(upbeat intro music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm your host, John Furrier, here in Palo Alto, California. Got a special remote guest coming in. Teresa Carlson, President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport, theCUBE alumni, one of the first, let me go back to 2013, Teresa, former AWS. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Oh my gosh, almost 10 years. That is unbelievable. It's hard to believe so many years of theCUBE. I love it. >> It's been such a great honor to interview you and follow your career. You've had quite the impressive run, executive level woman in tech. You've done such an amazing job, not only in your career, but also helping other women. So I want to give you props to that before we get started. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. I, it's my, it's been my honor and privilege. >> Let's talk about Flexport. Tell us about your new role there and what it's all about. >> Well, I love it. I'm back working with another Amazonian, Dave Clark, who is our CEO of Flexport, and we are about 3,000 people strong globally in over 90 countries. We actually even have, we're represented in over 160 cities and with local governments and places around the world, which I think is super exciting. We have over 100 network partners and growing, and we are about empowering the global supply chain and trade and doing it in a very disruptive way with the use of platform technology that allows our customers to really have visibility and insight to what's going on. And it's a lot of fun. I'm learning new things, but there's a lot of technology in this as well, so I feel right at home. >> You quite have a knack from mastering growth, technology, and building out companies. So congratulations, and scaling them up too with the systems and processes. So I want to get into that. Let's get into your personal background. Then I want to get into the work you've done and are doing for empowering women in tech. What was your journey about, how did it all start? Like, I know you had a, you know, bumped into it, you went Microsoft, AWS. Take us through your career, how you got into tech, how it all happened. >> Well, I do like to give a shout out, John, to my roots and heritage, which was a speech and language pathologist. So I did start out in healthcare right out of, you know, university. I had an undergraduate and a master's degree. And I do tell everyone now, looking back at my career, I think it was super helpful for me because I learned a lot about human communication, and it has done me very well over the years to really try to understand what environments I'm in and what kind of individuals around the world culturally. So I'm really blessed that I had that opportunity to work in healthcare, and by the way, a shout out to all of our healthcare workers that has helped us get through almost three years of COVID and flu and neurovirus and everything else. So started out there and then kind of almost accidentally got into technology. My first small company I worked for was a company called Keyfile Corporation, which did workflow and document management out of Nashua, New Hampshire. And they were a Microsoft goal partner. And that is actually how I got into big tech world. We ran on exchange, for everybody who knows that term exchange, and we were a large small partner, but large in the world of exchange. And those were the days when you would, the late nineties, you would go and be in the same room with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. And I really fell in love with Microsoft back then. I thought to myself, wow, if I could work for a big tech company, I got to hear Bill on stage about saving, he would talk about saving the world. And guess what my next step was? I actually got a job at Microsoft, took a pay cut and a job downgrade. I tell this story all the time. Took like three downgrades in my role. I had been a SVP and went to a manager, and it's one of the best moves I ever made. And I shared that because I really didn't know the world of big tech, and I had to start from the ground up and relearn it. I did that, I just really loved that job. I was at Microsoft from 2000 to 2010, where I eventually ran all of the U.S. federal government business, which was a multi-billion dollar business. And then I had the great privilege of meeting an amazing man, Andy Jassy, who I thought was just unbelievable in his insights and knowledge and openness to understanding new markets. And we talked about government and how government needed the same great technology as every startup. And that led to me going to work for Andy in 2010 and starting up our worldwide public sector business. And I pinch myself some days because we went from two people, no offices, to the time I left we had over 10,000 people, billions in revenue, and 172 countries and had done really amazing work. I think changing the way public sector and government globally really thought about their use of technology and Cloud computing in general. And that kind of has been my career. You know, I was there till 2020, 21 and then did a small stint at Splunk, a small stint back at Microsoft doing a couple projects for Microsoft with CEO, Satya Nadella, who is also an another amazing CEO and leader. And then Dave called me, and I'm at Flexport, so I couldn't be more honored, John. I've just had such an amazing career working with amazing individuals. >> Yeah, I got to say the Amazon One well-documented, certainly by theCUBE and our coverage. We watched you rise and scale that thing. And like I said at a time, this will when we look back as a historic run because of the build out. I mean as a zero to massive billions at a historic time where government was transforming, I would say Microsoft had a good run there with Fed, but it was already established stuff. Federal business was like, you know, blocking and tackling. The Amazon was pure build out. So I have to ask you, what was your big learnings? Because one, you're a Seattle big tech company kind of entrepreneurial in the sense of you got, here's some working capital seed finance and go build that thing, and you're in DC and you're a woman. What did you learn? >> I learned that you really have to have a lot of grit. You, my mom and dad, these are kind of more southern roots words, but stick with itness, you know. you can't give up and no's not in your vocabulary. I found no is just another way to get to yes. That you have to figure out what are all the questions people are going to ask you. I learned to be very patient, and I think one of the things John, for us was our secret sauce was we said to ourselves, if we're going to do something super transformative and truly disruptive, like Cloud computing, which the government really had not utilized, we had to be patient. We had to answer all their questions, and we could not judge in any way what they were thinking because if we couldn't answer all those questions and prove out the capabilities of Cloud computing, we were not going to accomplish our goals. And I do give so much credit to all my colleagues there from everybody like Steve Schmidt who was there, who's still there, who's the CISO, and Charlie Bell and Peter DeSantis and the entire team there that just really helped build that business out. Without them, you know, we would've just, it was a team effort. And I think that's the thing I loved about it was it was not just sales, it was product, it was development, it was data center operations, it was legal, finance. Everybody really worked as a team and we were on board that we had to make a lot of changes in the government relations team. We had to go into Capitol Hill. We had to talk to them about the changes that were required and really get them to understand why Cloud computing could be such a transformative game changer for the way government operates globally. >> Well, I think the whole world and the tech world can appreciate your work and thank you later because you broke down those walls asking those questions. So great stuff. Now I got to say, you're in kind of a similar role at Flexport. Again, transformative supply chain, not new. Computing wasn't new when before Cloud came. Supply chain, not a new concept, is undergoing radical change and transformation. Online, software supply chain, hardware supply chain, supply chain in general, shipping. This is a big part of our economy and how life is working. Similar kind of thing going on, build out, growth, scale. >> It is, it's very much like that, John, I would say, it's, it's kind of a, the model with freight forwarding and supply chain is fairly, it's not as, there's a lot of technology utilized in this global supply chain world, but it's not integrated. You don't have a common operating picture of what you're doing in your global supply chain. You don't have easy access to the information and visibility. And that's really, you know, I was at a conference last week in LA, and it was, the themes were so similar about transparency, access to data and information, being able to act quickly, drive change, know what was happening. I was like, wow, this sounds familiar. Data, AI, machine learning, visibility, common operating picture. So it is very much the same kind of themes that you heard even with government. I do believe it's an industry that is going through transformation and Flexport has been a group that's come in and said, look, we have this amazing idea, number one to give access to everyone. We want every small business to every large business to every government around the world to be able to trade their goods, think about supply chain logistics in a very different way with information they need and want at their fingertips. So that's kind of thing one, but to apply that technology in a way that's very usable across all systems from an integration perspective. So it's kind of exciting. I used to tell this story years ago, John, and I don't think Michael Dell would mind that I tell this story. One of our first customers when I was at Keyfile Corporation was we did workflow and document management, and Dell was one of our customers. And I remember going out to visit them, and they had runners and they would run around, you know, they would run around the floor and do their orders, right, to get all those computers out the door. And when I think of global trade, in my mind I still see runners, you know, running around and I think that's moved to a very digital, right, world that all this stuff, you don't need people doing this. You have machines doing this now, and you have access to the information, and you know, we still have issues resulting from COVID where we have either an under-abundance or an over-abundance of our supply chain. We still have clogs in our shipping, in the shipping yards around the world. So we, and the ports, so we need to also, we still have some clearing to do. And that's the reason technology is important and will continue to be very important in this world of global trade. >> Yeah, great, great impact for change. I got to ask you about Flexport's inclusion, diversity, and equity programs. What do you got going on there? That's been a big conversation in the industry around keeping a focus on not making one way more than the other, but clearly every company, if they don't have a strong program, will be at a disadvantage. That's well reported by McKinsey and other top consultants, diverse workforces, inclusive, equitable, all perform better. What's Flexport's strategy and how are you guys supporting that in the workplace? >> Well, let me just start by saying really at the core of who I am, since the day I've started understanding that as an individual and a female leader, that I could have an impact. That the words I used, the actions I took, the information that I pulled together and had knowledge of could be meaningful. And I think each and every one of us is responsible to do what we can to make our workplace and the world a more diverse and inclusive place to live and work. And I've always enjoyed kind of the thought that, that I could help empower women around the world in the tech industry. Now I'm hoping to do my little part, John, in that in the supply chain and global trade business. And I would tell you at Flexport we have some amazing women. I'm so excited to get to know all. I've not been there that long yet, but I'm getting to know we have some, we have a very diverse leadership team between men and women at Dave's level. I have some unbelievable women on my team directly that I'm getting to know more, and I'm so impressed with what they're doing. And this is a very, you know, while this industry is different than the world I live in day to day, it's also has a lot of common themes to it. So, you know, for us, we're trying to approach every day by saying, let's make sure both our interviewing cycles, the jobs we feel, how we recruit people, how we put people out there on the platforms, that we have diversity and inclusion and all of that every day. And I can tell you from the top, from Dave and all of our leaders, we just had an offsite and we had a big conversation about this is something. It's a drum beat that we have to think about and live by every day and really check ourselves on a regular basis. But I do think there's so much more room for women in the world to do great things. And one of the, one of the areas, as you know very well, we lost a lot of women during COVID, who just left the workforce again. So we kind of went back unfortunately. So we have to now move forward and make sure that we are giving women the opportunity to have great jobs, have the flexibility they need as they build a family, and have a workplace environment that is trusted for them to come into every day. >> There's now clear visibility, at least in today's world, not withstanding some of the setbacks from COVID, that a young girl can look out in a company and see a path from entry level to the boardroom. That's a big change. A lot than even going back 10, 15, 20 years ago. What's your advice to the folks out there that are paying it forward? You see a lot of executive leaderships have a seat at the table. The board still underrepresented by most numbers, but at least you have now kind of this solidarity at the top, but a lot of people doing a lot more now than I've seen at the next levels down. So now you have this leveled approach. Is that something that you're seeing more of? And credit compare and contrast that to 20 years ago when you were, you know, rising through the ranks? What's different? >> Well, one of the main things, and I honestly do not think about it too much, but there were really no women. There were none. When I showed up in the meetings, I literally, it was me or not me at the table, but at the seat behind the table. The women just weren't in the room, and there were so many more barriers that we had to push through, and that has changed a lot. I mean globally that has changed a lot in the U.S. You know, if you look at just our U.S. House of Representatives and our U.S. Senate, we now have the increasing number of women. Even at leadership levels, you're seeing that change. You have a lot more women on boards than we ever thought we would ever represent. While we are not there, more female CEOs that I get an opportunity to see and talk to. Women starting companies, they do not see the barriers. And I will share, John, globally in the U.S. one of the things that I still see that we have that many other countries don't have, which I'm very proud of, women in the U.S. have a spirit about them that they just don't see the barriers in the same way. They believe that they can accomplish anything. I have two sons, I don't have daughters. I have nieces, and I'm hoping someday to have granddaughters. But I know that a lot of my friends who have granddaughters today talk about the boldness, the fortitude, that they believe that there's nothing they can't accomplish. And I think that's what what we have to instill in every little girl out there, that they can accomplish anything they want to. The world is theirs, and we need to not just do that in the U.S., but around the world. And it was always the thing that struck me when I did all my travels at AWS and now with Flexport, I'm traveling again quite a bit, is just the differences you see in the cultures around the world. And I remember even in the Middle East, how I started seeing it change. You've heard me talk a lot on this program about the fact in both Saudi and Bahrain, over 60% of the tech workers were females and most of them held the the hardest jobs, the security, the architecture, the engineering. But many of them did not hold leadership roles. And that is what we've got to change too. To your point, the middle, we want it to get bigger, but the top, we need to get bigger. We need to make sure women globally have opportunities to hold the most precious leadership roles and demonstrate their capabilities at the very top. But that's changed. And I would say the biggest difference is when we show up, we're actually evaluated properly for those kind of roles. We have a ways to go. But again, that part is really changing. >> Can you share, Teresa, first of all, that's great work you've done and I wan to give you props of that as well and all the work you do. I know you champion a lot of, you know, causes in in this area. One question that comes up a lot, I would love to get your opinion 'cause I think you can contribute heavily here is mentoring and sponsorship is huge, comes up all the time. What advice would you share to folks out there who were, I won't say apprehensive, but maybe nervous about how to do the networking and sponsorship and mentoring? It's not just mentoring, it's sponsorship too. What's your best practice? What advice would you give for the best way to handle that? >> Well yeah, and for the women out there, I would say on the mentorship side, I still see mentorship. Like, I don't think you can ever stop having mentorship. And I like to look at my mentors in different parts of my life because if you want to be a well-rounded person, you may have parts of your life every day that you think I'm doing a great job here and I definitely would like to do better there. Whether it's your spiritual life, your physical life, your work life, you know, your leisure life. But I mean there's, and there's parts of my leadership world that I still seek advice from as I try to do new things even in this world. And I tried some new things in between roles. I went out and asked the people that I respected the most. So I just would say for sure have different mentorships and don't be afraid to have that diversity. But if you have mentorships, the second important thing is show up with a real agenda and questions. Don't waste people's time. I'm very sensitive today. If you're, if you want a mentor, you show up and you use your time super effectively and be prepared for that. Sponsorship is a very different thing. And I don't believe we actually do that still in companies. We worked, thank goodness for my great HR team. When I was at AWS, we worked on a few sponsorship programs where for diversity in general, where we would nominate individuals in the company that we felt that weren't, that had a lot of opportunity for growth, but they just weren't getting a seat at the table. And we brought 'em to the table. And we actually kind of had a Chatham House rules where when they came into the meetings, they had a sponsor, not a mentor. They had a sponsor that was with them the full 18 months of this program. We would bring 'em into executive meetings. They would read docs, they could ask questions. We wanted them to be able to open up and ask crazy questions without, you know, feeling wow, I just couldn't answer this question in a normal environment or setting. And then we tried to make sure once they got through the program that we found jobs and support and other special projects that they could go do. But they still had that sponsor and that group of individuals that they'd gone through the program with, John, that they could keep going back to. And I remember sitting there and they asked me what I wanted to get out of the program, and I said two things. I want you to leave this program and say to yourself, I would've never had that experience if I hadn't gone through this program. I learned so much in 18 months. It would probably taken me five years to learn. And that it helped them in their career. The second thing I told them is I wanted them to go out and recruit individuals that look like them. I said, we need diversity, and unless you all feel that we are in an inclusive environment sponsoring all types of individuals to be part of this company, we're not going to get the job done. And they said, okay. And you know, but it was really one, it was very much about them. That we took a group of individuals that had high potential and a very diverse with diverse backgrounds, held 'em up, taught 'em things that gave them access. And two, selfishly I said, I want more of you in my business. Please help me. And I think those kind of things are helpful, and you have to be thoughtful about these kind of programs. And to me that's more sponsorship. I still have people reach out to me from years ago, you know, Microsoft saying, you were so good with me, can you give me a reference now? Can you talk to me about what I should be doing? And I try to, I'm not pray 100%, some things pray fall through the cracks, but I always try to make the time to talk to those individuals because for me, I am where I am today because I got some of the best advice from people like Don Byrne and Linda Zecker and Andy Jassy, who were very honest and upfront with me about my career. >> Awesome. Well, you got a passion for empowering women in tech, paying it forward, but you're quite accomplished and that's why we're so glad to have you on the program here. President and Chief Commercial Officer at Flexport. Obviously storied career and your other jobs, specifically Amazon I think, is historic in my mind. This next chapter looks like it's looking good right now. Final question for you, for the few minutes you have left. Tell us what you're up to at Flexport. What's your goals as President, Chief Commercial Officer? What are you trying to accomplish? Share a little bit, what's on your mind with your current job? >> Well, you kind of said it earlier. I think if I look at my own superpowers, I love customers, I love partners. I get my energy, John, from those interactions. So one is to come in and really help us build even a better world class enterprise global sales and marketing team. Really listen to our customers, think about how we interact with them, build the best executive programs we can, think about new ways that we can offer services to them and create new services. One of my favorite things about my career is I think if you're a business leader, it's your job to come back around and tell your product group and your services org what you're hearing from customers. That's how you can be so much more impactful, that you listen, you learn, and you deliver. So that's one big job. The second job for me, which I am so excited about, is that I have an amazing group called flexport.org under me. And flexport.org is doing amazing things around the world to help those in need. We just announced this new funding program for Tech for Refugees, which brings assistance to millions of people in Ukraine, Pakistan, the horn of Africa, and those who are affected by earthquakes. We just took supplies into Turkey and Syria, and Flexport, recently in fact, just did sent three air shipments to Turkey and Syria for these. And I think we did over a hundred trekking shipments to get earthquake relief. And as you can imagine, it was not easy to get into Syria. But you know, we're very active in the Ukraine, and we are, our goal for flexport.org, John, is to continue to work with our commercial customers and team up with them when they're trying to get supplies in to do that in a very cost effective, easy way, as quickly as we can. So that not-for-profit side of me that I'm so, I'm so happy. And you know, Ryan Peterson, who was our founder, this was his brainchild, and he's really taken this to the next level. So I'm honored to be able to pick that up and look for new ways to have impact around the world. And you know, I've always found that I think if you do things right with a company, you can have a beautiful combination of commercial-ity and giving. And I think Flexport does it in such an amazing and unique way. >> Well, the impact that they have with their system and their technology with logistics and shipping and supply chain is a channel for societal change. And I think that's a huge gift that you have that under your purview. So looking forward to finding out more about flexport.org. I can only imagine all the exciting things around sustainability, and we just had Mobile World Congress for Big Cube Broadcast, 5Gs right around the corner. I'm sure that's going to have a huge impact to your business. >> Well, for sure. And just on gas emissions, that's another thing that we are tracking gas, greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact we've already reduced more than 300,000 tons and supported over 600 organizations doing that. So that's a thing we're also trying to make sure that we're being climate aware and ensuring that we are doing the best job we can at that as well. And that was another thing I was honored to be able to do when we were at AWS, is to really cut out greenhouse gas emissions and really go global with our climate initiatives. >> Well Teresa, it's great to have you on. Security, data, 5G, sustainability, business transformation, AI all coming together to change the game. You're in another hot seat, hot roll, big wave. >> Well, John, it's an honor, and just thank you again for doing this and having women on and really representing us in a big way as we celebrate International Women's Day. >> I really appreciate it, it's super important. And these videos have impact, so we're going to do a lot more. And I appreciate your leadership to the industry and thank you so much for taking the time to contribute to our effort. Thank you, Teresa. >> Thank you. Thanks everybody. >> Teresa Carlson, the President and Chief Commercial Officer of Flexport. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is International Women's Day broadcast. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro music)

>>Welcome back, everyone live here at Supercomputing 22 in Dallas, Texas. I'm John for host of the Queue here at Paul Gillin, editor of Silicon Angle, getting all the stories, bringing it to you live. Supercomputer TV is the queue right now. And bringing all the action Bresniker, chief architect of Hewlett Packard Labs with HP Cube alumnis here to talk about Supercomputing Road to Quantum. Kirk, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me guys. Great to be >>Here. So Paul and I were talking and we've been covering, you know, computing as we get into the large scale cloud now on premises compute has been one of those things that just never stops. No one ever, I never heard someone say, I wanna run my application or workload on slower, slower hardware or processor or horsepower. Computing continues to go, but this, we're at a step function. It feels like we're at a level where we're gonna unleash new, new creativity, new use cases. You've been kind of working on this for many, many years at hp, Hewlett Packard Labs, I remember the machine and all the predecessor r and d. Where are we right now from your standpoint, HPE standpoint? Where are you in the computing? It's as a service, everything's changing. What's your view? >>So I think, you know, you capture so well. You think of the capabilities that you create. You create these systems and you engineer these amazing products and then you think, whew, it doesn't get any better than that. And then you remind yourself as an engineer. But wait, actually it has to, right? It has to because we need to continuously provide that next generation of scientists and engineer and artists and leader with the, with the tools that can do more and do more frankly with less. Because while we want want to run the program slower, we sure do wanna run them for less energy. And figuring out how we accomplish all of those things, I think is, is really where it's gonna be fascinating. And, and it's also, we think about that, we think about that now, scale data center billion, billion operations per second, the new science, arts and engineering that we'll create. And yet it's also what's beyond what's beyond that data center. How do we hook it up to those fantastic scientific instruments that are capable to generate so much information? We need to understand how we couple all of those things together. So I agree, we are at, at an amazing opportunity to raise the aspirations of the next generation. At the same time we have to think about what's coming next in terms of the technology. Is the silicon the only answer for us to continue to advance? >>You know, one of the big conversations is like refactoring, replatforming, we have a booth behind us that's doing energy. You can build it in data centers for compute. There's all kinds of new things. Is there anything in the paradigm of computing and now on the road to quantum, which I know you're involved, I saw you have on LinkedIn, you have an open rec for that. What paradigm elements are changing that weren't in play a few years ago that you're looking at right now as you look at the 20 mile stair into quantum? >>So I think for us it's fascinating because we've had a tailwind at our backs my whole career, 33 years at hp. And what I could count on was transistors got at first they got cheaper, faster and they use less energy. And then, you know, that slowed down a little bit. Now they're still cheaper and faster. As we look in that and that Moore's law continues to flatten out of it, there has to be something better to do than, you know, yet another copy of the prior design opening up that diversity of approach. And whether that is the amazing wafer scale accelerators, we see these application specific silicon and then broadening out even farther next to the next to the silicon. Here's the analog computational accelerator here is now the, the emergence of a potential quantum accelerator. So seeing that diversity of approaches, but what we have to happen is we need to harness all of those efficiencies and yet we still have to realize that there are human beings that need to create the application. So how do we bridge, how do we accommodate the physical of, of new kinds of accelerator? How do we imagine the cyber physical connection to the, to the rest of the supercomputer? And then finally, how do we bridge that productivity gap? Especially not for people who like me who have been around for a long time, we wanna think about that next generation cuz they're the ones that need to solve the problems and write the code that will do it. >>You mentioned what exists beyond silicon. In fact, are you looking at different kinds of materials that computers in the future will be built upon? >>Oh absolutely. You think of when, when we, we look at the quantum, the quantum modalities then, you know, whether it is a trapped ion or a superconducting, a piece of silicon or it is a neutral ion. There's just no, there's about half a dozen of these novel systems because really what we're doing when we're using a a quantum mechanical computer, we're creating a tiny universe. We're putting a little bit of material in there and we're manipulating at, at the subatomic level, harnessing the power of of, of quantum physics. That's an incredible challenge. And it will take novel materials, novel capabilities that we aren't just used to seeing. Not many people have a helium supplier in their data center today, but some of them might tomorrow. And understanding again, how do we incorporate industrialize and then scale all of these technologies. >>I wanna talk Turkey about quantum because we've been talking for, for five years. We've heard a lot of hyperbole about quantum. We've seen some of your competitors announcing quantum computers in the cloud. I don't know who's using these, these computers, what kind of work they're being used, how much of the, how real is quantum today? How close are we to having workable true quantum computers and what can you point to any examples of how it's being, how that technology is being used in the >>Field? So it, it remains nascent. We'll put it that way. I think part of the challenge is we see this low level technology and of course it was, you know, professor Richard Fineman who first pointed us in this direction, you know, more than 30 years ago. And you know, I I I trust his judgment. Yes. You know that there's probably some there there especially for what he was doing, which is how do we understand and engineer systems at the quantum mechanical level. Well he said a quantum mechanical system's probably the way to go. So understanding that, but still part of the challenge we see is that people have been working on the low level technology and they're reaching up to wondering will I eventually have a problem that that I can solve? And the challenge is you can improve something every single day and if you don't know where the bar is, then you don't ever know if you'll be good enough. >>I think part of the approach that we like to understand, can we start with the problem, the thing that we actually want to solve and then figure out what is the bespoke combination of classical supercomputing, advanced AI accelerators, novel quantum quantum capabilities. Can we simulate and design that? And we think there's probably nothing better to do that than than an next to scale supercomputer. Yeah. Can we simulate and design that bespoke environment, create that digital twin of this environment and if we, we've simulated it, we've designed it, we can analyze it, see is it actually advantageous? Cuz if it's not, then we probably should go back to the drawing board. And then finally that then becomes the way in which we actually run the quantum mechanical system in this hybrid environment. >>So it's na and you guys are feeling your way through, you get some moonshot, you work backwards from use cases as a, as a more of a discovery navigational kind of mission piece. I get that. And Exoscale has been a great role for you guys. Congratulations. Has there been strides though in quantum this year? Can you point to what's been the, has the needle moved a little bit a lot or, I mean it's moving I guess to some, there's been some talk but we haven't really been able to put our finger on what's moving, like what need, where's the needle moved I >>Guess in quantum. And I think, I think that's part of the conversation that we need to have is how do we measure ourselves. I know at the World Economic Forum, quantum Development Network, we had one of our global future councils on the future of quantum computing. And I brought in a scene I EEE fellow Par Gini who, you know, created the international technology roadmap for semiconductors. And I said, Paulo, could you come in and and give us examples, how was the semiconductor community so effective not only at developing the technology but predicting the development of technology so that whether it's an individual deciding if they should change careers or it's a nation state deciding if they should spend a couple billion dollars, we have that tool to predict the rate of change and improvement. And so I think that's part of what we're hoping by participating will bring some of that road mapping skill and technology and understanding so we can make those better reasoned investments. >>Well it's also fun to see super computing this year. Look at the bigger picture, obviously software cloud natives running modern applications, infrastructure as code that's happening. You're starting to see the integration of, of environments almost like a global distributed operating system. That's the way I call it. Silicon and advancements have been a big part of what we see now. Merchant silicon, but also dpu are on the scene. So the role role of silicon is there. And also we have supply chain problems. So how, how do you look at that as a a, a chief architect of h Hewlett Packard Labs? Because not only you have to invent the future and dream it up, but you gotta deal with the realities and you get the realities are silicon's great, we need more of that quantums around the corner, but supply chain, how do you solve that? What's your thoughts and how do you, how, how is HPE looking at silicon innovation and, and supply chain? >>And so for us it, it is really understanding that partnership model and understanding and contributing. And so I will do things like I happen to be the, the systems and architectures chapter editor for the I eee International Roadmap for devices and systems, that community that wants to come together and provide that guidance. You know, so I'm all about telling the semiconductor and the post semiconductor community, okay, this is where we need to compute. I have a partner in the applications and benchmark that says, this is what we need to compute. And when you can predict in the future about where you need to compute, what you need to compute, you can have a much richer set of conversations because you described it so well. And I think our, our senior fellow Nick Dubey would, he's coined the term internet of workflows where, you know, you need to harness everything from the edge device all the way through the extra scale computer and beyond. And it's not just one sort of static thing. It is a very interesting fluid topology. I'll use this compute at the edge, I'll do this information in the cloud, I want to have this in my exoscale data center and I still need to provide the tool so that an individual who's making that decision can craft that work flow across all of those different resources. >>And those workflows, by the way, are complicated. Now you got services being turned on and off. Observability is a hot area. You got a lot more data in in cycle inflow. I mean a lot more action. >>And I think you just hit on another key point for us and part of our research at labs, I have, as part of my other assignments, I help draft our AI ethics global policies and principles and not only tell getting advice about, about how we should live our lives, it also became the basis for our AI research lab at Shewl Packard Labs because they saw, here's a challenge and here's something where I can't actually believe, maintain my ethical compliance. I need to have engineer new ways of, of achieving artificial intelligence. And so much of that comes back to governance over that data and how can we actually create those governance systems and and do that out in the open >>That's a can of worms. We're gonna do a whole segment on that one, >>On that >>Technology, on that one >>Piece I wanna ask you, I mean, where rubber meets the road is where you're putting your dollars. So you've talked a lot, a lot of, a lot of areas of, of progress right now, where are you putting your dollars right now at Hewlett Packard Labs? >>Yeah, so I think when I draw, when I draw my 2030 vision slide, you know, I, for me the first column is about heterogeneous, right? How do we bring all of these novel computational approaches to be able to demonstrate their effectiveness, their sustainability, and also the productivity that we can drive from, from, from them. So that's my first column. My section column is that edge to exoscale workflow that I need to be able to harness all of those computational and data resources. I need to be aware of the energy consequence of moving data, of doing computation and find all of that while still maintaining and solving for security and privacy. But the last thing, and, and that's one was a, one was a how one was aware. The last thing is a who, right? And is is how do we take that subject matter expert? I think of a, a young engineer starting their career at hpe. It'll be very different than my 33 years. And part of it, you know, they will be undaunted by any, any scale. They will be cloud natives, maybe they metaverse natives, they will demand to design an open cooperative environment. So for me it's thinking about that individual and how do I take those capabilities, heterogeneous edge to exito scale workflows and then make them productive. And for me, that's, that's where we were putting our emphasis on those three. When, where and >>Who. Yeah. And making it compatible for the next generation. We see the student cluster competition going on over there. This is the only show that we cover that we've been to that is from the dorm room to the boardroom and this cuz Supercomputing now is elevating up into that workflow, into integration, multiple environments, cloud, premise, edge, metaverse. This is like a whole nother world. >>And, and, but I think it's, it's the way that regardless of which human pursuit you're in, you know, everyone is going to be demand simulation and modeling ai, ML and massive data m l and massive data analytics that's gonna be at heart of, of everything. And that's what you see. That's what I love about coming here. This isn't just the way we're gonna do science. This is the way we're gonna do everything. >>We're gonna come by your booth, check it out. We've talked to some of the folks, hpe obviously HPE Discover this year, GreenLake with center stage, it's now consumption is a service for technology. Whole nother ballgame. Congratulations on, on all this. I would say the massive, I won't say pivot, but you know, a change >>It >>Is and how you guys >>Operate. And you know, it's funny sometimes you think about the, the pivot to as a services benefiting the customer, but as someone who has supported designs over decades, you know, that ability to to to operate and at peak efficiency, to always keep in perfect operating order and to continuously change while still meeting the customer expectations that actually allows us to deliver innovation to our customers faster than when we are delivering warranted individual packaged products. >>Kirk, thanks for coming on Paul. Great conversation here. You know, the road to Quantum's gonna be paved through computing supercomputing software integrated workflows from the dorm room to the boardroom to Cube, bringing all the action here at Supercomputing 22. I'm Jacque Forer with Paul Gillin. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>> We're back at the ARIA Las Vegas. We're covering CrowdStrike's Fal.Con 22. First one since 2019. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson on theCUBE. Adam Meyers is here, he is the Senior Vice President of Intelligence at CrowdStrike. Adam, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> Interesting times, isn't it? You're very welcome. Senior Vice President of Intelligence, tell us what your role is. >> So I run all of our intelligence offerings. All of our analysts, we have a couple hundred analysts that work at CrowdStrike tracking threat actors. There's 185 threat actors that we track today. We're constantly adding more of them and it requires us to really have that visibility and understand how they operate so that we can inform our other products: our XDR, our Cloud Workload Protections and really integrate all of this around the threat actor. >> So it's that threat hunting capability that CrowdStrike has. That's what you're sort of... >> Well, so think of it this way. When we launched the company 11 years ago yesterday, what we wanted to do was to tell customers, to tell people that, well, you don't have a malware problem, you have an adversary problem. There are humans that are out there conducting these attacks, and if you know who they are what they're up to, how they operate then you're better positioned to defend against them. And so that's really at the core, what CrowdStrike started with and all of our products are powered by intelligence. All of our services are our OverWatch and our Falcon complete, all powered by intelligence because we want to know who the threat actors are and what they're doing so we can stop them. >> So for instance like you can stop known malware. A lot of companies can stop known malware, but you also can stop unknown malware. And I infer that the intelligence is part of that equation, is that right? >> Absolutely. That that's the outcome. That's the output of the intelligence but I could also tell you who these threat actors are, where they're operating out of, show you pictures of some of them, that's the threat intel. We are tracking down to the individual persona in many cases, these various threats whether they be Chinese nation state, Russian threat actors, Iran, North Korea, we track as I said, quite a few of these threats. And over time, we develop a really robust deep knowledge about who they are and how they operate. >> Okay. And we're going to get into some of that, the big four and cyber. But before we do, I want to ask you about the eCrime index stats, the ECX you guys call it a little side joke for all your nerds out there. Maybe you could explain that Adam >> Assembly humor. >> Yeah right, right. So, but, what is that index? You guys, how often do you publish it? What are you learning from that? >> Yeah, so it was modeled off of the Dow Jones industrial average. So if you look at the Dow Jones it's a composite index that was started in the late 1800s. And they took a couple of different companies that were the industrial component of the economy back then, right. Textiles and railroads and coal and steel and things like that. And they use that to approximate the overall health of the economy. So if you take these different stocks together, swizzle 'em together, and figure out some sort of number you could say, look, it's up. The economy's doing good. It's down, not doing so good. So after World War II, everybody was exuberant and positive about the end of the war. The DGI goes up, the oil crisis in the seventies goes down, COVID hits goes up, sorry, goes down. And then everybody realizes that they can use Amazon still and they can still get the things they need goes back up with the eCrime index. We took that approach to say what is the health of the underground economy? When you read about any of these ransomware attacks or data extortion attacks there are criminal groups that are working together in order to get things spammed out or to buy credentials and things like that. And so what the eCrime index does is it takes 24 different observables, right? The price of a ransom, the number of ransom attacks, the fluctuation in cryptocurrency, how much stolen material is being sold for on the underground. And we're constantly computing this number to understand is the eCrime ecosystem healthy? Is it thriving or is it under pressure? And that lets us understand what's going on in the world and kind of contextualize it. Give an example, Microsoft on patch Tuesday releases 56 vulnerabilities. 11 of them are critical. Well guess what? After hack Tuesday. So after patch Tuesday is hack Wednesday. And so all of those 11 vulnerabilities are exploitable. And now you have threat actors that have a whole new array of weapons that they can deploy and bring to bear against their victims after that patch Tuesday. So that's hack Wednesday. Conversely we'll get something like the colonial pipeline. Colonial pipeline attack May of 21, I think it was, comes out and all of the various underground forums where these ransomware operators are doing their business. They freak out because they don't want law enforcement. President Biden is talking about them and he's putting pressure on them. They don't want this ransomware component of what they're doing to bring law enforcement, bring heat on them. So they deplatform them. They kick 'em off. And when they do that, the ransomware stops being as much of a factor at that point in time. And the eCrime index goes down. So we can look at holidays, and right around Thanksgiving, which is coming up pretty soon, it's going to go up because there's so much online commerce with cyber Monday and such, right? You're going to see this increase in online activity; eCrime actors want to take advantage of that. When Christmas comes, they take vacation too; they're going to spend time with their families, so it goes back down and it stays down till around the end of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, which you can probably extrapolate why that is. And then it goes back up. So as it's fluctuating, it gives us the ability to really just start tracking what that economy looks like. >> Realtime indicator of that crypto. >> I mean, you talked about, talked about hack Wednesday, and before that you mentioned, you know, the big four, and I think you said 185 threat actors that you're tracking, is 180, is number 185 on that list? Somebody living in their basement in their mom's basement or are the resources necessary to get on that list? Such that it's like, no, no, no, no. this is very, very organized, large groups of people. Hollywood would have you believe that it's guy with a laptop, hack Wednesday, (Dave Nicholson mimics keyboard clacking noises) and everything done. >> Right. >> Are there individuals who are doing things like that or are these typically very well organized? >> That's a great question. And I think it's an important one to ask and it's both it tends to be more, the bigger groups. There are some one-off ones where it's one or two people. Sometimes they get big. Sometimes they get small. One of the big challenges. Have you heard of ransomware as a service? >> Of course. Oh my God. Any knucklehead can be a ransomwarist. >> Exactly. So we don't track those knuckleheads as much unless they get onto our radar somehow, they're conducting a lot of operations against our customers or something like that. But what we do track is that ransomware as a service platform because the affiliates, the people that are using it they come, they go and, you know, it could be they're only there for a period of time. Sometimes they move between different ransomware services, right? They'll use the one that's most useful for them that that week or that month, they're getting the best rate because it's rev sharing. They get a percentage that platform gets percentage of the ransom. So, you know, they negotiate a better deal. They might move to a different ransomware platform. So that's really hard to track. And it's also, you know, I think more important for us to understand the platform and the technology that is being used than the individual that's doing it. >> Yeah. Makes sense. Alright, let's talk about the big four. China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Tell us about, you know, how you monitor these folks. Are there different signatures for each? Can you actually tell, you know based on the hack who's behind it? >> So yeah, it starts off, you know motivation is a huge factor. China conducts espionage, they do it for diplomatic purposes. They do it for military and political purposes. And they do it for economic espionage. All of these things map to known policies that they put out, the Five Year Plan, the Made in China 2025, the Belt and Road Initiative, it's all part of their efforts to become a regional and ultimately a global hegemon. >> They're not stealing nickels and dimes. >> No they're stealing intellectual property. They're stealing trade secrets. They're stealing negotiation points. When there's, you know a high speed rail or something like that. And they use a set of tools and they have a set of behaviors and they have a set of infrastructure and a set of targets that as we look at all of these things together we can derive who they are by motivation and the longer we observe them, the more data we get, the more we can get that attribution. I could tell you that there's X number of Chinese threat groups that we track under Panda, right? And they're associated with the Ministry of State Security. There's a whole other set. That's too associated with the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force. So, I mean, these are big operations. They're intelligence agencies that are operating out of China. Iran has a different set of targets. They have a different set of motives. They go after North American and Israeli businesses right now that's kind of their main operation. And they're doing something called hack and lock and leak. With a lock and leak, what they're doing is they're deploying ransomware. They don't care about getting a ransom payment. They're just doing it to disrupt the target. And then they're leaking information that they steal during that operation that brings embarrassment. It brings compliance, regulatory, legal impact for that particular entity. So it's disruptive >> The chaos creators that's.. >> Well, you know I think they're trying to create a they're trying to really impact the legitimacy of some of these targets and the trust that their customers and their partners and people have in them. And that is psychological warfare in a certain way. And it, you know is really part of their broader initiative. Look at some of the other things that they've done they've hacked into like the missile defense system in Israel, and they've turned on the sirens, right? Those are all things that they're doing for a specific purpose, and that's not China, right? Like as you start to look at this stuff, you can start to really understand what they're up to. Russia very much been busy targeting NATO and NATO countries and Ukraine. Obviously the conflict that started in February has been a huge focus for these threat actors. And then as we look at North Korea, totally different. They're doing, there was a major crypto attack today. They're going after these crypto platforms, they're going after DeFi platforms. They're going after all of this stuff that most people don't even understand and they're stealing the crypto currency and they're using it for revenue generation. These nuclear weapons don't pay for themselves, their research and development don't pay for themselves. And so they're using that cyber operation to either steal money or steal intelligence. >> They need the cash. Yeah. >> Yeah. And they also do economic targeting because Kim Jong Un had said back in 2016 that they need to improve the lives of North Koreans. They have this national economic development strategy. And that means that they need, you know, I think only 30% of North Korea has access to reliable power. So having access to clean energy sources and renewable energy sources, that's important to keep the people happy and stop them from rising up against the regime. So that's the type of economic espionage that they're conducting. >> Well, those are the big four. If there were big five or six, I would presume US and some Western European countries would be on there. Do you track, I mean, where United States obviously has you know, people that are capable of this we're out doing our thing, and- >> So I think- >> That defense or offense, where do we sit in this matrix? >> Well, I think the big five would probably include eCrime. We also track India, Pakistan. We track actors out of Columbia, out of Turkey, out of Syria. So there's a whole, you know this problem is getting worse over time. It's proliferating. And I think COVID was also, you know a driver there because so many of these countries couldn't move human assets around because everything was getting locked down. As machine learning and artificial intelligence and all of this makes its way into the cameras at border and transfer points, it's hard to get a human asset through there. And so cyber is a very attractive, cheap and deniable form of espionage and gives them operational capabilities, not, you know and to your question about US and other kind of five I friendly type countries we have not seen them targeting our customers. So we focus on the threats that target our customers. >> Right. >> And so, you know, if we were to find them at a customer environment sure. But you know, when you look at some of the public reporting that's out there, the malware that's associated with them is focused on, you know, real bad people, and it's, it's physically like crypted to their hard drive. So unless you have sensor on, you know, an Iranian or some other laptop that might be target or something like that. >> Well, like Stuxnet did. >> Yeah. >> Right so. >> You won't see it. Right. See, so yeah. >> Well Symantec saw it but way back when right? Back in the day. >> Well, I mean, if you want to go down that route I think it actually came from a company in the region that was doing the IR and they were working with Symantec. >> Oh, okay. So, okay. So it was a local >> Yeah. I think Crisis, I think was the company that first identified it. And then they worked with Symantec. >> It Was, they found it, I guess, a logic controller. I forget what it was. >> It was a long time ago, so I might not have that completely right. >> But it was a seminal moment in the industry. >> Oh. And it was a seminal moment for Iran because you know, that I think caused them to get into cyber operations. Right. When they realized that something like that could happen that bolstered, you know there was a lot of underground hacking forums in Iran. And, you know, after Stuxnet, we started seeing that those hackers were dropping their hacker names and they were starting businesses. They were starting to try to go after government contracts. And they were starting to build training offensive programs, things like that because, you know they realized that this is an opportunity there. >> Yeah. We were talking earlier about this with Shawn and, you know, in the nuclear war, you know the Cold War days, you had the mutually assured destruction. It's not as black and white in the cyber world. Right. Cause as, as Robert Gates told me, you know a few years ago, we have a lot more to lose. So we have to be somewhat, as the United States, careful as to how much of an offensive posture we take. >> Well here's a secret. So I have a background on political science. So mutually assured destruction, I think is a deterrent strategy where you have two kind of two, two entities that like they will destroy each other if they so they're disinclined to go down that route. >> Right. >> With cyber I really don't like that mutually assured destruction >> That doesn't fit right. >> I think it's deterrents by denial. Right? So raising the cost, if they were to conduct a cyber operation, raising that cost that they don't want to do it, they don't want to incur the impact of that. Right. And think about this in terms of a lot of people are asking about would China invade Taiwan. And so as you look at the cost that that would have on the Chinese military, the POA, the POA Navy et cetera, you know, that's that deterrents by denial, trying to, trying to make the costs so high that they don't want to do it. And I think that's a better fit for cyber to try to figure out how can we raise the cost to the adversary if they operate against our customers against our enterprises and that they'll go someplace else and do something else. >> Well, that's a retaliatory strike, isn't it? I mean, is that what you're saying? >> No, definitely not. >> It's more of reducing their return on investment essentially. >> Yeah. >> And incenting them- disincening them to do X and sending them off somewhere else. >> Right. And threat actors, whether they be criminals or nation states, you know, Bruce Lee had this great quote that was "be like water", right? Like take the path of least resistance, like water will. Threat actors do that too. So, I mean, unless you're super high value target that they absolutely have to get into by any means necessary, then if you become too hard of a target, they're going to move on to somebody that's a little easier. >> Makes sense. Awesome. Really appreciate your, I could, we'd love to have you back. >> Anytime. >> Go deeper. Adam Myers. We're here at Fal.Con 22, Dave Vellante, Dave Nicholson. We'll be right back right after this short break. (bouncy music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone to the Cube's live coverage in Monaco. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. Monaco Crypto Summit is the event and there's a big conversation later at the yacht club with Prince Albert and everyone else will be there, and it'll be quite the scene. And Rachel Wolfson is here. She's with Cointelegraph. They're the media partner of the event, the official media partner of the Monaco Crypto Summit. She's also MCing the event on stage, presented by DigitalBits. Rachel, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, John. >> So I know you're busy, thanks for taking the time cause' you got to go jump back in and moderate, and keep things on track. This isn't an inaugural event. So DigitalBits has exploded on the scene. I just saw a thing on YouTube news around this soccer player in Rome, has DigitalBits logo on their jersey. They're a big to do cause everyone's popular and they got a couple teams. So real world, kind of, assets coming together, what's going on in the event that you're MCing? What's the focus? What's the agenda? What's some of the conversations like? >> Yeah, definitely. Well, it's a great event. It's my first time here in Monaco and I'm loving it. And I think that Monaco is really becoming the next crypto hotspot. Definitely in terms of Metaverse and Web3 innovation, I think that we're going to start seeing a lot of that here. That's what we're seeing today at the Summit. So a lot of the presentations that we're seeing are really focused on Web3 and NFT platforms, so for instance, obviously what DigitalBits is doing. We watched a video before the break on Ecosystem and the Metaverse that people can join and be a part of, in terms of real estate, but we're seeing a lot of innovation here today with that. I moderated a great panel with Britney Kaiser, Lauren Bissell, Taross, I'm blanking on his last name, but it was about blockchain and how governments are implementing blockchain. So that was also really interesting to hear about what the Ukrainian government is doing with blockchain. So there's kind of a mix, but I'd say that the overall theme is Web3 and NFTs. >> Yeah. Britney was mentioning some of that, how they're going to preserve buildings and artifacts, so that in case they're looted or destroyed, they can preserve them. >> Right. I think it's called the Heritage Fund. And I just think it's such an interesting use case in terms of how governments are using blockchain because the best use for blockchain in my opinion, is recording data, and having that data be permanent. And so when we can have artifacts in Ukraine recorded on the blockchain, you know by being scanned, it's really revolutionary. And I think that a lot of governments around the world are going to see that use case and say, "Oh wow, blockchain is a great technology for things like that." >> So DigitalBits had a press conference this morning and they talked about their exchange and some other things. Did you attend that press conference or did you get briefed on that? >> I did not attend the press conference. I was prepping for my MC role. >> So they got this exchange thing and then there's real interest from Prince Albert's foundations to bring this into Monaco. So Monaco's got this vibe, big time. >> Rachel: Right. There's a vibe (John chuckles) >> What does it all mean, when you're putting in your reporting? What do you see happening? >> So, I mean, I honestly haven't covered Monaco actually ever in my reporting. And John, you know I've been reporting since 2017, but the vibe that I'm getting just from this summit today is that Web3 and NFTs are going to be huge here. I'm speaking, I haven't... You know, there's a panel coming up about crypto regulations, and so we're going to talk a little bit about laws being passed here in Monaco in terms of Metaverse and digital identity. So I think that there are a few laws around that here that they're looking at, the government here is looking at to kind of add clarity for those topics. >> I had a couple guests on earlier. We were talking about the old days, a couple years ago. You mentioned 2017, so much has changed. >> Yes. >> You know, we had a up and down. 2018 was a good year, and then it kind of dived back and changed a little bit. Then NFTs brought it back up again, been a great hype cycle, but also movement. What's your take on the real progress that's been made? If you zoom out and look at the landscape, what's happened? >> Right. I mean, well, a lot has happened. When I first entered the space, I initially came in, I was interested in enterprise, blockchain and private networks being utilized by enterprises to record data. And then we saw public blockchains come in, like Ethereum and enterprises using them. And then we saw a mix. And now I feel like we're just seeing public blockchains and there's really... (John chuckles) But there's still our private blockchains. But today, I mean, we've gone from that in 2017 to right now, I think, you know, we're recently seeing a lot of these centralized exchanges kind of collapsing. What we've seen with Celsius, for instance, and people moving their crypto to hardware wallets. I think that the space is really undergoing a lot of transformation. It's really revolutionary, actually, to see the hardware wallet market is growing rapidly, and I think that that's going to continue to grow. I think centralized exchanges are still going to exist in custody crypto for enterprises and institutions, and you know, in individuals as well. But we are seeing a shift from centralized exchanges to hardware wallets. NFTs, although the space is, you know, not as big as it was a year ago, it's still quite relevant. But I think with the way the market is looking today, we're only seeing the top projects kind of lead the way now, versus all of the noise that we were seeing previously. So yeah, I think it's- >> So corrections, basically? >> Right. Exactly. Corrections. And I think it's necessary, right. It's very necessary. >> Yeah. It's interesting. You know, you mentioned the big players you got Bitcoin, Ethereum driving a lot. I remember interviewing the crypto kiddies when they first came out, it was kind of a first gen Ethereum, and then it just exploded from there. And I remember saying to myself, if the NFTs and the decentralized applications can have that scale, but then it felt like, okay, there was a lot of jocking for under the covers, under the hood, so to speak. And now you've got massive presence from all the VCs, and Jason Ho has like another crypto fund. I mean, >> Right. you can't go a day without another big crypto fund from you know, traditional venture capitalists. Meanwhile, you got investors who have made billions on crypto, they're investing. So you kind of got a diversity of investor base going on and different instruments. So the investor community's changing and evolving too. >> Right. >> How do you see that evolving? >> Well, it's a really good point you mentioned. So Cointelegraph research recently released a report showing that Web3 is the most sought after investment sector this year. So it was DeFi before, and Web3 is now leading the way over DeFi. And so we're seeing a lot of these venture capitalist funds as you mentioned, create funds allocated just to Web3 growth. And that's exactly what we're seeing, the vibe I'm getting from the Monaco Crypto Summit here today, this is all about Web3. It's all about NFT, it is all about the Metaverse. You know, this is really revolutionary. So I think we're definitely going to see that trend kind of, you know, conquer all of these other sectors that we're seeing in blockchain right now. >> Has Web3 become the coin term for Metaverse and NFTs? Or is that being globalized as all shifted, decentralized? What's the read on it? It seems to be like, kind of all inclusive but it tends to be more like NFT's the new thing and the young Gen Zs >> Yeah want something different than the Millennials and the Xs and the Boomers, who screwed everything up for everybody. >> Yeah. (John chuckles) No, I mean, it's a great question. So when I think of Web3, I categorize NFTs and the Metaverse in there. Obviously it's just, you know the new form of the internet. It's the way the internet is- >> Never fight fashion, as I always say, right? >> Right. Yeah. Right. (John chuckles) It's just decentralization. The fact that we can live in these virtual worlds and own our own assets through NFT, it's all decentralized. And in my opinion, that all falls under the category of Web3. >> Well, you're doing a great job MCing. Great to have you on theCube. >> Rachel: Thanks. I'd like to ask you a personal question if you don't mind. COVID's impacted us all with no events. When did you get back onto the events circuit? What's on your calendar? What have you been up to? >> Yeah, so gosh, with COVID, I think when COVID, you know, when it was actually really happening, (John chuckles) and it still is happening. But when it was, you know, >> John: Like, when it was >> impacting- shut down mode. >> Right. When we were shut down, there were virtual events. And then, I think it was late last year or early this year when the events started happening again. So most recently I was at NFT NYC. Before that, I was at Consensus, which was huge. >> Was that the one in Austin or Miami? >> In Austin. >> That's right, Austin. >> Right. Were you there? >> No, I missed it. >> Okay. It was a very high level, great event. >> Huge numbers, I heard. >> Yes. Massive turnout. (John chuckles) Tons of speakers. It was really informative. >> It feels like a festival. actually. >> It was. It was just like South by Southwest, except for crypto and blockchain. (John chuckles) And then coming up, gosh, there are a lot of events. I'll be at an event in Miami, it's an NFT event that's in a few months. I know that there's a summit happening, I think in Turkey that I may be at as well. >> You're on the road. You're traveling. You're doing a lot of hopping around. >> Yes I am. And there's a lot of events happening in Europe. I'm US-based, but I'm hoping to spend more time in Europe just so I can go to those events. But there's a lot happening. >> Yeah. Cool. What's the most important story people should be paying attention to in your mind? >> Wow. That's... (Rachel chuckles) That's a big question. It's a good question. I think most, you know, the transition that we're seeing now, so in terms of prices, I think people need to focus less on the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum and more on innovation that's happening. So for instance, Web3 innovation, what we're seeing here today, you know, innovation, isn't about prices, but it's more about like actually now is the time to build. >> Yeah. because the prices are a bit down. >> Yeah. I mean, as, you know, Lewis Hamilton's F1 driver had a quote, you know, "It takes a team. No matter who's in the driver's seat, it's a team." So community, Wayne Gretzky skates where the puck is going to be I think is much more what I'm hearing now, seeing what you're saying is that don't try to count the price trade of Bitcoin. This is an evolution. >> Right. >> And the dots are connecting. >> Exactly. And like I said, now is the time to build. What we're seeing with the project Britney mentioned, putting the heritage, you know, on the blockchain from Ukraine, like, that's a great use case for what we're seeing now. I want to see more of those real world use cases. >> Right. Well, Rachel, thanks for coming on theCube. I really appreciate it. Great to see you. >> Thanks, John. >> And thanks for coming out of your schedule. I know you're busy. >> Thanks. Now you get some lunchtime now and get some break. >> Yeah. Get back on stage. Thanks for coming on. >> Rachel: Thank you. >> All right. We're here at the Monaco Crypto Summit. Rachel's MCing the event as part of the official media partner, Cointelegraph. Rachel Wolfson here on theCube. I'm John Furrier. More coverage coming after this short break. >> Thank you. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> According to the latest survey from Enterprise Technology Research, container orchestration is the number one category as measured by customer spending momentum. It's ahead of AIML, it's ahead of cloud computing, and it's ahead of robotic process automation. All of which also show highly elevated levels of customer spending velocity. Now, we drill deeper into the survey of more than 1200 CIOs and IT buyers, and we find that a whopping 70% of respondents are spending more on Kubernetes initiatives in 2022 as compared to last year. The rise of Kubernetes came about through a series of improbable events that change the way applications are developed, deployed and managed. Very early on Kubernetes committers chose to focus on simplicity in massive adoption rather than deep enterprise functionality. It's why initially virtually all activity around Kubernetes focused on stateless applications. That has changed. As Kubernetes adoption has gone mainstream, the need for stronger enterprise functionality has become much more pressing. You hear this constantly when you attend the various developer conference, and the talk is all around, let's say, shift left to improve security and better cluster management, more complete automation capabilities, support for data-driven workloads and very importantly, vastly better application performance in visibility and management. And that last topic is what we're here to talk about today. Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this special CUBE conversation where we invite into our East Coast Studios Matt Provo, who's the founder and CEO of StormForge and Chandler Hoisington, the general manager of EKS Edge in Hybrid at AWS. Gentlemen, welcome, it's good to see you. >> Thanks. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Chandler, you have this convergence, you've got application performance, you've got developer speed and velocity and you've got cloud economics all coming together. What's driving that convergence and why is it important for customers? >> Yeah, yeah, great question. I think it's important to kind of understand how we got here in the first place. I think Kubernetes solves a lot of problems for users, but the complexity of Kubernetes of just standing up a cluster to begin with is not always simple. And that's where services like EKS comes in and where Amazon tried to solve that problem for users saying, "Hey the control plane, it's made up of 10, 15 different components, standing all these up, patching them, you know, handling the CBEs for it et cetera, et cetera, is a very complicated process, let me help you do that." And where EKS has been so successful and with EKS Anywhere which we launched last year, that's what we're helping customers do, a very similar thing in their own data centers. So we're kind of solving this problem of bringing the cluster online and helping customers launch their first application on it. But then what do you do once your application's there? That's the question. And so now you launched your application and does it have enough resources? Did you tune the right CPU? Did you tune the right amount of memory for it? All those questions need to be answered and that's where working with folks like StormForge come in. >> Well, it's interesting Matt because you're all about optimization and trying to maximize the efficiency which might mean people's lower their AWS bill, but that's okay with Amazon, right? You guys have shown the cheaper it is, the more they buy, well. >> Yeah. And it's all about loyalty and developer experience. And so when you can help create or add to the developer experience itself, over time that loyalty's there. And so when we can come alongside EKS and services from Amazon, well, number one StormForge is built on Amazon, on AWS, and so it's a nice fit, but when we don't have to require developers to choose between things like cost and performance, but they can focus on, you know, innovation and connecting the applications that they're managing on Kubernetes as they operationalize them to the actual business objectives that they have, it's a pretty powerful combination. >> So your entry into the market was in pre-production. >> Yeah. >> You can kind of simulate what performance is going to look like and now you've announced optimized live. >> Yep. >> So that should allow you to turn the crank a little bit more. >> Yeah. >> Get a little bit more accurate and respond more quickly. >> Yeah. So we're the only ones that give you both views. And so we want to, you know, we want to provide a view in what we call kind of our experimentation side of our platform, which is pre-production, as well as on ongoing and continuous view which we kind of call our observation, the observation part of our solution, which is in production. And so for us, it's about providing that view, it's also about taking an increased number of data inputs into the platform itself so that our machine learning can learn from that and ultimately be able to automate the right kinds of tasks alongside the developers to meet their objectives. >> So, Chandler, in my intro I was talking about the spending velocity and how Kubernetes was at the top. But when we had other survey questions that ETR did, and this is post pandemic, it was interesting. We asked what's the most important initiative? And the two top ones were security, no surprise, and it popped up really after the pandemic hit in the lockdown even more prominent and cloud migration, >> Right. >> was number two. And so how are you working with StormForge to effect cloud migrations? Talk about that relationship. >> Yeah. I think it's, you know, different enterprises to have different strategies on how they're going to get their workloads to the cloud. Some of 'em want to have modernize in place in their data centers and then take those modernized applications and move them to the cloud, and that's where something like I mentioned earlier, EKS Anywhere comes into play really nicely because we can bring a consistent experience, a Kubernetes experience to your data center, you can modernize your applications and then you can bring those to EKS in the cloud. And as you're moving them back and forth you have a more consistent experience with Kubernetes. And luckily StormForge works on prem as well even in air gapped environments for StormForge. So, you know, that's, you can get your applications tuned correctly for your data center workloads, and then you're going to tune them differently when you move them to the cloud and you can get them tuned correctly there but StormForge can run consistently in both environments. >> Now, can you add some color as to how you optimize EKS? >> Yeah, so I think from a EKS standpoint, when you, again, when the number of parameters that you have to look at for your application inside of EKS and then the associated services that will go alongside that the packages that are coming in from a Kubernetes standpoint itself, and then you start to transition and operationalize where more and more of these are in production, they're, you know, connected to the business, we provide the ability to go beyond what developers typically do which is sort of take the, either the out of the box defaults or recommendations that ship with the services that they put into their application or the any human's ability to kind of keep up with a couple parameters at a time. You know, with two parameters for the typical Kubernetes application, you might have about a 100 different possible combinations that you could choose from. And sometimes humans can keep up with that, at least statically. And so for us, we want to blow that wide open. We want developers to be able to take advantage of the entire footprint or environment itself. And, you know, by using machine learning to help augment what the developers themselves are doing, not replacing them, augmenting them and having them be a part of that process. Now this whole new world of optimization opens up to them, which is pretty fantastic. And so how the actual workloads are configured, you know, on an ongoing basis and predictively based on upcoming business events, or even unknowns many times is a pretty powerful position to be in. >> I mean, you said not to replace development. I mentioned robotic process automation in my intro, and of course in the early days, I was like, oh, it's going to replace my job. What's actually happened is it's replacing all the mundane tasks. >> Yeah. >> So you can actually do your job. >> Yeah. >> Right? We're all working 24/7, 365 these days, so that the extent that you can automate the things that I hate doing, >> Yeah. >> That's a huge win. So Chandler, how do people get started? You mentioned EKS Anywhere, are they starting on prem and then kind of moving into the cloud? If I'm a customer and I'm interested and I'm sort of at the beginning, where do I start? >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it really depends on your workload. Any workload that can run in the cloud should run in the cloud. I'm not just saying that because I work at Amazon but I truly think that that is the case. And I think customers think that as well. More and more customers are trying to move workloads to the cloud for that elasticity and all the benefits of using these huge platforms and, you know, hundreds of services that you have advantage of in the cloud but some workloads just can't move to the cloud yet. You have workloads that have latency requirements like some gaming workloads, for example, where we don't have regions close enough to the consumers yet. So, you know, you want to put workloads in Turkey to service Egypt customers or something like this. You also have workloads that are, you know, on cruise ships and they lose connectivity in the middle of the Atlantic, or maybe you have highly secure workloads in air gapped environments or something like this. So there's still a lot of use cases that keep workloads on prem and sometimes customers just have existing investments in hardware that they don't want to eat yet, right? And they want to slowly phase those out as they move to the cloud. And again, that's where EKS Anywhere really plays well for the workloads that you want to keep on prem, but then as you move to the cloud you can take advantage of obviously EKS. >> I'll put you in the spot. >> Sure. >> And don't hate me for doing this, but so Andy Jassy, Adam Selipsky, I've certainly heard Maylan Thompson Bukavek talk about this, and in fullness of time, all workloads will be in the cloud. >> Yeah. >> And I've said the cloud is expanding. We're going to bring the cloud to the edge. Edge is in your title. >> Yeah. >> Is that a correct interpretation and obvious it relates >> Absolutely. >> to Kubernetes. >> And you'll see that in Amazon strategy. I mean, without posts and wavelengths and local zones, like we're, at the end of the day, Amazon tries to satisfy customers. And if customers are saying, "Hey, I need workloads in San, I want to run a workload in San Francisco. And it's really important to me that it's close to those users, the end users that are in that area," we're going to help them do that at Amazon. And there's a variety of options now to do that. EKS Anywhere is actually only one piece of that kind of whole strategy. >> Yeah. I mean, here you have your best people working on the speed of light problem, but until that's solved, sure, sure. >> That's right. >> We'll give you the last word. >> How do you know about that? >> Yeah. Yeah. (all laughing) >> It's a top secret. Sorry. You heard it on the CUBE first. Matt, we'll give you the last word, bring us home. >> I, so I couldn't agree more. The, you know, the cloud is where workloads are going. Whether what I love is the ability to look at, you know, for the same enterprises, a lot of the ones we work with, want a, they want a public and a private view, public cloud, private cloud view. And they want that flexibility to, depending on the nature of the applications to be able to shift between from time to time where, you know, really decide. And I love EKS Anywhere. I think it's a fantastic addition to the, you know, to the ecosystem. And, you know, I think for us, we're about staying focused on the set of problems that we solve. No developer that I've ever met and probably neither of you have met, gets super excited about getting out of bed to manually tune their applications. And so what we find is that, you know, the time spent doing that, literally just is, there's like a one-to-one correlation. It means they're not innovating and they're not doing what they love to be doing. And so when we can come alongside that and automate away the manual task to your point, I think there are a lot of parallels to RPA in that case, it becomes actually a pretty empowering process for our users, so that they feel like they're, again, meeting the business objectives that they have, they get to innovate and yet, you know, they're exploring this whole new world around not having to choose between something like cost and performance for their applications. >> Well, and we're entering an entire new era of scale. >> Yeah. >> We've never seen before and human just are not going to be able to keep up with that. >> Yep. >> And that affect quality and speed and everything else. Guys, hey, thanks so much for coming in a great conversation. And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's special showcase with Unstoppable Domains. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. And Matt Gould who's the founder and CEO of Unstoppable Domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company, Unstoppable Domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >> Well, thank you, happy to be here. >> So first of all, love the story you've got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big Web3 wave, which we know 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 Web3. So this is kind of 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 that got unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have 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 and 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 to a whole lot more applications, from money, which everyone's familiar with, to NFT projects like Board Apes or CryptoBucks. >> You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pod. I think you're on 117 episodes now and growing. You guys do a deep dive, so people watching check out the Unstoppable Podcast. But on the last podcast, Matt, you mentioned 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, but IP was generated by the United States Department of Commerce and R&D, that became the internet, the internet became the web. Back then it was just get some web pages up and find what you're looking for. Very analog compared to what's now today, now you mentioned gaming. You mentioned how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about the queue for many, many years now, but it's at actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding in 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 it just goes back to the shift of people's 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 of their assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset compared to literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen. And simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, ways for you to track digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with Web3 is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application and then 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 transition from a model in Web2, where you are on a hosted service like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? To a system where it's much more open. You can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you and you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an end-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game, and you can spend it somewhere else. So the user is now enable 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 in how applications serve up to users. It's going to change their user experiences for instance. >> I think 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 Facebook "and the LinkedIns of the world who are using the user." Now, the contract was a free product and you gave up 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 marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does a digital identity architecture work with Unstoppable? How would you guys enabling that? Can you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique, you had an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together, can you explain? >> Yeah, so we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, 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 Instagram, you have an Instagram handle. It's your name, right? You have that name that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a 100% of their followers, right? 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, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. And then they could be deplatformed, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform if that platform raises 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? 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 "is going to be your name across these applications." If you look at every computing network in the history of computing networks, they end up with a naming system. And when we looked back at DNS, you know which came out in the 90s, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier instead of mapping these IP addresses. And then we said to ourselves, "What's going to happen in the future?" Is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their Web2 world in order to identify themselves as they log into all these applications. They're going to have an NFT domain in the Web3 world in order to authenticate and 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. And the bigger breakthrough here is that NFT domain systems all of these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users. They're built 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 Web3 metaverse. And we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're going to need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of these long IP addresses or hex addresses in the case of crypto. >> Yeah, and also people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name verification, you see the link tree is everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app. I mean, doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people trying to figure it out. I got a github handle. I got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >> Yeah, 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 and you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency, and then the first time you try to send it, there's this field where you want to send it and it's this very long hex address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And 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 D apps system replace IP addresses, NFT domains on blockchain systems replace hex addresses for sending and receiving 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 could have an error, or you could send it to the wrong place, it's pretty scary. You could send it to johnfurrier.nft. And so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing it worked with .com domains. And this is the same thing for Bitcoin and other crypto. >> It's interesting, look at the Web2 or trend one to two, Web1 went to two, it was all about use, ease of use, right? And making things simpler, clutter, more pages can't find things that was search, that was Google. Since then, has there actually been an advancement? >> Hmm. >> Facebook certainly is not an advancement, they're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of 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 Web3 crossover? So take us through your vision on digital identity on Web2, Google searching, Facebook's broken, democracy's broken, users aren't in charge to Web3? >> Got it. Well, we can start at Web1. So the way that I think about it is if you go to Web1, 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? And then what happened with Web2, was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about Web2, these are all websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or a search engine or whatever. And then as we move to Web3, the new thing that's happening here, is the user is coming onto that experience and they're able to connect in their wallet or their Web3 identity to that app and they can bring their data to the party. So it's kind of like Web1, you just have a static web page, Web2, you have a static webpage with a service, like a server back here, and then Web3, the user can come in and bring their database with them in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that you want data to be portable across apps. So we touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an in-game item for one game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. 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. But then another thing that happens is I can bring unlimited amount of additional information about myself when I plug in my wallet. And as an example, when I plug into 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 enable 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. >> You know, I've always thought about this and always debated it with Dave a lot and my co-host, 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 "(laughing) before it even starts." It was almost as if those services were built for the problem of Web2. >> Yes. >> Not three. >> Right. >> What's your reaction to that? >> I think that is right on the money. And 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 breaches. Like Equifax, you know a few years back is a big one and this all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your 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 attack. 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 Web3. So for those in the audience who have used, a Web3 application, one of these D app, to trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that stored, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on apps or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these defi exchanges, for instance, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the user is actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, "Wow, that's a much better or data model." And that gives so much more control of user 'cause the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. And so I think you're right and like we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see it like if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR and then all the companies are going, "We can't comply with that." They keep postponing it or like changing it 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 going to be in a much better spot. >> And GDPR is again a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. I always said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored and nevermind how they delete someone's entry in a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level they become so complicated. So right on the money there 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 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 important on the identity side, wallet 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. 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 and actually work together. So, 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 mattgloud.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 defi trades or whatever. And that doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to 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 we're going to... Still early, so figuring out exactly how the industry is going to shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon and maybe a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging... What you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. And I also think that your financial applications of defi are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. And just a note on this, when you have a wallet that usually has multiple cryptocurrency addresses, so you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. 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, like blockchain.com and another 30 plus of these to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >> So the wallet basically is a D app, the way you look at it, the integrated. >> Yeah. >> Whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized application with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay. I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm an my own NFT. I mean, how this video's going to be an NFT soon. We get on board with the program here, but how 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 APIs and SDK kind of thinking around it? How are you thinking about dealing with the apps? >> Yeah, so all of the above. And what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution, but it's consumer based. So what we've done is adapted some SSO protocols that other people have used, the standard ones, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you GET the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are, you know, standard Web2 APIs, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user-controlled NFT. So they're assigning it that with their private public key pair in order to make those updates. So that allows you to connect into both of these systems. 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. And we really see these Web3 components and net two domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google off, Facebook off, or you can type in an email address, you could see NFT, Unstoppable Domains or NFT authorization. And you can SSO in to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself, 'cause you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, "Yes, I am a unique individual. "I do live in New York and I just bought a new house." And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. And we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts online for e-commerce specifically in the future because that opens up a whole new market. 'Cause they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information directly to the app. >> I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency, in game end engagement, in game data. And now bringing that to kind of a horizontally scalable like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think that's a huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is you getting any pushback from, ICANN, the International Corporation of Naming and Numbers, they got dot everything now.club, 'cause the clubhouse, they got dot, party.live. I mean the real domain name people are over here, Web2, you guys are coming out with the Web3. Where is that connect for people who are not following along the Web3 trend? How do you rationalize the domain angle here? >> Yeah, well, so I would say that NFT domains are 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 business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, 20 to 50 million small businesses who own the majority of these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus. NFT domains, because all of a sudden you have the wallet, 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 instead of being for 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to four billion people who have an internet connection. And so we actually think that the market size for NFT domains is somewhere 50 to a hundred X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for individuals on a day to day basis. So it's like people are going to want you on a use them for receiving cryptocurrency or receiving dollars or payments or USCC coin, 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. And they're not going to want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what Web2 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 going to want to work with and adopt this new NFT technology, 'cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain names. So like in short, I think NFT domain names are domain names with superpowers. This is the next generation of naming systems. And naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >> Yeah, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean they just can't, they're not built for that. And having people, having their own names, is essentially what decentralization is all about. 'Cause we, what is a company? It's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place, they're decentralized. So then you decentralize the identity and everything's been changed. So completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. You pretty much laid out what's next for Web3, but you guys are in this state of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common use case for folks who are putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see, what's the progression? >> Yeah, so the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately, is we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. 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 100% year over year. So 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. And then we want to make it easier for all those people to send crypto back and forth. And I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like... I would say utility focused tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. And that's the really the first step for NFT domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFT domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, 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 corporation, you say, oh, you have to have ID, here's your password, you have to have it. We're going to do it, bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet and up to you domain name, it's going to give them some utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. And we're going to say, "Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile?" Yes. Okay, great. You just attach that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes, Instagram? Yes, TikTok, yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay, yeah, we can attach that back. And then what happens is you end up building up organically digital identifiers for people using these blockchain naming systems. And once they have that, they're going to just... They're going to be able to share that information and that's going to lead to better experiences online for both commerce, but also just better user experiences in general. >> Every company when they web came along first, everyone pro proved the web once. Oh, it's terrible. A bad idea. Oh, it's so, unreliable, so slow. Hard to find things. Web2, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these premalinks became so long, the webpage address fully qualified, 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 ceiling. Here, everyone gets their NFT, they start doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. So we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink, permanent. >> Yeah. >> Excellent. >> Yes indeed. I mean, if we're lucky it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity 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 come out always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain's perfect for this 'cause it's, imitable, 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 comments on efficiency. First of all, we picked domains as first product to market. 'Cause you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple times per year. So, the usage for that to set this up and configure it, most people set it up and configure it and then they only have a few changes per year. First of all, the overall you, it's not like a game. >> An IO problem. >> Right, right, right. So that part's good. So we picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking, are computer systems going to get more efficient over time? And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. And I remember the 90s, I had a modem and it was 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56 and then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. 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 there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. And you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you would try to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would've had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah, some applications are going to be 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, they tried to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds, double, triple in homes right now. Matt, congratulations, great stuff. Final, TikTok moment here. How would you summarize in a short clip, the difference between digital identity and Web2 and Web3. >> In Web2, you don't get to own your own online presidence, and in Web3 you do get to own it. So I think if you were going to simplify it, really Web3 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, you got it. >> They're not the product anymore. If you got to be the product you might as well monetize the product, and that's the data. Real quick thoughts just to close out the roll of data and 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 their users. >> Awesome stuff, Matt, take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What are you guys looking for for hiring, fundraising? Give a quick commercial for what's going on Unstoppable Domains. >> Yeah, so if you haven't already, check us out at unstoppabledomains.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 we are just crossed a hundred people. We're growing, three to five hundred percent year over year. We're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into Web3, even if you're coming from a traditional to background, please reach out. We love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >> And you're a virtual company. You have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >> Yeah, I actually just assumed we are 100% remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet in mostly concentrated in the US and the EU areas. >> I heard a rumor too. Maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >> This is true. And that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. But we also know that recovery is an important part of any organization. So if you push too hard, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. And so we want people to be with us long term, and we do think that this is a 10 year move. And so yeah, do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you- >> That's what I was going to ask you. So what's the consequence of, I don't take vacation. >> Yeah, we literally unplug you. (both laughing) >> You won't be able to get into slack. Right, and that's (indistinct). >> Well, when people start having their avatars be their bought and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFT saying that that's not the real person, it's not the real human. >> Yeah, exactly. We'll be able to check. >> NFT is great innovation, great use case, Matt congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with theCUBE. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, John had a wonderful time. >> All right, this is theCUBE Unstoppable Domains showcasing. We've got 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>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. Stay with us for more coverage on John furrier with cube. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome back to Couchbase connect. My name is Dave Vellante and we're going to dig into a customer case study of sorts with two software engineers from a company called trendy all the largest e-commerce platform in Turkey. And with me are in MRA, tan Rivera, both software engineers at trendy. All welcome. Good to see you guys. Hey, before we get into the story, maybe you can tell us a little bit about trendy all. >>Let me answer that question first. Um, tri-annual uh, today is, um, 10 years old. Uh, actually, uh, it starts with them, um, e-commerce company, uh, Jen, uh, especially, uh, for clothing, uh, today, uh, it's serves several, uh, services, uh, mainly still e-commerce right. Um, we, uh, we do our business mainly on technology and we even have a say in technology, uh, technology is our main concern actually. Um, just like that actually now, >>So thank you for that. I mean, you started, I think, I think the company was founded in 2009, 2010. So you weren't, you were just, you know, kind of which we would consider the, sort of the modern era at the same time. When you look back 10 years, you know, major challenges, major advancements from a technology standpoint. So you at, at the time you had a, uh, a legacy database and you, you had a migraine, maybe you could describe the business conditions that drove you to think about actually making a change. What was the before, and then we can get into the after and what was driving that change? >>Um, maybe I could start it a bit. Well, uh, we have a recommendation domain and try new. It's like when you, when you look at a certain product, like for example, you look at a pencil, it it's commanding you, uh, any razor, uh, if you are going to buy a pink dress, it's going to recommend you a yellow dress. So if you're going to maybe buy pants, it will show you some t-shirts according to it. So, uh, since the recommendations, domain group larger, uh, we, we have struggled, uh, to keep it high scale, and it wasn't a relational DB at first, but that's even as product count increased and, uh, our right frequency increased day by day, uh, and our reef performance was affected very dramatically. Uh, I believe. Yeah. >>So you were using a traditional RDBMS, uh, and then, and, and the issue was you quite, you couldn't make the recommendations fast enough. And, you know, we always say what's real time. Real time is before you lose the customer. So you, you have to make those recommendations in time for the customer to act otherwise, you know, what do you do? Send an email after the fact, Hey, you bought this, nobody's going to pay attention to that. Right? You want to catch them in the moment. Um, and so, so what was it that, that led you to, to Couchbase and w and what was the experience of that? You know, whether it was onboarding, you know, the technology, you know, how difficult was it to get up and running to where you are today? >>Um, we were using ch Couchbase in, uh, in inter-annual, um, for several years, and we had experienced on that. Uh, and, uh, we actually, we need performance as described. So, uh, we convert our data structure to, from relational DB to, um, noise, Carol Levy, um, them actually on our recommendation, uh, platform, the main problem was, uh, invalidation process. You know, um, we are selling things and, um, in seconds they can be sold out and we, we shouldn't be recommend them anymore. And we are, we are keeping track of this by invalidation process and relational DB writing those data to our relationship Libby was, uh, was taking two, two minutes too much time. And, um, by changing this structure to, uh, pathways, we, we, we see that benefits, uh, and it takes so, so, uh, uh, short time, actually, >>I'm so sorry if, if I can just clarify w what was taking a long time, the, the updating the actual records, so that you could actually inform a customer that it was out of stock, or was it the coding that was too complicated? >>Well, it was, it was not because, um, there are millions of products intangible, and, uh, those issues are coming huge, actually. So we are keeping track of time if it's sold out or it's, it can be sellable, uh, when, when a product, uh, detail is seen by the customers, we are recommending some other products too, but those other products must be sellable too. So the main, the main problem was that, and, uh, we are writing them in our relational DB. There is a huge rights law actually. So it was not coding. It was the amount of data actually. >>Okay. And so it was the update intensity, um, within the database and the ability of the database to actually return accurate results quickly. So what was the after, like, uh, can you talk about sort of the, the business impact? What were the, the improvements that you've experienced? >>Yeah. Maybe I can ask her that, uh, like parties said that the main reason we switched is because that, uh, there are so many products coming near in trend, and many of them are being stopped being sold out and the updates to it, it was on a relational, the vendor rights, or too much that you couldn't, uh, dur customers that fast reply because the database was getting effected by the amount of high rights. Because when you think about it, there are millions of products coming, and there are millions of rights, uh, operations on the database. So those affecting the reach performance. So, uh, it, it could occur to you that when you click on a product, you would see maybe as took out product as a recommendation, or maybe a product that is not in the website anymore. So, uh, when we switched to, uh, Couchbase that, uh, we saw that, uh, it's using less resources, which, uh, using less posts, active, alive, and it's also, uh, giving responses faster. >>The main reason, uh, we were using relational DB at first was the invalidation process like five. He said, because it was, we had a consumer that was listening to messages, uh, the innovation messages, and then, uh, and then the writing them into database. But, uh, in the part, uh, it meant that actively writing to database that for every product document that you would need to update the document, but for, uh, for, for, uh, for relational DB, it would be vetoed easier to just make this product, uh, every available, false, or true. So that's why we were sticking with relationship with DB at first. And that's why we made it that first as a relational DB, but as time increased and our product count, and our sellers increased, we realized that, uh, we should find another solution to the invalidation process, and we should, uh, switch because, uh, I mean, it CA it has come to a point at one point that it would just maybe, uh, take a solid, so much time that, uh, we were scaling our consumers at nighttime to just not affect daily users anymore. >>Uh, so that's why that's the main reason we switched. And, uh, after switching, we had in, uh, like I said, the response time and high write throughput, and also one of the reasons is also because that the, uh, the application that was with the use of Couchbase because, uh, since strangled is growing larger than our main data centers. And, uh, like we can see that every day, sometimes we deploy our, uh, apps to yet another cluster. And we, that's why we sometimes need to have backups or different data centers, and Couchbase was providing very good relations, very good solutions to this, which is. Yeah. That's why we switched actually. So we asked >>Couchbase running it's if I understand it, it's running the recommendation engine. And do you still use a traditional RDBMS for the transaction system or is Couchbase doing both? >>Yeah, okay. Uh, we are, uh, actually inter-annual, we are in discovery a team, actually, we call it tribe and in discovery, tribe, uh, relational DB, I think, uh, now, uh, very small, uh, small, uh, teams are using it. Um, it's personally just very low actually. Uh, but, uh, other other tribes, for example, orders, checkout, and maybe, uh, uh, promotions, uh, something like other teams are still using RDBMS, but in discovery team, it's very important to serve customers very fast. We need to show them the products immediately. We need to personalize them. Uh, we sh we should, uh, show them, uh, related products in the meantime, in real time, actually. So in this current Stripe, we are, um, barely using it, uh, RDBMS systems, actually. >>How hard was it to migrate from the RDBMS? Because you hear a lot of stories about how difficult that is to do. You've got to freeze the code, you bringing up new code, you've got to synchronize the functionality. How did you manage that? >>Well, to be honest with you, just ask the data science team to just send the products. Uh, at the same time, we were like, we were keeping the legacy API open that the clients were still coming there. And, um, to be honest, there were lots of legs on that, too. So even if, uh, the, the newer products came a bit later, uh, it shouldn't be seen because it was always coming late. So, uh, we had, we made a new API that is connecting to Couchbase and we wanted the data science team to start feeding it, but we asked the clients to switch it by time. I mean, we were still supporting the old one, but, uh, when we, when we asked the clients to switch to the new API, we just closed the last one. So we didn't really migrate any data to be honest. Like we, we, it was from scratch. And since it's a, it's a recommendation domain, uh, we believe it's better to, uh, add data's from scratch because in our new domains, we are storing them in documents. They are always sending a new list to us. So that's how it gets updated all the time. So since it's not a user related data, it wasn't really like a migration process. >>Is this is part of the secret sauce that you're doing. Schema lists, no schema on, right to Couchbase. And is that correct? And how are you handling it? I'm like, how are you getting that awesome write performance? >>Well, the main reason we believe is that, uh, before, when it was relational DB, like for example, loan product to one product and a second product to first product, third product, first of all, that like you were duplicating the records so that when the product gets removed, uh, from, from a product recommendation, or maybe one of, if a product is getting invisible, for any reason, it should be removed, or maybe it could be a stockout that it means it's not that for every record, you are sending your records for invalidation, but in our new system, it means that this, uh, for this content, there are 24 contents let's say, and like four of them that's finished. It's not there. It's okay. You're just replacing the whole list so that you are not duplicating the records. I mean, this is not like first product first and first, the second, and first to third, and first changes you are replicating this, this change three times, like a delete, uh, product one from three, three product, one from two, and you are deprecating the deletion record, but now we are just replacing the list. So you are doing that all of the operation in 1, 1, 1, uh, Kafka queue message. If I should be able, if I was able to, uh, tell about it. So it's a bit hard to explain it in, uh, in speech, but, uh, we have a nice graphic that's showing how we are doing it now. >>That makes sense. Okay. Thank you for that. And so, as you think about, you're modernizing your application infrastructure, where are you at today? How do you see this modernization effort going forward >>Actually, um, today, uh, we are mainly looking for, um, cross cluster replication. Uh, all our products are, uh, uh, deployed, uh, different clusters and different geographical locations. Uh, we, we always using ch um, we try to always use, um, modern products and, uh, uh, try to avoid, uh, old relational databases, especially for our discovery. Right. And, uh, my mandala is modernizing it, uh, all, uh, engineer's keeping up to date with recent technologies and, uh, our customers are happier. They are not seeing some glitches, some, uh, rates, uh, or while they're using our products. >>Okay. So maybe I could double click on that. So, cause you mentioned the impact of customers and I'm interested in your organizational impact and what it means for you internally, but, but when you talk about cross cluster replication, is that to scale, uh, is that a performance impact? Is that for availability? What's the impact of that effort? That modernization effort? >>Uh, I believe it's, it's all, uh, main reason is availability. I believe. Uh, like we can't know when a cluster can go down, we can't be sure about it, uh, in a, in a system we can, but that we should be up and running all the time. And, uh, there should be some, uh, some backups that, uh, that can switch when a cluster goes down. But also the main reason, uh, well, one of the main reasons is to be able to scale because, uh, the, the clusters that we had wasn't enough, uh, considering our user base. So, uh, let's say you want to even extend your user base, but, uh, like the cluster is being a bottleneck to you because you can't get that much users, but, uh, when you do post cluster that you have backup and you have scalability and it's, uh, considering how new considering if the machines are newer, maybe faster response times. I don't know, uh, maybe, uh, network part would know that better, but, uh, yeah, but all of them, I will leave. >>Great guys. Well, thank you so much for sharing your story, uh, uh, MRA and Fati. Uh, appreciate you guys coming on the cube. >>Thanks a lot. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you for, uh, hosting. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. And thank you for watching. Couchbase connect online on the cube, keep it right there for more great content from the event.

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Live the cube. Yes, it's live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio. Lisa Martin, with Dave Alante, we are covering UI path forward for very excited to be here, talking with customers, UI path, employees, partners, lots of great conversations going on about automation and the acceleration that we're seeing, especially in the last 18 months. We've got two guests here with me today to talk about emerging technologies, specifically continuous process discovery. Please welcome Paula Katikia VP of product management at UI path and Layla Deleage CIO and digital officer at Coca Cola. Ladies, welcome to >>The program. Thank you. It's great to be here. So let's >>Talk about public. Let's start with you. Continuous process discovery. Define that for us. What does that mean? >>So process discovery has been, um, a concept that's been around for awhile, right? It's enterprises have a bunch of processes that are deployed and people are following them. Um, the concept of discovery has existed. What we're trying to do with continuous process discovery is enable you to identify the processes, figure out how to optimize them and then automate them once they're automated, we want to monitor them and then keep doing that cycle over and over again, using technology rather than having fill in, having people fill in paperwork and then having those processes go out of, um, out of, um, status, like right away, because they're just becoming stale with continuous process discovery. They don't become stale. You're getting that real time feedback loop and you're getting the processes to work and to end continuously. >>So I wonder if I could follow up on that because I remember when you guys made the acquisition of process gold. And so as somebody who's heavily involved in product management, how did you go about, I mean, it's been, sounds like it's seamless, but it never is. Right. But how did you go about integrating and making it appear as though it's just kind of part of the platform? >>I mean, there's a lot goes into that right. Process gold was a great technology to begin with. So it wasn't a huge stretch for us to take it and integrate it and make it part of the platform. Um, typically when we acquire companies, we look for product market fit. We look for a technology fit. We look for people fit and we had that with process gold. The other thing to add there is a process discovery, um, specifically with Parsis gold and automation go hand in hand, you can't having one without the other is kind of leaving half of your solution on the table and just focusing on understanding and not focusing on implementation. And so it was very easy to take that technology and make it part of the hyper automation platform. >>Well, the reason why I asked that question is because it sort of coincides with a customer's journey where you go from sort of a individual department. And then now you're saying, I always say pave the cow path. And I kind of take a process that I know I'll just implement that even might not be the best I'm going to repeat and takes you to a new realm. And so this is, to me, this is all about how incumbent companies, a hundred plus year old companies can actually be digital disruptors as opposed to being disrupted themselves. Right? A lot of smart people running these big companies. So last time we talked, you were relatively new inside of a year. So how's the journey going. And, and how does it tie in to some of the advancements that UI path has made? Yeah, >>Absolutely. So the journey is going great. I like to work to use accelerate. So I'm here to accelerate and transform and why we have to do it is so that we don't become obsolete and we continue to be relevant for our customers, for our employees. They're important and for our community. So the are doing a lot of finished running a lot of initiatives. When you look at being relevant for the customer, that means we have to transform the way we operate and our business models. We have to generate new revenue streams now that are enabled and based on data and technology, while you do that, you have to create efficiency internally. You cannot create great experiences with customers and you work with very monolithic and very old school, traditional processes or based off working and systems. So you have to make sure that you adapt and change and transform the way you work internally to meet the customer's needs and demand and generate these new business models. >>So our starting position was automation. We have to automate at an extreme speed, but we also wanted to go really far without automation, not just fast and hit with task automation and just automate these traditional 50, 60 year old processes, but have Doobie identify what else is there? There's a wealth of opportunity when you look at an end to end process. So that's where process mining as Polak described, comes into play. And actually we started affiliating with process mining during process gold. So your question around how the integration went, we actually went through that. I think the UI pads, one key value that they have, and they should never use is listening to the customer. So the got to get her with iPads. And we said, there's more to what we can do with automation. And we implemented process mining for one end to end process, amazing results, just one country, one end to end process, amazing results. But it's because of the partnership. We know what we need to achieve, but we have to do, and they know how to help us to get the technology up and running or adapt to technology and improve the technology. So that's where we are achieving outcomes. We are generating new business model, new revenue stream, automating internally re-skilling and up-skilling our people, which is extremely important that comes along with automation that redesign exciters sorry, but that redesign a work is >>Very important in the CEO's role is very important in that as well. I wanted to talk though about something that you just said with respect to the listening piece that you have is so good at this morning in the keynote. Mary said too, you know, all that, which was standing room only, which was amazing to see, um, in this day and age, but that they wanted to hear from customers. What are we doing? Right? What are we not doing that you want to see more of? What do you want to see less of? Talk to me about the direction and advice that you, as the CIO of Coca-Cola is able to provide to flock and the team about where you I've had this going, right. It's really on a very fast cadence. >>Absolutely. So as Coca-Cola TJ, we started the journey with two iPad, three years of work. Exactly. I was on the job and the second big technology decision I made was the iPad. And since then it was fear consistently think. But during our cab meeting, Daniel said something, he said, I'm not welcoming the request. He said, we welcome. He said, no, no, sorry. I am not welcoming. I'm requesting you to give us insight. And I think that's very critical. That's what we want to hear. At the end of the day, we are technologists. We are total leaders, but the are better taught leaders with our technology partners. So we want technology partners to show us the way sometimes. And with low code, no code type of approaches. And the evolution of the technology that UI path is, has been running since the past three years is helping us remove so many barriers. >>When it comes to people, they are listening to us in terms of the roadmap and what should be implemented and what should be prioritized VR, providing with them, our roadmap, our vision on where we want to go in automation and hugged battle. We want to integrate with other ecosystem and environments that we have. They are listening to us in terms of, for the existing products, what can be improved, what can work better? And we don't need a cab actually for you iPad to listen to us. We work hand in hand with two iPad team continuously be coil, you know, eight sometimes. So, and that's what we want them to continue to do. They are great technologists, as long as they continue to listen to us, they're going to be greater technology. >>Yeah. And I'll share my perspective on this, this, this, you know, these partnerships actually make us build better products, right? We get to, this is how we stay ahead of the curve by listening to our customers, because they're the ones who are doing the implementations. They understand how our product works. We can design it, we can test it. But that's the extent to which we can go once they implement it is when we know what's working, what's not working. And how do we take that feedback and make better products. So it's a two-way street. We love hearing from them constantly. >>You have to decode what the customer is saying sometimes, right? Like Steve jobs said, yeah, if you just ask the customer what they want, you'll never build, you know, something that's game changing the world changing. And so, so you have to talk to Layla, you get the input from COVID, Coca-Cola maybe many and then other customers to figure out, okay, how can I apply this? So that actually can scale and meet the needs of many customers. Not just so, because otherwise you end up being, you know, a custom development shop, which ironically is what you guys were 20 years ago. Right? So it's kind of some art involved in the science of listening. Isn't it? >>There is definitely, I mean, most of our job as product managers is to design the product, right? It's very much art and the feedback that we get from Layla and others, it really just helps us focus on a vision. But, you know, keeping up with new technology trends, figuring out how to figuring out how to, um, bring AI into our product vision and looking beyond what we're being told and asked for and looking forward at what the next trends are going to be in technology is what helps us continue to innovate. So it's both, it's the balance of what we're hearing, but also technologies. And what's possible with what's available >>Question for you. You said three years ago, you guys brought in UI path, right after you joined the company as it's CIO, why U I path, clearly you looked at some of the other folks, you mentioned that company that they acquired, but what in your mind differentiates what they're able to deliver on the partnership side and the technology side? >>Yeah. Very important question. We have a definition for a technology partner for us, the technology partner needs to meet criteria of innovating. So how much do you invest in innovation? And Daniel says, I don't even know the number, right? So because we want them to be on the forefront. Sometimes they have to pull us and sometimes we have to pull them. The second one is very important for a company to be successful in automation or in any advanced technology, you have to build intellectual property within your enterprise. And we did not want to art source technology. We wanted to insource technology and we asked you, I pad, if they would be reeling to co-innovate, co-develop collaborate with us. They were the only ones who allowed us to build the intellectual property within my enterprise, because that's the way I'm going to innovate. And that's the way I'm going to help product leaders like Pollock to create better products. Right? So, and the third one is just building expertise. Low-code no-code the technology company needs to, you know, wait where they remove some of the barriers for me to find the skills or develop talent, how easy it is to find the talent and skills to develop this technology. Right. And what, what does the technology company do to develop skills? So these are a few criteria that we have, and then when the company takes all of those, they are in, >>I'm interested in, um, to kind of shift the conversation. If I may, in your, your role, it's not uncommon to see a CIO and a chief digital officer together, but it's quite uncommon at a, at a large firm like Coca-Cola. And, and I'm wondering, is that how the company, cause your group sees information in digital? Is that how the company's organized? You know, that you plug into somebody who has that to a role. Can you talk about, >>Yeah, absolutely. So cocoli too. Jake is within the Coca-Cola system. We are one of the leading butlers within the Coca-Cola system. The reason I merged the two roles is to be successful in the digital era. When you have the digital and it separated. If it goes a little slower, you can not be successful in digital and you cannot be successful in generating new revenue streams or new business models. So you have to orchestrate that evolution and transformation of it and the rest of the business together. And that's why I merged the two roles. We are unique as Coca-Cola >>Merged them. You say you merged those roles, like, did you come at it from the, where you digital first and then CIO first >>Digital first. Okay. Great point. I built from scratch and started with the digital strategy. And then we went into defining what roles, what skills do we need? And then we redefined, what are the improvements we need on the it side? But it was all digital product based >>Because I think, uh, I think it would be much harder for a CIO, let alone a woman CIO, no offense, but I don't think there's any offense there, but oh, she's trying to do a land grab. I could see that happening, but the digital officer title, because that's the hot title and it's the visionary. Right. And it's a lot of times it's undefined. Yeah. So that's that and that, and that that's the structure of the organization. So you roll up into it. >>Uh, so yeah, because I came into the ex-con role. I had the privilege to kind of shape it from scratch. >>Exactly. And >>Like Shankar was talking about hidden brain and all the change this morning, it was a change in terms of how are we going to approach digital? It was a change in terms of all the people who are part of the company and people who have been in technology or it before right now, the expectations are very different. You have to be product organization, you have to be outcome centric. You have to generate the revenue streams. So it's very different from the world of it. I think any it or any technology leader can do this, if they are willing to transform themselves first and then their organization, and then they can transform the rest of the company, >>Chief digital officer data is a big part of your role. You're not the chief data officer, >>The organization, that's >>Part of your, okay, so the CDL reports into, okay, and that individual sure is responsible for governance and compliance. >>Well look, the data management, data governance, the foundation, and all the database solutions, I think >>You got it right. I think this idea of creating stovepipes, it just it's, it's not as productive and it's harder to make decisions that are aligned with the organization's goals, >>Boulder. So we're going to disrupt further. Our goal now is to create platforms and then democratize the platforms. So our operating partners can learn the new skills and they can develop their own use cases on the platforms. And that way they'll go much, further and much faster in terms of the generational new revenue, streams, changing, operating models, data and technology. I call it the new operating system of any business and everybody must learn >>Well. And that's what I want to ask you about, because if you think about, uh, uh, a company and incumbent, like Coca-Cola your processes over the years have in your data, maybe they were organized around the bottlers or the distribution channel, et cetera. And that might not be the best process. So you have to take a look at that and then use process mining to say, actually, what is the best process, reinvent yourself? Okay. >>Absolutely VRD and re-engineering and reinventing in a lot of places. Process mining helped us in short order to cash cycle. Everybody, every company has ordered to cash process. We took an order to cash process, which we recently standardized, by the way we thought we did. And every process mining told us that very few times you go through the happy path. Most of the times you go out of the happy path. So gave us a lot of tangible outcomes where we improve the cycle time. And it's an interesting process because you touch the customer it's impacts your delivery and your commitments to the customer. And it makes life easier for the employees. When you improve the process, this is only one piece VR also transforming the way we are interacting with our customers using digital means and digital channel. But one thing is very valuable with us while we do all of this staying hybrid is very important. Like with everything else, they do that human touch and personal relationship with our customers and consumers is invaluable. So we going to keep that doesn't matter how digital we go or how much technology we implement. They're going to keep the customer and consumer connect the most valuable asset that we have. >>Absolutely. It is. I'll go ahead. >>I was going to say, this is the one thing that, that we think about when we're designing our products, right? It's how can process my mining help you optimize your workflows, such that you can spend more time with the customer such that you can spend more time and get back to them faster. >>Yeah, that's critical. They, I always say the employee experience is inextricably linked to the customer experience. And so what you just talked about, you talked about so much stuff that I'd love to unpack. We probably don't have time, but coming in as with a transformation mindset, one being, you mentioned, you know, leaders need to be willing to embrace that. Obviously you were, but as a CIO, >>Working with UI path, you're really helping to redefine work. And also that customer experience, to an extent, how's your iPod helped facilitate that. So because they are listening and they are willing to partner with, and I think the most importantly, they're going to be part of our outcomes. They care about our outcomes. And going back to your question, how do we select a technology partner? That was one of the critical items. Outcomes are very critical. If there's no outcome, there's no point in it are not doing technology for the sake of doing it. We are, yes. We are all excited with what technology can bring and removing barriers very important, which is a huge, another huge topic. But if you don't generate an outcome it's meaningless and you AIPAC is willing to understand the outcome we are generating. So it's less of a commercial discussion, more of a technology and outcome conversation. >>So whether it's an customer outcome or an employee outcome or a cash outcome, financial outcome, I think that's why we have been successful. And they have been on the journey with you, iPad process mining. I think they are one of the very few clients, right? Customers of UI path who are using it. And because we are very progressive organization, you AIPAC is listening to our feedback and implementing back to your earlier question, you have so many customers who do you listen, right? So when you are progressive and when you really know what you are doing, you're also pulling your iPad, a big technology company into a direction that is more meaningful. So they listen to us in terms of what to improve with process mining. And that's why we were able to achieve the outcomes. And now they are listening to us further on further improvements on process mining so that we can capitalize on further outcomes and benefits of process mining >>In order to cash is common use cases. So what, what, uh, were there any diamonds in the rough, or do you suspect there are with, >>We already realized, yes. We realized multiple tangible outcomes. We discussed this with Polak earlier today. One of them is some very interesting, I'm not able to share, but the most critical one is be focused on improving cash cycle. It's scent. You can imagine extremely full flow business, even within FMCG, right? We as Coca-Cola system, we are an extremely flow business. It's an instant consumption business. Hence your delivery and cash cycles are very different compared to other industries. So we said, we want to improving cash. We discovered that the improved, the invoice due date change, which impacts the payment terms by 20%, we improved credit limits approvals by 5% by removing unnecessary approval steps. We realized there were unnecessary approvals. These two are directly impacting our customers as well because it's waiting in somebody's queue to handle those approvals. And the customer is not getting to delay delivery because it's payment, payment and delivery go hand in hand. >>And the third one is, and I'm not able to articulate it exact outcome, but it's a very critical day, every day gain on getting cash. So it's a cash game. The next big outcome is the cycle time improvements. So we significantly improve the cycle time of the process. And this means efficiency for our employees. We are making life easier for them. The last one is again, a tangible one 30,000 hours back in terms of productivity, one process, one country, 30,000 hours. And that translates into exactly that translates into benefit for the customer. You increase customer satisfaction, you increase employee satisfaction. 'cause you remove all the non-available for it. So going back to Pollock's point around continuous discovery, that's why we love it. It's like good old lean six Sigma lean six Sigma is exactly that you continuously, you want to continuously improve the process. You don't do it once with process mining. We don't want to do it once. We want to do it continuously, but this time with automation, >>But before we go, I'm the lone male on the panel. So I have to ask. So, so you CIO seat, chief digital role, very uncommon, let alone uncommon for a woman. Big time product management person. Okay. That's cool check. Right? You've been in the industry for a while now, a celebrity on the, on the cube and elsewhere. So has the pandemic, how has the pandemic affected the whole women in tech trend? Has it slowed it down? Has it accelerated? We were talking earlier about the working moms feeling like way stressed out more than the working dads, double 30% versus 15%. Has the pandemic in your minds altered in any way, was women in tech meme? How so positive. Negative. >>So we are trying to turn the negative into a positive. It is negative. Absolutely. I think it's impacted everybody, all, all women in all industries and in all areas of operation and workforce women in technology is already a very slim, right? It's a very tiny layer within any company and out there in the society. And unfortunately the challenges that came with COVID impacted and some of them had to leave and they couldn't stick around. Right. So we are trying to turn that into positive. As a digital function, we have a big give back initiative. It's a priority of the digital team. I'll be talking about that very in, in, and our technology removes barriers. So we have to turn this into a positive, yes, COVID has impacted everybody personally and directly or indirectly. But now with technology, we can remove barriers. We have now flexible working and hybrid working models, being ramped up across all geographies and all industries and all companies, technology removes barriers. >>We can teach technology to a lot of people and our communities and they can join because we have huge skill gaps in technology that would sat is we have huge scarcity of skills in technology. And we have very few people, but we are talking about women dropping out or any type of minor to dropping out, right? So we can leverage and improve and turn it around. I hope we'll accomplish to do that. We started doing that in our company and in Turkey. And we are trying to expand that across multiple other countries with NGO partnerships, helping women to gain certain skills so that they can join the economy again from wherever they are. >>And from my point of view, I think there are two aspects to it. As Layla said, it has affected women a little bit more, but I've also seen, in some cases it has leveled the playing field a little bit because there's, you know, everybody's on zoom. The kids show up on zoom cameras for men, just as much as they do for women. So it helps shine a light on things that we would normally go through that nobody would know about. And I thought that was a really cool outcome to some degree of this. You know, my manager prom has little kids and they'd be in his background all the time, just as my little kids would be by background. And I'm like, oh wow. So you know how it feels to be the caregiver at home. And I thought, I thought that was a positive outcome of the whole being a female in technology. I liked that >>That's something that I hadn't thought about in terms of leveling the playing field like that there's in this situation, there are both positives and negatives. I like how you're seeing the playing field level a bit more and how you're at. Coca-Cola looking to, how can we turn this negative into a positive lots of opportunities there we uncovered a lot in the last, I'm going to guess 20 minutes talking about continuous process discovery, all the way to women in technology, how you're each doing that and what your perspectives are. I wish we had more time. We could keep going, but ladies, thank you for joining David. >>It's been a pleasure >>For Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at the Bellagio UI path forward for it. We'll be right back.

>>Okay, okay, we're back, you're watching the cubes, continuous coverage of HBs Green Lake announcement. One of the things that we said on the Cuban. We first saw Green Lake was let's watch the pace at which H P E delivers new servants is what's that cadence like? Because that's a real signal as to the extent that the company's leading into the cloud and today we're covering that continued expansion. We're here with Tom Black, who was the general manager of HPC storage and Omar assad, who's the storage platform lead for cloud data services at Hewlett Packard Enterprise gentlemen welcome. It's good to see you. >>Thanks Dave. Thanks for having us today. Good to see you. >>Happy to be here. Dave. >>So obviously a lot has changed globally, but when you think of things like cyber threats, ransomware, uh, the acceleration of business transformation, uh, these are new things, a lot of it is unknown a lot of it was forced upon us tom what are you guys doing to address these trends? How are you helping customers? >>Sure, thanks for the question. So if you think back to what we launched in early May, kind of the initial cloud transformation of what was our traditional storage business. Um, we really focused on one key theme. Very customer and customer driven theme that the cloud operational model has one and that customers want that operational model, whether they're operating their workload in the cloud or whether they're operating that workload in their own facility or Nicolo kind of the same thing. So that was kind of our true north and that's what we launched out of the gate in May. But we did allude in May to the fact that we would have an ongoing series of new services coming out on the uh H B Green Lake edge to cloud platform. And just really excited today to be talking about somewhat that expansion looks like um we will continue uh through this month and through the quarters ahead to really add more and more services in that vein of focusing on bringing that true cloud services model to our customer. So we're really excited today to unveil kind of, we've entered the data protection as a service market with HP Green Lake. So this is really our expansion into a very top of mind topic and set of problems and solutions or headaches and aspirins, to quote an old friend um that Ceos faces, they think about how to manage data through its life cycle in their organization. >>When I talked to see IOS during the pandemic. Not that we're out yet, but really in the throes of it and asked them about things like business resilience that they said, you know, we really had to rethink our disaster recovery strategy. It was it was sort of geared toward a fire or a hurricane and we we just didn't even imagine this type of disaster if you will. So we really needed to rethink it. So when I, I see your disaster recovery as a service and capabilities like that. Is that the Xarelto acquisition? >>Yes. Dave thanks you. So we're super happy to have the Xarelto team now as part of our family. Um, just a brilliant team, a well respected technology, uh, kind of a blue chips at our customers and partners that really appreciate what zero has to offer. Um, as we looked at the data protection as a service market, one of the hardest problems is really in that disaster recovery space, I think Omar's gonna talk a little bit more about today. Um, but sort of really does bring the leading industry, what's called continuous data protection um, capability into our green lake platform. Um, we've just recently closed the acquisition and we're working on kind of integration plan as we speak now that we can actually talk to each other post close. Um, but you'll uh, you'll continue to see, you know, some really exciting milestones each and every quarter as we march forward with certain now as part of the family. >>So we all talk about how data is, is so important. We certainly learned during the pandemic that that if you weren't a digital business, you were out of business and a digital business is a data business. So things like backup data protection as a service become increasingly critical. I know you have some capabilities there maybe you could share with us. >>Absolutely. So you know, one of the things that we noticed was as we took the storage business through its transformation and we started can work you know, with the launch of the electron 90 and the six K platform. We really really brought the cloud operational model to our customers. So one of the things that you know, feedback that was coming loud and clear to us is that as we look at the storage portfolio where we look at file block and object, which are now being transformed into a cloud operational experience, data protection, disaster recovery coming back into business after a disaster snapshot management. All of those capabilities, we still have to rely on our partner technologies in order to do that now. It's not bad that we have great partners in the data protection world, but what we're really focused on is that cloud operational model and cloud operational experience and to and as tom mentioned through the data management life cycle. So as a result of that, we talked to a lot of our customers, we talked to a bunch of partners and one of the things that was coming back was that yes, there are many data protection backup offerings on the market. But that true as a service experience that is completely integrated to the services experience of the storage that the customers is experiencing that is not there. So what we looked at was especially to the largest ecosystem, which is the VM ware ecosystems. So we're launching data protection as a service or backup as a service for our VM ware customers offered from data services, cloud console as a SAAS portal. 100% SAs service, nothing to install. No media servers, no application servers, no catalog servers, no backup targets, no patching, no expansion, no capacity planning. None of that is needed. All that's needed is sign on click. Give your V center credentials and off you go, that's it. That is it three clicks and you're in business. So currently, you know, in our, in our analysis we offer five x faster recovery from any of the competitive offerings that there there there are 3.5 better de doop ratios. But for our customers is as simple as this. VM is protected as this many dollars per gig per month. That's it. No backup target, no media server, no catalogs are nothing nothing to manage total Turkey off of the portal. So that's the cadence of services that if you promise and this is one of the first ones when it comes to data management that is coming out into the open. >>So you may have just answered this question, but I want to pose it and get you maybe just summarize it because tom was talking earlier about the customer mandate for cloud in a cloud operational model. So I want you to explain to the audience how you're making that real >>actually can I start that one should be the test was monday morning. Getting ready for this chat with you Dave they got me on console and I'm not kidding three clicks, I got back up and running off the lab VM ware instance so I'll pass it off to you the real answer. But if I could do it three clicks >>as well as a convenience of this service, even tom can be your back, you might be able to do with this. Uh again, you know, a very important question the when you, when you look at the cloud operational model as you abstracts the hardware and and take the management model up into a SAS service, it gives our customers that access to that continuous delivery access that we have. We're going to continue to make the service medal better in the cloud model and automatically customers get the value of it without even reinstalling or going through a patch cycle or an upgrade cycle. But as we get into this cloud operational model, one of the things that was missing was uh if you if you if you if you start to talk about applications, how our application workloads going to be deployed, how are they going to be protected and how are they going to be expanded? So what we did was we, we expanded our info site offerings by merging them into the data services, cloud console and we're releasing a new service called app insects. It is going to be available to our customers at the end of the month. Uh It is, nothing has to change. They don't have to install any sort of agents or or host modifications, nothing like that. If their customers of electra nimble primary boxes and they're using info site and data services, cloud console, they will automatically get app insights. What Athens sites does is it really teases apart all that data that we have been collecting within foresight and now with the acquisition of HPV cloud physics, we're merging them together and relating the operational stacked top to bottom. So discovering all the way from your application usage, network usage, storage, use it. IOP usage VM values cross, collaborating them and presenting that to a customer from an app or an outcome perspective all in the data services, cloud console. So what this does for our customers is it really really transforms not only their operational experience but also buying experience. Because if you remember in one of the earlier releases of data services cloud console we released this application called, you know, intelligent intent based provisioning in which you just describe your workload and we go ahead and we provision that app insights and info site, feed that information directly into that and cloud physics generates and results and displays those analytics back to us to your partner of record and to the H. B. So we can all come together on a common data driven discussion point with our customers to continue to make their journey better >>tom where's all the boxes, traditional storage is changing. I've actually been waiting for this day for a long, long time. We've certainly seen glimpses of it from the cloud players, but they don't have, you know, super rich portfolio storage portfolio. They're growing now, but this is a really good strong example of a company with a large storage portfolio. That's, I mean I haven't heard the word three power once today. Right. And so what that says to me, that's an indication that you're thinking like a cloud player, can you maybe talk >>to that? Sure. Yeah, we're just tremendously excited about this transformation and really the reception we've got in the market from analysts, from partners, from customers because you're right, you haven't heard us talk about a box at all today. It's really about a block service, a file on the object service, a backup and recovery service, disaster recovery service. That that's that is the the language, if you will of the business problems of our customers not, do they need to pick this widget or that widget. And how many apps can I get here and there? And which did the h a cage protection scheme be that, is that, is our job to manage underneath are true North, which is the cloud operational model. And so that's going to be really how we we've set our course and how we will uh kind of deliver products solutions offers into the market underneath that umbrella, Ultimately, um getting our customers wherever their data is Dave to be able to interact at that service level instead of at that infrastructure box >>level, you've got my attention wherever the data. So that's the north star here is this is, you know, you're not done today obviously, but you've got a vision to bring that to the cloud across clouds on prem out to the edge. That's the abstraction layer that you're gonna build, your hiding all that complexity. That's correct. And that's cloud. The definition of cloud is changing. >>Yeah, >>it's no longer started, it's no longer a remote set of services. Somewhere up in the cloud. It's expanding on prem hybrid across clouds edge >>everywhere. You're exactly right. Dave it is, cloud is more about the experience and the outcome. It gives a customer than actually where the compute or storage is. We've chosen to take a very customer an agnostic position of whether it's, you know, data in your premise, data in your cloud. We're going to help you manage that data and deliver, you know, that data to workloads and analytics, uh, wherever the, wherever the compute needs to be, where the data needs to be. Again, technologies like Xarelto giving instability and move data across clouds from facilities and clouds back and forth. So it's a really exciting new day for HP. Green Lake were just so super happy to bring these technologies out and really continue to follow on the course of doing what we said, we would do >>the new mindset starts there, I guess it's obviously knew certainly new technologies, uh, you're talking about machine intelligence is a metadata challenge. Absolutely. Big time, you know, long term that North Star that we talked about and applying that machine intelligence, all the experience that you gather data that you're gathering is, I think ultimately how customers want you to solve this problem >>in the middle of info site data services, cloud console and the instrumentation that is already shipping on our appliances, both in edge appliances and the data center appliances were collecting more than a trillion data points over the period of a quarter. Right at the end of the day. So it's harnessing that at the back end to cross relate and then using the cloud physics accusation. What we're doing is we can now simulate these things on behalf of our customers into the future timeline. So at the end of the day, it's really about listening to the customer and what outcomes that they want to achieve with their data storage is there we provide excellent persistence layers where customers can store their data safely. But at the end of the day it's customers choice, They can store their data out of the edge in compute servers, commodity servers, X 86 servers, they can have their data in the data center which they are privately owned or their data can be in a service provider or it can be in a hyper secular. The infrastructure of the persistence layer is independent from the data services. Cloud console data services. Cloud console provides our customers with a SAS based industry leading metadata rich management experience, which then allows you to draw conclusions. So services like cloud physics services like uh enforce it, provide the analytics and richness of the metadata, backup and recovery service allows us to index our customers data and add a rich metadata to that and then combine that with xylitol, which is our disaster recovery as a service offering. Going to start over here. That gives the customer a very simple slider as to where they want their protection levels to be, they want their protection to be instant or they want their protection to be lazy eight hours window. But the thing is at the end of the day, it's about choice without managing the complexities of the hardware >>underneath because programmable completely right I come in, what I'm hearing is file object blocks of your multi protocol. I got a full stack so data data reduction, my snaps might replicate whatever whatever I need it in there as a service. I can I can access latency sensitive storage if I need to or I can push it out to cheaper stores. I could push it out to the cloud, presumably I could someday I air gap it uh and it's all done as infrastructure as code and then different protection levels where I see this going. It really gets exciting is you're now a data company and you're bringing ai machine intelligence and driving data products, data services for your customers who are going to monetize that at their end of the value >>chain. That's right. That's right. And safely insecurity. Keeping in mind that was their toes technology. We can give you, you know, small second recovery points to protect against ransomware. So all of that operational elegance, all those insights and intelligence to help you build a more agile, um you know, workloads centric organization, but then to do it safely and securely against ransomware, that's kind of the storm, if you will. That's brewing. And we're just really excited to be at the eye of it. >>I'm excited to. This is uh I've been waiting for this day for a long time and we're not talking about envy, Emmy and Atomic Rights and I love that stuff by the way and I'm sure it's all under the covers, but that's not what drives business value guys. Thanks so much for coming on the Cuban. David. >>Thanks for having us. It's been great. Thank you. >>All right. We're seeing a transformation all through the stack and keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for the Cuban. Our coverage of HBs Green Lake announcements right back mm mhm

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome to theCUBEs coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Exciting conversation coming up about in vaccine cloud management. I've got two guests with me, Tim Elcott is here, the sales and delivery director of IBM services for Salesforce and Fran Thompson joins us as well, the CEO of the Health Service Executive in Ireland. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Hi, there. >> Hi. >> Good to be here. >> So we're very socially distance, Northern California, UK. Glad to have you guys here. We're going to talk about what the Health Service Executive or HSE in Ireland has done with IBM and Salesforce to facilitate vaccine management. But Fran, let's go ahead and start with you, talk to us a little bit about HSE. >> Well, the HSE provides public health and social services to everyone living in Ireland, okay. We got Acute hospitals, community services nationally. We directly employ about 80,000 people and we formed a farther about 40,000 people. And our annual budget is slightly North of 21.6 billion a year. We are the largest employer in the state and the largest organizations in the state. And, you know, we provide a huge range of services right across the whole spectrum. And we also formed other organizations who provide those services as well. So we would fund some voluntary and charity organizations and we would also buy services from the likes of say GP and other organizations as well. >> So talk to me about a year or so ago when the pandemic hit what were some of the challenges that HSE faced? And then when it came time to, we have a vaccine, we have multiple vaccines that rollout capability what were some of the challenges that you faced initially? >> So from an organizational perspective, there were huge challenges in that we were like every other health service worldwide facing an enormous pandemic that was impacting on people. And this is all about people, it's all about people's lives at the end of the day. People can talk about numbers and they can talk about costs and they can talk about other elements but at the end of the day this is about individual, people's lives, their families and their communities. And for the HSE, our challenge was really about how do we manage to protect the totality of the population in Ireland, as much as we can from the ravages of the virus. And the initial challenge we had was around contact tracing and managing that before a vaccine became available. And once the vaccine became available it was then how do we stand up a national vaccine solution that we would be able to deliver and record vaccines to the totality of the population who were getting a vaccine. >> Yeah, so there was no preexisting vaccination program of course, probably in most places you needed to get healthcare workers vaccinated ASAP and it's also needed to be a national program. So what did you do next after determining all right, we need to work with some partners to be able to build technology to facilitate equitable efficient rollout of the vaccine? >> So we did have regional vaccine systems and we do have a number of vaccine programs out there that were managing flu vaccine, Hep C vaccine, but we didn't have a national program and we needed to vaccinate people immediately. And we also wanted to make sure that vaccine program was not dependent on the HSE infrastructure, because we want to be able to vaccinate people in non HSE sites, and we wanted non HSE staff to be able to vaccinate. And we didn't want a huge pre-dependence on our existing infrastructure. So the first thing we did, we looked at a number of vendors and we chose IBM as our partner with Salesforce. And that partnership is really a strategic partnership and it's a partnership that we worked to all the bumps and all the lumps through the program together and there have been challenges but like it's still working with Tim and his team and to our team that we've overcome some of those challenges. And like, when we started off I remember the very first conversation I had with Tim he said, "Look, we need to vaccinate healthcare workers now, okay? And you've got two weeks to start and we need to configure a system, get it up and running and to be able to roll it out to the hospitals and very quickly then to all of our nursing care homes now" and that was the challenge. >> And let's bring Tim in, and this is a radically quick project from MPV to roll out in two weeks. Tim talk to us first about the IBM partnership with Salesforce and what you're building together. >> Absolutely, it's great and Fran it's interesting to hear you speaking about the running into this, 'cause from my perspective a week before we all started this we had a simple conversation called into the Health Service Executive they're talking about some vaccination program how can we help? And then within a week, we've gone from zero to having how many calls with Fran and team just to understand and with the Salesforce team to really understand how the three parties can bring the best of IBM, the best of Salesforce and the best of HSE in terms of the adaptability and what we need to get done to get those vaccinations up and running for the healthcare workers now. When Fran said to me, "We need something in two weeks." There was absolutely clarity, if you can't do it in two weeks there's the door, right? So we knew exactly the challenge and that's the kind of thing right before Christmas that we were so fortunate to really bring in the team, like everyone you think about this, everyone has probably the 14th of December was thinking of winding down, thinking of having their Christmas holidays and vacation time. And everybody from the Irish team and from the English team said, "No, we will cancel Christmas, we will cancel everything." So is it really Christmas came early and Christmas was canceled all at once. So, and the key bit here, the strategic partnership is IBM and Salesforce have been working together for years and years and years growing out a partnership. We know their products really well, we've got huge capability in that space. But actually with the new health cloud part of it the vaccine management parts are quite new to Salesforce as well only launched back in sort of the August, September time. So it's quite new. So we had to go in together as a sort of a partnership there to say, "Did you get this done?" So we had the best people from Salesforce who know the product, the best people from IBM all turning up on the 14th of December and saying, "Right, we've got to get this done by the 29th, with Christmas holidays in the way, the vacation time in the way." I think we had 36 hours of time off to eat turkey and fill ourselves before getting back to the wheel and really getting this done. And to get I think it was four acute hospitals we went into as of the 29th to start the vaccination program. So trying to do that, understanding everything is a compromise at that point. Yeah, but it has to be secure, you know this is personal data going into these systems. So you can't forget about all the aspects it's got as minimum, but minimum with those kinds of constraints as a health system. So it needs to be secure, it needs to also be that national platform going forwards as well. So basing on a great platform like Salesforce, you know you can scale out, you know you've got those options to grow in the future, but yeah, not without a lot of challenge and then working out what's now getting to know each other, but if we only talked about twice before we ever know each other pretty well now. But just trying to work out how we then structure what's going to happen every two weeks afterwards, how's that going to move forward? We're going live every two weeks and we have done that now for the last three months, so, good fun. >> So, yeah, good fun. But so much work to get done and accord a huge coordinated effort in a very short time period during a very challenging time. Talk to me a little bit about Fran but you launched this Vaccine Cloud Management in January, 2021. And to date, I think you told me 1 million people have been vaccinated so far. Talk to me about what the IBM, Salesforce solution enables you to deliver to the HSE and to the Irish citizens. >> So we have delivered a million vaccines, okay in two stages. The dose one, the dose two for most people in Ireland. And there's about 720,000 people got their dose one and the balance have got the dose two. That's about sort of just about one in five of the population that has to be vaccinated. And one of things we were very conscious of is that as an organization like that we need to take a risk based approach to this. So we need to look at the most vulnerable groups there were lots of people who were dying from this. And a lot of people were elderly groups, and people who were vulnerable with pre medical conditions. So our challenge was how do we vaccinate those people quickly and effectively and also vaccinate healthcare workers who are going to care for these people. And that's where we prioritize the work. So we have to go into 50 acute sites about 600 or so care homes, we set up a lot of what we call pop-up clinics literally a tent in a location, or we took over a sports hall or whatever we did. We rolled it out to the GP so about two and a half thousand GP sites. And all of that was being done while we were building the system. So we were building the system and designing a system on two week sprints. We have to be agile, we have to be quick, we had to make huge compromises and we know that. Though I hate to admit it everyone wants a perfect system, which will make the compromise and look into what do you need to do now to keep the program running? And how you manage that with about 3,000 users all to be set up fairly quickly or a little over half thousand users. So you have to manage all that as you're going through everything. >> I think agile is the name of the game here. Tim, talk to us about how you're delivering the agility in such a tenuous time. >> Well, we're all virtual, which is added to the mix. But the funny thing with that agility we've got a span of people across all the countries and everywhere that we can bring in to that party. And yeah, we're running what I would call a normal agile project, except normally it would take two, three months to really get that team working effectively, getting to know each other and we just not had time to do that. So there's been a core team here and we're bringing in the experts around it but really just everything is working with Fran, worked very hand in glove trying just to work out, what we need to do here, to look at the next sprint to look at the next go live, to look at the compromise. How do we compromise for two weeks? What can we live with for two weeks? What's in the backlog for now and Fran and I have many conversations. What do we need to do this week and then what's next week? And that's level of fluidity and that's in part because of the way the pandemics and the response of pandemic is mapping out. As we saw the vaccines are changing, availability is changing, the rollout plan is changing. None of us have worked through a pandemic before. So agility is the name of the game at the highest level. I think we're all now very used to being, sorry there's a problem something's changed, can we adapt the system too, you know, and normally in a sprint I'll be thinking, I've got some fixed requirements for two weeks, I'll build that and then do the next two weeks. Everything is up for grabs and we're just having to maintain quality at the pace, the responsiveness and balancing it all as an IBM team and you think. And whilst we're also doing that on a platform that it takes time to configure and build these things as well. So it's some of it is you're going to have to wait a few days. So we're sorry, you know, a few days is really the probably sometimes the maximum amount of time that can be you can defer, but as Fran and everyone in the HSE and the National Immunization Office, everyone's pragmatic about realizing we're all in this together and it's really just being one single team, one unit working out and very open and transparent about the odds that are possible. >> And when doing something... Go ahead, Fran. >> We had a phrase there like there was a pieces we just had, "Just do it now." And we did a lot of that, okay? You know, where there were things that were prioritized were in the middle of a sprint, there were changes in the program or there were changes in how the vaccination was going to be delivered. And we couldn't waste the week just wasn't available. So we have the thing just got to do it now. And Tim and the team they'll drop what they were doing you know, made the changes, we tested them fast and we pulled them in and then gave us an extra time to actually then deliver the rest of the sprint. We have to do that several occasions, several very, very late night delivers. >> And I imagine that's still going on, but to wrap here guys, an amazing work that you've done together so far with the Salesforce Vaccine Club Management rolling out across the HSE you said 1 million vaccinations delivered many hundreds of thousands in the queue. I'm sure more iterative work and sleepless nights but what you're doing for the country of Ireland is literally as Fran said in the beginning, lifesaving. Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today on the program. >> You're welcome, thank you. >> You're very welcome. Thank you. >> From Tim and Fran I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBEs coverage of IBM Think 2021. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. >>It's the cube >>With digital coverage of IBM. Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Welcome to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm lisa martin, exciting conversation coming up about vaccine cloud management. I've got two guests with me, tim Elka is here, the sales and delivery director of IBM Services for Salesforce and fred Thompson joins us as well. The C. I. O. Of the health service executive in Ireland. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. >>Either I have to be here >>so we're very socially distant northern California UK. Glad to have you guys here. We're gonna talk about what the health service executive or HST and Ireland has done with IBM and Salesforce to facilitate vaccine management. But Fran let's go ahead and start with you talk to us a little bit about HSC >>So that the HSC provides public health and social services to everyone living in Ireland. Okay. We that acute hospitals community services nationally. We directly employ about 80,000 people and we fund a further about about 40,000 people. Um and our annual budget is slightly north of 21.6 billion a year. We are the largest employer in the state of the largest organizations the state. Uh you know, we provide a huge range of services right across the whole spectrum and we also fund other organizations who provide those services as well. So we would we would fund some voluntary and charity organizations and we would also uh by services from the latest A GP and other organizations as well. >>So talk to me about a year or so ago when the pandemic hit, what were some of the challenges that HSC faced and then when it came time to we have a vaccine, we have multiple vaccines that roll out um capability. What were some of the challenges that you faced initially? >>So from a an organizational perspective, um, there are, there were huge challenges in that. We were like every other health service worldwide facing uh, an enormous pandemic that was impacting on people. And this is all about people, it's all about people's lives. At the end of the day, people can talk about numbers and they can talk about costs and they can talk about other elements at the end of the day. This is about individual people's lives, their families and their communities. And for the HFC, our challenge was really about how do we manage to protect the totality of the population in Ireland as much as we can from, from the ravages of the virus. Um, and you know, the initial challenge we had was around contact tracing and managing that before a vaccine became available and once the vaccine became available it was then how do we stand up and national vaccine solution that we would be able to deliver and record vaccine to the totality of the population who were getting back? >>Yeah. So there was no pre existing vaccination program. Of course, probably in most places, you needed to get health care workers vaccinated ASAP. And it's also needed to be a national program. So what did you do next? After determining? All right, we need to work with some partners to be able to build technology to facilitate uh equitable, efficient rollout of the vaccine. >>So we did have regional vaccine systems and we do have a number of vaccine programs out there that were that were managing flu vaccine, heP C vaccine. But we needed we did we didn't have a national program and we needed to vaccinate people immediately. Um, and we also wanted to make sure that vaccine program was not dependent on the HSC infrastructure because, you know, we want to be able to vaccinate people in non HSC sites and we wanted non HSC staff to be able to vaccination. Uh, and we didn't want a huge pre dependent on our existing infrastructure. Um, so the first thing we did, we we looked at a number of vendors. Um, and we chose IBM as our partner with Salesforce. And that partnership is really a strategic partnership and it's a partnership that we worked through all the bumps and all the lumps of the program together. Um, and you know, and and there there have been challenges, but like it's too working with him and his team and through our team that we've overcome some of those challenges. Um, and like when we started off, remember the very first conversation I had with him as legislators, we need to vaccinate healthcare workers now, okay, you've got two weeks to start, um and we need to configure a system, get it up and running and to be able to um roll it out to the hospital And two. I'm very quickly then to all of our nursing care homes. Now, that was the challenge. >>And let's bring tIM in is this is a radically quick project from MPB to roll out in two weeks to talk to us about first about the IBM partnership with Salesforce and what you're building together. >>Absolutely. And it's great and Fran. It's interesting to hear you speaking about the run into this because from my perspective, a week before we all started this, we had a simple conversation called into Health Service Executive has some talking about some vaccination program, how can we help? And then within a week we've gone from zero to having how many calls with Fran and team just to understand and with the salesforce team to really understand how the 33 parties can bring the best of IBM, the best of Salesforce and the best of HSC in terms of the adaptability and what we need to get done to get those vaccinations up and running for the health care workers. Now, you know when franz said to me, we need something in two weeks, there was absolutely clarity. If you can't do it in two weeks there's a door, right? So we knew exactly the challenge and that's the kind of thing right before christmas that we were so fortunate to really bring in the team like everyone you think about this, everyone has probably the 14th of december, I was thinking of winding down thinking of having their christmas holidays and vacation time and everybody from the irish team and from the english team said no or cancel, christmas will cancel everything. So it's really christmas came early and christmas was canceled all at once, so and the key bit here, the strategic partnership is, I'm in the sales force have been working together for years and years and years growing out a partnership, we know their products really well, we've got huge capability in that space, but actually with the new health cloud part of it, the vaccine management parts are quite new to salesforce as well, only launched back in august september time, so it's quite new, so we had to go in together as a sort of partnership there to say to just get this done. So we had the best people from salesforce, I know the product, the best people from IBM all turning up on the 14th of december and saying right, we've got to get this done By the 29th with christmas and christmas holidays in the way the vacation time in the way, I think we have 36 hours of time off to eat turkey and fill ourselves before getting back to the wheel and really getting this done and to get I think was four acute hospitals we went into as of the 29th to start the vaccination program, so trying to do that, understanding everything is a compromise at that point, but it has to be secure, you know, this, this is, this is personal data going into these systems, so you can't forget about all the aspects, it's got this minimum but minimum with those kind of constraints as a health system. So it needs to be secure, it needs to also be that national platform going forward as well. So basing on a great platform like Salesforce, you know, you can scale out, you know, you've got those options to grow in the future, but yeah, not without a lot of challenge and then working out what's now getting to know each other, but if we only talked about twice before, we have to know each other pretty well now, um, but just trying to work out how we then structure, what's going to happen every two weeks afterwards, How is that going to move forward? We're going live every two weeks and we haven't done that now for the last three months, So good fun. >>So yeah, good fun. And but so much work to get done and according huge, coordinated effort in a very short time period, during a very challenging time. Talk to me a little bit about France, but you launched this um cloud management vaccine, Cloud management in january 2021 today to thank you. Told me one million people have been vaccinated so far. Talk to me about what the IBM Salesforce solution enables you to deliver to the HSC and to the irish citizens. >>So we have delivered a million vaccines. Okay to uh to stage is uh there's a dose one of those two for most people in Ireland. Um and there's about 720,000 people have got their dose one and the balance I've got, I've got the dose too, that's about sort of just about one in five of the population. That has to be that there has to be vaccinated. And one of these were very conscious of is that, you know, an organization is that we need to take a risk-based approach to this. So we need to look at the most vulnerable groups. There were lots of people who were dying from, you know, from this and they were all the a lot of people are elderly groups and people who were who were vulnerable with uh with pre medical condition. So our challenge was how do we, how do we vaccinate those people quickly and effectively uh and also vaccinate health care workers who are going to care for these people? Uh and and that's what we're, we prioritize the work. So we have to go into 50 acute sites, about 600 or so care homes. We set up a lot of what we call pop up clinics literally attended the in a location or we took over a sports hall or whatever we did. We rolled it out to the GPS to about 2.5 1000 G. P. Site. Um and all of that was being done while we were building the system. So we were, you know, building the system and designing the system on two weeks prints. We have to be agile way too quick. We can make huge compromises and we know that okay. I mean everyone wants a perfect system which is to make the compromise and look and see what you need to do now to keep the program running and how you manage that were, you know, Uh about 3000 users all to be set up fairly quickly or a little over between 1000 users so you can manage all that as you're going through everything. >>I think agile is the name of the game here. Tim talked to us about how you're delivering the agility in such a 10uous time. >>Well, we're all virtual which is added to the mix. But the funny thing with that agility, we've got a span of people across all the countries and everywhere that we can bring to that that party and we're running a normal but I was kind of a normal agile project except normally it would take 23 months to really get that team working effectively, getting to know each other and we just not had time to that to do that. So there's been a core team here and we're bringing in the experts around it. But really just everything is working with Fran work very hand in glove, trying just to work out what we need to do here to look at the next sprint, to look at the next go Live, to look at the compromise. How do we compromise for two weeks? What can we live with for two weeks? What's in the backlog for now? And Fran and I have many conversations, what do we need to do this week and then what's next week? And that's the level of fluidity And that's in part because of the way the pandemics and the response to pandemic is mapping out as we saw the vaccines are changing availability, is changing the rollout plan is changing. None of us have worked through a pandemic before. So agility is the name of the game at the highest level. I think we're all now very used to being sorry, there's a problem. Something's changed. Can we adapt the system to you know where normally in a sprint, I'd be thinking I've got some fixed requirements for two weeks. I'll build that and then do the next two weeks, everything is up for grabs and we're just having to maintain quality at the pace, the responsiveness and balancing it all as an IBM team and you think, and whilst we're also doing that on a platform that it takes time to configure and build these things as well. So it's some of it is you're gonna have to wait a few days. So sorry, you know, in a few days is really probably sometimes the maximum amount of time that can be, you can differ. But as Fran and everyone in the HRC and the, the national immunization office, everyone's pragmatic about realizing we're all in this together and it's really just being one single team, one unit working out and very open and transparent about the, after the possible >>we're doing something, go ahead. >>And we had a phrase, there was like, those are the pieces, we just just do it now and, and we did a lot of that. Okay. Um, you know, where there were things that were prioritized, we're in the middle of a sprint. Um, there were there were changes in the program or there were changes in how, how the vaccination was going to be delivered. Um, and we couldn't wait the week. Just it wasn't available. So we have this thing is just gonna do it now and him and the team, you know, drop what they were doing, you know, made the changes, we test them fast and we put them in and and that gave us then, you know, an extra time to actually then deliver the rest of the sprint and we have to do that. Several Okay. Several very, very late night to deliver >>and I imagine that's still going on. But to wrap here guys, amazing work that you've done together so far with the Salesforce vaccine Club Management rolling out across the HSC, you said one million vaccinations delivered many hundreds of thousands in the queue. I'm sure more iterative work and sleepless nights. But what you're doing for the country of Ireland is literally as friends in the beginning. Life saving Gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me today on the program. >>You're welcome. Thank you. You're very welcome. Thank you. >>Tim and Fran. I'm lisa martin. You're watching two cubes coverage of IBM think 2021. >>Mhm >>mm.

>> Hi everyone, my name is Michael Swan and I'm the global director of business development for HPE Financial Services, and I'm really excited to have the opportunity to speak with you today. In this session, I will provide you with an overview of how we help our customers create investment capacity to help fuel their cloud in digital transformation initiatives. I will then share with you three customer use cases to talk about the types of solutions that we've implemented to help our customers move their businesses forward. Now, it wasn't that long ago that businesses were prioritizing their 2020 digital transformation projects. And executives were telling us that they thought 2020 was going to be a year where they were going to see a significant ramp in their spending on digital transformation projects. Businesses were already starting to plan to make investments in cloud and security and AI and machine learning to help improve their customer experience, help to advance employee productivity, and help them to get an overall better competitive edge. Then of course, we were all hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. And in response to the pandemic, businesses have had to think really hard about how do they enable workforce productivity when they have nearly all of their employee base working from home. They've also had to think about some of the challenges around ensuring connectivity, security, and maintaining a very high degree of customer support and customer experience. And the economic impact of COVID put a lot of pressure on companies to maintain their cash positions and preserve capital. Now Gartner's forecasted that IT spending will increase to about $3.7 trillion in 2021, which is up about a little more than 4% from last year. And investment in cloud-based IT infrastructure in particular is expected to surge to more than 27% this year. So what all this is telling us is that customers are ready to move beyond the pandemic. They're thinking about how can I take my company to the next level? Where are the investments that I need to be making to advance and grow? Now to advance and grow requires investment capacity. Investment capacity is really the lifeblood of any business, and without that, you can't invest in your digital transformation, and you can't invest in the long-term future of your business. So this is where HPE Financial Services can help. We're working with businesses to help create the investment capacity that they need to move their business ahead. And we're doing this in three ways. Firstly, we're creating financial vitality. In the last two years alone, we've injected more than $640 million back into our customers' budgets to help fuel their investments. And we provide a range of investment solutions that help our customers to increase their ability to invest and do so in a way that actually results in better financial outcomes. Secondly, we're able to manage any tech, anytime, anywhere. We are recognized by both IDC and Gartner as a global leader in asset lifecycle supporting the circular economy. And in the last two years alone, we've taken in more than eight million assets into our technology renewal centers with more than 90% of those assets being designated for reuse before recycle. And thirdly, we are your CIFO. With nearly 30 years of IT Asset economic experience in our DNA, we work with you to understand where you want to go, what you need, and to help you put an investment strategy in place to help you get there. Let's now look at some of the solutions that we are delivering to our customers. Now, many of our customers seek to defer or reduce the expense of investing in IT in order to preserve their capital, or to try to do more with their available budgets. So we offer a range of Payment Deferral programs which enable our customers to delay the upfront costs of modernizing their IT. And in response to COVID, in 2020 we introduced the Payment Relief Program which enables customers to keep those critical IT projects moving forward while deferring more than 90% of the cost into the next calendar year. We're also helping customers to create investment capacity by generating cash from assets. And we're doing this based on the value of equipment that they already own. With our Accelerated Migration offer, we're converting existing, client-owned IT into an incremental source of capital, while enabling them to continue to use that equipment for its remaining useful life. And with our Tech Buyback program, we're managing the disposition of older legacy equipment returning value back to our customers and helping them to contribute to their sustainability initiatives. Now in each of our IT investment solutions, we aim to help our customers match their payments with the use of the technology. Our Extended Deployment solution is a phased deployment program that allows our customers to acquire the critical technology that they need today upfront. But we allow them time to get the equipment stood up in place, configured and tested, up and running before they actually have to begin making any payments for that equipment. And then lastly, we help enterprises relieve capacity strain or delivery delays that might be caused by supply chain disruptions or limitations in their capital budget, ar perhaps they're just simply looking to maintain existing legacy systems that are running critical business applications. And we do this by sourcing HPE certified pre-owned equipment that can be used to help maintain existing legacy systems. Now, all of the pre-owned equipment that we make available is available with a warranty, and is also eligible for HPE support services. Now, with that, as an overview, I'd like to transition to a brief video, which highlights how we help customers create investment capacity. (bright music) HPE and HPE Financial Services are meeting customer demands across the IT life cycle, while also contributing to the circular economy. And we're doing this in three ways. First HPE designs solutions and sources components with the aim to maximize reuse before recycle, and to minimize environmental impacts. Second, HPE's GreenLake Cloud services helps customers to acquire and consume only the capacity that they need for the period of time that they need to use it, and have the flexibility to refresh technology in an environmentally friendly way. We are committed to taking back 100% of all technology that is deployed within the HPE GreenLake Services contract. And last, HPE has industry leading experience and capabilities to renew IT assets, keeping them in the circular economy longer, and thus minimizing waste. We are committed to helping each one of our customers contribute to the circular economy, and this is one of the more important reasons why customers choose to partner with HPE. So let's now look at three customer use cases to help explain how we have helped customers create the investment capacity that they needed to move their business ahead. This first example involves an agricultural company based in Turkey. Their objective was to prevent COVID from disrupting their operations. They needed to ensure that they could preserve cash while at the same time, they wanted to continue to move ahead with a critical IT modernization project. They sought creative approaches to do more with their IT budget and to keep the project moving on track. HPE Financial Services made it possible for MAY Tohum to continue modernizing their IT estate while deferring the cost of the project into the following fiscal year, by utilizing our Payment Relief program. As a result, the infrastructure transformation project went forward, they were able to preserve their cash position and most importantly, MAY was able to continue to bring its innovative seed products to market without any disruption. The next customer example involved a large bank in New Zealand. Now, it might come as a surprise to you to think about a bank seeking additional investment capacity. Well banks understand well the importance of maximizing the return on their capital, and they also need to comply with regulations requiring certain capital funding commitments. Therefore banks as a whole comprise one of our largest set of customers. Now this bank in particular sought to transform the management of IT for their business to an as-a-service model. They sought additional investment capacity, and they wanted a single approach to managing their IT infrastructure. HPE Financial Services helped the bank to generate cash from their existing assets and transition them into the new GreenLake Services contract. This solution helped ensure not only that the ongoing business operations would not be disrupted, but it also provided an additional source of capital to help fund the project, and it helped to accelerate their move to an as-a-service model. And the last example I would like to share with you involves a hospital based in Austria. Now like most healthcare facilities around the world, this hospital's operations were severely impacted by COVID in the increased demand for their services. They experienced IT system constraints that were created by increased patient workloads, and sought immediate access to additional computing power to ensure they could continue to deliver critical care to their patients. HPE Financial Services sourced 14 Gen9 C7000 Blades, pre-owned equipment to match the existing systems that they already had in place. And this enabled the hospital to ensure that they could provide uninterrupted operations and critical care to their patients. HPE Financial Services also works closely with partners, whether they be IT solution providers, system integrators, or channel partners to help them create investment capacity for their customers. So now I'd like to share a brief video with a few stories from some of our partners. >> We had a client who needed to roll out a more robust identity and access management solution to support their efforts of enabling their remote workforce. The project wasn't budgeted, but quickly moved to the top of the priority list. And we were able to structure a deal that allowed them to acquire the technology they needed in the timeframe required, while deferring payments over an extended period. >> I think what's really important for the HPE at Tech Data structure shift, it allows us to offer an enterprise class solution as a true partnership, addressing some of their requirements and needs of the enterprise market plus. >> Obviously the customer was very pleased, we were very happy, and it was a way for us to get much closer to that customer, become their trusted advisor, and set us up for the future where we can continue to add value to that customer with HPE. >> Now we do believe that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise has a very strong and competitive offering to our customers when it comes to especially asset upcycling services, and also offering certified pre-owned products on the Nordic market. >> We leveraged HPEFS to acquire millions of dollars of hardware to stock up our data center to provide instant on-demand for a virtual desktop environment for remote users for several of our manufacturing and financial clients. (light music) >> As a recap, HPE provides the solutions and services to accelerate your business transformation. With HPE GreenLake, you can deploy any workload as-a-service and achieve cloud-like speed, agility, in the as-a-service model, wherever your apps and your data reside today, whether that be in a co-location facility, or within your own data center. With HPE Pointnext Services, you gain access to more than 15,000 experts, and an ecosystem of partners to help you at every stage of your digital transformation journey. And HPE Financial Services helps you create investment capacity to drive your digital transformation initiatives. We help you overcome financial barriers to your transformation, we help you unlock the value of your entire IT estate, and we are your business and technology partner. Maintaining flexibility and creating financial capacity are key to achieving your digital transformation objectives. I encourage you to reach out to HPE Financial Services to discuss your IT investment strategy and explore ways that we can help you achieve your desired business outcomes. Included here are a few QR codes where you can learn more or even view a virtual tour of one of our technology renewal centers. Thank you again for joining me in this session. I wish you a great rest of the day, and I hope you keep well, bye.

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >>Everyone welcome back to the cubes Coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 virtual. This is the Cube virtual. I'm John for your host this year. We're not in person. We're doing remote interviews because of the pandemic. The whole events virtual over three weeks for this week would be having a lot of coverage in and out of what's going on with the news. All that stuff here happening on the Cube Our next guest is a featured segment. Brown Venkatesh, VP of Engineering at Cloudera. Welcome back to the Cube Cube Alumni. Last time you were on was 2018 when we had physical events. Great to see you, >>like good to be here. Thank you. >>S O. You know, Cloudera obviously modernized up with Horton works. That comedy has been for a while, always pioneering this abstraction layer originally with a dupe. Now, with data, all those right calls were made. Data is hot is a big part of reinvent. That's a big part of the theme, you know, machine learning ai ai edge edge edge data lakes on steroids, higher level services in the cloud. This is the focus of reinvents. The big conversations Give us an update on cloud eras. Data platform. What's that? What's new? >>Absolutely. You are really speaking of languages. Read with the whole, uh, data lake architecture that you alluded to. It's uploaded. This mission has always been about, you know, we want to manage how the world's data that what this means for our customers is being ableto aggregate data from lots of different sources into central places that we call data lakes on. Then apply lots of different types of passing to it to direct business value that would cdp with Florida data platform. What we have essentially done is take those same three core tenants around data legs multifunctional takes on data stewardship of management to add on a bunch off cloud native capabilities to it. So this was fundamentally I'm talking about things like disaggregated storage and compute by being able to now not only take advantage of H d efs, but also had a pretty deep, fundamental level club storage. But this is the form factor that's really, really good for our customers. Toe or to operate that from a TCO perspective, if you're going to manage hundreds of terabytes of data like like a lot of a lot of customers do it. The second key piece that we've done with CDP has to do with us embracing containers and communities in a big way on primer heritages around which machines and clusters and things of that nature. But in the cloud context, especially in the context, off managed community services like Amazon CKs, this Lexus spin apart traditional workloads, Sequels, park machine learning and so on. In the context of these Cuban exiles containerized environments which lets customers spin these up in seconds. They're supposed to, you know, tens of minutes on as they're passing, needs grow and shrink. They can actually scale much, much faster up and down to, you know, to make sure that they have the right cost effective footprint for their compute e >>go ahead third piece. >>But the turkey piece of all of this right is to say, along with like cloud native orchestration and cloud NATO storage is that we've embraced this notion of making sure that you actually have a robust data discovery story around it. so increasingly the data sets that you create on top off a platform like CDP. There themselves have value in other use cases that you want to make sure that these data sets are properly replicated. They're probably secure the public government. So you can go and analyze where the data set came from. Capabilities of security and provenance are increasingly more important to our customers. So with CDP, we have a really good story around that data stewardship aspect, which is increasingly important as you as you get into the cloud. And you have these sophisticated sharing scenarios. The >>you know, Clotaire has always had and Horton works. Both companies had strong technical chops. It's well document. Certainly the queues been toe all the events and covered both companies since the inception of 10 years ago. A big data. But now we're in cloud. Big data, fast data, little data, all data. This is what the cloud brings. So I want to get your thoughts on the number one focus of problem solving around cloud. I gotta migrate. Or do I move to the cloud immediately and be born there? Now we know the hyper scale is born in the cloud companies like the Dropbox in the world. They were born in the cloud and all the benefits and goodness came with that. But I'm gonna be pivoting. I'm a company at a co vid with a growth strategy. Lift and shift. Okay, that was It's over. Now that's the low hanging fruit that's use cases kind of done. Been there, done that. Is it migration or born in the cloud? Take us through your thoughts on what does the company do right now? >>E thinks it's a really good question. If you think off, you know where our customers are in their own data journey, right? So increasingly. You know, a few years ago, I would say it was about operating infrastructure. That's where their head was at, right? Increasingly, I think for them it's about deriving value from the data assets that they already have on. This typically means in a combining data from different sources the structure data, some restructure data, transactional data, non transactional, data event oriented data messaging data. They wanna bring all of that and analyze that to make sure that they can actually identify ways toe monetize it in ways that they had not thought about when they actually stored the data originally, right? So I think it's this drive towards increasing monetization of data assets that's driving the new use cases on the platform. Traditionally, it used to be about, you know, sequel analysts who are, if you are like a data scientist using a party's park. So it was sort of this one function that you would focus on with the data. But increasingly, we're seeing these air about, you know, these air collaborative use cases where you wanna have a little bit of sequel, a little bit of machine learning, a little bit off, you know, potentially real time streaming or even things like Apache fling that you're gonna use to actually analyze the data eso when this kind of an environment. But we see that the data that's being generated on Prem is extremely relevant to the use case, but the speed at which they want to deploy the use case. They really want to make sure that they can take advantage of the clouds, agility and infinite capacity to go do that. So it's it's really the answer is it's complicated. It's not so much about you know I'm gonna move my data platform that I used to run the old way from here to there. But it's about I got this use case and I got to stand this up in six weeks, right in the middle of the pandemic on how do I go do that on the data that has to come from my existing line of business systems. I'm not gonna move those over, but I want to make sure that I can analyze the data from their in some cohesive Does that make sense? >>Totally makes sense. And I think just to kind of bring that back for the folks watching. And I remember when CDP was launching the thes data platforms, it really was to replace the data warehouse is the old antiquated way of doing things. But it was interesting. It wasn't just about competing at that old category. It was a new category. So, yeah, you had to have some tooling some sequel, you know, to wrangle data and have some prefabricated, you know, data fenced out somewhere in some warehouse. But the value was the new use cases of data where you never know. You don't know where it's going to come until it comes right, because if you make it addressable, that was the idea of the data platform and data Lakes and then having higher level services. So s so to me. That's, I think, one distinction kind of new category coexisting and disrupting an old category data warehousing. Always bought into that. You know, there's some technical things spark Do all these elements on mechanisms underneath. That's just evolution. But income in incomes cloud on. I want to get your thoughts on this because one of the things that's coming out of all my interviews is speed, speed, speed, deploying high, high, large scale at very large speed. This is the modern application thinking okay to make that work, you gotta have the data fabric underneath. This has always been kind of the dream scenario, So it's kind of playing out. So one Do you believe in that? And to what is the relationship between Cloudera and AWS? Because I think that kind of interestingly points to this one piece. >>Absolutely. So I think that yeah, from my perspective, this is what we call the shared data experience that's central to see PP like the idea is that, you know, data that is generated by the business in one use case is relevant and valid in another use case that is central to how we see companies leveraging data or the second order monetization that they're after, Right? So I think this is where getting out off a traditional data warehouse like data side of context, being able to analyze all of the data that you have, I think is really, really important for many of our customers. For example, many of them increasingly hold what they call this like data hackathons right where they're looking at can be answered. This new question from all the data that we have that is, that is a type of use case that's really hard to enable unless you have a very cohesive, very homogeneous view off all of your data. When it comes to the cloud partners, right, Increasingly, we see that the cloud native services, especially for the core storage, compute and security services are extremely robust that they give us, you know, the scale and that's really truly unparalled in terms of how much data we can address, how quickly we can actually get access to compute on demand when we need it. And we can do all of this with, like, a very, very mature security and governance fabric that you can fit into. So we see that, you know, technologies like s three, for example, have come a long way on along the journey with Amazon on this over the last 78 years. But we both learned how to operate our work clothes. When you're running a terabytes scale, right, you really have to pay attention to matters like scale out and consistency and parallelism and all of these things. These matters significantly right? And it's taken a certain maturity curve that you have to go through to get there. The last part of that is that because the TCO is so optimized with the customer to operate this without any ops on their side, they could just start consuming data, even if it's a terabyte of data. So this means that now we have to have the smarts in the processing engines to think about things like cashing, for example very, very differently because the way you cash data that Zinn hedge defense is very different from how you would do that in the context of his three are similarly, the way you think about consistency and metadata is very, very different at that layer. But we made sure that we can abstract these differences out at the platform layer so that as an as it is an application consumer, you really get the same experience, whether you're running these analytics on clam or whether you're running them in the cloud. And that's really central to how I see this space evolving is that we want to meet the customer where they are, rather than forcing them to change the way they work because off the platform that they're simple. >>So could you take them in to explain some of the integrations with AWS and some customer examples? Because, um, you know, first of all, cost is a big concern on everyone's mind because, you know, it's still lower costs and higher value with the cloud anyway. But it could get away from you. So you know, you're constantly petabytes of scale. There's a lot of data moving around. That's one thing to integration with higher level services. Can you give where does explain how Claudia integration with Amazon? What's the relation of customer wants to know. Hey, you guys, you know, partnering, explain the partnership. And what does it mean for me? >>Absolutely. So the way we look at the partnership hit that one person and ghetto. It's really a four layer cake because the lowest layer is the core infrastructure services. We talked about storage and computing on security, and I am so on and so forth. So that layer is a very robust integration that goes back a few years. The next layer up from that has to do with increasingly, you know, as our customers use analytic experiences from Florida on, they want to combine that with data that's actually in the AWS compute experiences like the red Ship, for example. That's what the analytics layer uploaded the data warehouse offering and how that interrupts would be other services in Amazon that could be relevant. This is common file formats that open source well form it really help us in this context to make sure that they have a very strong level of interest at the analytics there. The third layer up from that has to do with consumption. Like if you're gonna bring an analyst on board. You want to make sure that all of their sequel, like analyst experiences, notebooks, things of that nature that's really strong. And club out of the third layer on the highest layer is really around. Data sharing. That's as aws new and technologies like that become more prevalent. Now. Customers want to make sure that they can have these data states that they have in the different clouds, actually in a robbery. So we provide ways for them, toe browse and search data, regardless of whether that data is on AWS or on traffic. And so that's how the fourth layer in the stack, the vertical slice running through all of these, that we have a really strong business relationship with them both on the on the on the commercial market side as well as in AWS marketplace. Right? So we can actually by having cdp be a part of it of the US marketplace. This means that if you have an enterprise agreement with with Amazon, you can actually pay for CDP toe the credit sexuality purchased. This is a very, very tight relationship that's designed again for these large scale speeds and feeds. Can the customer >>so just to get this right. So if I love the four layer cake icings the success of CDP love that birthday candles can be on top to when you're successful. But you're saying that you're going to mark with Amazon two ways marketplace listing and then also jointly with their enterprise field programs. That right? You say because they have this program you can bundle into the blanket pos or Pio processes That right can explain that again. >>S so if you think this'll states, if you're talking about are significant. So we want to make sure that, you know, we're really aligned with them in terms off our cloud migration strategy in terms of how the customer actually execute to what is a fairly you know, it's a complex deployment to deploy a large multiple functions did and existed takes time, right, So we're gonna make sure that we navigate this together jointly with the U. S. To make sure that from a best practices standpoint, for example, were very well aligned from a cost standpoint, you know what we're telling the customer architecturally is very rather nine. That's that's where I think really the heart of the engineering relationship between the two companies without. >>So if you want Cloudera on Amazon, you just go in. You can click to buy. Or if you got to deal with Amazon in terms of global marketplace deal, which they have been rolling out, I could buy there too, Right? All right, well, run. Thanks for the update and insight. Um, love the four layer cake love gets. See the modernization of the data platform from Cloudera. And congratulations on all the hard work you guys been doing with AWS. >>Thank you so much. Appreciate. >>Okay, good to see you. Okay, I'm John for your hearing. The Cube for Cube virtual for eight of us. Reinvent 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching.