>> Male's Voice: From around the globe, its theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. (soft music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special announcement for Nutanix, about some new product releases in the public cloud. To help us kick this off for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome to the program Jordan Reizes, who's the vice president of marketing, for APJ and Nutanix. Jordan, help us introduce it. Thanks Stu. So today we're really pleased to announce Nutanix Clusters, availability in Asia Pacific and Japan, at the same time as the rest of the world. And we think this technology is really important to our geographically dispersed customers, all across the region, in terms of helping them, On-Ramp to the cloud. So, we're really excited about this launch today. And Stu, I can't wait to see the rest of the program. And make sure you stay tuned at the end, for our interview with our CTO, Justin Hurst. Who's going to be answering a bunch of questions that are really specific to the APJ region. >> All right, thank you so much Jordan, for helping us kick this off. We're now going to cut over to my interview with Monica and Tarkan, with the news. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed. And that has changed some of the priorities, for many companies out there. Acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe, or thinking about, where they were going to cloud. And of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers, and the like. So, we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening, and make sure that our workforce, and our customers are all taken care of. So, one of the front seats of this, is of course, companies working to help modernize customers out there. And, Nutanix is part of that discussion. So, I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix. I have two of our CUBE alumnus. First of all, we have Monica Kumar. She's the senior vice president of product, with Nutanix. And Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer. Second time on theCUBE, in his new role many time guests. Previously, Tarkan is the chief commercial officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right. So, Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that, IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general. But in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So, why don't you explain to us, the special cloud announcement. Tell us, what's Nutanix launching, and why it's so important today. >> So, Stu first of all, thank you. And glad to be here with Monica. And basically you and I, spend some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you, the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we never seen before. Especially with this pandemic backdrop, as we're going through. And obviously, all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously, health challenges and across the world, all the pain it creates. But also it creates some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers, and commercial customers, and in a public sector customers, in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains, and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context, Monica knows as well as she's our leader. You know, our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-class strategy as a company. As you know, is too well, Nutanix wrote the book, in digital infrastructures with its own private, (mumbles) infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level, via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions, and end user computer solutions. Now, the multicloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So, in this launch, we have our new, hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available in the AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms, and customers, and partners at sealable executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important, because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus what's important for them, save money for them, and making sure they streamlined their IT operation. So it's a huge launch for us. And we're super excited about it. >> Yeah. And the one thing I would add too, what Tarkan said too is, look, we talk to a lot of customers, and obviously cloud is the constant, in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation? But really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we are excited about is we're bringing, making really a hybrid cloud reality, across public and private cloud. But also making sure customers, get the cost efficiency they need, when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed, watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI Space and Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that, true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multicloud, simplicity is not the first thing that I think of. So, Tarkan has helped us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done, for so long now in the data center, into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu you're spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about Nutanix executive team, you're very customer-driven. And I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So, just recently I was with a senior executive, C level executive of an airline. Right before that, Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris. Right before the pandemic, we were actually traveling. Talking to, not all the CIO, the chief operating officer on one of these huge banks. And the biggest issue was, how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop with the economic stress. And obviously, now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, he was an airline executive. "Look Tarkan, in the next four months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less, in so many different ways, while I'm cutting costs." So it's a tough time. So, in that context is to... Your actually right. Multicloud is in a difficult proposition, but it's critical, for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us, is not a destination, it's a means to an ends. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is still the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures, to deliver, end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to making sure to take advantage of, these VDI decibels service topic capability. So in that context, what we are providing now to this CIOs who are going through, this difficult time is, a platform, in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud, based on their needs, with freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank. They have a workloads on AWS, they have workload on Azure, they have workloads on Google, workloads on (indistinct), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany. They have workloads providers in Asia, in Taiwan, and other locations. On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for VR. And then, this is not just in this nation. This is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use, all these operating models and move our data, and applications from cloud to cloud? In simple terms, can we get, some kind of a flexibility with commits as well as we pay credits they paid for so far? And, those are things we're working on. And I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail, as we talk to this. You are super excited, to start this journey with AWS, with this launch, but you're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just kind of discussed with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds, both on-prem and off-prem, for our customers to cut costs, and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add, to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multicloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more detail, but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement, and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers, and how do they decide, what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud? It's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So, when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect, or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure. And as we talk to customers too, this clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to, build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud, right? In case of, a demand of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say a VDI environment. or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply, and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR, and we saw with COVID, right? Business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly, in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, of which many customers talk about is, can I lift and shift my applications as is, into the cloud? Without having to rewrite a single line of code, or without having to rewrite all of it, right? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is, how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services, that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course. But in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, right? VDI, which is Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, and is a computing, and also databases. More and more of our customers, don't want to invest in again having, on-premises data center assets sitting there idly. And, wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to what Tarkan was talking about, really their three key reasons, why the current hybrid cloud solutions, haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough, to actually put into real execution. You know, with Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within, under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters, which you have on-premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon, under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan, that we offer on-prem, that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then, you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you're going to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs, making sure you know, how you're going to incur costs. How about, if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We allow the... We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing, where to place which workload. Which workload goes into public cloud, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called beam, that gives the customers that ability to assess, which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this. You know, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell. You know, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand of course? You're probably going to need to anonymize. But, I'd like to understand, how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia, I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine, if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row, well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they are getting ready with now clusters, to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud, in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS, and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event-driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer, who is in the insurance business. For them, DR is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry in every business. But for them, they realize that they need to be able to, transparently run the applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using non Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of the database applications into, AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring, their a part of the data center estate, and moving that completely to AWS, with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as a backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity, and spin up hundreds and thousands of remote employees, using clusters into AWS cloud. Using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for the solution. Because now it's so easy to use. We have customers, really surprised going, "Wait, I now have built a whole hybrid card within an hour. And I was able to scale from, six nodes, to 60 nodes, just like that, on AWS cloud from on-prem six nodes, to 16 in AWS cloud. Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use, and how quickly they can scale, using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah. Tarkan I have to imagine that, this is a real change for the conversation you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partner with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix, at the reinvent show. But, cloud is definitely front and center, in a lot of your customer's conversations. So, with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect, to the conversations that you can have. >> Actually Stu, as you heard from Monica too. As I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers, right? I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, there's an open end model. If it's an open end model they want to take advantage of, to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard, even in this conversation, there is many pinpoint in this. Like again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations. Again, as Monica suggested, making the apps, and the data relating those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities. All those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So we're hearing constantly, from the enterprises is small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different. Clearly they have options. They want to have the freedom of choice. Some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off prem. And off prem is going to have, tons of different radiations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skews to 17,000 customers around the world. It's a $2 billion software business run rate is as you know. And, a lot of those questions on-prem customers now, also coming to our own cloud services. With cloud partners, we have our own cloud services, with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities. With a credit card, you can actually, you can do DR. (mumbles) a service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS, or Azure, or to a local service provider. Sometimes it's US companies, we think US only. But think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want to DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider, within the country. Because of the new data governance, laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us, to go outside of the boundaries of the country. In some cases, in the same continent, if you're in Switzerland, not even forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure, we give capabilities for customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, just you know Stu, you're not alone in this, we can not do this alone. We have, tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see in the new announcements. From HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing. You're partnering with Palo Alto networks for security, Azure partners, as you know we support (indistinct). We have partners like Red Hat, whose in tons of work in the Linux front. We partnered with IBM, we partner with Dell. So, the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially with this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points, to help the customers innovate the cut costs, in this difficult backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is, tremendous so to speak adoption, of this multicloud approach that you're focusing on right now. >> Yeah, and let me add, I know our partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course. The WebPros, and HCL, and TCS, and Capgemini, and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And, for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu, which I forgot to mention earlier, and Tarkan reminded me is a superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers, right? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now, and work across multiple clouds. And, we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS is, it's built in native network integration. And what that means is, if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs, in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services. And we bypass any, complex and latency issues with networking, because we are exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, the Amazon credits, with the way we've architected this. And we allow for bringing your own license, by the way. That's the other true part about simplicity is, same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix, can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And now of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only. But I want to point out that DVIOL is something that we are very proud of. It's truly enabling, bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move, from an appliance primarily to a software model. And, as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like, that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have, when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, and cloud as popular. So, customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine. Or they can bring their existing on-prem license, to AWS. Or we also have a commit model, where they commit for a certain capacity for the year, and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers. We offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring your own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah. Well, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there. If I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all of the hybrid solutions. So, every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So, architecture you talked a bit about. Anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand, as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd, when it comes to hybrid cloud. >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego. But really, I mean, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we, speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So, building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plan, being able to move apps and data, with one click in many cases. And last but not least, the license portability. All of that together. I think the way, (indistinct) I've talked about this as, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe they are the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Tarkan and I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So, with Monica kind of alluded to, anybody that kind of digs underneath the covers is, it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had, that enabled this, and now you're taking advantage of it. What do you feel when you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit what should we be looking for, when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond. >> Thank you Stu. Actually, is spot on question. Most companies in the space, they follow these buzzwords, right? (indistinct) multicloud. And when you killed on, you and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services, and you actually own some kind of a marketplace. And you're one of the 19,000 services. We don't see this as a multicloud. Our view is, complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government clouds success with our customers. We've got enterprise commercial and public sector customers. Also delivered to them choice, with Nutanix is own cloud as I mentioned earlier. With our own billing payment, we're just as capable starting with DR as a service, Disaster Recovery as a service. But take that to next level, the database as a service, with VDI based up as a service, and other services that we deliver. But on top of that also, as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have, with service providers, like Yoda in India, a lot going on with SoftBank in Japan, Brooklyn going on with OBH in France. And multiple countries that we are building this XSP (indistinct) telco relationships, give those international customers, choice within that own local region, in their own country, in some cases in their city, where they are, making sure the network latency is not an issue. Security, data governance, is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multilayer stool is, hyperscalers themselves like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner, working with Doug (indistinct), Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos, biggest super partners. Obviously, that bare metal service capability, is huge differentiator. And with the typical AWS simplicity. And obviously, with Nutanix simplicity coming together. But given choice to our customers as we move forward obviously, our customer set a multicloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called Silk Roads. It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout the history, those empires, those countries who have been successful, partnered well, connect the dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history. Connecting dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier. Working with companies that with Wipro. And we over deliver to the end user computer service called, best of a service door to desk. Database as a service, digital data services get that VA to other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure, as we move forward in upcoming weeks and months, you're going to see, these announcements coming up, one partner at a time. And obviously we are going to measure success, one customer at a time as we more forward with the strategy. >> All right. So Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud, in under an hour. I guess final question I have for you is, number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud. and leverage some capabilities? And, whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely. We are all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing. So if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects, and customers the ability to go try this out. Either just take a tour, or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out. They can just get spun up in the cloud completely, and then connect to on-premises if they choose to. Or just, if they choose to stay in public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say this is really, only the beginning for us as Tarkan was saying. I mean, I'm just really super excited about our future, and how we are going to enable customers, to use cloud for innovation going forward. In a really simple, manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning. So, we look forward to, talking to you, your partners, and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you Stu. Thank you, Monica. >> Hi, and welcome back. We've just heard Nutanix's announcement about Nutanix Clusters on AWS, from Monica and Tarkan, And, to help understand some of the specific implications for the Asia Pacific and Japan region. Happy to welcome Justin Hurst, who is the CTO, for APJ with Nutanix. Justin, thanks for joining us. >> Well, thanks Stu. Thanks for having me. >> Absolutely. So, we know Justin of course, 2020, has had a lot of changes, for everyone globally. Heard some exciting news from your team. And, wondering if you can bring us inside the APJ region. And what will the impact specifically be for your customers in your region? >> Yeah, let's say, that's a great question. And, it has been a tremendously unusual year, of course, for everyone. We're all trying, to figure out how we can adapt. And how we can take this opportunity, to not only respond to the situation, but actually build our businesses in a way, that we can be more agile going forward. So, we're very excited about this announcement. And, the new capabilities it's going to bring to our customers in the region. >> Justin, one of the things we talk about is, right now, there's actually been an acceleration of how customers are looking to On-Ramp to the cloud. So when you look at the solution, what's the operational impact of Nutanix Clusters? And that acceleration to the cloud? >> Well, sure. And I think that, is really what we're trying to accomplish here, with this new technology is to take away a lot of the pain, in onboarding to the public cloud. For many customers I talk to, the cloud is aspirational at this point. They may be experimenting. They may have a few applications they've, spun up in the cloud or using a SaaS service. But really getting those core applications, into the public cloud, has been something they've struggled with. And so, by harmonizing the control plan and the data plan, between on-premises and the public cloud, we just completely remove that barrier, and allow that mobility, that's been, something people have really been looking forward to. >> All right, well, Justin, of course, the announcement being with AWS, is the global leader in public cloud. But we've seen the cluster solution, when has been discussed in earlier days, isn't necessarily only for AWS. So, what can you tell us about your customer's adoption with AWS, and maybe what we should look at down the road for clusters with other solutions? >> Yeah, for sure. Now of course, AWS is the global market leader, which is why we're so happy to have this launch event today of clusters on AWS. But with many of our customers, depending on their region, or their regulatory requirements, they may want to work as well, with other providers. And so when we built the Nutanix cluster solution, we were careful not to lock in, to any specific provider. Which gives us options going forward, to meet our customer demands, wherever they might be. >> All right. Well, when we look at cloud, of course, the implications are one of the things we need to think about. We've seen a number of hybrid solutions out there, that haven't necessarily been the most economical. So, what are the financial considerations, when we look at this solution? >> Yeah, definitely. I think when we look at using the public cloud, it's important not to bring along, the same operational mindset, as traditional on-premise infrastructure. And that's the power of the cloud, is the elasticity. And the ability to burst workloads, to grow and to shrink as needed. And so, to really help contain those costs, we've built in this amazing ability, to hibernate workloads. So that customers can run them, when they need them. Whether it's a seasonal business, whether it's something in education, where students are coming and going, for different terms. We've built this functionality, that allows you to take traditional applications that would normally run on-premises 24/7. And give them that elasticity of the public cloud, really combining the best of both worlds. And then, building tooling and automation around that. So it's not just guesswork. We can actually tell you, when to spin up a workload, or where to place a workload, to get the best financial impact. >> All right, Justin, final question for you is, this has been the works on Nutanix working on the cluster solution world for a bit now. What's exciting you, that you're going to be able to bring this to your customers? >> Yeah. There's a lot of new capabilities, that get unlocked by this new technology. I think about a customer I was talking to recently, that's expanding their business geographically. And, what they didn't want to do, was invest capital in building up a new data center, in a new region. Because here in APJ, the region is geographically vast, and connectivity can vary tremendously. And so for this company, to be able to spin up, a new data center effectively, in any AWS region around the world, really enables them to bring the data and the applications, to where they're expanding their business, without that capital outlay. And so, that's just one capability, that we're really excited about. And we think we'll have a big impact, in how people do business. And keeping those applications and data, close to where they're doing that business. >> All right. Well, Justin, thank you so much for giving us a look inside the APJ region. And congratulations to you and the team, on the Nutanix Clusters announcement. >> Thanks so much for having me Stu. >> All right. And thank you for watching I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely has been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and commercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know Stu well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hyperconverged infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new hybrid cloud infrastructure, Nutanix Clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said Stu is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. Well, I can tell you Nutanix Clusters is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HCI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executive of an airline right before that Monica and I spent time with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is through the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these VDI desktop-as-a-service capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on Trans Telecom, the local SP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on-prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for DR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on-prem and off-prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the Cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my, let's say, VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that are available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, end user computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idly and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there are three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up Nutanix Clusters which you have on premises, the same exact Cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plane that we offer on-prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix Clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on-prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on-prem, do it. Single management plane, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on-premises. We have an amazing tool called Beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging Clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our Clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on-prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix Clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix Clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using Clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using Clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanix at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there isn't any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on-prem, some of them off-prem and off-prem is going to have tons of different variations. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus SKUs to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, on-prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and apps to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew of partners, as you know we support VMware ESXi. We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at end of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So, Tarkan also we have the global size, of course, the Wipro and HCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zensar, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring Clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yotta. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up Stu which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected Clusters with AWS it's a built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on-premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that BYOL is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the Clusters solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on-prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. Because you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Dheeraj our CEO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at Clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Stu, actually spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you drill-down and you find out, okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, logistics capabilities starting with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yotta in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Doug Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like Wipro and we all deliver an end user computing service called desktop-as-a-service virtual desk, database as a service, digital data services we have, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix Clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage, have a special announcement, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And I want to welcome you to this special event that we are doing with Nutanix. Of course, in 2020 many things have changed and that has changed some of the priorities for many companies out there, acceleration of cloud adoption, absolutely have been there. I've talked to many companies that were dipping their toe or thinking about where they were going to the cloud and of course it's rapidly moved to accelerate to be able to leverage work from home, remote contact centers and the like. So we have to think about how we can accelerate what's happening and make sure that our workforce and our customers are all taken care of. So at one of the front seats of this is of course companies working to help modernize customers out there and Nutanix is part of that discussion. So I want to welcome to join us for this special discussion of cloud and Nutanix, I've two of our CUBE alumnis. First of all, we have Monica Kumar, she's the Senior vice President of Product with Nutanix and Tarkan Maner, who's a relative newcomer, second time on theCUBE in his new role, many-time guest previously. Tarkan is the Chief Commercial Officer with Nutanix. Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you so much. So happy to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Thank you. >> All right, so Tarkan as I was teeing up, we know that IT staffs in general, CIO specifically, and companies overall, are under a lot of pressure in general, but in 2020, there are new pressures on them. So why don't you explain to us the special cloud announcement, tell us what's Nutanix's launching and why it's so important today. >> So first of all, thank you. Glad to be here with Monica. Basically, you and I spent some time with a few customers in the past few weeks and months. I'll tell you the things in our industry are changing at a pace that we've never seen before, especially with this pandemic backdrop as we're going through. And obviously all the economic challenges that creates beyond the obviously health challenges and across the globe, all the pain it creates, but also create some opportunities for our customers and partners to deliver solutions to our enterprise customers and infomercial customers and public sector customers in multiple industries. From healthcare, obviously very importantly, to manufacturing, to supply chains and to all the other industries, including financial services and public sector again. So in that context and Monica knows this well as she's our leader in our strategy, we're putting lots of effort in this new multi-cloud strategy as a company. As you know too well, Nutanix wrote the book in digital infrastructures with its own hybrid infrastructure story. Now they're taking that next level via our data center solutions, via DevOps solutions and end user computer solutions now in multi-cloud fashion, working with partners like AWS. So in this launch, we have our new multi-cloud infrastructure, clusters product now available on AWS. We are super excited. We have more than 20 tech firms and customers and partners at senior executive level support in this big launch. Timing is usually important because of this pandemic backdrop. And the goal is obviously to help our customers save money, focus on what's important for them, save money for them and making sure they streamline their IT operations. So it's a huge launch for us and we're super excited about it. >> Yeah, and the one thing I would add to what Tarkan said too is, look, we talked to a lot of customers and obviously cloud is the constant in terms of enabling innovation. But I think more with COVID, what's on top of mind is also how do we use cloud for innovation, but really be intelligent about cost optimization. So with this new announcement, what we're excited about is we're making really a hybrid cloud a reality across public and private cloud, but also making sure customers get the cost efficiency they need when they're deploying the solution. So we are super excited to bring true hybrid cloud offering with AWS to the market today. >> Well, I can tell you Nutanix cluster is absolutely one of the exciting technologies I've enjoyed watching and getting ready for. And of course, a partnership with the largest public cloud player out there, AWS, is really important. When I think about Nutanix from the earliest days, the word that we always used for the HI space in Nutanix specifically, was simplicity. Anybody in the tech space know that true simplicity is really hard to do. When I think about cloud, when I think about multi-cloud, simplicity's not the first thing that I think of. So Tarkan, help us connect, how is Nutanix going to extend the simplicity that it's done for so long now in the data center into places like AWS with this solution? >> So, Stu, you're right on, spot on. Look, Monica and I spend a lot of time with our customers. One thing about an Nutanix executive team we're very customer driven, and I'm not just saying this to make a point. We really spent tons of time with them because our solutions are basically so critical for them to run their businesses. So just recently, I was with a senior executives of an airline right before that Monica and I spent actually with one of the largest banks in the world in France, in Paris, right before pandemic, we were actually traveling, talking to not only the CIO, the Chief Operating Officer on one of these huge banks, and the biggest issue was how these companies are trying to basically adjust their plans, business plans. I'm not talking about tech plans, IT plans, the business plans around this backdrop that the economic stress and obviously now pandemic is in a big way. One of the CIOs told me, it was an airline executive, "Look, Tarkan, in the next 12 months, my business might be half of what it is today. And I need to do more with less in so many different ways, while I'm cutting cost." So it's a tough time. So in that context is to, you're actually right, multi-cloud is a difficult proposition, but it's critical for these companies to manage their cost structures across multiple operating models. Cloud to us is not a destination. It's a means to an end. It is an operating model. At the end of the day, the differentiation is to the software. The unique software that we provide from digital infrastructures to deliver end to end discreet data center solutions, DevOps solutions for developers, as well as for end user computing individuals, to make you sure to take advantage of these EDI disability service topic capability. So in that context, what we're providing now, to these CIOs who are going through this difficult time is a platform in which they can move their workloads from cloud to cloud based on their needs, the freedom of choice. Look, one of these big banks that Monica and I visited in France, huge global bank, they have a workloads on AWS, they have workloads on Azure, they have workloads on Google, they have workloads on (mumbles), the local XP, they have workloads in Germany, they have workloads on cloud service providers in Asia, in Taiwan and other locations, On top of that, they're also using Nutanix on Prem as well as Nutanix cloud, our own cloud services for BR. And for them, this is not just a destination, this is an operating model. So the biggest request from them is, "Look, can you guys make this cost effective? Can we use all these operating models and move our data and applications from cloud to cloud?" In simple terms, can we get some flexibility with commits as well as with the credits they paid for so far? And those are the things we're working on, and I'm sure Monica is going to get a little bit more into detail as we talk though this. We're super excited to start this journey with AWS with this launch, but we're not going to stop there. Our goal is, we just discussed it with Monica earlier, provide freedom of choice across multiple clouds both on Prem and off Prem for our customers to cut costs and to focus on what's important for them. >> Yeah, and I would just add to sum it up, we are really simplifying the multi-cloud complexity for our customers,. And I can go into more details but that's really the gist of it. Is what Nutanix is doing with this announcement and more coming up in the future. >> Well, Monica, when I think about customers and how do they decide what stays in their data center, what goes into the public cloud, it's really their application portfolio. I need to look at my workloads, I need to look at my skillset. So when I look at the cluster solution, what are some of the key use cases? What workloads are going to be the first ones that you expect or you're having customers use with it today? >> Sure, and as we talk to customer too, there's clearly few key use cases that they've been trying to build a hybrid strategy around. The first few ones are bursting into cloud. In case of sudden demand, how do I burst and scale my let's say a VDI environment or database environment into the cloud? So that's clearly one that many of our customers want to be able to do simply and without having to incur this extreme complexity of managing these environments. Number two, it's about DR. And we saw it with COVID, business continuity became a big deal for many organizations. They weren't prepared for it. So the ability to actually spin up your applications and data in the cloud seamlessly in case of a disaster, that's another big use case. The third one, which many customers talk about is can I lift and shift my applications as is into the cloud without having to rewrite a single line of code or without having to rewrite all of it? That's another one. And last but not least, the one that we're also hearing a lot about is how do I extend my current applications by using cloud native services that's available on public cloud? So those are four, there's many more, of course, but in terms of workloads, I mentioned two examples, VDI, which is virtual desktop infrastructure, and there's a computing and also databases. More and more of our customers don't want to invest, in again, having on premises data center assets, sitting there idlely and wait for when the capacity surges, the demand for capacity surges, they want to be able to do that in the cloud. So I'd say those are the few use cases and workloads. One thing I want to go back to, what Tarkan was talking about, really there're three key reasons why the current hybrid cloud solutions haven't really panned out for customers. Number one, it's having a unified management environment across public and private cloud. There's a few solutions out there, but none of them have proved to be simple enough to actually put into real execution. With Nutanix, the one thing you can do is literally build a hybrid cloud within under an hour. Under an hour, you can spin up new data clusters which you have on premises, the same exact cluster in Amazon. Under one hour. There you go. And you have the same exact management plan that we offer on Prem that now can manage your AWS Nutanix clusters. It's that easy, right? And then you can easily move your data and applications across, if you choose to. You want to move and burst into cloud, public cloud? Do it. You want to keep some stuff on prem? Do it. If you want to develop in the cloud, do it. Want to keep production on prem, do it. Single management plan, seamless mobility. And the third point is about cost. Simplicity of managing the costs making sure you know how are you going to incur costs? How about if you can hibernate your AWS cluster when you're not using it? We have the capability now in our software to do that. How about knowing where to place, which workload, which workload goes into public node, which stays on premises. We have an amazing tool called beam that gives the customers that ability to assess which is the right cloud for the right workload. So I can go on and on about this, we've talked to so many customers, but this is in a nutshell, the use cases and workloads that we are delivering to customers right out the gate. >> Well, Monica, I'd love to hear a little bit about the customers that have had an early access to this. What customer stories can you share? Understand, of course, you're probably going to need to anonymize, but I'd like to understand how they've been leveraging clusters, the value that they're getting from it. >> Absolutely. We've been working with a number of customers. And I'll give you a few examples. There's a customer in Australia. I'll start with that. And they basically run a big event that happens every five years for them. And that they have to scale something to 24 million people. Now imagine if they have to keep capacity on site, anticipating the needs for five years in a row. Well, they can't do that. And the big event is going to happen next year for them. So they're getting ready with our clusters to really expand the VDI environments into the cloud in a big way with AWS. So from Nutanix on prem to AWS and expand VDI and burst into the cloud. So that's one example. That's obviously when you have an event driven capacity bursting into the cloud. Another customer who is in the insurance business. For them DR Is of course very important. I mean, DR is important for every industry and every business, but for them they realize that they need to be able to transparently run their applications in the case of a disaster on the cloud. So they've been using Nutanix clusters with AWS to do that. Another customer is looking at lifting and shifting some of their database applications into AWS with Nutanix, for example. And then we have yet another customer who's looking at retiring a part of the data center estate and moving that completely to AWS with Nutanix as a backbone, Nutanix clusters as the backbone. I mean, and we have tons of examples of customers who during COVID, for example, were able to burst capacity and spin up remote, hundreds and thousands of remote employees using clusters into AWS cloud, using Citrix also by the way, as the desktop provider. So again, I can go on, we have tons of customers. There's obviously a big demand for this solution because now it's so easy to use. We have customers really surprised going, "Wait, I have built a whole hybrid cloud within an hour? And I was able to scale from six nodes to 16 nodes just like that on AWS cloud from on prem six nodes to 16 and AWS cloud? Our customers are really, really pleasantly surprised with the ease of use and how quickly they can scale using clusters in AWS. >> Yeah, Tarkan, I have to imagine that this is a real change for the conversations that you have with customers. I mean, Nutanix has been partnering with AWS for a number of years. I remember the first time that I saw Nutanics at the re:Invent show, but cloud is definitely front and center in a lot of your customer's conversations. So with your partners, with your customers, has to be just a whole different aspect to the conversations that you can have. >> Absolutely, Stu. As you heard from Monica too, as I mentioned earlier, this is not just a destination for the customers. I know you using these buzzwords, at the end of day, it's an operating model. It's an operating model they want to take advantage of to cut costs and do more with less. So in that context, as you heard even in this conversation, there's any pain point in this. Like, again, being able to move the workloads from location to location, cost-optimize those things, provide a streamlined operations, again, as Monica suggested, making the apps and the data related to those apps mobile, and obviously provide built-in networking capabilities, all those capabilities make it easier for them to cut costs. So what we're hearing constantly from the enterprises is, small and large, private sector and public sector, nothing different, clearly they have options, they want to have the freedom of choice, some of these workloads are going to run on prem, some of them off prem and off prem is going to have tons of different reactions. So in that context, as I mentioned earlier, we have our own cloud as well. We provide 20 plus skells to 17,000 customers around the world. There's a $2 billion software business run rate as you know and a lot of those customers, prem customers, now are also coming to our own cloud services with cloud partners we have our own cloud services with our own billing, payments, logistics, and service capabilities, fit a credit card, you can do DR it's actually come with this service to Nutanix itself. But some of these customers also want to go be able to go to AWS or Azure or to a local service provider. Sometimes as US companies we think US only, but think about this, this is a global phenomenon. I have customers in India. We have customers in Australia as Monica talked about. In China, in Japan, in Germany. And some of these enterprise customers, public sector customers, they want a DR, Disaster Recovery as a service to a local service provider within the country. Because of the new data governance laws and security concerns, they don't want the data and us to go outside of the boundaries of the country, in some cases in the same town. If you're in Switzerland, forget about the country, the same city. So we want to make sure we give capabilities to customers, use the cloud as an operating model the way they want. And as part of this, Stu, we're not alone on this. We can not do this alone. We have tremendous level of partner support as you're going to see the announcements from HP as one of our key partners, Lenovo, AMD, Intel, Fujitsu, Citrix for end user computing, we're partnering with Palo Alto Networks for security, a slew partners, as you know we support VMware is excited, We have partners like Red Hat who's done tons of work in the Linux front, we partnered with IBM, we partnered with Dell. So the ecosystem makes it so much easier for our customers, especially in this pandemic backdrop. And I think what you're going to see from Nutanix, more partners, more customer proof points to help the customers at of the day to cut costs in this typical backdrop. Especially for the next 24 months, I think what you're going to see is tremendous, so to speak, adoption of this multi-cloud approach that we're focusing on right now. >> Yeah. And let me add, I know a partner list is long. So Tarkan also, we have the global size, of course, the WebPros and FCL and TCS and Capgemini and Zinsser, you name it all. We're working with all of them to bring clusters based solutions to market. And for the entire Nutanix stack, also partners like Equinix and Yoda. So it's a long list of partnerships. The one thing I did want to bring up still, which I forgot to mention earlier and Tarkan reminded me, is our superior architecture. So why is it that Nutanix can deliver this now to customers? I mean, our customers have been trying to build hybrid cloud for a little while now and work across multiple clouds and we know it's been complex. The reason why we are able to deliver this in the way we are, is because of our architecture. The way we've architected clusters with AWS it's built-in native network integration. And what that means is if your customer and end user who's a practitioner, you can literally see the Nutanix VMs in the same space as Amazon VMs. So for a customer, it's in the exact same space, it's really easy to then use other AWS services and we bypass any complex and latency issues with networking because we're exactly part of AWS VPC for the customer. And also, the customers can use by the way, their Amazon credits with the way we've architected this. We allow for bringing your own license, by the way, that's the other true part about, simplicity is same license that our customers use on premises today for Nutanix can be brought exactly the same way to AWS, if they choose to. And, of course, we do also offer other licensing models that are cloud only, but I want to point out that (indistinct) is, is something that we're very proud of. It's truly enabling bring your own license to AWS cloud in this case. >> Well, it's interesting, Monica. Of course, one of the things everybody's watched of Nutanix over the last few years is that move from an appliance primarily to a software model and as an industry as a whole, it's much more moving to the cloud model for pricing. And it sounds like that's the primary model with some flexibility and options that you have when you're talking about the cluster solution here, is that correct? >> Yeah, we also offer the pay as you go model of course, on cloud it's popular. So customers can decide they just want to pay for the amount they use, that's fine, or they can bring their existing on prem license to AWS, or we also have a commit model where they commit for a certain capacity for the year and they go with that. So we have two or three different kinds of models. Again, going with the freedom of choice for our customers, we offer them different models they can choose from. But to me, the best part is to bring own license model. That's again, a true hybrid pricing model here. They can choose to use Nutanix where they want to. >> Yeah, well, and, and Monica, I'm glad you brought up some of the architectural pieces here. 'Cause you talked about all the partners that you have out there, if I'm sitting in the partner world, I've been heard nothing over the last few years, but I've been inundated by all the hybrid solutions. So every public cloud provider, including AWS now, is talking about hybrid solutions. You've got virtualization players, infrastructure players, all talking out there. So architecture, you talked a bit about, anything else, key differentiators that you want people to understand as what sets Nutanix apart from the crowd when it comes to hybrid cloud? >> Well, like I said, it's because of our architecture, you can build a hybrid cloud in under an hour. I mean, prove to me if you can do with other providers. And again, I don't mean that, having that ego, but really, honestly for our customers, it's all about how can we speed up a customer's experience to cloud. So building a cloud under an hour, being able to truly manage it with a single plane, being able to move apps and data with one click in many cases and last but not least the license portability, all of that together, I think the way, Durage RCO sums it and Tarkan have talked about this is, we may not have been the first to market, but we believe we're the best to market in this space today. That's what I would say. >> Now, Tarkan, I'd love to hear a little bit of the vision. So as Monica alluded to, anybody that digs underneath the covers it's bare metal offerings from the cloud providers that are enabling this technology. There was a certain partnership that AWS had that enabled this and now you're taking advantage of it. When you look at clusters going forward, give us a little bit, what should we be looking for when it comes to AWS and maybe even beyond? >> Thank you, Tsu, actually is spot on question. Most companies in this space, they follow these buzzwords like, "Oh, multi-cloud." And when you (indistinct) down and you find out, Okay, you support two cloud services and you actually own some kind of a marketplace and you're one of the 19,000 services, you don't see this as a multi-cloud. Our view is complete freedom of choice. So our vision includes a couple of our private clouds, government cloud success with our customers, with enterprise, commercial and public sector customers also delivered to them choice with Nutanix's own cloud, as I mentioned earlier, with our own billing payment, we'll just escapable these started with DR as a service, disaster recovery as a service. But take that next level, the database as a service, VDI, desktop as a service and other services that we deliver. But on top of that, also as Monica talked about earlier, partnerships we have with service providers like Yoda in India, work going on with SoftBank in Japan, work going on with OVH in France and multiple countries that we're building this XSP service provider- customer relationships, give those international customers choice within their own local region in their own country, in some cases, even in their city where they are making sure the network latency is not an issue, security, data governance is not an issue. And obviously, third leg of this multi legged stool is hyperscalers themselves, like AWS. AWS has been a phenomenal partner working with Hume, Matt Garmin, the executive team under Andy Jassy and Jeff Bezos they're just super partners, obviously that bare metal service capability is huge differentiator and typical AWS simplicity, and obviously data simplicity coming together, but giving choice to our customers has we move forward, obviously our customers have a multi-cloud strategy. So I'm reading an amazing book called "Silk Roads." It's an amazing book. I strongly suggest you all read it. It's all talking about partnerships. Throughout history, those empires, those countries who've been successful, partnered well, connect dots well. So that's what we're trying to learn from our own history, connecting the dots with the customers and partners as we talked about earlier, working with companies like WebPro and we all deliver an end user company service called database service go to desk, database as a service, digital data services with MBA, few other new services started in HCL and others. So all these things come up together as a complete end to end strategy with our partners. So we want to make sure as we move forward, in upcoming weeks and months, your going to see these announcements coming up one partner at a time and obviously we're going to measure success one customer at a time as we move forward with this strategy. >> All right, so Monica, you mentioned that if you were an existing Nutanix customer, you can spin up in the public cloud in under an hour, I guess final the question I have for you is number one, if I'm not yet a Nutanix customer, is this something I could start in the public cloud and leverage some capabilities and whether I'm an existing customer or a prospect, how do I get started with Nutanix clusters? >> Absolutely, we're all about making it easy for our customers to get started. So in fact, I know seeing is believing, so if you go to nutanix.com today, you'll see we have a link there for something called a test drive. So we are giving our prospects and customers the ability to go try this out, either just take a tour or even do a 30 day free trial today. So they can try it out, they can just get spun up in the cloud completely and then connect on premises if they choose to, or if they just sustain public cloud only with Nutanix, that's absolutely the customer choice. And I would say, this is really only the beginning for us as Tarkan saying. Our future, I mean, I'm just really super excited about our feature and how we're going to enable customers to use cloud for innovation going forward in a really simple manner that's cost efficient for our customers. >> All right. Well, Monica and Tarkan, thank you so much for sharing the updates. Congratulations to the team on bringing this solution out. And as you said, just the beginning so we look forward to talking to you, your partners and your customers going forward. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, Stu, thank you, Monica. >> All right, for Tarkan and Monica, I'm Stu Miniman with theCUBE. Thank you as always for watching this special Nutanix announcement. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next 19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its eco system partners. >> Hello everyone welcome back here to theCUBE live coverage here in San Francisco, California. We're in the Moscone Center on the ground floor here. Day three of three days of coverage for Google Cloud Next 2019. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante, Stew Miniman out there getting stories out there He's also been hosting. Dave, great to see you! Evren, Director of Product Management at Google Cloud, doing all the data streaming the data. We're streaming data right now. >> Absolutely, this is it. This is it. >> So let's stream some data. So streaming data has certainly been around for awhile. Dave and I when we first started theCUBE ten years ago, it was part of Silk and Angle Media hadoop was just a small little project. That really kind of was the catalyst moment for around big data that's now evolved to it's own position. Now you have streaming data, you have cloud scale, the Cloud has really changed the game on big data. Changed the nature and dynamics of it and one of the things is streaming data, streaming analytics as a core value proposition for enterprises, and this is fairly new. >> Very true. >> What's your take on it and how does it relate to what's going on with Google Cloud? >> I am glad we're talking about that. This is an exciting time for us. Streaming like you said is growing. Batch is not going away, but streaming is actually overtaking a lot of the applications that we're seeing. Today we're seeing more streaming applications taking place than batch. One of the things that we're seeing is everybody is gathering data from all over the place from your websites, from your mobile phones, from your IoT devices, just like we're doing right now. There's data coming in and people want to make decisions real time whether it's in the banking industry, in your healthcare, retail, it doesn't matter which word cycle you're working with and we're seeing how those messages how those events are coming in and where the decisions are being made real time, milliseconds we're talking about. >> Why is it happening, what's the real catalyst here? Just tsunami of data, nature of the value, all of the above, what's the? >> We believe one of the things is like you mentioned Cloud really changed the game. Where people actually can reach globally data and messages at scale. We're talking about billions of messages coming in and processing capacity is available now we can actually process it and make a decision within milliseconds and get to the results. To me, that was the biggest catalyst. And we're seeing many of us have grown up using batch data, making decisions now everybody is talking about M.L. and A.I. You need that data coming in real time and we can actual process it and make the decision. To me, that's the catalyst. >> First of all we love streaming data, this topic. One we believe streaming where shooting video but data, real time, has been one of the keys you see self driving cars monging of data, mixing and matching of data to get better signal and better machine learning and I got to ask you, because batch is certainly the role for batch is kind of old school it's some old techniques it's been around for awhile, >> It's not going to go away though. >> It's not going to go away it's established it's place but the knee jerk reaction of existing old school people who haven't migrated to the new modern version they go to the batch kind of mind set. I want to get you're reaction. Data lakes, there's nothing flowing in a lake. Okay, so there is a role for a data lake streaming gives me the impression of like an ocean or a river or something moving fast. Talk about the differences because it's not just the data lake okay that's a batch kind of reaction. >> It is a complementary. Actually it's not going away because all of that data that we had in the back is something we're relying on to really augment and see what's changing. So if you're in a retail house you're buying something, you're going to make a decision and your support is actually behind it. OK here's Evren, he's actually shopping around this and he wants this for his son. That's what the models built around it is looking at what is my behavior and in the moment making a decision for me. So that's not going away. The other thing is batch users are able to take advantage of the technology today. If you look at our data flow, same set of codes, same set of capability can be used by the same folks that are used to batch. You don't have to change anything so that actually we help folks to be up skilled using the same set of tools and become much more experienced and experts in the streaming too. That's not going away we help both of the worlds. >> So, complementary. >> Very complementary. >> So data lakes are good for kind of setting the table if you have to store it somewhere but that's not the end game though. >> No. >> Okay. >> I wonder if we could talk about the evolution from batch to real time streaming. And my favorite example, because I think people can relate to it, is fraud detection. Ten years ago, it was up to the user to go through his or her bill, right? And then you started to get inundated with false positives, and now lately, last couple of years it's getting better and better. Fewer false positives, usually when you usually no news is good news. News is usually bad news now, so take that example and use that to describe how things have evolved. >> I am a student of AI I did my Master's and PhD in that and I went through that change in my career because we had to collect the data, batch it and analyze it, and actually make a decision about it and we had a lot of false positives and in some cases some negative misses too which you don't want that either. And what happened is our modeling capabilities became much better. With this rich data, and you actually tap into that data lake, you can go in there the data is there, and this is spread data we can pull in data from different sources and actually remove the outliers and make our decision real time right there. We didn't have the processing capability we didn't have a place like PostUp where globic can scan and bring in data at hundreds of gigabytes of data. That's messaging you want to deal with at scale no matter where it is and process that, that wasn't available for us. Now it's available it's like a candy shelf for technologists, all the technology is in our hands and we wanted all these things. >> You were talking about I think the simplicity of, I'm able to use my batch processes and apply them. One of the complaints I hear from developers sometimes is that the data pipeline is getting so complicated. You were talking about you're grabbing stuff from websites, from financial databases, and so depending on what data store you're using and what streaming tools you're using or other A.I. tools, the pipeline gets very complicated the A.P.Is start to get complicated but I'm hearing a story of simplicity. Can you elaborate on that and add some color? >> Yeah I'm glad you're asking that question you may have heard, yesterday we announced a whole bunch of new things and ease of use is the top of the line for us. Really are trying to make it easy. If you look at this eco pipeline we're building with data flow, it helps you end to end. Data engineered no matter which angle their coming in should be able to use their known skill sets and be able to build their pipelines end to end so that you can achieve your goals around streaming. We aren't really having to go through a lot of the clusters of the pipelines we are going to continue to push that ease of use over and over, we're not going to let it go because make it easier, everyone will adapt it faster. >> You mentioned you got a PhD in A.I., Master's in A.I., A.I. has been around for awhile. A lot of people have been saying that but machine learning certainly has changed the game. Machine learning plus cloud has been a real accelerant in the academic and now commercial aspects of A.I. So I want to get your thoughts on the notion of scale which you talk about, plus the diversity of data. So if you can bring in data at scale get more signaling points more access to data signaling the diversity of data becomes very key. But cleanliness, data cleaning, used to be an old practice of you get a bunch of data, stack it up, put it in a pile corpus, and you kind of go clean it. With streaming, if it's always flowing there's kind of a behavioral characteristic of data cleanliness, data monitoring, talk about that diversity of data clean data and how that feeds machine learning and makes better A.I. >> Good one, so that's where we actually are able to, if you look at PostUp, you're building joint your table set of datas with streaming set of datas you can actually put it into data filter it and make those analyses. And within both, we provide enough of a window for you to be able to go back, hey are there things that I should be looking at, up to seven days we can provide a snapshot because you will always find something you can go back, you know what I'm going to remove this outlier. All worrying about all the processing we do before we bring in the data so there's a lot of cleanliness that takes place but we have the built in tools we have the built in capabilities for everyone to get going. It's ready to scale for you from the moment you open it up. That's the beauty of it, that's the beauty of when you start from PostUp to data flow to streaming engine it's ready for you to run. >> Talk about what's changed though when people hear diversity of data they get scared, oh my god I work, heavy lifting. Now it's a benefit. What's easier now to deal with all of these diverse data sets, what's the easy revolution? >> So do you remember the big V's of big data right? Volume, velocity, variety. People were scared about the variety. Now I can actually bring in my data from different places. Again, let's go back to the shopping example. Where I shop, what I shop for, that actually defines my behavior around it. Those data sit somewhere else. We bring those in to make a decision about okay everyone wants to go buy a scooter or whatever else, that's the diversity of the data. We're now able to deal to with this at scale. That was not available we could actually bring in and render this, now everything is going to do this much more sequential. We're now able to bring all of them together process it at the same time and make the decision. >> What's the key products that will make all of those happen, take us through the portfolio if I want that would you just said which is a great value. It sounds like not a heavy lift all I have to do is point the data sources into this engine, what are the products that make up that capability? >> So if I look at the overall portfolio on Google Cloud from our data analysts point of view, so you actually can bring in your data through PostUp, lots of messaging capability globally and you can actually do it regionally because we have a lot of regional requirements coming from various countries and data flow is where we actually transfer the data. That's where you do the processing. And you use all of these advance analytics capabilities through your streaming engine that we released and you have your B query, you have your OMLs, you have all kinds of things that you can bring in you're big tables and what have you. That's all easily integrated end to end for any analyst to be able to use. >> What is beam? >> Beam ah that's great I'm so glad you asked that question I almost forgot! Beam is one of our open sources we donated the same set, just like we did with Koppernes few years ago, we donated to the open source it's growing. This year actually it won The Technology Awards. So the source is open the community really took it upon, they use that toolkit to build their pipelines you can use any kind of a code that you want Java, Gold, whatever you want to do it and they contribute. We use it internally and externally. It's one of those things that's going to grow. We have a lot of community events coming up this year. We might, and I've seen the increase, I'm really really proud of that community. >> Evren, I love the A.I. can't get my mind off your background and academic because I studied A.I. as well in the 80s and 90s all that good stuff. Young kids are flocking to computer science now because A.I. is very sexy, it's very intoxicating and it's so easy to deal with now. You guys had a hack-a-thon here with NCAA using data really kind of real time and kind of cool things are happening. So it's a moment now for A.I. this is the moment. What's your advice, you've been through the wars you've done your chore duty all those years now it's actually happening. What's your advice for young people who want to come in, get their hands dirty, build things, use A.I., what's your advice, how they should tackle that? >> I am living it, both of my sons one is finishing junior high, the other one is a senior in high school, their both in it. So when I hear my young kids come and say, "hey bubba we just built this using transfer flow." Like it is making me really proud. At the middle school level they were doing it. So the good news is we have all of this publicly available data for them. I encourage every one of them. If you look at what we provide from Google Cloud, you come in there, we have the data for them, we have the tools for them, it's all ready for them to play so schools get free access to it too. >> It's a major culture but how do they get someone who's interested but never coded before, how do they jump right in and get ingratiated and immersed into the code, what do they do? >> We have some community reaches that we're actually doing as Google. We go out to them and we're actually establishing centers to really build community events for them to really learn some new skills. And we're making this easy for them. And I'm happy to hear more and do it, but I'm an advocate I go to middle schools, I go to high schools, I go to colleges. Colleges are a different story. We provide school classes and we provide our technologies at the universities because enterprises need that talent, need that skill, when they graduate, their going to hire them just like I'm going to hire them into my organization. >> So my number one complaint my kids have about school, they're talking about kids that, oh school's going to be a waste it's so linear I can learn everything on YouTube and Google.com. All the stuff I learned in school I'm never going to use in the real world. So the question is, what skill should kids learn that could be applied to machine learning, thinking, the kind of constructs, data structures, or methodologies, what are some of the skills and classes that can tease out and be natural lead into computer science and machine learning A.I.? >> You know, actually their going to build up the skills. The languages will evolve and so forth. As long as they have that inner curiosity asking new questions, how can I find the answer a little faster, that will push them towards different sets of tools, different sets of areas. If you go to Berkeley in here, you will see a whole bunch of high school kids working side by side with graduate students asking those questions, developing those skill sets, but it's all coming down to their curiosity. >> And I think that applies for business too. I mean there's a big gap between the A.I. haves and have-nots I always say. And the good news here that my take away is, you're going to buy A.I, you're going to buy it from people like Google and you're going to build it and apply it, you're going to spend time applying it, and that's how these incumbents can close the gap and that's the good news here. >> Very true if you look at it, look at all the A.P.Is that we have. From text recognition to image recognition to whatever it is, those are all built models and I've seen some customers build some fantastic applications starting from there and they use their own data, bring it in, they update their model for their own businesses cases. >> It's composition it's composing. It's not coding it's composing. >> Exactly, it's composing. We are taking it to the next level. That abstraction is going to actually help others come into the field because they know their field of expertise, they can ask direct questions. You and I may not know it but, they will ask direct questions. And they will go with the tools available for them for the curiosity that they reach. >> Okay what's the coolest thing you're working on right now? >> Coolest thing, I just y'know streaming is my baby. We are working on, I want to solve all the streaming challenges, whatever the industry is. I really want to welcome everyone, bring you to us. I think, if I look at it, one of the things we discussed today was Antos was fantastic right? I mean we're really going to change the game for all enterprises to be able to provide those capabilities at the infrastructure. But imagine what we can do with all the data analytics capabilities we have on top of it. I think this is the next five years is going to be fantastic for us. >> What's the coolest use case thing you see emerging out of streaming? >> Ah you know, yesterday I actually had one of my clients with me onstage, AB Tasty. They had a fantastic capability that they built. They tried everything. And we were not their first choice, I'll be very open. They said the same thing to everybody, you guys were not our first choice. They went around, they looked at all the tool kits, everything. They came they used PostUp, they used data flow, they used engine, streaming engine. And they AB testing for marketing. And they do that at scale, billions of messages every minute, and they do it within seconds, milliseconds, 32 milliseconds at most. Because they have to make the decision. That was awesome, go check. I don't know if you're familiar with that. One of our customers, they provide these real time delivery. In India, imagine where things are. In global leaders, you can actually ask for a food to be delivered and they have to optimize, depending on what the traffic is and go with their scooters, and provide you this delivery. They aren't doing it as well. Okato, they believe, provide food in UK 70% of the population use our technologies for real time delivery. Those are some great examples. >> Evren, great insight, great to have you on. Just a final word here, next couple years, how do you see the trajectory of machine learning A.I. Analytics feeding into the value of making life easier society better, and businesses more productive? >> We are seeing really good pull from enterprises from every archival that you can think of. Regulated, retail, what have you. And we're going to solve some really hard problems whether it's in health care industry, financial industry, retail industry, we're going to make lives of people much easier. And their going to benefit from it at scale. And I believe we're just scratching the tip of it and you're seeing this energy in here. Year over year this has gotten better and better. I can't wait to see what's going to happen next year. >> Evren Eryurek great energy, expert at A.Is, streaming analytics, again this is early days of a brand new shift that's happening. You get on the right side of history it's A.I. machine learning, streaming analysts. Thanks for coming, I appreciate it. >> Thank you so much, take care guys. >> More live coverage here in theCUBE in San Francisco at Google next Cloud 2019. We'll be back after this short break.

(Upbeat music) >> From the Hard Rock hotel in Las Vegas, its theCUBE! Covering the Hosho Con 2018, brought to you by Hosho. >> Okay, welcome back every one, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here live in Las Vegas for Hosho Con, the first inaugural event where security and block chain conferences is happening, it's the first of its kind where practitioners and experts get together to talk about the future, and solve some of the problems in massive growth coming they got a lot of them. Its good new and bad news but I guess the most important thing is security again, the first time ever security conference has been dedicated to all the top shelf conversations that need to be had and the news here are covering. Our next guest Greg Pinn who's the head of strategy and products for iComply Investor Services. Great to have you thanks for joining us. >> Very nice to be here >> So, we were just talking before we came on camera about you know all the kind of new things that are emerging with compliance and all these kind of in between your toes details and nuances and trip wires that have been solved in the traditional commercial world, that have gotten quite boring if you will, boring's good, boring means it works. It's a system. But the new model with Block Chain and Token Economics is, whole new models. >> Yeah I think what's so exciting about this is that in the Fiat world, from the traditional financial market, everyone is so entrenched in what they've been doing for 20, 30, 40 years. And the costs are enormous. And Block Chain, Crypto coming in now is like we don't have to do it that way. We have to do compliance. Compliance matters, it's important and it's your legal obligation. But you don't have to do it in the same sort of very expensive, very human way that people have been doing it in the past. >> And Cloud Computing, DevOps model of software proved that automations a wonderful thing >> Right >> So now you have automation and you have potentially AI opportunities to automate things. >> And what we've seen is huge increases in technology, in around machine learning and clustering of data, to eliminate a lot of the human process of doing AML, KYC verification, and that's driving down costs significantly. We can take advantage of that in the Crypto Space because we don't have thousands of people and millions of millions of dollars of infrastructure that we've built up, we're starting fresh, we can learn from the past and throw away all the stuff that doesn't work, or isn't needed anymore. >> Alright let's talk about the emerging state of regulation in the Block Chain community and industry. Where are we? What's the current state of the union? If you had to describe the progress bar you know with zero meaning negative to ten being it's working, where are we? What is the state of >> I think if you'd asked me a year ago I think negative would've been the answer. A year ago there was still a big fight in Crypto about do we even want to be part of Compliance, we don't want to have any involvement in that. Because it was still that sort of, Crypto goes beyond global borders, it goes beyond any of that. What's happened now is people have realized, it doesn't matter if you're dealing in Crypto Currency or traditional currency, or donkeys or mules or computers or whatever, if you're trading goods for value, that falls under Regulatory Landscape and that's what we're hearing from the SCC, from FinCEN, from all the regulators. It's not the form it's the function. So if you've got a security token, that's a security, whether you want it to be or not. You can call it whatever you want, but you're still going to be regulated just like a security. >> And I think most entrepreneurs welcome clarity. People want clarity, they don't want to have to be zigging when they should be zagging. And this is where we see domicile problem. Today it's Malta, tomorrow it's Bermuda. Where is it? I mean no one knows it's a moving train, the big countries have to get this right. >> A hundred percent. And beyond that what we're seeing, what's very, very frustrating for a market as global as this is it's not just country-level jurisdiction, the US you've got State-level jurisdiction as well. Makes it very, very hard when you're running a global business if you're an exchange, if you're any sort of global, with a global client reach. Managing that regulation is very, very difficult. >> You know I interviewed Grant Fondo who's with Goodwin Law Firm, Goodwin Proctor they call it Goodwin now, he's a regulatory guy, and they've been very on the right side of this whole SCC thing in the US. But it points to the issue at hand which is there's a set of people in the communities, that are there to be service providers. Law Firms, Tax, Accounting, Compliance. Then you got technology regulation. Not just financial you have GDPR, it's a nightmare! So okay, do we even need GDPR with Block Chain? So again you have this framework of this growth of internet society, now overlaid to a technical shift. That's going to impact not only technology standards and regulations but the business side of it where you have these needed service providers. Which is automated? Which isn't automated? What's your take on all of this? >> I agree with you a hundred percent, and I think what's helpful is to take a step back and realize while compliance is expensive and a pain and a distraction for a lot of businesses. The end of the day it saves people's lives. And this is what, just like if someone was shooting a gun as you were running down the street, in your house, you're going to call the police, that is what financial institutions are doing to save these industries and individuals that are impacted by this. A lot of it from a Crypto Currency perspective, we have a responsibility because so much of what the average person perception is, is Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road. And we have to dig our way out of that sort of mentality of Crypto being used for negative things. And so that makes it even more important that we are ultra, ultra compliant and what's great about this is there's a lot great opportunities for new vendors to come into the space and harness what existed whether that's harnessing data, different data channels, different IDDent verification channels and creating integrated solutions that enable businesses to just pull this in as a service. It shouldn't be your business, if you're in exchange, compliance is something you have to do. It should not become your business. >> Yeah I totally agree, and it becomes table stakes not a differentiator. >> Exactly >> That's the big thing I learned this week it's people saying security's a differentiator, compliance is a, nah, nah, I have standards. Alright so I got to ask you about the, you know I always had been on the biased side of entrepreneurship which is when you hear regulations and you go whoa, that's going to really stunt the growth of organic innovation. >> Right. But in this case the regulatory peace has been a driver for innovation. Can you share some opinions and commentary on that because I think there's a big disconnect. And I used to be the one saying regulation sucks, let the entrepreneurs do their thing. But now more than ever there's a dynamic, can you just share your thoughts on this? >> Yeah, I mean regulators are not here to drive innovation. That's not what their job is. What's been so interesting about this is that because of regulations coming to Crypto along with these other things, it's allowing businesses to solve the problem of compliance in very exciting, interesting ways. And it's driving a lot of technologies around machine learning, what people like IBM Watson are doing around machine learning is becoming very, very powerful in compliance to reduce that cost. The cost is enormous. An average financial institution is spending 15 percent. Upwards of 15 percent of their revenue per year on compliance. So anything they can do to reduce that is huge. >> Huge numbers >> And we don't want Crypto to get to that point. >> Yeah and I would also love to get the percentage of how much fraud is being eaten into the equation too. I'm sure there's a big number there. Okay so on the compliance side, what are the hard problems that the industry is solving, trying to solve? Could you stack rank the >> I think number one: complexity. Complexity is the biggest. Because you're talking about verifying against sanctions, verifying against politically exposed persons, law enforcement lists, different geographical distributions, doing address verification, Block Chain forensics. The list just stacks and stacks and stacks on the complexity >> It's a huge list. >> It's a huge list >> And it's not easy either. These are hard problems. >> Right, these are very, very difficult problems and there's no one expert for all of these things. And so it's a matter of bringing those things together, and figuring out how can you combine the different levels of expertise into a single platform? And that's where we're going. We're going to that point where it's a single shop, you want to release an ICO? You're an exchange and you need to do compliance? All of that should be able to be handled as a single interface where it takes it off of your hands. The liability is still with the issuer. It's still with the exchange, they can't step away from their regulatory liability, but there's a lot that they can do to ease that burden. And to also just ignore and down-risk people that just don't matter. So many people are in Crypto, not the people here, but there's so many people in Crypto, you buy one tenth of a Bitcoin, you buy a couple of Ether, and you're like okay that was fine. Do we really need to focus our time on those people? Probably not. And a lot of the >> There's a lot big money moving from big players acting in concert. >> And that's where we need to be focused. Is the big money, we need to be focused on where terrorists are acting within Block Chain. That's not to say that Block Chain and Crypto is a terrorist vehicle. But we can't ignore the reality. >> And I think the other thing too is also the adversary side of it is interesting because if you look at what's happening with all these hacks, you're talking about billions of dollars in the hands now of these groups that are highly funded, highly coordinated, funded basically underbelly companies. They get their hands on a quantum computer, I was just talking to another guy earlier today he's like if you don't have a sixteen character password, you're toast. And now it's twenty four so, at what point do they have the resources as the fly wheel of profit rolls in on the hacks. >> You know, one of the interesting things we talk about a lot is we have to rely on the larger community. We can't, I can't, you can't solve all of the problems. Quantum computing's a great example. That's where we look for things like two-factor authentication and other technologies that are coming out to solve those problems. And we need to, as a community, acknowledge That these are real problems and we've identified potential solutions. Whether that's in academia, whether it's in something like a foundation like the Ethereum Foundation, or in the private sector. And it's a combination of those things that are really driving a lot of it's innovation. >> Alright so what's the agenda for the industry if you had to have a list this long, how do you see this playing out tactically over the next twelve months or so as people start to get clarity. Certainly SCC is really being proactive not trying to step on everybody at the same time put some guard rails down and bumpers to let people kind of bounce around within some frame work. >> I think the SCC has taken a very cautious approach. We've seen cease and desist letters, we've seen notifications we haven't seen enormous finds like we see in Fiat. Look at HSBC, look at Deutsche Bank, billions of dollars in fines from the SCC. We're not seeing that I think the SCC understands that we're all sort of moving together. At the same time their responsibility is to protect the investor. And to make sure that people aren't being >> Duped. >> Duped. I was trying to find an appropriate term. >> Suckered >> Suckered, duped. And we've seen that a lot in ICOs but we're not seeing it, the headlines are so often wrong. You see this is an ICO scam. Often it's not a scam, it's just the project failed. Like lots of businesses fail. That doesn't mean it's a scam, it means it was a business fail. >> Well if institutional investors have the maturity to handle they can deal with failures, but not the average individual investor. >> Right, which is why in the US we have the credit investor, where you have to be wealthy enough to be able to sustain the loss. They don't have that anywhere else. So globally the SCC care and the other financial intelligence units globally are monitoring this so we make that we're protecting the investor. To get back to your question, where do I see this going? I think we're going to need to fast track our way towards a more compliant regime. And this I see as being a step-wise approach. Starting with sanctions making sure everyone is screened against the sanction list. Then we're going to start getting more into politically exposed persons, more adverse media, more enhanced due diligence. Where we really have that suite of products and identify the risk based on the type of business and the type of relationship. And that's where we need to get fast. And I don't think the SCC is going to say yeah be there by 2024, it's going to be be there by next year. I was talking to Hartej, he was one of the co founders of Hosho and we were talking on TheCUBE about self-regulation and some self-policing. I think this was self-governed, certainly in the short term. And we were talking about the hallway conversations and this is one of the things that he's been hearing. So the question for you Greg is: What hallway conversations have you overheard, that you kind of wanted to jump into or you found interesting. And what hallway conversations that you've been involved in here. >> I think the most interesting, I mentioned this on a panel and got into a great conversation afterwards, about the importance of the Crypto community reaching out to the traditional financial services community. Because it's almost like looking across the aisle, and saying look we're trying to solve real business problems, we're trying to create great innovative things, you don't have to be scared. And I was speaking at a traditional financial conference last week and there it was all people like this Crypto is scary and it's I don't understand it. >> You see Warren Buffett and Bill Gates poopooing it and freak out. >> But we have an obligation then, we can't wait for them to realize what needs to be done. We need to go to them and say, look we're not scary, look let's sit down. If you can get a seat at a table with a head of compliance at a top tier bank, sit down with them and say let me explain what my Crypto ATM is doing and why it's not a vehicle for money laundering, and how it can be used safely. Those sorts of things are so critical and as a community for us to reach across the aisle, and bring those people over. >> Yeah bridge the cultures. >> Exactly. Because it's night and day cultures but I think there's a lot more in common. >> And both need each other. >> Exactly. >> Alright so great job, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. >> Thank you so much. >> If you have a quick plug on what you're working on, give the plug for the company. >> Sure, so iComply Investor Services is here to help people who want to issue ICOs, do that in a very compliant way. Because you shouldn't have to worry about all of your compliance and KYC and Block Chain Forensics and all that, you should be worried about raising money for your company and building a product. >> Alright final question since I got you here 'cause this is on my mind. Security token, has got traction, people like it 'cause no problem being security. What are they putting against that these days, what trend are you seeing in the security token? Are they doing equity? I'm hearing from hedge funds and other investors they'll want a little bit of equity preferred and or common, plus the token. Or should the token be equity conversion? What is some of the strings you're seeing? >> You know I think it' really just a matter of do you want paper or do you want a token? Just like a stock certificate is worth nothing without the legal framework behind it. A security token is the same way. So we're seeing where some people are wanting to do equity, where some of their investors want the traditional certificate. And some are fine with the token. We're seeing people do hybrid tokens where it morphs from security to utility or back. Where they're doing very creative things. It's what's so great about the Ethereum Network and the Smart Contracts, is there are all of these great options. The hard part then is, how do you fit those options into regular framework. >> And defending that against being a security, and this is interesting because if it converts to a utility, isn't that what security is? >> So that's the question. >> Then an IPO is an, again this is new territory. >> Right, and very exciting territory. It's an exciting time to be involved in this industry. >> In fact I just had an AE3B Election on tokens, first time ever. >> Yeah it's an amazing state that we're in. Where serious investors are saying yeah token's great for me. Give me the RC20 I'll stick it in my MetaMask Wallet, it's unbelievable where we are. And only more exciting things to come. >> Greg Pinn, thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. TheCUBE covers live here in Las Vegas, Hoshocon, the first security conference in the industry of its kind where everyone's getting together talking about security. Not a big ICO thing, in fact it's all technical, all business all people shaping the industry, it's a community it's TheCUBE coverage here in Las Vegas. Stay with us for more after this short break. (Upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week, now here's John Furrier. (upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage here in New York City in Manhattan at the Hilton Midtown for Consensus 2018 part of Blockchain Week New York. Our next guest here is Greg Landegger who's with Smith Parsons and Whittemore also known for Bit Digest, investor in this space since the beginning, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me John. >> So I've got to ask you, you've been an investor in a lot of coins and equity deals the space is now busting out, I mean first of all are you amazed by the amount of people here? >> I'm more than amazed, it's surreal. >> And you now have an interesting culture of new investors in the space coming in. What's it like for you working with the new investors? >> So we are a single family office that started originally in 2014 and the way I describe it is for the past few years I was the loser at the lunchroom, everyone was making fun of me and then last year all the cool jocks wanted me to sit at their table. (John laughing) A lot of our bankers, all the traditional firms, started calling up saying, "What are you doing? What is this bitcoin thing that you've been spending your time on?" >> So you had a nice little cover story there for a while but can't ignore the returns, at the end of the day. >> That's exactly right, last year was too good a year. >> Alright, so talk about some of the dynamics that you're seeing here at Blockchain Week. What are you seeing? What's the top story, what's the big news that you think is most important? >> I think the news right now is that there's real development going on, I mean we're all waiting, the holy grail to me is coming up with an institutional custodial project. Ledger Wallets announced something today so we're very excited about that and there's more and more effort being done in that area. And that's really what'll bring in more people into the market. >> Big controversy yesterday in the panel about you know Blockchain washing or you know seeing blockchain, pretty heated argument there, your thoughts? I mean obviously, it's early, embryonic, it's growing really fast, I've heard the same arguments when the web came along, too slow, you know it's not fully functional, but it was still early. Same here? What's your take on all this? >> As an investor we'd like it to be must faster, but realistically everything's surpassing any expectations. I mean nobody, if you talked to people early last year we would laugh about people predicting bitcoin at 2,500. >> So with the coins, talk about the investment you're making in coins. >> So we invest it. >> 'Cause that's different than the equity. >> It is, but we had a learning experience where one of our companies ICOed, we chose not to participate in it and it was the wrong decision, it really told us we need to be on the equity side as well the coin side. >> When was that? Early on or? >> Last year. >> Last year. >> The middle of last year. >> Okay, so what kind of coin deals are you doing? What's that profile? >> So we do a little bit of everything, I mean we've come up with a term rebel coins which are the top six coins, it's Ripple, Etherium, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, EOS, and Lightcoin, we like those. Then we invest in a total of about 20 coins. >> And the blockchain doesn't bother you in the performance and all that good stuff? >> No because we're making a bet on the future of different things >> Long game. >> It's a long game for us. >> What's your criteria for investment? You obviously get the, you're kind of a rebel in yourself, but your returns are there, I've seen this movie before in the web, but everything happened in the web and the returns were made you know really before the dot com bubble popped around 2001 timeframe. But there's still great returns, but the decisions were interesting then. How do you make your choices? How do you know what a good deal is? >> It's, I'd say 80% the team. Do they have the experience? Do they have an understanding of what they're doing? I mean I have a lot of great ideas on things I know nothing about and know I'll never succeed in 'em. So if we find a team that is experienced in an area, understands it, has a real go to market story, >> Interesting enough. >> that's exciting us. >> Okay so it's the classic criteria with a twist. How about running hard? You say really you got to run hard in this game it's a fast-moving, unlike the dot com bubble, this thing is highly accelerated, you got to, you can't be sittin' on you butt on this one. >> No agreed, you've got to be very aggressive in the area, but I think with the ICOs there's more money up front than people typically had and that's really what's changed the market a lot for us, is it's not a deal where the venture capitalists go out and give a million dollars to five companies, wait to see what happens, now those five companies are able to raise a lot more money, but it doesn't guarantee they'll succeed. >> Greg you've become kind of a great known investor, certainly the Bit Digest is well-known for great following there. I got to ask you the double coin question, pun intended. There's the good and the bad, name something that's really good about this industry right now, that people should know about that might not be familiar. And what are some of the things that you're concerned with? That you want to see kind of stopped, or bad behavior eradicated? Share your perspective on the double coin side of the life if you're in the crypto world. >> So let's, starting with the bad, I think it's education, people don't understand what's going on. We keep on hearing about Mt Gox, Silk Road, that's in the past, bitcoin, and I use bitcoin as a general term at times, but you know it is not a, I mean it's a transparent currency, it's safer than a lot of other things out there, people don't understand that and I blame the media a lot for just repeating the story, maybe it sells papers, but just people aren't explaining what's really going on in the market. >> That's the Ed model for you, if it leads, if it bleeds, it leads, and that's a story. No but I think people see the ICO things too happening right? They go, "Okay, there's been some scams on the ICO-side, so I've heard that story, you know I'm worried about that." >> I mean I've spent some time in the microcap space I dealt with a lot more questionable people in microcaps than I deal in crypto. >> You mean in the traditional market? >> Traditional, pink sheets area. >> So I think what's different now, I'd love to get your perspective on that I see at least, observation wise, is you have an open source ethos kind of community model where there's a lot of self-governing going on. Are you seeing the same thing? Is there people talking, it's a tight knit community, still small, growing, is there like a special self-governance thing going on in the finance world? I mean you know there's been talk on people kind of organizing, syndicating, pooling deals together, which is natural. But how about the self-governing aspect of it? >> You know I think, I mean people, the funds or the actual token offerings themselves, that's still something that needs to be addressed, people haven't done it in the same way a typical equity raise would be done and a lot of the different fund managers, let me back up by saying this is the most open market I've ever seen where everybody is willing to talk to each other to try and share ideas and make this grow and a lot of the fund managers are now looking at it saying, "We need some more governance." There're things going on today, such as in the ICO market, if you invested in equity, you never thought that a ICO offering may occur originally and is it a liquidity event and what happens? So we're trying to come up with some governance that hasn't existed but probably needs to be, but to be fair the companies that we've been lucky enough to invest with are supporting the ideas. >> Yeah so there's liquidity going on. It's a new kind of liquidity. What is that liquidity? Where is the liquidity? It's not just a Kickstarter campaign, there's actually liquidity going on. >> There is liquidity going on and I think we're trying to figure out how to now take equity that is established in the traditional sense, we talked about security tokens, but the companies that are actually have issued ICOs are trying to determine how to give a dividend or some form of liquidity to the shareholders and that's a new market. >> Greg does the domicile matter to you? Where they are located? I mean I've heard things like special purpose vehicles have always been kind of an analogy. >> I mean traditionally I will say no, our attorneys would say yes, but if it's a Cayman, we've invested in some Cayman companies, Europe, Asian companies, so that really doesn't bother us that much, again it's the team >> It's not a deal killer. >> It's definitely not a deal killer. >> But you'd prefer, obviously, security token, in the US. >> Delaware-based would make us the happiest. But if they have a real team behind it, if they have real attorneys, real auditors, we'll look past that. >> And global reach, that's a big factor. >> Absolutely. >> How much is global impacting this world? I mean, we're in the US, we're kind of turning into it. >> It's incredibly, but I think the one area where we need to do a better job is in expanding it, I mean there are a lot of foreigners at this market today, at this event, but it's, we know the US market really well, we don't know what's going on in Asia, we read the trade magazines and that's how we know what's going on there's efforts now, I'm even, Consensus announced today they're having an event next year, or this year, in Singapore. We need to have greater reach to share what's going on around the world versus what a few people are telling us. >> John: You see that as a big issue? >> I do, we don't see what's going on in China today, we don't see what's going on in Singapore, the Philippines, and that's where a lot of the effort is going on. >> Well I think you're right, I think one of the things and that's where fake news on Facebook, you know with the whole election here in the US and now outside influence, whether it's terrorist groups or propaganda-based systems, quality of the data >> That's exactly right. >> is a really important with real time. >> And the data's limited today, I mean it's not. >> I agree, I mean we totally agree with the same thing. Okay final thought, walk away this week from big data, not big data, Blockchain Week NYC, your big walk away here this week. What's your takeaway? What do you take home? >> We went in the right direction, I mean that this is still developing, we're not there yet, there's still a lot of work to be done, but long-term whether you believe in digital currencies or not today, this is something that central governments are looking at in supporting, enterprise is getting into it, and this is the future. So we made the right choice. >> And is it only going to get better you think? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah I think stability-wise, technically, and the business models are starting to shake out. Just quickly before, I know you got to go, thank you for your time, quickly token economics, big part of the business model side of it your thoughts and reaction to how that's going and how people should start thinking about that if they could meet their criteria for some sort of de-centralized business opportunity. >> So I think, it's looking at network usage, I mean that's really the way we look at it today, the fundamental model doesn't work, or we haven't been able to determine how to do that, but adoption, it's growth, and that's how we've focused things and see where it is. >> Well congratulations for all the work and all the work you're doing and that continue to do. Thanks for coming on theCUBE, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Great to have a big-time investor on theCUBE here. Big-time investors, we had entrepreneurs, we had folks from Europe, Lithuania, all over the world here on theCUBE, we're out in the open. This is theCUBE covering Blockchain Week New York City Consensus 2018, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. Stay with us for more, after this break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas it's The Cube covering Polycon 18 brought to you Polymath. >> Hello, welcome to The Cube for a special Cube event, our first kick off for our cryptocurrency, Blockchain, decentralized computing world that we know as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain and all the rest. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're here previewing the conference/\. We'll be live tomorrow and Friday but were here down getting ready for the big festivities which is tonight's opening keynotes. We had the co-founder of Ethereum, Anthony Diiorio, and then Brock Pierce coming on. He also is a chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation. Luminaries as well as a bunch of other great guests, Bill Tai from California, a friend of The Cube's. This is a game changing event, Dave. You and I have talked about this on The Cube many times. The waves of innovation come, you know, this big once in a generation, maybe centuries. We're seeing one that I think is not as even big as the other ones, bigger. You combine the PC Revolution. I was just texting Michael Dell earlier today and said, "This feels like the PC Revolution." A bunch of pioneers coming together but it's got a different vibe. It's bigger. It's like the combination of the internet and PC Revolution all rolled into one with a community vibe on it. So, and we're going to have tons of coverage on this. What I want to ask you, Dave, directly is you've seen many waves and we work with and we cover some of the old guard, older companies like Dell EMC, HPE, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and they're doing really good work pivoting and trying to be ready for this new wave. It's just on Blockchain, it's just how the world works, Cloud, you know, IoT but decentralized cannot be ignored. So, some think this is a blind spot to these legacy and emerging vendors changing vendors like Oracle and IBM and HPE and Dell Technologies. Are they ready? Do you think they're ready? Do you think they even understand what's coming? And people squabble over Cloud market share and it's just funny, right? It's like there's a bigger thing coming over the top. >> Well, first thing I got to say is I got to give you props as my partner because you've been covering, you know, Blockchain, Bitcoin on SiliconANGLE since I don't know -- >> John: 2010. >> 2010, when I first met you, right. And so once again you are sort of ahead of the curve. I feel like we're at our first Hadoop World, you know, back in 2010. And so, props to you and the SiliconeANGLE team. To answer your question, no. No, they're not ready and to me it's not even about just Blockchain. I mean, Blockchain technology they can adopt. The bigger issue is digital disruption. And digital disruption is all about the data at the core of the organization and business models that are built around data. And if you think about the history of companies, it's human expertise and data's bolted on. We've seen this time and time again but if you look at the top five market cap companies, Facebook, Amazon, Google, et cetera, they're data companies. Data is at the center and they take human expertise and wrap it around there. So, the future is going to be about innovation with data, with artificial intelligence and Cloud economics and the old guard doesn't have those things. Blockchain fits in there. To me Blockchain is about building out a new distributed web and on top of the old web and rewarding those who were building it. So, it's a new form open-source where the builders get paid. >> But it's also decentralized and you have a value store, value creation capture model that has all the wrappings of what we traditionally see in a centralized database or even Cloud. You need networks, you need storage, you need databases, you need tokens, which is a form of data. So token economics, I mean, it's a new value economy, Dave. I mean, I just don't, I feel like the, I just, from my perspective, I just don't think those guys are seeing it. >> No and so it's not only those guys. It's the most of the world. I mean, you turn on CNBC and Buffet's on there saying this is going to end badly and there's negative, you know, trade press about, you know, Bitcoin and Silk Road and all that stuff. What most of the world is missing, and that makes people run away, but this is happening, it's real. It's going be the foundation for a next generation internet. It's happening, you see it all the time. Developers built the internet. Developers are going to rebuild the internet on top of this. So, I would suggest that people just try to squint through or squint passed the negative press and try to really understand what this trend is all about and how it's going to fundamentally change the internet and change the world. >> Well, there's negative press that's worthy. There's a lot of scams out there. There's security issues >> Sure >> but these are evolutionary problem spaces that can be solved. One, the scammers are going to be vetted out, the bubble bursting but the real value, creation is going to come from developers and that, to me, is what I hear you saying as your main point. >> No question about it. And I think that that, you know, there's lots of challenges. This stuff is not easy. First of all, who would've ever thought that something like Ethereum could even have been built, this kind of distributed infrastructure? I mean, it's very, very challenging. Of course we know about the scaling problems, the latency issues, all that stuff but these are problems that smart people are going to go attack and solve. And again I emphasize, it's the new form of, remember the old open systems, right? Unix and open systems. Well fast forward passed open-source, which the internet was built on open-source. Think about Linnux, everything's built on Linnux. But today developers who are building these new protocols are actually going to get paid to that. Guys like Anthony, you know, who made hundreds of millions -- >> Anthony Diiorio, co-founder of Ethereum, doing Jaxx wallet as part of Decentral. Great use case. He's paying it forward and I think the community here is a real dynamic and I think what we learned at The Cube, Dave, is the communities matter and now, more than ever they're actually having an input. Look what open-source has done to the software business over the past three decades, okay? Completely revolutionized the world we live in. So if you take the open-source apply those principals to, whether it's content media or decentralized infrastructure and applications, it's going to be a haven of innovation. >> Well and if you think about this, too, folks. Is that, you know, the centralized model has essentially co-opted all this innovation in the last 15 years, right? They've won. Closed won, Facebook won, they killed RSS. >> Well, Facebook's not winning now. They're under a lot of pressure because they screwed the election over and the data that they're using, some will argue, that, when I use Facebook, okay? Facebook's great, I get a free app, I let them have my data 'cause I want to connect with my friends but they're throwing elections off. I didn't bargain for that. The context has changed. So, to me, the shift of user data is going to move into the hands of the users. Do you agree with that statement? >> Yes, no question. And the other thing, just to finish my thought -- >> That's not good for Facebook. >> And we've talked about this, John. Protocol and development has stagnated, you know? Gmail is built on SMTP, you know, HTTP, DNS, these are all protocols that were developed by governments, and academia and the big guys just co-opted them and so, protocol development stagnated. What you need to understand about Blockchain is it bring back innovation -- >> Well, Anthony Diiorio said on my interview with him, one-on-one, that protocol developers are the most in demand role because those big guys take in co-oping those protocols, Dave, as you pointed out, is causing a revolution. It's almost like the 60s for tech. It's like there is a ground swell. I see it, I feel it. Not just a wave of innovation but the actors and the people involved look at this as a liberating opportunity to free the centralized forces that are quite frankly holding the world back. >> And I want to, this is very important and it was really epiphany when it hit me, is if you wanted to invest in TCP/IP, back in the day, how would you do that? You couldn't invest in TCP/IP. You could maybe invest in companies -- >> John: Cisco. (laughs) >> Yeah, can invest in companies. Okay, but you and I couldn't have gotten in early on Cisco, right? It was all the insiders. Today, developers who are building out these protocols, they can own the protocol. That's a form of investment and they got, essentially, equity in that token. >> Dave, we're going to be doing a lot of crypto shows and Blockchain shows because we're talking about the decentralization of the world. This is the future of our globe and work and play. What are you looking for, as we go down and knock down these shows, as The Cube goes out on this new mission? >> Well, I think Anthony kind of hinted at this. Is he's looking at infrastructure. It's like the early days of the internet with, you know, the pickaxe guys, you know, made all the money. It's the infrastructure that's getting built out. So, I want to see how that develops and how that sets the foundation, the platform for distributed applications, number one. Number two is I want to understand some of these challenges and how they're going to be addressed. The scaling issues, the latency problems, some of the, you know, nitty gritty technical challenges, who's working on those? And the third is, what's the right investment profile? How are the investors at this conference and other conferences going about deciding what to invest in? Right? How do they squint through quality and garbage? >> Well, I'm going to be heading to a special investor event. Dave, I'm going to put my ear to the ground and of course The Cube will go wherever it takes to get the story, whether it's the Bahamas. Not a bad gig here but important. We're going to get the most important stories and share that with you. And continue our mission of getting this content out in the open, shining the light on relevance and the right reputable people. Dave, always great. >> Thanks, John. >> And looking forward to a great week. (techno music)

(upbeat dramatic music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to the Cube Conversation, here in Palo Alto Studios, for The Cube. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of The Cube, co-founder of Silicon Angle Media. We are here for Thought Leader Thursday, with Mitzi Chang. She's a securities attorney and partner at Goodwin. Formerly Goodwin Proctor, Goodwin Proctor's the name. Again, great to have you on. Thanks for coming in and talking about some of the securities around Blockchain ICO's. You guys doing a lot of work, thanks for coming in. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, obviously, Blockchain is the hottest thing we're seeing. AI, obviously, is hot as well, IOT, all of this about a new, decentralized internet. And it's the wild west. And we know because we're looking at doing our Blockchain and tokens for The Cube and all that good stuff. So we're totally love the new environment. Everyone, all the light tier one entrepreneurs are licking their chops and going, ah, man, good action. And a lot of the thought leaders are saying this is a fundamental shift. So it's cool, we get that. But now, okay, is the technology ahead of the law? And, just today, the news is breaking that the SEC is now putting a clampdown on a new thing, celebrity endorsements, into ICO's initial coin offering. So, yeah, you're a securities attorney. You have to sit back there and, like, wire these deals together. >> Right. >> What's going on, I mean, is the law behind the tech? How are you guys managing it, what's the flow look like for you? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that the law is almost always behind the technology, right. That's just how it works. I mean, from our perspective, you know, we represent tons of companies on normal securities law, or securities issuances. And this can be similar, depending on how the token is structured. So, you know, the SEC said in its July guidance that tokens can be securities, depending on the facts. A part of what we do, as lawyers, is review the facts of the token, right. What does the token do, how do you treat the token, how are you issuing the token, how are you marketing the token? Are there securities-like features of the token? So, for example. Does it have profit sharing features? Does it have voting features? Those are pretty obviously more security-like features. But, also, you know, in the token ecosystem, are you treating it like you would equity? So, for example, you know, are you putting vesting conditions on there? Are you marketing it to VC's who may never use your network? Those are some factors that make it look like more security. Versus a utility. >> You guys also, I mean, I've been in Silicon Valley now 18 years, and been an entrepreneur for longer, and entrepreneurs are always three feet in a cloud of dust, breaking things in the bowl in the China shop, as they say, and have to get the lawyers to kind of clean things up or set things straight. Securities is a known practice, but now there's some kind of bumps in the road but still people are moving forward. So I got to ask you, what's the test? I mean, we hear things like the Howey Test. >> Mm hmm. >> What are some of the things that entrepreneurs should know around where to pay attention? Kind of where to put their head down and drive because there are known practices, on the security site you mentioned, a few of them, but where's the test? What's the one thing, is it the Howey Test? What is this Howey Test concept? And what other things should entrepreneurs know about? >> Right, so I think, you know, the Howey Test is a test that was in CaseLab that basically explains what is an investment contract. And an investment contract is what is considered a security. So, basically, the payment of money, you know, based on the efforts of others, where you kind of have the reasonable expectation of obtaining profits, right, from those efforts of others, versus yourself. So that's the general gist of it. So I think, from a securities law perspective, that's really important. Because there has been so much focus from the SEC. But there's also other regulatory agencies who are focused on this. Some of those are, you know, money transmitter laws. You know, there's potential commodities law issues. So there's definitely other regulatory regimes that could implicate the token. Or the token could be implicated in that regime. But I think the securities law one is one that I focus on. >> Yeah. >> And it's important to look at. >> Alright, so the first test is, okay, obviously, new internet infrastructure, different conversation, but the real law test is, is this token going to be an investment making money. >> Right. >> Or is it going to be a utility. One that provides values to the participants. Did I get that right? >> Yes, I would say, generally speaking, right. Is the token, you know, is it a use case? Or is it an investment? Am I expecting profits from that token? Or am I using it like an access fee or a membership? Or to obtain services. >> An arcade game, as Grant Fonda would say. >> Exactly. An arcade game is probably your best example. >> Yeah. Okay, so then the next test is I've heard of some things I'd like to get you to explain. What anti-money laundering or AML is. And KYC, Know Your Customer. And, obviously, Bitcoin has been kind of, you know, we've heard Silk Road stories, underbelly, a lot of bad things are happening, but anonymous is good. But here, financially, Know Your Customer is a specific thing that means something and then AML, anti-money laundering, how does that factor into this whole thing? >> Yeah, so I think for, you know, when you open a bank account, for example, right, your bank wants to know who you are. They'll obtain certain information from you. Whether it's your drivers license or passport. Where you obtained your funds. I mean, that's part of the Know Your Customer, anti-money laundering activity, right. >> And identity behind the, before you sign the thing. >> Right. So part of it is because cryptocurrency can be very anonymous, right. There are anonymous wallets that you're sending cryptocurrency to and from, you don't know who these people are. So part of it is making sure that you understand who your purchasers are. You don't want to run afoul of, you know, an anti-terrorist type, you know, regulations. The US government has several lists that they have online that you can search for names of folks that you don't need to be doing business with. So there's a lot of structures already in place. And part of that is just understanding who your purchasers are. >> And these are requirements on certain things, and the anti-money laundering exposes just audit trailing and certain things that you got to have as compliance things. >> Correct, correct. And so I think, in America, we don't normally, I would say if you were kind of outside of the US, this is probably a little bit more normal, right. People are used to doing it. I think, in America, maybe we're not as used to it. But these are not kind of new guidelines. This has always existed. >> Alright, so sometimes entrepreneurs are fast and loose with their, ah, screw the anti-money laundering thing. Or they get, I don't understand, that's too much work, I don't understand it. >> Yeah. >> So they blow it off. When do they have to not blow it off? When do you have to worry about, like, all these anti-money laundering things? Cause you have to, obviously, do more work. >> Right. >> Got to make sure you're checking the boxes, complying. That probably has overhead, costs money, or maybe write some new software. So we've been recommending that all of our clients who are in the token space and kind of obtaining, you know, digital currency, go through KYC and AML. Some of the digital currency exchanges, right. So in order, when you're receiving your digital currency and you need an account, >> Mm hmm. >> in order to exchange the digital currency into US dollars, for example, it's essentially like opening a bank account. So they're going to ask for all of the information with respect to how did you receive your digital currency. So part of that is you need to have that in place prior to actually launching your token sale so that you can kind of follow the flow of funds. >> So I was trying to find this image I would put up but I can't find it cause I'm on this computer, but I saw a thing on a conference, might have been Block Con, that you guys were at. I think you guys sponsored that event. Where the cost of doing an ICO can range from, they said, on the cheap end, they use the word cheap, not inexpensive, cheap, probably implying not get a good lawyer, a hundred K up to 750 thousand dollars. So, range of cost between hundred thousand and 750 thousand. From cheap to done right. >> Right. Right. >> Or expensive. Is that right or is that, what's the cost ranges? >> Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of players in the ecosystem, right. So there's the lawyers. And typically lawyers bill by the hour, so that's kind of how much time, you know, we're kind of looking at documents and things and helping you structure. There's the tax accountants. So part of that is also, you know, how much time they're spending. But some of it can be very complicated from a tax structuring perspective. Then there's the technical people, right. Unless you have that in house. To actually build your Blockchain network. Kind of help you with all of that, you know, the technical aspects of it. So software engineers, for example. Then there's the ICO consultants. Someone to kind of help you manage, quarterback the process, maybe help you with marketing the tokens to certain different websites, or help you with that. So, all of those together, I mean, yes, it can be very expensive, it kind of depends on how much of that you want to outsource. And how much of that you can do yourself. Obviously, you can't really do all that stuff yourself. >> So it's in the ranges. It could be in the ranges. >> Yeah. I mean, tax alone could kill you if you're looking at all kinds of complicated schemes or licensing agreements. >> Right. >> I mean. >> So all that, you want to make sure you're structuring the entity appropriately before you start it. >> Okay, so where do you get involved? So let's just say that, let's just walk through the day and day operations of, say, Goodwin. Okay, I've got to client. >> Yep. >> And, okay, you come in for the securities component. What does that mean? You just make sure they're incorporated properly? All the laws on the stock and then the tokens treatment? What specific things do you do? >> Sure, so, you know, once we kind of have brought the client in, after our conflicts procedures, and we've agreed to the engagement, part of depends on where they are. If they don't have a company, we'll help you form the company, right. And make sure that all of those startup documents have been appropriately done. Sometimes people have already, they're, you know, an actual company, right. We don't need to form them, they're already in existence. So then we look at pass the formation items and we look at the token issuance. So we'll look at your white paper. The white paper typically describes how the token works in the ecosystem and kind of what the company. >> You get involved in that, just to kind of check if it sounds. >> From a structuring perspective, right. Do we think this is a security? Or do we think it is leaning towards utility? And the SEC obviously has not said, what is a utility and what is a security. >> So that's the gray area? >> Yes. >> So the gray area is watch the language, be careful what you say. >> But also what you do, right. It's not just what you say, it's also what you do. So part of it is talking to the clients about what are you thinking, how are you envisioning this? Where can we help you kind of restructure or decrease your risks? >> And you guys become a safety net and help defend that too, obviously, as attorneys. But the clients still own, >> Correct. I mean, part of it is we give you advice. And the clients can take or not take our advice. But that's what we're here for. >> Do you guys offer a legal opinions behind these? I'm sure you don't. (laughs) >> We don't offer legal opinions. You know, we do do research memos on kind of where we think your token lies. But we don't do legal opinions. >> So have you guys talked to the SEC at Goodwin? I mean, do you guys have conversations? I don't know what goes on behind the curtain of the big law firms but I'm assuming that you guys are up to speed on all the notes and everything, but do you guys actually talk to people at the SEC? Is that how it works? Cause this is a cutting edge area, I'm sure you guys have to be on the cutting edge. >> Yeah, I mean we haven't had any clients, knock on wood, that have had to go through any of the SEC investigations on this. So, you know, we have not had, on behalf of our clients, had to talk to them about it. >> So that's good news, you guys doing good. >> Yeah. >> I know you guys doing over close to 30 plus ICO's, so congratulations. Is there a pattern that you've seen, from a legal standpoint, that you've seen emerging? Obviously, it's pretty clear, out in the market place, certainly the celebrity endorsement, Paris Hilton to the boxer dude and all kinds of stuff was going on where people were endorsing >> Right. >> things, so. Kind of, I don't want to say pump and dump, but that's a word that's been used in the dot com bubble, but people are saying a lot of these things are scams. And the majority of them aren't going to work out. So we've said, editorially here on The Cube and Silicon Angle, that failure doesn't mean scams. We had some failures, but certainly there are some scams. So has that caused people to pull back a little bit? And say, whoa, we're not going to go forward fast enough? Or is nothing stopping this, what's the pattern? >> Yeah, I would say, compared to a year ago, where there was no SEC guidance, right, there was no guidance from other regulator agencies, people were definitely going very quickly. I think now what we're seeing are more sophisticated clients. Clients who really want to make sure that they're following all of the legal requirements to the best that they can, given the grayness in the securities laws and other regimes. And a lot more of a thoughtfulness about, well, let's make sure that this works, right, we're not going to get into trouble. >> Have you seen any co-mingling between some of the traditional VC, venture capital investors or hedge funds, they're emerging, who want to come in and participate on the pure equity side, or the preferred stock or, more common, mostly prefer we see them. But, also, play in the tokens. Is there co-existence between participation? Or is it mostly they line up on the preferred and then let the tokens go here? Is there a pattern there that you see around how those securities are playing out? >> Yeah, I think a lot of people see value in the token ecosystem and they want to participate in that. And a lot of our venture capital clients, or our token clients who have VC investors, they want to participate. So we are definitely seeing people are very excited about it and want to kind of be a part of it. >> What about the presale concept? We're seeing a lot of people jump on the presale bandwagon because it allows them to, you know. It's not an inexpensive process. You guys, obviously, don't work for free. You guys have deals where, obviously, startups can come in. And you guys have a great startup program, I could testify that. You guys do have a good community participation there. But, at the end of the day, this is a legitimate process now. >> Mm Hmm. >> It costs money. You guys have to get paid. And service provides, like the tax attorneys got to get paid. So there's a lot, we see a lot of entrepreneurs doing that's presale. Where they try to offer this kind of discount. How is that working out and has that been going well? >> Yeah, I mean I think, you know, while the SEC has not commented on this, the practitioners and kind of the ecosystem, most people, I think, are considering that presale agreement prior to a network actually being live as a security. And, so, people are going out to accredited investors, sometimes that's VC, sometimes that's high net worth individuals. That's usually done through a SAFT, which is, it stands for Simple Agreement for Future Tokens, or a presale contribution agreement. So part of that is it's like a, you can liken it to a preferred stock financing. >> It's a known process. >> But it's not preferred stock. >> But it's a known vehicle for financing. >> Correct. >> It's not like it's tied to the ICO in a new vehicle. It's just like, okay, we're going to do something down the road, there's risks associated, all that stuff. >> Right, it's an investment contract. I'm giving you a million dollars to invest, to build up the platform. At the end of, when the platform launches, and, hopefully, when the network has utility and your token has utility, then you'll receive tokens. >> And this is good for innovation, because it gets everyone rolling a little bit. Is that, that kind of seems to be the pattern that I'm seeing. It's like, you know. >> It's basically like a seed round, alright. That's probably a really good example, is it's a seed round to get something started. That thing is not your company, it is your network. >> And it also sets the community. I've noticed on the Blockchain, these ICO communities are a very bit part of it. Goodwin's got a great reputation, certainly here in Silicon Valley, and around the world, as a law firm. This is a big part of it. So the presale's also kind of a gesture of credibility for the opportunity and I think, I mean, you know, people I talk to are like, hey, I look at what's going on in the presale, kind of as an indicator of who's involved, judged by the company that you keep kind of thing. So that's interesting. Have you seen that presale dominating more than just going right to the ICO, given the market conditions of all the ICO's? >> Yeah, I mean I think it depends, right. Some of our clients have existing businesses, right. Where this is very complimentary. The Blockchain network is complimentary to their existing business and, so, they may not need to have this big presale, right. Part of the presale could be two weeks before your general crowd sale. You have folks who kind of get in early. To me, that is not necessarily, I mean, it really depends, obviously, fact-specific, but that's a little big different that doing a, quote, presale agreement. Like a year before or six months before your token launch. That's a little bit different. >> Yeah, so also you brought up a good point. Existing businesses versus kind of like people who just need the cash to get going. >> Right. >> We're seeing a lot of companies that either have a successful business, like Kik and then Kik Kin Token was once example, we talk about all the time. The other one is pivots. We're seeing a lot of entrepreneurs take companies that were pivots, AKA, going out of business, where the token timing of a token in decentralized Blockchain actually is great for their business model. And they have to, essentially, go recap or do some securities, you know, resetting. That's your world, right? You got to get involved in those areas. >> Yeah, I mean, I think anything that has to do with kind of changing your capital structure, right, you should have your securities lawyer or your corporate lawyer involved. Because that'll obviously impact your securities law. You know, exemptions that you're taking, you know, typically from a private placement exemption, for most of our private company clients. >> Is there any new trends that are popping out of that kind of pivot or, wow, this is really, you know, I was out there, I got some funding from Y Combinator, or some sort of venture, and we're kind of just barely staying alive. This Blockchain could really accelerate, there's now momentum. Is there any trends that you see, from your work standpoint, where you have, that are happen, that are obvious new things that are coming out of this? Or is it a standard recap to cap table, normal corporate work? >> I think there is a tension, right, between doing a normal stock finance, preferred stock, or common stock financing that, you know, whatever you would typically do. Whether that's a convertible security or a convertible note. And then raising funds through a token sale. And so, from my perspective, it's obviously cleaner to do it the traditional way. Because you're not dealing with unclear SEC rules, right. It's very clear how you do a preferred stock financing. We do that every day. So to the extent that companies are in that position where they can choose, it's certainly cleaner to do it the traditional way. >> If you pull off an ICO, god bless you. It's certainly equity-free, tokens. There's no equity to token, if you're a utility token. >> Right. >> Okay, so I was reading about the Delaware, Delaware was allowing companies to use Blockchain. >> Mm hmm. >> This is right up your alley. So, they're not doing ICO's. So can you clarity the Delaware situation relative to Blockchain, cause they're using a Blockchain from a ledger standpoint, but it's not an ICO haven yet. So talk about the Delaware situation. >> Correct, so the Delaware amendments, which I believe are now approved, as of a couple of months ago, over the summer, essentially allow the cap table ledger to be on the Blockchain. So they're kind of ahead of everything, right. Because, you know. So, for like, for example, a few years ago, no one had uncertificated stock certificates. Everybody wanted the physical stock certificates. And now most companies, that we represent, >> They want digital. >> Exactly, digital, uncertificated stock certificates. But there is a ledger and there is a record of it. You just don't have the fancy paper with the pretty legend on it. So I think technology is moving and the law needs to as well. So part of that is Delaware kind of getting onboard. >> Delaware's got a great opportunity, they can nail the ICO's. Well, Mitzi, thanks for coming, I really appreciate it. Any other observations that you'd like, that you see in the market that you'd like to share? Take a minute to talk about what you're doing at Goodwin, as well. What's going on, what's happening? >> Yeah, I mean I think it's a really exciting time, we're really excited to be a part of it. It's cutting edge work. I think that there's a lot of, I guess, what I would call kind of your more traditional clients that we have, that we take calls from every day. Whether that's investment banks, or VC funds, private equity funds, or just our venture backed companies that are curious as to what is this all about. >> Yeah. >> So I think it's really exciting and I'm glad to be a part of it. I don't think that it is going to stop. I think that certainly there's likely to be more regulation about how you do one of these ICO's, one of these token generation events, you know, within the confines of the law. But I don't see it stopping. >> You don't see it stopping at all? >> No, I mean I think once there's more regulation, there'll be more clarity about how to do it. And how to do it within the confines of the law, which we try to do, obviously, you know, given that there's not a ton of clear guidance. But I think that, I think the ship has sailed. >> Yeah, well this is a great conversation here with Goodwin, formerly Goodwin Proctor, Mitzi Chang, partner, she's a securities attorney. We should call this show Billable Hours. Because we're getting some free legal opinions and conversations, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having me. >> Blockchain is hot, entrepreneurs are using it. All the top tier one entrepreneurs are looking at this. Great opportunity, similar with the Web One dato, the TC IP era of the internet, Blockchain. It's fundamental infrastructure for the future of decentralization, so. Great opportunities, causing lots of innovation. Check with your attorneys, obviously Goodwin, and a few others all doing great ICO's. Great potential fundraising, but also great business opportunities. Thanks again, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So Cube Conversations here, in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (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.

live from las vegas it's the cube covering knowledge 60 brought to you by service now here your host dave vellante and Jeff Frick welcome back to knowledge 16 everybody this is the cube this is day two for the cube at knowledge our fourth year here cube goes out to the events we extract the signal from the noise we find the people that really know what they're talking about April Carter is a practitioner she's a senior IT operations manager at cars.com you want when a car go check out cars.com April thanks for coming on the cube thank you so take us inside well first of all talking about cars com I mean very competitive industry you're in right very competitive lots of merging market you're transforming thing you're disrupting and you're banging heads with everybody else is trying to do that but what's happening in the business what are the real pressures that are they're putting on i.t coming up with those new services really and really delivering quickly so we're very much anjel shops and we're doing continuous integration and continuous delivery is the big things for us right now the need for speed but so take us inside the world of IT Service Management your world you know what's it like so basically our transformation was you think of us of us accom so you think that were you know ahead of them a game but when I got two cars they were very paper and spreadsheet driven email is still even still very key to what we do you're rolling your eyes when you say that we can relate it annoys me so you know what service now has really helped us to really start that process and really rethink the services we deliver to our employees so everybody thinks of that external face to cars.com and that's what we focus on so much and we forget that internal phase so making things easier for our employees okay so um maybe start with the the journey of service now you you brought service now into the organization three years ago you had had experience in prior lives with not with service now but with other itsm vendors and they have always been very painful so when we did our bake off on what product that we were going to use you know when they came in they weren't we weren't really considering them a contender how long ago was this sorry two three years okay um but when they came in and they did their demo that you you know we were in the system and we're like this is a little too good to be true and then they say they we could be implemented in three months were like yeah right right that never happens but it all came to fruition and we were implemented with you know incident problem changed the basics you know knowledge an employee self-service portal with probably 30 or so orderable IIT items and it was a big deal for us and a huge success and how long did it take uh three months three months then you got a cake we did get a game everybody gets in here they don't miss daddy must have that in service now so they don't miss that reverse process okay so what was so the cars before was really paper-based spreadsheet based email base what was the business impact the business impact is really trying to drive our business partners in HR and in even in the development space to really try to rethink the way they interact internally so HR we implemented an onboarding automation so we went from multiple forms that we had to fill out as hiring managers to down to one so that was a big deal for us plus we were manually creating user accounts we were manually provisioning and how hardware and access we went through the entire process of about six months after we implemented service now to really try to grab ahold of that process and make it easier because we were delivering our new employees they're all of their things on time that first day because that's our goal but it was extremely painful for the service desk and those folks that Purdue that provisioning so we wanted to make it easier for them and we were able to okay so you you you brought in HR is Ellis recruiting but yeah okay HR pieces a little bit more difficult so we have let we left that piece out so we said onboarding yep you met onboarding so for my recruiting so as a hiring manager you basically submit the form to hire somebody and then all the way through to provisioning all their heirs and that inner integrates or interfaces in some way shape or form with your HR system or um it doesn't today it integrates with the recruiting system right okay which is separate from the HR system am okay and how does that integration occur so basically what what we did was we stood up a form within our catalog so as a hiring manager I can fill out all the information I need from the position that I'm filling through you know their salary requirements and all that kind of stuff plus all of their access they need once that person is hired all that's in there that in that form I can also save that form so as I need it in the future because I'm never going to remember what each person needs so i can say that form as well but then what service now does it sends that all that data over to Silk Road and actually implements all that data for the recruiters so they don't have to manually enter it because they were manually entering it before how do you find stuff ready listen giant content repository all right search it's just we have great search capabilities yeah yeah so this is that simple yeah cuz I could never find anything in my laptop uh-huh I'm very organized so it's one of those things that the the CMS that we had a portal that we have implemented now the design when we were implementing cuz it was three months we didn't really were thinking about everything it was a very broad scope when we were implementing so we didn't really think too heavily on a design of the portal and i think that the organization of the portals what probably annoys me the most at this point because people have to navigate through so much so with the news i'm very excited about the new CMS that they're pulling in helsinki which will actually help us to actual redesign that portal and get it so it's not so deep so as you say it's very hierarchical before yes and so now you're you're able to develop up with hell sinking a flatter structure exactly and it's much more easy to manage because right now it's kind of hard to manage especially if you don't have the technical skill set to do so because it's it's not easy it's more like nested folders versus labels exactly love labels so jizz so talk some more about the kinds of things that that you want to do with with the platform so there's a couple things we really want to push HR so HR is very very paper-based they love their paper actually so we implemented a take my paper ok what's your week HR status change form that you know it's a very very large process so any any time you want to change an employee status whether it's giving them a raise or changing their their location that they're based we fill out this foot paper form so we automated that and put it into service now it goes through approval processes so it's even auditable now or at least much easier to audit it and at the end of the design process was the HR folks are like well as long as I can print it out at the end I'll be fine yeah not really the point uploaded to ever know ok the other really thing that we're really excited about is actually so with the continuous delivery continuous integration that we're doing on the development side is we're opening up a lot of API is that our developers can use to automate a lot of their processes so we want to automate our release cycles right now everything's somewhat manual when we're doing release there's still people at the keyboard it's not wholly up manual but we want to get to that point where they just click on something in JIRA and it initiates the Jenkins Jenkins crates you know changes and it automates it all for them but it's still completely auditable from our perspective if you had to take a creative benefits pie and and you how to allocate a portion of the value let's say that's received by sort of IT versus outside of IT what would that pie look like I would say the biggest benefit is you know that an employee's so my goal is is to make the employees life easier I mean and that's the way I evangelize the product it's really what can I do to make your life easier what can I do to take some process it's very heavy and make it lighter for you that's the biggest biggest benefit the other thing is the ease of development on the tool so we don't want to go out and buy something every time a developer decides it wants to do something else so the ease of development so we can build small ABS we have a library app so they can check out kindle books I can check out Kendall even logins and within the tool that they're just little apps we're not going to go somewhere and buy that but we need to be able to do that so we can do that easily within the tool and it's funny in making the employees job easier is this nice second order effect where your phone doesn't ring exactly that's my goal are you don't tell him that little secret we were just doing it for you April could you talk about building these you know lightweight apps well describe the skill set of the people who are building these apps so they hard core developers or they locoed developers both I think its a mix of both so we some hard core developers that JavaScript pretty much 24 7 and then we have you know the admins who I can I code it within the tool myself but I'm definitely not a developer but it makes it easy enough for me to be able to do those little snippets of code that i need to make form easier for somebody to make it prettier to make it behave lightweight as so you're not you've never been a developer you've never written no code no never i still do it never works in pewter science major no ok but so you know you said no like okay so uh so you're smart this is ok all right ok but and so i want to dig it to level but so you are able to build apps or at least improve apps absolutely and I think there's there's multiple ways to do it obviously research the internet can tell me how to do a lot of stuff the community has been very helpful there's a also share the where you can find you know little little apps that will help you along your way as well so they make it very easy to actually kind of build out your core product did you have to go through training to get to that point or was it just sort of autodidactic or Ashley knowledge has been most of my training we didn't training at the beginning when we implemented but I haven't taken a look at training sense and you mentioned JIRA and just every tonight these stories make me think of JIRA it sounds like you know using kind of best practice in the hardcore software development part of the house and now bringing that over into the less hardcore software development side of the house but still very similar types of techniques and processes absolutely yeah that's great so bumper sticker on knowledge 16 for you what's the way they wouldn't when the trucks are pulling away from the Mandalay Bay was from April Carter standpoint what's it gonna say so the one thing there's a couple things I guess you know I did I always find vendors it at the show so I found we're implementing move soft right now it's a it's an event management tool and we're literally going through the process as we're here at the conference but it's it's an event management tool it I can't I in service now i can create manage my critical instant through being the OC critical incidents are my my bread and butter I have to make sure that those go off well and they that we reduce that time and i always find products here that I'm like oh I want to look into that we found one downstairs just yesterday that help is gonna help us and hopefully manage our mobile communications so all the cell phones and tablets and everything that we have in our orders and then dealing with the external vendors like Verizon and AT&T have been fun maybe not quite fun yeah I'm surprised something good here and and I learn a lot a new thing so it's it's always been very helpful how many years have you been coming um this will be my fourth your fourth all right same as ours too yeah April an awesome having you thanks so much for coming on the cube you know cube newbie did a great job awesome yeah you're a cube alone I here alone all right thank you thank you okay keep right here everybody will be back with our next guest is the cube we're live from knowledge 16 in Las Vegas bright back every once in a while a true break