>>Hello, and welcome to the cubes. Special showcase with unstoppable domains. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California and Matt Gould, who is the founder and CEO of unstoppable domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company on stumbled domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >>Thank you. Happy to be here. So >>Love, first of all, love the story you got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big web three wave, which we know where that leads into. Metaverse unlimited new ways. People are consuming information, content applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with web three. So this is kind of the what's happening in the market. So give us your take. What's your reaction? You're in the middle of it. You're on this wave. >>Yeah. Well, I would say it's a torrent of change and the get unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have a digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing. And people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items. Do you see it from, you know, gaming and Fortnite and skins and Warcraft and all these other places, but this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend a whole lot more, uh, applications for money, which everyone's familiar with, uh, to, uh, NFT projects, uh, like boarding school. >>You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pot. I think you're on a 117 episodes now and growing, you guys do a deep dive. So people watching check out the unstoppable podcast, but in the last podcast, man, you mentioned, you know, some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses and before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet. Um, but IP was, was generated by the United States department of commerce and R and D that became the internet. The internet became the web back then it was just get some webpages up and find what you're looking for. Right. Very analog compared to what's. Now, today, now you mentioned gaming, you mentioned, uh, how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about in the queue for many, many years now, but it's actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding and groups, whether it's gaming or communities are expecting new behaviors, new applications, and it's a forcing function. >>This shift is having now, what's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? >>Yeah, well, I think, uh, it just goes back to the shift of peoples, where are they spending their time? And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much, how much of assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset, uh, compared to, you know, literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen and simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around, uh, cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, uh, ways for you to track the digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into, uh, your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with web three is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application. >>And I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now. As we transitioned from a model in web to where you're on a hosted service, like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, you know, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? So to assist them where it's much more open, you can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you, uh, and you can, you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an in-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game and you can spend it somewhere else. Uh, so the user is now enabled to bring their data to the party. Whereas before now you couldn't really do that. And that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot and how applications, uh, serve up to user. So it's going to change their user experiences. For instance, >>The flip, the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying I'm done with being mined and being manipulated by the big Facebooks and the LinkedIns of the world who were using the user. Now, the contract was a free product and you gave it your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game, or maybe do some commerce in an application or a marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does the digital identity architecture work with unstoppable? How are you guys enabling that? Could you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique in an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together? Can you explain? >>Yeah. So, uh, we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, uh, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network, like when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle. When you log on, uh, you know, Instagram, you have an Instagram handle, it's your name, right? You have that name that's that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a hundred percent of their followers, right? And theirs. And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers who are, today's small businesses who build up these large, you know, profitable, small businesses online, uh, you know, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. >>Uh, and then they could be D platform, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform. If that platform raised their fees, you've seen several platforms, increase their take rates. You have 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed. Right. Uh, so we just said, you know what, the first thing you're going to want to own that this is going to be your piece of digital property. It's going to be your name across these applications. And if you look at every computer network in the history of computing networks, the end up with a naming system, and when we've looked back at DDA desk, which came out in the nineties, uh, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier, you know, instead of mapping these IP addresses. Uh, and then we said to ourselves, you know, uh, what's going to happen in the future is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their web two world in order to, uh, identify themselves as they log into all these applications. >>They're going to have an NFT domain in the web three world in order to authenticate and, and, uh, bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. Um, and the bigger breakthrough here is at NMT domain systems or these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users to build on these open systems so that multiple applications could read data off of them. And that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging web three metaverse. Uh, and we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people, you know, with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're gonna need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of, you know, these long IP addresses or a hex addresses in the case of Porto. >>So people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name, verification, you see link trees everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app and it doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people kind of trying to figure it out. I mean, you've got to get up, Angela got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >>Yeah. And, and then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app, you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency. And then the first time you try to send it, there's this, there's this field where you want to send it. And it's this very long text address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's, it's like a bank number and no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names and the DNS system replace IP addresses in Ft domains, uh, on blockchain systems, replace hex addresses for sending and receiving, you know, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use case is it really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just, instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you can have an error or you can send it to the wrong place. It's pretty scary. You could send it to John furrier dot, uh, NFT. And uh, so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing. It worked with the.com domains. And this is the same thing for the coin and other >>Crypto. It's interesting to look at the web two or trend one to two web one went to two. It was all about user ease of use, right? And making things simpler. Clutter, you have more pages. You can't find things that was search that was Google since then. Has there actually been an advancement? Facebook certainly is not an advancement. They're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of, you know, a free search to all the resources in the world, to which, by the way, they're mining a lot of data too, with the toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that web three crossover. So take us through your vision on digital identity on web to Google searching, Facebook's broken democracy is broken users. Aren't in charge to web three. >>Got it. Well, we can start at web one. So the way that I think about it is if you go to web one, it was very simple, just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's a piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it. Right. Uh, and then what happened with web two was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about web two, these are all, you know, these are websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or search engine or whatever. And then as we moved to web three, the new thing that's happening here is the user is coming on to that experience. And they're able to connect in their wallet or their web three identity, uh, to that app and they can bring their data to the party. >>So it's kind of like web one, you just have a static web page whip, two, you have a static web page with a service, like a server back here. And then with three, the user can come in and bring their database with them, uh, in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that the, you want data to be portable across apps. So we've touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an end game item for one, a game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. Uh, it also impacts money. Money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. >>Uh, but then another thing that happens is I can bring in from, you know, an unlimited amount of additional information about myself. When I plug in my wallet, uh, as an example, when I plug in to Google search, for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enabled that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites. And I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy, especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. >>I always thought about this and I always debated it with David laundry. My cohost does top down governance, privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation. So what you're getting at here is, Hey, if you can actually have that solved before it even starts, it was almost as if those services were built for the problem of web two. Yes, not three. Write your reaction to that. >>I think that is, uh, right on the money. And, uh, if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots. And there have been huge, uh, breaches like Equifax, you know, a few years back is a big one and just all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your, uh, credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies silo your data. They create a giant database, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not, billions, to be attacked. And then someone eventually is going to hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at web three. >>So for those of the audience who have used the web three application, one of these depths, um, you know, trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect to your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you, you know, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that storage, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on depths or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these DFI exchanges, for instance, uh, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the users actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, wow, that's a much better data model. And that give so much more control of user because the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. Um, and so I think you're right. And like, we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see, like, if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR. And then all the companies are going, we can't comply with that and they keep postponing it or like changing a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're gonna be in a much better spot. >>The GDPR is again, a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. Oh, I said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored. Nevermind how they delete someone's entering a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level it becomes so complicated. So right on the money are good. Good call out there. Question for you. Is this then? Okay. So do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together? Uh, and is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is super important on the identity side while it, is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? >>Well, I think so. The way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online. Right. And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term, uh, and they actually work together. So, you know, like if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to, you know, method, rules dot crypto. And that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing defy trades or whatever. And doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to, uh, you know, sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. >>And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think there's, we're gonna still early. So figuring out exactly how the industry is gonna shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon. And it may be a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging, uh, what you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. Uh, and I also think that your financial applications of defy are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. Um, and just to, you know, a note on this, when you have a wallet, it usually has multiple cryptocurrency address. So you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. Uh, you're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those, because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate. And we collaborate with several large wallets as well, uh, like blockchain.com, uh, and you know, another 30 plus of these, uh, to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >>So the wallet, basically as a D app, the way you look at it, you integrate whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized applications with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay, I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm in my own NFT. I mean, hell, this video is going to be an NFT. Soon. We get on board with the program here. Uh, but I do, I log into my app, I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit, is there benchmarking, is there approval process? Is there API APIs and a SDK kind of thinking around it? How do you thinking about dealing with the apps? >>Yeah, so all of the above and what we're trying to, what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution. Uh, but that it's consumer based. So, uh, what we've done is adapted some SSL protocols that other people have used the standard ones, uh, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you keep the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are standard web to API APIs. Uh, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user controlled in FTE. So they're assigning that with their private public key pair order to make those updates. Um, so that, that allows you to connect into both of these systems. Uh, we think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. >>You have an integration of these technologies over time. Uh, and we really see these three components in MTU domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google or Facebook, or you can type in an email address, you can see not ensemble domains or NFT, uh, authorization, and you can SSO in with that, to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself because you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, yes, I am a unique individual. I do live in New York, uh, and I just bought a new house. Right. And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. Um, and we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts, um, online for e-commerce specifically, uh, in the future, because that opens up a whole new market because they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information. >>Yeah. I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency in game to engagement in game data. And now bringing that, so kind of a horizontally scalable, like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think you're, that's huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is, um, you getting any pushback from ICANN, the international corporates have name and numbers. They got dot everything now.club, cause the clubhouse, they got dot, you know, party.live. I mean, so the real domain name people are over here, web too. You guys are coming out with the web three where's that connect for people who are not following along the web three trend. How do they, how do you rationalize the, the domain angle here? >>Yeah, well, uh, so I would say that NFTE domains or what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago and they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the nineties when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being the business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, uh, who, uh, own the majority of these, uh, these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus NFTE domains because all of a sudden you have the, uh, the Walton, if you have them in your wallet and your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses is actually end-users. So, and instead of being for, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to 4 billion people who have an internet connection. >>Uh, and so we actually think that the market size we're in a few domains and somewhere 50 to 100 X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for, uh, individuals on a day-to-day basis. So it's like people are gonna want you on to use them for receiving cryptocurrency versus receiving dollars or payments or USCC point where they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, where they're going to want to use them for SSO. Uh, and they're not gonna want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what web is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are gonna want to work with and adopt this new NFC technology. Cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain next. So like in short, I think NMT domain names or domain names with superpowers, this is the next generation of, uh, naming systems and naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >>Yeah. They hit a car, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean, they just can't, they're not built for that. Right. So I mean, and, and having people, having their own names is essentially what decentralization is all about. Cause what does a company, it's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place they're decentralized. So, and then you decentralize the identity and everything's can been changed so completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. Um, you pretty much laid out what's next for web three, but you guys are in this state of, of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the, what are the, um, best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common, uh, use case for folks we're putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see what's the progression? >>Yeah. So the, the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately is, uh, we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I, and I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to a hundred percent year over year. So, uh, first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket and that's going to happen over the next three to five years. Let's call it if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. Uh, and then we want to make it easier for all those people to sit encrypted back and forth. And I, and I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like, you know, I would say utility focused, uh, tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for, you know, transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. >>Uh, and that's the really the first step freight FTE domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFTE domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, um, and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps. It starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that it's going to build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network, top-down where you're like a government or a corporation say, oh, you have to have ID. Here's your password. You have to have it. We're going to do a bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet, NFTE domain name, it's going to give them to the utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. They're going to say, Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile? Yes. Okay, great. You test that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes. Instagram. Yes. Tik TOK. Yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay. Yeah, we can attach that back. Uh, and then what happens is you end up building up organically, uh, digital identifiers for people using these blockchain, uh, naming systems. And once they have that, they're gonna just, they're going to be able to share that information. Uh, and that's gonna lead to better experiences online for, uh, both commerce, but also just better user experiences. >>You know, every company when they web came along, first of all, everyone, poo-pooed the web ones. That was terrible, bad idea. Oh. And so unreliable. So slow, hard to find things. Web two, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these permalinks became so long. The web page address fully qualified, you know, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit a ceiling here. Everyone gets their NFT. They, they started doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. Um, so we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink permanent. Yeah. >>Yes. I mean, if we're lucky, it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity, uh, that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. >>And the gas prices thing that's always coming. That's always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain is perfect for this because it's immutable, it's written on the chain. All good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? >>Well, so a couple of comments on efficiency. Uh, first of all, we picked domains as a first product to market because, you know, as you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do, uh, and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. Right? So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple of times per year. So, so the usage for that to set this up and configure it, you know, most people set up and configure it and then it'll have a few changes for years. First of all, the overall it's not like a game problem. Right, right, right. So, so that, that part's good. We picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking our computer, system's going to get more efficient over time. >>And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. Uh, and you know, I remember the nineties, I had a modem and it was, you know, whatever, 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56, then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. Uh, and I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time. And you know, there's, there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. Uh, and you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you had tried to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would have had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah. Some applications are going to wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle, but I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. >>Yeah. The motivated parties for innovations here, I mean, a point cast failed miserably that was like the, they try to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds double, triple on homes right now, Matt. Congratulations. Great stuff. Final tick, tock moment here. How would you summarize short in a short clip? The difference between digital identity in web two and web three, >>Uh, in, in web too, you don't get to own your own online presidents and in web three, you do get to own it. So I think if you were gonna simplify it really web three is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. >>So now users are in charge. >>Exactly. >>They're not the product anymore. Going to be the product might as well monetize the product. And that's the data. Um, real quick thoughts just to close out the role of data in all this, your view. >>We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet. And we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with >>Awesome stuff, man, I take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What do you guys looking for for hiring, um, fundraising, give a quick, a quick commercial for what's going on, on unstoppable domains. Yeah. >>So if you haven't already check us out@ensembledomains.com, we're also on Twitter at unstoppable web, and we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And, uh, we are just crossed a hundred people. We've, we're growing, you know, three to five, a hundred percent year over year. Uh, we're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into web three, even if you're coming from a traditional web two background, please reach out. Uh, we love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >>And you're a virtual company. Do you have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >>Yeah, I actually just assumed we were a hundred percent remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet. Uh, mostly concentrated in the U S and EU areas, >>Rumor to maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >>Uh, this is true. Uh, and that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. And, but we also know that recovery is an important part of any organizations. So if you push too hard, uh, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. Uh, and so we want people to be with us term. Uh, we do think that this is a ten-year move. And so yeah. Do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you have >>To ask me, so what's the consequence of, I don't think vacation. >>Yeah. We literally unplug it. You won't be able to get it. You won't be able to get into slack. Right. And that's a, that's how we regulate. >>Well, when people start having their avatars be their bot and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFD saying that that's not the real person. It's not the real human And FTS. Great innovation, great use case, Matt. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with the cube. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >>John had a wonderful time. All right. Just the >>Cube unstoppable domains showcasing. We got great 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. 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>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> When Facebook changed its name to Meta last fall, it catalyzed a chain reaction throughout the tech industry. Software firms, gaming companies, chip makers, device manufacturers, and others have joined in hype machine. Now, it's easy to dismiss the metaverse as futuristic hyperbole, but do we really believe that tapping on a smartphone, or staring at a screen, or two-dimensional Zoom meetings are the future of how we work, play, and communicate? As the internet itself proved to be larger than we ever imagined, it's very possible, and even quite likely that the combination of massive processing power, cheap storage, AI, blockchains, crypto, sensors, AR, VR, brain interfaces, and other emerging technologies will combine to create new and unimaginable consumer experiences, and massive wealth for creators of the metaverse. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in cyber expert, hacker gamer, NFT expert, and founder of ORE System, Nick Donarski. Nick, welcome, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, sir, glad to be here. >> Yeah, okay, so today we're going to traverse two parallel paths, one that took Nick from security expert and PenTester to NFTs, tokens, and the metaverse. And we'll simultaneously explore the complicated world of cybersecurity in the enterprise, and how the blockchain, crypto, and NFTs will provide key underpinnings for digital ownership in the metaverse. We're going to talk a little bit about blockchain, and crypto, and get things started there, and some of the realities and misconceptions, and how innovations in those worlds have led to the NFT craze. We'll look at what's really going on in NFTs and why they're important as both a technology and societal trend. Then, we're going to dig into the tech and try to explain why and how blockchain and NFTs are going to lay the foundation for the metaverse. And, finally, who's going to build the metaverse. And how long is it going to take? All right, Nick, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your background, your career. You started as a hacker at a really, really young age, and then got deep into cyber as a PenTester. You did some pretty crazy stuff. You have some great stories about sneaking into buildings. You weren't just doing it all remote. Tell us about yourself. >> Yeah, so I mean, really, I started a long time ago. My dad was really the foray into technology. I wrote my first program on an Apple IIe in BASIC in 1989. So, I like to say I was born on the internet, if you will. But, yeah, in high school at 16, I incorporated my first company, did just tech support for parents and teachers. And then in 2000 I transitioned really into security and focused there ever since. I joined Rapid7 and after they picked up Medis boy, I joined HP. I was one of their founding members of Shadowlabs and really have been part of the information security and the cyber community all throughout, whether it's training at various different conferences or talking. My biggest thing and my most awesome moments as various things of being broken into, is really when I get to actually work with somebody that's coming up in the industry and who's new and actually has that light bulb moment of really kind of understanding of technology, understanding an idea, or getting it when it comes to that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, and when you think about what's going on in crypto and NFTs and okay, now the metaverse it's you get to see some of the most innovative people. Now I want to first share a little bit of data on enterprise security and maybe Nick get you to comment. We've reported over the past several years on the complexity in the security business and the numerous vendor choices that SecOps Pros face. And this chart really tells that story in the cybersecurity space. It's an X,Y graph. We've shown it many times from the ETR surveys where the vertical axis, it's a measure of spending momentum called net score. And the horizontal axis is market share, which represents each company's presence in the data set, and a couple of points stand out. First, it's really crowded. In that red dotted line that you see there, that's 40%, above that line on the net score axis, marks highly elevated spending momentum. Now, let's just zoom in a bit and I've cut the data by those companies that have more than a hundred responses in the survey. And you can see here on this next chart, it's still very crowded, but a few call-outs are noteworthy. First companies like SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope and Darktrace. They were all above that 40% line in the previous chart, but they've fallen off. They still have actually a decent presence in the survey over 60 responses, but under that hundred. And you can see Auth0 now Okta, big $7 billion acquisition. They got the highest net score CrowdStrike's up there, Okta classic they're kind of enterprise business, and Zscaler and others above that line. You see Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft very impressive because they're both big and they're above that elevated spending velocity. So Nick, kind of a long-winded intro, but it was a little bit off topic, but I wanted to start here because this is the life of a SecOps pro. They lack the talent in a capacity to keep bad guys fully at bay. And so they have to keep throwing tooling at the problem, which adds to the complexity and as a PenTester and hacker, this chaos and complexity means cash for the bad guys. Doesn't it? >> Absolutely. You know, the more systems that these organizations find to integrate into the systems, means that there's more components, more dollars and cents as far as the amount of time and the engineers that need to actually be responsible for these tools. There's a lot of reasons that, the more, I guess, hands in the cookie jar, if you will, when it comes to the security architecture, the more links that are, or avenues for attack built into the system. And really one of the biggest things that organizations face is being able to have engineers that are qualified and technical enough to be able to support that architecture as well, 'cause buying it from a vendor and deploying it, putting it onto a shelf is good, but if it's not tuned properly, or if it's not connected properly, that security tool can just hold up more avenues of attack for you. >> Right, okay, thank you. Now, let's get into the meat of the discussion for today and talk a little bit about blockchain and crypto for a bit. I saw sub stack post the other day, and it was ripping Matt Damon for pedaling crypto on TV ads and how crypto is just this big pyramid scheme. And it's all about allowing criminals to be anonymous and it's ransomware and drug trafficking. And yes, there are definitely scams and you got to be careful and lots of dangers out there, but these are common criticisms in the mainstream press, that overlooked the fact by the way that IPO's and specs are just as much of a pyramid scheme. Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be more regulation, there should, but Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, cryptocurrency, and you think about, it's really the confluence of software engineering, cryptography and game theory. And there's some really powerful innovation being created by the blockchain community. Crypto and blockchain are really at the heart of a new decentralized platform being built out. And where today, you got a few, large internet companies. They control the protocols and the platform. Now the aspiration of people like yourself, is to create new value opportunities. And there are many more chances for the little guys and girls to get in on the ground floor and blockchain technology underpins all this. So Nick, what's your take, what are some of the biggest misconceptions around blockchain and crypto? And do you even pair those two in the same context? What are your thoughts? >> So, I mean, really, we like to separate ourselves and say that we are a blockchain company, as opposed to necessarily saying(indistinct) anything like that. We leverage those tools. We leverage cryptocurrencies, we leverage NFTs and those types of things within there, but blockchain is a technology, which is the underlying piece, is something that can be used and utilized in a very large number of different organizations out there. So, cryptocurrency and a lot of that negative context comes with a fear of something new, without having that regulation in place, without having the rules in place. And we were a big proponent of, we want the regulation, right? We want to do right. We want to do it by the rules. We want to do it under the context of, this is what should be done. And we also want to help write those rules as well, because a lot of the lawmakers, a lot of the lobbyists and things, they have a certain aspect or a certain goal of when they're trying to get these things. Our goal is simplicity. We want the ability for the normal average person to be able to interact with crypto, interact with NFTs, interact with the blockchain. And basically by saying, blockchain in quotes, it's very ambiguous 'cause there's many different things that blockchain can be, the easiest way, right? The easiest way to understand blockchain is simply a distributed database. That's really the core of what blockchain is. It's a record keeping mechanism that allows you to reference that. And the beauty of it, is that it's quote unquote immutable. You can't edit that data. So, especially when we're talking about blockchain, being underlying for technologies in the future, things like security, where you have logging, you have keeping, whether you're talking about sales, where you may have to have multiple different locations (indistinct) users from different locations around the globe. It creates a central repository that provides distribution and security in the way that you're ensuring your data, ensuring the validation of where that data exists when it was created. Those types of things that blockchain really is. If you go to the historical, right, the very early on Bitcoin absolutely was made to have a way of not having to deal with the fed. That was the core functionality of the initial crypto. And then you had a lot of the illicit trades, those black markets that jumped onto it because of what it could do. The maturity of the technology though, of where we are now versus say back in 97 is a much different world of blockchain, and there's a much different world of cryptocurrency. You still have to be careful because with any fed, you're still going to have that FUD that goes out there and sells that fear, uncertainty and doubt, which spurs a lot of those types of scams, and a lot of those things that target end users that we face as security professionals today. You still get mailers that go out, looking for people to give their social security number over during tax time. Snail mail is considered a very ancient technology, but it still works. You still get a portion of the population that falls for those tricks, fishing, whatever it might be. It's all about trying to make sure that you have fear about what is that change. And I think that as we move forward, and move into the future, the simpler and the more comfortable these types of technologies become, the easier it is to utilize and indoctrinate normal users, to be able to use these things. >> You know, I want to ask you about that, Nick, because you mentioned immutability, there's a lot of misconceptions about that. I had somebody tell me one time, "Blockchain's Bs," and they say, "Well, oh, hold on a second. They say, oh, they say it's a mutable, but you can hack Coinbase, whatever it is." So I guess a couple of things, one is that the killer app for blockchain became money. And so we learned a lot through that. And you had Bitcoin and it really wasn't programmable through its interface. And then Ethereum comes out. I know, you know a lot about Ether and you have solidity, which is a lot simpler, but it ain't JavaScript, which is ubiquitous. And so now you have a lot of potential for the initial ICO's and probably still the ones today, the white papers, a lot of security flaws in there. I'm sure you can talk to that, but maybe you can help square that circle about immutability and security. I've mentioned game theory before, it's harder to hack Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain than it is to mine. So that's why people mine, but maybe you could add some context to that. >> Yeah, you know it goes to just about any technology out there. Now, when you're talking about blockchain specifically, the majority of the attacks happen with the applications and the smart contracts that are actually running on the blockchain, as opposed to necessarily the blockchain itself. And like you said, the impact for whether that's loss of revenue or loss of tokens or whatever it is, in most cases that results from something that was a phishing attack, you gave up your credentials, somebody said, paste your private key in here, and you win a cookie or whatever it might be, but those are still the fundamental pieces. When you're talking about various different networks out there, depending on the blockchain, depends on how much the overall security really is. The more distributed it is, and the more stable it is as the network goes, the better or the more stable any of the code is going to be. The underlying architecture of any system is the key to success when it comes to the overall security. So the blockchain itself is immutable, in the case that the owner are ones have to be trusted. If you look at distributed networks, something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, where you have those proof of work systems, that disperses that information at a much more remote location, So the more disperse that information is, the less likely it is to be able to be impacted by one small instance. If you look at like the DAO Hack, or if you look at a lot of the other vulnerabilities that exist on the blockchain, it's more about the code. And like you said, solidity being as new as it is, it's not JavaScript. The industry is very early and very infantile, as far as the developers that are skilled in doing this. And with that just comes the inexperience and the lack of information that you don't learn until JavaScript is 10 or 12 years old. >> And the last thing I'll say about this topic, and we'll move on to NFTs, but NFTs relate is that, again, I said earlier that the big internet giants have pretty much co-opted the platform. You know, if you wanted to invest in Linux in the early days, there was no way to do that. You maybe have to wait until red hat came up with its IPO and there's your pyramid scheme folks. But with crypto it, which is again, as Nick was explaining underpinning is the blockchain, you can actually participate in early projects. Now you got to be careful 'cause there are a lot of scams and many of them are going to blow out if not most of them, but there are some, gems out there, because as Nick was describing, you've got this decentralized platform that causes scaling issues or performance issues, and people are solving those problems, essentially building out a new internet. But I want to get into NFTs, because it's sort of the next big thing here before we get into the metaverse, what Nick, why should people pay attention to NFTs? Why do they matter? Are they really an important trend? And what are the societal and technological impacts that you see in this space? >> Yeah, I mean, NFTs are a very new technology and ultimately it's just another entry on the blockchain. It's just another piece of data in the database. But how it's leveraged in the grand scheme of how we, as users see it, it can be the classic idea of an NFT is just the art, or as good as the poster on your wall. But in the case of some of the new applications, is where are you actually get that utility function. Now, in the case of say video games, video games and gamers in general, already utilize digital items. They already utilize digital points. As in the case of like Call of Duty points, those are just different versions of digital currencies. You know, World of Warcraft Gold, I like to affectionately say, was the very first cryptocurrency. There was a Harvard course taught on the economy of WOW, there was a black market where you could trade your end game gold for Fiat currencies. And there's even places around the world that you can purchase real world items and stay at hotels for World of Warcraft Gold. So the adoption of blockchain just simply gives a more stable and a more diverse technology for those same types of systems. You're going to see that carry over into shipping and logistics, where you need to have data that is single repository for being able to have multiple locations, multiple shippers from multiple global efforts out there that need to have access to that data. But in the current context, it's either sitting on a shipping log, it's sitting on somebody's desk. All of those types of paper transactions can be leveraged as NFTs on the blockchain. It's just simply that representation. And once you break the idea of this is just a piece of art, or this is a cryptocurrency, you get into a world where you can apply that NFT technology to a lot more things than I think most people think of today. >> Yeah, and of course you mentioned art a couple of times when people sold as digital art for whatever, it was 60, 65 million, 69 million, that caught a lot of people's attention, but you're seeing, I mean, there's virtually infinite number of applications for this. One of the Washington wizards, tokenized portions of his contract, maybe he was creating a new bond, that's really interesting use cases and opportunities, and that kind of segues into the latest, hot topic, which is the metaverse. And you've said yourself that blockchain and NFTs are the foundation of the metaverse, they're foundational elements. So first, what is the metaverse to you and where do blockchain and NFTs, fit in? >> Sure, so, I mean, I affectionately refer to the metaverse just a VR and essentially, we've been playing virtual reality games and all the rest for a long time. And VR has really kind of been out there for a long time. So most people's interpretation or idea of what the metaverse is, is a virtual reality version of yourself and this right, that idea of once it becomes yourself, is where things like NFT items, where blockchain and digital currencies are going to come in, because if you have a manufacturer, so you take on an organization like Nike, and they want to put their shoes into the metaverse because we, as humans, want to individualize ourselves. We go out and we want to have that one of one shoe or that, t-shirt or whatever it is, we're going to want to represent that same type of individuality in our virtual self. So NFTs, crypto and all of those digital currencies, like I was saying that we've known as gamers are going to play that very similar role inside of the metaverse. >> Yeah. Okay. So basically you're going to take your physical world into the metaverse. You're going to be able to, as you just mentioned, acquire things- I loved your WOW example. And so let's stay on this for a bit, if we may, of course, Facebook spawned a lot of speculation and discussion about the concept of the metaverse and really, as you pointed out, it's not new. You talked about why second life, really started in 2003, and it's still around today. It's small, I read recently, it's creators coming back into the company and books were written in the early 90s that used the term metaverse. But Nick, talk about how you see this evolving, what role you hope to play with your company and your community in the future, and who builds the metaverse, when is it going to be here? >> Yeah, so, I mean, right now, and we actually just got back from CES last week. And the Metaverse is a very big buzzword. You're going to see a lot of integration of what people are calling, quote unquote, the metaverse. And there was organizations that were showing virtual office space, virtual malls, virtual concerts, and those types of experiences. And the one thing right now that I don't think that a lot of organizations have grasp is how to make one metaverse. There's no real player one, if you will always this yet, There's a lot of organizations that are creating their version of the metaverse, which then again, just like every other software and game vendor out there has their version of cryptocurrency and their version of NFTs. You're going to see it start to pop up, especially as Oculus is going to come down in price, especially as you get new technologies, like some of the VR glasses that look more augmented reality and look more like regular glasses that you're wearing, things like that, the easier that those technologies become as in adopting into our normal lifestyle, as far as like looks and feels, the faster that stuff's going to actually come out to the world. But when it comes to like, what we're doing is we believe that the metaverse should actually span multiple different blockchains, multiple different segments, if you will. So what ORE system is doing, is we're actually building the underlying architecture and technologies for developers to bring their metaverse too. You can leverage the ORE Systems NFTs, where we like to call our utility NFTs as an in-game item in one game, or you can take it over and it could be a t-shirt in another game. The ability for having that cross support within the ecosystem is what really no one has grasp on yet. Most of the organizations out there are using a very classic business model. Get the user in the game, make them spend their money in the game, make all their game stuff as only good in their game. And that's where the developer has you, they have you in their bubble. Our goal, and what we like to affectionately say is, we want to bring white collar tools and technology to blue collar folks, We want to make it simple. We want to make it off the shelf, and we want to make it a less cost prohibitive, faster, and cheaper to actually get out to all the users. We do it by supporting the technology. That's our angle. If you support the technology and you support the platform, you can build a community that will build all of the metaverse around them. >> Well, and so this is interesting because, if you think about some of the big names, we've Microsoft is talking about it, obviously we mentioned Facebook. They have essentially walled gardens. Now, yeah, okay, I could take Tik Tok and pump it into Instagram is fine, but they're really siloed off. And what you're saying is in the metaverse, you should be able to buy a pair of sneakers in one location and then bring it to another one. >> Absolutely, that's exactly it. >> And so my original kind of investment in attractiveness, if you will, to crypto, was that, the little guy can get an early, but I worry that some of these walled gardens, these big internet giants are going to try to co-op this. So I think what you're doing is right on, and I think it's aligned with the objectives of consumers and the users who don't want to be forced in to a pen. They want to be able to live freely. And that's really what you're trying to do. >> That's exactly it. You know, when you buy an item, say a Skin in Fortnite or Skin in Call of Duty, it's only good in that game. And not even in the franchise, it's only good in that version of the game. In the case of what we want to do is, you can not only have that carry over and your character. So say you buy a really cool shirt, and you've got that in your Call of Duty or in our case, we're really Osiris Protocol, which is our proof of concept video game to show that this all thing actually works, but you can actually go in and you can get a gun in Osiris Protocol. And if we release, Osiris Protocol two, you'll be able to take that to Osiris Protocol two. Now the benefit of that is, is you're going to be the only one in the next version with that item, if you haven't sold it or traded it or whatever else. So we don't lock you into a game. We don't lock you into a specific application. You own that, you can trade that freely with other users. You can sell that on the open market. We're embracing what used to be considered the black market. I don't understand why a lot of video games, we're always against the skins and mods and all the rest. For me as a gamer and coming up, through the many, many years of various different Call of Duties and everything in my time, I wish I could still have some this year. I still have a World of Warcraft account. I wasn't on, Vanilla, Burning Crusade was my foray, but I still have a character. If you look at it that way, if I had that wild character and that gear was NFTs, in theory, I could actually pass that onto my kid who could carry on that character. And it would actually increase in value because they're NFT back then. And then if needed, you could trade those on the open market and all the rest. It just makes gaming a much different thing. >> I love it. All right, Nick, hey, we're out of time, but I got to say, Nick Donarski, thanks so much for coming on the program today, sharing your insights and really good luck to you and building out your technology platform and your community. >> Thank you, sir, it's been an absolute pleasure. >> And thank you for watching. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast", and you'll find them. I publish pretty much every week on siliconangle.com and wikibond.com. And you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter or comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can always email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR, happy 2022 be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with coverage of Kubecon and CloudNativeCon, North America, 2020, virtual brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, virtual coverage of Kubecon and CloudNativeCon 2020. We're not in person this year, normally we're there in person. We have to do remote because of the pandemic, but hey, it opens up more conversations. And this is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host. And you'll see a lot of interviews. We've got some great guests, Talking to the leaders, the developers, the end users, as well as the vendors with the CNCF, we got two great guests, Priyanka Sharma, the General Manager of the CNCF, great to see you and Stephen Augustus OSS Engineer at VMware. He's also the KubeCon co-chair back on the cube. Thanks for coming on folks. I appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. So, thanks for coming on, actually, remote and virtual. We're doing a lot of interviews, we're getting some perspectives, people are chatting in Slack. It's still got the hallway vibe feel, a lot of talks, a lot of action, keynotes happening, but I think the big story for me, and I would like to talk about, I want to get your perspective is this new working group that's out there. So I know there's some news around it. Could you take a minute to explain kind of what this is all about? >> Sure. I'll give a little bit of context for those who may have missed my keynote which... very bad. (Priyanka laughs) As I announced, I'm so proud to be working with the likes of Stephen Augustus here, and a bunch of other folks from different companies, different open source projects, et cetera, to bring inclusive naming to code. I think it's been a forever issue. Quite frankly. We've had many problematic terms in software out there. The most obvious one being master-slave. That really shouldn't be there. That have no place in an inclusive world, inclusive software, inclusive community with the help of amazing people like Stephen, folks from IBM, Red Hat, and many, many others. We came together because while there's a lot of positive enthusiasm and excitement for people to make the changes that are necessary to make the community welcome for all, there's a lot of different work streams happening. And we really wanted to make sure there is a centralized place for guidelines and discussion for everybody in a very non...pan-organizational kind of way. And so that's the working group that John is talking about. With that said, Stephen, I think you can do the best justice to speak to the overall initiative. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I think that's to Priyanka's point, there are lots of people who are interested in this work and again, lots of work where this is already happening, which is very exciting to say, but as any good engineer, I think that's it's important to not duplicate your work. It's important to recognize the efforts that are happening elsewhere and work towards bringing people together. So part of this is providing, being able to provide a forum for discussion for a variety of companies, for a variety of associations that... and foundations that are involved in inclusive naming efforts. And then to also provide a framework for walking people through how we evaluate language and how we make these kinds of changes. As an example, for Kubernetes, we started off the Kubernetes working group naming and the hope for the working group naming was that it was going to evolve into hopefully an effort like this, where we could bring a lot of people on and not just talk about Kubernetes. So since we formed that back in, I want to say, June-ish, we've done some work on about of providing a language evaluation framework, providing templates for recommendations, providing a workflow for moving from just a suggestion into kind of actuating those ideas right and removing that language where it gets tricky and code is thinking about, thinking about, say a Kubernetes API. And in fact that we have API deprecation policies. And that's something that we have to if offensive language is in one of our APIs, we have to work through our deprecation policy to get that done. So lots of moving parts, I'm very excited about the overall effort. >> Yeah, I mean, your mind can explode if you just think about all the complications involved, but I think this is super important. I think the world has voted on this, I think it's pretty obvious and Priyanka, you hit some of the key top-line points, inclusive software. This is kind of the high order bit, but when you get down to it, it's hard as hell to do, because if you want to get ne new namings and/or changing namings accepted by the community and code owners, you're dealing with two things, a polarizing environment around the world today, and two, the hassles involved, which includes duplicate efforts. So you've got kind of a juggling act going on between two forces. So it's a hard problem. So how are you tackling this? Because it's certainly the right thing to do. There's no debate there. How do you make it happen? How do you go in without kind of blowing things up, if you will? And do it in a way that's elegant and clean and accept it. 'Cause that's the... end of the day, it's acceptance and putting it code owners. >> Absolutely. I think so, as you said, we live in a polarizing environment right now. Most of us here though know that this is the right thing to do. Team CloudNative is for everyone. And that is the biggest takeaway I hope people get from our work in this initiative. Open source belongs to everybody and it was built for the problems of today. That's why I've been working on this. Now, when it goes into actual execution, as you said, there are many moving parts, Stephen and the Kubernetes working group, is our shining example and a really good blueprint for many folks to utilize. In addition to that, we have to bring in diverse organizations. It's not just open source projects. It's not just companies. It's also standards organizations. It's also folks who think about language in books, who have literally done PhDs in this subject. And then there are folks who are really struggling through making the changes today and tomorrow and giving them hope and excitement. So that at the end of this journey, not only do you know you've done the right thing, but you'd be recognized for it. And more people will be encouraged by your own experience. So we and the LF have been thinking at it from a holistic perspective, let's bring in the standards bodies, let's bring in the vendors, let's bring in the open source projects, give them guidelines and blueprints that we are lucky that our projects are able to generate, combine it with learnings from other people, because many people are doing great work so that there is one cohesive place where people can go and learn from each other. Eventually, what we hope to do is also have like a recognition program so that it's like, hey, this open source project did this. They are now certified X or there's like an awards program. They're still figuring that piece out, but more to come on that space. That's my part. But Stephen can tell you about all the heavy lifting that they've been doing. >> Before we get to Steve, I just want to say congratulations to you. That's great leadership. And I think you're taking a pragmatic approach and you putting the stake in the ground. And that's the number one thing, and I want to take my hat off to you guys and Priyanka, thank you for that leadership. All right, Stephen, let's talk about how this gets done because you guys open sources is what it's all about is about the people, it's about building on the successes of others, standing on the shoulders of others, you guys are used to sitting in rooms now virtually and squabbling over things like, code reviews and you got governing bodies. This is not a new thing in collaboration. So this is also a collaboration test. What are you seeing as the playbook to get this going? Can you share your insights into what the Kubernetes group's doing and how you see this. What are the few first few steps you see happening? So people can either understand it, understand the context and get involved? >> So I think it comes down to a lot of it is scope, right? So as a new contributor, as a current contributor, maybe you are one of those language experts, that is interested in getting involved as a co-chair myself for SIG Release. A lot of the things that we do, we have to consider scope. If we make this change, how is it affecting an end user? And maybe you work in contributor experience. Maybe you work in release, maybe you work in architecture. But you may not have the entire scope that you need to make a change. So I think that first it's amazing to see all of the thought that has gone through making certain changes, like discussing master and slave, discussing how we name control plane members, doing the... having the discussion around a whitelist and blacklist. What's hard about it is, is when people start making those changes. We've already seen several instances of an invigorated contributor, and maybe the new contributor coming in and starting to kind of like search and replace words. And it... I wish it was that simple, it's a discussion that has to be heard, you need buy-in from the code owners, if it's an API that you're touching, it's a conversation that you need to have with the SIG Architecture, as well as say SIG Docs. If it's something that's happening in Release, then it's a easier 'cause you can come and talk to me, but, overall I think it's getting people to the point where they can clearly understand how a change affects the community. So we kind of in this language evaluation framework, we have this idea of like first, second and third order concerns. And as you go through those concerns, there are like diminishing impacts of potential harm that a piece of language might be causing to people. So first order concerns are the ones that we want to eliminate immediately. And the ones that we commonly hear this discussion framed around. So master-slave and whitelist, blacklist. So those are ones that we know that are kind of like on the track to be removed. The next portion of that it's kind of like understanding what it means to provide a recommendation and who actually approves the recommendation. Because this group is, we have several language aficionados in this group, but we are by now means experts. And we also want to make sure that we do not make decisions entirely for the community. So, discussing that workflow from a turning a recommendation into actuating a solution for that is something that we would also do with the steering committee. So Kubernetes kind of like top governing body. Making sure that the decision is made from the top level and kind of filtered out to all of the places where people may own code or documentation around it is I think is really the biggest thing. And having a framework to make it easy to make, do those evaluations, is what we've been craving and now have. >> Well, congratulations. That's awesome. I think it's always... it's easier said than done. I mean, it's a system when you have systems and code, it's like, there's always consequences in systems architecture, you know that you do in large scales OSS. You guys know what that means. And I think the low hanging fruit, obviously master, slave, blacklist, whitelist, that's just got to get done. I mean, to me, if that just doesn't get done, that's just like a stake in the ground that must happen. But I think this idea of it takes a village, kind of is a play here. People just buy into it. That so it's a little bit of a PR thing going on too, for get buy-in, this is again a classic, getting people on board, Priyanka, isn't it? It's the obvious and then there's like, okay, let's just do this. And then what's the framework? What's the process? What's the scope? >> Yeah, absolutely agree. And many people are midway through the journey. That's one of the big challenges. Some people are on different phases of the journey, and that was one of the big reasons we started this working group, because we want to be able to provide a place of conversation for people at different stages. So we get align now rather than a year later, where everybody has their own terms as replacements and nothing works. And maybe the downstream projects that are affected, like who knows, right? It can go pretty bad. And it's very complex and it's large-scale opensource or coasters, anywhere, large software. And so because team CloudNative belongs to everyone because open source belongs to everyone. We got up, get people on the same page. For those who are eager to learn more, as I said in my keynote, please do join the two sessions that we have planned. One is going to happen, which is about inclusive naming in general, it's an hour and a half session happening on Thursday. I'm pretty sure. And there we will talk about all the various artists who are involved. Everybody will have a seat at the table and we'll have documentation and a presentation to share on how we recommend the all move, move together as an ecosystem, and then second is a presentation by Celeste in the Kubernetes working group about how Kubernetes specifically has done naming. And I feel like Stephen, you and your peers have done such amazing work that many can benefit from it. >> Well, I think engineers, you got two things going to work in for you, which is one, it's a mission. And that's... There's certainly societal benefits for this code, code is for the people. Love that, that's always been the marching orders, but also engineers are efficient. If you have duplicate efforts. I mean, it's like you think about people just doing it on their own, why not do it now, do it together, more efficient, fixing bugs over stuff, you could have solved now. I mean, this is a huge issue. So totally believe it. I know we got to go, but I want to get the news and Priyanka, you guys had some new stuff coming out from the CNCF, new things, survey, certifications, all kinds of new reports. Give us the quick highlights on the news. >> Yes, absolutely. So much news. So many talking points. Well, and that's a good thing, why? Because the CloudNative Ecosystem is thriving. There is so many people doing so much awesome stuff that I have a lot to share with you. And what does that tell us about our spirit? It tells you about the spirit of resilience. You heard about that briefly in the conversation we just had with Stephen about our working group to align various parties and initiatives together, to bring inclusive naming to code. It's about resilience because we did not get demoralized. We did not say, "oh, it's a pandemic. I can't meet anyone. So this isn't happening." No, we kept going. And that is happening in inclusive naming that is happening in the CloudNative series we're doing, that's happening in the new members that are joining, as you may have seen Volcano Engine just joined as platinum member and that's super exciting. They come from China. They're part of the larger organization that builds Tik Tok, which is pretty cool as a frequent bruiser I can say that, in addition, on a more serious note, security is really key and as I was talking to someone just minutes ago, security is not something that's a fad. Security is something that as we keep innovating, as cloud native keeps being the ground zero, for all future innovation, it keeps evolving. The problems keep getting more complex and we have to keep solving them. So in that spirit, we in CNCF see it as our job, our duty, to enable the ecosystem to be better conversant in the security needs of our code. So to that end, we are launching the CKS program, which is a certification for our Kubernetes security specialist. And it's been in the works for awhile as many of you may know, and today we are able to accept registrations. So that's a really exciting piece of news, I recommend you go ahead and do that as part of the KubeCon registration folks have a discount to get started, and I think they should do it now because as I said, the security problems keep getting worse, keep getting more complicated. And this is a great baseline for folks to start when they are thinking about this. it's also a great boon for any company out there, whether they're end users, vendors, it's all sometimes a blurry line between the two, which is all healthy. Everybody needs developers who are security conversant I would say, and this certification help you helps you achieve that. So send all of your people to go take it. So that's sort of the announcements. Then other things I would like to share are as you go, sorry, were you saying something? >> No. Go ahead. >> No, as you know, we talked about the whole thing of team CloudNative is for everyone. Open source is for everyone And I'm really proud that CNCF has offered over 1000 diversity scholarships since 2016 to traditionally under-representing our marginalized groups. And I think that is so nice, and, but just the very, very beginning. As we grow into 2021, you will see more and more of these initiatives. Every member I talked to was so excited that we put our money where our mouth is, and we support people with scholarships, mentorships, and this is only going to grow. And it just so like at almost 17%, the CNCF mentors in our program are women. So for folks who are looking for that inspiration, for folks who want to see someone who looks like them in these places, they have more diverse people to look up to. And so overall, I think our DEI focus is something I'm very proud of and something you may hear about in other news items. And then finally, I would like to say is that CloudNative continues to grow. The cloud native wave is strong. The 2.0 for team CloudNative is going very well. For the CloudNative annual survey, 2020, we found an astonishing number of places where CloudNative technologies are in production. You heard some stories that I told in my keynote of people using multiple CNCF projects together. And these are amazing and users who have this running in production. So our ecosystem has matured. And today I can tell you that Kubernetes is used in production, by at about 83% of the places out there. And this is up by 5% from 78% last year. And just so much strength in this ecosystem. I mean, now at 92% of people are using containers. So at this point we are ubiquitous. And as you've heard from us in various times, our 70 plus project portfolio shows that we are the ground zero of innovation in cloud native. So if you asked me to summarize the news, it's number one, team CloudNative and open source is for everyone. Number two, we take pride in our diversity and over 1000 scholarships have been given out since 2016 to recipients from underrepresented groups. Number three, this is the home base for innovation with 83% of folks using Kubernetes in production and 70 plus projects that deliver a wide variety of support to enterprises as they modernize their software and utilize containers. >> Awesome. That was a great summary. First of all, you're a great host. You should be hosting theCUBE with us. Great keynote, love the virtual events that you guys have been doing, love the innovation. I think I would just say just from my perspective and being from there from the beginning is it's always been inclusive and the experience of the events and the community have been top-notch. People squabble, people talk, people have conversations, but at the end of the day, it is a great community and it's fun, memorable, and people are accepting, it's a great job. Stephen, good job as co-chair this year. Well done. Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Take it easy. >> Okay, this is theCUBE virtual, we wish we were there in person, but we're not, we're remote. This is the virtual Cube. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. (soft music) >> Hi, Lisa Martin, with theCUBE here, talking with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing, at Dell technologies. Caitlin how are you? It's great to see you. >> I'm doing very well Lisa, thank you so much for having me. >> Nice to see you back on theCUBE. So lots of stuff going on in the news the last few months or so. A lot of stuff with respect to Cyber Recovery, Cyber Security, but talk to us about what's happening in the Purpose-Built Appliance Backup Appliance market. This market is growing. What's happening there, and talk to me about Dell's leadership role. >> Yeah, we've kind of come full circle. I've been in the data protection space for a while and I would say that, you know now we're looking at this as a $4 billion industry and security and protection has bubbled backup to the top of the list from an IT perspective. And one of the simplest, fastest ways to improve data protection is leveraging Backup Appliances. And there's really two segments within that. There's what I'll refer to as the target appliances and the integrated appliances. And we actually have had leadership in this space, since really the beginning. You know 50 cents of every dollar in this market is spent on Dell equipment. Where we see massive growth is really in that integrated appliance market. And those integrated appliances really simplify the deployment of not only the protection storage, but the protection software. So you can modernize your data protection, get much faster recovery, faster backups, as well as really get a smaller footprint, better efficiency, all in one single solution. And that's really where we've seen a lot of growth in the appliance market recently. >> Yeah. So as that, an integrated appliance market is growing twice as fast as targeted, give us a picture. You mentioned a few things, but kind of dig deeper into why customers are opting more and more for the integrated approach. >> Yeah that comes back to kind of a lot of the trends we see in IT overall. It's simplicity. It's ease of, how can you get to a better solution, a better outcome faster. And when it comes to integrated data protection appliances, it really it takes the guesswork out of it. You know, you have software and hardware, that's optimized to work together. You're really quick and easy to deploy, really simple to manage, 'cause it's all fully integrated and you get to a solution where you can get things like 65 one data reduction, get a very small footprint, get really fast improvements to not only backups, but probably even more importantly to recovery, get instant access to that data. And you really are able to with one purchase, transform all of your data protection. Now there's still a lot of great uses for target appliances as well of better flexibility. But, we've seen this overall you've seen this Lisa, every trend in probably IT and life, right? Simplicity. How can you get a faster, better answer? And integrated appliances really lean into that. It's as similar to what we see in the hyperconverged space, kind of in the primary storage and compute side of things. >> Yeah, I think we all want faster, simpler, better in every walk of life. One of the things this year that, in all of that lack of simplification, the complexity that we're living in that we've seen, is the rise of ransomware. It's not only on the rise, it's getting more personal. We've seen, you know, big companies, Garmin was attacked, one of the Cruise Lines was attacked, The New Zealand Stock Exchange, Facebook and Tik Tok were hacked. So we're starting to see so much more vulnerability and the ability of these hackers to expose more vulnerabilities. Have you seen that impacting your customers saying, "Hey, we need help here because now we have so many employees and devices, scattered." >> Yeah, unfortunately we have. You know, we've been talking about Ransomware Protection, Cyber Resiliency, Cyber Recovery with our customers for quite a number of years. And, now it's not a niche conversation just with financial institutions, it's a conversation with all of our customers. 'Cause either they've felt it or they've seen their competitors feel it and they need to protect themselves. So it has really become a conversation but it's not only our specialty sellers, but all of our sellers are having with our customers. And, it's really about not only being able to protect against them, which is an important part, but also recover from them. And that's really what our PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Solution is all about. And the exciting thing for us is that we actually have recently become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. Which really gives you an idea of the level of investment that we've made to provide that secure, automated air gap solution to give our customers that peace of mind. Because unfortunately this is becoming table stakes for any data protection out there today. >> Well, and as more and more, we see every company either becoming a data company or needing to become a data company to not just survive these times, but become successful as time goes on. To a point, it's one thing about protecting the data, but the actual need is to recover it should anything happen. Tell us a little bit more about Sheltered Harbor and what you guys were the first there to receive? Tell me a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Okay a little bit more on overall our solution and Sheltered Harbor is actually a consortium of organizations, primarily financial institutions that have really come together to define the standards, of what we need or Cyber Resiliency for Cyber Recovery. And for us with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we've worked closely with that organization, to meet those standards. And with that work and with that actual deploying in with one of our customers, we were able to become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor to meet their standards there. And what's an important about our solution is that it's both that automated air-gapped solution for the data isolation, which is a part of it. But it's also, we have the CyberSense analytics and forensic tools that give you the ability to discover, to diagnose and to remediate against these attacks. So it gives you both sides of protecting that data air-gapping it, but also being able to intelligently discover and remediate against those attacks, if they do indeed happen. >> As VP of Product Marketing, I'm sure you're with customers often these days virtually. When you're having customer conversations, as you were singing out data protection and being able to recover and remediate, should anything like a ransomware attack happen, that's business critical. That's, you know, lifeline kind of stuff we're talking about. Have you seen the conversations within customer organizations shifts or is this now a board level or a C-level conversation in terms of data protection? >> Yeah, it's interesting. It's become a more frequent conversation. The people involved, are different. It's not just the backup administrators that are involved, it's really about the overall compliance strategy, the CSOs that are involved here. And it's becoming a corporate mandate as it really unfortunately needs to be at this point. So it's coming up more frequently, but also the types of people involved in that conversation have really changed the types of things we're having to talk about and build solutions for. So it's really changed that dynamic for us. And it's been great to really be on the front lines of that with our customers. You know, it started with those financial institutions and now it's really commonplace, to talk about this with everyone. >> So let's talk customers. Give us an example or two of some customers that are leveraging this new technology that are really achieving like the big deduplication ratio that you talked about, but also enabling their business to move forward. >> Yeah. One of my favorite ones for a couple of reasons I'll confess is, World Candy. Actually there are a World Corporation, but to me, they're a candy company. They actually make some chocolate out of Pennsylvania one of my favorites, chocolate covered pretzels. And they're a great example, right? 'Cause they're certainly not an IT specialty organization. They're trying to contract manufactured candy and they want to get things done as efficiently as possible. So they were looking a solution to overall modernize, their overall IT and that came with the combination of an Integrated Data Protection Appliance, as well as VXRail. And by implementing that, they were able to reduce their backup times from running overnight all night, to just two hours. They were able to get dedupe ratios of a 12O to one, 99.2% reduction, which is just incredible. And they were able to reduce their physical server footprint by 60%. So you can just imagine with an organization like this, that needs to run things as efficiently, as simply, as quickly as possible, how transformational that is. And, probably one of the other things that we find out of customers like this is, it's really about finding them a partner that can solve all of their problems in one place. And for data protection that's certainly one of the biggest things for PowerProtect is we now have a one-stop shop appliances software for all your data protection needs, large and small. And my favorite thing is actually our quote from this customer which is, he calls it a perfect partnership and that they have a single hand to high five. And we love to get those high fives from our customer and we really like to be that partner for them and to help them solve these challenges really no matter where their data is or what their challenges are. >> I like that a single can for a virtual high five. Speaking of partners, what's the channel play here? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for us, Dell Technology is overall channel partners are absolutely critical and in the data protection space, probably even more so. So channel partners are a huge part of our go-to-market. And one of the reason that channel partners really like to work with us, with Dell technologies on the data protection side, is because of the breadth of that portfolio. And now with our most recent enhancements on the appliance side, you now have a full PowerProtect portfolio. Target appliances, integrated appliances, physical, virtual, as well as modern data protection software with PowerProtect data manager. And for our partners, and for us, it's so important that they can have one vendor to offer all of these solutions because we know that our customer's challenges are complex, they're diverse, their data sets are diverse and they need to be able to partner with someone, leverage us as a vendor, leverage our partners, leveraging us as a vendor to really give our customers that answer. And that could be very different needs. They have traditional applications, they have new modern applications in Kubernetes and the growth of, and the importance of those types of applications. Our partners don't want and our customers don't want to have to deal with multiple vendors. Multiple vendors actually can increase risk, increase costs. They want to keep that simple, efficient. And that's why partnering with us, with Dell Technologies, why our channel partners really find us to be such a critical vendor to work with on the data protection side. >> So you've shared some impressive stats about what the technology is able to deliver. You gave us the great World Candy company example in terms of the things I heard a big workforce productivity there, they've got big deduplication there. They're able to sounds like reduce their on-prem footprint. From an economic value perspective, help us understand what the economic value of the DP series and even maybe feedback from the analyst community. >> Yeah, we've actually got a recent study which I'd encourage you guys to go read and I will just kind of give you the Cliffs Notes version of it. Which shows you the advantages of leveraging Dell Technologies portfolio for data protection. You can have your cost to protect as low as 1 cent per gigabyte per month, which is impressive. And that's that efficiency that you can get with PowerProtect. It's a reduction in the administration costs for data reduction of 22%, a reduction of 84% in your Cloud resources and services. We all know that people have moved to Public Cloud and probably one of the biggest concerns is the cost of that. By implementing the right data protection solutions, leveraging our in-cloud backup and protection, you can actually significantly reduce that because of the way that we've implemented it. And overall, you can't argue with anything that reduces costs by 98%. So you can reduce your storage resource costs by 98% by leveraging the PowerProtect portfolio. And again, it's a recent ESG study, which you can find on our website and read more about that study and the economic elements that lead into that. But you can just see the dramatic impact that can have, not only are you protecting your most valuable asset of data, but you're doing so in a way that saves the company money, and time and resources. And we all know that's never been more critical than ever. >> Those are very impressive, but compelling stats. Last question, talking about the three waves that we know Dell technologies is writing, we've got VMware, Cloud, Cyber Recovery, give us a flavor of the launch and the news and the new capabilities for this one-stop shop with perspective of what's happening in Cyber Recovery today. >> Yeah, so we've got enhancements on all fronts. So we, let me go in order there. So we've got on the Cloud front our PowerProtect data manager, which we've talked about a lot this year. We continued to really enhance that. Some recent enhancements, the ability to deploy that in Azure and AWS Cloud, to be able to do in-Cloud data protection. On the VMware side as we talked about just recently at VMworld, we've got new integrations with Storage Based Policy Management to really simplify and automate protection for the Vadmins as well as protection administrators. The ability to support, real mission critical applications and VMs, that are something we're working on to be able to more intelligently protect those VMs that have become more challenging to protect in traditional methods as well as integration with protect VCF. And then lastly, I think we've covered a bit today is certainly on that Cyber Recovery, Cyber Resiliency solution. First one to be endorsed by Sheltered Harbor in providing that air gap solution, as well as that ability to discover to remediate from those attacks. And you can kind of get a sense of, where we're really focused on. Those are our big three areas in both our appliance as well as our software portfolio really focused on simplifying that for our customers. >> Well Caitlin, we thank you for joining us as per what theCUBE has seen for many years with Dell Technologies. Lots of innovation, continued innovation. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here, Lisa. >> Excellent. With Caitlin Gordon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (soft music)

From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering HPE's Discover Virtual Experience. Brought to you by HPE. >> Hello and welcome back to the CUBE's coverage of HPE discover Virtual Experience. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, we're here in the Palo Alto Studio for the remote interviews. We have a great innovation story here with Disney and HPE, Alice Taylor, Vice President of Content Innovation with studioLAB at Disney. And Soumyendu Sarkar, distinguished technologist director of AI at HPE. Thanks for coming on Alice. Samandiyu thank you for taking the time. >> No worries. Great to be here. Hi. >> Hi >> I love this story. I think it's an innovation story and I think it's going to be one that we'll experience in our life going forward, and that is media, video, and its experiences and these innovation about AI, It's a lot to do with the collaboration between Disney studioLAB, Alice, that you're running, and it's super, super important and fun as well and very relevant and Cool. So first before we get started, Alice, take a minute to explain a little about yourself and how StudioLAB came about. >> Oh my goodness. StudioLAB is just in its second year of operation. It was an idea that was had by our CTO. I'm going to say three years ago, And at the time, just previously before that, I had a startup company that came through the Disney accelerator. So I was already inside the building and the team there said well, the CTO there, and the boss said, you know, we need to start up an innovation lab that will investigate storytelling through emerging technology. And that's basically being the majority of my background. So I said, yes. And then since then we've been growing a team. We opened the lab in may of 2018 and here we are, in the middle of a pandemic, but it has grown like crazy. It's just a wonderful place to be and to operate. And we've been doing some amazing projects with some amazing partners, >> And it's not unusual that an entrepreneur has this kind of role to think outside the box. We'll get at some of that. Talk about your experience as an entrepreneur, how you got into this position, because you came in as an entrepreneur, you're doing some creative things. Tell us that story real quick. >> Yeah. Okay. Well, so as you can tell, I'm British. My actual background started, my whole career started in technology in the mid 90s. As I started as a trainee video editor, but then switched very quickly in 95 to building websites and from there on, and it was internet all the way. But I've always focused on storytelling and I, you know, much of my background is working for broadcasters and media and content creators. So I was five years at the BBC in their R and D department. And I'm actually out here as VP of digital media for them, and then Channel 4 as well. And throughout the whole process, I was always interested in how to tell stories with new technology and the new mediums as they emerged. So yeah, slight side story and doing a startup, which was actually in toys and video games, but again, big digital storytelling environments for children. And then I came round Robin, if you like into Disney and here we are still looking at how to make films and episodic content, even more, you name it faster, better, more exciting, using the best and greatest in emerging tech as we find it. >> The lab that you're doing, it's an accelerant almost for new technologies. Your job is to what? look out over the horizon next 10 years or so to figure out? >> Yeah >> what's next. It's not a structured thing. You have some reign to be creative and experiment? >> Well, yeah, I mean, the studioLAB, at the studios, well, Disney has eight studios at the moment, And what we do is we look at actually the whole breadth of storytelling. So right from the moment when a creative has an idea through to how our guests and fans might be receiving the end product out in the world, and we segregate that whole breadth into three categories; Ideate, when, you know, the process of generating the idea and building it, Make, how we make it, where we make it, what we make it with and then Experience. How we experience it out in the world. So we have a whole slew of projects, the studio level works with some of the best technology companies in the world. And we call those our innovation partners and we sign these partnerships really to bring what we like to call Superpowers to the system. We like to think that the combination of those companies and what comes out of these projects is going to give our filmmakers superpowers, but also that combinatorial effect of Disney, you know, in this case, for instance, working with HPE, like producing something that Disney couldn't necessarily do on its own or the HBE couldn't necessarily do on his own either. So yeah, it's a huge remit and we don't look quite so far out, generally speaking as 10 years, it's more like three to now. We don't do day to day operational work, but we try to pick something up a couple of years before it's going to be operationally ready and really investigate it then and get a bit of a headstart. >> Well, it's great to have HPE as partner and having that bench of technology, software, and people, and it's just a nice power source for you as well. >> Exactly So Soumyendu talk about HPE relationship with Disney, because you got a lot of deep technical from the lab standpoint to resilient technology. How are you involved? What's your role, you guys sitting around you riffing and put a whiteboard together and say, Hey, we're going to solve these big problems? ... Here's the future of consumption, here's the future of video... What goes on? Tell us the relationship between you guys. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At HPE We can not only make the servers, but what we also do is we work quite a lot on optimizing some of the Artificial Intelligence solutions and algorithms on the GPUs and scale it across Servers. So this opportunity came up from Disney where Disney came up with a very innovative solution where they were solving the video quality problem. As you know, there are a lot of blemishes in the Video that can come up and Disney wanted to fix all of them. And they came up with great algorithm, but what happens is, like with great algorithm comes a huge amount of computational complexity which needs quite a bit of heterogeneous input in both in Parallel Processing and in Sequential Processing. So we thought that it's a perfect, I'd say combination of two skillsets to make this video quality software execute at speeds which are needed for production in Disney. >> So it's good to have a data center whenever you need it to, you guys have some great technology. We'll hear a lot more from the Execs at HPE. On our reporting Alice, we want to to get your thoughts. We're covering some of those new edge technologies, we're talking about new experiences. I gave a talk at Sundance a few years ago called the new creative class, and it's really about this next wave of art and filmmakers who are using the tools of the trade, which is a cellphone, you know, really easy to set up a studios and use the technology. Can you give us some examples of how the studioLAB collaborates with filmmakers and the Execs to push the art and technology of storytelling to be fresh, Because the sign of the times, are Instagram and Tik Tok, this is just very elementary, the quality and the storytelling is pretty basic dopamine driven, but you can almost imagine that the range of quality that's going to come, so access to more people, certainly more equipment and cameras, et cetera. What's next? How do you guys see And what some examples can you share? >> Oh, that's an amazing question. I mean, where working on Films and Episodics rather than very short form content , Obviously. But you're absolutely right. There's a lot of consumer grade technology that is entering the production pipeline in many ways and in many areas, whether it's phones or iPads, using certain bits of software. One of the things that we're building at the moment is the ability to generate photometrical models, capturing with consumer drones or even iPhones, and then getting that data into a 3-D model as soon as possible. There's a really big theme of what we want to do. It's like make the process more efficient so that our creatives and the folks working on productions, aren't having to slog through something that's and tedious. They want to get to the storytelling and the art and the act of storytelling as much as possible. And so waiting for a model to render or waiting for the QC process to finish is what we want to kind of get rid of. So they can really get to the meat of the problem much, much faster. And just going back to what Soumyendu was saying about the AI project here, I mean, it was about finding the dead pixels on the screen when we do all finished prints, which would you believe we do with humans? Humans are the best, or historically have been the best at finding dead pixels, but what a job to have to do at the end of the process. To go through quality control and then have to go and manually find the little dead pixels in each frame of our print, right? Nobody actually wants to be doing that job. So the algorithm goes and looks for those automatically. And then HPE came in and sped that whole process up by 9X. So now it actually runs fast enough to be used on our final prints. >> You know, it's interesting in the tech trend for the past 10, 15 years that I've been covering cloud technology even in the early days, it was kind of on the fringe and then become mainstream. But all the trends were more agility, faster, take away that heavy lifting so that the focus on the job at hand, whether its creative or writing software. This is kind of a a success formula, and you're kind of applying it to film and creation, which is still, like software, it's kind of the same thing almost. >> Yeah >> So you know, when you see these new technologies, I'd love to get both of your reactions to this. One of the big misses, that people kind of miss is the best stuff is often misunderstood until it's understood. >> Yes >> And we're kind of seeing that now with Covid and everyone's like no way I could've seen this. No, no one predicted it. So what's an example of something that people might be misunderstanding. That's super relevant, that might become super important very quickly. Any thoughts? >> Gosh, that's a great one. Well, I can give an example of something that has come and gone and then come and potentially gone, except it hasn't. You'll see. It's VR. So it came whenever it was, 20 years ago and then 10 years ago, and everybody was saying VR is going to change the world. And then it reappeared again, six years ago. And again, everybody said it was going to change the world. And in terms of film production, it really has. But that's slightly gone unnoticed. I think, because out in the market, everyone is expecting VR to have been a huge consumer success. And I suspect it still will be one day a huge consumer success. But meanwhile, in the background, We are using VR on a daily basis in film production, Virtual production is one of the biggest emerging processes that is happening. If you've seen anything to do with Jungle Book, Lion King , the Mandalorian, anything that industrial light and magic work on, you're really looking at a lot of virtual production techniques that have ended up on the screen. And it is now a technology that we can't do without. I'm going to have to think two seconds for something that's emerging. AI and ML is a huge area. Obviously, we're scratching it. I don't think anyone is going to to say that it's going to come and go this one. This is huge, but we're already just beginning to see where and how we can apply AI and ML. >> Yeah. >> So Soumyendu, did you want to jump in on that one? >> Yeah, Let me take it from the technology standpoint. I think Alice sort of puts out some very cool trends. Now what happens in tHE AI and ML spaces, people can come up with creative ideas, but one of the biggest challenges is how do you take those ideas for commercial usage and make it work at a speed, as Alice was mentioning, makes it feasible in production. So accelerating AI/ML and making it in a form, which is usable is super important. And the other aspect of it is, just see, for instance, video quality, that Alice was mentioning. Dead pixel is one type, And I know that Disney is working on certain other video qualities to fix the blemishes, but there is a whole variety of these blemishes and with human operators, Its kind of impossible to scale up the production and to find all these different artifacts, and especially now, as you can see, the video is disseminated in your phones, in your iPads. Like, you know, in just streaming. So this is a problem of scale and to solve this is also like, you know, a lot of computers, and I'd say a lot of collaboration with complementary skillsets that make AI real. >> I was talking with a friend who was an early Apple employee. He's now retired, good friend. And we were talking about, you know, all the dev apps, agile, go fast, scale up. And he made a comment. I want to get your reaction to it. He said, "you know, what we're missing is craft." And software used to be a craft game. So when you have speed, you lose craft. And we see that certainly with cloud and agility and then iterate, and then you get to a good product over time. But I think one of the things that's interesting and you guys are kind of teasing out is you can kind of get craft with the help from some of these technologies, where, you can kind of build crafting into it. >> Yap Alice, what's your reaction to that? >> One of our favorite anecdotes from the lion King is, so Jon Favreau the director, built out the virtual production system with his team to make the film. And it allowed for a smaller production team acting on a smaller footprint. What they didn't do was shorten the time to make the film, what the whole system enabled was more content created within that same amount of time. So effectively Jon had more tapes and more material to make his final film with. And that's what we want people to have. We want them to not ever to have to say, Oh, I missed my perfect shot because of, I don't know what, you know, we ran out of time, so we couldn't get the perfect shot. That's it, that's a terrible thing. We never want that to happen. So where technology can help gather as much material as possible in the most efficient way, basically at the end of the day for our our creatives, that means more ability to tell a story. >> So Soumyendu, this is an example of the pixel innovation, the video QC, it's really a burden if you have to go get it and chase it, you can automate that. That's back to some of the tech trends. A lot of automation action in there. >> Yeah, absolutely. And as Alice was mentioning, if you can bridge the gap between imagination and realization then you have solved the problem. That way, the people who are creative can think and implement something in a very short time. And that's fair, like, you know, some of these scientists come in >> Well, I also very impressed and I'm looking forward to coming down and visiting studio labs when the world gets back to work, >> Alright. >> You guys are in the part of Burbank and all the action. I know you're a little sort of incubate. It's really kind of R and D meet commercially. Commercial is really cool. But I have to ask you what the COVID-19 going on, how are you guys handling the situation? Certainly impacted people coming to work. >> Yeah >> How has your team in been impacted and how are you guys continuing the mission? >> Well, the lab itself is obviously a physical place on the lot. It's in the old animation building. But there's also this program of innovation that we have with our partners. To be honest, we didn't slow down at all the team carried on the next day from home. And in fact, we have expanded even, because new projects came rolling in as folks who were stuck at home suddenly had needs. So we had editors needing to work remotely, you name it, folks with bad home connections, wondering if we had some 5G phones hanging around, that kind of thing. And so everything really expanded a bit. We are hoping to get back into physical co-location as soon as possible, not least to be able to shoot movies again. But I think that there will be an element of this remote working that's baked in forever from here on then. Not least, coz it was just a round, this kind of, what this has done is accelerated things like the beginning of cloud adoption properly, in the beginning of remote teleworking and remote telepresence, and then also ideas coming out of that. So you know, again, the other day I heard Holograms coming up, like, can we have holograms yet? >> Yeah, we can do that, we've done that, Lets do it. Bring that back. >> And so it's that kind of thing. Exactly, that's going to come around again. Yeah. But you know what? The team have all been amazing. But we'll miss each other, you know, there's something about real life that can't be replaced by technology. >> Well, You know, we were talking earlier on theCUBE last week about, the future got pulled to the present, not the present accelerated the future. Which exposes some of these things that are really important and you mentioned it. So I have to ask you Alice, as you guys got more work, obviously it makes sense. What have you learnt as adapting and leading your team through this change? Any learnings you can share with folks? >> Well, yes, that's a good one. But mainly resilience. It's been a nonstop and quite relentless and the news out there is extraordinary. So we're also trying to balance a very full pipeline of work with understanding that people are struggling to balance their lives as well at home, You know, kids, pets, BLM, like you name it, everything is affecting everybody. So resilience and empathy is really top of my mind at the moment as we try to continue to succeed, but making sure that everybody stays healthy and sane. >> Yeah. And in great news, you got a partner here with HPE, the innovation doesn't stop there. You still have to partner. How do you keep up with these technologies and the importance of partners, comments, and Soumyendu your comment as well. >> Yeah. So HPE has been a great leader in accommodating all HPE employees to work from remote and in the process, what we also discovered is, we humans are innovative. So we discover the innovative ways where we can still work together. So we increased the volume of our virtual collaborations, and I have worked with Erica from Disney, who is a tremendous facilitator and a technologist of mine, to have this close collaboration going, and we almost missed nothing. But yes, we would like to, you know the feel each other to be in close proximity, look at each other's eyes. Probably that's the only missing thing, a crest of it, You know, we created an environment where we can collaborate and work pretty well. And to Alice's point in the process, we also discovered a lot of things which can be done in remote considering the community of Silicon Valley. >> You know, I'd love. The final question I want to get your thoughts on is your favorite technologies that you're excited about. But some Soumyendu, you know, we were talking amongst us nerds and geeks here in Silicon Valley around, you know, what Virtualization... Server Virtualization has done. And HPE knows a lot about server virtualization. You're in the server business, that created cloud, because with virtualization, you could create one server and great many servers, but I think this COVID-19 and the future beyond it, virtualization of life, an immersion of digital is going to bring and change a lot of things. You guys highlighted a few of them. This virtualization of life, society, experiences, play, work. It's not just work it's experiences. So Internet of Things, devices, how I'm consuming, how I'm producing, it's really going to have an impact. I'd love to get your, both of your thoughts on this kind of "virtualization of life" because it certainly impacts studioLAB, because you think about these things, Alice, and HP has to invent the tech to get scaling up. So final question. What do you think about virtualization of life and what technologies do you see that you're excited about to help make our lives better? >> Wow. Goodness, me. I think we're only beginning to understand the impact that things like video conferencing has on folks. You know, I don't know whether you've seen all of the articles flying around about how it's a lot more work to do, video conferencing, that you don't have the same subtle cue as you have in real life. And again, you know, virtual technologies like VR and similar, are not going to solve that immediately. So what will have to happen is that humans themselves will adapt to the systems. I think though, fundamentally we're about to enter a radical period. We basically have already a radical period of innovation because as folks understand what's at their fingertips and then what's missing, we're going to see all sorts of startups and new ideas come rushing out. As people understand this new paradigm and what they can do to solve, for the new pains that come out of it. I mean, just from my perspective, I have back-to-back nine hours of etc a day. And by the end of the day, I can barely walk. What are we going to do about that? I think we're going to see, >> Holograms, I like that Idea. >> right, we're going to see home exercise equipment combined with like, you know, really good ones. Like you've seen pellets on the shares going crazy. There's going to be tons of that. So I'm just really excited at the kind of three years or so. I think that we're going to see of radical innovation, the likes of which we have always usually been held back by other reasons, maybe not enough money or not enough permission. Whereas now people are like, we have to fix this problem. >> Well, you got a great job. I want to come, just quit my job and come join studio lab, sounds like that's a playground of fun. They have great stuff. >> Ton of fun. >> Soumyendu, close this out here. What are you excited about as we virtualize. You're in the labs, creating new technology, you're a distinguished technologist and director of AI. I Wean, you're on the cutting edge. You're riding the wave too. What's your take on this virtual center? >> I think, you know the COVID experience, what it has done is it has pushed the edge to the home. So now, if you really see a home is one of the principle connectivity to the outside world, as far as professionalism goes. And with that, what AI also offers is like a better experience. Right now we are all Gaga about zoom being able to do a video conferencing, but as Alice was pointing out, there is that ER, and the VR. Now consider combining the augmented reality. And the way that we do review a conference and all the other AI innovations that we can bring in so that the interactions becomes much more real. And that is like, you know, I'd say, where the world is moving. >> I can't let this go. I have to go one more step in because you guys brought that up. Alice, you mentioned the fatigue and all these things. And if you think about just the younger generations, we have to invest in our communities and our young people. I mean, think about all the kids who have to go back to school in September, in the fall, what their world's like. And you talk about, you know, we can handle video, but learners? So the transformation that's going to come down the path really fast is how do you create an experience for education and for learning and connecting. This is huge. Thoughts and reactions to that. So it's something that I've been thinking a lot about, but I'm sure a lot of other parents have as well. >> My take on that, kids, I've worked a lot with kids and kids media. And over the years, you often find that when a new media does come in, there's a lot of fear around it, but kids are plastic and incredibly good at adapting to new media and new technology and new ways of working. The other thing is, I think this generation of kids have really had to live through something, you know, and it's going to have, with luck, taught them some resilience. I think, if there's one thing that teachers can be focusing on, it is things like resilience and how to cope under very unusual and very unpredictable circumstances, which is never good for things like anxiety. But it's also the reality of the world, you know, be adaptive and learn, keep learning. These are great messages to give to kids. I think if anything, they are the ones who'll figure out how to socialize online successfully and healthily. So we're going to have to learn from them. >> Yeah. They're going to want to make it to be fun too. I mean, you have to make it entertaining. I mean, I find my personal experience, if it's boring, it ain't going to work. Thank you so much, Alice. Well, thank you very much for that comment and insight really enjoy. Congratulations on studioLAB, you got a great mission and very cool and very relevant. Soumyendu thank you very much for sharing the insights on HPE's role in that. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. >> Thanks. It's nice. >> Okay. >> Thanks John. >> This is theCUBE virtual covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Stay tuned for more coverage from HPE Discover Virtual Experience after this break.