>> Live from Los Angeles, it's theCube covering Open Source Summit North America 2017 brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat. >> Hey welcome back everyone, live here at Los Angeles, California it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit in North America. I'm John Furrier, your host with my co-host Stu Miniman with Wikibon, and our next two guests, Alan Dickenson who is the program director of the blockchain platform at IBM and Shaun Frankson, who's the co-founder and TED speaker at a company called The Plastic Bank doing some truly amazing things with technology for the betterment of society and communities. We'll get this out in a second. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> So two important things honestly. IBM, well-known in the history books that's being written. Real proponent of Linux, they were one of the early guys in during that movement, with a billion dollars in cash. That's a big number. You guys went all in on Linux, good bet, Linux was successful, it's now the standard so congratulations. Now you have the same thing going on with Blockchain. IBM's got the big bet, the company's best brains at work working on blockchain, kind of reminds me of the Linux move back in the day. Pretty impressive. >> Yeah I mean, there's a lot going on with Blockchain and one of the reasons we're here is that this is a developer event. We really want to help accelerate technology adoption and with our platform we launched two weeks ago, we have a whole suite of capabilities that developers can use that's complimentary, that's free and they can use that to go and try blockchain with a Hyperledger Composer and they can experiment and work on blockchain projects. >> You know I love the IBM marketing department, they always have the best commercials. To me I also love the Smarter Planet and I think Shaun, I would like to give you a chance to talk about your amazing project you have going on. Take a minute to explain, you're up on stage here at the event, pretty compelling, great social good, real value. What's some tech behind it. Take a minute to talk about your work. >> At The Plastic Bank we make plastic waste a currency so in developing countries it can be too valuable to enter the ocean. So the mission to use technology to stop ocean plastic. So we create a recycling ecosystems all around the world where people can go out, recycle the plastic that's abundant in the environment, they can earn enough value to provide for their families, send their kids to school and we have this entire ecosystem where we gather the plastic, we have these incentive programs to sort it, recycle, then we actually sell it back to some of the world's largest corporations who can use that recycled social plastic in their products instead of using new plastic. Which means that every single product tells a story of stopping ocean plastic, reducing global poverty and this really allows just a responsible consumer to make a choice that's helping to stop ocean plastic in the end. >> Well great story I just want to drill down because this highlights couple of big trends we've seen in the Internet business as it got into Big Data. And certainly you guys know a lot about that at IBM. The collective intelligence idea of having these self-forming communities, you think of any problem. Recycling plastic, which is not that hard to do, you go to the placement. How do you get it institutionalized? Is the collective intelligence problem. So you got a clever idea to do this but you also have to support it. There's a lot of cost involved so how did you pull this together? What were some of the nuance to keep the incentives, to keep the motivation, to create the payouts. We all recycle our cans for five cents at some points in our lives, I remember when I was in college it helped me a lot. But it's a whole other scale here. Take a minute to talk about the technology. >> For sure. So we're starting in developing countries that essentially have almost no existing waste management systems so we're really starting from the ground and looking at the way of how do we remove the dangers of the cash-based systems, instead have an asset-backed token that we can safely distribute and create new abilities. So really we're dealing with the unbankable who can now for the first time, save and earn through recycling. So it's not really not looking of how do we go back to you know, what's been done in the past, it's how do we take an area and start with the best technology that exists to safely bring in these new systems. >> When you say unbankable, what does that mean? >> I mean sadly, but most of the world does not qualify for a bank account. They don't have the identity, they don't have the credit history, so it's simple concept of how do you save 200 dollars to send your kid to school. You essentially hide it under a mattress and hope that nothing happens in between. But when you can safely have a digital wallet, it's just instant savings. >> Mobile phone penetration is pretty high in these areas, so they might have mobility but no actual institutional credit bank account, am I getting that right? >> Oh exactly. It's amazing when we think there's countries with no power but who have phones. So that means the education of the mobile payments is still there, it's not a foreign concept, but now you can earn the tokens which can then even be converted into mobile payment. Again where recycling is the equal opportunity. >> So are you using the blockchain component, IBM blockchain, or are you guys using a derivatives, what's the tech? >> So we use IBM blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric and LinuxOne and you know it's a system designed to scale around the world without any interruptions and just it's a go big go at home and do it right. >> You mentioned LinuxOne and I believe there's some announcements week around how to secure containers even more and we've been trying LinuxOne, Linux on the mainframe for quite a few years. Give us the update on what's new. >> One of the new things that we're announcing at this year's show is Emperor II. It's a new Linux platform and it's the technology that's underpinning The Plastic Bank's blockchain. The other thing that we're announcing is the beta for Secure Services Containers. Around the globe we have a lot of cases where data is stolen and blockchain's another type of data, we don't want it to get stolen even though there's a lot of encryption in blockchain. We still don't want the data stolen and people trying to get at it. So we have this idea of Secure Service Containers that kind of wraps around the application and protects it from malware, protects it from insiders, can't see it, insider credentials get compromised, goes into the main ways, data gets stolen. You have to do it that way. Even if IBM gets a court order for us to reveal your blockchain data, we can't do it. It's protected and encrypted in this area, and only you have the encryption keys. So the beta for that is something we also announced today. And then two weeks ago we announced the blockchain platform, it's kind of a technology that we put in place to accelerate and help people. >> Security is a huge issue, I mean the ICO marker for instance, remind me of the old stagecoach robberies, right. You literally do like a multimillion dollar ICO, completely a secured, when you're getting your wallet getting snatched, you're getting hijacked, is that something that is related to that? Or is that just a point of the security is still an open book? I mean you can have secure transactions on the blockchain but you still got your wallets out there, so you got to have a wallet strategy. >> Most of the Secure Container technology can be used for any Linux application that you run when it's out of beta. Right now it's in beta. So we're looking for users that want to have a very secure application environment, running on Linux and sign then up for our beta. >> Shaun can you tell us, what led you to this solution? I'm sure security has got to be high on your list, the kind of financial transactions that are involved in it, but I have to say a young small company, mainframe is not the initial thing that we think of. >> Again, the only way to solve the global problems is really go on such a scale that we can have hundreds of millions of pounds provided to the world's largest companies. Which just means it's got to be large scale, no interruptions and for us, trust is the biggest thing. Investor trust, client trust, and just even everyone's trust that not only the financial side, but you know we're delivering a promise of social good, environmental justice, that if we get an irrefutable trust that it's just the right system, and to me, blockchain's a trust stamp, IBM's a trust stamp, LinuxOne is a trust stamp that just it's the right way to do it on a global scale. And for us it was global was the only way to go. >> And now of course, the supply chain is a channel that you're dealing with that blockchain is a good fit for. A lot of these early use cases, their supply chain like, well you got to keep track of a lot of moving parts and who's contributing to what. >> You can have a digital token that represents the physical asset and you can kind of track it through that way and blockchain can keep the information safe and documented so that you don't lose track of the value. >> Well we're super excited. As you know, we're looking at blockchain for our audience and our world, so it's interesting, a lot of the blockchain, certainly people see the hype and the scams out there and the ICO stuff, which is natural, they're early market, the underbelly kind of shows itself, we've seen that movie before. But, here's the thing that I've never seen in my career ever. Very often, when you have alpha geeks getting super excited, we're talking CTOs, really strong technical people, and A plus entrepreneurs, they're salivating at the blockchain opportunity because they're the canaries in the coal mines in my opinion on disruption opportunities. You seeing use cases where I can solve that problem, people with passion are going after these new opportunities that were ungettable before because you'd have to roll out this complex software product, all these costs to get started. Same pattern. >> We're seeing a lot of technology people get excited about it. But they understand the technology relatively quickly and they can get it. What seems to be slowing down a lot of blockchain adoption is more the linkages with other organizations because when you're exchanging value, you're passing it between one organization and another, and another and a value chain. And getting that value chain where you can articulate who it is, and codifying the ways that you work with the people in the value chain and create a smart contract around that, that's what we see slowing down the progress of blockchain. >> We had Brian Behlendorf on yesterday, he runs the SmartLedger project for the group and we talked about decentralizations versus distributive, we all know what distributive computing is, we've seen that. But now with decentralizations, he had a good quote, he said, minimum viable decentralization and 'cause if people think that you have to have a completely decentralized environment which I thought was a really good observation. >> I agree, I heard him say that and it reminded me of one of the steps we see in blockchain progression is we have to get a minimum viable ecosystem together. We see people sometimes biting off too big of a problem and one thing I like about The Plastic Bank's approach is that they try to get it working right somewhere first and then scale from there. And then the same thing with blockchain. You have to get your ecosystem defined, you have to get that working and then expand from there. And that's one of the things that we've designed into our blockchain platform, is the ability to govern a group of folks that are trying to exchange value and then also how to operate a blockchain once it's exchanging value with a group of folks. Things like, lets say you have a new version of Hyperledger Fabric, you want to take down your blockchain that's operating while you install the new version, but we've made sure that you can do that in a smooth way that keeps on running. >> You know Alan, that is a super smart observation. I hundred percent agree with you. I've always said this, and Stu and I and Dave, we talked about this. Blockchain is a community win. The community could win this together as the community participants increase in that kind of philosophy, the value increases. If it's a winner take all, it doesn't work, clearly. So what do you guys with the ecosystem? That's a good question. Are you guys investing in the ecosystem? Can you give some examples. Obviously you're supporting great projects. >> We've built a lot of technology but one of the things that is unique about IBM's approach to blockchain is the governance tools that we've created to help manage the ecosystem. We're the only blockchain partner out there right now that has these kind of ecosystem partner tools that can kind of speed the creation of bringing multi parties together and helping them think through how they should govern the creation and then also the operation of the blockchain. What if you want to add a few more members after your blockchain is running? That's a technology problem, but it's also a business problem. And will your blockchain keep running? >> Well we'll keep in touch, we definitely want to do a lot more coverage on what you guys are doing. I think it's instrumental, we're doing a lot of coverage as well on the ICO side, tracking that business side of it, but down on the enterprise it's a lot of activity coming and I think Accenture is going to do very well. Shaun, get back to you for a second. Want to ask you a quick question. On a personal note, what has been a learning from your process? You're doing, what seems to be probably an exciting and intoxicating job where you're making social good happen, using some tech. I mean, it's a cool project. Assuming there's been some bumps along the road like any other entrepreneurial venture. What are some of the learnings you've taken away from where you are today, where you've come from and what you achieved? What are some personal learnings? >> I think really the two biggest things is one, especially coming from just a entrepreneurial nature, it's not what you know, it's what you can figure out. There's always a how. And for us, when it was when you come up with such a giant idea and you just know where it's going and where it can go past there. Mentally just becoming the person capable of achieving what you are trying to achieve as compared to getting caught up on all the things you don't know, I mean the more you know, the more you know how much you don't know and it's really just getting inspired by the fact that whatever the next answer, whatever the next hiccup, whatever the next how, we'll figure it out. I might now know the answer, but I'm committed to figuring it out and committed to becoming the person capable of figuring it out. And you know it's a journey and process and an inspiring journey to be on. >> You got to dream the future to create it. What you're saying is it's a growth mindset, I love that growth mindset, say hey we're going to go after it, we're going to see some things and have to figure it out, that's a great mindset. Versus nervousness and insecurity. Good job, well done. Well congratulations on your success and thanks for coming on theCUBE, we really appreciate it. Alan, we look forward to chatting with you in the future and talking blockchain. IBM here on theCUBE with the great projects they're doing on blockchain and also they had an announcement a couple weeks ago around some really cutting edge value around food distribution and value chain so again, Smarter Planet, I know you guys do a lot of investments early on but congratulations, and continued success Shaun. Live coverage here from the Open Source Summit in Los Angeles, California. It's theCube, I'm John Furrier, Stu Minniman, be right back with more after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live, from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back, everyone. We're live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier and my co-host this week, Stu Minniman, for three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Our next guest is the chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, Inc., that's the first time we've actually used that. Congratulations on, I think last Thursday or Wednesday, the name officially became Dell Technology. Michael Dell, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Super excited to be with you and obviously super excited about the formation of Dell Technologies as we bring together Dell and EMC and VMware and Pivotal and RSA and Virtustream and SecureWorks and so many other great organizations. >> So Dell Technology, now it's official, but EMC, Dell EMC is not yet official. Quick, give us the update. That's the number one thing people are asking. What's the update with the merger and the China situation. What's the quick update there from your standpoint? >> You know, we announced this back in October of last year and we're very much on track with the original timeline that we said, which was that we'd close between May and October of this year, and on the original terms. So everything is moving along and we're making great progress. >> Chinese government not playing monkey business with you, looking at the big mega-merger and thinking, whoa, slow down. >> We're continuing to work with them, and as I said, we're on track with the original schedule and terms that we said when we announced it back in October of last year. >> Exciting things on the global landscape, we'll get to that in a second. But I want to get your thoughts on VMworld because this is a geek show and this is a technology show and on the keynote they're showing debugging ports, migrating from the cloud, I mean you don't see that. You usually see the pomp and circumstance, all the glamour. Here, I mean you're a geek, you're always getting down and dirty with the technology. Thoughts on this community, because this is, these guys roll their sleeves up. And by the way, they're very vocal on social media so you can always get the Twitter feed, but your thoughts on VMworld, the culture of this ecosystem? >> I thought the demos that Guido showed were incredibly cool, showing sort of the evolution of virtualization to the software-defined data center to the hybrid cloud to now Cross-Cloud and all the things that you can do. And as you saw, live examples with Citibank and Columbia and J & J, these are real live organizations. And of course at VMworld you have the ecosystem of VMware in all of its glory, with the whole industry coming together and, as you said, a passionate group of individuals that are excited about what they're doing and VMware is kind of a big part of how the industry is evolving. And we're thrilled be an even bigger part of it now than we have been in the past. It's not my first time to come to VMworld, of course. >> But again, with now Dell Technologies looming, and the merger is going to be a big part of that. >> Yes. >> Technologies, and I'll ask that specific question later. But I do want to get your thoughts as someone who has been in the industry as a power broker, founder, CEO, now going private, you've seen all the waves of innovation. The ecosystem has become a really important part of it in your world there was the Wintel and the developer communities during those days, for the software business, aka the computer industry per se, but now we're on a new inflection point where the computer industry-like movement is happening with cloud and data center, hyper-converged environments. What does the ecosystem mean? Because we've seen the ecosystem kind of sitting there kind of waiting for this explosion with the cloud. Your thoughts on what the ecosystem means in this new era, vis-a-vis other times in history? >> You know, I don't see them waiting. You think about the kind of armada of companies that are coming along as the ecosystem evolves. Again, you see it out there on the show floor. You take NSX as an example. There's tremendous growth in software-defined networking. And NSX is kind of leading the way. And you see all the leading networking companies in the world here at VMworld using NSX as the platform for the software-defined network. It's just another great example. The original growth in the hypervisor and then into software-defined storage, software-defined networking and you can, if you look further on the show floor, right, you'll see kind of software-defined everything. And all aspects of the network, layers four through seven, eventually being virtualized. From the cutting edge -- >> John: So, virtualized stack. >> New things all the way to the mainstream and of course there's a lot of growth in our industry around converged and hyper-converged because it's making it easy to deploy these solutions in a rapid fashion and we're right in the middle of all this. >> So Michael, you speak pretty passionately about VMware and their role in the ecosystem. There's still a lot of noise out there that people I don't think understand how you're going to finance the debt and there's many people, like still during the keynote this morning, they're like, as soon as the deal's done, VMware is going to be sold off. Really, hardware companies don't want to do software. >> Absolutely incorrect. That's totally wrong. Anybody that says that has no clue what they're talking about. So look, I think first thing is you've got do do some math. If you look at the combined cash flows of Dell and EMC and VMware, what you find is they're many, many times greater than the debt service. And so we have, in fact, an advantage capital structure that allows us to not only do what we're doing and have tremendous scale and investment in innovation, roughly $4.5 billion annually invested in R & D, the largest enterprise systems company in the world, the strongest supply chain, and also have the speed and flexibility with some of these new startup instances. You guys are familiar with what we're doing with Pivotal and Cloud Foundry and all the great things that are going on there. With SecureWorks, with Boomi, so we've got both the speed and agility of a startup plus the scale and breadth with the broadest ecosystem and access to customers, and while we're here at VMworld, we're not just about VMware, right? Dell Technologies is a company that embraces all of the major ecosystems, be it the Microsoft ecosystem, the Linux and OpenStack and container ecosystems. So the hardware platforms that we're creating allow customers the broadest set of solutions to be able to stand up against their requirements. >> So back at Dell World, Michael, you talked about, you had Satya Nadella up on stage, how Microsoft fits and understanding, you know, in many ways Dell Technologies is an arms supplier to a lot of environments. You've got the enterprise data center. You've got the public cloud. Where do you see VMware in this evolving multi-cloud very varied ecosystem? >> I think if you look at VMware's business in the first half of this year, it's done quite well. And when I look at the trends for the forward outlook and kind of growth characteristics, VMware is making a very nice transition into this emerging cloud world. And it's doing that by taking the whole virtualization and software-defined technologies beyond the hypervisor into the whole software-defined data center. And things like the VMware Cloud Foundations make it a lot easier to do that, whether you're doing it on premise in a private cloud or whether you're a service provider, a telco, an IBM, for example. And I think you'll see others as well. And customers that have embranced VMware and of course there are 500,000 plus around the world, are looking for ways to be able to extend out to the public cloud. And the kinds of announcements you saw today with IBM, with the VMware Cross-Cloud initiative, will allow for this to extend deep into the public clouds. >> We're getting some questions from Twitter. I'll read a few of them here. Two questions. Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like? And two, what of the technologies in the portfolio are you most excited about. And I asked VMware or Dell Technologies and they asked, both. So two questions. Have you met Chairman Chang and what's he like? And what technology are you most excited about? >> I have met a number of the distinguished folks over in China for sure, whether it be in one on one meetings or in group meetings and I'm over there on a pretty regular basis. China is the second largest market in the world for Dell to sell its products. So it's also the second largest economy in the world so that shouldn't be too surprising. But we have roughly $5.5 billion business in China, a big part of our supply chain. On the second question, you know, it's kind of like saying >> John: Your favorite child. >> Which of your children do you love the most, right? So that's not, you can get in a lot of trouble with that. But when I look across the whole -- >> We need to categorize here. I'll just rephrase the question because I think that's, I mean that's a political response, I get that. But let's go into, where do you see the disruption coming from? If you had to point out a disruptive enabler that is a lever for the portfolio, where would you look at and say okay, that's going to be a real enabling technology that's going to one, propel Dell on a domestic and global basis, and two, power the ecosystem? >> I think this digital transformation is real. And I think that we are at the very beginning of this period of time where the cost to make things intelligent is approaching zero and the number of them is going to explode. And so the influence and impact that our industry has on the world will expand geometrically as a result. And so the challenge that every organization is going to have, is how do you take all this information in real time and also in time series, because I think there will be some value to the historical data, and turn it into better insights, to be able to make better decisions, to make better products and services. And we're just at the very beginning of that. So, to me, that is the most exciting thing going on and obviously, we're right in the middle of that from lots of different perspectives. >> I've got to ask you a personal question. And I want to get your thoughts on this as someone who's been in the industry and is a chess master, 3D chess player, also running a big business, global business, billions of dollars. In 1994, Bill Gates wrote The Road Ahead and he talked about the future and he completely missed the internet in his forward-looking book. And I bring that up because now we're living in a time where IOT and autonomous vehicles, looking at digital state, digital transformation is a big part of that, so I ask the question, do you worry about missing something? I don't mean FOMO, fear of missing out, but there are big moves being made like technology in autonomous vehicles, drones, all this AI going on, machine learning, do you look at that and go hmmm. Is that on your mind, like maybe you might miss something and how do you handle that? >> It's a good point. If you look at all the smartest people in the industry, whatever that means, and you say what's their ability to predict what happens in five years, 10 years, 15 years, it's actually not been very good, right? And so that has been humbling, if somebody included me in that category of people that could try to do that. But we've got a lot of smart folks. I think we have, at the core of our company, this concept of having big ears, which means we want to listen and we want to learn. And our job is to take all these things that we're learning from our customers and all of our understanding of the core molecular elements of technology, and make the magic happen in the middle that go solves the problems that customers have. >> Do you see IOT and cars and this kind of consumer experience very real for Dell Technologies to play in? >> I think there's no question that the elemental cost of computing is declining and whenever you see that happening, you see, it's like a gas, right? It expands to fit the space available. And I think you'll absolutely see this explosion, proliferation, you're already seeing it. We have hundreds of IOT projects going already within our company and we know of many, many others, so it's real. >> It's in the early phase of the hype cycle. Michael, we've got to wrap but I want to ask one final question and then kind of wrap it up. Everyone wants to know, what's the future of VMware in your words, talk to the customers that are watching and the people in the ecosystem and employees and partners. What is the future of VMware in the Dell Technologies vision? >> I think VMware has got a very bright future. I've seen this in the past where people said, Oh, you know, the PC is dead so forget about Dell. Everything's going to the cloud, so forget about all these other companies. I don't think that's quite the way it all works. So what I see in VMware is an incredibly vibrant ecosystem that's getting stronger. I see VMware remaining independent and we're obviously the majority shareholder and helping to ensure the ecosystem stays very, very strong. And I see very exciting new things, like NSX. Extending the reach of virtualization technology well beyond the core original business of VMware which was a great business and continues to actually be a great business. >> Michael, thanks for spending the time, with your busy schedule, to join us on theCUBE. I appreciate it. Great to see you. Michael Dell here inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE from SiliconANGLE Media. We'll be right back with more. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.