Farbod Abolhassani, University of Toronto | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 – Virtual
>>from around the globe. >>It's the Cube with coverage >>of Coop con and cloud, Native con Europe 2020 Virtual brought to you by Red Hat, The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. I'm stew minimum. And this is the Cube's coverage of cube con cloud, native con Europe 2020 of course, happening virtual this year. We always love when we get to talk to the practitioners in this community. So much happening in the developer space and really excited to have on the program first time guest in a very timely topic, we welcome our bod. Hassani, Who is the back and lead for house? My flattening, which is a joint research project. It related to code 19 associated with the University of Toronto. About thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. >>All right, so maybe explain how is my flattening? You know, the term flattening the curve is something that I think everyone around the globe is familiar with. Now, um, you know, Canada, you've got some great initiatives going. So help us understand how you got involved in this in what? What is the project? Sure, So I'll >>take a stock to March, which now feels like years ago. Um, back in March, way could look across in Europe, and we saw that. You know, I feel we're being overwhelmed. This new Cobra thing was happening, and there seems to be nothing happening here despite the fact that we know what was going on in Europe. So this whole collaboration started. It's really the brainchild of Dr Ben. Fine. Who's the radiologist that actually and partners on the idea was, Why don't we put all the data that is related to co bid, uh, for the province of Ontario, where I'm from in one place, right. So for the data mining people, like a lot of people on the on the program here and for the data minded people of Ontario to be able to have the information they need to make targeted both of the general public on that policy makers to really empower them with the right tools. We know the data was siloed in health care, and we know, you know, when this whole thing started, everything was on a website, you would get a daily update, but it wasn't something that you could analyze. Something you couldn't use. Really? It was unusable. How everything kind of started it. What if we did something about that? What if we brought all the data in one place? What if we visualize it and put all the resources in place that was released? How is my fattening got a Which is this initiative that I got involved with back in March and what we've been doing is building a number of dashboards based on Kobe data that are close to real time as possible. Doing a number of analyses. Um, the answer, your specific questions and doing deep dives into specific question. We have a team of scientific experts where our leadership, um you know Dr Ben Fine. I mentioned earlier. There's Dr Laura Rosello, the epidemiologists out of Ah, Perceptron. Oh, and then we have a Dr Alley that he's Austin Oy. Who the data science lead over it. Quick. Also, we got this kind of three perfect or the organization of the right talent required, and we've been trying Yeah, and whatever way we can by making the data transparent, >>Yeah, there's been a lot of initiatives, obviously that have had to accelerate really fast during this time it bring us inside a little bit. How long did it take to spend the site up? How do you make sure you're getting good data in Who decides? You know which visualizations love to hear a little bit about? You know how that has matured over the months that you've had project out there >>for sure. So when we started what people were doing out on Twitter, really, where there's a lot of this activity was happening was people were grabbing expect sheets and typing out every day what was happening. And I mean, coming from I'm not by any means a technical developer. That's not what I specialize in, but having some development dot com, and it makes sense that things could be done so much better. So we started to build data pipelines. Starting in March. We had a couple of government sources that were public. It was basically scrapping the government website and recording that in a database. Um, and then we start to visualize that we're using, you know, whatever we could that we started with Pablo just because we had a few. We're trying to build a community, right? So a community people want help and do this. But we have some tableau experts on our team and our community and, you know, the way we went. So we had the database. We started to connect with tableau and visualize it. Do you know, besides into and also that and then the project has matured from that web stopper ever since, with more complex data, pipeline building and data from different sources and visualizing them in different ways and expanding our dash boarding and expanding our now >>well in the cube con show that we're here at is so much about community. Obviously, open source is a major driver of what's going on there. So it sounded like that was that was a big piece of what you're working on. Help us bring inside out of that community build. I'd love to hear if there's any projects and tools you mentioned tableau for visualization, but anything from open source also that you're using. >>So actually, I I've never been involved in open source project before That this was kind of my first attempt, if you will, on we started, uh, on get hub quite early on. Actually, one of the partners I got involved in re shots was was Red hat off course. They're known for doing open source and for selling at it, and we have some amazing help from them into how we can organize community. Um, and we started to move the community over from getting up to get lab. You know, we started to the way we collaborate in slack. Ah, lot of times. And there's a lot of silos that we started to break those down and move them into get lab. And all conversations were happening in public that would beam or more closer to an open source approach. And honestly, a lot of people that are involved are our students, grass students who want to help our people in the community that want to help people from all kind of different backgrounds. I think we're really bringing in open source is not not a known concept in a lot of these clinical scientific communities, right? It's a lot more developer oriented, and I think it's been it's been learning opportunity for everyone involved. Uh, you know, something that may seem kind of default or basic have been a big learning opportunity for everyone of, you know, issues shocking and labeling and using comments and I'll going back into our own old ways of like, emailing people are people. Um, they had been digital art to it, and we'll get a lot of the big one. Um, we went from having this kind of monolithic container rising it and using Kubernetes, of course, were developed with the help of Red Hat. We're able to move everything over to their open shift dedicated platform, and that was that allowed us to do is really do a lot of do things a lot better and do things in a more mature way. Um, that's that's quite a bit of information, but that's kind of high level. What it? >>Well, no, it's great. We One of the things we've been poking out for the last few years is you know, in the early days you talk about kubernetes. It was Oh, I need things at a scale on And, you know, while I'm sure that the amount of data and scale is important, speed was a major major piece of what you need to be involved in and you'll be able to rally and James So can you talk a little bit more. Just open shift. What did that bring to the environment? Any aspects related to the data that red hat help you with. >>So a few things there. The one thing that open shift I think really helped us with was really mean and how to help us with generally was establishing a proper see I CD pipeline. Right. So now we we use git lab itself. We have get lab runners that everyone, basically all developers involved have their own branches when they push code to get auto. We like to their branch. It just made everything a lot easier and a lot faster to be able to push things quickly without worrying about everything breaking That was definitely a big plus. Um, the other thing that we're doing with, uh that is using containers. Actually, we've been working on this open data hub, which is, you know, working on another great open source project which is again built on kubernetes and trying to break down some of the barriers when it comes to sharing data in the healthcare system. Um, we're using that and we, with the help of red, how we're able to deploy that to be able to collaborate between hospitals, share data securely. You do security analytics and try to break down some of these silos that I've gone up due to fears over security and find the so That's another great example open source helping us kind of pushing forward. >>Well, that that's I'm glad you brought that up The open data hub, that collaboration with other places when you have data being able to share that, you know, has to be important talk. This was a collaboration to start with, you know, what's the value of being able to work with other groups and to share your data beyond beyond just the community that's working on it. >>So if you think about what's happening right now in a lot of hospitals in Canada, and I mean it's the same in the US is everyone is in this re opening stage. We shut down the economy. We should down a lot of elective surgeries and a lot of procedures. I know hospitals are trying to reopen right so and trying to figure out how to go back to their old capacity, and in that they're all trying to solve the same problem in different ways. So everyone is in their silo trying to tackle the same problems in a way. So what we're trying to do is basically get everyone together and collaborate on this open, open source environments, right? And what this open data allows us to do in to some degree alleviate some of the fears over sharing data so that we're not all doing the same thing in parallel are not talking to each other. We're able to share code, share data, get each other's opinions and, you know, use your resources in the healthcare system or official the drill, you know, all trying to address the same goal here. >>So imagine if you've had a lot of learnings from this project that you've done. Have you given any thought to? You know, once you get past that kind of the immediate hurdle of covert 19 you know what? Will this technology be able to help you going forward? You know, what do you see? Kind of post dynamic, if you will. >>I think the last piece I touched on, there is a big thing that I'm really hoping we'll be able to push forward past the pandemic. I think what? What the pandemic has shown us is the need for more transparency and more collaboration and being able to be more agile in response to things faster. And that's know how they're operating. And I think we know that now we can see that. I'm hoping that can be used as an opportunity to be able to bring people together to collaborate on projects like, How's my funding outside of this, right? We're not Not only the next pandemic. Hopefully I never come. Um but but for other, bigger problem that we face every day, collaboration can only help things, not tender thing. I'm hoping that's one big side effect that comes out of this. And I think the data transparency thing is is another big one that I'm hoping can improve outside of the situation. >>Yeah, I I wonder if I can ask you just a personal question. We've heard certain organizations say that, you know, years of planning have been executed in months. When I think about all the technologies that you had thrown at you, all the new things you learned often that something that would have taken years. But you didn't month. So how do you work through that? You know, there's only 24 hours in any day, and we do need some sleep. So what was important from your standpoint? What partners into tools helped, you know, and And the team, you know, take advantage of all of these new technologies. >>Yeah, honestly, I think that the team is really, really important. We've had an amazing set of people that are quite diverse and then usually would, quite honestly, never be seen in the same room together just because of all the different backgrounds that are there. Um, so that was a big driver. I think everyone was motivated to get things done. What happens when we first launched the site? We, you know, put it together. Basic feedback mechanism. Where we where we could hear from the public on. We've got an outpouring of support, people saying that they found that information really useful. And I think that pushed everyone to work harder and ah, and kind of reinforces our belief that this is what we're doing is helpful on, is making a difference in someone's life. And I think everyone that helped everyone work harder in terms of some of the tools that we use. Yeah, I totally agree. I think there was a 1,000,000 things that we all learned. Um, and it definitely wasn't amazing. Growing opportunity, I think, for the whole group. Um, I I don't know if there's a There's any wisdom I can impart. They're more than I think we were just being pushed by the need and being driven by the support that we're getting. Okay, >>well, you know, when there's a necessity to get things done, it's great to see the team execute the last question I have for you. You've got all this data. You've got visualizations. You've been going through a lot of things any any interesting learnings that you had or something that you were. You able to visualize things in a certain way in the community, reacted anything that you've learned along the way. That may be surprised you. >>That's a really interesting question there. I think the biggest, the biggest learning opportunity or surprise for me was what? How much people are willing to help if you just write, um, a lot of people involved. I mean, this is a huge group of volunteers who are dedicating their time to this because they believe in it on because they think they're doing the right thing and they're doing it for a bigger cause. It sounds very cheesy. Um, but I think that was wonderful to me to see that we can bring together such diverse people to dedicate their time for freedom to do something for the public. >>Yeah, well, and along that note, I I see on the website there is a get involved. But so is there anything you know, skill set or people that you're looking for, uh, further to help the team >>100%. So I think when I every time we do a presentation of any thought really got for anyone who's watching to just go on our site and get involved, there's a 1,000,000 different things that you can get involved with. If you're a developer, we can always use help. If you're a data, this person, we can always use help If you're a designer, honestly, there were a community driven organization. Uhm and we can always use more people in that community. That's that's the unique thing about the organization. 100%. Please do to house my finding, Dr and you get involved in get Lab. >>Well, so far, but thank you so much for sharing. We definitely encourage the unity get involved. It's projects like this that are so critically important. Especially right now during the pandemic. Thanks so much for joining. And thank you for all the work the team did. >>Thank you for having me. >>Alright. And stay tuned for more coverage from Cube Con Cloud native on 2020 in Europe Virtual Edition. I'm Stew Minimum. And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
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So much happening in the developer space and really excited to have on the program you know, Canada, you've got some great initiatives going. and we know, you know, when this whole thing started, everything was on a website, you would get a daily update, You know how that has matured over the months that you've had project But we have some tableau experts on our team and our community and, you know, So it sounded like that was that was a big piece of what you're working on. Uh, you know, speed was a major major piece of what you need to be involved in and you'll be able we've been working on this open data hub, which is, you know, working on another great open source project This was a collaboration to start with, you know, what's the value of being able to work with the drill, you know, all trying to address the same goal here. Will this technology be able to help you going forward? And I think we know that now we can see that. you know, and And the team, you know, take advantage of all of these new technologies. I think there was a 1,000,000 things that we all learned. any any interesting learnings that you had or something that How much people are willing to help if you just write, But so is there anything you know, skill set or people that you're looking for, Please do to house my finding, Dr and you get involved in get And thank you for all the work the team did. And thank you for watching the Cube.
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Alex Hanna, The DAIR Institute | WiDS 2022
(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science, 2022. I'm Lisa Martin, excited to be coming to you live from Stanford University at the Ariaga alumni center. I'm pleased to welcome fresh keynote stage Alex Hanna the director of research at the dare Institute. Alex, it's great to have you on the program. >> Yeah, lovely to be here. >> Talk to me a little bit about yourself. I know your background is in sociology. We were talking before we went live about your hobbies and roller derby, which I love. >> Yes. >> But talk to me a little bit about your background and what the DAIR Institute this is, distributed AI research Institute, what it actually is doing. >> Sure, absolutely. So happy to be here talking to the women in data science community. So my background's in sociology, but also in computer science and machine learning. So my dissertation work was actually focusing on developing some machine learning and natural language processing tools for analyzing protest event data and generating that and applying it to pertinent questions within social movement scholarship. After that, I was a faculty at University of Toronto and then research scientist at Google on the ethical AI team where I met Dr. Timnit Gebru who is the founder of DAIR. And so, DAIR is a nonprofit research Institute oriented on around independent community based AI work, focused really on, the kind of, lots of discussions around AI are done by big companies or companies focus on solutions that are very much oriented around collecting as much data as they can. Not really knowing if it's going to be for community benefit. At DAIR, we want to flip that, we want to really want to prioritize what that would mean if communities had input into data driven technologies what it would mean for those communities and how we can help there. >> Double click and just some of your research, where do your passions lie? >> So I'm a sociologist and a lot of that being, I think one of the big insights of sociology is to really highlight at how society can be more just, how we can interrogate inequality and understanding how to make those distances between people who are underserved and over served who already have quite a lot, how we can reduce the disparities. So finding out where that lies, especially in technology that's really what I'm passionate about. So it's not just technology, which I think can be helpful but it's really understanding what it means to reduce those gaps and make the world more just. >> And that's so important. I mean, as more and more data is generated, exponentially growing, so are some of the biases and the challenges that that causes. You just gave your tech vision talk which I had a chance to see most of it. And you were talking about something that's very interesting. That is the biases in facial recognition software. Maybe on a little bit about what you talked about and why that is such a challenge. And also what are some of the steps being made in the right direction where that's concerned? >> Yeah. So there's the work I was talking about in the talk was highlighting, not work I've done, but the work by doctors (indistinct) and (indistinct) focusing on the distance that exists and the biases that exist in facial recognition as a technical system. The fact remains also that facial recognition is used and is disproportionately deployed on marginalized population. So in the U.S, that means black and brown communities. That's where facial recognition is used disproportionately. And we also see this in refugee context where refugees will be leaving the country. And those facial recognition software will be used in those contexts and surveilling them. So these are people already in a really precarious place. And so, some of the movements there have been to debias some of the facial recognition tools. I actually don't think that's far enough. I'm fundamentally against facial recognition. I think that it shouldn't be used as a technology because it is used so pervasively in surveillance and policing. And if we're going to approach that we really need to think, rethink our models of security models of immigration and whatnot. >> Right, it's such an important topic to discuss because I think it needs more awareness about some of the the biases, but also some to your point about some of those vulnerable communities that are really potentially being harmed by technologies like that. We have to be, there's a fine line. Or maybe it's not so fine. >> I don't think it's that fine. So like, I think it's used, in an incredibly harsh way. And for instance there's research that's being done in which, so I'm a transgender woman and there's a research being done by researchers who collected data sets that people had on YouTube documenting their transitions. And already there was a researcher collecting those data and saying, well, we could have terrorists or something take hormones and cross borders. And you talk to any trans person, you're like, well, that's not how it works, first off. Second off, it's already viewing trans people and a trans body as kind of a mode of deception. And so that's, whereas researchers in this space were collecting those data and saying that well, we should collect these data to help make these facial recognitions more fair. But that's not fair if it's going to be used on a population that's already intensely surveilled and held in suspicion. >> Right. That's, the question of fairness is huge, absolutely. Were you always interested in tech, you talked about your background in sociology. Was it something that you always, were you a stem kid from the time you were little? Talk to me about your background and how you got to where you are now? >> Yeah. I've been using computers since I was four. I've been using, I was taking a part, my parents' gateway computer. yeah, when I was 10. Going to computer shows, slapping hard drives into things, seeing how much we could upgrade computer on our own and ruining more than in one computer, to my parents chagrin but I've always been that. I went to undergrad in triple major to computer science, math and sociology, and originally just in computer science and then added the other two where I got interested in things and understanding that, was really interested in this section of tech and society. And I think the more and more I sat within the field and went and did my graduate work in sociology and other social sciences really found that there was a place to interrogate those, that intersection of the two. >> Exactly. What are some of the things that excite you now about where technology is going? What are some of the positives that you see? >> I talk so much about the negatives. It's really hard to, I mean, there's I think, some of the things that I think that are positive are really the community driven initiatives that are saying, well, what can we do to remake this in such a way that is going to more be more positive for our community? And so seeing projects like, that try to do community control over certain kinds of AI models or really try to tie together different kinds of fields. I mean, that's exciting. And I think right now we're seeing a lot of people that are super politically and justice literate and they how to work and they know what's behind all these data driven technologies and they can really try to flip the script and try to understand what would it mean to kind of turn this into something that empowers us instead of being something that is really becoming centralized in a few companies >> Right. We need to be empowered with that for sure. How did you get involved with WIS? >> So Margo, one of the co-directors, we sit on a board together, the human rights data analysis group and I've been a huge fan of HR dag for a really long time because HR dag is probably one of the first projects I've seen that's really focused on using data for accountability for justice. Their methodology has been, called on to hold perpetrators of genocide to accounts to hold state violence, perpetrators to account. And I always thought that was really admirable. And so being on their board is sort of, kind of a dream. Not that they're actually coming to me for advice. So I met Margo and she said, come on down and let's do a thing for WIS and I happily obliged >> Is this your first Wis? >> This is my very first Wis. >> Oh, excellent. >> Yeah. >> What's your interpretation so far? >> I'm having a great time. I'm learning a lot meeting a lot of great people and I think it's great to bring folks from all levels here. Not only, people who are a super senior which they're not going to get the most out of it it's going to be the high school students the undergrads, grad students, folks who, and you're never too old to be mentored, so, fighting your own mentors too. >> You know, it's so great to see the young faces here and the mature faces as well. But one of the things that I was, I caught in the panel this morning was the the talk about mentors versus sponsors. And that's actually, I didn't know the difference until a few years ago in another women in tech event. And I thought it was such great advice for those panelists to be talking to the audience, talking about the importance of mentors, but also the difference between a mentor and sponsor. Who are some of your mentors? >> Yeah, I mean, great question. It's going to sound cheesy, but my boss (indistinct) I mean, she's been a huge mentor for me and with her and another mentor (indistinct) Mitchell, I wouldn't have been a research scientist. I was the first social scientist on the research scientist ladder at Google before I left and if it wasn't for their, they did sponsor but then they all also mentored me greatly. My PhD advisor, (indistinct) huge mentor by, and I mean, lots of primarily and then peer mentors, people that are kind of at the same stage as me academically but also in professionally, but are mentors. So folks like Anna Lauren Hoffman, who's at the UDub, she's a great inspiration in collaborating, co-conspirator, so yeah. >> Co-conspirator, I like that. I'm sure you have quite a few mentees as well. Talk to me a little bit about that and what excites you about being a mentor. >> Yeah. I have a lot of mentees either informally or formally. And I sought that out purposefully. I think one of the speakers this morning on the panel was saying, if you can mentor do it. And that's what I did and sought out that, I mean, it excites me because folks, I don't have all the answers, no one person does. You only get to those places, if you have a large community. And I think being smart is often something that people think comes like, there's kind of like a smart gene or whatever but like there probably is, like I'm not a biologist or a cognitive, anything, but what really takes cultivation is being kind and really advocating for other people and building solidarity. And so that's what mentorship really means to me is building that solidarity and really trying to lift other people up. I mean, I'm only here and where I'm at in my career, because many people were mentors and sponsors to me and that's only right to pay that forward. >> I love that, paying that forward. That's so true. There's nothing like a good community, right? I mean, there's so much opportunity that that ground swell just generates, which is what I love. We are, tomorrow is international women's day. And if we look at the numbers, women are 50% of the workforce, but only less than a quarter in stem positions. What's your advice and recommendation for those young girls who might be intimidated or might be being told even to this day, no, you can't do physics. You can't do computer science. What can you tell them? >> Yeah, I mean, so individual solutions to that are putting a bandaid on a very big wound. And I mean I think, finding other people in a working to change it, I mean, I think building structures of solidarity and care are really the only way we'll get out of that. >> I agree. Well, Alex, it's been great to have you on the program. Thank you for coming and sharing what you're doing at DAIR. The intersection of sociology and technology was fascinating and your roller derby, we'll have to talk well about that. >> For sure. >> Excellent. >> Thanks for joining me. >> Yeah, thank you Lisa. >> For Alex Hanna, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage live, of women in data science worldwide conference, 2022. Stick around, my next guest is coming right up. (upbeat music)
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to be coming to you live Talk to me a little bit about yourself. But talk to me a little and applying it to pertinent questions and a lot of that being, and the challenges that that causes. and the biases that exist but also some to your point it's going to be used Talk to me about your background And I think the more and What are some of the and they how to work and they know what's We need to be empowered and I've been a huge fan of and I think it's great to bring I caught in the panel this morning people that are kind of at the and what excites you about being a mentor. and that's only right to pay that forward. even to this day, no, and care are really the only to have you on the program. of women in data science
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Madhu Matta, Lenovo & Dr. Daniel Gruner, SciNet | Lenovo Transform 2018
>> Live from New York City it's theCube. Covering Lenovo Transform 2.0. Brought to you by Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of Lenovo Transform, I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Madhu Matta; He is the VP and GM High Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence at Lenovo and Dr. Daniel Gruner the CTO of SciNet at University of Toronto. Thanks so much for coming on the show gentlemen. >> Thank you for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> So, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about the Lenovo mission in this area to use the power of supercomputing to help solve some of society's most pressing challenges; and that is climate change, and curing cancer. Can you talk a little bit, tell our viewers a little bit about what you do and how you see your mission. >> Yeah so, our tagline is basically, Solving humanity's greatest challenges. We're also now the number one supercomputer provider in the world as measured by the rankings of the top 500 and that comes with a lot of responsibility. One, we take that responsibility very seriously, but more importantly, we work with some of the largest research institutions, universities all over the world as they do research, and it's amazing research. Whether it's particle physics, like you saw this morning, whether it's cancer research, whether it's climate modeling. I mean, we are sitting here in New York City and our headquarters is in Raleigh, right in the path of Hurricane Florence, so the ability to predict the next anomaly, the ability to predict the next hurricane is absolutely critical to get early warning signs and a lot of survival depends on that. So we work with these institutions jointly to develop custom solutions to ensure that all this research one it's powered and second to works seamlessly, and all their researchers have access to this infrastructure twenty-four seven. >> So Danny, tell us a little bit about SciNet, too. Tell us what you do, and then I want to hear how you work together. >> And, no relation with Skynet, I've been assured? Right? >> No. Not at all. It is also no relationship with another network that's called the same, but, it doesn't matter. SciNet is an organization that's basically the University of Toronto and the associated research hospitals, and we happen to run Canada's largest supercomputer. We're one of a number of computer sites around Canada that are tasked with providing resources and support, support is the most important, to academia in Canada. So, all academics, from all the different universities, in the country, they come and use our systems. From the University of Toronto, they can also go and use the other systems, it doesn't matter. Our mission is, as I said, we provide a system or a number of systems, we run them, but we really are about helping the researchers do their research. We're all scientists. All the guys that work with me, we're all scientists initially. We turned to computers because that was the way we do the research. You can not do astrophysics other than computationally, observationally and computationally, but nothing else. Climate science is the same story, you have so much data and so much modeling to do that you need a very large computer and, of course, very good algorithms and very careful physics modeling for an extremely complex system, but ultimately it needs a lot of horsepower to be able to even do a single simulation. So, what I was showing with Madhu at that booth earlier was results of a simulation that was done just prior us going into production with our Lenovo system where people were doing ocean circulation calculations. The ocean is obviously part of the big Earth system, which is part of the climate system as well. But, they took a small patch of the ocean, a few kilometers in size in each direction, but did it at very, very high resolution, even vertically going down to the bottom of the ocean so that the topography of the ocean floor can be taken into account. That allows you to see at a much smaller scale the onset of tides, the onset of micro-tides that allow water to mix, the cold water from the bottom and the hot water from the top; The mixing of nutrients, how life goes on, the whole cycle. It's super important. Now that, of course, gets coupled with the atmosphere and with the ice and with the radiation from the sun and all that stuff. That calculation was run by a group from, the main guy was from JPL in California, and he was running on 48,000 cores. Single runs at 48,000 cores for about two- to three-weeks and produced a petabyte of data, which is still being analyzed. That's the kind of resolution that's been enabled... >> Scale. >> It gives it a sense of just exactly... >> That's the scale. >> By a system the size of the one we have. It was not possible to do that in Canada before this system. >> I tell you both, when I lived on the vendor side and as an analyst, talking to labs and universities, you love geeking out. Because first of all, you always have a need for newer, faster things because the example you just gave is like, "Oh wait." "If I can get the next generation chipset." "If the networking can be improved." You know you can take that petabyte of data and process it so much faster. >> If I could only get more money to buy a bigger one. >> We've talked to the people at CERN and JPL and things like that. - Yeah. >> And it's like this is where most companies are it's like, yeah it's a little bit better, and it might make things a little better and make things nice, but no, this is critical to move along the research. So talk a little bit more about the infrastructure and what you look for and how that connects to the research and how you help close that gap over time. >> Before you go, I just want to also highlight a point that Danny made on solving humanity's greatest challenges which is our motto. He talked about the data analysis that he just did where they are looking at the surface of the ocean, as well as, going down, what is it, 264 nautical layers underneath the ocean? To analyze that much data, to start looking at marine life and protecting marine life. As you start to understand that level of nautical depth, they can start to figure out the nutrients value and other contents that are in that water to be able to start protecting the marine life. There again, another of humanity's greatest challenge right there that he's giving you... >> Nothing happens in isolation; It's all interconnected. >> Yeah. >> When you finally got a grant, you're able to buy a computer, how do you buy the computer that's going to give you the most bang for your buck? The best computer to do the science that we're all tasked with doing? It's tough, right? We don't fancy ourselves as computer architects; we engage the computer companies who really know about architecture to help us do it. The way we did our procurement was, 'Ok vendors, we have a set pot of money, we're willing to spend every last penny of this money, you give us the biggest and the baddest for our money." Now, it has to have a certain set of criteria. You have to be able to solve a number of benchmarks, some sample calculations that we provided. The ones that give you the best performance that's a bonus. It also has to be able to do it with the least amount of power, so we don't have to heat up the world and pay through the nose with power. Those are objective criteria that anybody can understand. But then, there's also the other criteria, so, how well will it run? How is it architected? How balanced is it? Did we get the iOS sub-system for all the storage that was the one that actually meets the criteria? What other extras do we have that will help us make the system run in a much smoother way and for a wide variety of disciplines because we run the biologists together with the physicists and the engineers and the humanitarians, the humanities people. Everybody uses the system. To make a long story short, the proposal that we got from Lenovo won the bid both in terms of what we got for in terms of hardware and also the way it was put together, which was quite innovative. >> Yeah. >> I want to hear about, you said give us the biggest, the baddest, we're willing to empty our coffers for this, so then where do you go from there? How closely do you work with SciNet, how does the relationship evolve and do you work together to innovate and kind of keep going? >> Yeah. I see it as not a segment or a division. I see High Performance Computing as a practice, and with any practice, it's many pieces that come together; you have a conductor, you have the orchestra, but the end of the day the delivery of that many systems is the concert. That's the way to look at it. To deliver this, our practice starts with multiple teams; one's a benchmarking team that understands the application that Dr. Gruner and SciNet will be running because they need to tune to the application the performance of the cluster. The second team is a set of solution architects that are deep engineers and understand our portfolio. Those two work together to say against this application, "Let's build," like he said, "the biggest, baddest, best-performing solution for that particular application." So, those two teams work together. Then we have the third team that kicks in once we win the business, which is coming on site to deploy, manage, and install. When Dr. Gruner talks about the infrastructure, it's a combination of hardware and software that all comes together and the software is open-source based that we built ourselves because we just felt there weren't the right tools in the industry to manage this level of infrastructure at that scale. All this comes together to essentially rack and roll onto their site. >> Let me just add to that. It's not like we went for it in a vacuum. We had already talked to the vendors, we always do. You always go, and they come to you and 'when's your next money coming,' and it's a dog and pony show. They tell you what they have. With Lenovo, at least the team, as we know it now, used to be the IBM team, iXsystems team, who built our previous system. A lot of these guys were already known to us, and we've always interacted very well with them. They were already aware of our thinking, where we were going, and that we're also open to suggestions for things that are non-conventional. Now, this can backfire, some data centers are very square they will only prescribe what they want. We're not prescriptive at all, we said, "Give us ideas about what can make this work better." These are the intangibles in a procurement process. You also have to believe in the team. If you don't know the team or if you don't know their track record then that's a no-no, right? Or, it takes points away. >> We brought innovations like DragonFly, which Dr. Dan will talk about that, as well as, we brought in for the first time, Excelero, which is a software-defined storage vendor and it was a smart part of the bid. We were able to flex muscles and be more creative versus just the standard. >> My understanding, you've been using water cooling for about a decade now, maybe? - Yes. >> Maybe you could give us a little bit about your experiences, how it's matured over time, and then Madhu will talk and bring us up to speed on project Neptune. >> Okay. Our first procurement about 10 years ago, again, that was the model we came up with. After years of wracking our brains, we could not decide how to build a data center and what computers to buy, it was like a chicken and egg process. We ended up saying, 'Okay, this is what we're going to do. Here's the money, here's is our total cost of operation that we can support." That included the power bill, the water, the maintenance, the whole works. So much can be used for infrastructure, and the rest is for the operational part. We said to the vendors, "You guys do the work. We want, again, the biggest and the baddest that we can operate within this budget." So, obviously, it has to be energy efficient, among other things. We couldn't design a data center and then put in the systems that we didn't know existed or vice-versa. That's how it started. The initial design was built by IBM, and they designed the data center for us to use water cooling for everything. They put rear door heat exchanges on the racks as a means of avoiding the use of blowing air and trying to contain the air which is less efficient, the air, and is also much more difficult. You can flow water very efficiently. You open the door of one of these racks. >> It's amazing. >> And it's hot air coming out, but you take the heat, right there in-situ, you remove it through a radiator. It's just like your car radiator. >> Car radiator. >> It works very well. Now, it would be nice if we could do even better by doing the hot water cooling and all that, but we're not in a university environment, we're in a strip mall out in the boonies, so we couldn't reuse the heat. Places like LRZ they're reusing the heat produced by the computers to heat their buildings. >> Wow. >> Or, if we're by a hospital, that always needs hot water, then we could have done it. But, it's really interesting how the option of that design that we ended up with the most efficient data center, certainly in Canada, and one of the most efficient in North America 10 years ago. Our PUE was 1.16, that was the design point, and this is not with direct water cooling through the chip. >> Right. Right. >> All right, bring us up to speed. Project Neptune, in general? >> Yes, so Neptune, as the name suggests, is the name of the God of the Sea and we chose that to brand our entire suite of liquid cooling products. Liquid cooling products is end to end in the sense that it's not just hardware, but, it's also software. The other key part of Neptune is a lot of these, in fact, most of these, products were built, not in a vacuum, but designed and built in conjunction with key partners like Barcelona Supercomputer, LRZ in Germany, in Munich. These were real-life customers working with us jointly to design these products. Neptune essentially allows you, very simplistically put, it's an entire suite of hardware and software that allows you to run very high-performance processes at a level of power and cooling utilization that's like using a much lower processor, it dissipates that much heat. The other key part is, you know, the normal way of cooling anything is run chilled water, we don't use chilled water. You save the money of chillers. We use ambient temperature, up to 50 degrees, 90% efficiency, 50 degree goes in, 60 degree comes out. It's really amazing, the entire suite. >> It's 50 Celsius, not Fahrenheit. >> It's Celsius, correct. >> Oh. >> Dr. Bruner talked about SciNet with the rado-heat exchanger. You actually got to stand in front of it to feel the magic of this, right? As geeky as that is. You open the door and it's this hot 60-, 65-degree C air. You close the door it's this cool 20-degree air that's coming out. So, the costs of running a data center drop dramatically with either the rado-heat exchanger, our direct to node product, which we just got released the SE650, or we have something call the thermal-transfer module, which replaces a normal heat sink. Where for an air cool we bring water cool goodness to an air cool product. >> Danny, I wonder if you can give us the final word, just the climate science in general, how's the community doing? Any technological things that are holding us back right now or anything that excites you about the research right now? >> Technology holds you back by the virtual size of the calculations that you need to do, but, it's also physics that hold you back. >> Yes. Because doing the actual modeling is very difficult and you have to be able to believe that the physics models actually work. This is one of the interesting things that Dick Peltier, who happens to be our scientific director and he's also one of the top climate scientists in the world, he's proven through some of his calculations that the models are actually pretty good. The models were designed for current conditions, with current data, so that they would reproduce the evolution of the climate that we can measure today. Now, what about climate that started happening 10,000 years ago, right? The climate was going on; it's been going on forever and ever. There's been glaciations; there's been all these events. It turns out that it has been recorded in history that there are some oscillations in temperature and other quantities that happen about every 1,000 years and nobody had been able to prove why they would happen. It turns out that the same models that we use for climate calculations today, if you take them back and do what's called paleoclimate, you start with approximating the conditions that happened 10,000 years ago, and then you move it forward, these things reproduce, those oscillations, exactly. It's very encouraging that the climate models actually make sense. We're not talking in a vacuum. We're not predicting the end of the world, just because. These calculations are right. They're correct. They're predicting the temperature of the earth is climbing and it's true, we're seeing it, but it will continue unless we do something. Right? It's extremely interesting. Now he's he's beginning to apply those results of the paleoclimate to studies with anthropologists and archeologists. We're trying to understand the events that happened in the Levant in the Middle East thousands of years ago and correlate them with climate events. Now, is that cool or what? >> That's very cool. >> So, I think humanity's greatest challenge is again to... >> I know! >> He just added global warming to it. >> You have a fun job. You have a fun job. >> It's all the interdisciplinarity that now has been made possible. Before we couldn't do this. Ten years ago we couldn't run those calculations, now we can. So it's really cool. - Amazing. Great. Well, Madhu, Danny, thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> It was really fun talking to you. >> Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more from the Lenovo Transform just after this. (tech music)
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Brought to you by Lenovo. and Dr. Daniel Gruner the CTO of SciNet and that is climate change, and curing cancer. so the ability to predict the next anomaly, and then I want to hear how you work together. and the hot water from the top; The mixing of nutrients, By a system the size of the one we have. and as an analyst, talking to labs and universities, to buy a bigger one. and things like that. and what you look for and how that connects and other contents that are in that water and the humanitarians, the humanities people. of that many systems is the concert. With Lenovo, at least the team, as we know it now, and it was a smart part of the bid. for about a decade now, maybe? and then Madhu will talk and bring us up to speed and the rest is for the operational part. And it's hot air coming out, but you take the heat, by the computers to heat their buildings. that we ended up with the most efficient data center, Right. Project Neptune, in general? is the name of the God of the Sea You open the door and it's this hot 60-, 65-degree C air. by the virtual size of the calculations that you need to do, of the paleoclimate to studies with anthropologists You have a fun job. It's all the interdisciplinarity We will have more from the Lenovo Transform just after this.
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Lenovo Transform 2.0 Keynote | Lenovo Transform 2018
(electronic dance music) (Intel Jingle) (ethereal electronic dance music) ♪ Okay ♪ (upbeat techno dance music) ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Oh oh oh oh oh ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back ♪ ♪ Take it back take it back ♪ ♪ Yeah everybody get loose yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Ye-yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Yeah yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody everybody yeah ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo yeah ♪ ♪ Everybody get loose whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ >> As a courtesy to the presenters and those around you, please silence all mobile devices, thank you. (electronic dance music) ♪ Everybody get loose ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (upbeat salsa music) ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ha ha ha ♪ ♪ So happy ♪ ♪ Whoo whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) >> Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. Our program will begin momentarily. ♪ Hey ♪ (female singer scatting) (male singer scatting) ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Whoo ♪ (female singer scatting) (electronic dance music) ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ Red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ In don't go ♪ ♪ Oh red go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are red don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red red red red ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in red go ♪ >> Ladies and gentlemen, there are available seats. Towards house left, house left there are available seats. If you are please standing, we ask that you please take an available seat. We will begin momentarily, thank you. ♪ Let go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ All hands are in don't go ♪ ♪ Red all hands are in don't go ♪ (upbeat electronic dance music) ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ I live ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Hey ♪ ♪ Yeah ♪ ♪ Oh ♪ ♪ Ah ♪ ♪ Ah ah ah ah ah ah ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ ♪ Just make me ♪ (bouncy techno music) >> Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask that you please take the available seats to your left, house left, there are many available seats. If you are standing, please make your way there. The program will begin momentarily, thank you. Good morning! This is Lenovo Transform 2.0! (keyboard clicks) >> Progress. Why do we always talk about it in the future? When will it finally get here? We don't progress when it's ready for us. We need it when we're ready, and we're ready now. Our hospitals and their patients need it now, our businesses and their customers need it now, our cities and their citizens need it now. To deliver intelligent transformation, we need to build it into the products and solutions we make every day. At Lenovo, we're designing the systems to fight disease, power businesses, and help you reach more customers, end-to-end security solutions to protect your data and your companies reputation. We're making IT departments more agile and cost efficient. We're revolutionizing how kids learn with VR. We're designing smart devices and software that transform the way you collaborate, because technology shouldn't just power industries, it should power people. While everybody else is talking about tomorrow, we'll keep building today, because the progress we need can't wait for the future. >> Please welcome to the stage Lenovo's Rod Lappen! (electronic dance music) (audience applauding) >> Alright. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning. >> Ooh, that was pretty good actually, I'll give it one more shot. Good morning everyone! >> Good morning! >> Oh, that's much better! Hope everyone's had a great morning. Welcome very much to the second Lenovo Transform event here in New York. I think when I got up just now on the steps I realized there's probably one thing in common all of us have in this room including myself which is, absolutely no one has a clue what I'm going to say today. So, I'm hoping very much that we get through this thing very quickly and crisply. I love this town, love New York, and you're going to hear us talk a little bit about New York as we get through here, but just before we get started I'm going to ask anyone who's standing up the back, there are plenty of seats down here, and down here on the right hand side, I think he called it house left is the professional way of calling it, but these steps to my right, your left, get up here, let's get you all seated down so that you can actually sit down during the keynote session for us. Last year we had our very first Lenovo Transform. We had about 400 people. It was here in New York, fantastic event, today, over 1,000 people. We have over 62 different technology demonstrations and about 15 breakout sessions, which I'll talk you through a little bit later on as well, so it's a much bigger event. Next year we're definitely going to be shooting for over 2,000 people as Lenovo really transforms and starts to address a lot of the technology that our commercial customers are really looking for. We were however hampered last year by a storm, I don't know if those of you who were with us last year will remember, we had a storm on the evening before Transform last year in New York, and obviously the day that it actually occurred, and we had lots of logistics. Our media people from AMIA were coming in. They took the, the plane was circling around New York for a long time, and Kamran Amini, our General Manager of our Data Center Infrastructure Group, probably one of our largest groups in the Lenovo DCG business, took 17 hours to get from Raleigh, North Carolina to New York, 17 hours, I think it takes seven or eight hours to drive. Took him 17 hours by plane to get here. And then of course this year, we have Florence. And so, obviously the hurricane Florence down there in the Carolinas right now, we tried to help, but still Kamran has made it today. Unfortunately, very tragically, we were hoping he wouldn't, but he's here today to do a big presentation a little bit later on as well. However, I do want to say, obviously, Florence is a very serious tragedy and we have to take it very serious. We got, our headquarters is in Raleigh, North Carolina. While it looks like the hurricane is just missing it's heading a little bit southeast, all of our thoughts and prayers and well wishes are obviously with everyone in the Carolinas on behalf of Lenovo, everyone at our headquarters, everyone throughout the Carolinas, we want to make sure everyone stays safe and out of harm's way. We have a great mixture today in the crowd of all customers, partners, industry analysts, media, as well as our financial analysts from all around the world. There's over 30 countries represented here and people who are here to listen to both YY, Kirk, and Christian Teismann speak today. And so, it's going to be a really really exciting day, and I really appreciate everyone coming in from all around the world. So, a big round of applause for everyone whose come in. (audience applauding) We have a great agenda for you today, and it starts obviously a very consistent format which worked very successful for us last year, and that's obviously our keynote. You'll hear from YY, our CEO, talk a little bit about the vision he has in the industry and how he sees Lenovo's turned the corner and really driving some great strategy to address our customer's needs. Kirk Skaugen, our Executive Vice President of DCG, will be up talking about how we've transformed the DCG business and once again are hitting record growth ratios for our DCG business. And then you'll hear from Christian Teismann, our SVP and General Manager for our commercial business, get up and talk about everything that's going on in our IDG business. There's really exciting stuff going on there and obviously ThinkPad being the cornerstone of that I'm sure he's going to talk to us about a couple surprises in that space as well. Then we've got some great breakout sessions, I mentioned before, 15 breakout sessions, so while this keynote section goes until about 11:30, once we get through that, please go over and explore, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. We have all of our subject matter experts from both our PC, NBG, and our DCG businesses out to showcase what we're doing as an organization to better address your needs. And then obviously we have the technology pieces that I've also spoken about, 62 different technology displays there arranged from everything IoT, 5G, NFV, everything that's really cool and hot in the industry right now is going to be on display up there, and I really encourage all of you to get up there. So, I'm going to have a quick video to show you from some of the setup yesterday on a couple of the 62 technology displays we've got on up on stage. Okay let's go, so we've got a demonstrations to show you today, one of the greats one here is the one we've done with NC State, a high-performance computing artificial intelligence demonstration of fresh produce. It's about modeling the population growth of the planet, and how we're going to supply water and food as we go forward. Whoo. Oh, that is not an apple. Okay. (woman laughs) Second one over here is really, hey Jonas, how are you? Is really around virtual reality, and how we look at one of the most amazing sites we've got, as an install on our high-performance computing practice here globally. And you can see, obviously, that this is the Barcelona supercomputer, and, where else in New York can you get access to being able to see something like that so easily? Only here at Lenovo Transform. Whoo, okay. (audience applauding) So there's two examples of some of the technology. We're really encouraging everyone in the room after the keynote to flow into that space and really get engaged, and interact with a lot of the technology we've got up there. It seems I need to also do something about my fashion, I've just realized I've worn a vest two days in a row, so I've got to work on that as well. Alright so listen, the last thing on the agenda, we've gone through the breakout sessions and the demo, tonight at four o'clock, there's about 400 of you registered to be on the cruise boat with us, the doors will open behind me. the boat is literally at the pier right behind us. You need to make sure you're on the boat for 4:00 p.m. this evening. Outside of that, I want everyone to have a great time today, really enjoy the experience, make it as experiential as you possibly can, get out there and really get in and touch the technology. There's some really cool AI displays up there for us all to get involved in as well. So ladies and gentlemen, without further adieu, it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you a lover of tennis, as some of you would've heard last year at Lenovo Transform, as well as a lover of technology, Lenovo, and of course, New York City. I am obviously very pleasured to introduce to you Yang Yuanqing, our CEO, as we like to call him, YY. (audience applauding) (upbeat funky music) >> Good morning, everyone. >> Good morning. >> Thank you Rod for that introduction. Welcome to New York City. So, this is the second year in a row we host our Transform event here, because New York is indeed one of the most transformative cities in the world. Last year on this stage, I spoke about the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and our vision around the intelligent transformation, how it would fundamentally change the nature of business and the customer relationships. And why preparing for this transformation is the key for the future of our company. And in the last year I can assure you, we were being very busy doing just that, from searching and bringing global talents around the world to the way we think about every product and every investment we make. I was here in New York just a month ago to announce our fiscal year Q1 earnings, which was a good day for us. I think now the world believes it when we say Lenovo has truly turned the corner to a new phase of growth and a new phase of acceleration in executing the transformation strategy. That's clear to me is that the last few years of a purposeful disruption at Lenovo have led us to a point where we can now claim leadership of the coming intelligent transformation. People often asked me, what is the intelligent transformation? I was saying this way. This is the unlimited potential of the Fourth Industrial Revolution driven by artificial intelligence being realized, ordering a pizza through our speaker, and locking the door with a look, letting your car drive itself back to your home. This indeed reflect the power of AI, but it just the surface of it. The true impact of AI will not only make our homes smarter and offices more efficient, but we are also completely transformed every value chip in every industry. However, to realize these amazing possibilities, we will need a structure built around the key components, and one that touches every part of all our lives. First of all, explosions in new technology always lead to new structures. This has happened many times before. In the early 20th century, thousands of companies provided a telephone service. City streets across the US looked like this, and now bundles of a microscopic fiber running from city to city bring the world closer together. Here's what a driving was like in the US, up until 1950s. Good luck finding your way. (audience laughs) And today, millions of vehicles are organized and routed daily, making the world more efficient. Structure is vital, from fiber cables and the interstate highways, to our cells bounded together to create humans. Thankfully the structure for intelligent transformation has emerged, and it is just as revolutionary. What does this new structure look like? We believe there are three key building blocks, data, computing power, and algorithms. Ever wondered what is it behind intelligent transformation? What is fueling this miracle of human possibility? Data. As the Internet becomes ubiquitous, not only PCs, mobile phones, have come online and been generating data. Today it is the cameras in this room, the climate controls in our offices, or the smart displays in our kitchens at home. The number of smart devices worldwide will reach over 20 billion in 2020, more than double the number in 2017. These devices and the sensors are connected and generating massive amount of data. By 2020, the amount of data generated will be 57 times more than all the grains of sand on Earth. This data will not only make devices smarter, but will also fuel the intelligence of our homes, offices, and entire industries. Then we need engines to turn the fuel into power, and the engine is actually the computing power. Last but not least the advanced algorithms combined with Big Data technology and industry know how will form vertical industrial intelligence and produce valuable insights for every value chain in every industry. When these three building blocks all come together, it will change the world. At Lenovo, we have each of these elements of intelligent transformations in a single place. We have built our business around the new structure of intelligent transformation, especially with mobile and the data center now firmly part of our business. I'm often asked why did you acquire these businesses? Why has a Lenovo gone into so many fields? People ask the same questions of the companies that become the leaders of the information technology revolution, or the third industrial transformation. They were the companies that saw the future and what the future required, and I believe Lenovo is the company today. From largest portfolio of devices in the world, leadership in the data center field, to the algorithm-powered intelligent vertical solutions, and not to mention the strong partnership Lenovo has built over decades. We are the only company that can unify all these essential assets and deliver end to end solutions. Let's look at each part. We now understand the important importance data plays as fuel in intelligent transformation. Hundreds of billions of devices and smart IoTs in the world are generating better and powering the intelligence. Who makes these devices in large volume and variety? Who puts these devices into people's home, offices, manufacturing lines, and in their hands? Lenovo definitely has the front row seats here. We are number one in PCs and tablets. We also produces smart phones, smart speakers, smart displays. AR/VR headsets, as well as commercial IoTs. All of these smart devices, or smart IoTs are linked to each other and to the cloud. In fact, we have more than 20 manufacturing facilities in China, US, Brazil, Japan, India, Mexico, Germany, and more, producing various devices around the clock. We actually make four devices every second, and 37 motherboards every minute. So, this factory located in my hometown, Hu-fi, China, is actually the largest laptop factory in the world, with more than three million square feet. So, this is as big as 42 soccer fields. Our scale and the larger portfolio of devices gives us access to massive amount of data, which very few companies can say. So, why is the ability to scale so critical? Let's look again at our example from before. The early days of telephone, dozens of service providers but only a few companies could survive consolidation and become the leader. The same was true for the third Industrial Revolution. Only a few companies could scale, only a few could survive to lead. Now the building blocks of the next revolution are locking into place. The (mumbles) will go to those who can operate at the scale. So, who could foresee the total integration of cloud, network, and the device, need to deliver intelligent transformation. Lenovo is that company. We are ready to scale. Next, our computing power. Computing power is provided in two ways. On one hand, the modern supercomputers are providing the brute force to quickly analyze the massive data like never before. On the other hand the cloud computing data centers with the server storage networking capabilities, and any computing IoT's, gateways, and miniservers are making computing available everywhere. Did you know, Lenovo is number one provider of super computers worldwide? 170 of the top 500 supercomputers, run on Lenovo. We hold 89 World Records in key workloads. We are number one in x86 server reliability for five years running, according to ITIC. a respected provider of industry research. We are also the fastest growing provider of hyperscale public cloud, hyper-converged and aggressively growing in edge computing. cur-ges target, we are expand on this point soon. And finally to run these individual nodes into our symphony, we must transform the data and utilize the computing power with advanced algorithms. Manufactured, industry maintenance, healthcare, education, retail, and more, so many industries are on the edge of intelligent transformation to improve efficiency and provide the better products and services. We are creating advanced algorithms and the big data tools combined with industry know-how to provide intelligent vertical solutions for several industries. In fact, we studied at Lenovo first. Our IT and research teams partnered with our global supply chain to develop an AI that improved our demand forecasting accuracy. Beyond managing our own supply chain we have offered our deep learning supply focused solution to other manufacturing companies to improve their efficiency. In the best case, we have improved the demand, focused the accuracy by 30 points to nearly 90 percent, for Baosteel, the largest of steel manufacturer in China, covering the world as well. Led by Lenovo research, we launched the industry-leading commercial ready AR headset, DaystAR, partnering with companies like the ones in this room. This technology is being used to revolutionize the way companies service utility, and even our jet engines. Using our workstations, servers, and award-winning imaging processing algorithms, we have partnered with hospitals to process complex CT scan data in minutes. So, this enable the doctors to more successfully detect the tumors, and it increases the success rate of cancer diagnosis all around the world. We are also piloting our smart IoT driven warehouse solution with one of the world's largest retail companies to greatly improve the efficiency. So, the opportunities are endless. This is where Lenovo will truly shine. When we combine the industry know-how of our customers with our end-to-end technology offerings, our intelligent vertical solutions like this are growing, which Kirk and Christian will share more. Now, what will drive this transformation even faster? The speed at which our networks operate, specifically 5G. You may know that Lenovo just launched the first-ever 5G smartphone, our Moto Z3, with the new 5G Moto model. We are partnering with multiple major network providers like Verizon, China Mobile. With the 5G model scheduled to ship early next year, we will be the first company to provide a 5G mobile experience to any users, customers. This is amazing innovation. You don't have to buy a new phone, just the 5G clip on. What can I say, except wow. (audience laughs) 5G is 10 times the fast faster than 4G. Its download speed will transform how people engage with the world, driverless car, new types of smart wearables, gaming, home security, industrial intelligence, all will be transformed. Finally, accelerating with partners, as ready as we are at Lenovo, we need partners to unlock our full potential, partners here to create with us the edge of the intelligent transformation. The opportunities of intelligent transformation are too profound, the scale is too vast. No company can drive it alone fully. We are eager to collaborate with all partners that can help bring our vision to life. We are dedicated to open partnerships, dedicated to cross-border collaboration, unify the standards, share the advantage, and market the synergies. We partner with the biggest names in the industry, Intel, Microsoft, AMD, Qualcomm, Google, Amazon, and Disney. We also find and partner with the smaller innovators as well. We're building the ultimate partner experience, open, shared, collaborative, diverse. So, everything is in place for intelligent transformation on a global scale. Smart devices are everywhere, the infrastructure is in place, networks are accelerating, and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and Lenovo is at the center of it all. We are helping to drive change with the hundreds of companies, companies just like yours, every day. We are your partner for intelligent transformation. Transformation never stops. This is what you will hear from Kirk, including details about Lenovo NetApp global partnership we just announced this morning. We've made the investments in every single aspect of the technology. We have the end-to-end resources to meet your end-to-end needs. As you attend the breakout session this afternoon, I hope you see for yourself how much Lenovo has transformed as a company this past year, and how we truly are delivering a future of intelligent transformation. Now, let me invite to the stage Kirk Skaugen, our president of Data Center growth to tell you about the exciting transformation happening in the global Data C enter market. Thank you. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) >> Well, good morning. >> Good morning. >> Good morning! >> Good morning! >> Excellent, well, I'm pleased to be here this morning to talk about how we're transforming the Data Center and taking you as our customers through your own intelligent transformation journey. Last year I stood up here at Transform 1.0, and we were proud to announce the largest Data Center portfolio in Lenovo's history, so I thought I'd start today and talk about the portfolio and the progress that we've made over the last year, and the strategies that we have going forward in phase 2.0 of Lenovo's transformation to be one of the largest data center companies in the world. We had an audacious vision that we talked about last year, and that is to be the most trusted data center provider in the world, empowering customers through the new IT, intelligent transformation. And now as the world's largest supercomputer provider, giving something back to humanity, is very important this week with the hurricanes now hitting North Carolina's coast, but we take this most trusted aspect very seriously, whether it's delivering the highest quality products on time to you as customers with the highest levels of security, or whether it's how we partner with our channel partners and our suppliers each and every day. You know we're in a unique world where we're going from hundreds of millions of PCs, and then over the next 25 years to hundred billions of connected devices, so each and every one of you is going through this intelligent transformation journey, and in many aspects were very early in that cycle. And we're going to talk today about our role as the largest supercomputer provider, and how we're solving humanity's greatest challenges. Last year we talked about two special milestones, the 25th anniversary of ThinkPad, but also the 25th anniversary of Lenovo with our IBM heritage in x86 computing. I joined the workforce in 1992 out of college, and the IBM first personal server was launching at the same time with an OS2 operating system and a free mouse when you bought the server as a marketing campaign. (audience laughing) But what I want to be very clear today, is that the innovation engine is alive and well at Lenovo, and it's really built on the culture that we're building as a company. All of these awards at the bottom are things that we earned over the last year at Lenovo. As a Fortune now 240 company, larger than companies like Nike, or AMEX, or Coca-Cola. The one I'm probably most proud of is Forbes first list of the top 2,000 globally regarded companies. This was something where 15,000 respondents in 60 countries voted based on ethics, trustworthiness, social conduct, company as an employer, and the overall company performance, and Lenovo was ranked number 27 of 2000 companies by our peer group, but we also now one of-- (audience applauding) But we also got a perfect score in the LGBTQ Equality Index, exemplifying the diversity internally. We're number 82 in the top working companies for mothers, top working companies for fathers, top 100 companies for sustainability. If you saw that factory, it's filled with solar panels on the top of that. And now again, one of the top global brands in the world. So, innovation is built on a customer foundation of trust. We also said last year that we'd be crossing an amazing milestone. So we did, over the last 12 months ship our 20 millionth x86 server. So, thank you very much to our customers for this milestone. (audience applauding) So, let me recap some of the transformation elements that have happened over the last year. Last year I talked about a lot of brand confusion, because we had the ThinkServer brand from the legacy Lenovo, the System x, from IBM, we had acquired a number of networking companies, like BLADE Network Technologies, et cetera, et cetera. Over the last year we've been ramping based on two brand structures, ThinkAgile for next generation IT, and all of our software-defined infrastructure products and ThinkSystem as the world's highest performance, highest reliable x86 server brand, but for servers, for storage, and for networking. We have transformed every single aspect of the customer experience. A year and a half ago, we had four different global channel programs around the world. Typically we're about twice the mix to our channel partners of any of our competitors, so this was really important to fix. We now have a single global Channel program, and have technically certified over 11,000 partners to be technical experts on our product line to deliver better solutions to our customer base. Gardner recently recognized Lenovo as the 26th ranked supply chain in the world. And, that's a pretty big honor, when you're up there with Amazon and Walmart and others, but in tech, we now are in the top five supply chains. You saw the factory network from YY, and today we'll be talking about product shipping in more than 160 countries, and I know there's people here that I've met already this morning, from India, from South Africa, from Brazil and China. We announced new Premier Support services, enabling you to go directly to local language support in nine languages in 49 countries in the world, going directly to a native speaker level three support engineer. And today we have more than 10,000 support specialists supporting our products in over 160 countries. We've delivered three times the number of engineered solutions to deliver a solutions orientation, whether it's on HANA, or SQL Server, or Oracle, et cetera, and we've completely reengaged our system integrator channel. Last year we had the CIO of DXE on stage, and here we're talking about more than 175 percent growth through our system integrator channel in the last year alone as we've brought that back and really built strong relationships there. So, thank you very much for amazing work here on the customer experience. (audience applauding) We also transformed our leadership. We thought it was extremely important with a focus on diversity, to have diverse talent from the legacy IBM, the legacy Lenovo, but also outside the industry. We made about 19 executive changes in the DCG group. This is the most senior leadership team within DCG, all which are newly on board, either from our outside competitors mainly over the last year. About 50 percent of our executives were now hired internally, 50 percent externally, and 31 percent of those new executives are diverse, representing the diversity of our global customer base and gender. So welcome, and most of them you're going to be able to meet over here in the breakout sessions later today. (audience applauding) But some things haven't changed, they're just keeping getting better within Lenovo. So, last year I got up and said we were committed with the new ThinkSystem brand to be a world performance leader. You're going to see that we're sponsoring Ducati for MotoGP. You saw the Ferrari out there with Formula One. That's not a surprise. We want the Lenovo ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile brands to be synonymous with world record performance. So in the last year we've gone from 39 to 89 world records, and partners like Intel would tell you, we now have four times the number of world record workloads on Lenovo hardware than any other server company on the planet today, with more than 89 world records across HPC, Java, database, transaction processing, et cetera. And we're proud to have just brought on Doug Fisher from Intel Corporation who had about 10-17,000 people on any given year working for him in workload optimizations across all of our software. It's just another testament to the leadership team we're bringing in to keep focusing on world-class performance software and solutions. We also per ITIC, are the number one now in x86 server reliability five years running. So, this is a survey where CIOs are in a blind survey asked to submit their reliability of their uptime on their x86 server equipment over the last 365 days. And you can see from 2016 to 2017 the downtime, there was over four hours as noted by the 750 CXOs in more than 20 countries is about one percent for the Lenovo products, and is getting worse generation from generation as we went from Broadwell to Pearlie. So we're taking our reliability, which was really paramount in the IBM System X heritage, and ensuring that we don't just recognize high performance but we recognize the highest level of reliability for mission-critical workloads. And what that translates into is that we at once again have been ranked number one in customer satisfaction from you our customers in 19 of 22 attributes, in North America in 18 of 22. This is a survey by TVR across hundreds of customers of us and our top competitors. This is the ninth consecutive study that we've been ranked number one in customer satisfaction, so we're taking this extremely seriously, and in fact YY now has increased the compensation of every single Lenovo employee. Up to 40 percent of their compensation bonus this year is going to be based on customer metrics like quality, order to ship, and things of this nature. So, we're really putting every employee focused on customer centricity this year. So, the summary on Transform 1.0 is that every aspect of what you knew about Lenovo's data center group has transformed, from the culture to the branding to dedicated sales and marketing, supply chain and quality groups, to a worldwide channel program and certifications, to new system integrator relationships, and to the new leadership team. So, rather than me just talk about it, I thought I'd share a quick video about what we've done over the last year, if you could run the video please. Turn around for a second. (epic music) (audience applauds) Okay. So, thank you to all our customers that allowed us to publicly display their logos in that video. So, what that means for you as investors, and for the investor community out there is, that our customers have responded, that this year Gardner just published that we are the fastest growing server company in the top 10, with 39 percent growth quarter-on-quarter, and 49 percent growth year-on-year. If you look at the progress we've made since the transformation the last three quarters publicly, we've grown 17 percent, then 44 percent, then 68 percent year on year in revenue, and I can tell you this quarter I'm as confident as ever in the financials around the DCG group, and it hasn't been in one area. You're going to see breakout sessions from hyperscale, software-defined, and flash, which are all growing more than a 100 percent year-on-year, supercomputing which we'll talk about shortly, now number one, and then ultimately from profitability, delivering five consecutive quarters of pre-tax profit increase, so I think, thank you very much to the customer base who's been working with us through this transformation journey. So, you're here to really hear what's next on 2.0, and that's what I'm excited to talk about today. Last year I came up with an audacious goal that we would become the largest supercomputer company on the planet by 2020, and this graph represents since the acquisition of the IBM System x business how far we were behind being the number one supercomputer. When we started we were 182 positions behind, even with the acquisition for example of SGI from HP, we've now accomplished our goal actually two years ahead of time. We're now the largest supercomputer company in the world. About one in every four supercomputers, 117 on the list, are now Lenovo computers, and you saw in the video where the universities are said, but I think what I'm most proud of is when your customers rank you as the best. So the awards at the bottom here, are actually Readers Choice from the last International Supercomputing Show where the scientific researchers on these computers ranked their vendors, and we were actually rated the number one server technology in supercomputing with our ThinkSystem SD530, and the number one storage technology with our ThinkSystem DSS-G, but more importantly what we're doing with the technology. You're going to see we won best in life sciences, best in data analytics, and best in collaboration as well, so you're going to see all of that in our breakout sessions. As you saw in the video now, 17 of the top 25 research institutions in the world are now running Lenovo supercomputers. And again coming from Raleigh and watching that hurricane come across the Atlantic, there are eight supercomputers crunching all of those models you see from Germany to Malaysia to Canada, and we're happy to have a SciNet from University of Toronto here with us in our breakout session to talk about what they're doing on climate modeling as well. But we're not stopping there. We just announced our new Neptune warm water cooling technology, which won the International Supercomputing Vendor Showdown, the first time we've won that best of show in 25 years, and we've now installed this. We're building out LRZ in Germany, the first ever warm water cooling in Peking University, at the India Space Propulsion Laboratory, at the Malaysian Weather and Meteorological Society, at Uninett, at the largest supercomputer in Norway, T-Systems, University of Birmingham. This is truly amazing technology where we're actually using water to cool the machine to deliver a significantly more energy-efficient computer. Super important, when we're looking at global warming and some of the electric bills can be millions of dollars just for one computer, and could actually power a small city just with the technology from the computer. We've built AI centers now in Morrisville, Stuttgart, Taipei, and Beijing, where customers can bring their AI workloads in with experts from Intel, from Nvidia, from our FPGA partners, to work on their workloads, and how they can best implement artificial intelligence. And we also this year launched LICO which is Lenovo Intelligent Compute Orchestrator software, and it's a software solution that simplifies the management and use of distributed clusters in both HPC and AI model development. So, what it enables you to do is take a single cluster, and run both HPC and AI workloads on it simultaneously, delivering better TCO for your environment, so check out LICO as well. A lot of the customers here and Wall Street are very excited and using it already. And we talked about solving humanity's greatest challenges. In the breakout session, you're going to have a virtual reality experience where you're going to be able to walk through what as was just ranked the world's most beautiful data center, the Barcelona Supercomputer. So, you can actually walk through one of the largest supercomputers in the world from Barcelona. You can see the work we're doing with NC State where we're going to have to grow the food supply of the world by 50 percent, and there's not enough fresh water in the world in the right places to actually make all those crops grow between now and 2055, so you're going to see the progression of how they're mapping the entire globe and the water around the world, how to build out the crop population over time using AI. You're going to see our work with Vestas is this largest supercomputer provider in the wind turbine areas, how they're working on wind energy, and then with University College London, how they're working on some of the toughest particle physics calculations in the world. So again, lots of opportunity here. Take advantage of it in the breakout sessions. Okay, let me transition to hyperscale. So in hyperscale now, we have completely transformed our business model. We are now powering six of the top 10 hyperscalers in the world, which is a significant difference from where we were two years ago. And the reason we're doing that, is we've coined a term called ODM+. We believe that hyperscalers want more procurement power than an ODM, and Lenovo is doing about $18 billion of procurement a year. They want a broader global supply chain that they can get from a local system integrator. We're more than 160 countries around the world, but they want the same world-class quality and reliability like they get from an MNC. So, what we're doing now is instead of just taking off the shelf motherboards from somewhere, we're starting with a blank sheet of paper, we're working with the customer base on customized SKUs and you can see we already are developing 33 custom solutions for the largest hyperscalers in the world. And then we're not just running notebooks through this factory where YY said, we're running 37 notebook boards a minute, we're now putting in tens and tens and tens of thousands of server board capacity per month into this same factory, so absolutely we can compete with the most aggressive ODM's in the world, but it's not just putting these things in in the motherboard side, we're also building out these systems all around the world, India, Brazil, Hungary, Mexico, China. This is an example of a new hyperscale customer we've had this last year, 34,000 servers we delivered in the first six months. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 68 days. The next 34,000 servers we delivered in 35 days, with more than 99 percent on-time delivery to 35 data centers in 14 countries as diverse as South Africa, India, China, Brazil, et cetera. And I'm really ashamed to say it was 99.3, because we did have a forklift driver who rammed their forklift right through the middle of the one of the server racks. (audience laughing) At JFK Airport that we had to respond to, but I think this gives you a perspective of what it is to be a top five global supply chain and technology. So last year, I said we would invest significantly in IP, in joint ventures, and M and A to compete in software defined, in networking, and in storage, so I wanted to give you an update on that as well. Our newest software-defined partnership is with Cloudistics, enabling a fully composable cloud infrastructure. It's an exclusive agreement, you can see them here. I think Nag, our founder, is going to be here today, with a significant Lenovo investment in the company. So, this new ThinkAgile CP series delivers the simplicity of the public cloud, on-premise with exceptional support and a marketplace of essential enterprise applications all with a single click deployment. So simply put, we're delivering a private cloud with a premium experience. It's simple in that you need no specialists to deploy it. An IT generalist can set it up and manage it. It's agile in that you can provision dozens of workloads in minutes, and it's transformative in that you get all of the goodness of public cloud on-prem in a private cloud to unlock opportunity for use. So, we're extremely excited about the ThinkAgile CP series that's now shipping into the marketplace. Beyond that we're aggressively ramping, and we're either doubling, tripling, or quadrupling our market share as customers move from traditional server technology to software-defined technology. With Nutanix we've been public, growing about more than 150 percent year-on-year, with Nutanix as their fastest growing Nutanix partner, but today I want to set another audacious goal. I believe we cannot just be Nutanix's fastest growing partner but we can become their largest partner within two years. On Microsoft, we are already four times our market share on Azure stack of our traditional business. We were the first to launch our ThinkAgile on Broadwell and on Skylake with the Azure Stack Infrastructure. And on VMware we're about twice our market segment share. We were the first to deliver an Intel-optimized Optane-certified VSAN node. And with Optane technology, we're delivering 50 percent more VM density than any competitive SSD system in the marketplace, about 10 times lower latency, four times the performance of any SSD system out there, and Lenovo's first to market on that. And at VMworld you saw CEO Pat Gelsinger of VMware talked about project dimension, which is Edge as a service, and we're the only OEM beyond the Dell family that is participating today in project dimension. Beyond that you're going to see a number of other partnerships we have. I'm excited that we have the city of Bogota Columbia here, an eight million person city, where we announced a 3,000 camera video surveillance solution last month. With pivot three you're going to see city of Bogota in our breakout sessions. You're going to see a new partnership with Veeam around backup that's launching today. You're going to see partnerships with scale computing in IoT and hyper-converged infrastructure working on some of the largest retailers in the world. So again, everything out in the breakout session. Transitioning to storage and data management, it's been a great year for Lenovo, more than a 100 percent growth year-on-year, 2X market growth in flash arrays. IDC just reported 30 percent growth in storage, number one in price performance in the world and the best HPC storage product in the top 500 with our ThinkSystem DSS G, so strong coverage, but I'm excited today to announce for Transform 2.0 that Lenovo is launching the largest data management and storage portfolio in our 25-year data center history. (audience applauding) So a year ago, the largest server portfolio, becoming the largest fastest growing server OEM, today the largest storage portfolio, but as you saw this morning we're not doing it alone. Today Lenovo and NetApp, two global powerhouses are joining forces to deliver a multi-billion dollar global alliance in data management and storage to help customers through their intelligent transformation. As the fastest growing worldwide server leader and one of the fastest growing flash array and data management companies in the world, we're going to deliver more choice to customers than ever before, global scale that's never been seen, supply chain efficiencies, and rapidly accelerating innovation and solutions. So, let me unwrap this a little bit for you and talk about what we're announcing today. First, it's the largest portfolio in our history. You're going to see not just storage solutions launching today but a set of solution recipes from NetApp that are going to make Lenovo server and NetApp or Lenovo storage work better together. The announcement enables Lenovo to go from covering 15 percent of the global storage market to more than 90 percent of the global storage market and distribute these products in more than 160 countries around the world. So we're launching today, 10 new storage platforms, the ThinkSystem DE and ThinkSystem DM platforms. They're going to be centrally managed, so the same XClarity management that you've been using for server, you can now use across all of your storage platforms as well, and it'll be supported by the same 10,000 plus service personnel that are giving outstanding customer support to you today on the server side. And we didn't come up with this in the last month or the last quarter. We're announcing availability in ordering today and shipments tomorrow of the first products in this portfolio, so we're excited today that it's not just a future announcement but something you as customers can take advantage of immediately. (audience applauding) The second part of the announcement is we are announcing a joint venture in China. Not only will this be a multi-billion dollar global partnership, but Lenovo will be a 51 percent owner, NetApp a 49 percent owner of a new joint venture in China with the goal of becoming in the top three storage companies in the largest data and storage market in the world. We will deliver our R and D in China for China, pooling our IP and resources together, and delivering a single route to market through a complementary channel, not just in China but worldwide. And in the future I just want to tell everyone this is phase one. There is so much exciting stuff. We're going to be on the stage over the next year talking to you about around integrated solutions, next-generation technologies, and further synergies and collaborations. So, rather than just have me talk about it, I'd like to welcome to the stage our new partner NetApp and Brad Anderson who's the senior vice president and general manager of NetApp Cloud Infrastructure. (upbeat music) (audience applauding) >> Thank You Kirk. >> So Brad, we've known each other a long time. It's an exciting day. I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say NetApp's perspective on this announcement. >> Very good, thank you very much, Kirk. Kirk and I go back to I think 1994, so hey good morning and welcome. My name is Brad Anderson. I manage the Cloud Infrastructure Group at NetApp, and I am honored and privileged to be here at Lenovo Transform, particularly today on today's announcement. Now, you've heard a lot about digital transformation about how companies have to transform their IT to compete in today's global environment. And today's announcement with the partnership between NetApp and Lenovo is what that's all about. This is the joining of two global leaders bringing innovative technology in a simplified solution to help customers modernize their IT and accelerate their global digital transformations. Drawing on the strengths of both companies, Lenovo's high performance compute world-class supply chain, and NetApp's hybrid cloud data management, hybrid flash and all flash storage solutions and products. And both companies providing our customers with the global scale for them to be able to meet their transformation goals. At NetApp, we're very excited. This is a quote from George Kurian our CEO. George spent all day yesterday with YY and Kirk, and would have been here today if it hadn't been also our shareholders meeting in California, but I want to just convey how excited we are for all across NetApp with this partnership. This is a partnership between two companies with tremendous market momentum. Kirk took you through all the amazing results that Lenovo has accomplished, number one in supercomputing, number one in performance, number one in x86 reliability, number one in x86 customers sat, number five in supply chain, really impressive and congratulations. Like Lenovo, NetApp is also on a transformation journey, from a storage company to the data authority in hybrid cloud, and we've seen some pretty impressive momentum as well. Just last week we became number one in all flash arrays worldwide, catching EMC and Dell, and we plan to keep on going by them, as we help customers modernize their their data centers with cloud connected flash. We have strategic partnerships with the largest hyperscalers to provide cloud native data services around the globe and we are having success helping our customers build their own private clouds with just, with a new disruptive hyper-converged technology that allows them to operate just like hyperscalers. These three initiatives has fueled NetApp's transformation, and has enabled our customers to change the world with data. And oh by the way, it has also fueled us to have meet or have beaten Wall Street's expectations for nine quarters in a row. These are two companies with tremendous market momentum. We are also building this partnership for long term success. We think about this as phase one and there are two important components to phase one. Kirk took you through them but let me just review them. Part one, the establishment of a multi-year commitment and a collaboration agreement to offer Lenovo branded flash products globally, and as Kurt said in 160 countries. Part two, the formation of a joint venture in PRC, People's Republic of China, that will provide long term commitment, joint product development, and increase go-to-market investment to meet the unique needs to China. Both companies will put in storage technologies and storage expertise to form an independent JV that establishes a data management company in China for China. And while we can dream about what phase two looks like, our entire focus is on making phase one incredibly successful and I'm pleased to repeat what Kirk, is that the first products are orderable and shippable this week in 160 different countries, and you will see our two companies focusing on the here and now. On our joint go to market strategy, you'll see us working together to drive strategic alignment, focused execution, strong governance, and realistic expectations and milestones. And it starts with the success of our customers and our channel partners is job one. Enabling customers to modernize their legacy IT with complete data center solutions, ensuring that our customers get the best from both companies, new offerings the fuel business success, efficiencies to reinvest in game-changing initiatives, and new solutions for new mission-critical applications like data analytics, IoT, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Channel partners are also top of mind for both our two companies. We are committed to the success of our existing and our future channel partners. For NetApp channel partners, it is new pathways to new segments and to new customers. For Lenovo's channel partners, it is the competitive weapons that now allows you to compete and more importantly win against Dell, EMC, and HP. And the good news for both companies is that our channel partner ecosystem is highly complementary with minimal overlap. Today is the first day of a very exciting partnership, of a partnership that will better serve our customers today and will provide new opportunities to both our companies and to our partners, new products to our customers globally and in China. I am personally very excited. I will be on the board of the JV. And so, I look forward to working with you, partnering with you and serving you as we go forward, and with that, I'd like to invite Kirk back up. (audience applauding) >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Well, thank you, Brad. I think it's an exciting overview, and these products will be manufactured in China, in Mexico, in Hungary, and around the world, enabling this amazing supply chain we talked about to deliver in over 160 countries. So thank you Brad, thank you George, for the amazing partnership. So again, that's not all. In Transform 2.0, last year, we talked about the joint ventures that were coming. I want to give you a sneak peek at what you should expect at future Lenovo events around the world. We have this Transform in Beijing in a couple weeks. We'll then be repeating this in 20 different locations roughly around the world over the next year, and I'm excited probably more than ever about what else is coming. Let's talk about Telco 5G and network function virtualization. Today, Motorola phones are certified on 46 global networks. We launched the world's first 5G upgradable phone here in the United States with Verizon. Lenovo DCG sells to 58 telecommunication providers around the world. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and Shanghai, you saw China Telecom and China Mobile in the Lenovo booth, China Telecom showing a video broadband remote access server, a VBRAS, with video streaming demonstrations with 2x less jitter than they had seen before. You saw China Mobile with a virtual remote access network, a VRAN, with greater than 10 times the throughput and 10x lower latency running on Lenovo. And this year, we'll be launching a new NFV company, a software company in China for China to drive the entire NFV stack, delivering not just hardware solutions, but software solutions, and we've recently hired a new CEO. You're going to hear more about that over the next several quarters. Very exciting as we try to drive new economics into the networks to deliver these 20 billion devices. We're going to need new economics that I think Lenovo can uniquely deliver. The second on IoT and edge, we've integrated on the device side into our intelligent devices group. With everything that's going to consume electricity computes and communicates, Lenovo is in a unique position on the device side to take advantage of the communications from Motorola and being one of the largest device companies in the world. But this year, we're also going to roll out a comprehensive set of edge gateways and ruggedized industrial servers and edge servers and ISP appliances for the edge and for IoT. So look for that as well. And then lastly, as a service, you're going to see Lenovo delivering hardware as a service, device as a service, infrastructure as a service, software as a service, and hardware as a service, not just as a glorified leasing contract, but with IP, we've developed true flexible metering capability that enables you to scale up and scale down freely and paying strictly based on usage, and we'll be having those announcements within this fiscal year. So Transform 2.0, lots to talk about, NetApp the big news of the day, but a lot more to come over the next year from the Data Center group. So in summary, I'm excited that we have a lot of customers that are going to be on stage with us that you saw in the video. Lots of testimonials so that you can talk to colleagues of yourself. Alamos Gold from Canada, a Canadian gold producer, Caligo for data optimization and privacy, SciNet, the largest supercomputer we've ever put into North America, and the largest in Canada at the University of Toronto will be here talking about climate change. City of Bogota again with our hyper-converged solutions around smart city putting in 3,000 cameras for criminal detection, license plate detection, et cetera, and then more from a channel mid market perspective, Jerry's Foods, which is from my home state of Wisconsin, and Minnesota which has about 57 stores in the specialty foods market, and how they're leveraging our IoT solutions as well. So again, about five times the number of demos that we had last year. So in summary, first and foremost to the customers, thank you for your business. It's been a great journey and I think we're on a tremendous role. You saw from last year, we're trying to build credibility with you. After the largest server portfolio, we're now the fastest-growing server OEM per Gardner, number one in performance, number one in reliability, number one in customer satisfaction, number one in supercomputing. Today, the largest storage portfolio in our history, with the goal of becoming the fastest growing storage company in the world, top three in China, multibillion-dollar collaboration with NetApp. And the transformation is going to continue with new edge gateways, edge servers, NFV solutions, telecommunications infrastructure, and hardware as a service with dynamic metering. So thank you for your time. I've looked forward to meeting many of you over the next day. We appreciate your business, and with that, I'd like to bring up Rod Lappen to introduce our next speaker. Rod? (audience applauding) >> Thanks, boss, well done. Alright ladies and gentlemen. No real secret there. I think we've heard why I might talk about the fourth Industrial Revolution in data and exactly what's going on with that. You've heard Kirk with some amazing announcements, obviously now with our NetApp partnership, talk about 5G, NFV, cloud, artificial intelligence, I think we've hit just about all the key hot topics. It's with great pleasure that I now bring up on stage Mr. Christian Teismann, our senior vice president and general manager of commercial business for both our PCs and our IoT business, so Christian Teismann. (techno music) Here, take that. >> Thank you. I think I'll need that. >> Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, you and I last year, we had a bit of a chat about being in New York. >> Exports. >> You were an expat in New York for a long time. >> That's true. >> And now, you've moved from New York. You're in Munich? >> Yep. >> How does that feel? >> Well Munich is a wonderful city, and it's a great place to live and raise kids, but you know there's no place in the world like New York. >> Right. >> And I miss it a lot, quite frankly. >> So what exactly do you miss in New York? >> Well there's a lot of things in New York that are unique, but I know you spent some time in Japan, but I still believe the best sushi in the world is still in New York City. (all laughing) >> I will beg to differ. I will beg to differ. I think Mr. Guchi-san from Softbank is here somewhere. He will get up an argue very quickly that Japan definitely has better sushi than New York. But obviously you know, it's a very very special place, and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. What about Munich? Anything else that you like in Munich? >> Well I mean in Munich, we have pork knuckles. >> Pork knuckles. (Christian laughing) Very similar sushi. >> What is also very fantastic, but we have the real, the real Oktoberfest in Munich, and it starts next week, mid-September, and I think it's unique in the world. So it's very special as well. >> Oktoberfest. >> Yes. >> Unfortunately, I'm not going this year, 'cause you didn't invite me, but-- (audience chuckling) How about, I think you've got a bit of a secret in relation to Oktoberfest, probably not in Munich, however. >> It's a secret, yes, but-- >> Are you going to share? >> Well I mean-- >> See how I'm putting you on the spot? >> In the 10 years, while living here in New York, I was a regular visitor of the Oktoberfest at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, where I actually met my wife, and she's German. >> Very good. So, how about a big round of applause? (audience applauding) Not so much for Christian, but more I think, obviously for his wife, who obviously had been drinking and consequently ended up with you. (all laughing) See you later, mate. >> That's the beauty about Oktoberfest, but yes. So first of all, good morning to everybody, and great to be back here in New York for a second Transform event. New York clearly is the melting pot of the world in terms of culture, nations, but also business professionals from all kind of different industries, and having this event here in New York City I believe is manifesting what we are trying to do here at Lenovo, is transform every aspect of our business and helping our customers on the journey of intelligent transformation. Last year, in our transformation on the device business, I talked about how the PC is transforming to personalized computing, and we've made a lot of progress in that journey over the last 12 months. One major change that we have made is we combined all our device business under one roof. So basically PCs, smart devices, and smart phones are now under the roof and under the intelligent device group. But from my perspective makes a lot of sense, because at the end of the day, all devices connect in the modern world into the cloud and are operating in a seamless way. But we are also moving from a device business what is mainly a hardware focus historically, more and more also into a solutions business, and I will give you during my speech a little bit of a sense of what we are trying to do, as we are trying to bring all these components closer together, and specifically also with our strengths on the data center side really build end-to-end customer solution. Ultimately, what we want to do is make our business, our customer's businesses faster, safer, and ultimately smarter as well. So I want to look a little bit back, because I really believe it's important to understand what's going on today on the device side. Many of us have still grown up with phones with terminals, ultimately getting their first desktop, their first laptop, their first mobile phone, and ultimately smartphone. Emails and internet improved our speed, how we could operate together, but still we were defined by linear technology advances. Today, the world has changed completely. Technology itself is not a limiting factor anymore. It is how we use technology going forward. The Internet is pervasive, and we are not yet there that we are always connected, but we are nearly always connected, and we are moving to the stage, that everything is getting connected all the time. Sharing experiences is the most driving force in our behavior. In our private life, sharing pictures, videos constantly, real-time around the world, with our friends and with our family, and you see the same behavior actually happening in the business life as well. Collaboration is the number-one topic if it comes down to workplace, and video and instant messaging, things that are coming from the consumer side are dominating the way we are operating in the commercial business as well. Most important beside technology, that a new generation of workforce has completely changed the way we are working. As the famous workforce the first generation of Millennials that have now fully entered in the global workforce, and the next generation, it's called Generation Z, is already starting to enter the global workforce. By 2025, 75 percent of the world's workforce will be composed out of two of these generations. Why is this so important? These two generations have been growing up using state-of-the-art IT technology during their private life, during their education, school and study, and are taking these learnings and taking these behaviors in the commercial workspace. And this is the number one force of change that we are seeing in the moment. Diverse workforces are driving this change in the IT spectrum, and for years in many of our customers' focus was their customer focus. Customer experience also in Lenovo is the most important thing, but we've realized that our own human capital is equally valuable in our customer relationships, and employee experience is becoming a very important thing for many of our customers, and equally for Lenovo as well. As you have heard YY, as we heard from YY, Lenovo is focused on intelligent transformation. What that means for us in the intelligent device business is ultimately starting with putting intelligence in all of our devices, smartify every single one of our devices, adding value to our customers, traditionally IT departments, but also focusing on their end users and building products that make their end users more productive. And as a world leader in commercial devices with more than 33 percent market share, we can solve problems been even better than any other company in the world. So, let's talk about transformation of productivity first. We are in a device-led world. Everything we do is connected. There's more interaction with devices than ever, but also with spaces who are increasingly becoming smart and intelligent. YY said it, by 2020 we have more than 20 billion connected devices in the world, and it will grow exponentially from there on. And users have unique personal choices for technology, and that's very important to recognize, and we call this concept a digital wardrobe. And it means that every single end-user in the commercial business is composing his personal wardrobe on an ongoing basis and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and based where he's going and based what task he is doing. I would ask all of you to put out all the devices you're carrying in your pockets and in your bags. You will see a lot of you are using phones, tablets, laptops, but also cameras and even smartwatches. They're all different, but they have one underlying technology that is bringing it all together. Recognizing digital wardrobe dynamics is a core factor for us to put all the devices under one roof in IDG, one business group that is dedicated to end-user solutions across mobile, PC, but also software services and imaging, to emerging technologies like AR, VR, IoT, and ultimately a AI as well. A couple of years back there was a big debate around bring-your-own-device, what was called consumerization. Today consumerization does not exist anymore, because consumerization has happened into every single device we build in our commercial business. End users and commercial customers today do expect superior display performance, superior audio, microphone, voice, and touch quality, and have it all connected and working seamlessly together in an ease of use space. We are already deep in the journey of personalized computing today. But the center point of it has been for the last 25 years, the mobile PC, that we have perfected over the last 25 years, and has been the undisputed leader in mobility computing. We believe in the commercial business, the ThinkPad is still the core device of a digital wardrobe, and we continue to drive the success of the ThinkPad in the marketplace. We've sold more than 140 million over the last 26 years, and even last year we exceeded nearly 11 million units. That is about 21 ThinkPads per minute, or one Thinkpad every three seconds that we are shipping out in the market. It's the number one commercial PC in the world. It has gotten countless awards but we felt last year after Transform we need to build a step further, in really tailoring the ThinkPad towards the need of the future. So, we announced a new line of X1 Carbon and Yoga at CES the Consumer Electronics Show. And the reason is not we want to sell to consumer, but that we do recognize that a lot of CIOs and IT decision makers need to understand what consumers are really doing in terms of technology to make them successful. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> When you're the number one business laptop of all time, your only competition is yourself. (wall shattering) And, that's different. Different, like resisting heat, ice, dust, and spills. Different, like sharper, brighter OLA display. The trackpoint that reinvented controls, and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, built by an engineering and design team, doing the impossible for the last 25 years. This is the number one business laptop of all time, but it's not a laptop. It's a ThinkPad. (audience applauding) >> Thank you very much. And we are very proud that Lenovo ThinkPad has been selected as the best laptop in the world in the second year in a row. I think it's a wonderful tribute to what our engineers have been done on this one. And users do want awesome displays. They want the best possible audio, voice, and touch control, but some users they want more. What they want is super power, and I'm really proud to announce our newest member of the X1 family, and that's the X1 extreme. It's exceptionally featured. It has six core I9 intel chipset, the highest performance you get in the commercial space. It has Nvidia XTX graphic, it is a 4K UHD display with HDR with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos Audio, two terabyte in SSD, so it is really the absolute Ferrari in terms of building high performance commercial computer. Of course it has touch and voice, but it is one thing. It has so much performance that it serves also a purpose that is not typical for commercial, and I know there's a lot of secret gamers also here in this room. So you see, by really bringing technology together in the commercial space, you're creating productivity solutions of one of a kind. But there's another category of products from a productivity perspective that is incredibly important in our commercial business, and that is the workstation business . Clearly workstations are very specifically designed computers for very advanced high-performance workloads, serving designers, architects, researchers, developers, or data analysts. And power and performance is not just about the performance itself. It has to be tailored towards the specific use case, and traditionally these products have a similar size, like a server. They are running on Intel Xeon technology, and they are equally complex to manufacture. We have now created a new category as the ultra mobile workstation, and I'm very proud that we can announce here the lightest mobile workstation in the industry. It is so powerful that it really can run AI and big data analysis. And with this performance you can go really close where you need this power, to the sensors, into the cars, or into the manufacturing places where you not only wannna read the sensors but get real-time analytics out of these sensors. To build a machine like this one you need customers who are really challenging you to the limit. and we're very happy that we had a customer who went on this journey with us, and ultimately jointly with us created this product. So, let's take a look at the video. (suspenseful music) >> My world involves pathfinding both the hardware needs to the various work sites throughout the company, and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, laptop, or workstation to match those needs. My first impressions when I first seen the ThinkPad P1 was I didn't actually believe that we could get everything that I was asked for inside something as small and light in comparison to other mobile workstations. That was one of the I can't believe this is real sort of moments for me. (engine roars) >> Well, it's better than general when you're going around in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, and going on a track is not necessarily the best bet, so having a lightweight very powerful laptop is extremely useful. It can take a Xeon processor, which can support ECC from when we try to load a full car, and when we're analyzing live simulation results. through and RCFT post processor or example. It needs a pretty powerful machine. >> It's come a long way to be able to deliver this. I hate to use the word game changer, but it is that for us. >> Aston Martin has got a lot of different projects going. There's some pretty exciting projects and a pretty versatile range coming out. Having Lenovo as a partner is certainly going to ensure that future. (engine roars) (audience applauds) >> So, don't you think the Aston Martin design and the ThinkPad design fit very well together? (audience laughs) So if Q, would get a new laptop, I think you would get a ThinkPad X P1. So, I want to switch gears a little bit, and go into something in terms of productivity that is not necessarily on top of the mind or every end user but I believe it's on top of the mind of every C-level executive and of every CEO. Security is the number one threat in terms of potential risk in your business and the cost of cybersecurity is estimated by 2020 around six trillion dollars. That's more than the GDP of Japan and we've seen a significant amount of data breach incidents already this years. Now, they're threatening to take companies out of business and that are threatening companies to lose a huge amount of sensitive customer data or internal data. At Lenovo, we are taking security very, very seriously, and we run a very deep analysis, around our own security capabilities in the products that we are building. And we are announcing today a new brand under the Think umbrella that is called ThinkShield. Our goal is to build the world's most secure PC, and ultimately the most secure devices in the industry. And when we looked at this end-to-end, there is no silver bullet around security. You have to go through every aspect where security breaches can potentially happen. That is why we have changed the whole organization, how we look at security in our device business, and really have it grouped under one complete ecosystem of solutions, Security is always something where you constantly are getting challenged with the next potential breach the next potential technology flaw. As we keep innovating and as we keep integrating, a lot of our partners' software and hardware components into our products. So for us, it's really very important that we partner with companies like Intel, Microsoft, Coronet, Absolute, and many others to really as an example to drive full encryption on all the data seamlessly, to have multi-factor authentication to protect your users' identity, to protect you in unsecured Wi-Fi locations, or even simple things like innovation on the device itself, to and an example protect the camera, against usage with a little thing like a thinkShutter that you can shut off the camera. SO what I want to show you here, is this is the full portfolio of ThinkShield that we are announcing today. This is clearly not something I can even read to you today, but I believe it shows you the breadth of security management that we are announcing today. There are four key pillars in managing security end-to-end. The first one is your data, and this has a lot of aspects around the hardware and the software itself. The second is identity. The third is the security around online, and ultimately the device itself. So, there is a breakout on security and ThinkShield today, available in the afternoon, and encourage you to really take a deeper look at this one. The first pillar around productivity was the device, and around the device. The second major pillar that we are seeing in terms of intelligent transformation is the workspace itself. Employees of a new generation have a very different habit how they work. They split their time between travel, working remotely but if they do come in the office, they expect a very different office environment than what they've seen in the past in cubicles or small offices. They come into the office to collaborate, and they want to create ideas, and they really work in cross-functional teams, and they want to do it instantly. And what we've seen is there is a huge amount of investment that companies are doing today in reconfiguring real estate reconfiguring offices. And most of these kind of things are moving to a digital platform. And what we are doing, is we want to build an entire set of solutions that are just focused on making the workspace more productive for remote workforce, and to create technology that allow people to work anywhere and connect instantly. And the core of this is that we need to be, the productivity of the employee as high as possible, and make it for him as easy as possible to use these kind of technologies. Last year in Transform, I announced that we will enter the smart office space. By the end of last year, we brought the first product into the market. It's called the Hub 500. It's already deployed in thousands of our customers, and it's uniquely focused on Microsoft Skype for Business, and making meeting instantly happen. And the product is very successful in the market. What we are announcing today is the next generation of this product, what is the Hub 700, what has a fantastic audio quality. It has far few microphones, and it is usable in small office environment, as well as in major conference rooms, but the most important part of this new announcement is that we are also announcing a software platform, and this software platform allows you to run multiple video conferencing software solutions on the same platform. Many of you may have standardized for one software solution or for another one, but as you are moving in a world of collaborating instantly with partners, customers, suppliers, you always will face multiple software standards in your company, and Lenovo is uniquely positioned but providing a middleware platform for the device to really enable multiple of these UX interfaces. And there's more to come and we will add additional UX interfaces on an ongoing base, based on our customer requirements. But this software does not only help to create a better experience and a higher productivity in the conference room or the huddle room itself. It really will allow you ultimately to manage all your conference rooms in the company in one instance. And you can run AI technologies around how to increase productivity utilization of your entire conference room ecosystem in your company. You will see a lot more devices coming from the node in this space, around intelligent screens, cameras, and so on, and so on. The idea is really that Lenovo will become a core provider in the whole movement into the smart office space. But it's great if you have hardware and software that is really supporting the approach of modern IT, but one component that Kirk also mentioned is absolutely critical, that we are providing this to you in an as a service approach. Get it what you want, when you need it, and pay it in the amount that you're really using it. And within UIT there is also I think a new philosophy around IT management, where you're much more focused on the value that you are consuming instead of investing into technology. We are launched as a service two years back and we already have a significant number of customers running PC as a service, but we believe as a service will stretch far more than just the PC device. It will go into categories like smart office. It might go even into categories like phone, and it will definitely go also in categories like storage and server in terms of capacity management. I want to highlight three offerings that we are also displaying today that are sort of building blocks in terms of how we really run as a service. The first one is that we collaborated intensively over the last year with Microsoft to be the launch pilot for their Autopilot offering, basically deploying images easily in the same approach like you would deploy a new phone on the network. The purpose really is to make new imaging and enabling new PC as seamless as it's used to be in the phone industry, and we have a complete set of offerings, and already a significant number customers have deployed Autopilot with Lenovo. The second major offering is Premier Support, like in the in the server business, where Premier Support is absolutely critical to run critical infrastructure, we see a lot of our customers do want to have Premier Support for their end users, so they can be back into work basically instantly, and that you have the highest possible instant repair on every single device. And then finally we have a significant amount of time invested into understanding how the software as a service really can get into one philosophy. And many of you already are consuming software as a service in many different contracts from many different vendors, but what we've created is one platform that really can manage this all together. All these things are the foundation for a device as a service offering that really can manage this end-to-end. So, implementing an intelligent workplace can be really a daunting prospect depending on where you're starting from, and how big your company ultimately is. But how do you manage the transformation of technology workspace if you're present in 50 or more countries and you run an infrastructure for more than 100,000 people? Michelin, famous for their tires, infamous for their Michelin star restaurant rating, especially in New York, and instantly recognizable by the Michelin Man, has just doing that. Please welcome with me Damon McIntyre from Michelin to talk to us about the challenges and transforming collaboration and productivity. (audience applauding) (electronic dance music) Thank you, David. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> We on? >> So, how do you feel here? >> Well good, I want to thank you first of all for your partnership and the devices you create that helped us design, manufacture, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? I just had to say it and put out there, alright. And I was wondering, were those Michelin tires on that Aston Martin? >> I'm pretty sure there is no other tire that would fit to that. >> Yeah, no, thank you, thank you again, and thank you for the introduction. >> So, when we talk about the transformation happening really in the workplace, the most tangible transformation that you actually see is the drastic change that companies are doing physically. They're breaking down walls. They're removing cubes, and they're moving to flexible layouts, new desks, new huddle rooms, open spaces, but the underlying technology for that is clearly not so visible very often. So, tell us about Michelin's strategy, and the technology you are deploying to really enable this corporation. >> So we, so let me give a little bit a history about the company to understand the daunting tasks that we had before us. So we have over 114,000 people in the company under 170 nationalities, okay? If you go to the corporate office in France, it's Clermont. It's about 3,000 executives and directors, and what have you in the marketing, sales, all the way up to the chain of the global CIO, right? Inside of the Americas, we merged in Americas about three years ago. Now we have the Americas zone. There's about 28,000 employees across the Americas, so it's really, it's really hard in a lot of cases. You start looking at the different areas that you lose time, and you lose you know, your productivity and what have you, so there, it's when we looked at different aspects of how we were going to manage the meeting rooms, right? because we have opened up our areas of workspace, our CIO, CEOs in our zones will no longer have an office. They'll sit out in front of everybody else and mingle with the crowd. So, how do you take those spaces that were originally used by an individual but now turn them into like meeting rooms? So, we went through a large process, and looked at the Hub 500, and that really met our needs, because at the end of the day what we noticed was, it was it was just it just worked, okay? We've just added it to the catalog, so we're going to be deploying it very soon, and I just want to again point that I know everybody struggles with this, and if you look at all the minutes that you lose in starting up a meeting, and we know you know what I'm talking about when I say this, it equates to many many many dollars, okay? And so at the end the day, this product helps us to be more efficient in starting up the meeting, and more productive during the meeting. >> Okay, it's very good to hear. Another major trend we are seeing in IT departments is taking a more hands-off approach to hardware. We're seeing new technologies enable IT to create a more efficient model, how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, and how they are ultimately supporting themselves. So what's your strategy around the lifecycle management of the devices? >> So yeah you mentioned, again, we'll go back to the 114,000 employees in the company, right? You imagine looking at all the devices we use. I'm not going to get into the number of devices we have, but we have a set number that we use, and we have to go through a process of deploying these devices, which we right now service our own image. We build our images, we service them through our help desk and all that process, and we go through it. If you imagine deploying 25,000 PCs in a year, okay? The time and the daunting task that's behind all that, you can probably add up to 20 or 30 people just full-time doing that, okay? So, with partnering with Lenovo and their excellent technology, their technical teams, and putting together the whole process of how we do imaging, it now lifts that burden off of our folks, and it shifts it into a more automated process through the cloud, okay? And, it's with the Autopilot on the end of the project, we'll have Autopilot fully engaged, but what I really appreciate is how Lenovo really, really kind of got with us, and partnered with us for the whole process. I mean it wasn't just a partner between Michelin and Lenovo. Microsoft was also partnered during that whole process, and it really was a good project that we put together, and we hope to have something in a full production mode next year for sure. >> So, David thank you very, very much to be here with us on stage. What I really want to say, customers like you, who are always challenging us on every single aspect of our capabilities really do make the big difference for us to get better every single day and we really appreciate the partnership. >> Yeah, and I would like to say this is that I am, I'm doing what he's exactly said he just said. I am challenging Lenovo to show us how we can innovate in our work space with your devices, right? That's a challenge, and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. We've done some in the past, but I'm really going to challenge you, and my whole aspect about how to do that is bring you into our workspace. Show you how we make how we go through the process of making tires and all that process, and how we distribute those tires, so you can brainstorm, come back to the table and say, here's a device that can do exactly what you're doing right now, better, more efficient, and save money, so thank you. >> Thank you very much, David. (audience applauding) Well it's sometimes really refreshing to get a very challenging customers feedback. And you know, we will continue to grow this business together, and I'm very confident that your challenge will ultimately help to make our products even more seamless together. So, as we now covered productivity and how we are really improving our devices itself, and the transformation around the workplace, there is one pillar left I want to talk about, and that's really, how do we make businesses smarter than ever? What that really means is, that we are on a journey on trying to understand our customer's business, deeper than ever, understanding our customer's processes even better than ever, and trying to understand how we can help our customers to become more competitive by injecting state-of-the-art technology in this intelligent transformation process, into core processes. But this cannot be done without talking about a fundamental and that is the journey towards 5G. I really believe that 5G is changing everything the way we are operating devices today, because they will be connected in a way like it has never done before. YY talked about you know, 20 times 10 times the amount of performance. There are other studies that talk about even 200 times the performance, how you can use these devices. What it will lead to ultimately is that we will build devices that will be always connected to the cloud. And, we are preparing for this, and Kirk already talked about, and how many operators in the world we already present with our Moto phones, with how many Telcos we are working already on the backend, and we are working on the device side on integrating 5G basically into every single one of our product in the future. One of the areas that will benefit hugely from always connected is the world of virtual reality and augmented reality. And I'm going to pick here one example, and that is that we have created a commercial VR solution for classrooms and education, and basically using consumer type of product like our Mirage Solo with Daydream and put a solution around this one that enables teachers and schools to use these products in the classroom experience. So, students now can have immersive learning. They can studying sciences. They can look at environmental issues. They can exploring their careers, or they can even taking a tour in the next college they're going to go after this one. And no matter what grade level, this is how people will continue to learn in the future. It's quite a departure from the old world of textbooks. In our area that we are looking is IoT, And as YY already elaborated, we are clearly learning from our own processes around how we improve our supply chain and manufacturing and how we improve also retail experience and warehousing, and we are working with some of the largest companies in the world on pilots, on deploying IoT solutions to make their businesses, their processes, and their businesses, you know, more competitive, and some of them you can see in the demo environment. Lenovo itself already is managing 55 million devices in an IoT fashion connecting to our own cloud, and constantly improving the experience by learning from the behavior of these devices in an IoT way, and we are collecting significant amount of data to really improve the performance of these systems and our future generations of products on a ongoing base. We have a very strong partnership with a company called ADLINK from Taiwan that is one of the leading manufacturers of manufacturing PC and hardened devices to create solutions on the IoT platform. The next area that we are very actively investing in is commercial augmented reality. I believe augmented reality has by far more opportunity in commercial than virtual reality, because it has the potential to ultimately improve every single business process of commercial customers. Imagine in the future how complex surgeries can be simplified by basically having real-time augmented reality information about the surgery, by having people connecting into a virtual surgery, and supporting the surgery around the world. Visit a furniture store in the future and see how this furniture looks in your home instantly. Doing some maintenance on some devices yourself by just calling the company and getting an online manual into an augmented reality device. Lenovo is exploring all kinds of possibilities, and you will see a solution very soon from Lenovo. Early when we talked about smart office, I talked about the importance of creating a software platform that really run all these use cases for a smart office. We are creating a similar platform for augmented reality where companies can develop and run all their argumented reality use cases. So you will see that early in 2019 we will announce an augmented reality device, as well as an augmented reality platform. So, I know you're very interested on what exactly we are rolling out, so we will have a first prototype view available there. It's still a codename project on the horizon, and we will announce it ultimately in 2019, but I think it's good for you to take a look what we are doing here. So, I just wanted to give you a peek on what we are working beyond smart office and the device productivity in terms of really how we make businesses smarter. It's really about increasing productivity, providing you the most secure solutions, increase workplace collaboration, increase IT efficiency, using new computing devices and software and services to make business smarter in the future. There's no other company that will enable to offer what we do in commercial. No company has the breadth of commercial devices, software solutions, and the same data center capabilities, and no other company can do more for your intelligent transformation than Lenovo. Thank you very much. (audience applauding) >> Thanks mate, give me that. I need that. Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we are done. So firstly, I've got a couple of little housekeeping pieces at the end of this and then we can go straight into going and experiencing some of the technology we've got on the left-hand side of the room here. So, I want to thank Christian obviously. Christian, awesome as always, some great announcements there. I love the P1. I actually like the Aston Martin a little bit better, but I'll take either if you want to give me one for free. I'll take it. We heard from YY obviously about the industry and how the the fourth Industrial Revolution is impacting us all from a digital transformation perspective, and obviously Kirk on DCG, the great NetApp announcement, which is going to be really exciting, actually that Twitter and some of the social media panels are absolutely going crazy, so it's good to see that the industry is really taking some impact. Some of the publications are really great, so thank you for the media who are obviously in the room publishing right no. But now, I really want to say it's all of your turn. So, all of you up the back there who are having coffee, it's your turn now. I want everyone who's sitting down here after this event move into there, and really take advantage of the 15 breakouts that we've got set there. There are four breakout sessions from a time perspective. I want to try and get you all out there at least to use up three of them and use your fourth one to get out and actually experience some of the technology. So, you've got four breakout sessions. A lot of the breakout sessions are actually done twice. If you have not downloaded the app, please download the app so you can actually see what time things are going on and make sure you're registering correctly. There's a lot of great experience of stuff out there for you to go do. I've got one quick video to show you on some of the technology we've got and then we're about to close. Alright, here we are acting crazy. Now, you can see obviously, artificial intelligence machine learning in the browser. God, I hate that dance, I'm not a Millenial at all. It's effectively going to be implemented by healthcare. I want you to come around and test that out. Look at these two guys. This looks like a Lenovo management meeting to be honest with you. These two guys are actually concentrating, using their brain power to race each others in cars. You got to come past and give that a try. Give that a try obviously. Fantastic event here, lots of technology for you to experience, and great partners that have been involved as well. And so, from a Lenovo perspective, we've had some great alliance partners contribute, including obviously our number one partner, Intel, who's been a really big loyal contributor to us, and been a real part of our success here at Transform. Excellent, so please, you've just seen a little bit of tech out there that you can go and play with. I really want you, I mean go put on those black things, like Scott Hawkins our chief marketing officer from Lenovo's DCG business was doing and racing around this little car with his concentration not using his hands. He said it's really good actually, but as soon as someone comes up to speak to him, his car stops, so you got to try and do better. You got to try and prove if you can multitask or not. Get up there and concentrate and talk at the same time. 62 different breakouts up there. I'm not going to go into too much detai, but you can see we've got a very, very unusual numbering system, 18 to 18.8. I think over here we've got a 4849. There's a 4114. And then up here we've got a 46.1 and a 46.2. So, you need the decoder ring to be able to understand it. Get over there have a lot of fun. Remember the boat leaves today at 4:00 o'clock, right behind us at the pier right behind us here. There's 400 of us registered. Go onto the app and let us know if there's more people coming. It's going to be a great event out there on the Hudson River. Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote. I want to thank you all for being patient and thank all of our speakers today. Have a great have a great day, thank you very much. (audience applauding) (upbeat music) ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ♪ ♪ Ba da bop bop bop ba do ♪
SUMMARY :
and those around you, Ladies and gentlemen, we ask that you please take an available seat. Ladies and gentlemen, once again we ask and software that transform the way you collaborate, Good morning everyone! Ooh, that was pretty good actually, and have a look at all of the breakout sessions. and the industries demand to be more intelligent, and the strategies that we have going forward I'm going to give you the stage and allow you to say is that the first products are orderable and being one of the largest device companies in the world. and exactly what's going on with that. I think I'll need that. Okay, Christian, so obviously just before we get down, You're in Munich? and it's a great place to live and raise kids, And I miss it a lot, but I still believe the best sushi in the world and I have had sushi here, it's been fantastic. (Christian laughing) the real Oktoberfest in Munich, in relation to Oktoberfest, at the Lower East Side in Avenue C at Zum Schneider, and consequently ended up with you. and is reconfiguring it based on the work he's doing and a carbon fiber roll cage to protect what's inside, and that is the workstation business . and then finding an appropriate model of desktop, in the wind tunnel, which isn't alway easy, I hate to use the word game changer, is certainly going to ensure that future. And the core of this is that we need to be, and distribute the best tire in the world, okay? that would fit to that. and thank you for the introduction. and the technology you are deploying and more productive during the meeting. how IT gets hardware in the hands of end-users, You imagine looking at all the devices we use. and we really appreciate the partnership. and it's going to be starting up next year for sure. and how many operators in the world Ladies and gentlemen that is the end of your keynote.
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Nataliya Hearn, Cryptochicks | Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018
>> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE! >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, we're live here in Toronto for the Blockchain Futurist Conference put on by Untraceable, Tracy and her team doing a fantastic job, so shout out to the team at Untraceable for another great event. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, my cohost's Dave Vellante, and we're here with CUBE's friend, CUBE alumni, from the CryptoChicks, Nataliya Hearn, director, good to see you, great to have you back. >> Thank you. (laughs) >> Okay, good to see you, we're laughing, we've got some great funny stories we've been telling, since PolyCon, but really, some great things going on, so give us the update, you had a hackathon recently, you got new things happening here in your organization, take a quick minute to explain what it is for the folks that don't know, what do you guys do, and what's going on? >> Good, well, CryptoChicks is a organization focused on educating women in blockchain and cryptospace. We started because at meetups there would be one or two women out of hundreds of men, who would be afraid to ask stupid questions, so we said, Oh, okay, there's no stupid questions, come and join us, and we'll show you how to open a wallet, what blockchain is all about, so we've been doing that. We've actually grew quite a bit, we are now have chapters in all over the world, in Pakistan, in Bahamas, in Moscow, we just teamed up with She Codes in Israel, which is 50,000 women, so, we're doing really well. >> Congratulations, a great mission, we totally support it, and, you know, I'm proud to say that I love my shirt that says, Satoshi is Female, thanks to Nyla Rodgers, who gave it to me, at Consensus in Blockchain Week in New York, but this is really beyond women in tech, it's beyond that, it's a really, you're doing some innovative things around onboarding, new talent and education, this is a really important, because the Internet is bounded on discovery, learning. >> Absolutely. >> What's the new thing? >> Well, you know when you hear, when you go to the blockchain conference and events, and we hear again and again about the chasm. How do we bridge the chasm, right? That's just the, like, big word that you hear like every third presentation, because the blockchain community needs it. But I think globally, blockchain represents something that's quite unique, and it's an opportunity not just to make money and speculate, or to develop new technology, it's technology that can liberate. But how do we get that message across? And I think we have to start with kids. Kids are our future, but they're also the ones who spend most of their time on social media, so that's a good thing, but if you ask their parents, that's not such a good thing necessarily. So how do we convert them, some of their time from social media to learning? So we've put, we're putting together this program that focuses on children to earn to learn. >> Earn to learn, like they earn coins or money, or? >> That's right, basically they can earn swag, so basically we're creating the marketplace that rewards children for learning. >> All kids, right? >> All kids, well we're focusing on -- >> On girls. >> No, not on girls, we're going to high schools, so immediate next generation. >> So girls, boys, everybody's welcome? >> Absolutely. Yep. >> Awesome. >> Next generation, and they're the next generation that has to solve the problems that we, and opportunities that can be captured, that's coming right to their front door. >> Absolutely, we have a lot of question marks in the blockchain community. Which blockchain, how do we do it, there is going to be multi-chain tokens, we're talking about, next generation is the one who's going to provide solutions for us. So we got to open their minds, and to show that blockchain is a tool like potentially calculus is a tool. To create something that hasn't been there before. >> You know, I have a lot of conversations in Silicon Valley and Nataliya, recently at the Google Cloud event, Google's been very much a great change agent, especially with women in tech and underrepresented minorities, but Aparna Sinha, who's one of the senior people there, dual degrees from Stanford, she's got a PhD, she said we're losing the girls early, and what came out of it was a conversation that, when you have these new market movements like blockchain, AI, these are new skills that you can level up, so the ability to come from behind and level up is an opportunity for people who have traditionally been behind, whether it's women or other minorities, to level up. So it's a huge opportunity now to put the naysayers down to rest, and saying, Screw you, we're going to level up and learn. >> Absolutely, and it's global, the thing is -- >> There's nothing stopping anyone from learning. >> Absolutely, and trust, and the borderless system that blockchain potentially can provide is at a global advantage. As long as you have a cell phone, you can be in a village, an old village, like at our last hackathon, we actually were streaming women hackers from Zimbabwe. So there you go, it's doable. >> So how are you, how are you scaling your message globally? >> So we're starting, one thing is that education today, is basically the bill is being paid either by the government or by parents. The reason I would call that a marketplace, I would like companies to be involved. And it could be local companies, or it could be global. What about creating ARVR classrooms, and providing the information to kids, via a completely new way that they would actually move away from swiping or just looking on some random YouTube videos, to something that they can get a phone, some shoes, mascara, focusing on girls, right? And to understand what that borderless economy really means by experiencing, what does it mean to have tokens that you can trade globally? You are used to your parents giving you some dollars, you go to a corner store. What about if you learn something, you go to a bakery, in Kenya, and for the work that you've done, you get a bun, right, or a meal? >> So this democratizing access, it's bringing education to the masses? >> And it's also uniting the blockchain community, 'cause we would be building this governance platform on blockchain, we would tokenize it, and there will be many elements of it, reward programs, smart contracts that reward content, some level of AI in terms of analysis of what we're doing, so I think this is why I was looking at multi-chain tokens. Maybe that would be a solution to kind of, to deal with -- >> Explain that, what does that mean? >> Well, we've got different chains right now, right? You've got Hyperledger, you've got Ethereum, and all this good stuff. How do you bridge all this, right, instead of having to choose one, you're now saying, I can work in all of them, because each one potentially can offer something unique. Maybe you don't have to choose one. We don't know. Only time will tell, as this, this is such a young industry, and this is why it's so exciting. >> Well, Nataliya -- >> It -- >> Oh, go ahead. >> No, I was going to say, and you're giving the kids examples, so a lot of times kids ask me, Well, what's the difference between crypto and Venmo? I'm like, okay, you know, let's talk about the different things you can do with crypto that you can't do, but they're closer than the older generations are to transferring, you know, money, at least, so now you're applying different use cases and expanding their minds in ways that, perhaps -- >> Absolutely, and I'll give you my example. I mean, I got into blockchain early before Ethereum was launched, and partly I was into public markets, and then I kind of stopped because that project ended, or I stopped and I actually reentered it, because my fifteen-year-old who started mining. But he started mining because I was in that field already, so there you go, it kind of, you know, what comes around. >> Good job. I hope he gets all his Bitcoin. >> Yeah, he did. (laughs) >> So, I want you to tell a story, of what you've seen that's been high impact from your work you've done. You had, again, that whole Pakistan thing going on, you've got all these hackathons, what is a good story you could share? >> You know, the good story we can share, I think the part that we were able to do, the hackathons that we are doing are local, but they're also global, it really is, there's this sense of empowerment, and you know what I think the best story, this is the best story: best story was, at the hackathon that we ran, it was women, over 100 women, that participated. But all our mentors were young, geeky programming guys. Sorry guys. But you really knew they really knew their stuff, so there was technology transfer, and we had a 48 hour hackathon, these guys stayed 48 hours, they didn't go to sleep, they didn't have to as mentors, and there was this amazing technology transfer that happened, and I think some relationships were formed too. >> Yeah, some serious bonding went on, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's actually a good thing that you're including people. It's not just a certain thing, you got this inclusion. >> Absolutely, and actually all it is is about inclusion, all it is is we are giving a platform for women not to be afraid, I mean, I'm an engineer, so I've been working with men all my life, so for me to ask difficult questions, or stupid questions, it's like natural now, because it's been what my life, but for women, for many, it isn't. So we just wanted to kind of cross that divide, it's not a chasm, it's just a little divide that we're bridged. >> So when you say stupid questions, do you mean like, Why do you do it that way? (laughs) Why don't you do it this way? >> Or, what's a wallet? Like, what's a private key? What's a public key? And asking that not once, but twenty times until you got it. That's okay too. >> That's called learning. >> Yeah. >> Last question, okay I got to ask you, the most important question is, how do someone get a CryptoChicks shirt? >> I think you can order it on our website, sizes are a problem, I know we've discussed this, so we need to -- >> Extra-large. >> Well, CryptoChicks is a not-for-profit organization so there are, we'll have to order this in bunches, so I'll figure this out, but what I wanted to say is that we have another hackathon that's coming up. And the hackathon is in New York, October 5th to 8th, and we have three streams, so if you're a developer, and this is for women, so if you're a developer, we have a stream. If you're not a developer, or you've never coded in your life, but you have a business mind, and you think you have a really good idea that you can put on blockchain, you're welcome to join as well, and now with all the news and regulations, we also have a regulatory stream. >> So for entrepreneurs and for business-minded people, that want to get involved, that they can come too? >> Absolutely. >> Okay, and their website is cryptochicks.ca, that's where you can get access to the information, that's great. >> October 5th to 8th, you said, right? >> That's right. >> And anybody can go? >> Anybody can register. >> And where in New York? >> It's going to be at University of New York, and at their School of Law. >> Great. >> Blockchain Educational Fun Hub. That's what it says on the website, love your website. Looking forward to getting some shirts, and putting it out there, and promoting your mission. Great job, good to see you again. >> You guys are awesome. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, Nataliya. >> Thank you. >> This is crypto for good, a lot of education, and this opportunity, and our role is to share that, as a community, and I think this is a great example of the kind of community that crypto is. Education people can level up and move fast through and get proficiency, and change their lives. This is what this is all about, glad to bring us this CUBE coverage live, stay with us! Day One continues, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, we'll be right back from Toronto Blockchain Futurist Summit. Thank you. (techno music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by theCUBE! so shout out to the team at Untraceable Thank you. come and join us, and we'll show you how to open a wallet, that says, Satoshi is Female, thanks to Nyla Rodgers, that you hear like every third presentation, so basically we're creating the we're going to high schools, so immediate next generation. Absolutely. and opportunities that can be captured, there is going to be multi-chain tokens, that you can level up, so the ability So there you go, it's doable. and providing the information to kids, and there will be many elements of it, Maybe you don't have to choose one. and I'll give you my example. I hope he gets all his Bitcoin. Yeah, he did. what is a good story you could share? and you know what I think the best story, It's not just a certain thing, you got this inclusion. Absolutely, and actually all it is is about inclusion, And asking that not once, but twenty times until you got it. and you think you have a really good idea that's where you can get access to the information, It's going to be at University of New York, Great job, good to see you again. Thank you so much. and this opportunity, and our role is to share that,
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Gabriel Abed, Bitt & Digital Asset Fund | Global Cloud & Blockchain Summit 2018
(upbeat music) >> Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in Toronto for the Blockchain Cloud Summit, part of the Blockchain Futurist event happening tomorrow and Thursday here in Toronto. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We're here with Gabriel Abed who's the founder of Bitt and also the Digital Asset Fund. Great story he's been there from the beginning. President at creation in the movement that's now changing the world. Blockchain and cryptocurrency certainly. Infrastructure and token economics, changing how things are doing. And rolling out, reimagining everything from infrastructure to value exchanges. Gabriel welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you it's great to be here. >> So we were just talking on camera, you like to go after the big changes. You're an entrepreneur, you have that fire in your belly. You've been very successful. Where are we? I mean, you've been part of the movement, we're now on the cusp of mainstream adoption, there's still work to do. >> Oh, plenty of work. Lots of infrastructure still to build, many regulators and legislators still to educate, lots of laws still to be amended and changed. And, at the end of the day, it's happening and it's happening quickly and beautifully right now. The entire industry is changing. >> One of the things that you've done, you've taken on some big projects and you've made change happen. Regulation is one of the hottest topics we're hearing certainly in the United States, it affects innovation and there's so much entrepreneurial activity happening right now. There's so many entrepreneurs, alpha entrepreneurs really want to do great things, and regulation is just a blocker. It's an antibody for innovation. And you've busted through that. And it's probably going to continue. The old guard is either going to be replaced or adapting to the technology. You've done that, and a lot of people want to do what you've done. What's the secret? What's the secret of your success? How have you taken on these big, incumbent positions and taken them over >> But you're not running from regulators, you're embracing them. >> No, no, I think regulators are important to a responsible and sophisticated market. When my partner and I started Bitt in 2013, 2014, we immediately realized that if we wanted to build a product for the monetary authorities around the world, we needed to have the buy-in from the regulators. So from day one we were regulator-friendly. And it's not to say that we don't believe in a decentralized future, I'm as big of an advocate for decentralization and the freedom of information as anyone else, but I'm also a big believer in if you're a product for a market in the traditional world you have to involve the regulators in order to ensure that product does its job, keeps the consumers safe, and ensures that the economy around it doesn't collapse. So regulators are critical in this field. >> Talk about what you guys have done. Take a minute to explain the project you did, how it worked out, the tenacity, but also, what was the outcome? What were you trying to do in the project and where is it right now? >> It depends on the project you're referring to >> Maybe start at the beginning >> The Caribbean >> Let's start at the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Okay, so, Gabriel Abed, born, raised, educated in Barbados, around the age of 19, I decided I was going to take my computer science education a bit further. I went to Canada, I did a Bachelor of IT, where I majored in network security. In Ontario, the University of Ontario. And, unlike the rest of of my peers, who usually stay in Canada, I decided to go back to my little nation with the education that I had just received. And I took that education home, and started one of the world's first blockchain companies, but at the time I didn't understand blockchain per se, I understood it as a commodity, as a cool investment, I didn't understand the true nature behind the protocol itself. It was only until 2013 that my partner and I ran one of the larger mining operations in the world, that we realized a commodity was actually a protocol. A network tool. A system that you could build on top of. So in 2014, we actually created one of the world's first blockchain assets, on Bitcoin's blockchain. And that a representation of a digital dollar for a central bank. And the notion behind Bitt.com in 2014 was, let's compete with cash, because it's inefficient, it's costly, and it slows down the movement of society. So what we wanted to do is create a digital version of that, that would save economies hundreds of millions of dollars. Cash is expensive to to create, that linen, plastic, paper money, it's easily forged, it can be counterfeited, it's hard to transport, it has an expense to transport, it has an expense to count, it has an expense to secure, and then it has overheads around the entire ecosystem of accountability. Whereas, a blockchain-based digital dollar eliminates all of those efficiencies, and increases the ability for a monetary authority to trace, track, and have a better form of anti-money laundering, counter-terrorism financing and a better overview of their entire society. So that all, we took that notion, went to the central bank of Barbados, who at the time was being led by Dr. DeLisle Worrell, and our very first meeting he had asked me to excuse his office. And 13 meetings later, and a whole two years, lots of development, building out infrastructure around compliance, around finance, around security, and around regulation, we finally got the nod of approval from Dr. DeLisle Worrell to operate a fiat example of a digital dollar in Barbados. And since then, we have been working with several central banks around the world, bitt.com today is the leading central bank provider for digital dollars. A lot has changed, I've developed other tools since, and other businesses, but bitt.com continues to be the best friend for central banks looking to move and transition into the digital arena. >> Why, I mean other than a closed mindset, why wouldn't every government around the world want to move in this direction? Initiate some kind of FedCoin, for example. >> Education, education, it's the fear that the system may not be scalable, it's the fear that the system could be hacked, it's the fear that they could be cut out, their control, at the end of the day, monetary authorities, like the Federal Reserve, they have a control on the money supply. Whereas, something like decentralized cryptographic currencies, there is nobody in control of the money supply. Hence, inflation versus deflation systems. Then there's the issue of hacking and the threat of digital and cybersecurity. Typically, the head of these monetary authorities are older gentlemen who are traditionally conservative. And who are not (mumbles) with cybersecurity. So the fear of hacking is very real for someone like them, whereas someone like me who is trained as a network security expert, those fears can be mitigated with good policy and procedure, cold wallets, and the right process, to ensuring the environment can run without the risk or the fear of malicious attacks. So it really boils down to education. The educated governors of central banks, like there's one, for example, Timothy Antoine. Dr. Antoine is the governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. And they govern and mandate the currency union of eight islands below them. St. Lucia, Grenada, Antigua, et cetera. Now, he's a governor that gets this and has wrapped his head around it, and understands that this is the future. He gets it so much that he signed an agreement with bitt.com to begin exploring a pilot for his currency union to have a digital dollar implemented in it. You also have governors and presidents like that of Curacao. Or the central bank of Curacao, where we've just signed an agreement to move forward with a phase of looking at the implications of rolling out a digital dollar in a society like Curacao and St. Maarten. What is the ramifications? What is the feasibility study behind that? So, to answer your question, it's not every single regulator, governor, and central bank manager is going to head toward this technology tomorrow. But with more education, and more lobbying, you will see more and more central bank governors moving in this direction, because it's better, cheaper, faster, makes their job easier, gives them more control, gives them more oversight, and provides all the things that they would want as a central bank to continue to do their job for their society. Which is to protect their dollar from alien threats. And to ensure that the dollar remains stable, and to just generally ensure that the society is functioning the way it should. >> Gabriel, what's your vision on what this will enable for the citizens? What's the impact that you see happening? If this continues down the trajectory, what is the adoption look like, impact to people's lives on a everyday basis. >> Well, for a very starting point, you democratize payment. Right now, if I want to make a payment, I have to go through a utility company called a bank. And this bank typically has frictional costs, and frictional overheads and time. That's one of the biggest problems, is that these monopolistic infrastructures hinder the ability for the average participation of a free-flowing payment system. So what you end up having is rather than me being able to make a digital payment in seconds, with no cost, I have to wait days, I have to use manual-based systems whether it's check, cash or the bank's Visa Mastercard system. And then it has frictional costs. So right off the bat, you democratize payment. What does that do for a society in a developing nation? It empowers people. And you're empowered because now as a developer, I can build on this payment system. As an entrepreneur, I can tap in to this payment system. As a merchant, I can utilize this low-cost payment system. As a society, I now have GDP growth because of financial inclusion. The underbanked, who do not have access to banking facilities for one reason or another, maybe they don't like the bank, maybe the banks don't like them. Maybe they don't have two proofs of ID. Maybe they don't have a fixed place of abode. Maybe they don't have the minimum deposit amount. All of these features keep the poor and the underbanked out of the system. Whereas, in developed nations, we have mobile penetration rates that are through the roof. In some cases, like Barbados, over 100 percent. So if you have 100 percent penetration rate of this mobile platform, this thing in my pocket, but I cannot access the banking system, well flip that around, democratize the payment system, allow payments to exist on this mobile phone, and watch how quickly society becomes banked. So what you end up having is full adoption. Why would we not have full adoption when it's cheaper, it's faster, it's more inclusive. >> And the data from that collective intelligence only creates a digital nation >> A more responsible environment. >> Wealth creation environment. >> It creates a more traced, tracked, and accountable society so that the monetary authorities in the government can now start making educated decisions on data. They now know who's buying milk, who's gambling, who's paying their taxes and who's not. >> The downstream benefits of this are massive. >> The downstream benefits are massive, enormous. They're disruptive. This is a brand new fiscal tool, a monetary tool, being given to central banks to start eroding the field of private e-money systems, and to start bringing about a uniform standard towards payments. Plain and simple. We're going to the central banks and introducing a new monetary instrument, that they're in control of. That now the commercial banks, the financial institutions, the corporatocracies, the citizens, and the merchants can all fall under one roof issued by their monetary authority. And this is not a cell phone company or a bank building their own private system that I have to jump through some hoops and some red tape and sign away my first born and give away my left arm to enter. This is a free and open source standard system. >> And it's networked, as you said, penetration is 100 percent on mobile or roughly that, it's a network society that now has digital fabric built into it. This is the future. >> But I played this out in terms of, when you talked about this in your panel, now every device, every thing, every physical asset will be instrumented. >> Yes. >> And as a result, theory can be coconuts. >> You're building the deep infrastructure. I remember we met with World Bank back in 2014 and they coined this term for me. Because they were saying we want to help entrepreneurs and it's important to help entrepreneurs in developing nations because they're the lifeblood of it. But what we are building is the deep infrastructure. And that's exactly what it is. It's the infrastructure that would allow the entrepreneur and the developer to now have a framework that they can build against to provide more uplift. So in essence, it's really going to be exponential growth once systems like this are implemented. The stock market can move digital, and people could buy stocks using digital dollars. E-commerce can occur because I can now buy things online or sell things online with digital dollars. I can now be part of a global, financial ecosystem, with my smartphone and my wallet. >> That's a great use case, congratulations on amazing success, so much is on your plate, you've had great success in this new era, what's on your plate now, what are you working on, what's happening in your world now? >> So in 2017, we realized Bitt was entering a new growth phase. It was no longer a battle of trying to convince regulators and central banks, our product had been proven. Our reputation had been proven. It was time now to scale the company into a professional level of dealing with these regulators around the world. At the end of the day, we would like to digitize cash, wherever cash exists. And to provide those tools for central banks around the world. That would require professional management, and that is not I. >> (laughs) >> So, our investors and shareholders were quite comfortable with our proposal of bringing on that professional management, so in 2017 I resigned as CEO, retained a board position and still single largest shareholder, but with the idea of what other types of infrastructure can I build, now that a deep infrastructure had been put in place. So I've been attacking three major markets, the banking sector, an actual commercial banking enterprise working with a group from the United States towards looking at deploying the future of where we think commercial banking is going. I think that the community, the crypto community in general, there's a lot of noise happening in the chats. And therefore we built a machine learning chat bot to start looking at market sentiments and aggregating market information and of course building common tools for community members. So we've launched a agent called Gabby, the form to gab. My name's Gabriel and my mom calls me Gabby, so it works out quite well. >> You have the gift of gab that's for sure. >> And then I launched a mutual fund with a very sophisticated former managing director of JPMorgan. A guy named Richard Galvin. And we launched the world's first protocol-only fund. We focus only on protocols. And that's called Digital Asset Fund. And we launched that in late 2017 and got full regulatory approval to become a professional fund, that handles 100 percent, solely crypto. And that's basically been my ride, and then outside of that, just your standard consulting, because everybody from World Bank, to IADB, to some government agency to some private organization wants to know about blockchain they want advice, and they need a team of people to give them that advice. So it's just been, all around, looking at how I can be an entrepreneur in this space, while finding great leaders, and partnering with those leaders to build out great companies. While still focusing on ensuring bitt.com becomes the solution for dollars, digital dollars, worldwide. >> Got a great mission, entrepreneur, builder, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Industry's lucky to have you, congratulations. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you guys. >> CUBE coverage here, live in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in concert with the Blockchain Futures Conference happening in the next two days after today. More coverage from theCUBE we're live here, stay with us for more great coverage after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)
SUMMARY :
Brought to you by theCUBE. and also the Digital Asset Fund. So we were just talking on camera, And, at the end of the day, it's happening One of the things that you've done, But you're not running from regulators, and ensures that the economy around it doesn't collapse. Take a minute to explain the project you did, the best friend for central banks looking to move want to move in this direction? and the right process, to ensuring the environment can run What's the impact that you see happening? So right off the bat, you democratize payment. so that the monetary authorities in the government and give away my left arm to enter. This is the future. But I played this out in terms of, and the developer to now have a framework that they can At the end of the day, we would like to digitize cash, at deploying the future of where we think commercial banking the solution for dollars, digital dollars, worldwide. Got a great mission, entrepreneur, builder, in the next two days after today.
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Bradley Rotter, Investor | Global Cloud & Blockchain Summit 2018
>> Live from Toronto Canada, it's The Cube, covering Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit 2018, brought to you by The Cube. >> Hello, everyone welcome back to The Cube's live coverage here in Toronto for the first Global Cloud and Blockchain Summit in conjunction with the Blockchain futurist happening this week it's run. I'm John Fourier, my cohost Dave Vellante, we're here with Cube alumni, Bradley Rotter, pioneer Blockchain investor, seasoned pro was there in the early days as an investor in hedge funds, continuing to understand the impacts of cryptocurrency, and its impact for investors, and long on many of the crypto. Made some great predictions on The Cube last time at Polycon in the Bahamas. Bradley, great to see you, welcome back. >> Thank you, good to see both of you. >> Good to have you back. >> So I want to just get this out there because you have an interesting background, you're in the cutting edge, on the front lines, but you also have a history. You were early before the hedge fund craze, as a pioneer than. >> Yeah. >> Talk about that and than how it connects to today, and see if you see some similarities, talk about that. >> I actually had begun trading commodity futures contracts when I was 15. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, which is a small state in the Midwest. >> I've heard of it. >> And I was in charge of >> Was it a test market? (laughing) >> I was in charge of hedging our one corn contract so I learned learned the mechanisms of the market. It was great experience. I traded commodities all the way through college. I got to go to West Point as undergrad. And I raced back to Chicago as soon as I could to go to the University of Chicago because that's where commodities were trading. So I'd go to night school at night at the University of Chicago and listen to Nobel laureates talk about the official market theory and during the day I was trading on the floor of the the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Grown men yelling, kicking, screaming, shoving and spitting, it was fabulous. (laughing) >> Sounds like Blockchain today. (laughing) >> So is that what the dynamic is, obviously we've seen the revolution, certainly of capital formation, capital deployment, efficiency, liquidity all those things are happening, how does that connect today? What's your vision of today's market? Obviously lost thirty billion dollars in value over the past 24 hours as of today and we've taken a little bit of a haircut, significant haircut, since you came on The Cube, and you actually were first to predict around February, was a February? >> February, yeah. >> You kind of called the market at that time, so props to that, >> Yup. >> Hope you're on the right >> Thank you. >> side of those shorts >> Thank you. >> But what's going on? What is happening in the capital markets, liquidity, why are the prices dropping? What's the shift? So just a recap, at the time in February, you said look I'm on short term bear, on Bitcoin, and may be other crypto because all the money that's been made. the people who made it didn't think they had to pay taxes. And now they're realizing, and you were right on. You said up and up through sort of tax season it's going to be soft and then it's going to come back and it's exactly what happened. Now it's flipped again, so your thoughts? >> So my epiphany was I woke up in the middle of the night and said oh my God, I've been to this rodeo before. I was trading utility tokens twenty years ago when they were called something else, IRUs, do you remember that term? IRU was the indefeasible right to use a strand of fiber, and as the internet started kicking off people were crazy about laying bandwidth. Firms like Global Crossing we're laying cable all over the ocean floors and they laid too much cable and the cable became dark, the fiber became dark, and firms like Global Crossing, Enron, Enron went under really as a result of that miss allocation. And so it occurred to me these utility tokens now are very similar in characteristic except to produce a utility token you don't have to rent a boat and lay cable on the ocean floor in order to produce one of these utility tokens, that everybody's buying, I mean it takes literally minutes to produce a token. So in a nutshell it's too many damn tokens. It was like the peak of the internet, which we were all involved in. It occurred to me then in January of 2000 the market was demanding internet shares and the market was really good at producing internet shares, too many of them, and it went down. So I think we're in a similar situation with cryptocurrency, the Wall Street did come in, there were a hundred plus hedge funds of all shapes and sizes scrambling and buying crypto in the fall of last year. It's kind of like Napoleon's reason for attacking Russia, seemed like a good idea at the time. (laughing) And so we're now in a corrective phase but literally there's been too many tokens. There are so many tokens that we as humans can't even deal with that. >> And the outlook, what's the outlook for you? I mean, I'll see there's some systemic things going to be flushed out, but you long on certain areas? What do you what do you see as a bright light at the end of the tunnel or sort right in front of you? What's happening from a market that you're excited about? >> At a macro scale I think it's apparent that the internet deserves its own currency, of course it does and there will be an internet currency. The trick is which currency shall that be? Bitcoin was was a brilliant construct, the the inventor of Bitcoin should get a Nobel Prize, and I hope she does. (laughing) >> 'Cause Satoshi is female, everyone knows that. (laughing) >> I got that from you actually. (laughing) But it may not be Bitcoin and that's why we have to be a little sanguine here. You know, people got a little bit too optimistic, Bitcoin's going to a hundred grand, no it's going to five hundred grand. I mean, those are all red flags based on my experience of trading on the floor and investing in hedge funds. Bitcoin, I think I'm disappointed in Bitcoins adoption, you know it's still very difficult to use Bitcoin and I was hoping by now that that would be a different scenario but it really isn't. Very few people use Bitcoin in their daily lives. I do, I've been paying my son his allowance for years in Bitcoin. Son of a bitch is rich now. (laughing) >> Damn, so on terms of like the long game, you seeing the developers adopted a theory and that was classic, you know the decentralized applications. We're here at a Cloud Blockchain kind of convergence conference where developers mattered on the Cloud. You saw a great developer, stakeholders with Amazon, Cloud native, certainly there's a lot of developers trying to make things easier, faster, smarter, with crypto. >> Yup. >> So, but all at the same time it's hard for developers. Hearing things like EOS coming on, trying to get developers. So there's a race for developer adoption, this is a major factor in some of the success and price drops too. Your thoughts on, you know the impact, has that changed anything? I mean, the Ethereum at the lowest it's been all year. >> Yup. Yeah well, that was that was fairly predictable and I've talked about that at number of talks I've given. There's only one thing that all of these ICOs have had in common, they're long Ethereum. They own Ethereum, and many of those projects, even out the the few ICO projects that I've selectively been advising I begged them to do once they raised their money in Ethereum is to convert it into cash. I said you're not in the Ethereum business, you're in whatever business that you're in. Many of them ported on to that stake, again caught up in the excitement about the the potential price appreciation but they lost track of what business they were really in. They were speculating in Ethereum. Yeah, I said they might as well been speculating in Apple stock. >> They could have done better then Ethereum. >> Much better. >> Too much supply, too many damn tokens, and they're easy to make. That's the issue. >> Yeah. >> And you've got lots of people making them. When one of the first guys I met in this space was Vitalik Buterin, he was 18 at the time and I remember meeting him I thought, this is one of the smartest guys I've ever met. It was a really fun meeting. I remember when the meeting ended and I walked away I was about 35 feet away and he LinkedIn with me. Which I thought was cute. >> That's awesome, talk about what you're investing-- >> But, now there's probably a thousand Vitalik Buterin's in the space. Many of them are at this conference. >> And a lot of people have plans. >> Super smart, great ideas, and boom, token. >> And they're producing new tokens. They're all better improved, they're borrowing the best attributes of each but we've got too many damn tokens. It's hard for us humans to be able to keep track of that. It's almost like requiring a complicated new browser download for every website you went to. We just can't do that. >> Is the analog, you remember the dot com days, you referred to it earlier, there was quality, and the quality lasted, sustained, you know, the Amazon's, the eBay's, the PayPal's, etc, are there analogs in this market, in your view, can you sniff out the sort of quality? >> There are definitely analogs, I think, but I think one of the greatest metrics that we can we can look at is that utility token being utilized? Not many of them are being utilized. I was giving a talk last month, 350 people in the audience, and I said show of hands, how many people have used a utility token this year? One hand went up. I go, Ethereum? Ethereum. Will we be using utility tokens in the future? Of course we will but it's going to have to get a whole lot easier for us humans to be able to deal with them, and understand them, and not lose them, that's the big issue. This is just as much a cybersecurity play as it is a digital currency play. >> Elaborate on that, that thought, why is more cyber security playing? >> Well, I've had an extensive background in cyber security as an investor, my mantra since 9/11 has been to invest in catalyze companies that impact the security of the homeland. A wide variety of security plays but primarily, cyber security. It occurred to me that the most valuable data in the world used to be in the Pentagon. That's no longer the case. Two reasons basically, one, the data has already been stolen. (laughing) Not funny. Two, if you steal the plans for the next generation F39 Joint Strike Force fighter, good for you, there's only two buyers. (laughing) The most valuable data in the world today, as we sit here, is a Bitcoin private key, and they're coming for them. Prominent Bitcoin holders are being hunted, kidnapped, extorted, I mean it's a rather extraordinary thing. So the cybersecurity aspect of if all of our assets are going to be digitized you better damn well keep those keys secure and so that's why I've been focused on the cybersecurity aspect. Rivets, one of the ICOs that I invested in is developing software that turns on the power of the hardware TPM, trusted execution environment, that's already on your phone. It's a place to hold keys in hardware. So that becomes fundamentally important in holding your keys. >> I mean certainly we heard stories about kidnapping that private key, I mean still how do you protect that? That's a good question, that's a really interesting question. Is it like consensus, do you have multiple people involved, do you get beaten up until you hand over your private key? >> It's been happening. It's been happening. >> What about the security token versus utility tokens? A lot of tokens now, so there's yeah, too many tokens on the utility side, but now there's a surge towards security tokens, and Greg Bettinger wrote this morning that the market has changed over and the investor side's looking more and more like traditional in structures and companies, raising money. So security token has been a, I think relief for some people in the US for sure around investing in structures they understand. Is that a real dynamic or is that going to sustain itself? How do you see security tokens? >> And we heard in the panel this morning, you were in there, where they were predicting the future of the valuation of the security tokens by the end of the year doubling, tripling, what ever it was, but what are your thoughts? >> I think security tokens are going to be the next big thing, they have so many advantages to what we now regard as share certificates. My most exciting project is that I'm heavily involved in is a project called the Entanglement Institute. That's going to, in the process of issuing security infrastructure tokens, so our idea is a public-private partnership with the US government to build the first mega quantum computing center in Newport, Rhode Island. Now the private part of the public-private partnership by the issuance of tokens you have tremendous advantages to the way securities are issued now, transparency, liquidity. Infrastructure investments are not very liquid, and if they were made more liquid more people would buy them. It occurred to me it would have been a really good idea if grandpa would have invested in the Hoover Dam. Didn't have the chance. We think that there's a substantial demand of US citizens that would love to invest in our own country and would do so if it were more liquid, if it was more transparent, if the costs were less of issuing those tokens. >> More efficient, yeah. >> So you see that as a potential way to fund public infrastructure build-outs? >> It will be helpful if infrastructure is financed in the future. >> How do you see the structure on the streets, this comes up all the time, there's different answers to this. There's not like there's one, we've seen multiple but I'm putting a security token, what am i securing against, cash flow, equity, right to convert to utility tokens? So we're starting to see a variety of mechanisms, 'cause you have to investor a security outcome. >> Yeah, so as an investor, what do you look for? >> Well, I think it's almost limitless of what these smart securities, you know can be capable of, for example one of the things that were that we're talking with various parts of the government is thinking about the tax credit. The tax credit that have been talked about at the Trump administration, that could be really changed on its head if you were able to use smart securities, if you will. Who says that the tax credit for a certain project has to be the same as all other projects? The president has promised a 1.5 trillion dollar infrastructure investment program and so far he's only 1.5 trillion away from the goal. It hasn't started yet. Wilbur Ross when, in the transition team, I had seen the white paper that he had written, was suggesting an 82% tax credit for infrastructure investment. I'm going 82%, oh my God, I've never. It's an unfathomable number. If it were 82% it would be the strongest fiscal stimulus of your lifetime and it's a crazy number, it's too big. And then I started thinking about it, maybe an 82% tax credit is warranted for a critical infrastructure as important as quantum computing or cyber security. >> Cyber security. >> Exactly, very good point, and maybe the tax credit is 15% for another bridge over the Mississippi River. We already got those. So a smart infrastructure token would allow the Larry Kudlow to turn the dial and allow economic incentive to differ based on the importance of the project. >> The value of the project. >> That is a big idea. >> That is a big idea. >> That is what we're working on. >> That is a big idea, that is a smart contract, smart securities that have allocations, and efficiencies, and incentives that aren't perverse or generic. >> It aligns with the value of the society he needs, right. Talk about quantum computing more, the potential, why quantum, what attracted you to quantum? What do you see as the future of quantum computing? >> You know, you don't you don't have to own very much Bitcoin before what wakes you up in the middle of the night is quantum computing. It's a hundred million times faster than computing as we know it today. The reason that I'm involved in this project, I believe it's a matter of national security that we form a national initiative to gain quantum supremacy, or I call it data supremacy. And right now we're lagging, the Chinese have focused on this acutely and are actually ahead, I believe of the United States. And it's going to take a national initiative, it's going to take a Manhattan Project, and that's that's really what Entanglement Institute is, is a current day Manhattan Project partnering with government and three-letter agencies, private industry, we have to hunt as a pack and focus on this or we're going to be left behind. >> And that's where that's based out of. >> Newport, Rhode Island. >> And so you got some DC presence in there too? >> Yes lots of DC presence, this is being called Quantum summer in Washington DC. Many are crediting the Entanglement Institute for that because they've been up and down the halls of Congress and DOD and other-- >> Love to introduce you to Bob Picciano, Cube alumni who heads up quantum computing for IBM, would be a great connection. They're doing trying to work their, great chips to building, open that up. Bradley thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Always great to see you, impeccable vision, you've got a great vision. I love the big ideas, smart securities, it's coming, that is, I think very clear. >> Thank you for sharing. >> Thank you. The Cube coverage here live in Toronto. The Cube, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, more live coverage, day one of three days of wall-to-wall coverage of the Blockchain futurist conference. This is the first global Cloud Blockchain Summit here kicking off the whole week. Stay with us for more after this short break.
SUMMARY :
brought to you by The Cube. and long on many of the crypto. good to see both of you. but you also have a history. and see if you see some similarities, talk about that. I grew up on a farm in Iowa, and during the day I was trading on the floor (laughing) What is happening in the capital markets, and the market was really good at producing internet shares, that the internet deserves its own currency, 'Cause Satoshi is female, everyone knows that. I got that from you actually. Damn, so on terms of like the long game, I mean, the Ethereum at the lowest it's been all year. about the the potential price appreciation They could have done better and they're easy to make. When one of the first guys I met in this space Many of them are at this conference. for every website you went to. that's the big issue. that impact the security of the homeland. I mean still how do you protect that? It's been happening. and the investor side's looking more and more is a project called the Entanglement Institute. is financed in the future. How do you see the structure on the streets, Who says that the tax credit for a certain project and maybe the tax credit is 15% That is what and efficiencies, and incentives the potential, why quantum, and are actually ahead, I believe of the United States. Many are crediting the Entanglement Institute for that I love the big ideas, smart securities, of the Blockchain futurist conference.
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Beth Smith & Rob Thomas - BigDataSV 2015 - theCUBE
live from the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose California it's the queue at big data sv 2015 hello everyone welcome back this is the cube our flagship program we go out to the events they strike this evil noise i'm john furrier we're here with IBM to talk about big data big data analytics and we're doing a first-ever crowd chat simulcast of live feed with IBM so guys we're going to try this out it's like go to crouch at dan / Hadoop next and join the conversation and our guests here Rob Thomas vice president product development big data analyst at IBM and beth smith general manager of IBM analytics platform guys welcome to welcome to the cube thank you welcome back and so IBM mostly we're super excited to next week as I was the interconnect you're bigger than you guys mashed up three shows for the mega shows and and Aerosmith's playing so it's going to say I'm from the Boston air so I'm really excited about you know Aerosmith and all the activities of social lounge and and whatnot but we've been following you guys the transformation of IBM is really impressive you guys certainly think a lot of heat in the press in terms of some of the performance size in the business but it's pumping right now you guys seem to have great positioning the stories are hanging together a huge customer base huge services so we're at the Big Data world which is tends to be startup driven from the past few years over the past phase one the big cuppies came in and started saying hey you know there's a big market our customers see demand and that so I got your take on on as we're coming in to interconnect next next week what is the perspective of big data asli Watson has garnered headlines from powering toys to jeopardy to solving huge world problems that's a big data problem you guys are not new to Big Data so when you look at this big data week here and Silicon Valley what's the take sure so I'll start often embedded Bethke night in so our big focus is how we start to bring data to the masses and we start to think in terms of personas data science and plays an increasingly important role around big data how people are accessing that the developer community and then obviously the line of business community which is the client set that I've been serving four years but the announcements that we've made this week around Hadoop are really focused on the first two personas in terms of data scientists how they start to get better value out of Hadoop leveraging different tools we'll talk about what some of those are and so we're really starting to change it about Hadoop results me about insight it's not about infrastructure infrastructure is interesting but it's really about what you're getting out of it so that's why we're approaching it that way it's how well it has naturally the IBM strategy around data cloud and engagement and data is really about using the insights which like Rob said it's about the value can get from the data and how that can be used in to transform professions and industries and I think when we bring it back to Big Data and the topic of a doob I think frankly it has gotten to a point that clients are really beginning to say it's time to scale they're seeing the value in the technology what it can bring how it gives them some diversity in their data and analytics platform and they're ready to announce scale on their workloads as a part of it so the theme is Hadoop next okay so that takes us right to the next point which is okay what's next is a phase one okay we got some base position validation okay this new environments customers don't want that so what so what is next i mean we're earring things like in memories hot aussie spark has proven that there's an action in member that that kind of says okay analytics at the speed of business is something that's important you guys are all over that and we've heard some things from you guys so so what's how do we get to the next part where we take Hadoop as an infrastructure opportunity and put it into practice for solutions at what what are the key things that you guys see happening that must happen for the large customers to be successful so I think that actually ties into the announcements we made this week around the open data platform because that's about getting that core platform to ensure that their standardization around it there's interoperability around it and then that's the base and that vendors and clients are coming together do that and to really enable and facilitate the community to be able to standardize around that then it's about the value on top of that around it etc it's about the workloads and what could be brought to bear to extend up that how do you apply it to real time streaming how do you add things like machine learning how do you deal with things like text analytics I mean we have a we have a client situation where the client took 4 billion tweets and were able to analyze that to identify over a hundred and ten million profiles of individuals and then by integrating and analyzing that data with the internal data sources of about seven or eight different data sources they were able to narrow into 1.7 million profiles that matched at at least ninety percent precision you know now they've got data that they can apply on buying patterns and stuff it's about that it's about going up the stack we're going to talk for hours my mind's exploding privacy creepy I mean a personas is relevant now you talk about personalization I mean collective intelligence has been an AI concepts we try not to be creepy okay cool but now so that brings us to the next level I mean you guys were talk about cognitives on that is a word you guys kick around also systems of engagement systems of records an old term that's been around in the old data warehousing dates fenced-off resources of disk and data but now with systems of engagement real-time in the moment immersive experience which is essentially the social and/or kind of mobile experience what does that mean how do you guys get there how do you make it so it's better for the users more secure or I mean these are hot button issues that kind of lead us right to that point so I'll take you to that a couple ways so so first of all your first question round head tube next so Hadoop was no longer just an IT discussion that's what I've seen changed dramatically in the last six months I was with the CEO of one of the world's largest banks just three days ago and the CEO is asking about Hadoop so there's a great interest in this topic and so so why so why would a CEO even care I think one is people are starting to understand the use cases of the place so that talks about entity extraction so how you start to look at customer records that you have internally in your systems are record to your point John and then you you know how do you match that against what's happening in the social world which is more or the engagement piece so there's a clear use case around that that changes how clients you know work with their with their customers so so that's one reason second is huge momentum in this idea of a logical data warehouse we no longer think of the data infrastructure as oh it's a warehouse or it's a database physically tied to something not tied to just what relational store so you can have a warehouse but you can scale in Hadoop you can provision data back and forth you can write queries from either side that's what we're doing is we're enabling clients to modernize their infrastructure with this type of a logit logical data warehouse approach when you take those kinds of use cases and then you put the data science tools on top of it suddenly our customers can develop a different relationship with their customers and they can really start to change the way that they're doing business Beth I want to get your comments we have the Crouch at crowd chat / a dupe next some commentary coming in ousley transforming industries billion tweets killer for customer experience so customer experience and then also the link about the data science into high gear so let's bring that now into the data science so the logical you know stores okay Nick sands with virtualization things are moving around you have some sort of cognitive engines out there that can overlay on top of that customer experience and data science how are they inter playing because this came out on some of the retail event at New York City that happened last week good point of purchase personalization customer experience hated science it's all rolling together and what does that mean unpack that for us and simplify it if you can oh wows complexing is a big topic you know it's a big topic so a couple of different points so first of all I think it is about enabling the data scientists to be able to do what they their specialty is and the technologies have advanced to allow them to do that and then it's about them having the the data and the different forms of data and the analytics at their fingertips to be able to apply that I the other point in it though is that the lines are blurring between the person that is the data scientist and the business user that needs to worry about how do they attract new customers or how do they you know create new business models and what do they use as a part of do you think we're also seeing that line blurring one of the things that we're trying to do is is help the industry around growing skills so we actually have big data University we have what two hundred and thirty thousand participants and this online free education and we're expanding that topic now to again go up the stack to go into the things that data scientists want to deal with like machine learning to go into things that the business user really wants to now be able to capture it's a part of it trying to ask you guys kind of more could be a product question and/or kind of a market question at IBM's Ted at IBM event in he talked about a big medical example in one of her favorite use cases but she made a comment in their active data active date is not a new term for the data geeks out there but we look at data science lag is really important Realty near real time is not going to make it for airplanes and people crossing the street with mobile devices so real real time means like that second latency is really important speed so active date is a big part of that so can you guys talk about passive active data and how that relates to computing and because it's all kind of coming to get it's not an obvious thing but she highlighted that in her presentation because I see with medical medical care is obviously urgent you know in the moment kind of thing so if you would what does that all mean I mean is that something custom Street paying attention to is it viable is it doable so certainly a viable I mean it's a huge opportunity and i'd say probably most famous story we have around that is the work that we did at the university of toronto at the Hospital for Sick Children where we were using real-time streaming algorithms and a real-time streaming engine to monitor instance in the neonatal care facility and this was a million data points coming off of a human body monitoring in real time and so why is that relevant I mean it's pretty pretty basic actually if you extract the data you eat yell it somewhere you load in a warehouse then you start to say well what's going on it's way too late you know we're talking about you know at the moment you need to know what's happening and so it started as a lot was in the medical field would you notice there's some examples that you mentioned but real time is now going well beyond the medical field you know places from retail at the point of sale and how things are happening to even things like farming so real time is here to stay we don't really view that as different from what I would describe as Hadoop next because streaming to me as part of what we're doing with a dupe and with spark which we'll talk about in a bit so it's certainly it is it is the new paradigm for many clients but it's going to be much more common actually if i can add there's a client North Carolina State University it's where I went to school so it's a if it's a client that I talk about a lot but they in addition to what they do with their students they also work with a lot of businesses own different opportunities that may that they may have and they have a big data and analytics sort of extended education business education project as a part of that they are now prepared to be able to analyze one petabyte in near real time so the examples that you and Rob talked about of the real world workloads that are going to exist where real time matters are there there's no doubt about it they're not going away and the technology is prepared to be able to handle the massive amount of data and analytics that needs to happen right there in real time you know that's a great exact point I mean these flagship examples are kind of like lighthouses for people to look at and kind of the ships that kind of come into the harbor if you will for other customers as you always have the early adopters can you guys talk about where the mainstream market is right now I'll see from a services standpoint you guys have great presence and a lot of accounts where are these ships coming into which Harper where the lighthouse is actually medical you mentioned some of those examples are bringing in the main customers is it the new apps that are driving it what innovations and what are the forces and what are the customers doing in the main stream right now where are they in the evolution of moving to these kind of higher-end examples so I mean so Hadoop I'd say this is the year Hadoop where clients have become serious about Hadoop like I said it's now become a board-level topic so it's it's at the forefront right now I see clients being very aggressive about trying out new use cases everybody really across every interest industry is looking for one thing which is growth and the way that you get growth if you're a bank is you're not really going to change your asset structure what you're going to change is how you engage with clients and how you personalized offers if your retailer you're not going to grow by simply adding more stores it might be a short term growth impact but you're going to change how you're engaging with clients and so these use cases are very real and they're happening now Hadoop is a bore group discussion or big day I just didn't see you formula we should have more Hadoop or is it you know I see I've seen it over and over again I'll tell you where you see a lot from his companies that are private equity-owned the private equity guys have figured out that there's savings and there's innovation here every company i worked with that has private equity ownership Hadoop is a boardroom discussion and the idea is how do we modernize the infrastructure because it's it's because of other forces though it's because of mobile it's because of cloud that comes to the forefront so absolutely so let's take Hadoop so I do bits great bad just great a lot of innovations going on there boardroom in these private equity because one they're cutting edge probably they're like an investment they want to see I realized pretty quickly now speed is critical right I would infer that was coming from the private equity side speed is critical right so speed to value what does that mean for ibn and your customers how do you guys deliver the speed to value is that's one of the things that comes out on all the premises of all the conversations is hey you can do things faster now so value on the business side what do you guys see that sure so a a lot of different ways to approach that so we believe that as I said when I said before it's not just about the infrastructure it's about the insight we've built a lot of analytic capabilities into what we're doing around a dupe and spark so that clients can get the answers faster so one thing that we're going to be we have a session here at strata this week talking about our new innovation big R which is our our algorithms which are the only our algorithms that you can run natively on Hadoop where your statistical programmers can suddenly start to you know analyze data and you know drive that to decision make it as an example so we believe that by providing the analytics on top of the infrastructure you can you can change how clients are getting value out of that so how do we do it quickly we've got IBM SoftLayer so we've got our Hadoop infrastructure up on the cloud so anybody can go provision something and get started and ours which is not something that was the case even a couple years ago and so speed is important but the tools and how you get the insight is equally important how about speed 22 value from a customer deployment standpoint is it the apps or is it innovating on existing what do you sing well I think it's both actually um and and so you talked earlier about system of engagement vs system of record you know and I think at the end of the day for clients is really about systems of insight which is some combination of that right we tend to thank the systems of engagement or the newer things and the newer applications and we tend to thank the systems of record are the older ones but I think it's a combination of it and we see it show up in different ways so I'll take an example of telco and we have a solution on the now factory and this is now about applying analytics in real time about the network and the dynamics so that for example the operator has a better view of what's happening for their customers they're in users and they can tell that an application has gone down and that customers have now switched all of a sudden using a competitive application on their mobile devices you know that's different and that is that new applications or old or is it the combination and I think at the end of the day it really comes to a combination I love these systems of insight i'm just going to write that down here inside the inside the crowd chat so i got to talk about the the holy grail for big data analytics and big data from your perspective ideas perspective and to where you guys are partnering I'll see here there's a show of rich targets of a queue hires acquisitions partnerships I mean it's really a frill ground certainly Silicon Valley and and in the growth of a big data cloud mobile and social kind of these infrared photography biz is a message we've heard so what is the holy grail and then what are you guys looking for in partnerships and within the community of startups and or other alliances sure you want to start with the Holy Grail me yeah so so you know I think at the end of the day it is about using technology for business value and business outcome I you know I really think that's what said the spirit of it and so if I tell you why we have for example increased our attention and investment around this topic it's because of that it's because of what Rob said earlier when he said the state that clients are now in um so that's what I think is really important there and I think it's only going to be successful if it's done based own standards and something that is in support of you know heterogeneous environments I mean that's the world of technology that we live in and that's a critical element of it which leads to why we are a part of the Open Data Platform initiative so on the on the the piece of analytics I was just cus our comment about our for example I was just mentioning the crowd chat I had Microsoft just revolution analytics which is not our which is different community is there a land-grab going on between the big guys of you know IBM's a big company what do you guys see in that kind of area terms acquisition targets yeah man I think the numbers would say there's not a land-grab I don't think the MMA numbers have changed at a macro level at all in the last couple years I mean we're very opportunistic in our strategy right we look for things that augment what we do I think you know it's related to partner on your comment your question on partnering but we do acquisitions is not only about what that company does but it's about how does it fit within what IBM already does because we're trying to you know we're going after a rising tide in terms of how we deliver what clients need I think some companies make that mistake they think that if they have a great product that's relevant to us maybe maybe not but it's about how it fits in what we're doing and that's how we look at all of our partnerships really and you know we partner with global systems integrators even though we have one with an IBM we partner with ISVs application developers the big push this week as I described before is around data scientists so we're rolling out data science education on Big Data university because we think that data scientists will quickly find that the best place to do that is on an IBM platform because it's the best tools and if they can provide better insight to their companies or to their clients they're going to be better off so I was so yes that was the commenting on and certainly the end of last week and earlier this week about that Twitter and it's a lot of common in Twitter's figured out and people are confused by Twitter versus facebook and I know IBM has a relation but we're so just that's why pops in my head and I was are saying HP Buddha's got a great value and so I was on the side of Twitter's a winner i love twitter i love the company misunderstood certainly i think in this market where there's waves coming in more and more there's a lot of misunderstanding and i think i want to get your perspective you can share with the folks out there what is that next way because it's confusing out there you guys are insiders IBM i would say like twitter is winning doing very well certainly we're close to you guys we are we're deeply reporting on IBM so we can see the momentum and the positioning it's all in line what we see is that is where the outcomes will end up being for customers but there's still a lot of naysayers out there certainly you guys had your share as as to where's as an example so what is the big misunderstanding that you think is out there around the market we're in and what's the next wave as always waves coming in if you're not out in front that next wave usually driftwood as the old expression goes so what is that big misunderstanding and this kind of converged from a hyper targeted with analytics this is all new stuff huge opportunities huge shifts and inflection point as Bob picciano said on the cube is its kind of both going on the same time shift and it point so what's misunderstood and what's that next big waves so let me start with the next big way is that I'll back into the misunderstanding so the next big wave to me is machine learning and how do you start to take the data assets that you have and through machine learning and the application of those type of algorithms you start to generate better insights or outcomes and the reason i think is the next big wave is it's it may be one of the last competitive motes out there if you think about it if you have a a corpus of data that's unique to you and you can practice machine learning on that and have that you know either data that you can sell or to feed into your core business that's something that nobody else can replicate so it becomes incredibly powerful so one example I'll share with you and I want to bring you my book but it's actually not getting published next week since so maybe next week but so Wiley's publishing a book I wrote and one of the examples I give is a company by the name of co-star which I think very few people have heard of co-star is in the commercial real estate business they weren't even around a decade ago they have skyrocketed you know from zero to five hundred million dollars in revenue and it's because they have data on four million commercial properties out there who else has that absolutely nobody has that kind of reach and so they've got a unique data asset they can apply things like machine learning and statistics to that and therefore anybody who wants to do anything commercial real estate has to start with them so I pointed you're starting to get the point where you have some businesses where data is the product it's not an enabler it's the actual product I think that's probably one of the big misunderstandings out there is that you know data is just something that serves our existing products or existing services we're moving to a world where data is the product and that's the moat I wrote a post in 2008 called data is the new development kit and what you're basically saying is that's the competitive advantage a business user can make any innovation observation about data and not be a scientist and change the game that's what you were saying earlier similar right that's right okay so next big wave misunderstanding what do you wait bet what's your take on what are people not getting what is Wall Street what is potential the VCG really on the front end of some of the innovation but what is the general public not getting I mean we are in shift and an inflection what's it what's the big shift and misunderstanding going on so so I I would tend to you know actually agree with with Rob that I think folks aren't yet really appreciating and I guess I would twist it a little bit and say the insight instead of just the data but but they're not realizing what that is and what it's going to give us the opportunity for you know I would retire early if I actually could predict everything that was going to happen but but you know yeah but if you think about it you know if you think about you know mid to late 90s and what we would have all fault that the internet was going to allow us to do compared to what it actually allowed us to do is probably like night and day and I think the the time we're in now when you take data and you take mobility and you take cloud and you take these systems of engagement and the fact the way people individuals actually want to do things is is similar but almost like on steroids to what we were dealing with in the mid-90s or so and so you know the possibilities are frankly endless and and I think that's part of what people aren't necessarily realizing is that they have to think about that insight that data that actually has some value to it in very different ways there's a lot of disruptive enablers out Dunham's there's a lot to look at but finding which ones will be the biggest right it's hard I mean you get paid a lot of money to do that is if you can figure it out and keep it a secret um but you didn't you machine learning is now out there you just shared with us out competitive advantage so everyone knows know everyone kind of new kind of in the inside but but not everybody's using it right i mean i think another example a company like into it has done a great job of they started off as a software company they've become a data company i think what you what i've observed in all these companies is you can build a business model that's effectively recession proof because data becomes the IP in the organization and so I don't I actually you know I think for us those are the live in the world we this is well understood I don't think it's that well understood yet yeah insiders mic right and you know when we first started doing big data research and working with thousands of clients around the world there were there were six basic use cases it started of course with the customer the the end customer and the customer 360 and that sort of thing and went through a number of different things around optimization etc but the additional one is about those new business models and you know that is clearly in the last 12 to 18 months has become a lot more of what the topic is when I'm talking to clients and I think we will see that expand even more as we go in the future we've a lot of activity on the crowd chatter crowd chatter net / Hadoop necks and I'll mentioned we can probably extend time on that if you guys want to keep it keep it going conversation is awesome and we did getting the hook here so we'll remove the conversation to crouch at totnes Esther Dube next great thought leadership and I can go on this stuff for an hour you guys are awesome great to have you on the cube and so much to talk about a lot of ground will certainly see it in to connect go final question for you guys is what do you guys see for this week real quick summarize what do you expect to see it unfold for a big data week here at Silicon Valley Big Data asked me so I think you know a lot of the what we talked about machine learning is going to be a big topic I think there'll be a lot of discussion around the open data platform that Beth mentioned before it's a big move that we made along with another group supporting the apache software foundation I think that that's a big thing for this week but it should be exciting alright guys thanks for coming out to be IBM here inside the cube we're live in Silicon Valley would be right back with our next guest after the strip break I'm Jennifer this is the cube we write back
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