(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this CUBE conversation where we're going to go deep into system performance. We're here with an expert. Kim Leyenaar is the Principal Performance Architect at Broadcom. Kim. Great to see you. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thanks so much too. >> So you have a deep background in performance, performance assessment, benchmarking, modeling. Tell us a little bit about your background, your role. >> Thanks. So I've been a storage performance engineer and architect for about 22 years. And I'm specifically been for abroad with Broadcom for I think next month is going to be my 14 year mark. So what I do there is initially I built and I manage their international performance team, but about six years ago I moved back into architecture, and what my roles right now are is I generate performance projections for all of our next generation products. And then I also work on marketing material and I interface with a lot of the customers and debugging customer issues, and looking at how our customers are actually using our storage. >> Great. Now we have a graphic that we want to share. It talks to how storage has evolved over the past decade. So my question is what changes have you seen in storage and how has that impacted the way you approach benchmarking. In this graphic we got sort of big four items that impact performance, memory processor, IO pathways, and the storage media itself, but walk us through this data if you would. >> Sure. So what I put together is a little bit of what we've seen over the past 15 to 20 years. So I've been doing this for about 22 years and kind of going back and focusing a little bit on the storage, we looked back at hard disk, they ruled for. And nearly they had almost 50 years of ruling. And our first hard drive that came out back in the 1950s was only capable of five megabytes in capacity. and one and a half iOS per second. It had almost a full second in terms of seat time. So we've come a long way since then. But when I first came on, we were looking at Ultra 320 SCSI. And one of the biggest memories that I have of that was my office is located close to our tech support. And I could hear the first question was always, what's your termination like? And so we had some challenges with SCSI, and then we moved on into SAS and data protocols. And we continued to move on. But right now, back in the early 2000s when I came on board, the best drives really could do maybe 400 iOS per second. Maybe two 250 megabytes per second, with millisecond response times. And so when I was benchmarking way back when it was always like, well, IOPS are IOPS. We were always faster than what the drives to do. And that was just how it was. The drives were always the bottleneck in the system. And so things started changing though by the early 2000s, mid 2000s. We started seeing different technologies come out. We started seeing that virtualization and multi-tenant infrastructures becoming really popular. And then we had cloud computing that was well on the horizon. And so at this point, we're like, well, wait a minute, we really can't make processors that much faster. And so everybody got excited to include (indistinct) and the home came out but, they had two cores per processor and four cores per processor. And so we saw a little time period where actually the processing capability kind of pulled ahead of everybody else. And memory was falling behind. We had good old DVR, 2, 6, 67. It was new with the time, but we only had maybe one or two memory channels per processor. And then in 2007 we saw disk capacity hit one terabyte. And we started seeing a little bit of an imbalance because we were seeing these drives are getting massive, but their performance per drive was not really kind of keeping up. So now we see a revolution around 2010. And my co-worker and I at the time, we have these little USB discs, if you recall, we would put them in. They were so fast. We were joking at the time. "Hey, you know what, wonder if we could make a raid array out of these little USB disks?" They were just so fast. The idea was actually kind of crazy until we started seeing it actually happen. So in 2010 SSD started revolutionizing storage. And the first SSDs that we really worked with these plaint LS-300 and they were amazing because they were so over-provisioned that they had almost the same reader, right performance. But to go from a drive that could do maybe 400 IOS per second to a drive like 40,000 plus iOS per second, really changed our thought process about how our storage controller could actually try and keep up with the rest of the system. So we started falling behind. That was a big challenge for us. And then in 2014, NVMe came around as well. So now we've got these drives, they're 30 terabytes. They can do one and a half million iOS per second, and over 6,000 megabytes per second. But they were expensive. So people start relegating SSDs more towards tiered storage or cash. And as the prices of these drives kind of came down, they became a lot more mainstream. And then the memory channels started picking up. And they started doubling every few years. And we're looking now at DVR 5 4800. And now we're looking at cores that used to go from two to four cores per processor up to 48 with some of the latest different processes that are out there. So our ability to consume the computing and the storage resources, it's astounding, you know, it's like that whole saying, 'build it and they will come.' Because I'm always amazed, I'm like, how are we going to possibly utilize all this memory bandwidth? How are we going to utilize all these cores? But we do. And the trick to this is having just a balanced infrastructure. It's really critical. Because if you have a performance mismatch between your server and your storage, you really lose a lot of productivity and it does impact your revenue. >> So that's such a key point. Pardon, begin that slide up again with the four points. And that last point that you made Kim about balance. And so here you have these, electronic speeds with memory and IO, and then you've got the spinning disc, this mechanical disc. You mentioned that SSD kind of changed the game, but it used to be, when I looked at benchmarks, it was always the D stage bandwidth of the cash out to the spinning disc was always the bottleneck. And, you go back to the days of you it's symmetrics, right? The huge backend disk bandwidth was how they dealt with that. But, and then you had things the oxymoron of the day was high spin speed disks of a high performance disk. Compared to memories. And, so the next chart that we have is show some really amazing performance increases over the years. And so you see these bars on the left-hand side, it looks at historical performance for 4k random IOPS. And on the right-hand side, it's the storage controller performance for sequential bandwidth from 2008 to 2022. That's 22 is that yellow line. It's astounding the increases. I wonder if you could tell us what we're looking at here, when did SSD come in and how did that affect your thinking? (laughs) >> So I remember back in 2007, we were kind of on the precipice of SSDs. We saw it, the writing was on the wall. We had our first three gig SAS and SATA capable HPAs that had come out. And it was a shock because we were like, wow, we're going to really quickly become the bottleneck once this becomes more mainstream. And you're so right though about people work in, building these massive hard drive based back ends in order to handle kind of that tiered architecture that we were seeing that back in the early 2010s kind of when the pricing was just so sky high. And I remember looking at our SAS controllers, our very first one, and that was when I first came in at 2007. We had just launched our first SAS controller. We're so proud of ourselves. And I started going how many IOPS can this thing, even handled? We couldn't even attach enough drives to figure it out. So what we would do is we'd do these little tricks where we would do a five 12 byte read, and we would do it on a 4k boundary, so that it was actually reading sequentially from the disc, but we were handling these discrete IOPS. So we were like, oh, we can do around 35,000. Well, that's just not going to hit it anymore. Bandwidth wise we were doing great. Really our limitation and our bottleneck on bandwidth was always either the host or the backend. So, our controllers are there basically, there were three bottlenecks for our storage controllers. The first one is the bottleneck from the host to the controller. So that is typically a PCIe connection. And then there's another bottleneck on the controller to the disc. And that's really the number of ports that we have. And then the third one is the discs themselves. So in typical storage, that's what we look at. And we say, well, how do we improve this? So some of these are just kind of evolutionary, such as PCIE generations. And we're going to talk a little bit about that, but some of them are really revolutionary, and those are some of the things that we've been doing over the last five or six years to try and make sure that we are no longer the bottleneck. And we can enable these really, really fast drives. >> So can I ask a question? I'm sorry to interrupted but on these blue bars here. So these all spinning disks, I presume, out years they're not. Like when did flash come in to these blue bars? is that..you said 27 you started looking at it, but on these benchmarks, is it all spinning disc? Is it all flash? How should we interpret that? >> No, no. Initially they were actually all hard drives. And the way that we would identify, the max iOS would be by doing very small sequential reads to these hard drives. We just didn't have SSDs at that point. And then somewhere around 2010 is where we.. it was very early in that chart, we were able to start incorporating SSD technology into our benchmarking. And so what you're looking at here is really the max that our controller is capable of. So we would throw as many drives as we could and do what we needed to do in order to just make sure our controller was the bottleneck and what can we expose. >> So the drive then when SSD came in was no longer the bottleneck. So you guys had to sort of invent and rethink sort of how, what your innovation and your technology, because, I mean, these are astounding increases in performance. I mean, I think in the left-hand side, we've built this out pad, you got 170 X increase for the 4k random IOPS, and you've got a 20 X increase for the sequential bandwidth. How were you able to achieve that level of performance over time? >> Well, in terms of the sequential bandwidth, really those come naturally by increases in the PCIe or the SAS generation. So we just make sure we stay out of the way, and we enable that bandwidth. But the IOPS that's where it got really, really tricky. So we had to start thinking about different things. So, first of all, we started optimizing all of our pathways, all of our IO management, we increased the processing capabilities on our IO controllers. We added more on-chip memory. We started putting in IO accelerators, these hardware accelerators. We put in SAS poor kind of enhancements. We even went and improved our driver to make sure that our driver was as thin as possible. So we can make sure that we can enable all the IOPS on systems. But a big thing happening a few couple of generations ago was we started introducing something called tri capable controllers, which means that you could attach NVMe. You could attach SAS or you could attach SATA. So you could have this really amazing deployment of storage infrastructure based around your customized needs and your cost requirements by using one controller. >> Yeah. So anybody who's ever been to a trade show where they were displaying a glass case with a Winchester disc drive, for example, you see it's spinning and its actuators is moving, wow, that's so fast. Well, no. That's like a tourist slower. It's like a snail compared to the system's speed. So it's, in a way life was easy back in those days, because when you did a right to a disk, you had plenty of time to do stuff, right. And now it's changed. And so I want to talk about Gen3 versus Gen4, and how all this relates to what's new in Gen4 and the impacts of PCIe here, you have a chart here that you've shared with us that talks to that. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that, Kim. >> Sure. But first, you said something that kind of hit my funny bone there. And I remember I made a visit once about 15 or 20 years ago to IBM. And this gentleman actually had one of those old ones in his office and he referred to them as disk files. And he never until the day he retired, he'd never stopped calling them disc files. And it's kind of funny to be a part of that history. >> Yeah. DASD. They used to call it. (both laughing) >> SD, DASD. I used to get all kinds of, you know, you don't know what it was like back then, but yeah. But now nowadays we've got it quite easily enabled because back then, we had, SD DASD and all that. And then, ATA and then SCSI, well now we've got PCIe. And what's fabulous about PCIe is that it just has the generations are already planned out. It's incredible. You know, we're looking at right now, Gen3 moving to Gen4, and that's a lot about what we're going to be talking about. And that's what we're trying to test out. What is Gen4 PCIe when to bias? And it really is. It's fantastic. And PCIe came around about 18 years ago and Broadcom is, and we do participate and contribute to the PCIe SIG, which is, who develops the standards for PCIe, but the host in both our host interface in our NVMe desk and utilize the standards. So this is really, really a big deal, really critical for us. But if you take a look here, you can see that in terms of the capabilities of it, it's really is buying us a lot. So most of our drives right now NVMe drives tend to be by four. And a lot of people will connect them. And what that means is four lanes of NVMe and a lot of people that will connect them either at by one or by two kind of depending on what their storage infrastructure will allow. But the majority of them you could buy, or there are so, as you can see right now, we've gone from eight gig transfers per second to 16 gig of transfers per second. What that means is for a by four, we're going from one drive being able to do 4,000 to do an almost 8,000 megabytes per second. And in terms of those 4k IOPS that really evade us, they were really really tough sometimes to squeeze out of these drives, but now we're got 1 million, all we have to 2 million, it's just, it's insane. You know, just the increase in performance. And there's a lot of other standards that are going to be sitting on top of PCIe. So it's not going away anytime soon. We've got to open standards like CXL and things like that, but we also have graphics cards. You've got all of your hosts connections, they're also sitting on PCIe. So it's fantastic. It's backwards, it's orbits compatible, and it really is going to be our future. >> So this is all well and good. And I think I really believe that a lot of times in our industry, the challenges in the plumbing are underappreciated. But let's make it real for the audience because we have all these new workloads coming out, AI, heavily data oriented. So I want to get your thoughts on what types of workloads are going to benefit from Gen4 performance increases. In other words, what does it mean for application performance? You shared a chart that lists some of the key workloads, and I wonder if we could go through those. >> Yeah, yeah. I could have a large list of different workloads that are able to consume large amounts of data, whether or not it's in small or large kind of bytes of data. But as you know right now, and I said earlier, our ability to consume these compute and storage resources is amazing. So you build it and we'll use it. And the world's data we're expected to grow 61% to 175 zettabytes by the year 2025, according to IDC. So that's just a lot of data to manage. It's a lot of data to have, and it's something that's sitting around, but to be useful, you have to actually be able to access it. And that's kind of where we come in. So who is accessing it? What kind of applications? I spend a lot of time trying to understand that. And recently I attended a virtual conference SDC and what I like to do when I attend these conferences is to try to figure out what the buzz words are. What's everybody talking about? Because every year it's a little bit different, but this year was edge, edge everything. And so I kind of put edge on there first in, even you can ask anybody what's edge computing and it's going to mean a lot of different things, but basically it's all the computing outside of the cloud. That's happening typically at the edge of the network. So it tends to encompass a lot of real time processing on those instant data. So in the data is usually coming from either users or different sensors. It's that last mile. It's where we kind of put a lot of our content caching. And, I uncovered some interesting stuff when I was attending this virtual conference and they say only about 25% of all the usable data actually even reach the data center. The rest is ephemeral and it's localized, locally and in real time. So what it does is in the goal of edge computing is to try and reduce the bandwidth costs for these kinds of IOT devices that go over a long distance. But the reality is the growth of real-time applications that require these kinds of local processing are going to drive this technology forward over the coming years. So Dave, your toaster and your dishwasher they're, IOT edge devices probably in the next year, if they're not already. So edge is a really big one and consumes a lot of the data. >> The buzzword does your now is met the metaverse, it's almost like the movie, the matrix is going to come in real time. But the fact is it's all this data, a lot of videos, some of the ones that I would call out here, you mentioned facial recognition, real-time analytics. A lot of the edge is going to be real-time inferencing, applying AI. And these are just a massive, massive data sets that you again, you and of course your customers are enabling. >> When we first came out with our very first Gen3 product, our marketing team actually asked me, "Hey, how can we show users how they can consume this?" So I actually set up a head to environment. I decided I'm going to learn how to do this. I set up this massive environment with Hadoop, and at the time they called big data, the 3V's, I don't know if you remember these big 3Vs, the volume, velocity and variety. Well Dave, did you know, there are now 10 Vs? So besides those three, we got velocity, we got valued, we got variability, validity, vulnerability, volatility, visualization. So I'm thinking we need just to add another beat of that. >> Yeah. (both laughing) Well, that's interesting. You mentioned that, and that sort of came out of the big data world, a dupe world, which was very centralized. You're seeing the cloud is expanding, the world's getting, you know, data is by its very nature decentralized. And so you've got to have the ability to do an analysis in place. A lot of the edge analytics are going to be done in real time. Yes, sure. Some of it's going to go back in the cloud for detailed modeling, but we are the next decade Kim, ain't going to be like the last I often say. (laughing) I'll give you the last word. I mean, how do you see this sort of evolving, who's going to be adopting this stuff. Give us a sort of a timeframe for this kind of rollout in your world. >> In terms of the timeframe. I mean really nobody knows, but we feel like Gen5, that it's coming out next year. It may not be a full rollout, but we're going to start seeing Gen5 devices and Gen5 infrastructure is being built out over the next year. And then follow very, very, very quickly by Gen6. And so what we're seeing though is, we're starting to see these graphics processors, These GPU's, and I'm coming out as well, that are going to be connecting, using PCIe interfaces as well. So being able to access lots and lots and lots of data locally is going to be a really, really big deal and order because worldwide, all of our companies they're using business analytics. Data is money. And the person that actually can improve their operational efficiency, bolster those sales and increase your customer satisfaction. Those are the companies that are going on to win. And those are the companies that are going to be able to effectively store, retrieve and analyze all the data that they're collecting over the years. And that requires an abundance of data. >> Data is money and it's interesting. It kind of all goes back to when Steve jobs decided to put flash inside of an iPhone and the industry exploded, consumer economics kicked in 5G now edge AI, a lot of the things you talked about, GPU's the neural processing unit. It's all going to be coming together in this decade. Very exciting. Kim, thanks so much for sharing this data and your perspectives. I'd love to have you back when you got some new perspectives, new benchmark data. Let's do that. Okay. >> I look forward to it. Thanks so much. >> You're very welcome. And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Despite its 70 to $80 billion total available market, computer storage is like a small town, everybody knows everybody else. We say in the storage world, there are a hundred people, and 99 seats. Infinidat is a company that was founded in 2011 by storage legend, Moshe Yanai. The company is known for building products with rock solid availability, simplicity, and a passion for white glove service, and client satisfaction. Company went through a leadership change recently, in early this year, appointed industry vet, Phil Bullinger, as CEO. It's making more moves, bringing on longtime storage sales exec, Richard Bradbury, to run EMEA, and APJ Go-To-Market. And just recently appointed marketing maven, Eric Hertzog to be CMO. Hertzog has worked at numerous companies, ranging from startups that were acquired, two stints at IBM, and is SVP of product marketing and management at Storage Powerhouse, EMC, among others. Hertzog has been named CMO of the year as an OnCon Icon, and top 100 influencer in big data, AI, and also hybrid cloud, along with yours truly, if I may say so. Joining me today, is the newly minted CMO of Infinidat, Mr.Eric Hertzog. Good to see you, Eric, thanks for coming on. >> Dave, thank you very much. You know, we love being on theCUBE, and I am of course sporting my Infinidat logo wear already, even though I've only been on the job for two weeks. >> Dude, no Hawaiian shirt, okay. That's a pretty buttoned up company. >> Well, next time, I'll have a Hawaiian shirt, don't worry. >> Okay, so give us the backstory, how did this all come about? you know Phil, my 99 seat joke, but, how did it come about? Tell us that story. >> So, I have known Phil since the late 90s, when he was a VP at LSA of Engineering, and he had... I was working at a company called Milax, which was acquired by IBM. And we were doing a product for HP, and he was providing the subsystem, and we were providing the fiber to fiber, and fiber to SCSI array controllers back in the day. So I met him then, we kept in touch for years. And then when I was a senior VP at EMC, he started originally as VP of engineering for the EMC Isilon team. And then he became the general manager. So, while I didn't work for him, I worked with him, A, at LSA, and then again at EMC. So I just happened to congratulate him about some award he won, and he said "Hey Herzog, "we should talk, I have a CMO opening". So literally happened over LinkedIn discussion, where I reached out to him, and congratulate him, he said "Hey, I need a CMO, let's talk". So, the whole thing took about three weeks in all honesty. And that included interviewing with other members of his exec staff. >> That's awesome, that's right, he was running the Isilon division for awhile at the EMC. >> Right. >> You guys were there, and of course, you talk about Milax, LSA, there was a period of time where, you guys were making subsystems for everybody. So, you sort of saw the whole landscape. So, you got some serious storage history and chops. So, I want to ask you what attracted you to Infinidat. I mean, obviously they're a leader in the magic quadrant. We know about InfiniBox, and the petabyte scale, and the low latency, what are the... When you look at the market, you obviously you see it, you talk to everybody. What were the trends that were driving your decision to join Infinidat? >> Well, a couple of things. First of all, as you know, and you guys have talked about it on theCUBE, most CIOs don't know anything about storage, other than they know a guy got to spend money on it. So the Infinidat message of optimizing applications, workloads, and use cases with 100% guaranteed availability, unmatched reliability, the set and forget ease of use, which obviously AIOps is driving that, and overall IT operations management was very attractive. And then on top of that, the reality is, when you do that consolidation, which Infinidat can do, because of the performance that it has, you can dramatically free up rack, stack, power, floor, and operational manpower by literally getting rid of, tons and tons of arrays. There's one customer that they have, you actually... I found out when I got here, they took out a hundred arrays from EMC Hitachi. And that company now has 20 InfiniBoxes, and InfiniBox SSAs running the exact same workloads that used to be, well over a hundred subsystems from the other players. So, that's got a performance angle, a CapEx and OPEX angle, and then even a clean energy angle because reducing Watson slots. So, lots of different advantages there. And then I think from just a pure marketing perspective, as someone has said, they're the best kept secret to the storage industry. And so you need to, if you will, amp up the message, get it out. They've expanded the portfolio with the InfiniBox SSA, the InfiniGuard product, which is really optimized, not only as the PBA for backup perspective, and it works with all the backup vendors, but also, has an incredible play on data and cyber resilience with their capability of local logical air gapping, remote logical air gapping, and creating a clean room, if you will, a vault, so that you can then recover their review for malware ransomware before you do a full recovery. So it's got the right solutions, just that most people didn't know who they were. So, between the relationship with Phil, and the real opportunity that this company could skyrocket. In fact, we have 35 job openings right now, right now. >> Wow, okay, so yeah, I think it was Duplessy called them the best kept secret, he's not the only one. And so that brings us to you, and your mission because it's true, it is the best kept secret. You're a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant, but I mean, if you're not a leader in a Gartner magic quadrant, you're kind of nobody in storage. And so, but you got chops and block storage. You talked about the consolidation story, and I've talked to many folks in Infinidat about that. Ken Steinhardt rest his soul, Dr. Rico, good business friend, about, you know... So, that play and how you handle the whole blast radius. And that's always a great discussion, and Infinidat has proven that it can operate at very very high performance, low latency, petabyte scale. So how do you get the word out? What's your mission? >> Well, so we're going to do a couple of things. We're going to be very, very tied to the channel as you know, EMC, Dell EMC, and these are articles that have been in CRN, and other channel publications is pulling back from the channel, letting go of channel managers, and there's been a lot of conflict. So, we're going to embrace the channel. We already do well over 90% of our business within general globally. So, we're doing that. In fact, I am meeting, personally, next week with five different CEOs of channel partners. Of which, only one of them is doing business with Infinidat now. So, we want to expand our channel, and leverage the channel, take advantage of these changes in the channel. We are going to be increasing our presence in the public relations area. The work we do with all the industry analysts, not just in North America, but in Europe as well, and Asia. We're going to amp up, of course, our social media effort, both of us, of course, having been named some of the best social media guys in the world the last couple of years. So, we're going to open that up. And then, obviously, increase our demand generation activities as well. So, we're going to make sure that we leverage what we do, and deliver that message to the world. Deliver it to the partner base, so the partners can take advantage, and make good margin and revenue, but delivering products that really meet the needs of the customers while saving them dramatically on CapEx and OPEX. So, the partner wins, and the end user wins. And that's the best scenario you can do when you're leveraging the channel to help you grow your business. >> So you're not only just the marketing guy, I mean, you know product, you ran product management at very senior levels. So, you could... You're like a walking spec sheet, John Farrier says you could just rattle it off. Already impressed that how much you know about Infinidat, but when you joined EMC, it was almost like, there was too many products, right? When you joined IBM, even though it had a big portfolio, it's like it didn't have enough relevant products. And you had to sort of deal with that. How do you feel about the product portfolio at Infinidat? >> Well, for us, it's right in the perfect niche. Enterprise class, AI based software defined storage technologies that happens run on a hybrid array, an all flash array, has a variant that's really tuned towards modern data protection, including data and cyber resilience. So, with those three elements of the portfolio, which by the way, all have a common architecture. So while there are three different solutions, all common architecture. So if you know how to use the InfiniBox, you can easily use an InfiniGuard. You got an InfiniGuard, you can easily use an InfiniBox SSA. So the capability of doing that, helps reduce operational manpower and hence, of course, OPEX. So the story is strong technically, the story has a strong business tie in. So part of the thing you have to do in marketing these days. Yeah, we both been around. So you could just talk about IOPS, and latency, and bandwidth. And if the people didn't... If the CIO didn't know what that meant, so what? But the world has changed on the expenditure of infrastructure. If you don't have seamless integration with hybrid cloud, virtual environments and containers, which Infinidat can do all that, then you're not relevant from a CIO perspective. And obviously with many workloads moving to the cloud, you've got to have this infrastructure that supports core edge and cloud, the virtualization layer, and of course, the container layer across a hybrid environment. And we can do that with all three of these solutions. Yet, with a common underlying software defined storage architecture. So it makes the technical story very powerful. Then you turn that into business benefit, CapEX, OPEX, the operational manpower, unmatched availability, which is obviously a big deal these days, unmatched performance, everybody wants their SAP workload or their Oracle or Mongo Cassandra to be, instantaneous from the app perspective. Excuse me. And we can do that. And that's the kind of thing that... My job is to translate that from that technical value into the business value, that can be appreciated by the CIO, by the CSO, by the VP of software development, who then says to VP of industry, that Infinidat stuff, we actually need that for our SAP workload, or wow, for our overall corporate cybersecurity strategy, the CSO says, the key element of the storage part of that overall corporate cybersecurity strategy are those Infinidat guys with their great cyber and data resilience. And that's the kind of thing that my job, and my team's job to work on to get the market to understand and appreciate that business value that the underlying technology delivers. >> So the other thing, the interesting thing about Infinidat. This was always a source of spirited discussions over the years with business friends from Infinidat was the company figured out a way, it was formed in 2011, and at the time the strategy perfectly reasonable to say, okay, let's build a better box. And the way they approached that from a cost standpoint was you were able to get the most out of spinning disk. Everybody else was moving to flash, of course, floyers work a big flash, all flash data center, etc, etc. But Infinidat with its memory cache and its architecture, and its algorithms was able to figure out how to magically get equivalent or better performance in an all flash array out of a system that had a lot of spinning disks, which is I think unique. I mean, I know it's unique, very rare anyway. And so that was kind of interesting, but at the time it made sense, to go after a big market with a better mouse trap. Now, if I were starting a company today, I might take a different approach, I might try to build, a storage cloud or something like that. Or if I had a huge install base that I was trying to protect, and maybe go into that. But so what's the strategy? You still got huge share gain potentials for on-prem is that the vector? You mentioned hybrid cloud, what's the cloud strategy? Maybe you could summarize your thoughts on that? >> Sure, so the cloud strategy, is first of all, seamless integration to hybrid cloud environments. For example, we support Outpost as an example. Second thing, you'd be surprised at the number of cloud providers that actually use us as their backend, either for their primary storage, or for their secondary storage. So, we've got some of the largest hyperscalers in the world. For example, one of the Telcos has 150 Infiniboxes, InfiniBox SSAS and InfiniGuards. 150 running one of the largest Telcos on the planet. And a huge percentage of that is their corporate cloud effort where they're going in and saying, don't use Amazon or Azure, why don't you use us the giant Telco? So we've got that angle. We've got a ton of mid-sized cloud providers all over the world that their backup is our servers, or their primary storage that they offer is built on top of Infiniboxes or InfiniBox SSA. So, the cloud strategy is one to arm the hyperscalers, both big, medium, and small with what they need to provide the right end user services with the right outside SLAs. And the second thing is to have that hybrid cloud integration capability. For example, when I talked about InfiniGuard, we can do air gapping locally to give almost instantaneous recovery, but at the same time, if there's an earthquake in California or a tornado in Kansas City, or a tsunami in Singapore, you've got to have that remote air gapping capability, which InfiniGuard can do. Which of course, is essentially that logical air gap remote is basically a cloud strategy. So, we can do all of that. That's why it has a cloud strategy play. And again we have a number of public references in the cloud, US signal and others, where they talk about why they use the InfiniBox, and our technologies to offer their storage cloud services based on our platform. >> Okay, so I got to ask you, so you've mentioned earthquakes, a lot of earthquakes in California, dangerous place to live, US headquarters is in Waltham, we're going to pry you out of the Golden State? >> Let's see, I was born at Stanford hospital where my parents met when they were going there. I've never lived anywhere, but here. And of course, remember when I was working for EMC, I flew out every week, and I sort of lived at that Milford Courtyard Marriott. So I'll be out a lot, but I will not be moving, I'm a Silicon Valley guy, just like that old book, the Silicon Valley Guy from the old days, that's me. >> Yeah, the hotels in Waltham are a little better, but... So, what's your priority? Last question. What's the priority first 100 days? Where's your focus? >> Number one priority is team assessment and integration of the team across the other teams. One of the things I noticed about Infinidat, which is a little unusual, is there sometimes are silos and having done seven other small companies and startups, in a startup or a small company, you usually don't see that silo-ness, So we have to break down those walls. And by the way, we've been incredibly successful, even with the silos, imagine if everybody realized that business is a team sport. And so, we're going to do that, and do heavy levels of integration. We've already started to do an incredible outreach program to the press and to partners. We won a couple awards recently, we're up for two more awards in Europe, the SDC Awards, and one of the channel publications is going to give us an award next week. So yeah, we're amping up that sort of thing that we can leverage and extend. Both in the short term, but also, of course, across a longer term strategy. So, those are the things we're going to do first, and yeah, we're going to be rolling into, of course, 2022. So we've got a lot of work we're doing, as I mentioned, I'm meeting, five partners, CEOs, and only one of them is doing business with us now. So we want to get those partners to kick off January with us presenting at their sales kickoff, going "We are going with Infinidat "as one of our strong storage providers". So, we're doing all that upfront work in the first 100 days, so we can kick off Q1 with a real bang. >> Love the channel story, and you're a good guy to do that. And you mentioned the silos, correct me if I'm wrong, but Infinidat does a lot of business in overseas. A lot of business in Europe, obviously the affinity to the engineering, a lot of the engineering work that's going on in Israel, but that's by its very nature, stovepipe. Most startups start in the US, big market NFL cities, and then sort of go overseas. It's almost like Infinidat sort of simultaneously grew it's overseas business, and it's US business. >> Well, and we've got customers everywhere. We've got them in South Africa, all over Europe, Middle East. We have six very large customers in India, and a number of large customers in Japan. So we have a sales team all over the world. As you mentioned, our white glove service includes not only our field systems engineers, but we have a professional services group. We've actually written custom software for several customers. In fact, I was on the forecast meeting earlier today, and one of the comments that was made for someone who's going to give us a PO. So, the sales guy was saying, part of the reason we're getting the PO is we did some professional services work last quarter, and the CIO called and said, I can't believe it. And what CIO calls up a storage company these days, but the CIO called him and said "I can't believe the work you did. We're going to buy some more stuff this quarter". So that white glove service, our technical account managers to go along with the field sales SEs and this professional service is pretty unusual in a small company to have that level of, as you mentioned yourself, white glove service, when the company is so small. And that's been a real hidden gem for this company, and will continue to be so. >> Well, Eric, congratulations on the appointment, the new role, excited to see what you do, and how you craft the story, the strategy. And we've been following Infinidat since, sort of day zero and I really wish you the best. >> Great, well, thank you very much. Always appreciate theCUBE. And trust me, Dave, next time I will have my famous Hawaiian shirt. >> Ah, I can't wait. All right, thanks to Eric, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning or good afternoon, or good evening depending on where you are, and welcome to this session: Reduce claims fraud with data. Very excited to have you all here. My name is Monique Hesseling and I'm Cloudera's managing director for the insurance vertical. First and foremost, we want to let you know that we know insurance. We have done it for a long time collectively, personally, I've done it for over 30 years. And, you know, as a proof of that, we want to let you know that we insure, we insure as well as we do data management work for the top global companies in the world, in north America, over property casualty, general insurance, health, and life and annuities. But besides that, we also take care of the data needs for some smaller insurance companies and specialty companies. So if you're not one of the huge glomar, conglomerates in the world, you are still perfectly fine with us. So why are we having this topic today? Really digital claims and digital claims management is accelerating. And that's based on a couple of things. First and foremost, customers are asking for it. Customers are used to doing their work more digitally over the last decennium or two. And secondly, with the last year or almost two, by now with the changes that we made in our work processes and the society at large around Covid, both regulators, as well as companies, have enabled digital processing and a digital journey to a degree that they've never done before. Now that had some really good impacts for claims handling. It did meant that customers were more satisfied. They felt they have more control over their processes in the claims, in the claims experience. It also reduced in a lot of cases, both in commercial lines, as well as in personal lines, the time periods that it took to settle on a claim. However, it, the more digital you go, it, it opened up more access points for fraudulence activities. So unfortunately we saw indicators of fraud, and fraud attempts, you know, creeping up over the last time period. So we thought it was a good moment to look at, you know, some use cases and some approaches insurers can take to manage that even better than they already are. And this is how we plan to do that. And this is how we see this in action. On the left side, you see progress of data analytics and data utilization around in this case, we're talking about claims fraud, but it's a generic picture. And really what it means is most companies that start with data efforts pretty much started around data warehousing and preliminary analytics and all around BI and reporting, which pretty much is understanding what we know, right? The data that we already have utilizing that to understand better what we know already. Now, when we move to the middle blue color, we get into different types of analytics. We get into exploratory data science, we get to predictions and we start getting in the space of describing what we can learn from what we know, but also start moving slowly into predicting. So first of all, learn and gather insights of what we already know, and then start augmenting with that with other data sets and other findings, so that we can start predicting for the future, what might happen. And that's the point where we get to AI, artificial intelligence and machine learning, which will help us predict which of our situations and claims are most likely to have a potential fraud or abuse scenario attached to it. So that's the path that insurers and other companies take in their data management and analytics environments. Now, if you look at the right side of this slide, you see data complexity per use cases in this case in fraud. So the bubbles represent the types of data that are being used, or the specific faces that we discussed on the left side. So for reporting, we used a DBA data policy verification, claims, files, staff data, that it tends to be heavily structured and already within the company itself. And when you go to the middle to the more descriptive basis, you start getting into unstructured data, you see a lot of unstructured text there, and we do a use case around that later. And this really enables us to better understand what the scenarios are that we're looking at and where the risks are around, in our example today, fraud, abuse and issues of resources. And then the more you go to the upper right corner, you see the outside of the baseball field, people refer to it, you see new unstructured data sources that are being used. You tend to see the more complex use cases. And we're looking at picture analysis, we're looking at voice analysis there. We're looking at geolocation. That's quite often the first one we look at. So this slide actually shows you the progress and the path in complexity and in utilization of data and analytical tool sets to manage data fraud, fraud use cases optimally. Now how we do that and how we look at that at Cloudera is actually not as complicated as this slide might want to, to, to give you an impression. So let's start at the left side, at the left side, you see the enterprise data, which is data that you as an organization have, or that you have access to. It doesn't have to be internal data, but quite often it is. Now that data goes into a data journey, right? It gets collected first. It gets manipulated and engineered so that people can do something with it. It gets stored something, you know, people need to have access to it. And then they get into analytical capabilities for insight gathering and utilization. Now, especially for insurance companies that all needs to be underpinned by a very, very strong security and governance environment. Because if not the most regulated industry in the world, insurance is awfully close. And if it's not the most regulated one, it's a close second. So it's critically important that insurers know where the data is, who has access to it, for what reason, what is being used for, so terms like lineage, transparency are crucial, crucially important for insurance. And we manage that in the shared data experience that goes over the whole Cloudera platform and every application, or tool, or experience, you use within Cloudera. And on the right side, you see the use cases that tend to be deployed around claims and claims fraud, claims fraud management. So over the last year or so, we've seen a lot of use cases around upcoding, people get one treatment or one fix on a car, but it gets coded as a more expensive one. That's a fraud scenario, right? We see also the more classical fraud things and we see anti-money laundering. So those are the types of use cases on the right side that we are supporting on the platform around claims fraud. And this is an example of how that actually looks like. Now, this is a one that it's actually a live one of a company that had claims that dealt with health situations and pain killers. So that obviously is relevant for health insurers, but you also see it in, in auto claims and car claims, right? You know, accidents. There are a lot of different claims scenarios, that have health risks associated with it. And what we did in this one is, we joined tables in a complex schema. So you have to look at the claimant, the physician, the hospital, all the providers that are involved, procedures that are being deployed medically, medicines has been utilized to uncover the full picture. Now that is a hard effort in itself, just for one claim at one scenario. But if you want to see if people are abusing, for example, painkillers in this scenario, you need to do that over every instant that this member, this claimant has, you know, with different doctors, with different hospitals, with different pharmacies or whatever, That classically it's a very complicated and complex the and costly data operations. So nowadays that tends to be done by graph databasing, right? So you put fraud rings within a graph database and walk the graph. And if you look at it here in that, you can see that in this case, that is a member that was shopping around for painkillers and went to different systems, and different providers to get multiple of the same big LR stat. You know, obviously we don't know what he or she did with it, but that's not the intent of the system. And that was actually a fraud and abuse case. So I want to share some customer success stories and recent AML and fraud use cases. And we have a couple of them and I'm not going to go in an awful lot of detail about them because we have some time to spend on one of them immediately after this. But one of them, for example, is voice analytics, which is a really interesting one. And on the baseball slide that I showed you earlier, that would be a right upper corner one. And what happened there is that an insurance company utilized the, the divorce records. They got from the customer service people, to try to predict which one were potentially fraudulence. And they did it in two ways. They look at actually the contents of what was being said. So they looked at certain words that were being used, certain trigger words, but they also were looking at tone of voice, pitch of voice, speed of talking. So they try to see trends there, and hear trends that would, that would ping them for a potential bad situation. Now, good and bad news of this proof of concept was, it's, we learned that it's very difficult, just because every human is different to get an indicator for bad behavior out of the pitch or the tone or the voice, you know, or those types of nonverbal communication in voice. But we did learn that it was easier to, to predict if a specific conversation needed to be transferred to somebody else based on emotion. You know, obviously as we all understand, life and health situations tend to come with emotions. Also, people either got very sad or they got very angry or, so the proof of concept didn't really get us to affirm understanding of potential fraudulence situation, but it did get us to a much better understanding of workflow around claims escalation in customer service, to route people, to the right person, depending on, you know, what they need, in that specific time. Another really interesting one, was around social media, geo open source, all sorts of data that we put together. And we linked to the second one that I listed on the slide here that was an on-prem deployment. And that was actually an analysis that regulators were asking for in a couple of countries for anti-money laundering scams, because there were some plots out there that networks of criminals would all buy low value policies, surrender them a couple of years later. And in that way, got criminal money into the regular amount of monetary system, whitewashed the money and this needed some very specific and very, very complex link analysis because there were fairly large networks of criminals that all needed to be tied together with the actions, with their policies to figure out where potential pin points were. And that also obviously included ecosystems, such as lawyers, administrative offices, all the other things. Now, but most, you know, exciting, I think that we see happening at the moment and we, we, you know, our partner, of analytics just went live with this with a large insurer, is that by looking at different types, that insurers already have, unstructured data, their claims notes, reports, claims filings, statements, voice records, augmented with information that they have access to, but that's not theirs. So it's just geo information obituary, social media, deployed on the cloud, and we can analyze claims much more effectively and efficiently, for fraud and litigation than ever before. And the first results over the last year or two, showcasing a significant decrease, significant decrease in claims expenses and, and an increase at the right moment of what a right amount in claims payments, which is obviously a good thing for insurers. Right? So having said all of that, I really would like to give Sri Ramaswamy, the CEO of Infinilytics, the opportunity to walk you through this use case, and actually show you how this looks like in real life. So Sri, here you go. >> So insurers often ask us this question, can AI help insurance companies, lower loss expenses, litigation, and help manage reserves better? We all know that insurance industry is majority, majority of it is unstructured data. Can AI analyze all of this historically, and look for patterns and trends to help workflows and improve process efficiencies. This is exactly why we brought together industry experts at Infinilytics to create the industry's very first pre-trained and pre-built insights engine called Charlee. Charlee basically summarizes all of the data, structured and unstructured. And when I say unstructured, I go back to what Monique, basically traded, you know, it is including documents, reports, third party, it reports and investigation, interviews, statements, claim notes included as well, and any third party enrichment that we can legally get our hands on, anything that helps the adjudicate, the claims better. That is all something that we can include as part of the analysis. And what Charlee does is takes all of this data and very neatly summarizes all of this, after the analysis into insights within a dashboard. Our proprietary natural language processing semantic models adds the explanation to our predictions and insights, which is the key element that makes all of our insights action. So let's just get into understanding what these steps are and how Charlie can help, you know, with the insights from the historical patterns in this case. So when the claim comes in, it comes with a lot of unstructured data and documents that the, the claims operations team have to utilize to adjudicate, to understand and adjudicate the claim in an efficient manner. You are looking at a lot of documents, correspondences reports, third party reports, and also statements that are recorded within the claim notes. What Charlee basically does is crunches all, all of this data, removes the noise from that and brings together five key elements, locations, texts, sentiments, entities, and timelines. In the next step. In the next step, we are basically utilizing Charlee's built-in proprietary natural language processing models to semantically understand and interpret all of that information and bring together those key elements into curated insights. And the way we do that is by building knowledge, graphs, and ontologies and dictionaries that can help understand the domain language and convert them into insights and predictions that we can display on the dashboard. And if you look at what is being presented in the dashboard, these are KPIs and metrics that are very interesting for a management staff or even the operations. So the management team can basically look at the dashboard and start with the summarized data and start to then dig deeper into each of the problematic areas and look at patterns at that point. And these patterns that we learn, from not only from what the system can provide, but also from the historic data, can help understand and uncover some of these patterns in the newer claims that are coming in. So important to learn from the historic learnings and apply those learnings in the new claims that are coming in. Let's just take a very quick example of what this is going to look like for a claims manager. So here the claims manager discovers from the summarized information that there are some problems in the claims that basically have an attorney involved. They have not even gone into litigation and they still are, you know, experiencing a very large average amount of claim loss when they compare to the benchmark. So this is where the manager wants to dig deeper and understand the patterns behind it from the historic data. And this has to look at the wealth of information that is sitting in the unstructured data. So Charlee basically pulls together all these topics, and summarizes these topics that are very specific to certain losses combined with entities and timelines and sentiments, and very quickly be able to show to the manager where the problematic areas are and what are those patterns leading to high, severe claims, whether it's litigation or whether it's just high, severe indemnity payments. And this is where the managers can adjust their workflows, based on what we can predict using those patterns that we have learned and predict the new claims. The operations team can also leverage Charlee's deep level insights, claim level insights, in the form of red flags, alerts and recommendations. They can also be trained using these recommendations, and the operations team can mitigate the claims much more effectively and proactively, using these kind of deep level insights that need to look at unstructured data. So at the, at the end, I would like to say that it is possible for us to achieve financial benefits, leveraging artificial intelligence platforms like Charlee and help the insurers learn from their historic data and being able to apply that to the new claims, to work, to adjust their workflows efficiently. >> Thank you very much Sri. That was very enlightening as always. And it's great to see that actually, some of the technology that we all work so hard on together, comes to fruition in, in cost savings and efficiencies and, and help insurers manage potential bad situations, such as claims fraud better, right? So to close this session out as a next step, we would really urge you to assess your available data sources and advanced or predictive fraud prevention capabilities, aligned with your digital initiatives to digital initiatives that we all embarked on, over the last year are creating a lot of new data that we can use to learn more. So that's a great thing. If you need to learn more, want to learn more about Cloudera and our insurance work and our insurance efforts call me, I'm very excited to talk about this forever. So if you want to give me a call or find a place to meet, when that's possible again, and schedule a meeting with us. And again, we love insurance. We'll gladly talk to you until SDC and parts of the United States, the cows come home about it. And we're done. I want to thank you all for attending this session, and hanging in there with us for about half an hour. And I hope you have a wonderful rest of the day.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of where you've been hearing at the Public Sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an I V r. And, uh, you know, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age and barricade cake nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed. And as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in the endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of, right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers. But we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often, like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead, Ah, technologists to deploy at scale for the government. Canada all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know, the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's gonna be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example. In my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what, Ben? What I was trying to do sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah, I mean, so it's It's Ah, it's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes that make quick decisions that normally even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change How, How quick We can look at problems and and we reduced deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours, and I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that we know that when you were gonna come so >>Ben what this is. This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know? Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook timidly showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also, um, correctly because you know, you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental, and I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly to do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best paid plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going for it into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found the way. We certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity in the new, innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior study, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then obviously has a change leader. Our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's gonna allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, tested again and and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government can right? And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of edge of the building, blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean they're not fundamental to the way we're gonna. So our biggest, various and scariest problems, technologically and then from a business perspective, Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely re HVAC way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do on. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches, But the reality is that that's where we're heading. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they'll remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the other company, I would add is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. If you have been just about, well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better, it providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle, the client is the focus, and then we drive. Everyone's with that solution, >>you know, shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of us just looked could feel it's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been, uh, has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic if world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the >>West. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, this is the >>Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the public sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon. Connect a spiritual contact center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an ai VR and, uh, you know, we stood it up for 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, I'd be happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age in the arcade cake Nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed in, as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in that endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then, in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers, but we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today. Uh, with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead. Ah, technologist, to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it. Two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old, the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months, And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example, in my opinion of a partner working with the problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what? Ben? What I was trying to do, sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah. I mean, so it's It's Ah, It's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally, even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how, How quickly we can look at problems and and we reduce deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours that I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that you know that when you're gonna come So, >>Ben, what this is This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation. People process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know, Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook to build like showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also correctly because you know you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly, do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change. I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would ain't for. And so our challenge Now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found a way. And we certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity and in innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior studio, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with their systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes. But then, obviously, as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff in there, quickly, test it, change it tested again and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government. Can't right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of agile, the building blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean, they're not fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest various and scariest problems technologically and then from a business perspective. Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely revamped way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. Um, and I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches. But the reality is that that's where we're headed. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they don't remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think The other company, I would add, is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. It could have been just about well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better. It is his providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus. And then we drive. Everyone's with that, >>you know, shared success and and successes contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary numbers just look and feel. It's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the West. Thanks. Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, >>yeah, yeah, yeah

>> Hi. I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation. We're here in our Palo Alto studios and we got some really interesting guests, really interesting topic. We're going to talk about something called Computational Storage. Nader Salessi is the CEO of NGD Systems. >> Hello. >> And Scott Shadley is the VP of Marketing of NGD Systems. >> Pleasure to see ya again, Peter. >> So guys, let me set the stage and let's get in to this 'cause actually this is kind of interesting. If you think about a lot of the innovations happening in the marketplace right now and the tech industry right now, we're talking about greater densities of data, more advanced algorithms being applied against that data, greater parallelism in the compute, more I/O aggregate required but the presumption behind all this is that we're going to be flying data all over the organization and the other presumption is things like energy consumption, unlimited, who cares but we know the reality is something different. There is an intersection amongst all of that that seems to need a dressing. Nader, take us through that. >> And that's exactly what we are addressing. So we are bringing other than the energy efficiency in a large capacity storage. Instead of moving the data to do any computation on the data, we bring the computation inside the storage to do the computation locally in a distributive fashion as you have number of storage devices in a server without the need of moving the data and save energy. The main area is that it's a focus point for a lot of mega-data centers is the energy density being what per terabyte or what per terabyte per square inch and that's exactly with our technology we are addressing to have a more sufficient energy efficient computational storage into the market. >> So let me build on that a little bit. See if I got it. So that your traditional large system, you have an enormous amount of data, you have a bunch of logic dedicated to know where the data is. Find it. Once it finds it, it brings it, presents it to a CPU, a server somewhere, who then takes some degree of responsibility for formatting it and then presenting it to the application. And you're bringing that out and putting it down closer to the storage itself and so instead of having this enormous bus that's humming along at unbelievable speeds and maybe 35, 40 watts off the card, you're doing it for-- >> A fraction of that so we'll be able to do that with eight terabytes in an eight watt envelope. Or 64 terabytes to be done in a 15 watt envelope. That's the part that doesn't exist today and being able to not only do the storage part of it but bringing the application seamlessly without changing the application, bringing it down and acting on the data and just setting the subset of the results to the upper levels of the application is what market is looking for that doesn't exist today. >> So you're using, you're still using industry standard memory. You're still using industry standard form factors. What is the special sauce inside this that makes it faster and cheaper from a power standpoint? >> Very good question. So we are using a standard PCIe and MPE protocol for the drive. So we, our technology, the algorithm and the controller technology can have this large capacity of the NAND and we are flash agnostic so it could be any NAND, in fact, later on it could be any MBM. It doesn't need to be the NAND and having additional resources through the standard of the TCP/IP we can bring application down. We're not making any changes to the application. >> So we're taking a new approach to thinking about how I/O gets handled at the storage device. It's got to create some use cases, Scott. Tell us about some of the use cases. >> From a use cases perspective, you can think about it you can go to simple terms as thinking about traffic jams. If you have a traffic jam on the freeway when one lane of traffic gets stuck, well if the cars are able to actually relocate and do the movements on their own you eliminate the traffic bandwidth problem. What we can do is we allow you to say okay if I'm going to go look for a picture in a data set. Instead of having the CPU ask for all the different pictures, do the comparison and memory, tie up CPU resources, you just tell the drive go find this picture. It goes, finds this comparison picture. Tells you all about the picture, sends just that little tidbit back to you. So if you're collecting hundreds of thousands of Facebook photos today, you can analyze those and tell every person that's looking for a different photo what their photo is without having to use massive I/O bandwidth. >> So traditional high-performance computing? >> Yes. >> IOT? >> IOT. All of the AI where you're looking for things, where you're trying to have Artificial Intelligence be smarter, you have to throw CPUs and GPUs at it. Start throwing more storage at it 'cause you have to have to store all the data you're generating. Why not let the storage do some of that work? You can offload some of it from CPUs, GPUs and you can scale more effectively. >> So my colleague, David Floier, has been talking about how for example MAP and Hadoop could be accelerated pretty dramatically. But it's got to be more than just MAP? How are you supporting a range of applications. >> The of use cases totally separate, different from these use cases is for the content delivery, video delivery on the last mile or last hundred feet. So today, everybody's recording at home in their DVRs. What if it's set up having 10,000 DVRs in 10,000 homes is sitting in a central place and it has hundreds of thousands of video but everybody points to it. The new challenge with that is the security portion. With all our technology, we can do the encryption on the way out and authentication right at the storage so the concurrent users can be protected from each other. And that technology doesn't exist. >> Let me think about the business model implications now for a second. So I might enter as a private citizen. I might enter into a deal with Xfinity for example in which I agree to be the point of presense for my entire neighborhood. Is it that kind of thing we're talking about? >> Exactly. So that's the new edge delivery but with a higher security that doesn't exist today because it's a major challenge for everybody. >> Interesting. >> For the security and authentication. Even within the same household there could be multiple users that they need to be protected from each other. >> Very interesting. So Scott, you've got a fair amount of background in the systems universe. How is this technology going to change the way we think about systems? >> Yeah, so the beauty of this is we all thought MVE was going to be the savior of the world. It comes in at flash storage. It gives you the unlimited PCA bandwidth bus. The problem is we've already saturated that problem. We've got devices where a box can hold 24 MVE drives but you can only operate three or four of them at a time even with 16 lanes of PC-83. We're going to PC-84. We've still got a bottleneck because all of the I/O still has to go from the drive to host and back to drive and be managed because you can't run on traditional storage anything other than just data placement. Now, the drives are smart. They're relocating the data on it, protecting it, whatever else, but they're still not doing what can really be done with them. Adding this layer of computational storage with devices like ours, all it has to do is go ask the question and the storage can go do it's thing. So if I've got 24 drives, I can go ask 24 questions and I still have bandwidth to actually write data into that system or read other data out of that system at a random access pattern. >> So that brings us back to the question I asked earlier. Namely, to make this more general purpose, there's got to be a pretty robust software capabilities or libraries. How is that being handled so it can be made more general purpose and folks aren't building deep into the architectures specific controller elements. How is that happening? How does it work? >> So one of the biggest kricks whenever you bring something kind of new and innovative that actually solves a problem that does exist is how to get people to address it, right? 'Cause I want ease. I want to do simple. It took forever to get people to adopt SSDs and now we're telling them that we're giving them smart SSDs. What we're saying and what we're able to accomplish with what we're doing on the library front is very light touch. We're using the MVE protocol. We're tunneling through it with a host agent which is a very small modification at the host and it has that now communicate to all the different drives. So, simplifying that crossover of information is really what's important to your exact statement and we do that through C library and it's very modifiable to various different workloads. It's not tied to each workload has to be independently written. >> So the applications of enterprises of all sorts are actually trying to drive, that are more data orientated, computational orientated around that data. Get the computations closer. You guys are helping. From the new systems designs, we still think MVEOF is going to be very, very important but this could complement it. >> Exactly. >> Especially where I/O and the energy that bus becomes a crucial issue. What's on the horizon? >> Deploying this and driving the energy deficiency. It continues to be the biggest point no matter what we do. There is not enough energy in the world. With the amount of storage and server and computer that's being deployed and that's another area that we are focusing on and continue to focus to have the most optimum energy efficient in the smallest footprint in the model. >> So I got one more question. NGD Systems is not a household name. Where are you guys from? >> So we started the company about five years ago. Before that, myself as well as my two co-founders as well as a team of engineers we used to be at a company called Western Digital for a couple of years doing enterprise classes as this. Before that, I started the, in 2003, in this field for SSD, I started a product, a business line for a company called SDC Estate which we created industrial SSDs then later on became an enterprise class SSD. We became known for enterprise class SSDs in the industry. That's the heritage of the last 15, 17 years with many years of SSD development but this computational storage is already done an optimized SSD for a category that doesn't exist today and add to it a computational storage capability on top of it. >> Scott, last word? >> Yeah. Just from that perspective, we really didn't get into a lot of detail on it but the capabilities of reducing the amount of compute you need in a server whether it be a CPU, GPU or otherwise and actually being able to use intelligent storage to drive the bandwidth growth, the MVE fabric, or just the per-box density is just something that nobody's really taken a significant look at in the past. This is a definite solution to move it forward. >> So I'm going to turn that around and say software developers always find a way to fill up the space. So you can on the one hand look at it from a maybe you have low-cost CPUs but even if you have the same cost CPUs you can do so much more 'cause you can move so much more work out closer to the data. >> Correct. = All right. NGD Systems. Very, very interesting conversation. Thanks so much for coming and being on Cube. Once again, this is Peter Burris with a Cube Conversation. We've been speaking with NGD Systems. Thanks a lot for watching.

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco at Moscone West is the exclusive coverage from theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media of the SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and the co-host of theCUBE. My next guest is Amy Jo Kim who is the CEO of Shufflebrain. It's the parent company of gamethinking.io, a variety of other projects, and expert in the convergence of design, gaming, computer science, and et cetera. Welcome to theCUBE. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. Obviously we've been seeing the trend, the convergence trend for a while certainly in the tech industry. Computer science and social science coming together, that was our motto when we started our company eight years ago. But really to me the flashpoint was Steve Jobs had the technology-liberal arts crossroads. That really kind of spawned the beginning of a creative generation start thinking about the devices, how it all intersects, and not the pure play handheld. So gamers here at Samsung Development Conference and developers bring game mechanics in. That's communities, gamification, games themselves, user interface. What's your reaction to all this? You've designed a great bunch of interfaces. >> I'm, I think it's fantastic. I think what we're seeing is really a flashpoint that has several trends converging. One of the trends we have is developers, the folks here, you know are right here at this wonderful conference, they've grown up with games. They're familiar with the lexicon of games, with how games work. And so it's very natural for them when they start to build their own apps and say what will make this engaging to turn to games and look for inspiration in games? So that's been going on for a while and it's accelerating. We're also seeing that mobile technology, mobile phones, have become so ubiquitous that most of the traffic coming in on many people's experiences 70%, I recently ran a promotion for Shufflebrain, 70% of our traffic was mobile total traffic. So the ubiquity of mobile phones means that everybody's got a potential gaming machine or a machine where they can have a light, fun, engaging experience right in their pocket. So as you noted, we've moved away from single purpose game consoles, handheld or otherwise they still exist, but more and more what we see is the best games and the best game like experiences that might not be games but they the feel and the pull of games. Those are showing up on mobile phones like Samsung. >> And the screens are awesome. I'll say my Note 8 here is awesome and bigger and better and the graphics. But it's a generational shift too. Like my son was, we're designing a new app and we're kind of sitting at the drawing board and he's like, "Dad, you're a search generation. "No one searches anymore. "You actually type on the keyboard, that's like so old." So he brings up a point which is illuminated here. Which is you see voice touch, voice activation. Harman's got now the kind of interface with this audio. You're seeing cars all over the air with software. This is really the computer science, computer engineering culture interfacing with art. Where new user experiences are coming that quite frankly don't look the same. >> Exactly that's such a good point. So what's happening is that a lot of the user experiences, the back end neural networks, the AI, the sophisticated bots that we've been seeing in gaming for the last five or six years are trickling into the mainstream. And that's what you always see. Gaming is the canary in a coal mine. What we see now happening in games and what we saw a few years ago is becoming more mainstream. So if we look now at what's happening in gaming, that gives us a clue to 18 to 24 months out for app developers. >> Yeah we brought this up on day one. You nailed it. It's an early indicator. >> That's right. >> What are you seeing in that area? Because you're in the vanguard of the user interface so you have a computer science background. You understand how communities work. Which by the way, you look at anything from blockchain ICOs to game communities, community is the most important aspect right now in the world. The community role of the people are so important. You don't have a network effect. You don't have input output into the quote neural aspect of the interface because now people are involved. Not just software and data bits. I need a notification from my friend if they're right around the corner from me. So it's the role of people. >> Exactly, so I'm a multiplayer game designer. The teams I work with, because it's always a team effort, are multiplayer games. Rock Band, Covet Fashion is a more recent one. And so we've known for a long time in the gaming industry that if you want to drive deep lasting engagement, you need to create a multiplayer experience and some sort of community around that. What you'll hear gamers say is "You know, I'm kind of tired of that game "but my friends need me. "It's where my friends are, my team needs me." So that's part of what drives long term engagement. >> John: The socialization piece. >> Exactly. What we're seeing now and the opportunity I think for developers even outside of gaming is we're seeing the intersection of gaming, a style of gaming that's sort of I would call them gaming systems versus game mechanics. We're seeing gaming systems find their way into social media. Musical.ly is a great example. And Discord is another example. Discord is a platform started by gamers but now it's merging into just other people. That's for communication. Sort of like a next generation Slack but mobile and for gamers. Covet Fashion, a game I worked on with a brilliant team who actually came up with the idea at CrowdStar, really merged a cooperative game mechanic like you might see in say Portal 2 or Left for Dead with social media and very lightweight voting systems of the users themselves playing a crucial role in what's good or not. Just like in Facebook or in Instagram, your feed is going to show you what gets liked a lot, what gets popular. And games are starting to incorporate this too so that the players themselves become almost like the game pieces and become a big part of what's entertaining. We see networks like Twitch with a huge rush of popularity. That is people delivering entertainment to each other. It's not scripted. So this user generated content, this systems which let people be entertaining to each other, is the huge push that's going on in gaming. And we have, part of what makes a game so exciting, is when the game makes interacting with other people lower friction or more magical but it's still the people that makes it exciting. >> Amy Jo this is amazing. I think that you're right on it. Because remember when I was a gamer, single player game on the computer, you got bored. I mastered it. Then comes multiplayer. But you're bringing up a new dynamic which is the dynamic nature of the people themselves. And I think Twitch had an interesting experiment where the comments, which we know on Twitch are pretty bad, drove the game experience. So now you have the people being part of the input to the game itself. I mean isn't Life a game in a way? >> Sure, you could look at Life the game. I think that that's a semantic issue. There are people that really enjoy looking at life as a game And if you define a game as a structured activity with roles and goals, sure you could look at it that way. What I think is most exciting is not so much what is and isn't a game but the bleeding over of gaming systems into places like digital health and education and enterprise and fashion, and those are, and genealogy. Right now I have a client who's merging a game like experience with a genealogy crowd source experience. So I think what I'd like to leave you with and to understand is the first wave of this we called gamification where people got very excited about the visible markers of progress that are in games like points and badges and leaderboards. And that's a great opening door, but that's not where the magic is. Where the magic is is in the underlying systems that drive you toward mastery of something you care about. And that's the explosion we're seeing now. So you say what am I seeing? I'm seeing clients come to me, a game designer, in all kinds, banking, call centers, SaaS products, change transformation in companies as well as all kinds of consumer products, saying we tried gamification. It just worked in the short term. We want what makes games interesting in the long term. First of all you said the most important thing which is other people. But it's not just other people. It's other people in a playful and mastery based environment that helps you get better at something you care about getting better at. >> So this great so take me through what game system. What I hear you saying is, okay, people think of gamification as a one trick pony, a shortcut to something. You're taking a much more wholistic approach saying the game system. What does that mean? What is a game system? Because you're, what I hear you saying, is that this is like a fabric. It's not like, or an operating system maybe. How should people think of a game... >> It's a methodology or a system. A good way to think about this, are you familiar with design thinking? >> Mm-hmm. >> Are you familiar with an agile approach or Agile Lean UX? Those are systems. Those are methodologies. Those are approaches to creating great products. And they help you. Game thinking is similar. It's got elements of design thinking, elements of Agile, but it adds game design. The difference between strong game design and gamification is game design is about bringing systems to life from the inside out. And so game thinking is as much about how you bring your product to life as it is about anything that you put into the product once it's brought to life. Which is where gamification usually comes in. So it's really about building a learning architecture into the core of your game using feedback loops and using simple systems. And one more thing. Every complex system starts as a simple system that works. So it's really about building core systems and then bringing them to life with the right approach and the right people. >> It's like having a kernel or a small building block. If you overthink it you could get in trouble. >> Right. But you also have to have the right building block so you build a strong foundation. >> Yeah I remember the old days when game engines came out. There was no market for game engines when the first games came out. Then someone said hey why don't we just take the game engine and become a game engine. That was an interesting dynamic that spawned a lot of innovation. Is there an analogy to that happening now where there's new innovations that people can build on top of? Is it open source? Is there an equivalent? I'm trying to figure out where that next level up is going to be because right now we've gone like this and then we see a new level with AR and these new kinds of games and you're bringing this kind of integrated system approach is coming. >> Right so I think there's two thing that have to happen for those to take off. One of which is technology based. You have to have engines. So Unity's rise has been tremendous for the gaming industry. Many many simple game-like experiences are being built in Unity, not from scratch. And other tools like that. And then ARKit from Apple is causing an explosion of really interesting work happening, making it easier to create and experiment with an experience like Pokemon Go. So those are the bottom-up tools based changes that are really accelerating innovation in our industry. Now at the time, none of that will work if you don't have the customer demand and the customer hunger. So the other thing that's happening is that customers are being trained by Pokemon Go and things like that that oh, this is how AR could work. We've seen that VR has kind of stalled out but again, that's a special purpose hardware that's not something easy that you can get on your mobile phone in between all the other things you do. So I think it can't be overstated how powerful it is to have these platforms combined with a huge consumer base on mobile, with phones in their pocket, ready to have a compelling game-like experience that doesn't necessarily have to be a game. The world is waiting for those. >> Yeah and your point about VR, you don't want a build it they will come mentality. You got to focus on the magic formula which is-- >> Customer demand. >> Call it sticky. But some could say look it's got to be a utility and that mastery component is critical whether it's learning, friendship, or some human dopamine effect right. >> Well that's exactly what we do at gamethinking.io. We help teams and companies create a product that customers love and come back to from the ground up using gaming techniques. So anyone who's interested, that's what we do. And the reason we help people do that is it's hard, and it's incredibly high leverage. >> Yeah and you got to have the expertise to do it. And it really is. It sounds like gamethinking.io, you're going to bring architecture. It's not just going to be jump on the grenade that someone throws a project at you. Sure, if it's a big project maybe. But you're kind of train the trainer it sounds like, you're teaching people to fish if you will. >> It's product development. Gamification is often a marketing campaign. We're talking about product development. If you want to build lasting engagement and you're a product leader, then you can use these techniques to build it from the ground up but it's not a silver bullet. >> Give a plug for what you do at Shufflebrain about your company and share some advice for folks watching that might be interested. Like I want to transform my Web 2.0, my 1.0 web responsive app, or my offshore built mobile app that I hired someone to just iOS it and Android it. I want to actually build from the ground up a new architecture that's going to be, have a lot of headroom, I really want to build it from the ground up with good design thinking, game system, game thinking, with the game systems, all the magic potentially in there. What do they do? I don't know do you call the, you know there's no Yellow Pages anymore. Do you Google search it? >> Thank you that was a great setup because that's, I mean I wish that I had had this years ago when I doing a venture funded startup. I needed help. So that's why I do what I do. So what we do is take 20 years of what works and what doesn't in game and product design and turn it into a step by step toolkit with templates, instruction, training, and coaching. And let me give you a specific tip. So there's, it's a whole system we use, but one of the things that you do and if anybody wants to try this it will amaze you if you're able to do it right, one of the things that the greatest game designers, the Will Wrights and folks at CrowdStar and Harmonics, what they do is when they're bringing a new game idea to life, first of all they find out aggressively as much about what's wrong with their ideas, what's right with it, through iterative, low fidelity testing early. Secondly they test it on their superfans that shortcut for high need, high value, early adopters. Not your target market but people that can get you to your target market. Knowing how to find and identify and then leverage your superfans for very early product testing and iteration, that's how you bring your core systems to life. Not with your ultimate target market. Most people don't know this. Knowing this, and then finding those people and leveraging them will turn what's often a failure into success. >> John: That's gold. >> It's complete gold. Let me just tell you why. Because if you're able to ask very product-focused questions, again with my guidance, of these people, you can build your product around what you know they want rather than guessing. >> And you can also help the person, might have blind spot, your customer, understand what superfans are saying. Sometimes it's like they're just giving you the answer right there early on. >> That's such a good point. And when you're inside of it- >> And I have bias. I'm an entrepreneur. Oh no I want to hear what I want to hear. I'm going to change the world. (laughs) Not really. >> That's why when I was an entrepreneur I knew all this stuff but I needed a coach when I was doing this. Because you can't see outside of your bubble and that's part of the value of doing this. >> Amy, the URL is? >> Gamethinking.io. >> Gamthinking.io. Amy Jo is a coach, she is an entrepreneur, venture backed, probably has some scar tissue from that but now she's kicking ass and taking names on gamethinking.io. Great mind. Thank you for sharing an amazing tutorial. You know that's free consulting here on theCUBE right here from and expert. >> It's what I love to do. Thank you for having me. >> Amy Jo here on theCUBE. Live in San Francisco at the Samsung Developer Conference, I'm John Furrier back with more here in theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Hey, welcome back everyone, this is theCube's exclusive live coverage of Samsung Development Conference, SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, the founder, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCube. My next guest is Kevin Hague, Vice President of Technology Strategy at Harman, now part of Samsung. His twitter handle is JSGuy. Welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, thank you having me. >> So HARMAN has a lot of cool things. Obviously, you're known for music, audio, in-car stuff, headphones, really the premier audio tech. >> Kevin: Yes, yeah. >> So give us the update. Part of Samsung. When did that happen? What have you guys done? Have you integrated in to the edge of the network? Is entertainment. >> It is these days. And it seems like more and more people are becoming interested in audio. Audio's becoming, you know, a big part of everybody's lives. Everybody will have headphones at work, connected devices at home, with AIs and voice assistance in their car. You know, we're huge in the car. A huge percentage of our automotive business is in audio, and infotainment, IVI systems, and we're really excited to be here at the Samsung Developer Conference, because this is our first conference, kind of together, and we're excited to show off a lot of cool developer tech. >> So we're huge on internet of things. I've been saying this for years, but now it's so clear to the developer community that internet of things includes people. Wearables, we had guests on doing dresses that are part of the internet, and technology with robotic arms and software. But headphones, you guys have a cool program called Hack Your Headphones. Which, tell a little about that, and then we'll talk about this new product that's here on the desk, I can't wait to get to, but >> Yeah, we have a couple of new products >> Hack your headphones, I mean, you got to get developers excited, because augmented reality and virtual reality, no one wants to put those damn goggles on. And it's got no audio. >> That's right. Yeah, so we're trying to fix that with this particular product, which is the JBL Everest Elite headphones. And it's probably one of the first consumer hackable headphones. We have an API, out for Android, that allows the developer to control many of the features and functions of this headphone. And we've added a lot of extra features, so this thing not only, when you put it on, and you're wearing virtual VR goggles, you're immersed, right? And you don't even know what's going on in the outside world. Well, we've come up with some tech that allows some of the outside world to come in programmatically. So within a game, or a VR game, or a VR application, you can do something where the outside noise can be added in to the gameplay. So let's say if you're playing Fruit Ninja, or something really crazy on your VR goggles, and you're about to hit somebody, it could warn you through audio signals. So we're really excited about these headphones, lots of other features that developers would like. >> So let's talk about the API, because this is a really cool feature, and I want to get to that again, the new thing, new device that's coming out of this new, breaking news here on theCube, which is, these headphones, is about, you guys have the normal coolness around, noise canceling, all that stuff, but you guys have tech that actually lets developers play with the settings. >> Kevin: That's right. >> So you actually reverse the settings. Right? Like, imagining, like, okay, what if I want to increase the noise out that comes in. Is that the concept? >> That's right. And so we can adjust, the developers can adjust, almost an infinite levels, the noise ratio from outside to inside. So if you want it perfectly quiet, you can set that. If you want it where a lot of outside noise is coming in, you can adjust that as well, without having to do this to talk to somebody. >> It's almost tap your phone, tap your app, or have some notifications sensing, so you're looking for creativity from the developer community. >> That's the objective. >> We are. And we don't actually know what developers are going to do. I always have a saying, that says, If I put ten of my smartest guys in a room for a week, they're going to come up with a 100 ideas. If I throw this out to the developer community, they're going to come up with a 1,000 ideas, and I think that's what we're looking for, is that kind of creative spark, and we're just going to give them platform to do that on. >> And that's super smart, because now you can let the creative development community tinker around, and kick the tires. You guys get the free access to the creative, but also you have APIs that make it kind of stable. >> That's right. And that's that something that we support. We love developers to play with. >> Alright, so now you have a new product. So this is the exclusive Cube coverage. So let's see this new product. >> Actually, we just sent boxes right before coming on set. >> Here, let me introduce this thing. So this is looks like a collar. Goes around your neck. So, first of all, what's the product name? >> So this is a JBL Sound Gear, and it's going to be available starting next month. So this is, as far as I know, the first one in the United States. I can't say that for sure, but that's the first one I've seen in the United States. >> So it looks like one of those old football collars, but you put it around like this, and it allows for music to come up only to my ears, right? Actually, let's turn on the music, and then they'll actually get to hear through my little headset here. >> Kevin: Yeah, we'll just throw something on. There's a little, it's kind of cranked up, actually. >> Okay, so this is cranked up. Can you hear this? >> Kevin: Just a little bit. >> So he can barely hear this. I'm, like, talking loud. >> Kevin: Yeah, yeah, that's right, because it's pretty loud to you. >> So I could be a gamer, I could be doing virtual reality with a headset. This is kind of like my ear experience, without and freeing my arms up. >> Yeah, that's right. And the nice thing is, we're looking in the future, and seeing augmented reality-type experiences are going to be important. But with augmented reality, you want that kind of pass through. So I want to be able to talk to you while you have your glasses on, or whatever the future brings us. >> So I can get a little notification, bing, you got this car coming, or about to get attacked by my app. >> Yeah, imagine walking down the street. Now you can listen to your music while walking down the street, and not worry about getting hit by a car or something. >> Or pissing people off. Hey, turn your headphones on! Or having some ambient noise coming in so I'm aware. >> Kevin: Yeah, that's right. >> Yeah, that's cool. >> And so that's a really exciting product. >> They're not that flexible. >> Yeah, it's a little bit. So I think a lot of people put it on from the side and twist it around, but it's actually a pretty solid product, and we're, you know, it's a transformative product. There's nobody else shipping anything like this that I know of. >> So it has a little bit of wiggle, but it's not, you could break it if you snap it, like a chicken bone. >> Kevin: Yeah, don't do that. As far as I know it's the only one in the United States. >> You can just throw it too, it's like horseshoes. Just toss it. >> We have other uses. Yes, we made it multiuse. >> Don't toss it. It's not horseshoes. That's awesome. And you've also got a little pow here, but also now, the problem with some of these devices is on, watching TV, or interfacing with a large screen, there's latency issues and if people are talking, and you're hearing it separately. A lot of internet streamings we see that. It's not like direct connected. >> Kevin: Yes. >> Talk about that. How does that address that? Does it have a feature where you could create a low latency connection to something that's either on the internet or TV? >> Sure, so there's a couple of different ways, so like audio latency's very important, especially if you're watching TV, and lip sync, it's always weird if you get that delay, and so, that's why we actually pair with this in the box comes a low latency transmitter. So it's plug and play, plug it into your TV, turn on this, it pairs up. Now you can watch TV seamlessly in the house without disturbing like everybody. >> I can watch my football games, make some dinner, lunch, whatever. >> Or even late night TV, somebody's asleep in the same room as you, and it won't disturb them, right? >> My wife, Linda, Linda, if you're watching, this is perfect, save our marriage. Turn the TV off! Maybe not that. But it'll be a first step, but this is exactly the use of these. Create a personal space, and the technology as it shoots up from the sides. >> Yeah, there's two speakers on each side. >> And it shoots up to the ear, so it comes up this way. >> That's right. And we do a lot of work to make sure that the beam of sound stays in the vertical space, so that a lot of people can't hear it from outside maybe three feet. Literally, when you first put it on, I couldn't even tell it was working, and I was going, can you hear it? And you're like, oh, it's loud! And so. >> And the folks listening heard it to, 'cause my microphone was right there. >> That's right, yes, and that's the side effect, is in this area here, you have full. >> Okay so this product >> Full awareness. >> will be shipped and it's called the >> AVL Sound Gear. >> Sound Gear, it's available next month. >> Next month. >> In Best Buy retail. >> Best Buy retail. MSRP I think is going to be 249. >> Which includes some accessories, right? >> It includes a couple of accessories, like the streaming unit and everything. >> Yeah, that's awesome. So it's not going to break the bank. >> I don't think so. >> Good. Well, so that's a good price point, I'm definitely going to buy one. >> It's definitely different. It's not like just a regular pair of headphones. This is also available in the stores today, the 750. >> And how about this being developer enabled? API's for this, too, or not yet? >> Not yet, but stay tuned. >> This is the total Star Trek device. >> Kevin: It is. >> If you're a Star Trek classic fan like me, you know the thrall collars. (laughter) >> Kevin: That's awesome. >> And certainly, I can use this. It's got voice in there just so I can talk to it, like on conference calls? >> That's right. You can do a conference call with it, or. >> Have intercommunications on gameplay, multiplayer? >> That's right. >> So yeah, I think gamers are going to love this. >> I think so, too. >> Yeah, my son plays Call of Duty and Destiny. >> It's very comfortable to wear. I think that's one of the key things, is once you get it on, it feels like, when I've tried some of our early prototypes of it, I forgot that I was even wearing it. >> I can listen to theCube music while talking to the guests. >> Kevin: I know, we need to get you one of these. I mean, we'll get you one soon so you can try it. >> Promotional considerations by Samsung. >> Kevin: That's right. >> Kevin, thanks for coming on, great tunes, old school classics. Yeah, crank it up a little bit more, we'll end on some music. Kevin Hague, Vice President of Technology at Harmon, (upbeat music) Samsung. Bringing all the developer action to you here, theCube. >> Kevin: Thanks for having me. >> Alright. More after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's the Cube, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017, brought to you by Samsung. (electronic music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome back, live here in San Franscisco, Moscone West. This is the Cube's exclusive coverage of Samsung's Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, cohost here in the Cube. My next guest is Paris Rain, recording artist, innovator, working with Stan Lee, music projects. What's exciting about this event is that you have such exciting new lifestyle trends happening and this one here's a great story. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much. It's nice being here with everybody. >> You look fabulous, you're a superhero. Tell us the story, because one of the things that's super compelling about your projects you're working on, and your innovation, is the convergence of culture. You've got Comic Con kind of culture integrated with music, online services, digital communities, and now new products are being developed, new experiences, AR, VR, the new vibe is out there. Tell your story. >> Well, we just thought, why not? So what happened was, my manager had a really close relationship to Stan and he basically showed Stan my music and said, "Hey, this girl's talented," and then we got to talking and we were like, "Why don't we integrate Stan into the music business?" He took over the movie industry, why doesn't he take over the music industry as well? >> And so Marvel obviously absolutely hits a home run, the comics, but this is now also a digital life, and so people look at all the successes, certainly the movies. >> Absolutely, yeah, that would be the biggest. >> I was a comic kid when I was growing up. But the movies have just been spectacular. One sequel after the other. Gaming now is part of the movie scene, so gaming culture is huge, and you're doing a game with Samsung, that's something you've got going on, what's that about? >> I can't say too much about it, to be honest with you, but we're in preparation with Samsung on this new, innovative, high tech, app that's coming out, and it's going to be integrated to, I mean, everything's going to come together, it's going to have my music in it, it's going to have, Stan's going to make a cameo, in that, in the game, and in my music video as well, and yeah it's all coming together. >> So that's coming out. You can't really talk, it's under wraps, but it's an integrated project. You've been successfully into viral videos, a couple years ago that went viral on YouTube. What's that like, do you just like wake up one day and say, "Oh my God, this is going crazy?" >> It kind of happened like that with YouTube. Because you do it all yourself. I worked with Afflux Studios, it's in Wellington. They're a really awesome studio, super high tech and I got kind of an in, they're kind of family to me, and so it was kind of ... It was really easy to get with them anyway so we were like, "Hey, I did the blue hair thing." And I was like, "You know what? "I'm set on going viral, this is what I want to do." And the first video I put out, bitch better have-- B better have my money. (John laughs) By Rihanna. >> We're the internet. You can say whatever you want. >> Oh, fuck it. Bitch better have my money. Oh shit, really, I can swear? Oh I feel so much more comfortable now. On stage, I felt so ... So yeah, "Bitch Better Have My Money" came out and it got like 1.5 million, or 1.3 million views, and then I did another video and it got another 1.3 million. >> All right, so what happens after, because everyone wants to know. 'Cause everyone tries to engineer viral, and you can't really engineer viral, 'cause viral is one of those things where-- >> Dye your hair blue, sell your soul. >> (laughs) Okay, you sold your soul. Who bought it? The Devil? (laughs) >> The Devil, yeah, the Devil bought it. No. >> Well, you got to tell. >> No, for real, like honest talk right now. What you have to do is go on the top charts and pick one of your favorites, something that is completely not you, or you, but you have to do it a different way, so what we did, was I work with a producer who's super awesome, his name's Arcaeus, and we remixed it. And you know how remixes are huge? So we were like, "Why don't we do a remix cover?" and then it blew up and that's what happened. >> So now that you're on Stan's radar, he's got the whole, you know, he's been around the block, he's a legend in the community. His success is off the charts. What's his creative mind like right now? How are you guys looking at the mark offs? You're integrating music with comics. >> With comics and with gaming, that's, I mean, you just nailed it. >> So what's the creative scene like, do you guys sit back, do you kick back? What do you talk about? >> Stan's really big on making the powers unique, and he always has been really great on making sure that the powers are unique, so that's right now, we're still in the preparation stage of everything, but we're, we want to, we're prepping with Marvel right now. I have to say all the right words in order to not get in trouble. >> PR handled. (they laugh) >> We're prepping with Marvel to go into one of their storylines that I can't say. I can't say too much. >> Yeah. All these licensing things are going on. I've always been fascinated with how it's about time that the comics and Marvel really start expanding and start franchising the gaming because we were talking yesterday with one of the guests influencers about how the gaming culture really is a precursor to how life is evolving. You got multiplayer, it is virtual, you got virtual currencies, you have things happen on gaming, so it's a natural extension to move into gaming. How does the music piece, I mean, do you guys have licensing stuff? You must have to get authorizations. Is it indie, what's ... >> Well, it would be my music that's on the game. >> So you're doing your own music for the game. >> So I'd just be paying myself, essentially. >> You're licensing your movie? >> Yeah. >> All right. So here's another question for you. What's the weirdest thing that's happened to you in the past year? >> This interview right here. No, I'm just joking. >> (laughs) It's great for me too. >> No, it's Stan calling me up and saying, "Hey, I want to make you a superhero." That's the weirdest thing I've ever gone through. >> What's it like in the L.A. scene for you? >> I don't go to L.A. too much. I don't, but I am moving out there next month, so I will be in the L.A. scene. The L.A. scene's crazy, from what I've seen, from what I've seen about the scene. Yeah, it's crazy. >> So what's the plans for you and Stan the next couple months? What are you guys going to be working on, heading down, doing the tour, creative-- >> I think we're going to a couple Comic Cons. Potentially getting inducted into the music industry by a big player in the hiphop culture who, I can't say his name. There's a lot of big things, but it's mainly just preparation right now, we're just talking about everything, what we all want to do, and making sure that the gaming app with Samsung, which is why we're here today, it's like that's a huge thing, Jackie, Jacqueline Chow whose mobile game, it's a mobile game, so the game, the music, and hopefully eventually movies, but and the comic books, oh! You know what I think is really cool? I think that we're going to do a comic book on like a tablet version or a mobile version of the comic books, and I don't know if you've seen, I forget what it's called, but it's like a tilt screen comic book that's really, it's really innovative? I'll have to show you the app after, but it's, I think we're going to do something like that, 'cause people don't buy comic books, people don't buy books, they don't go to the store, they don't go to the library, I mean, I do, but they don't, you know? They go on their phone and they pay for it. >> Phone is where the action is, for the kids. All right, so what's exciting you these days? Obviously, you must be pretty pumped. Things are rocking. >> Yeah. >> What's on your mind these days? >> What's on my mind these days? >> Yeah, what are you excited about? >> Sitting beside Stan and just talking about this stuff. Honestly, performing, I'm super excited about the show, 'cause I want the show to be, I mean, if I'm a superhero, it's got to be heroic. >> Can you share your superpowers? What's the ... >> I can't! I can't, but I am a singer so I think obviously we're going to roll with the singing 'cause I think, I mean, naturally singing, performing, I think is almost like a human superpower that we have. >> So what's the event? Give us your take on the event here. Obviously Samsung is a big part, and congratulations, nice gig to have there. Congratulations, so you've got the app coming on, we'll dig into that, we'll look forward to the news when it comes out. But the vibe here, this developer community. We see high school kids here, I saw some eight year olds here. I mean, this is like an awesome developer conference. >> It is! When I was on stage with Stan, it was like, we had five minutes left, and I was kind of, you know, we had gone through all of the questions that we'd prepared, and I was like, "Hey, guys, if anyone "has any questions, please raise your hand," or whatever, and just kids, it was all, it was like mostly kids at first and then the adults are like, oh well we can do too, but the kids were like, "Stan, what do you think about DC?" and he was like, "DC who?" It was hilarious. >> So next year, "Rain, what do you think about ..." So you're going to be popular, congratulations. Thank you for coming on and chatting with me. This was great, with Rain Paris, here at the Cube live, from San Francisco for SDC, you got games coming out, music converging with comics, this is the culture. More after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From San Fransico, it's TheCUBE. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. (light electronic music) >> Hi everyone, welcome to day two coverage of the Samsung Developer Conference, or SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-host of TheCUBE, co-founder of siliconANGLE Media. I'm here with Anouk Wipprecht. Hard to say last name, but I have a hard time with my Rs. It's an east coast thing. Welcome to TheCUBE. >> Thank you so much! >> So I'm super excited to chat with you, because you're doing some really innovative things around fashion tech, which we think is going to be at the cusp of a whole new revolution of fashion embedding tech. Before we get started, I have some pointed questions, so to speak. >> Yeah. >> Talk about what you're working on. People might not know some of your dresses, the spider dress has been famous. Talk about your work, and we'll jump into it. >> Yeah, I work as my own self owned fashion and technology, so the combination of fashion and technology. Some of my dresses, they are bleeding in, they are serving cocktail shots, they are attacking, really, with mechanic spider legs on the shoulders. They are exploding in a layer of smoke, sort of. So I do a lot with animatronics and robotics, and what I want to do is that, fashion is augmenting us, you know? So creating an interaction. >> So you're designing dresses in a way that's integrating new elements... >> Yeah. >> With some tech, robotic arms, the spider dress is one that retracts and has some coolness to it. But there's also the smoke dress... >> Anouk: Yeah. >> How many dresses have you designed? Give us a taste of the flavors and the reactions. >> Yeah, so I have, in total, 37 dresses. So it's a really big family, and the family starts to expand more and more. For me, it's a lot about expression, and about investigating how, if you place these pieces of technology on the body, what they can do, you know? So, seeing fashion as an interface, because I always say garments are there to shelter us, to keep us comfortable in a way, and for me, fashion is something different. For me, fashion is about expression and about communication. And for me, this fashion is analog, our garments are analog, they're not digital, they're not interactive, you know? So I want to put computer boards, microcontrollers in everything, sensors in everything so they start to come alive and they can really express us. And by that, really interesting things come because, do you want to be always expressed? Or do you always want to emote yourself? Or, how does that go? That is, for me, my biggest fascination, researching this field. >> Yeah, and it's here, at the Samsung Developer Conference, so obviously front and center on the keynotes. You're hearing, you're seeing your work, and on the things displayed, they're calling smart things. >> Anouk: Yeah. >> Clothes can be smart. And you're kind of going down that road. Obviously, robotics was a first step, cause that's cool tech. >> Yeah. >> Digital displays are coming, right? >> Anouk: Correct. >> Imagine, like, >> Anouk: Oh yeah, oh yeah. >> My top tweed on my shirt, or you know, my Facebook posts, or my friends. >> Yeah. >> Using the data, how are you thinking about this as a designer? Most people will think geeky, okay, got the data, and a database, but as an artist, as a designer. >> Myself, I do this for about 12 to 15 years. So I started at the beginning of the 2000s, really trying to see how fashion can become this interface, and I think by me growing into this, technology got smaller and smaller, and it's got closer to the body, in a way, so it was able to emboss in your garments. I think that just opens up so many interesting possibilities that haven't been explored yet, except for only, like, the Fit Bits and the watches, the smart watches that are more bothering us. But they don't do anything with the data officialization. They don't do anything to officialize this data. It's only, basically, in the screen, and I want to get it out of the screen and into the real life. >> So one of the most popular dresses that I notice on Twitter and on Google Search was the spider dress. That's got mechanical arms, got like spider legs, and it comes out, it's this cool, cool experience. >> Anouk: Yeah. >> Also, you have the smoke dress. >> Mm-hmm. >> Talk about what they do differently. Talk about the spider dress, the smoke dress, and what was the one with the heartbeat? Share some of what the dresses personify. >> So the spider dress, I created or, I had the pleasure to create with the semiconductor company Intel, and this dress is really about personal space. There's proximity sensors under the chin, so they are measuring when people come into the personal space. And when people do, there's mechanic legs on the shoulders, and they are basically attacking. But they're not just in one way, it would be boring. So depending on how you walk into the space and where you're standing, it's reacting differently. So, somebody's walking up to you very fast, and your dress is reacting very fast. >> It's like a spider sense. It's like a spider sense and you can feel the expression. Whoa, stay back, or... >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Be ready to engage. >> You can use this piece of technology which is host on your body in order to do something that we might not do, like defend yourself. An animal, if you come in the closeness of a cat, the cat will give you a claw, right? But we would say like, oh... We would choose to maybe feel uncomfortable this way. So I was thinking, if you have a system on the body that can do that for you, wow. That's technology helping you out, right? >> Certainly, if someone gets too close, uncomfortable, a little shock treatment might help. >> Yeah, correct. >> Help keep people away. That's a fun example, but I think this is kind of revolutionary, in my opinion. This is so kind of cool because you've got technology, you've got expression, you've got human interaction, all these things going on. Talk about the smoke dress, what is that about? >> Yeah, to just point out, I think, working with this, one of the main factors that I think is really interesting is that technology doesn't become a tool, it becomes a companion. It lives on your body, it lives with you, and it can maybe also listen to your body signals and it knows how you're doing, and that is sometimes not with handheld devices. They don't know how you feel, but as soon as it's on the body, it feels your heart, it can sense your brain, it can sense your pulse, your muscle contraction, and I think that makes it really interesting. These new technologies on the body can really listen to us. >> They're coming faster, too. You're seeing here, Samsung Health is the first step, obviously that's the sensors on the body. That's an internetive things device. >> Anouk: Yeah. >> And the phone is just a companion. But also, I would just say, that we had some guests yesterday, some influencers on. Validating that augmented reality is so much more advanced. It points to what you're doing. It's not something virtual, it's just augmenting what the human's doing. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. >> Alright, smoke dress, and what's that other dress, that does the heartbeat? >> Yeah. Smoke dress, basically, also based on sense. If more people are around, in the surroundings, the more smoke escapes. So, more the feeling of diving away, like shyness. So working with different emotions, I also created a series of dresses for Cirque du Soleil. We know, as the theater, they have a restaurant in Ibiza, and I created dresses that make cocktails. So a little push on the button, and then a peristaltic pump in the back, and it serves a little cocktail shot, and they are giving that. So looking at how this science can also be social, for example. How can they be personal? How can they be intimate? And I think that is the most interesting thing, to look at that that way while designing. >> Yeah, it's got to pretty interesting. People can take these into different social situations. >> Yeah. >> Parties or large crowds, the spider could be good for that. >> Yeah, but it's also, how can it help you? How can it help your shyness? How can it help you proceed in the world? How can it engage you? I think, like a lot of these things we don't understand yet, how technology can be this learning system. How can we work with technology hand in hand that way? >> So how did you get into all this? This is so cool. >> I started with fashion design myself. I was 14 years old, and again, the notion of these dresses. Expressive, communicative, but they were analog. So when I was 17 years old, I combined it with another love of mine, which is robots. I love robots, they're amazing. But I didn't want the robot to stand next to me, be modeled after a human. I wanted to place the robot on my body, or on the body, and be reacting and interacting like an animal. More intuitive, much more expressive, or maybe rebellious. And by that, it's open up a bos-khal of possibilities for what you can do regarding that, and how they can be interesting. >> Yeah, and I think this is going to be one of those fashion tech areas. What's the industry like right now on the fashion tech? For the folks that aren't following fashion tech. Where's the state of the industry? I mean, this is cutting edge you're doing, certainly. We love it. >> Anouk: Yeah. >> Where is the industry? >> Correct. Especially, like, the things that I'm doing are a little bit more about extremities, right? Really provoking this notion of what fashion can be as soon as it becomes interactive. But especially, like, the last five years, the technology industry... Again, I'm doing this for longer than 12 years. The last five years, really, the technology industry is really interested it. The last two to three years, the fashion industry starts to like, hey, look at it. But I think technology and fashion need to go, much more talking to each other in order to really make this field grow and all of that. That is where we come in, the creators, and the creatives, you know? We are the instigators of the ones that try to push these boundaries and try to bridge these gaps a little bit in order to make a melting pot regarding to that. >> Well, you're doing a great job, I'm super impressed. It's super inspiring to me, I mean, I'm just intrigued by the whole thing. I got to get your reaction to how the younger generation's responding. I have two daughters and two sons, but my daughters would probably be into this. What's the younger, I mean, younger people must be loving this. Older people are, oh get off my lawn, this is too crazy. But maybe the younger people might like it better? What's the reaction? >> First of all, I do a lot of it like animals. Children love animals. I do myself a lot, the maker fair, for example. The maker scene, I always say, builds cool stuff, but also see how a new generation can learn from this, so most of my designs are open source. I do a lot of lectures at maker spaces, workshops with children, kids in electronics, but also girls in programming, just to see how that goes. In a really playful way, you know? Or looking at certain topics, so robotics, or these things. So really also trying to engage that. I think, children growing up, they love this because there are so many things in the screen and as soon as that becomes physical, they really have an engagement with it. >> So the maker culture is really growing. It certainly has been one of those awesome phenomenons that we're seeing, kind of like open source decades ago. The creator culture, the maker culture, the builder culture, this is real deal. >> Yeah. >> You get consumer devices as good as the Samsung 8 here happening, >> Yeah, correct. >> Or the smart TVs, so how are you making that open? Just take one minute to describe to the folks out there who might be interested in getting involved. Is there any collaboration with universities? Is it fashion institutes? Is it on the web? >> Anouk: Yeah. >> Is it your own community share? >> Yeah, well one really big fan I am of open source. So basically, open sourcing, like sharing what you have. You can do this online at websites, you can put your codes online. And I think by sharing... >> That's your website? >> You can find on my website, there's websites like, for example, GitHub. If you have pieces of code, you put it on there, and it's free for the community to use. It's a lot about community, you know? If I would make something, I can publish online, and release step by step how to do it, where to cut the 3D printed model, where to cut the codes, and people can make an electronic ring, for example. And by seeing what kind of piece you can give away from you process, somebody else can learn from that. >> And build on top of it. >> Yeah, correct. So I grew up with, for example, Arduino, it's an open source platform board. And it's microcontroller boards that you can program. And it's open-source, sort of free for people to just work with, and it's really a big education part in there. Education can be expensive, so how can we open this up? How can we make it accessible? And I think that is really important to do. >> And this is great, because this could democratize the closed fashion industry, open up new design opportunities from anyone. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and also, a company. You don't have to open-source, but what is that little piece that you can open-source? That you can give away, that you can give to the community, or to developers, or people to play with? >> So TheCUBE team can build some Cube clothes? >> Oh yeah. (laughter) >> Lenny's like, he wants that. >> Very cute. >> So I got to ask, on the community side. Love this, love this vision, because this is kind of an open source model. >> Yeah. >> You building on the shoulders of others, you're one of the pioneers. What do you see as critical things that need to happen to continue the accelerated growth or more momentum? What would you wish to see? >> Can you give an example? >> Like, what needs to happen to continue the momentum? More people participating? More designs? >> I think... >> More contributions from donors? More academic? >> I think what happens now, for example, like a Samsung developer conferencing part of the creative trek, me and also san-lee, who gave the keynote this morning. And I think inviting more people into each other's disciplines. Samsung here is inviting the creatives into the trek. How can the fashion industry invite technology in there? The technology industry invites fashion? And all of this stuff, you know? So you can really get this melting pot of creative, to architects, to designers, to engineers, and all of that together, you know? I think that is a wonderful world that I love, and that I see much more happening. The instigation of those different disciplines together. >> I love how you have the robotics love as a kid, and you brought your fashion love together. Two disciplines, two amazing things. Advice for young girls out there today who are, maybe feeling that, you know, it's a male dominated world, or who might have an interest in robotics. Robotics clubs are hot right now. Go to all the elementary schools and high schools in America you're seeing robotics become a big deal. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> What's your advice for young girls out there who want to develop their passion? >> One thing is always follow your dream. If you want to have something... If you have something in mind, hey, I want to build an octopus dress, and it might be too far away, how can you get there? Set your goal and go towards there, find it out, be curious, see how you can build these things. And especially if people would say no? You go there to prove them wrong. So that is something that I learned. >> Don't say take no for an answer, always follow your path. >> Yeah, my ideas are very far out, very far. So I always got, oh, this and that, and I always said no. And it's always about following your passion. If there's something that's really stirring you, go find it because that is, in the end, what is driving you. It is not the money, it's not anything of that. It is your passion and something that you want to fight for. >> Find that itch to scratch, always go after what you want. Okay, so final question for you, is, in your experience with your cutting edge designs and all the work you're doing, which is phenomenal, how have you observed the user experience of the general world these days? Because certainly, mobile's out there. We see mobile, but as you start to push the boundaries in clothing that's an expression, it's a human thing, the user experience is becoming integrated. The fabric. What have you learned and observed about user's expectations for future user interfaces? >> I think haptic feedback is really interesting. Also, as soon as you have garments with things in there, the feedback that you can get from that, notifications, or you can think of different ways regarding to that, really the way we interface now with the screen, how can that be more embodied? And to embody that experience, for example, is very interesting but it's also, how can an embodied experience become an epidermis which goes into your house? How can your living accessories react to you or your moods or emotions? I think moods and emotion are a really interesting topic, which also can be much more explored regarding to interaction design and user experiences. >> It's interesting, and I'm also visualizing coolness around an automatic QR code that could tell you how I'm feeling. Stay away from me today, QR code. >> And people still need to scan you. >> We'll have an automatic scanner on there, a little Samsung scanner with facial recognition. No, this is pretty cool, so... >> But these garments are QR codes, but they are surrounding the body, they are not... They have a broader bandwidth to broadcast. >> The personal network is coming. Your personal clothing network. And thank you very much for coming on, we really appreciate it. You're doing some really amazing work and the creative boundaries you're pushing, it's really phenomenal. We're going to share the links for all your stuff with our audience, and great to see Intel helping you out and getting that spider design going. Intel's always doing cutting edge work, so it's good to see that. >> Yeah, they're awesome. >> Thanks for coming on TheCUBE, we appreciate it. Good luck with all your endeavors, appreciate it. This is TheCUBE here, breaking down the fashion tech at the edge of the network. That's the new edge, is your clothes. Be ready for disruption, it's a maker culture. Get involved, check out Anouk's website. This is TheCUBE, more live coverage from Samsung Developer Conference 2017 after this short break. (light electronic music)

>> Voiceover: Live from San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here in San Francisco, this is The Cube's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference, SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, and co-host of The Cube. My next guest is Dominic Venuto, who is the General Manager of the consumer division of The Weather Channel, and Watson Advertising, which is part of The Weather Company. Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you for having me. >> Finally, I got the consumer guy on. I've interviewed The Weather Company folks from the IBM side, two different brands. One's the data, big data science operation going on, the whole Weather Company. But Weather Channel, the consumer stuff, Weather Underground, that's your product. >> Yes, you saved the best for last. We touch the consumer. >> So, weather content is good. So obviously, the hurricanes have been in the news over the years. Out here in California, the fires. People are interested in whether the impact, it used to be a unique thing on cable, go to the Weather Channel, check the forecast, read the paper. Now with online apps, weather is constantly a utility for users. So it's not a long-tail editorial product. It's pretty fundamental. >> Yeah, we want to be where our consumers are. Fundamentally we want to help people make better decisions and propel the world. And since weather touches everything, we need to be where the consumers are. So now, with all the digital touchpoints, whether that's your phone, or its a watch, your television, desktop if you still have one and you're still using it, as some of us do. We want to be there, for that very reason. And in fact, what we're aiming for, is to move from a utility, because if we are going to help people make better decisions, a utility only goes so far, would be a platform to anticipate behavior and drive decisions. >> So tell me about the Weather Underground and the weather.com consumer product. They're all one in the same now? Obviously one was very successful, with user generated content. This is not going away. Explain the product side of The Weather Channel consumer division. >> Yeah, so we have two brands in our portfolio, Weather Underground, which is more of a challenger brand. It's very data rich, and visualizes data in a number of different ways, that a certain user group really loves. So if you're a weather geek, as we call them, an avid aficionado of weather, and you really want to really get in there and understand what's happening, and look at the data, then Weather Underground is a platform. >> So for users to tie into, to put up weather stations, and other things that might be relevant. >> Exactly so, we started out in 2001, originally the first IOT implementation at the consumer level, connected devices. Where you could connect a personal weather station, put one in your back yard, and connect it to our platform, and feed hyper-local data into our network. And then we feed that into our forecast, to improve that, and actually validate whether the forecast is right or not, based on what people have at home. And we've hit a recent milestone. We've got over 250,000 personal weather stations connected to the network, which we are super thrilled about. And now, what we are doing is, we are extending that network to other connected devices, and air quality is a big topic right now, in other parts of the world, especially in Asia, where air quality is not always where it should be, that's a big thing we think we can... >> That's a big innovation opportunity for you, I mean, you point out the underground product was part of maker-culture, people do-it-yourself weather stations, evolve now into really strong products. That same dynamic could be used for air control, not just micro-climates. >> Exactly, yeah. >> In California, we had a problem this week. >> Exactly, California is a good example, really topical, where cities may have had great air quality, and all of the sudden the environment changes, and you want to know, what is it like? What is the breathing quality like outside right now? And you can come to our network and see that. And we're growing the air quality sensors every month, it's only been up a few months right now, so that's expanding quite well. >> So for the folks that don't know, The Weather Channel back end, has a huge data-driven product. I don't want to get into that piece, because we've talked about it. Go to youtube.com/siliconangle, search Weather Company. You'll see all our great videos from the IBM events, that are out, if you want the detail. But I do want to ask you, what's really happening with you guys, there's two things. One is, it's an app and content for devices, like Samsung is using. And two, essentially you're an IOT network. Sensors are sensors, whether they're user-generated, or user-populated, you guys are deploying a serious IOT capability. >> Absolutely, it's one of the reasons that IBM acquired The Weather Company, which houses the brands of Weather Underground and The Weather Channel, is that we have this fantastic infrastructure, this IOT infrastructure, ingesting large amounts of data, processing it, and then serving it back out to consumers at scale globally. >> What are you guys doing there with Samsung? Anything just particular in the IOT side, or? >> We've got a couple of initiatives going on with Samsung, a few I can't mention right now, but stay tuned. Some really cool things in the connect-at-home, that we're excited about, that builds on some of the work... >> Nest competitor? >> Not exactly a Nest competitor. Think more kitchen. >> Kitchen, okay. >> Think more kitchen. >> We had the goods, cooking in the kitchen, from our previous guest. So the question is, IOT personal, I get that. What else is going on with IOT, with you guys, that you can share? Lifestyle, in the home is great, but... >> So again, going back to how do we help people make better decisions, now that we are collecting data from not just personal weather stations, but air quality monitors, we are collecting it from cars, we are collecting it from the cell phone. We are really able to ingest data at scale, and when you're doing that, we've got hundreds of thousands of data sets that we are feeding into our models, when you do that, we've solved the computing challenge, now we are applying machine-learning and artificial intelligence to process this and extract insights. To validate data sets, in our forecast, and then deliver that back to the end user. >> One of the tech geek themes we talk about all of the time is policy-based something. Programming, setting the policy. So, connecting the dots from what you're saying is, I'm driving my car, and I want to know if it's hot, or the road temperature. I might want to know if I'm running too fast, and my sensor device on me wants to impact the weather, for comfortable breathing for me, for instance. The lifestyle impacts, the content of data, is not just watching a video on The Weather Channel. >> No, it's not. >> So this is a new user experience. It's immersive, it's lifestyle-oriented, it's relevant. What are some of the products you're doing with Samsung, that can enable this new user expectation? >> One of the products that we have right now, we we're one of the initial partners for the Made for Samsung program, is, we've got calendar integration in our app. So now we know, if you've got a meeting coming up, and you need to travel to get there, maybe there's a car trip involved, we know, obviously, the forecast. We know what traffic might be, and we can give you heads up, an alert, that says, hey you might want to leave 15 minutes early for that meeting coming up. That's in the Samsung product right now, which is really, again, helping people make better decisions. So we've got a lot of examples like that. But again, the calendar integration in the Made for Samsung app is really exciting. We recently announced, in fact I think it was this morning, we announced integration with Trip Advisor. So similarly, if we see time on your calendar, and the weather is fine for the weekend, we might suggest outdoor activities for you to go and explore, using Trip Advisor's almost one-billion library of events that they have. >> What's the coolest thing you guys are working on right now? >> Oh, that's a very long list. I say that I'm probably the luckiest guy in IBM right now, because I get to work with millions of consumers, we reach 250 million consumers a month, and I'm also bringing Watson to consumers, and artificial intelligence, which is a unique challenge to solve. Introducing consumers to a new paradigm of user interaction and abilities. So, I think the most exciting thing is taking artificial intelligence and machine-learning, and bringing that to consumers at scale, and solving some of the challenges there. >> Well contratulations. I'm a big fan of IBM, what they're doing with weather data, The Weather Company, The Weather Channel. Bringing that data and immersing it into these new networks that are being created, new capabilities, really helps the consumer, so. Hope to see you at the Think conference coming up next year. >> Yes, we are excited about that, and stay tuned, we may have some more exciting stuff to unveil. >> Make sure our writers get ahold of it, break the stories. It's The Cube, bringing you the data. The weather's fine in San Francisco today. I'm John Farrier with The Cube. More live from San Francisco, from the SDC Samsung Developer Conference, after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017 brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay, welcome back and we're live here in San Francisco for the Samsung Developer Conference, SDC2017. I'm John Furrier. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage, and I'm excited to have an amazing guest, Amanda Cooloong who's a chief storyteller, Women in Tech International, Tech TV, TechZula. She's been really a storyteller in digital for a long time. Great to have you on. Been following all your Twittersphere and your content. >> Thank you. >> You did some work with Leo Laporte, Jason Calcanis, both this week in tech's kind of version of the scene. >> Mm hm. >> What are you up to now? >> Well I am working very closely with Women in Technology International, WITI. It is the largest, oldest organization for women in tech. They have a huge summit that they put on in San Jose every year, and I'm sort of the class clown for that and emcee the conference and lead the charge there. >> Well certainly you know what's interesting you have kind of a cool vibe, you're a cool person, you know tech, you know cloud computing. >> Mm hm. >> You've been in inside baseball for the tech scene. >> Mm hm. >> But now the consumer market with digital. >> Yeah. >> Pretty powerful, I mean like finally us geeks now have a national and global stage to flex our geekness, so you see nerds- >> We're suddenly cool? >> Cool to be a geek and now you see well the programmer calls us over thank god. >> (laughs) Well is it? >> Well the bad side of it. The good side of the democratization is happening. >> Right. >> So now you have an augmented reality. So it's just some cool stuff happening. What are you most impressed with? >> What am I most impressed with? Well I love Blockchain. I've been involved with some of that for three or four years now. I actually had a podcast about Blockchain and Bitcoin. And I'm really excited about what that means for investment specifically and ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings. My friend Brock Pierce is a big, big figurehead with all of that, with Blockchain Capital. And I believe that, especially for women that are looking to get into investment and get back in the earlier stage of things, I think ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings, are a huge opportunity for them to really change up the venture world. >> So when you say ICOs, which we know a lot about 'cause we're doing one at SiliconANGLE the next couple quarters. >> Yeah. >> No rush to do it but we're going to use our own cryptocurrency. But those nuances, when you say investment do you mean as an alternative to venture capital investment or actually investing in, say, the currency itself? >> Both. But I think of it as a completely new way to invest in companies. And there are so many barriers especially for women in technology... Again, that's a big platform for me. To getting into that world that ICOs just are completely changing up the entire ecosystem there. >> Well we're seen a ton of stuff. You saw Lisa Fetterman was on earlier. >> Mm hm. >> She had a huge success with her Kickstarter. Now she's got some pretty glamorous products. The cooking thing is pretty sexy, right? >> Mm hm. >> That thing could go- >> Sous vide, even the term sous vide. I mean, it's so fresh (laughs) >> I would put money to that. I mean it's just so... But that's a good example of Kickstarter. When we look at some of the ICOs, a lot of people are raising some serious capital in utility and stock or securities. >> Mm hm. >> Although the regulations are a moving train. But on the utility side it's a no-brainer. There's some significant cash being raised. In some cases, five to 50 million plus in token sales. >> Mm hm. >> That's like Kickstarter on steroids. >> It really is, and some people are afraid of it. You know, some people are saying that's completely absurd. Why would you ever do that? I personally would say don't put all of your eggs in one basket either. We know that. There's volatility anywhere. But, again, I think it's opening a lot of doors and giving certain people opportunities that they didn't have before. >> So how is your Bitcoin position these days? >> I may have been an early investor in some Bitcoin. I may obsessively look at the value every 15 minutes or so. No, I am fortunate. I listened to my mentors, and luckily I love emerging tech, so I'm doing well in that regard. >> I saw a post on Facebook: If you just bought 10 in bitcoin and smoked weed and sat on the beach and clipped coupons all day and did nothing else, you'd be worth 20 million dollars. >> Let's just say I know people that have actually bought castles with it. I'm not joking. >> What I like about the crypto Boxchain side is that there's an early community growing. So what's your analysis, because a lot of people want to know, is it Silk Road guys? Are they bad actors? Bitcoin's the underbelly of the internet. Early adopter. >> Those stories were so funny at the beginning. I mean, I live in LA. Everyone loves the sensationalized story. And of course that existed with Bitcoin too, and yes, there was some truth to it. >> Oh of course there was. >> Yes, absolutely the Silk Road story was real. >> Anonymous and encrypted transactions. >> Oh yes. >> That's going to attract some honey to the bees. >> There's a reason why certain people can't come back into the country. Let's just leave it at that. However, we've also seen major financial institutions get onboard. You know, Fintech has exploded. There's a lot of legitimacy to Blockchain and the distributed ledger technology. >> It's one of the fastest growing products in the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger project- >> Yes. >> Which is just going gangbusters. IBM's behind it. >> Yep. >> So it's got that opensource vibe, I get that. But the community, talk about the community because there are people who are leading the community. You said you know a few of them. >> What's your take on the community? How big is it? It's emerging, obviously, it's growing. What's the protocol for new entrants coming in? What's the behavior norms? >> Sure. It's grown in leaps and bounds, I can say that. I mean, from the time I did my Bitcoin podcast a few years ago to now, back then it was very much the bro culture to a degree, a lot of libertarians (laughs), a lot of folks that couldn't come back in the country, to be quite honest. But there were certain people that came out of that movement though like Brock Pierce that really thought ahead to how do we legitimize this, how do we make sure that this is white knighted, so to speak. >> Yeah, well it's a revolutionary... It's fundamental. I had the founder of Alibaba Cloud on the record. Haven't published a video yet so this is exclusive material. He said, I asked him about Blockchain. He says it's fundamental to the internet. It is the internet. >> It is, mm hm. >> Just like TCP/IP was in the stack. >> Absolutely. >> He was adamant that this is not on top of the internet. It's fundamental to... He's talking about Blockchain. >> Yep. >> Absolutely 'cause it's supply chain, it's currency, it's a zillion things. >> It's not just coins. Everyone focused in on Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin. It's a distributed ledger technology. So it goes hand in hand with the internet of things. So the two have become very much married in that regard. >> You know, all these guys I interview on The Cube over the years, and certainly I lived through it, talk about the waves, the PC wave. >> Mm hm. They talk about the client server wave. Client server essentially, it's not so much about the mini computers 'cause the mini computers were not the client server wave 'cause that was proprietary operating systems and proprietary hardware. >> Mm hm. >> HP. >> Right. >> What made client server was TCP/IP. That created Threecom, Cisco, interoperability. So that really was that second wave. People are comparing Blockchain to TCP/IP. >> I can see that. >> Dr. Wang from Alibaba Cloud. Other people are saying like the dot com bubble, euphoric excitement. >> Yeah. >> So that begs the question. Who can bring functionality... This is my thesis. I want to test it with you. >> Mm hm. >> Who can bring functionality and simplicity? Because all the successes in Web 1.0, was Yahoo a directory of links, simple, easy to use. Cisco Routers, connect your networks, it works. So simplicity and functionality seems to be the norm in the Blockchain world. >> Mm hm. >> What's your thoughts on that? Can you share your reaction to that? >> Simplicity and functionality, I mean, for me it's- >> In terms of the winners versus the losers 'cause that's what people want to know with Blockchain. Where's the scams and where the legit? >> Mm hm, well the scams are the people that came from the gaming side that had no real business expanding out the way that they did and everybody loses their coin. But we won't name names there. I think more- >> It's okay to name names. >> (laughs) But with functionality, I mean again, I keep going back to its marriage with IOT, you know, the ledger based technology and just being able to do anything transactional. That's the simplicity of it for me, the fact that it's opensource, the fact that, yeah, I think that's the core of it. >> So let's talk about Samsung. We're here's at the Samsung event. >> Sure. >> How do you see these guys? We were talking about Blockchain. It's kind of the next big wave coming. Obviously a lot of things underneath that, but above that you've got software machine learning, all the goodness of open source is growing exponentially. That wave is coming to exponential growth in opensource, code shipments, meaning more people using opensource, and things like Blockchain. How does that impact a Samsung, an Apple, an Amazon? >> Well I think opensource is necessary for IOT specifically. Obviously that would be shut down without that. I've been talking with a lot of the developers here, the Samsung-specific people saying what is it that's exciting you about this forward movement, like with the keynote this morning. What do we need? How do we move this entire industry forward with IOT? And they're excited about the platform that Samsung has announced this morning in terms of just the ubiquity of everything working together in comparison to, well, a lot of other... Sorry. >> So the crypto thing is also tying into that too. >> Yes. >> I was tying that with IOT because IOT has some security issues. >> Right. >> So we can argue maybe- >> Some security issues? (laughs) >> Well the surface area. So you know, the theme in the enterprise is, you know, cloud computing. There's no moat anymore, there's no firewall. >> Yeah. >> Perimiterless security. Perimiterless problems. It means the edge is a surface area, and we've seen these attacks coming. >> Right. >> That's a problem. >> Mm hm. >> So there's no silver bullet right now. >> Yeah. >> So Samsung probably is cagey right now on the data. >> Exactly. >> They've got some security products, but smarter things is their kind of pitch. >> And then everybody keeps saying well who owns the security piece, who's responsible for the security piece. I think that's a big question we're going to see popping up a lot because the security piece is going to be a very valuable piece to all of this, especially when you're looking at edge computing too and data being passed back and forth between the edge. I would rather see everything stay with just the edge devices, personally. >> Yeah, well it's easier to manage, why do you want to move data across the network? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Move compute it's more efficient. >> Yeah. >> So final take on augmented reality VR. >> Oh, okay. >> What's imploding? What's imploded? What's growing? What's rising? What's falling? >> Sure. >> We had a comment earlier, said VR 1.0 is over. >> It really is. I personally think AR is where it's at. I've watched a lot of things on the VR front and a lot of it was marketing speak. I think we need a bigger push on the hardware side for VR to work effectively too. We also need to look at the audience there. And a lot of people are complaining, well I don't just want to go disappear into a separate world. A lot of women, actually, are complaining about that side of it. But the AR side I think has way more application. >> Yeah, crawl, walk, run in virtual space, basically. >> Yeah, yeah. VR I think will still be a place, but I think AR is going to be a bigger explosion. >> One of the things we were talking about earlier was as folks have been through many waves you and I've seen, waves of innovation, Web 1.0, the early adopters were the adult industry with banners 'cause they were about making money. We saw this wave. We're seeing the Silk Roads and Blockchain. Arbitrage comes from usually bad actors and not usually desirable actors. >> Right. >> But one big indicator of the current user experience we're seeing is the gaming culture, right. >> Mm hm. >> Gaming right now seems to be the early adopter indicator of the major trend lines 'cause it's gamification, it's a little bit analog, multiplayer. >> Look at Unity. Unity has a huge presence here at SDC and especially on the VR front if you want to look at that. Unity's a huge player there. >> What are some of the things you see coming out of the gaming world? 'Cause we've seen virtual currencies, ICO, lot of storage, lot of dynamic, realtime. >> Yeah. Gaming mechanism too across the board always play into this too, but I think the big one is ICOs for me. That's the one I've been focusing on a lot, yeah. >> I'd like to follow up more with you on the ICO thing. We're doing a whole programming on that on November second, love to have you. >> Mm hm. Look at what Crystal Rose with Sensay's been doing. >> Who? >> Crystal Rose, Sensay, she's launched her own ICO called SENSE. >> SENSE. Great, looking forward to chatting more. >> Mm hm, out of LA. >> Final question for you for the folks not here. What's the vibe here? How would you describe SDC2017? >> I love that there's a great vibe of innovation. Honestly, I've been to some other stodgier conferences lately, and this one definitely has a nice playful, creative vibe. >> B2B is boring to boring. This is not- >> I know, you were talking about E2E, everything to everything. See, I was listening. >> You were. >> Everything to everything. Exciting to exciting. >> Exciting. >> See, I listened to that too. Yeah, I would say there's a lot of creativity here. There's a lot of side conversations happening. That's important. And I see a good balance of men and women, so that makes me happy. >> Well I'm excited from Vanessa for bringing on a great lineup, you included. >> Thank you. >> Great to meet you in person. Had a great conversation here inside The Cube. I'm John Furrier here, exclusive coverage of the SDC2017. We'll be back after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017, brought to you by Samsung. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage, exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference, SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. Next guest is Patrick Moorhead who is the president and principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy, friend of theCUBE. We see him everywhere we go. He's quoted in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, all the top publications, and today, he was just on Power Lunch on CNBC. Here for our Power Cube segment, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for being here, and I appreciate you putting up with me heckling you from outside of theCUBE. >> Always great to have you on. Hard hitting, you're one of the best analysts in the business. We know you work hard, we see you at all the events that we go to. I got to get your take, Samsung. Obviously now obviously you run in parallel, at some point on Amazon, obviously winning in the cloud. Samsung downplaying their cloud, but calling about smart things. I get that, the cloud is kind of fragmented, they're trying to hide the ball there, I get that. But they talk about IOT which you got to talk about cloud without IOT, what's your analysis of Samsung? >> Yeah so first off, Samsung is a collection of really really successful stovepiped companies, right? You have displays, you have semiconductors, you have mobile phones, you have all these different areas and they say a lot of times your strength is sometimes your weakness, and the divisions just don't talk a whole lot. But what they did, and this is the first time I've seen this in a long time, is they got on the same page and said you know, we have to work together because IOT and connected and intelligent connectedness can't be done in stovepipes, we can't all go do our thing. So they're agreeing on standards, they're doing some really good stuff. >> And obviously we know from the cloud game now go back to the enterprises, more consumer, backing in from the edge, obviously the edge being devices and other things, I get that. But now the horizontally scalable nature of the cloud is the holy grail, we've seen Amazon's success continue to boom, they do more compute than any other cloud out I think combined. Maybe outside Google with their internal cloud. That horizontal resource pool, serverless as example trend, IOT, you got to have, the stovepipes got to be decimated. However, you need specialism at the application level. >> That's exactly right, and a smartphone will act a little bit differently from a camera which would be different from a refrigerator as we saw, right? Samsung wants the new meeting area to be, well not the new meeting area, we all meet in the kitchen, but the connected meeting area. So they all act differently, so they have to have even though they're different devices they have to connect into that horizontal cloud to make it efficient enough and effective enough for good responsiveness. >> I like the message of smart things, I think that's phenomenal, and I like that 'cause it connects their things, which are consumer things, and people like 'em, like you said very successful stovepipes. The question that I ask here and I try to get the execs to talk about it but they weren't answering yet, and I think it's by design. They're not talking about the data. Because again at the end of the day what's different from Alibaba again last week when I was in China, they are very up front. We're all about data acquisition and using the data to fuel the user experience. >> Right. >> That has to traverse across stovepipes. So is Samsung baked in that area, they have things going on, what's your analysis of data traversal across, is Bixby 2.0 the answer? >> So companies have to take, particularly consumer companies related to the cloud, have to have one or two paths. The one that says, we're not going to mine personal data to either sell you products or run ads, so Facebook, AWS and even Google, that's their business model, and then the other side you have people like Apple who are only going to use the data to make the products and experiences better. I think, I'll just pontificate here, the reason you're not getting a straight answer is I don't think they know exactly what they want to do yet. Because look at the market cap of Facebook. Apple, and even Amazon is planning to start and expand their own ad network. So I just don't think they know yet. Now what I would recommend to them is- >> Or they might not have visibility on it product-wise. So there's knowing what to do, or how to do it, versus the product capability. >> Well they have access to a ton of data, so if you're using Samsung Mail, if you're using, they know every application gets deleted, usage models of those applications. So they know a lot more than I think people think. They have a lot more data than people probably give them credit for. >> So they're going to hide the ball, I think they said that they're buying more time, I would agree with you there. Alright, question on IOT. Do you think that hangs together, that strategy? Obviously security updates to chip-level, that's one thing, can they succeed with IOT in this emerging stovepipe collapse fabric that they're bringing out? >> So I need to do a little bit more research on the security and also their scalability. 'Cause if you're going to connect billions of devices you have to have scalability and we already saw what GE Predix did, right? They did an about-face and partnered up with AWS realizing they just couldn't handle the scale and the complexity. And the second thing is the security model and how things like RM Embed Cloud and the latest announcements from Intel which is how from a gateway perspective you secure this work. So I have to go do some research on this. >> And by the way it's a moving train, you mentioned the GE thing, great example, I mean let's take that example, I got to ask you about cloud, because let's talk about Amazon, Cloud Foundry. Cloud Foundry became this thing and Pivotal tried to take and shape it, now they're claiming huge success, some are questioning the numbers. They're claiming victory on one hand, and I hear record, record, record! But I just don't see any cloud on Cloud Foundry out there. >> Yeah and I think the reason is, PCF, Pivotal Cloud Foundry is a Fortune 500 thing. And if I compare Fortune 500 to startups and other people, there's not nearly as much activity in the Fortune 500 as there is with the startups and the cloud native companies. So I'm optimistic. >> So you're saying Pivotal Cloud is more Fortune 500, less cloud native? >> Exactly, exactly. >> How about Amazon, what's your take, I know you were on Power Lunch kind of, now you're on the Power Cube, our new segment that you just invented by being here. (laughing) What is the Amazon take, 'cause that Reinvent event's coming up, what's the preview? Obviously we're going to have some one on ones with Jassi and the team beforehand, theCUBE will be there with two sets to come on if you're going to be there I'd love to have you on. >> I'd love to. >> Again, what's the preview for AWS Reinvent? >> AWS right, they had a seven-year headstart on almost everybody and then Azure and GCP just recently jumped in, and if you notice over the past year they've been firing canons at each other. One vendor says hey, I do by the minute pricing, and then another one says, oh, I have the by-the-second pricing, right, and I'm going to accept VMWare, oh no I'm not doing VMWare, I'm doing SAP. So what you have now is a feature fest and a fistfight now. AWS is no longer the only man standing here. So what I'm expecting is they are going to come in and make the case that, okay, we still are the best choice not just for IAS but also for PAS, okay? Because they have a lot of competition. And also I think they're going to fill in gaps in some of the regional services where oh they don't have GPUs in a certain country. Oh, I don't have FPGAs over here. I think they're going to fill that in to look better against GCP and Azure. >> I know you cover Intel as well, I was just over there and saw some of the folks there, I saw some of the Linux Foundation folks, obviously you're seeing Intel be more a computing company, not a chip company anymore, they have that Five-G end to end UK Mind and Mobile World Congress, talked a little bit about Five-G. End-to-end is big message here at Samsung, how is Intel positioned in all this, what's your take on Intel? >> Yes so I think related to Intel, I think in some areas they're competitors, because they have their own gateway solutions, they don't have cloud solutions but they have the gateway solutions. Regarding to some of the endpoints, Intel has exited the small cork endpoints in watches, so I would say right now there's less overlap with Intel now. >> From Samsung perspective? >> Exactly, now on the back end it's more than likely there's a 99% chance that the back end doing the cloud processing is going to be Intel. >> If I'm Samsung, why wouldn't I want to partner within Samsung? 'Cause they make their own chips, is that the issue or is it more a...? >> No, I think Samsung up until this point hasn't taken a lot of responsibility for the cloud. So this is a first step, and I think it would make a good partnership. >> And Intel could get the home theater market, the home, how connected home is, but every CES going back 10 years has been a connected home theme. Finally they could get it here. >> That's right, and I have seen Intel get into things, a lot of Amazon's products with the cameras in the bedroom and in the bathroom, scary stuff. But Movidius, silicon that's doing object recognition, that is a place where I think they compete which frankly Samsung could develop the silicon but they just don't have it. Silicon doesn't have capability that a Movidius has. That can be used in any type of camera. >> Okay so final question I know we got to break here and I appreciate you coming on, making room for you, PowerCUBE segment here in San Francisco at SDC 2017. Ecosystem, we hear the host of SDC, Thomas Coe, come up and saying we're going to be honest and transparent to the community here at large in San Francisco and around the globe, kind of incurring that they've been kind of stovepiped and they're going to open up, they believe in open cloud, open IOT, and he talks about ecosystem, I'm not seeing a lot of ecosystem partners around here. What does Samsung need to do to, well first of all, what's your letter grade on the ecosystem and certainly they got an opportunity. What moves should they be making to build a robust healthy ecosystem, because we know you can't do it end to end without support in the white spaces. >> Yeah so I go to a lot of the developer conferences, whether it's Microsoft Build, Apple WWDC, and even the enterprise ones, and this is a smaller, low-key event and I think first and foremost, operating system drives a lot of the ecosystem. And other than Tizen they don't have an operating system. So what they're doing is they're working on the connectedness of it, which is a different kind of ecosystems, it's farther up in the stack, but I think what they can do is they have to be very clear and differentiated and I think back to our earlier, our first conversation, they're not going to mine the data, therefore they're the safe place for you, consumer and our smart things ecosystem, to put your data. And we're going to help you make money to do that, because I don't think Google is as interested in that and I don't think Amazon is as interested in that either. >> They were clear, they said permission-based and even if they don't know what their permission is offering we're going to take the conservative route and protect the data, but they still got to use the data. They got to get their cloud story together, if they want to do the data play, cloud has to be more clear at least in my mind. >> Well I think what they can do is they're sitting on and they will sit on a bigger treasure trove of data that can help their partners deliver better experiences and products, because if you're at the epicenter and you're at that smart things hub? You know everything that's going on in that home whether it's your stuff or your partner's stuff. >> Yeah and they got to be trusted, and they got to be transparent, okay. Patrick Moorhead from Moorhead Insights here on theCUBE, great analyst, follow him everywhere on Twitter, your Twitter handle is, let me just get the Twitter handle. >> It's @patrickmoorhead. >> Okay, @patrickmoorhead on Twitter. He travels the world, gets the data and so does theCUBE, traveling for you, this is John Furrier. More after this short break. (electronic beats)

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. (futuristic music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here in San Francisco, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference, SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host theCube. My next guest is James Stansberry. SVP, Senior Vice President general manager of ARTIK, IoT of Samsung, AR kid, art kid, whatever you want to call it, is the IoT piece key-note presenter today. Thanks for spending the time, thanks for coming on. >> It's my pleasure John. Thanks for having us. >> So we love the IOT story. We covered it heavily across all of our other shows we come to, but now as the edge of the network becomes human, and machines, you guys have the devices, you have the home, you have The SmartThing strategy. Everything's a device, it's everything to everything now. >> Most people think of Samsung as a consumer electronics company. What ARTIK actually is is an enabling platform to enable other devices. So we build and end to end Iot platform, which includes The Cloud. And today we re-branded it The SmartThings Cloud. Down into network devices. Gateways and inodes. So we actually enable not just Samsung products, but we enable other company's products to be connected to the Internet. Almost regardless of the market, not even consumer. >> Thomas Ko was on earlier talking about this open strategy, which is great, and he was very humble. He said look, we're going to be honest and transparent. This is the new Samsung way. We're going to (mumbles) the developers. We're going to be completely open. We're not going to try to lock you into Samsung, although we have some intelligence and tips and what not, which is cool. And I think that's going to play well with the developers. But you introduced something that was pretty compelling on stage, and this is to me, the key observation from theCUBE team, is the security module. Take us through specifically what you announced and what does it mean to the developer community and what is the impact? >> Okay, and before I do that, let me just talk about what's happening to security. We all know about Mirai and WannaCry and these things just keep happening. And in order for us to be able to stop these threats, we have to up the level of security. And what we announced today was an end-to-end security platform that utilizes the hardware that we supply, connected to our Cloud, and overlaying it on top of this hardware Cloud platform and abstracting it in such a way that is easy to implement. But it's and end-to-end security and it contains all the major components you need to be able to secure an IoT network, from basically down network. And I can explain it more it you'd like. >> Yeah, so down network means from the device. >> From The Cloud actually. >> Or from the device through The Cloud. The question that people will ask is, and this is where I'd love to get your explanation on is, they don't want Silos. They want to have the horizontally scalable nature of The Cloud but they want the specialism of the IoT device. Some software. Could be an AR application. That could be a virtual interface into a cell tower or whatever but, being done we see those all the time, but I want a full stat, but I don't want to be locked in. So want to move to something SmartThing over there. How do you guys enable that security end-to-end? >> It's really important. With the security, we don't create any proprietary solutions. As a matter of fact, if you look at we've implemented it, we use third party partners and we use standards. For example, how we do a secure over the air update to an Indo device, we actually use a standard piece of software that's specified by a standard called LW M to M. Most people, embedded designers, will know what this is. We use a public key infrastructure. We use well known code signing capability. >> FPGA, kind of thing? Field-programmable gate arrays? >> No. In terms of the code signing I'm talking about, if I write a piece of code and I want to authenticate that it's the code that I wrote that is on the device a year from now, I'll create a hash, store the hash, when I boot it, I compare that hash and make sure that no one has modified it. By the way, it's a known hack. You're inserting bad, malicious code on a device. That's one of the things you want to avoid. The other thing we use is very standardized encryption. We use TLS. Part of the HTTPS standard. And in that we use very well known encryptography. The other thing we do is we create a hardware root of trust, using a secure element. These are the same devices that are used in Smart cars today. It's not new science, it's just the smart way to do it to actually create a root of trust. >> What would you say if someone who's new to Samsung, maybe watching here today, as he knows the Samsung brand 'cause you guys now are expanding a brand, across the platform and fabric of Samsung, you're seeing it here, in the smart home, kitchen examples, smart Tvs. It's all over the place. There's no doubt what Samsung is. Explain the premise of the IoT strategy and what the goals are, what the objectives, and how does that relate to someones impression of Samsung that they know. >> I'll maybe give some insight inside Samsung. Maybe people don't realize that we really are an IoT company in many ways because inside our factories, we use IoT to run our smart factories. So we actually are a consumer. We set the goal of connecting all of our devices by 2020. The consumer products. So in order to be, IoT is connected devices. What ARTIK does, is actually a platform, that is not necessarily consumer focused but brings IoT to markets like smart factories, commercial buildings, healthcare, home appliances. It's actually multi-faceted. And not just Samsung products. We enable devices that are non-Samsung to create their own ecosystem or connect to our ecosystem. >> So a headline on siliconANGLE.com today is timely for you and I put it in context because it might have a little bit more range on the IoT side but one of our managing engineers, Paul Gillin, writes a story "Who owns the data from the 'internet of things'? "That's about to become a very big deal". So it's kind of provocative. Who owns the IoT data? That's about to become a big deal. I've read the article and what he's basically saying is you've got vehicles our there that connected. You've got smart things everywhere now. >> [James Stansberry] That's a great question. >> And there's also what do you do with the data? Do you move compute to the data? Do you move data across the network? These are physics questions, these are architectural questions, that is the bigger scheme, maybe outside the scope of STC, but lend a point or two to what's happening at the edge. >> So first of all, you have to define that data. (chuckles) Right? There's personally identified data and there's data that's been extracted from that. And I think that you're going to see some regulation around that, especially in Europe. Defining exactly what that is. From a Samsung perspective, I think it's pretty clear. We believe that the consumer owns the data. If we ever use it, it's being done with the consumer's permission. >> John Furrier: That's a very key word. >> Yeah. >> Permission based. >> Oh, of course. And I think that that's where most regulations going to go and I think that's where the industry will generally go. >> That's what we're seeing in Europe. >> And that's personally indentifying. >> Yeah, they're information. But you also have to balance out the openness of data. This is the GPRS kind of debate, right, which is you want to have a strict policy to protect the person's data, at the same time, offer organic ways to provide a great user experience with the data. And you fuel the experience with data, but the protection, it's a hard problem. >> Okay, it's even more complicated because individually some people are more open about the consumption of their data than other people. And what that actually means is the individuals have to start to manage their data. And so what does that mean, everybody has a web portal that says I have, I give this level? I don't know. And so, that's actually one of the unanswered question is how does a consumer manage their own data and other peoples access to it. >> But we think, and our indications were looking at the future, we think this is where Blockchain is relevant. Not so much the bit currency like Bitcoin or Ethereum but Blockchain is an immutable, decentralized, not just distributed, decentralized (mumbles) >> One way to actually keep track of what they're allowing, but at some point they have to specify. (chuckles) And I think there's the trick. >> This is the fun part about tech is it looks a lot of promise, looks good off the tee as they say in golf, but there's off-chain and on-chain dynamics, in terms of mining, Bitcoin. >> In the meantime, I think, people are just going to opt in. >> Yeah. >> That's how they need to get permission. >> Where society is impacting, were seeing this big time with IoT, these are norms that are coming. This is a yet to be written chapter. >> Yeah. We're going to see. You mentioned GPRS and they are going to regulate it. There will be the people who have to manage it. We'll see how that works and we'll probably evolve from that. >> The Y2K problem of our generation because there's consequences to that regulation. >> Yep. It'll probably go as well as Y2K. Which didn't go bad! (chuckles) >> It's going to be disaster. I'll say it, it's going to be a disaster. It puts extra pressure on companies, especially ones that are using Cloud, so I think this would be an example where Samsung's SmartThings Cloud, might be helpful. This is the big security. Do we need a do-over? Probably yes. >> What we will do, is we will do everything we can to secure their data and, again, going back to if they chose to allow us, or to provide the data for someone to use it, then that's up to them. But we will do everything we can to secure it on the device, in the network, and in our Cloud. >> People have things. We're walking around with things like this. That's a device. It's a Samsung, it's a j phone (ahem). I got to get the better phones so I'm working on that today. We'll get the Samsung, great new phones. >> Yeah. >> That's entertainment. That's ecommerce. That's web services kind of rolled into one. That's essentially what The SmartThings is about, pretty much, right? >> It absolutely is. Absolutely is. On the consumer side, I would say. But I would say, IoT is more than just consumer. It's healthcare. It's in hospitals. It's in factories. It's going to be in your car. It's in autonomous vehicles. >> We coined the term here on theCUBE, I think I did, e to e. Everything to everything. >> Yes. >> B to b is boring to boring. Consumer to consumer is old. So you bring them together, it's everything to everything. Exciting to exciting. >> We describe our business model as b to b so I guess I'll take it! I'll own it! >> If you look at b to b marketing, I'm not picturing marketing, (laughs) look at Facebook. Their slogan was move fast, break stuff to move fast, make sure it's secure. Boring is secure. (chuckles) B to b is exciting. You got augmented reality. You got Cloud computing. I mean literally, unlimited potential compute power that's available through Cloud. It's certainly transformative for enterprises, so we think it's going to be pretty exciting. I personally think. I just don't like the b to b thing. But that's us. (laughter) Anything else you'd like to share with the audience here on the event here? Observations, what's your thoughts? >> By the way, I appreciate the opportunity. I think the really important thing here, and maybe Thomas mentioned this, is Samsung's integrating basically five Clouds together. And these are coming from mobile, from digital display, from digital appliances, to SmartThings, to ARTIK. Being a maker of devices, and then having this open ARTIK platform, really, I believe, is going to position Samsung in a very unique way in IoT. Not just for our own products, but for people to interact with our products and create new services. So I'm really excited about it. >> I think the ecosystem opportunity is big too. One of the things we're seeing in The Cloud community here in North America, and starting to see it in China with Alibaba, is hardware configurations are now being dictated by the workload. >> Yeah. >> So what's happening is hardware soft stacks, technology in hardware, are being configured. Storage might be configured differently based upon the legacy requirements, so now you have hardware stacks that haven't been tested at scale. This is a huge issue in enterprise. 'Cause if they have multiple clusters for say a data lag, and then a real time in memory cluster, who tested that? >> Yeah. >> This is where the opportunity on the hardware side is interesting. Any thoughts on that? >> Not necessarily on the data center side. I was actually thinking about on the network side, with compute moving to the edge, what we ended up having to do is we actually created ARTIK zeros. Which are these low compute, single protocol devices for Indo devices like lights. And then when RT357, which are dual processing core, quad-quad processing core, and octa processing core, just because of the variations in the type of computation that has to be done actually in the network because the application for IoT are from extremely low power to extremely high compute. In some cases, we see AI machine learning coming to the edge. That's just totally off the scale to inference (mumbles) >> You put the data center at the edge, at some point >> It's coming. >> It's coming. >> It's the tide. It's going to move up The Cloud, then it's going to come back down. >> No virtual machines, non-volatile memory at the edge, fabrics are going to be out there... Here's theCUBE, bringing you all the data here at SDC 2017 with James Stansberry, who's the Senior Vice President, general manager of Samsung IoT. I'm John Furrier. More cube coverage, after this short break. (futuristic music)