their stuff, so there was technology transfer, and we had a 48 hour hackathon, these guys stayed 48 hours, they didn't go to sleep, they didn't have to as mentors, and there was this amazing technology transfer that happened, and I think some relationships were formed too. >> Yeah, some serious bonding went on, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's actually a good thing that you're including people. It's not just a certain thing, you got this inclusion. >> Absolutely, and actually all it is is about inclusion, all it is is we are giving a platform for women not to be afraid, I mean, I'm an engineer, so I've been working with men all my life, so for me to ask difficult questions, or stupid questions, it's like natural now, because it's been what my life, but for women, for many, it isn't. So we just wanted to kind of cross that divide, it's not a chasm, it's just a little divide that we're bridged. >> So when you say stupid questions, do you mean like, Why do you do it that way? (laughs) Why don't you do it this way? >> Or, what's a wallet? Like, what's a private key? What's a public key? And asking that not once, but twenty times until you got it. That's okay too. >> That's called learning. >> Yeah. >> Last question, okay I got to ask you, the most important question is, how do someone get a CryptoChicks shirt? >> I think you can order it on our website, sizes are a problem, I know we've discussed this, so we need to -- >> Extra-large. >> Well, CryptoChicks is a not-for-profit organization so there are, we'll have to order this in bunches, so I'll figure this out, but what I wanted to say is that we have another hackathon that's coming up. And the hackathon is in New York, October 5th to 8th, and we have three streams, so if you're a developer, and this is for women, so if you're a developer, we have a stream. If you're not a developer, or you've never coded in your life, but you have a business mind, and you think you have a really good idea that you can put on blockchain, you're welcome to join as well, and now with all the news and regulations, we also have a regulatory stream. >> So for entrepreneurs and for business-minded people, that want to get involved, that they can come too? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, and their website is cryptochicks.ca, that's where you can get access to the information, that's great. >> October 5th to 8th, you said, right? >> That's right. >> And anybody can go? >> Anybody can register. >> And where in New York? >> It's going to be at University of New York, and at their School of Law. >> Great. >> Blockchain Educational Fun Hub. That's what it says on the website, love your website. Looking forward to getting some shirts, and putting it out there, and promoting your mission. Great job, good to see you again. >> You guys are awesome. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Nataliya. >> Thank you. >> This is crypto for good, a lot of education, and this opportunity, and our role is to share that, as a community, and I think this is a great example of the kind of community that crypto is. Education people can level up and move fast through and get proficiency, and change their lives. This is what this is all about, glad to bring us this CUBE coverage live, stay with us! Day One continues, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back from Toronto Blockchain Futurist Summit. Thank you. (techno music)