(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone! Welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase. This is season one, episode three with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Persichetti, the EVP of Global AWS Strategic Alliances at Jefferson Frank. A Tenth Revolution Group company. And Danielle Greshock, one of our own CUBE alumni, joins us, ISV PSA director. Ladies, it's great to have you on the program talking about a topic that is near and dear to my heart, women in tech. >> Thank you, Lisa! >> Great to be here! >> So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do, and about the partnership with AWS. >> Sure, so let's just start, Jefferson Frank is a Tenth Revolution Group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners, and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called Revolent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups, over half of them are women. And then we also have a company called Rebura, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the Tenth Revolution Group organization. >> Got it, Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS' perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >> Yes, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years of we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. We want to have an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right? And we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, giving them paths to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that, of course, I've benefited from it. But also, I try to bring that into my organization as well and it's super important. >> Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >> I just think that I've been able to get, a seat at the table. I think that. I feel as though I have folks supporting me very deeply and want to see me succeed. And also they put me forth as a representative to bring more women into the organization as well. They give me a platform in order to do that, like this, but also many other spots as well. And I'm happy to do it because I feel that... you always want to feel that you're making a difference in your job. And that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative. To bring more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there. >> Lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gendered diversity perspective in tech? We know the numbers of women in technical positions. >> Right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping out, but what are some of the trends that you're seeing? >> So that's a really interesting question. And Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you but just two weeks ago, I was in San Francisco with AWS at The Summit. And we were talking about this, we were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about the challenges that women have, and how hard to believe but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years. Which was really, really something that shocked everyone when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance working from home, better pay, more flexibility, better maternity leave. Seems like those things are happening. So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they couldn't be... you can't be what you can't see. So because they... we feel, collectively women, people who identify as women, just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. I think I've had great mentors, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson Frank really quickly we put out a hiring, a salary, and hiring guide. Career and hiring guide every year. And the data points, and that's about 65 pages long, no one else does it. It gives an abundance of information around everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. What I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, being that we have such a very big global platform, is to get more women to respond to that survey. So we can get as much information and take action. So... >> Absolutely only 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS' focus on women in tech. I was watching, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn the TED Talk that the CEO and founder of Girls Who Code did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a survey that HP did some years back that showed that 60%... that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less. We've all been in that imposter syndrome conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS' specific focus here to get these numbers up. >> Well, I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about how I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and those types of things. But then also, a more flexible working arrangements. But then also early... how can we actually impact early career women and actually women who are still in school. And our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, and make it a less intimidating place. And have them look at employees from AWS and say like, "Oh, I can see myself in those people". And kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think we're limited with the viable pool of candidates when you're talking about mid-to-late career. But how can we help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after having a child, and how can we help with military women who want to... or underrepresented minorities who want to move into AWS? We have a great military program but then also just that early high school career getting them in that trajectory. >> Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is getting those younger girls before they start to feel... >> Right. "There's something wrong with me, I don't get this." >> Right. >> Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >> Let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that Summit that we did we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. Cause that's the goal, right? To make sure that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal. So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs from a very young age, some people said high school. But then we said, even earlier, goes back to you can't be what you can't see. So getting mentoring programs established. We also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And so there was a teachable moment for me there actually. It was really wonderful because an African American woman said to me, "Sue". And I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. And what she said was, "Sue, it's really different for me as an African American woman" Or she identified as non-binary but she was relating to African American women. She said, "You're a white woman. Your journey was very different than my journey". And I thought, "This is how we're going to learn". I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that but those are the things that we need to educate people on. Those moments where we think we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson Frank we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this. Mentoring. We have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. We have a women's group, a women's leadership group. So much that we do and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >> Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far regarding some of the trends and and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >> Well, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders on how... it used to be a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, "Oh, this is... Danielle is going to solve this." And I think a lot of folks now realize, "Oh, this is something that we all need to solve for." And a lot of my colleagues, who maybe a couple years ago didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their or in their organizations, now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data, and actually make good decisions, and feel as though they often... these are not lived experiences for these folks. So they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data, and providing awareness, and providing tooling, and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned things around in a very positive way. >> And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective. What is Jefferson Frank doing to get those data points up to get more women of all, well, really underrepresented minorities to be able to provide that feedback so that you can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives? >> Right, so when I go back to that careers and hiring guide, that is my focus today really, because the more data that we have and the data takes... we need people to participate in order to accurately get ahold of that data. So that's why we're asking. We're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world. But if people don't take action then we can't get the right... the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be, therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the world to participate on our website jeffersonfrank.com In the survey so we can learn as much as we can. 7% is such a... Danielle and I we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute. Some of the other things that we're doing, we're partnering, as I mentioned, more of these events. We're doing around the Summits, we're going to be having more EDNI events, and collecting more information from women. Like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are out there, that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, "Listen, we really are trying to get these numbers up. We want to attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this hiring guide and offering your own information?" So we've got to get that 7% up. We've got to keep talking. We've got to keep getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've got to get that number up as well, because I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or her peers it inspires me. And I feel like I just want to give back. Make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >> Absolutely, we need- >> Love that metaphor. >> I do too! But to your point to get those numbers up not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need It's a help me help you situation. >> Exactly. >> So ladies, underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey. Help provide the data so that the women here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females in leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. >> Exactly. >> Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important cause. >> Thank you for having me, Lisa! >> Thank you! Thank you! >> My pleasure! For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. (gentle xylophone music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE special presentation of Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great conversation talking about the future of the infrastructure of Web3, all around domains, non fungible tokens and more. Two great guests, Charlie Brooks with Business Development of Unstoppable Domains, and Michael Williams, Product Leader and Advisor with Unstoppable Domains. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE, Partner Showcase with Unstoppable Domains. >> Thanks John, excited to be here. >> So I love what you guys are doing. Congratulations on all your success. You guys are on the leading edge of what is a major infrastructure. Shift to Web3 is being called, but people who have been doing this for a while know that you see the blockchain, you see decentralization, you see immutability all these future smart contracts. All the decentralized applications are now hitting the scene and NFTs are super hot as you can imagine, you guys in the middle of it. So you guys are in the sweet spot of what I call the Pragmatic pioneers. You guys are the building solutions that are making a difference, like single sign-on you have the login product, let's get into it. What is the path to a digital identity beyond the web? 'Cause we know what web identity is. But now that the web is being abstracted a away by this new Web3 layer, what is digital identity? >> I can take that one. So I think what we're really seeing is this transition away from a purely physical identity. Where your online identity is really just a reflection of the parts of your physical identity. Where you live, where you go to school, all of these things. And we're really seeing this world emerge where your online identity becomes much more of a primary. So if you have a way that you represent yourself in the online world, whether that's an Instagram account, or TikTok, or email address or username, all of these things together make up your digital identity. So congrats, if you have any of those things, you already have one. >> We see that all the time with Linktree, people put their Linktree out there and it's got the zillion handles. We all get up to Instagram. Everyone's got like zillion identities. Is that a problem or an opportunity? >> I think it's just a reality. The fact is our identities are spread across all of these different services and platforms that we use. The problem with something like Linktree is that it is owned by Linktree. If I won the lottery, purchased Linktree and decided I wanted to change your personal website, John, I could easily do that. Moving to the architecture that we have and NFT architecture, changes that significantly. It puts a lot of power back in the hands of the people who actually own those identities. I do a lot of CUBE showcases with folks around talking about machine learning and AI, and the number one conversation that they bring up, the number one issue, is data. And they say, when data's siloed and protected and owned, it is not optimized for machine learning. So I can almost imagine, as you bring NFTs to the digital identity, you mentioned you don't own your identity if someone else is managing the service like Linktree. This is a cultural shift, and infrastructure software shift at the same time. Can you guys expand more about what you guys are doing with the NFT and unstoppable domains with respect to that digital identity, because is that power shifting to the users now? And how does that compare to what's out there today? >> Sure, I think so. Our domains are NFTs, so they are ERC 721 tokens. And if you think about in the past Web2 identities are controlled by the platforms that we use. Twitter, Facebook, whatnot. There's really a lack of data portability there. Our accounts and data live on their servers, they can be deleted any time. So using an NFT to anchor your data identity, really gives you full control over your identity. It can't be deleted, it can't be revoked or edited, or changed without your permission. And really even better, the information you store on your entity domain can be plugged into the services you use, so that you never have to enter the same data twice. So when you go from platform to platform, everything can be tied to your existing domain. You're not going to a new site, entering their ecosystem and providing all this information time and time again, and not really having a clear understanding of how your data's being used and where it's being stored. >> So the innovation here is the NFT is your identity. And a non fungible token NFT is different than say a fungible token. So for the folks out there that's trying to follow the bouncing ball, Michael, what's the difference between an NFT and a fungible token? And why is that important for identity? >> My favorite metaphor here is baseball cards versus dollar bills. So a dollar bill is fungible. If I have a dollar and you have a dollar, we can trade dollars and none of us is richer or poorer. If I have a Babe Ruth and you have a Hank Aaron, and we swap baseball cards, we have changed something fundamental. So the important thing about NFTs is that they are non fungible. So if I have a domain and you have a domain, like I have that identity and you have that identity, they are unique, they're independent, they're owned by each one of us, and then we can't swap them interchangeably. >> And that's why you're seeing NFTs hot with art and artists, because it's like a property. It's a property issue, not so much- >> Absolutely >> Interchangeable or divisible kind of asset. >> Yep, it is ownership rights in digital form, yes. >> All right, so now let's get into what the identity piece. I think find that interesting because if I have something that's an NFT, it's non fungible, it's unique to me, it's property, my property my login, this sounds compelling. So how does login work with the NFT? Can you guys take us through that architecture, what does it do? How does it work? And what's the benefit? >> Good, so the way our login product works is it effectively uses your NFT domain. So Michael.crypto, for example, as the authentication piece of a login session. So basically when I go and I try to log in with my domain, I type in Michael.crypto, I sign it with my wallet which cryptographically proves that I am this human, this is me, I have the rights to log in. And then when I do so, I have the ability to share certain parts of my identity information with the applications that I use. So it really blends the ease of use from Web2 of just a standard like login with Gmail, SSO experience, with all of the security and privacy benefits of Web3. >> How important is single sign-on? Because right now people are used to seeing things like log with your GitHub handle or LinkedIn, or Google, Apple. You seeing people offering login. What's the difference here from those solutions and why does it make sense for the user? >> Sure, the big difference is what we're building is really user first. So if you think about traditional SSOs, you are the product. When you use their product, they're selling your data, they're tracking everything you do. Login with unstoppable handles not only authentication, but data sharing as well. So when you log in a domain owner can choose to share aspects of their online identities, such as first name, preferred language, profile picture, location. So this is a user controlled way of using a sign-on where their permissioning these different of their identity. And really apps can use this information to enable new experiences, such as, for example, website might automatically enable high contrast mode for someone visually impaired. It could pre-populate your friends from a decentralized social graph. So, what we're doing is taking the best parts of Web2 SSO and combining them with the best of Web3. So, no more losing your password, entering in the same data hundreds of times depending on other services to keep your information safe. Login with unstoppable really puts you in complete control of your data. And a big part of that is you're not going to have 80 plus usernames and passwords anymore. We have these tools like password managers that exist to put a bandaid on this issue, but it's not really a long term solution. So what we're building is really seamless onboarding where everything can be tied to your domains so that you can navigate to different apps in a much more seamless way. >> Michael, I got to get your thoughts on this because in the product side, it's interesting, my mind's connecting some dots. If I have first of all, great convenience to reduce all those logins. So, check their little pain reduction. But when you just think about what's different, I can now broker my data as well as login. So let's just say, hypothetically, I'm cruising around some dApps and I'm doing things in earning reputation, or attention, or points, or whatever utility tokens. There could be a way for me to control what I own. I'm the product, I own the data. Is that where this is going? >> I think it's definitely a direction it could go, say, for example, if I'm a e-commerce platform and I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to place a new billboard. One of the things that I could request from a user, is their address. I can figure out where they live, what city they're in, that will help inform me the decision that I need to make as a business. And in return, maybe I give that person a dollar off their purchase. We can start to build a stronger relationship between the applications that people use, and the people that use them. And try to optimize that whole experience, and try to just transfer information back and forth to make everyone's lives better. >> What's the roadmap on the business side Charlie, when you see companies adopting it, they're probably taking babies steps they're crawling before they walk, they're walking before they run. I can see decentralized applications in the future where there's FinTech or whatever, having new kinds of marketplaces that take advantage of the paradigm where the script flips to the user first. Okay, so I see that. How do people get started now? What are some of the success momentum points that you're seeing companies do now with unstoppable? >> Sure, so a lot of Web3 apps are very sensitive about respecting the information that their users are providing. So, what we're doing is offering different ways for apps can touch with their users in a way that is user controlled. So, an example there is that a lot of Web3 companies will use WalletConnect to allow users to log in using a wallet address. An issue there is that one person can have hundreds of wallet addresses, and it's impossible for the app to understand that. So, what we do is we use login, we attach an email address, some other pieces to a wallet address so that we can identify who our unique user is. And the app is able to collect that information, they don't have to deal with passwords or PII storage. They have access to a huge amount of new data for an improved UX. It's really simple to maintain as well. So one example there is if you are a DeFi platform and you want to reward your users for coming to their site for the first time, now that they can identify unique user, they can drop a token into that user's wallet. All because they're able to identify that user as unique. So they have a better way of understanding their customers. They enable their customers to share data. A lot of these companies will ask users to follow them on Twitter or Discord when they need to provide updates or bug bounties, all these different things. And login if unstoppable lets them permission email addresses so they can collect emails if they want to do a newsletter. And instead of harvesting data from elsewhere and forcing people to join this newsletter program, it's all user controlled. So each user saying, yes, you can use my email for your newsletter. I'm supporting your project, I want to be kept up to date with bugs or bounties or rewards programs. So really it's just a better way for users to share the data that they're willing to with dAPPs, and dAPPs can use it to create all sorts of incentives and really just understand their users on a different level. >> How is the development Michael, going on the smart contract side of the business? Ethereum has always been heralded as being very developer focused. There's been created innovations, you still got gas fees out there. You still got to do some things. How is the development environment? How are the applications coming? 'Cause I can see the flywheel kicking in as the developer front gets more streamlined, more efficient. And now you got the identity piece nailed down. I just see a lot of dominoes falling at the same time. What's the status on the DEV side. What you're doing. >> Good. The fascinating thing about crypto is how quickly it changes. When I joined Ethereum there was pretty reasonable still for transactions. It was very cheap to get things done very fast. With a look at last summer that things went completely out of control. This is a big reason that unstoppable for a long time has been working on a layer two. And we've moved over to the polygon as our primary source of record, which is built on top of Ethereum. Of course, I think saved well over a hundred million in gas fees for our users. We're constantly keeping an eye on new technologies that are emerging, weighing how we can incorporate those things. And really where of this industry is going to take us. In many ways we are just as much passengers as the other people floating around the ecosystem as well. >> It's certainly getting faster every day, I'm seeing a huge uptake on Ethereum. I heard a stat that most people at the university of California, Berkeley, 30% of the computer science students are dropping out to join Web3 companies. This goes to show you this cultural shift and you're going to see a lot more companies getting involved. So I got to ask you Charlie, on the BizDev front, how are companies getting started? What's the playbook? Are they putting their toe in the water? They jumping in full throttle? What's the roadmap? What's the best practice for people to get started with unstoppable? >> Absolutely. We're lucky that we get a lot of inbound interest from companies Web2 and Web3, because they first want to secure their domains. And we do a ton of work on the back end to protect trademark domains. We want to avoid squatting as much as possible. We don't think that's the spirit of Web3 at all. And certainly not what the original tension of the internet was. So, fair amount of companies will reach out to us to get their domain. And then we can have a longer conversation about some of the other integrations and ways we can collaborate. So certainly visiting our website, unstoppabledomains.com is a great starting point. We have an app submission page where apps can reach out to us, even request a grant. We have a grant program to help developers get started, provide them some resources to work with us and integrate some of our technology. We have great documentation as well on the site. So you can read all about what it takes to resolve domains, if you're a wallet and an exchange, as well as what it takes to integrate login with unstoppable, which is actually a super easy integration as well, which we're really excited about. So yeah, I'd say check out the website, apply for a grant if you think you're a fit there, then of course, people can always reach out to me directly on Twitter, on Telegram, email. We're very reachable and we're always happy to chat with projects and learn more about what they're doing. >> What's the coolest thing you see going on Charlie, with your partners right now? What's the number one use case that's cool that people are jumping on right now to get in and get some success out of the gate? >> Maybe GameFi play to earn is huge. It's blowing up and the gaming community is really passionate, vibrant, just expanding like crazy. Same with DeFi, there's all this cool new stuff you can do with DeFi where no matter how big your portfolio is, you're able to stake and use all these interesting tools to grow your book. So it's super exciting to see and talk to all these projects. And, there's certainly an energy in the community where everyone wants to onboard the general public to Web3. So we're all working on these school projects, but we need everyone to come over from Web2, understand the advantages of DeFi, of GameFi of having an entity domain. So, I'm lucky that I'm one of the first layers there of meeting new projects and helping get access to more users so that they can grow along with us. >> I remember the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum, we were giving it away. The community mantra was, give a Bitcoin to someone. That was like, >> Right. >> When you can actually give a Bitcoin to someone. What's the word of mouth or organic viral? I won't say growth hack 'cause that's got negative connotations. But what's the community's way of putting forth the mission for unstoppable? Is it just more domains? You guys have any programs got going on? Is it give it away? Obviously you can get domains on your site, but what's the way to get people ingratiated in and getting comfortable? >> So much of what we do is really to solve that question, answer that question. We spend a ton of time and energy just on education and whether that's specifically around domains or just general Web3. We have a podcast which is pretty exceptional, which talks to Web3 leaders from across the space and makes the project that they're working on more accessible. I think we passed over a hundred episodes, not too long ago. There's a ton of stuff that we do that other people do. If anyone has questions, I'm happy to talk about our resources, of course. >> The pod, I think you guys are up to 117, but that's a deep dive. You guys go deep on the podcast. So that's where you go in. What else is new on digital identity? Where do you guys see the future going? Now that you get the baseline identity with the NFT. Makes a lot of sense, create innovation. Good logic, makes sense. Solid technically, what's next? >> I think this really boils down to the way that the internet has grown. Doesn't really feel like the way that the internet should be. Like our data shouldn't live in these wild gardens, controlled by these large companies. Ultimately people should be responsible for their own identities. They should have control over of things that they do online. The data that's shared, the benefit of that data. It's about the world that we are working towards, is very much that. Where we are giving people the ability to be paid for sharing their data with companies. We're giving applications the ability to request information from the people that use those applications to improve their experience. We're really just trying to make connections across the ecosystem through these products, to enable a better experience for everyone. So whether that's the use cases that I mentioned already, or maybe viewing reviews on something like Yelp or Amazon, that just confirm that the person that you are you're looking at is actually a real person, not some bot that's been paid to load a review. The interesting thing about these products is they're so universally applicable. There are so many different ways that we can try to plug them in. So we are- >> A bots is a great example, double-edged sword. You can have a metaverse image and have pre-programmed conversations with liquid audio and the video application. Or it's a real person. How do you know the difference? These are going to be questions around who solves that problem. Now there's time for bots and there's a time not for bots. We all know what happens when you get into the game of manipulation, but also it can be helpful. This is where you got to be smart. And identity's critical in this future. Charlie, what's your reaction to the future of digital identity? So much to look at here on the trajectory. >> I think a big part of it is data portability. If you go to a site like Instagram, you're giving them all this content that's very personal to you, and you can't just pack up and leave Instagram. So we want a future where most of these apps are just a front end and you can navigate from one to the other and bring your data with you. And not be beholden to the companies that operate centralized servers. So, I think data portability is huge and it's going to open up a lot of doors. And just going back to that thought on cleaning up Web2 for a better web three. When I think about the Amazons, the Yelps of the world, there are all these bots, there are all these awful fake reviews. There's a lot of gamification happening that is really just creating a lot of noise. And I want to bring transparency back to the internet where when you see a review, you should know that that's a real human. And blockchain technology is enabling us to do that. And certainly FT domains are going to play a huge part of that. So I think that having an experience where you know and trust the people that you're interacting with is going to be really powerful and just a better experience for everyone. And there's a lot of ramifications with that. politically speaking, we've all seen all the issues with attacking communities and using bots and fake accounts to hit people's pain points, it's sad and certainly not something that we want to see continue happening. So, whatever we can do to give people their digital identity and help people understand that this is a real person on the other end, I think is huge for the future of the internet and really for society as well. >> That's a great call out there Charlie. Cleaning up the mess of Web 2.0, Web2, actually it was 2.0 technically, now Web3 is no point zero in it. But I saw on or listened to the podcast with Matt. This recent one, he had a great metaphor that went back to when I was growing up in the internet, you had IP addresses. And the mess there was, you couldn't find what you want to look. And no one could remember what to type in, 'cause you could type in IP address in the browser back then. And then DNS came out and then keywords that's web. Now that mess, now is fraud, misinformation, bot manipulation, deep fakes, many other kind of unwanted time to innovate. And every year, every time you had these inflection points, there'd be an abstraction on top of it. So, similar thing happening here, is that how you guys see it too? >> I think we're going back to some of the foundational architecture of the internet, DNS. And really bringing that forward about 30, 40 years in terms of technology. So loading in some more cryptography and some other fancy things to help patch some of those issues from the previous versions of the web. >> Awesome. Well guys, thanks so much for coming on and the spirit of TikTok, Emily summarizes asking, can you guys give us a quick TikTok moment, short comment on where this is all going, where is login, single sign-on mean and what should people do to steps to secure their digital identity? >> Sure, I'll jump in here. So, it's time for people to secure their digital identity. The great first step is going to sample domains and getting an NFT domain. You can control your data. You can do a lot of cool different things with your domain, including posting your own website that you will own forever, no one can take it away from you. I would certainly recommend that people join our Discord, Telegram communities, check out our podcasts. It's really great especially if you're new to crypto Web3. We do a great job of explaining all the basic concepts and expanding on them. So yeah, I would say, the time is now to get your digital identity and start embracing Web3 because it's really exploding right now. And there's just so many incredible advantages, especially for the user. >> Michael, what's your take? >> But not, have said it better myself. >> Like we always say, if you're not on the next wave, you're driftwood. And this is a big wave that's happening. It's pretty clear guys, it's there, it's happening now. And again, very pragmatic implementations of solving problems. The sign-on, the app integration. Congratulations and we got our CUBE domain too, by the way. So I think we're good. >> Excellent. >> So, we got to put it to use. Appreciate it, Charlie, Michael, thanks for coming on and sharing the update. >> It's pleasure. >> Welcome. >> Okay, this is theCUBE, with Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase I'm John for your host, got a lot of other great interviews. Check them out. We're going to continue our coverage and continue on with this great showcase. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto. Got some great guests here on this panel to talk about DeFi, the relevance of it, the importance, and all the major things happening in the changing world of finance and decentralized web, which is Web 3. Great wave here going on. We got Jaime Rogozinski, founder of WallStreetBets and strategic advisor of WallStreetBets app. Great to have you on. We've got Michael So, Partner, Head of Business Development, Cook Finance, and Mike Morhulets, CEO of DeHive. Gentlemen, thank you for coming. I'm super excited about this panel conversation here in the Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having us on. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, first of all, it's been a crazy ride. Even just go back from... Just go back eight years ago now, and then go to you had the big ICO craze, you had now the operationalizing of crypto, applications, blockchain. I see the price of Bitcoin has been going great. Everyone's been making a lot of money. But it's really about the fundamental change of users and DeFi, decentralized finance has been one of the tip of the spears here from terms of change 'cause money's involved. and that's the shift here. So before we get into it, I want to get you guys to help me define what is DeFi? If someone says, "Hey, what's DeFi?" And everyone wants to know, "What's DeFi? What does it mean?" What is DeFi? >> Well, I think it's still being defined to be quite honest with you, right? Like it stands for decentralized finance, but for the most part, it's figuring out a way to use these crypto coins, tokens assets, Dallas Dap, this, that, the other to try and integrate this worldwide transactional parallel ecosystem to traditional finance, right? So I'd say for the most part, you're able to transact, send money, buy things, invest it, generating interest rates, et cetera. >> So is it a new money system, is it an architecture? How should people think about this 'cause, you know, to me it seems like a whole another stack, if you will, I had to use the word stack, tech stack, but it's really more of a different thing. People still scratch their heads. Does it help me, does it hurt me? How would you explain it to someone who's like saying, "Hey, I got a bank, got my app on my phone." What's the difference? >> Yeah. To me, there are three things that define DeFi. You know, one is the fact that it is non-custodial, meaning there is no counterparties who take hold of your money and decide when they want to release it back to you. You own it, you hold assets, you know, on your own wallet. You know, that's one clear, you know, defining moment of DeFi. Second is the fact that, you know, where the value of transfer happens. And TraFi, traditional finance. You know, you would see how the actual transfer may not even happen, actually outside of a particular location, such as for example, a centralized exchange. However, on DeFi, you can clearly see how the value of transfer happens on chain, on Ethereum, on other lines, you know, on other chain as well. And third and last, you know, to me is how the organizations define what decisions, what setups are to be made within, right? For example, you know, DAO, you know, the centralized autonomous organization, they will actually use the communities to define how things can be decided. So that's one way to see it. >> Yeah. It's interesting. I saw these protocols and the tokens and infrastructure, Mike, there's a complex system going on here. It's the plumbing, right? I mean, it's a money system. You know, how decisions are made, you got communities involved in there, you got actually mechanisms for immutability and security. You got application developers. So you got to kind of think of like an operating system here to make it all work. What's your take on this whole impact of what is DeFi relative to what people see on their phones as just an app or just some finance app. There's a lot of stuff going on under the covers. >> Yeah. I want to totally agree with Michael because it's all about one point of entering to Web 3, yeah? I have just my personal key, and can use all my wallets, get access to my funds from different point in the world. And I just have enter to all these applications, all these huge amount of services and monies. Second general part for me that is all about smart contracts and not intermediate here. Then people want to cooperate on many ways to each other on stable coins, yeah. And this is just smart contract. And one person from another side and another person from other side, that's it. It's all about DeFi ecosystem, you know, into words. >> I mean, this idea of disintermediating the middle man is a huge part of this. I mean, smart contracts is critical to this. You got to have the infrastructure, you got to have the user behavior. This is why it's important. Can you guys weigh in on some of the things on the importance of DeFi and where we are right now relative to progress? Because even just in the past two years, the cultural shift of DeFi has changed a lot. Where are we right now in DeFi? Can you guys share your perspectives on kind of, you know, progress compared to the evolution of where it will go? >> No, I think that DeFi has DeFinitely made a lot of progress with regards to adoption. Not only by retail participants, but also by institutional ones, right? They're warming up the idea of these first stops from Bitcoin or whatever these larger ones that have more proven track record. And they're starting to experiment more and more from taking crypto transactions, et cetera. But from the retail standpoint, it's also made a lot of progress. I'd say the biggest benefit to the DeFi world is community, right? It works because it's decentralized, which means one of the requirements is a lot of participants. But one of the hindrances, which is one of the biggest ones that's kind of been in the way is the usability, which although it's improved a lot, it's still not ready for the mainstream user that's used to just one click, buy it, whatever, don't care to understand how things work. But those two worlds are starting to bridge, right? People getting comfortable, institutions getting comfortable, as well as retail participants not being scared away by the process. >> Yeah. I mean that... I will just ask you to follow up on that Jaime, if you don't mind. Is that that community user piece is huge. A lot of people in the old guard will dismiss things as meme stocks, if you will. You know, we've seen a lot of the traction. But when you have communities moving at massive forces, that's in a way infrastructure, right? So you have behavior changes, whether you got some peer to peer community happening, it can't be dismissed. I mean, yeah, this is my arbitrage and a little bit of a, you know, I won't say crypto vandalism or kind of fun, but at the end of the day, that's a behavior. That is specific change. That points to... It can't be dismissed. What do you guys react to that? What's your reaction to that? >> Right. Actually, at my firm, Cook Finance, we are actually at the forefront of seeing that movement. So at Cook, you know, we label ourselves as compostable finance. And one thing that we've seen is that our communities, consistently we propose very interesting strategies, connecting different DeFi protocols together to basically execute on a portfolio execution that allows them to achieve a certain objectives. And we have to say, you know, if you were to define Web 2 as read and write and Web 3 as read, write, and create, you know, then this is really, you know, where the difference lies. We are now at this point where we are simply providing an infrastructure, as you said before, but allowing, you know, the creativities, you know, from everybody to come together and let the crowd wisdom everywhere, you know, to decide exactly, you know, what should take home from a product perspective. So we're very excited about that. >> Yeah. And these are new protocols that need to built. I mean, what does that mean, right? So how does software adapt to that? This comes into the question, I think, why it can't be dismissed. Jaime, what's your reaction to that? Because you're in the middle of it, you see all these behaviors, and Wall Street certainly is an environment where there's a lot of activity 'cause there's finance all this money there, right? And then again, a lot of that is old money, old systems. Now moving to the new, now, global, et cetera. What's your take? >> Well, I mean, first of all, I don't think that one is going to move over to the other one. I believe there's going to be elements where they coexist, right? Traditional finance still has a lot of merits to it and it has a lot of use of practical applications, but they can feed off of each other. There's a lot of things that DeFi can learn from traditional finance and vice versa. So I think that we're just going to start seeing this convergence of these two different worlds. And I think it's extremely powerful, right? Because the way that you think about sequential and transactional systems that are centralized, right? Like it requires all sorts of mechanisms. For example, I know I'm speaking arbitrary, but like you have a market with an exchange in an order book with limit orders and then you have the guy come in there and push market buy or sell, pushes the price, right? That's the mechanism by which you see something flash on your screen. In the world of DeFi, there's additional mechanisms that have previously been impossible, like automated market makers, right? They don't have order books and there's no counterparty. I mean, there is, but they're distributed. So the risk profile is really different. So like it's just a matter of rethinking and looking at all the advantages and all the benefits that DeFi has to offer. >> I love that whole point there. 'Cause that's basically refactoring existing markets in the new way. And this becomes the next question is, is that okay, if you have like say Unstoppable, where they got this access through an NFT, which is super cool with kind of like an identity, the development environment is really key in all these big ways. Because if you think about what needs to happen next, does you need more software developers or developers in general on this new paradigm, right? So with that in mind, how do you guys see the market of more innovation being developed on top of where we are now? 'cause that's the next key flywheel in this equation, which is, I need simplicity, I got to make ease of use, and reduce the time it takes to do things. And that's just going to come from development. So what's you guys reaction to with the wave coming in from a development standpoint? You mentioned smart contracts earlier, Mike, what do you guys think? >> Yeah. At that moment, I'm thinking about Web 3.0 identity. It's very close to Unstoppable Domains doing, because they're doing that you can connect by your domain to different apps, to different projects and so on. And the next step after that will be Web 3.0 identity. I think there will be some custodial service when you will put your passport or verification service and we will get NFT identifying you. And then with this NFT, you will go to every service which should be identified. For example, tomorrow SEC will create new law that all users for U-Swap should be identifying and you'll use this identity NFT for using this UniSwap. And I think it will be huge amount of works for all Web 3 applications and always that. >> Michael, what is Unstoppable matter? Why does Unstoppable matter to DeFi? What's your take on that? >> Yeah. Yeah. First of all, you know, I have been a big fan of Unstoppable both since day one, you know, from the NFT domain, you know, rollout. But one thing that I'm super excited about Unstoppable is the fact that it provides a digital identity, exactly like what Mike said. And the fact that, you know, you can leverage Unstoppable. And the fact that the digital identity can be use in a different way than where we see the traditional finance data such as owning all your PII, you know, all the personal identifiable informations, you know. The NFT aspect allows, you know, only certain informations to be transferred, but at the same time, allow all the participants in the ecosystem, DeFi or even TraFi institutional alike, you know, to only pick certain pieces such that they can still live within, you know, the existing framework. So I think that really is powerful in a way, it bridges in a way, the existing money or value transfer happens, to a way in the future, how people can use the different infrastructure to perform the very same actions. >> Jaime, what's your take on the Unstoppable position here relative to DeFi? >> Look, I think Unstoppable is in a really great position, right? The whole spirit of DeFi is to removing bottlenecks, right? Removing kind of choke points, which can either be, you know, by some people choose to label that as the government, but I choose to think of it as more as a technological, right? Like you have this distributed naming system and this idea of identifying yourself has uncalculable benefits, right? I don't think we're at the point yet where we can just imagine it. Right now we start off by associating it with, I'm going to sign into a website with my username and password. And this is the new version of that. That doesn't have any huge feel to it, right? But what's under the hood is what actually allows people to do a lot more things such as like being able to port these things across and into connectivity on different websites. And being able to have control over your data, right? Like to actually be able to open up markets for even being able to monetize your own data, right? So that when you sign into a thing, you can just decide what things to share and whatnot. Like there's so many ways that we can't quite yet imagine the use for this, and I think that Unstoppable's in an incredible position to take advantage of that. >> That's awesome insight. That's a great way to talk about it. I mean, you look at distributed naming system, first of all, it really has not been done at large scale. I mean, the traditional naming systems have been centralized. So if you look at that as an enabling platform, I mean, it's limitless possibilities. Again, you start initially with some problems, but there's real technical enablement here. So in the last few minutes, I'd love to pivot on that point, and go, what's possible with this DeFi going forward? Because if you take that premise that you have this enabling system, that people are going to kind of align with defacto and then ultimately maybe standard, what does that enable? 'Cause you're now in a growth mode for the sector. Okay. Which is innovation coders. And when you start seeing protocols start to become defacto, that's a good thing. So let's talk about in the last few minutes, what's next for DeFi? Jaime, will start with you. What's your take on what's next? 'Cause you kind of teed it up. Take us through the... Walk down that path. In hypothetical of course, but you know, let's take a road. >> So, you know, I think that for starters, DeFi gets more powerful the more that people use it, right? So we're going to just start by saying there's going to be more adoption, so this thing is going to be more robust. And more things can actually live on this decentralized platform. One of the biggest benefits of decentralization is its robustness. You think about like the worldwide web, it's really not a web, it's more like just like a pipe of data that's owned by a handful of companies and the internet and the servers that host it and all these different things. We're already starting to see decentralized storage or servers. We're already starting to see decentralized networks, right? So that you're actually able to slowly start reducing those choke points. You're going to have this entire system where the world is interconnected, where people can communicate without these choke points, without being able to worry about censorship. You'll be able to have... The world that's able to transact, interact, and where you live is no longer going to be as much of a factor as it is today. >> Awesome. Michael, what's your take? What's possible? Where's it going? >> Yeah, I would take what Jaime said earlier. You know, I mean using the AMM example, the automated market making example. From our end, you know, I think one of the defining moment was, you know, when UniSwap first roll out, you know, in the big way, it allowed many individuals to become market makers for the first time in their lives. And I think that's very powerful, you know. It changes the dynamic as to where the, I guess, you know, the forces and the power of finance, you know, lies. In addition to that, you know, like I said before, I think many people would start to come up with their own ideas as to how things, you know, can be executed from a finance perspective to achieve many different risk reward profiles. So from that sense, you know, I think it is only the beginning that now we are seeing how, you know, digital identities, you know, can be linked, you know, to an individual. And at the same time, also the value creation side of the story. >> All right. Mike, your take. What's next? >> Yeah. I believe in two things. First, this is cross-chain and will it chain liquidity? Because right now it's not simple way for transferring, for example, USDC or stablecoin from polygon to cosmos network. But I believe in common liquidity for cross-chain. And the second one is more user friendly interfaces like hybrid interfaces and connecting DeFi and traditional financial startups like near ecosystem building now. Then you have layer one, blockchain solution, and then layer two, application with who are connected to our one application. More user friendly and more common useless applications. >> Great stuff, guys. Amazing content. Great panel. You guys are awesome. Great on the front front range of this whole wave. We got one minute left. So quick lightning questions. So in one quick statement, what one thing should people pay attention to in DeFi as we look at the next, you know, year or two as we go forward? What are the key innovations? What should people look at? It could be an area that's obvious, it could be an area that's not obvious that people should look at, pay attention, that's super important. That is the most important area. Mike, we'll start with you and we'll go across. >> Sure. I would say one thing is composability. I really am excited about the fact that everyone are starting to generate ideas on their own and simply leveraging the existing DeFi infrastructure to allow that to happen. So that's one thing I would say. >> Jaime? >> Sorry. I think NFTs, right? NFTs, I'm not talking about the JPEGs or the pictures. I'm talking about the use of these technologies in much the same way that we were talking about being able to identify yourself online or buying actual real estate or whatever it might be. I think that we're unable to imagine what's going to be some of the biggest uses and I'm very, very excited about seeing what's going to happen. >> Okay. Mike, final statement. What one thing should people pay attention to? >> To my mind, we don't know what market will be next year. And I will recommend to pay attention for stable strategies, for stable core and projects, for stable rates, and always stable coin farming sphere for DeFi market. >> Guys, thanks so much for sharing your insight on this topic. Really appreciate your time for coming into theCUBE here in Palo Alto for the Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. Really thankful. Thanks for sharing. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay. This is theCUBE conversation here. I'm John Furrier with theCube. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This segment in this session is about expansion into Asia Pacific and Europe for Unstoppable Domains. It's a hot startup in the Web3 area, really creating a new innovation around NFTs, crypto, single sign-on, and digital identity, giving users the power like they should. We've got two great guests, Sajjad Rehman, Head of Europe, and Nilkanth, known as Nil, Iyer, head of Asia. Sajjad, Nil, welcome to this CUBE, and let's talk about the expansion. It's not really an expansion, the global economy is global, but showcase here about Unstoppables going to Europe. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for inviting us. >> Thanks John, for inviting us. >> So we're living in a global world, obviously, crypto, blockchain, decentralized applications. You're starting to see mainstream adoption, which means the shift is happening. There are more apps coming, and it means more infrastructure, and things got to get easier, right? So, reduce the steps it takes to do stuff, makes the wallets better, give people more secure access and control of their data. This is what Unstoppable is all about. You guys are in the middle of it, you're on this wave. What is the potential of Web3 with Unstoppable, and in general, in Asia and in Europe? >> I can go first. So, now, let's look at the Asia market. I mean, typically, we see the US market, the Europe markets, for typical Web 2.0 software and infrastructure is definitely the larger markets, with US typically accounting for about 60%, and Europe about 20 to 30%, and Asia has always been small. But we see in this whole world of blockchain, crypto, Web 3.0, Asia already has about 160 million users. They have more than 35 local exchanges. And if you really look at the number of countries, in terms of the rate of adoption, many of the Asian countries, which probably you'd have never even heard of, like Vietnam, actually topping the list, right? One of the reasons that this is happening, again, if you go through the Asian Development Bank's latest report, you have these Gen Zs and millennials, of that's 50% of the Asian population. And if you really look at 50% of the Asian population, that's 1.1 billion people out of the total, 1.8 billion Gen Z and millennials that you have have in the world. And these folks are digitally native, they're people, in fact, the Gen Zs are mobile first, and millennials, many of us, like myself, at least, are people who are digital, and 20% of the world's economy is currently digital, and the rest, 40 to 50%, which is going to happen in the Web 3.0 world, and that's going to be driven by millennials and Gen Zs. I think that's why this whole space is so exciting, because it's being driven by the users, by the new generation. I mean, that's my broad thought on this whole thing. >> Before we get get this started, I want to just comment, Asia, also, in other areas where mobile first came, you had the younger demographics absolutely driving the change, because they're like, "Well, I don't want the old way." They go right from scratch at the beginning, they're using the technologies. That has propelled the crypto world. I mean, that is absolutely true. Everyone's kind of seeing that. And that's now influencing some of these developer nations, like say, in Europe, for instance, and even North America, I think Europe's more advanced than North America, in my opinion, but we'll get to that. Oh, so potential in Europe. Sajjad, take us through your thoughts on... As head of Europe, for our audience. >> Absolutely, so, Nil's right. I think Asia is way ahead in terms of Gen Z user adopting crypto, Europe is actually a distant second, but it's surprising to note that Europe actually has the highest transactional activity in crypto over the last year and a half. And if you dig a bit deeper, I'd say, arguably, for Europe, I think the opportunity in Web3 is perhaps the largest. And then perhaps it can mean the most for Europe. Europe, for the last decade, has been trailing behind Asia and North America, when it comes to birthing unicorns, and I think Web3 can provide a StepChain opportunity. This belief, for me, stems from the fact that Europe's policy, right, like, for example, GDPR, is focused on enabling your data ownership. And I think I recently read a very good paper out of Stanford, by Patrick Henson. He speaks about Web3 being the best part, here, for Europe enabling patient sovereignty. So what that means is users control the data, they're paying to enter it, and they harness the value from it. And on one hand, while Europe is enabling that regulation, that's entered in that code, Web3 actually brings it into action. So I think with more enablement, better regulation, and we'll see more hubs, like the Crypto Valley in Switzerland pop up, that will bring, I think, I'd rather be careful, better to say, not over-regulation, the right regulation. We can expect more in prop capital, more builder talent, that then drives more adoption. So I think the prospects for Europe in terms of usage, as well as builders, are quite bright. >> Yeah, and I think, also, you guys are in areas where the cultural shift is so dramatic. You mentioned Asia, the demographics, even the entrepreneurial culture in Europe right now is booming. You look at all the venture-backed startups, and the young generation building companies! And again, cloud computing is a big part of that, obviously. But look at, compared to the United States, you go back 15 years ago, Europe was way behind, on the startup scene. Now it's booming and pumping on all cylinders. And it kind of points at this cultural shift. It's almost like a generational... It's like the digital hippies changing the world. The Web3, it's kind of, "I don't want to be Web2, Web2 is so old, I don't want to do that." And then it's all because it's changing, right? And there are things inadequate with Web2, on the naming system. Also the arbitrage around fake information, bots, users being manipulated, and also merchandised and monetized through these portals. Okay, that's kind of ending. So talk about the dynamic of Web2, 3, at those areas. You've got users and you've got companies, who build applications. They're going to shift and be forced, in our opinion, and I want to get your reaction to that. Do you think applications are going to have to be Web3, or users will reject them? >> Yeah, I think that I'll jump in and add to there in Nil's part. I think the Web3 is built on three principles, right? They're decentralization, ownership, and composability. And I think these are not binary. So if I look further on in the future, I don't see a future where you have just Web3. I think there's going to be coexistence or cooperation between Web2 companies, Web3, building bridges. I think there's going to be... There's a sliding scale to decentralization, versus centralization. Similarly, ownership. And I think users will find what works best for them in different contexts. I think what Unstoppable is doing is essentially providing the identity system for Web3, and that's way more powerful when it comes to being built on blockchains, than with the naming system we had for Web2, right? The identity system can serve the purpose of taking a user's personal identifier, password, blockchain, domain name, and attaching all kinds of attributes that define who you are, both in the physical and digital world, and filling out information that you can transact on the basis of. And I think the users would, as we go to a no-code and low-code future, right, where in Web2, more of the users were essentially consumers, or readers of the internet. And in Web3, with more low-code and no-code technology platforms taking shape and getting proliferation, you would see more users being actually writers, publishers, and developers on the internet. And they would value owning their data, and to harness the most amount of value from it. So I think that's the power concept, and I think that's the future I see, where Web3 will dominate. Nil, what do you think? >> Well, I think you put it very, very nicely, Sajjad. I think you covered most of the points, I think. But I'm seeing a lot of different things that are happening at the ground. I think a lot of the governments, a lot of the Web 2.0 players, the traditional banks, these guys are not sitting quiet on the blockchain space. There are a lot of pilots happening in the blockchain space, right? I mean, I can give you real life examples. I mean, one of the biggest examples is in my home state of Maharashtra, where Mumbai is. They actually partnered with Polygon (MATIC), right? Actually built a private blockchain-based capability to kind of deliver your COVID vaccination certificates with the QR code, right? And that's the only way they could deliver that kind of volumes in that short a time, with the kind of user control, the user control the user has on the data. That could only be possible because of blockchain. Of course, it's still private, because it's healthcare data, they still want to keep it, something that's not fully on a blockchain. But that is something. Similarly, there is a consortium of about nine banks who have actually trying to work on making things like remittances or trade finance much, much easier. I mean, remittances through a traditional, Web 2.0 world is very, very costly. And especially in the Asian countries, a lot of people from Southeast Asia work across the world and send back money home. It's a very costly and a time-taking affair. So they have actually partnered and built a blockchain-based capability, again, in a pilot stage, to kind of reduce the transaction costs. For example, if you just look at the trade finance days where there are 14 million traders, who do 2.4, 5 trillion dollars, of transaction, they were able to actually reduce the time that it takes from eight to nine days, to about two to three days. And so, to add on to what you're saying, I think these two worlds are going to meet, and meet very soon. And when they meet, what they need is a single digital identity, a human-readable way of being able to send and receive and do commerce. I think that's where I see Unstoppable Domains, very nicely positioned to be able to integrate these two worlds, so that's my thought on all the logistics. >> That was a great point. I was going to get into which industries, and kind of what areas, you see in your geographies. But it's a good point about saving time. I like how you brought that up, because in these new waves, you either got to reduce the steps it takes to do something, or save time, make it easy. And this is the successful formula, in anything, whether it's an app or UI or whatever, but what specifically are they doing in your areas? And what about Unstoppable are they attracted to? Is it because of the identity? Is it because of the apps? Is it because of the single sign-on? What is the reason that they're leaning in, and unpacking this further into their pilots? >> Sajjad, do you want to take that? >> Yeah, absolutely, man. >> Because. >> Yeah, I'm happy. Please jump in if you want. So I think, and let me clarify the question, John, you're talking about Web2 companies, looking to partner in software, or potential partnerships, right? >> Yeah, what are they seeing, and what are they seeing as the value that these pilots we heard from Nilkanth around the financial industry? And obviously, gaming's one, it's obvious. Huge: financial, healthcare, I mean, these are obviously verticals that are going to be heavily impacted in a positive way. What are they seeing as value? What's getting them motivated to do these pilots? Why are they jumping in, with both feet, if you will, on these projects? Is it because it's saving money, is it time, or both, is it ease of use, is it the user's expectations? Trying to tease out how you guys see that evolving. >> Yeah, yeah, I think... This is still, the space is, the movement is going very fast, but I think the space is still young. And right now, a lot of these companies are seeing the potential that Web3 offers. And I think the key, key dimensions, right, composability, decentralization, and ownership. So I think the key thing I'm seeing in EU is these Web2 companies seeing the momentum and looking to harness that by enabling bridges to Web3. One of the key trends in Europe has been Fintech, I think over the last five to six years, we have the Revolut, N26, e-TOTAL creating platforms, new banks and super finance, super apps rising to the forefront. And they are all enabling, or also connecting a bridge with Web3 in some shape and form, either enabling creating of crypto, some are launching their own native wallets, and these are, essentially, ways that they can, one, attract users. So the Gen Z who are looking for more friction in finance, to get them on board, but also to look to enable more adoption by their own users, who are not using these services that potentially create new revenue streams, and create allocation of capital that they could not access, to have access to otherwise. So I think that's one trend I'm seeing over here. I think the other key trend is, in Europe, at least, has been games. And again, dead links or damaged, web creators would call the metaverse. So a lot of game companies are looking to step into Game Fire, which is, again, a completely different business model to what traditional game companies used to use. Similarly, metaverse is where again, ownership creates a different business model and they see that users and gamers of the future would want to engage with that, versus just being monetized on the basis of subscription or ads. And I think that's something that they're becoming aware of, and moving quickly in the space, launching their own metaverses, or game by applications. Or creating interoperability with these decentralized applications. >> You know, I wanted to get into this point, but I was going to ask about the community empowerment piece of this equation, 'cause digital identity is about the user's identity, which implies they're part of a community. Web3 is very community-centric. But you mentioned gaming, I mean, people who have been watching the gaming world, like ourselves, know that communities and marketplaces have been very active for years, many years, over 15 years. Community, games, currency, in-game activity, has been out there, right, but siloed within the games themselves. So now, it seems that that paradigm's coming in and empowering all communities. Is this something that you guys see and agree with? And if so, what's different about that? How are communities being empowered? I guess that's the question. >> Yeah, I can maybe take that, Sajjad. So, I mean, I must have heard of Axie Infinity, I mean, 40% of their user base is in Vietnam. And the average earning that a person makes in a month, out of playing this game, is more than the national, daily or minimum wage that is there, right? So that's the kind of potential. Actually, going back, as a combination of actually answering your earlier question, and I think over and above what Sajjad said, what's very unique in Asia is we still have a lot of unbanked people, right? So if you really look at the total unbanked population of the world, it's 1.6 billion, and 24% of that is in Asia, so almost 375 million people are in Asia. So these are people who do not have access to finance or credit. So the whole idea is, how do we get these people on to a banking system, onto peer-to-peer lending, or peer-to-peer finance kind of capabilities. I think, again, Unstoppable Domains kind of helps in that, right? If you just look at the pure Web 3.0 world, and the complex, technical way in which money or other crypto is transferred from one wallet to the other, it's very difficult for an unbanked person who probably cannot even do basic communication, cannot read and write, to actually be able to do it. But something that's very human-readable, something that's very easy for him to understand, something that's visual, something that he can see on his mobile. With 2G network, we are not talking of... The world is talking about 5G, but there are parts of Asia, which are still using 2G and 2.5G kind of network, right? So I think that's one key use case. I think the banks are trying to solve because for them, this is a whole new customer segment. And, sorry, I actually went back a little bit, to your earlier question, but coming to this whole community-building, right? So on March 8th, we're launching something called this Women of Web3, or, oh, that is WoW3, right? This is basically to, again, empower. So if you, again, look at Asia, women need a lot of training, they need a lot of enablement, for them to be able to leverage the power of Web 3.0. I can talk about India, of course, being from India. A lot of the women do not... They do all the small businesses, but the money is taken by middlemen, or taken by their husbands. With Web 3.0, fundamentally, the money comes to them, because that's what they use to educate their children. And it's the same thing in a lot of other Southeast Asian countries as well. I think it's very important to build those communities, communities of women entrepreneurs. I think this is a big opportunity to really get the section of society, which probably will take 10 more years, if we go through the normal Web1 to Web 2.0 progression, where the power is with corporations, and not with the individuals. >> And that's a great announcement, by the way, you mentioned the $10 million worth of domains being issued out for... This is democratization, it's what it's all about. Again, this is a new revolution. I mean, this is a new thing. So great stuff, more education, more learning. And going to get the banks up and running, get those people banking, 'cause once they're banking, they get wallets, right? So they need the wallets. So let's get to the real meat here. You guys are in the territory, Europe and Asia, where there's a lot of wallets. There's a lot of exchanges, 'cause that's... They're not in the United States. There's a few of them there, but most of them outside the United States. And you've got a lot of dApps developing, decentralized applications, okay? So you got all this coming together in your territory. What's the strategy, how you going to attack that? You got the wallets, you got the exchanges, and you got D applications. DApps. >> Yeah, I'm happy to (indistinct). So I think, and just quickly there, I think one point is, and Nil really expressed it beautifully, is finding inclusion. That is something that has inspired me, how Web3 can make the internet more inclusive. That inspired my move here. Yeah, I think, for us, I think we are at the base start when it comes to Europe, right? And the key focus, in terms of our approach in Europe would be that, we want to do two things. One, we want to increase the utility of these domain names. And the second thing is, we will invite proliferation with our partners. So when I speak about utility, I think utility is when you have a universal identifier, which is a domain name, and then you have these attributes around it, right? What then defines your identity. So in the context, in Europe, we would look to find partners to help us enrich that identity around the domain name. And that adds value for users, in terms of acquiring these domains and new clients. And on the other end, when it comes to proliferation, I think it's about working with all those crypto, and crypto and Web3, Web3 participants as well as Web3-adjacent companies, brands, and services, who can help us educate current and future, and upcoming Web3 users about the utility of domain names, and help us onboard them to the decentralized internet. So I think that's going to be the general focus. I think the key is that, as, oh, and hopefully, we'll be having one, overarching regulation, EU, that allowed us to do this at a vision level. But I would say I think it's going to be tackling it country by country, identifying countries where there's deeper penetration for Web3, and then making sure that we are partnered with local, trusted partners that are already developing for local communities there. So, yeah, that's my view and Nil, I believe those are wants in, for Asia. >> Oh, I think, yeah, so again, in Asia, one is you have a significant part of humanity living in Asia, right? So obviously, all the other challenges and the opportunities that we talk about, I think the first area of focus would be educating the people on the massive opportunity that they have, and if you're able to get them in early, I think it's great for them as well, right? Because by the time governments, regulations, large banking, financial companies move, but if you can get the larger population into this whole space, it's good for them, so they are first movers in that space. I think we are doing a lot of things on this, worldwide. I think we've done more than 100 past podcasts, just educating people on what is Web 3.0, what are NFT domains? What is DeFi, and so on and so forth. I think it would need some bit of localization, customization, in Asia, given that India itself has about 22 languages. And then there are the other countries which, each of them with their own local languages and syntax, semantics and all those things, right? So I think that that is very important, to be able to disseminate the knowledge, although it's global, but I think to get the grassroot people to understand the opportunity, I think it would need some amount of work there. I think also building communities, I think, John, you talked about communities, so did Sajjad talk about communities. I think it's very important to build communities, because communities create ideation. It talks about... People share their challenges, so that people don't repeat the same mistakes. So I think it's very important to build communities based on interest. I think we all know in the technology world, you can build communities around Elegram, Telegram, Discord, Twitter spaces, and all those things. But, again, when you're talking of financial inclusion, you're talking of a different kind of community-building. I think that that would be important. And then of course I will kind of, primarily from a company perspective, I think getting the 35 odd exchanges in Asia, the wallets to partner with us. Just as an example, MATIC. They had, until September of last year, about 3,500 apps. In just one quarter, it doubled to 7,000 dApps on their platform. But that is the pace, or the speed of innovation that we are seeing on this whole 3.0 space. I think it's very important to get those key partners, Who are developing those dApps. See the power of single sign-on, having a human-readable, digital identity, being able to seamlessly transfer all your assets, digital assets, across multiple cryptos, across multiple NFT marketplaces, and so on and so forth. >> Yeah, and I think the whole community thing, too, is also you seeing the communities being part of, certainly in the entertainment area, and the artistry, creator world, the users are art of the community, they own it, too. So it goes both ways, but this brings up the marketplace, too, as well, because you guys have the opportunity to have trust built into the software layer, right? So now you can keep the reputation data. You can be anonymous, but it's trustworthy, versus bots, which we all know bots can be killed and then started again with... And no one knows what the tagalong has been around. So the whole inadequacy of Web2, which is just growing pains, right? This is what it evolution looks like, next abstraction layer. So I love that vibe. How advanced do you think that thinking is, where people are saying, Hey, we need this abstraction layer. We need this digital identity. We need to start expanding our applications so that the users can move across these and break down those silos where the data is, 'cause that's... This is like the nerd problem, right? It's the data silos that are holding it back. What's your guys' reaction to that? The killing the silos and making it horizontally scalable? >> Yeah, I think it's a nerd problem. It is a problem of people who understand technology. It's a problem of a lot of the people in the business who want to compete effectively against those giants, which are holding all the data. So I think those are the people who will innovate and move. Again, coming back to financial inclusion, coming back to the unbanked, those guys just want to do their business. They want to live their daily life. I think that's not where you'll see... You will see innovation in a different form, but they're not going to disrupt the disrupters. I think that would be the people, Fintechs, I think they would be the first to move on to something like that. I mean, that's my humble opinion. >> Sajjad, you heard. >> Yeah, I think- >> Go ahead. >> I mean, absolutely. I think, I mean, I touched on creators, right? So, like I said earlier, right, we are heading to a future where more people will be creators on the internet. Whether you're publishing, writing something, you're creating video content, and that means that they have data they own, but that's their data, they bring it to the internet. That's more powerful, more useful, and they should be able to transact on that basis. So I think people are recognizing that, and they will increasingly look to do so. And as they do that, they would want these systems that enable them to hold permission to their data. They will want to be able to control what their permission and what they want to provide, dApp. And at the end of the day, these applications have to work backwards from customers, and the customer's looking for that. That's where... That's what they will build. >> The users want freedom. They want to be able to be connected, and not be restricted. They want to freely move around the global internet and do whatever they want with the friends and apps that they want to consume, and not feel arbitraged. They don't want to feel like they're kind of nailed into a walled garden and stuck there and having to come back. It's the new normal. >> They don't want to be the product, right, so. >> They don't want to be the product. Gentlemen, great to have you on, great conversation. We're going to continue this later. Certainly want to keep the updates coming. You guys are in a very hot area in Europe and Asia Pacific. That's where a lot of the action is happening. We see the entrepreneurial activity, the business transformation, certainly with the new paradigm shift, and this big wave that's coming. It's here, it's mainstream. Thanks for coming on and sharing your insights. Appreciate it. >> Thanks, John. >> Thanks, John, Thanks for the opportunity, have a good day. >> Okay, okay, great conversation. All the action's moving and happening real fast. This is theCUBE Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (contemplative music)

(bright music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the Unstoppable Domains Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here talking about the metaverse and what it all means, what it brings to the table. We've got two pioneers here in the metaverse breaking it down, doing great stuff. Both co-founders of companies, Noah Gainer, co-founder and CEO Parcel. And CJ Hetherington Co-Founder of Atlantis World, digging deep and doing all the great stuff in the Midwest. Chill and thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So, first of all, I want to say congratulations for the work you guys are doing. This is one of the biggest waves we've seen coming on. It's a changing user expectations, it's a changing architecture, it's real technology involved, there's a lot of action. 30% of people at University of California, Berkeley are dropping out of the Computer Science program to get into Web3. This is the biggest technological change, business model change, user experience change. And we've been seeing going back multiple inflection points. This is a big deal. So the metaverse is real. Some people say, "Well, you know, it's not com..." It's coming it's just a matter of time. So let's get into it. What are you guys doing? Tell us about your company's Parcel and Atlantis World. Noah, start with you. >> Sure, so Parcel is a marketplace for virtual real estate. So you can think of something like OpenSea, which everyone is familiar with, but we solely focus on virtual land and virtual real estate in a number of virtual world, maybe part of decent land or the sandbox. So we feature those on our platform and, you know, we take it the next level with the user experience. So we have fully interactive maps. We have price estimates. You can think of it like a estimate on Zillow and in general, we're building the fully verticalized solution for virtual real estate users. And that will extend into rentals, like Airbnbing out your virtual condo or getting a mortgage on your virtual home, as well as, you know, cultivating the community around it. And especially helping empower creators and architects and builders and getting them work and getting their work on display. >> I'm looking forward to digging into that, that sounds very cool. CJ what's Atlantis world doing? What do you got going on? >> Yeah, exactly. So at Atlantis world, we're building the Web3, social metaverse by connecting Web3 with social, gaming, and education in one light web virtual world, that's accessible to everybody. So by going with actually a light web first and a pixel approach so that you can play on mobile or a really old device, because the problem with existing metaverses is that they set an incredibly high cost barrier to entry and also tech isn't necessarily readily available globally in terms of things like VR headsets and gaming PCs. Like for example, when I was in Africa, I travel a lot. If my book would break, it's not even that I couldn't necessarily afford to buy anyone, it's actually not available there. So we're ruling out a lot of the global kind of population from a metaverse experience. And we're building something which is like 3D pixel and super light weight, to kind of bridge that gap and build something which is ready to be massive up till now and onboard billions of users into Web3. So they'll all basically be using Web3 applications in a gamified way and going really hard on connecting that with social features, like voice chat and talking, getting, and virtual events and vaulting and all of that stuff. >> You know, I love what you guys are doing, you're pioneering a whole another area, but what's great about the whole crypto area, is that, since you know, 2017 onwards you saw Ethereum set the developer market started coming in strong. So you start to see that development. And now we got the metaverse. So I got to ask you guys what's the current definition of the metaverse. I mean everyone's... I mean, since Facebook changed their name to Meta, it's been a hype cycle and everyone's like, "Woh..." First of all, you know why they did that. But they're actually putting a lot of DAO in this. This is a wave, we talked about that. But what is the metaverse? How do you describe it? Why is it relevant? Virtual real estate, that sounds cool. What does this all come together? Explain it for the people out there that might not be getting it right. >> Yeah, I feel like for me, the critical difference between an ordinary gamer, what one might think of as game and a metaverse is actually Web3. For me, Web3 is metaverse. And for me it's really because Web3 enables real world utility, but inside of a virtual environment. So for example, inside of Atlantis, you might run into a DeFi bank and understand by interacting with other game characters, which are programmed to teach you about DeFi and like, what is Avel, how to deposit. And so you're actually getting a real world utility out of doing something in a virtual environment. And for me, that's what really bridges the gap into metaverse. Yeah, I'm really kind of bullish on that. (chuckles) >> Noah, what's your take? Define the current state of the definition of the metaverse? What is the metaverse? >> Yeah, to me, it's the 3D internet. And I do agree with what CJ's saying, how, you know, what makes it the most compelling and will ultimately the most successful is that addition of a blockchain and essentialized, you know, tributed ledger technology. Because you can have the closed metaverse, which nobody wants that future. And I don't believe that will be the future. you know, versus the open metaverse, which is blockchain-based, the users are the owners of the assets and the land and everything around it. And it's really foreign by the people. But I see the metaverse as just an extension of the internet we're already using today but we're going to have hardware that makes it 3D and more immersive like AR and VR. >> Yeah, I think- >> Yeah, definitely- >> Go on CJ. >> Around kind of like eight or nine months ago when we started to build Atlantis, we decided that the metaverse was a virtual world where you could live, work, play, and earn, and that's what we've been building. It started off as like building the metaverse that has DeFi and over the kind of time it's gone on our community has grown, we've started to understand the future of our product and our mission and values. It started to become the Web3 metaverse, right? And then on top of that, the Web3 social metaverse, so it's a combination of what all these things. >> You know, it's interesting. And I'm a little bit older than you guys, I wish I was your age, but when the web came along, people were saying the same thing. That the web's terrible. It's a stupid thing. It's never going to be real. And yeah, there was problems. It was slow to dial up back in the day. But yeah, now with gaming, I got to say, I had to look at the gaming evolution being a gamer myself, old school, I guess, but the gaming culture is proxy to what I see kind of happening in the metaverse. And let me get your reaction to that. I'm not saying directly, but you saw what gaming did, right? In game currency, some, you know, pockets of the same kind of dynamic where a lot of value is happening, the expectations were different for users. So how does the metaverse... How does gaming cross over? What's the ecosystem of metaverse? Obviously it's a cultural shift, one. Infrastructure, two. But I can just see this new generation of thinking. It's a whole nother level. Can you guys share your thoughts on that riff? >> Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's like for us, we really believe that we can enable a social revolution, where workers from impoverished and remote regions can actually be onboarded into these digital player to earn economies and also learn to earn economies. So it's about leveraging Web3 and blockchain gaming, whatever actually you want to call it, to enable this revolution and actually onboard new people into a completely new working and dynamic. One of the other things we envision for Atlantis, imagine like you run around this game world and you complete quests inside of the game. And these quests basically involve talking to the non-player characters, the NPCs, which are basically pre-programmed. I don't know if anyone's ever played an MMORPG before, but it can be super fun. And they'll actually teach you how to use different crypto applications. Whether that's a DeFi bank, NFT marketplace, kind of digital asset exchange. And once you all do that, the kind of end goal in vision is that you'll be rewarded with tokens. So users will earn crypto for learning about crypto. And if anybody wants to do that right now, they can actually go to rabbithole.gg. It's a different project to Atlantis, but they building learn to earn, and you go on you complete quests and interact with different crypto applications. And it's so crucial for onboarding. And yeah, it's going to be really powerful, the kind of revolution that play to earn and learn to earn will enable. >> I'll check out the rabbihole.gg sounds awesome. What's your take on the reaction to that riff on this convergence of culture tech, gaming, vibe that's kind of divine the metaverse what's your take on that, Noah? >> Yeah, I mean... I think gaming will be the on ramp for maybe the first billion people, you know, into blockchain. It's something people already do and are already paying for, and they now have the opportunity to get paid to play. So the incentives are extremely strong and I think that will be a great way to usher people in, teach 'em about blockchain without realizing that they're using blockchain. And then once they're already in it and have already used it, then it becomes much more natural to user than other applications. >> It's funny, people always talk about, "Oh, user experience!" You know, expectations drive experience, right? If you expect something and if they're used to gaming, I see the great, great call out there, good point. Well, let me ask you guys a question, 'cause I think this is comes out a lot in terms of like the market shifts and metaverse, as an old expression, "Great markets pull the products out of companies or out of the industry." What organic growth have you guys seen in the metaverse that's been either a surprise or a natural evolution of just success and just growth, because the market's hungry for this and it is relevant. It's new, what's pulling out? What's coming out of the organic aspect of the metaverse? >> I think a lot of art and architecture and design. And, you know, it's empowering a lot of independent creators and allowing 'em to stretch their skills in a way that they maybe couldn't do before, but now can do and get compensated for. Like, we see really see the rise of the creator coming in the next couple of years in the open metaverse and finally they will be the ruling class. They won't get the short end of the stick, which artists have for... I mean all the time. >> Yeah, some of the wall street bet skies in the same way, feel the same way. CJ, What's your take on... What's getting pulled out on the organic execution growth of the interactions and metaverse evolution? >> Of course, yeah. I would, first of all love to go back to the previous point on gaming and just kind of like, definitely agree with what Noah said. And the thing is that gaming is 3.4 billion user market, and they're typically an experimental by nature people and group of users, right? So it's definitely a huge onboarding opportunity for teaching users about Web3 and using Web3 in a gamified way and making that kind of inherently fun and engaging. And again, in terms of organic growth, Web3 is incredible for that. We place a huge emphasis on, I think, collaborate versus compete and try to enable network effects for everybody who is involved in Atlantis and becoming part of our fast growing ecosystem. Like we have eight blockchain, more than 10 DeFi apps, like Aave, Yearn, Balanced, 1inch, Perpetual. All of the DAOs like The Exile, MetaCartel, lobsterdao, PizzaDAO, all of the NFT communities. Like we're actually building a yacht for bought yacht club on the beach in Atlantis. So that's fun. But yeah, we grew our community. We're very early stage still. We've been building only for eight or nine months, but we grew our community to like 20 to 30,000 community members across social channels. And we recently raised over a million dollars from our community and we're fully bootstrapped and taken no private money. So the ability to actually do that and to coordinate both kind of community efforts and fundraising and resources is really testament to Web3 and what it's becoming in the community aspect of that. And also its future and the kind of dawn and domination of the Metaverse. >> Well, I got to say, I just got to give you props for that. I think that fundraising dynamic is a real entrepreneurial new thing, that's awesome. You've got active community vote with their contribution and whether it's money and or other value, right? You got social value. This is the whole thing about the metaverse, there's a new community culture going next level here. >> We believe in community and we believe in Web3. And we know we don't understand why most leading metaverses are focusing fully on huge IP and actually ignoring Web3. So we're actually trying to build the infrastructure layer for Web3 applications and for Web3 driven utility inside of the metaverse. And what we mean by that imagine that any developer or any project or any team or any company could occupy a plot for free inside of the metaverse, customize it by branding and then effectively set up shop, whether that's a Web3 integration, so it's a DeFi Bank, or it's an exchange. Or whether that's an NFT marketplace or a music venue or a coworking space. We're really excited about that. And we really believe we've designed the value capture mechanism for virtual land in the metaverse and we're approaching it in a different way to land in the real world. >> That's awesome. Well, let's get that infrastructure conversation, unstoppable domains obviously there having the partner showcase here. You guys are partners. This NFT kind of like access method is a huge... I love it by the way. I think it's phenomenal. I love the value there, but it's also digital identity and it's distributed naming. So you kind of got this enablement vibe, you got solve a problem. How is it working with you guys? Take us through what does unstoppable metaverse... Why does unstoppable matter to the metaverse? >> Yeah, unstoppable is very great mostly for identity and having a kind of crush chain identity inside of the metaverse and just kind of in Web3 in general. And unstoppable, we enable log in with unstoppable. So if you have, for example, an unstoppable domain which is like a human readable kind of crypto wallet address, but you can also do some incredible, stuff with it, and there is a lot of fun and exciting utility, effectively, like if you would have, I don't know, like unstoppable.dao you would be able to use that to log in to the Atlantis metaverse and it would represent some of your identity and social graph in game with your peers. >> Awesome, Noah, what's your take on the unstoppable angle on this? >> Yeah, I mean, it makes it social. So, instead of you can have a feed, you know, something we're thinking about at Parcel is like a feed of all the real estate transactions, and you could follow certain people, you can follow your friends and see a feed of everything that your friends are doing in English or human readable terms that are not just like a wallet address. So, that's obviously a big one and they're also giving people more options in terms of, naming and top level domains if you want to be something.wallet or .nft, or hopefully eventually .metaverse- >> John: Yes. >> Will help expand that ecosystem much more. In addition to like on our... Like backend being able to capture email when they login and to provide better marketing for our users. >> What would you guys say to other metaverse partners looking for work with unstoppable domains for their login and digital identity, what would you recommend? >> It doesn't make sense to- >> I believe- >> Connect with the best DAO and integrate that if you want to keep shipping stuff for your community and keeping it exciting and engaging and enabling user choice in how they choose to display their identity in virtual environments. >> Yeah, there's practically no downside and plenty of upside, again, having those users who are already using unstoppable domains quickly, you know, log into your site and plug in. >> All right. That's awesome. Good stuff with unstoppable. I got to ask you guys give an example of on your products, I love the metaverse progression. I love the pioneering work you guys are doing. And again, the funding things are different. The user expectations are different. The technology experience are different. Billions of people going to be in enabled for it. What are the cool things you guys got going on? CJ, we were talking before we came on camera about the tree thing you got going on. Take us through some of the things that are exciting that people may not know about or may know about. What should they pay attention to share, share some insight? >> Yeah, of course. So one of the fun things, actually that we're building on that on these sites together with our full team and also some outside contributors from the community and two kin protocol, which is a regenerative finance protocol. And I'll get into that a little bit in a minute. Effectively what we're actually doing is planting a carbon capturing virtual forest inside of the metaverse that will in future also be bio diverse. So how we're approaching that is imagine that you can plant NFT trees inside of the metaverse, providing that your will deposit X amount of kind of USD stablecoin or Ether or some digital asset. You can actually use that to deposit inside of the tree. And we will use some, probably something like super fluid, which is like a kind of smart projecting infrastructure platform. And we all essentially enable every single second funds being sent from the contract and actually purchasing real world carbon credits. So legitimate, you know, government bags to carbon credits from the voluntary kind of public market that have actually been bridged on chain, transformed into a crypto asset, and they will be locked away inside of these trees inside of game forever. And in future, we also hope to have like user on animals, roaming the great forest of Atlantis, which will have biodiversity and endangered species credit, locked inside. And we hope to support a variety of different kind of sustainable assets and things like that to really populate this ecosystem. >> So it's you're doing climate change good for real, as well as rendering it as an asset for everyone to see and enjoy. >> Absolutely. And for me, that's what makes the metaverse the metaverse, that's what I talked about. It's how Web3 enables the metaverse to cross over into our real world, ordinary life from URL to IRL and actually provide some incredible positive impact for all of humanity on the planet. >> And Noah, you have some action going on there. I mean, I would be like, "oh, virtual real estate, isn't it unlimited real estate?" But when you have users come together, this value, we've seen this in gaming, what are some of the cool things you got going on over there at Parcel? >> Yeah, I think one thing that stands out, which maybe not enough people are thinking about are AR virtual world. So, right now a lot of people are focused on the VR types, central and sandbox and, and Atlantis, but there very well may be a billion people using augmented reality before there are a billion using virtual reality just because of the nature of the hardware development and apple may come out with their AR headset by the end of the year. So there are a few projects there they've taken the real world to map and Parcel it out into hexagons, and you can actually buy that, and you own that, that piece and you can put your own custom content there. And on that social impact point, we have heard about a few projects that are trying to use it for good. And like one project is bought up some land in the Amazon rain forest and some of the proceeds go to conservation of the rain forest. So, you know, we're all about using blockchain for good and right, coming together as a globe. >> I can't wait to see the commercial real estate division of your group with all the work from, a remote coming on. Guys, great stuff you got going on, again, you guys are pioneering an area that is coming big. It's coming strong, its got a lot of... A momentum, vitality, and energy to it. Put a plug in for your companies. Noah, we'll start with you. What's going on with Parcel, share a plug for the company. What you're looking for, do some key highlights, news, take a minute to, to give a plug. >> Sure. Yeah, great. We are the destination for virtual real estate and that extends well beyond just the buyers and sellers. That's everyone across the whole chain with property managers and property developers, but then also the builders and creators and artists, and we are working right now on aggregating the best creator directory in the metaverse. So you can think of it as a place where artists can come showcase their work and get hired. As well as just generally like bridging this knowledge gap that is much wider than we even expected. So we have our Parcel learn product coming soon, which is a fully fledged, knowledge base with education, informational content and lots of rich data. >> Where can people get involved? What's the channels? Are all channels open? Where can we find you? >> Yeah, our websites Parcel.so on Twitter, you can find us at ParcelNFT and you can link to our discord from either one of those. It's the best way to get involved. >> All right, CJ, put a plug in for the last world, I know you got a lot of action to share. >> Yeah, of course. I would love to see everybody there. Thanks so much for having us. And thanks for listening. Like I said, at the start of the call, we're building the Web3 social metaverse and we're connecting Web3 with social gaming and education, in one light web virtual world that's accessible to everybody. We're also doing some crazy stuff like planting their cabin, capturing virtual forest and all of that, and trying to be the infrastructure layer for Web3 driven real world utility inside of the metaverse. And we believe that we have designed the critical value capture mechanism for virtual learn. I we'll be sharing more all of that very soon and continuing to integrate the best apps from across the Web3 ecosystem and showcasing them at the center of Atlantis. You can go to discord.gg/atlantisworld. If you would love to learn more about us, you can go to wiki.atlantis.world. And there is some documentation now, which includes back story and team and some of our milestones and achievements so far from winning hackathons to raising grants and launching our Alpha belt, soft launching it. And we all have the public free to play coming in March. And where most active, I would say on discord and Twitter. On Twitter you can find us atlantisOx, or just search Atlantis world. And it's the first one that come up. >> All right. CJ, thank you. Noah, thanks for coming out. I really appreciate you spending the time here, and unstoppable showcase and being a partner. Again they got the great digital identity, great plug there for them here. Thanks for sharing that and thanks for sharing the time. Appreciate you guys are pioneer of some good stuff. Appreciate it. >> Thanks so much man. >> I so appreciate that. >> All right, theCUBE's unstoppable domains partner showcase. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE presentation of the AWS Partner Showcase season one, episode two. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got two great guest here. Douglas Ko, Director of product marketing at Cohesity and Sabina Joseph General Manager of AWS, Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the show. >> Thank you for having us. >> Great to see you Sabina and Douglas. Great to see you, congratulations at Cohesity. Loved the shirt, got the colors wearing there on Cohesity, Always good I can't miss your booth at the shows, can't wait to get back in person, but thanks for coming in remotely. I got to say it's super excited to chat with you, appreciate it. >> Yeah, pleasure to be here. >> What are the trends you're seeing in the market when it comes to ransomware threats right now. You guys are in the middle of it right now more than ever. I was hearing more and more about security, cloud scale, cloud refactoring. You guys are in the middle of it. What's the latest trends in ransomware? >> Yeah, I have to say John, it's a pleasure to be here but on the other hand, when you asked me about ransomware, right? The data and the statistics are pretty sobering right now. If we look at what just happened in 2020 to 2021, we saw a tenfold increase in a ransomware attacks. We also saw the prediction of a ransomware attack happening every 11 seconds meaning by the time I finished this sentence there's going to be another company falling victim to ransomware. And it's also expected by 2031 that the global impact of ransomware across businesses will be over $260 billion, right? So, that's huge. And even at Cohesisity, right, what we saw, we did our own survey, and this one actually directly to end users and consumers. And what we found was over 70% of them would reconsider doing business with a company that paid a ransom. So all these things are pretty alarming and pretty big problems that we face today in our industry. >> Yeah, there's so many dimensions to it. I mean, you guys at Cohesity have been doing a while. It's being baked in from day one, security in the cloud and backup recovery, all that is kind of all in one thing now. So to protect against ransomware and other threats is huge Sabina, I got to ask you Amazon's view of ransomware is serious. You guys take it very seriously. What's the posture and specifically, what is AWS doing to protect customers from this threat? >> Yeah, so as Doug mentioned, right, there's no industry that's immune to ransomware attacks. And just as so we all level set, right? What it means is somebody taking control over and locking your data as an individual or as a company, and then demanding a ransom for it, right? According to the NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology cybersecurity framework, there are basically five main functions which are needed in order to plan and manage these kind of cybersecurity ransomware attacks. They go across identifying what do you need to protect, actually implementing the things that you need in order to protect yourself, detecting things if there is an attack that's going on, then also responding, how do you get out of this attack? And then bringing things, recovery, right? Bringing things back to where they were before the attack. As we all know, AWS takes security very seriously. We want to make sure that our customer's data is always protected. We have a number of native security solutions, but we are also looking to see how we can work with partners. And this is in fact when in the fall of 2019, the Cohesity CEO, Mohit Aron, myself and a couple of us, we met and we brainstorm, what could we do something that is differentiated in the market? When we built this data management as a service native solution on top of AWS, it's a first of a kind solution, John. It doesn't exist anywhere else in the market, even to even today. And we really focused on using the well architected review, the five pillars of security, reliability, operational excellence, performance, and cost optimization. And we built this differentiated solution together, and it was launched in April, 2020. And then of course from a customer viewpoint, they should use a comprehensive set of solutions. And going back to that security, that cyber security framework that I mentioned, the Cohesity data management as a service solution really falls into that recovery, that last area that I mentioned and solution actually provides, granular management of data, protection of data. Customers can spin up things very quickly and really scale their solution across the globe. And ensure that there is compliance, no matter how many times we do data changes, ads and so on across the world. >> Yeah, Sabina, that's a great point about that because a lot of the ransomware actually got bad actors, but also customers can misconfigure things. They don't follow the best practice. So having that native solutions are super important. So that's a great call out. Douglas, I got to go back to you because you're on the Cohesity side and a the partner of AWS. They have all these best practices that for the good actors, got to pay attention to the best practices and the bad actors also trying to get in creates a two, challenge an opportunity. So how do organizations protect their data against these attacks? And also how do they maintain their best practices? Because that's half the battle too, is the best practices to make sure you're following the guidelines on AWS side, as well as protecting the attacks. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. First and foremost, right? As an organization, you need to understand how ransomware operates and how it's evolved over the years. And when you first look at it, Sabina already mentioned it, they started with consumers, small businesses, attacking their data, right? And some of these, consumers or businesses didn't have any backup. So the first step is just to make sure your data is backed up, but then the criminals kind of went up market, right? They understood that big organizations had big pocket and purses. So they went after them and the larger organizations do have backup and recovery solutions in place. So the criminals knew that they had to go deeper, right? And what they did was they went after the backup systems themselves and went to attack, delete, tamper with those backup systems and make it difficult or impossible to recover. And that really highlighted some solutions is out there that had some vulnerabilities with their data immutability and capabilities around WORM. And those are areas we suggest customers look at, that have immutability and WORM. And more recently again, given the way attacks have happened now is really to add another layer of defense and protection. And that includes, traditionally what we used to call, the 3-2-1 rule. And that basically means, three copies of data on two different sets of media with one piece of that data offsite, right? And in today's world and the cloud, right? That's a great opportunity to kind of modernize your environment. I wish that was all that ransomware guys we're doing right now and the criminals were doing, but unfortunately that's not the case. And what we've seen is over the past two years specifically, we've seen a huge increase in what you would call data theft or data exfiltration. And that essentially is them taking that data, a specific sense of the data and they're threatening to expose it to the dark web or selling it to the highest bidder. So in this situation it's honestly very difficult to manage. And the biggest thing you could do is obviously harden your security systems, but also you need a good understanding about your data, right? Where all that sensitive information is, who has access to it and what are the potential risks of that data being exposed. So that takes another step in terms of leveraging a bunch of technologies to help with that problem set. >> What can businesses do from an architectural standpoint and platform standpoint that you guys see there's key guiding principles around how their mindset should be? What's the examples of other approaches- >> Yeah. >> Approach here? >> No, I think they are both us at Cohesity and I'll speak for Sabina, AWS, we believe in a platform approach. And the reason for that is this a very complicated problem and the more tools and more things you have in there, you add risk of complexity, even potential new attack surfaces that the criminals can go after. So we believe the architecture approach should kind of have some key elements. One is around data resiliency, right? And that again comes from things like data encryption, your own data is encrypted by your own keys, that the data is immutable and has that, right, want to read many or WORM capabilities, so the bad guys can't temper with your data, right? That's just step one. Step two is really understanding and having the right access controls within your environment, right? And that means having multi factor authentication, quorum, meaning having two keys for the closet before you can actually have access to it. But it's got to go beyond there as well too. We got to leverage some newer technologies like AI and machine learning. And that can help you with detection and analysis of both where all your sensitive information is, right? As well as understanding potential anomalies that could signify attack or threat in progress. So, those are all key elements. And the last one of course is I think it takes a village, right? To fight the ransomware war. So we know we can't do it alone so, that's why we partner with people like AWS. That's why we also partner with other people in the security space to ensure you really have a full ecosystem support to manage all those things around that framework. >> That's awesome. Before I get to Sabina, I want to get into the relationship real quick, but I want to come back and highlight what you said about the data management as a service. This is a joint collaboration. This is some of the innovation that Cohesity and AWS are bringing to the market to combat ransomware. Can you elaborate more on that piece 'cause this is important. It's a collaboration that we're going to gather. So it's a partner and you guys were going to take us through what that means for the customer and to you guys. I mean, that's a compelling offering. >> So when we start to work with partners, right? we want to make sure that we are solving a customer problem. That's the whole working backwards from a customer. We are adding something more that the customer could not do. That's why when either my team or me, we start to either work on a new partnership or a new solution, it's always focused on, okay, is this solution enabling our customer to do something that they couldn't do before? And this approach has really helped us, John, in enabling majority of the fortune 500 companies and 90% of the fortune 100 companies use partner solutions successfully. But it's not just focused on innovation and technology, it's also focused on the business side. How are we helping partners grow their business? And we've been scaling our field teams, our AWS sales teams globally. But what we realized is through partner feedback, in fact, that we were not doing a great job in helping our partners close those opportunities and also bring net new opportunities. So in our field, we actually introduced a new role called the ISV Success Manager, ISMs that are embedded in our field to help partners either close existing opportunities, but also bring net new opportunities to them. And then at re:Invent 2020, we also launched the ISB accelerate program, which enables our field teams, the AWS field teams to get incentive to work with our partners. Cohesity, of course, participates in all of these programs and has access to all of these resources. And they've done a great job in leveraging and bringing our field teams together, which has resulted in hundreds of wins for this data management as a service solution that was launched. >> So you're bringing customers to Cohesity. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, I got to get the side. So they're helping you, how's this relationship going? Could you talk about the relationship on the customer side? How's that going? Douglas, what's your take on that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's going great. That's why we chose to partner with AWS and to be quite honest, as Sabina mentioned, we really only launched data management and service back in 2020, late 2020. And at that time we launched with just one service then, right, when we first launched with backup as a service. Now about 15 months later, right? We're on the brink of launching four services that are running on AWS cloud. So, without the level of support, both from a go to market standpoint that Sabina mentioned as well as the engineering and the available technology services that are on the AWS Cloud, right? There's no way we would've been able to spin up new services in such a short period of time. >> Is that Fort Knox and Data Govern, those are the services you're talking about Or is that- >> Yeah, so let me walk you through it. Yeah, so we have Cohesity DataProtect, which is our backup as a service solution. And that helps customers back their data to the cloud, on-prem, SaaS, cloud data like AWS, all in a single service and allows you to recover from ransomware, right? But a couple months ago we also announced a couple new services that you're alluding to John. And that is around Fort Knox and DataGovern. And basically Fort Knox, it is basically our SaaS solution for data isolation to a vaulted copy in the AWS cloud. And the goal of that is to really make it very simple for customers, not only to provide data immutability, but also that extra layer of protection by moving that data offsite and keeping it secure and vaulted away from cyber criminals and ransomware. And what we're doing is simplifying the whole process that normally is manual, right? You either do it manually with tapes or you'll manually replicate data to another data center or even to the cloud, but we're providing it as a service model, basically providing a modern 3-2-1 approach, right? For the cloud era. So, that's what's cool about Fort Knox, DataGovern, right? That's also a new service that we announced a few months ago and that really provides data governance and user behavior analytics services that leverages a lot that AI machine learning that everybody's so excited about. But really the application of that is to automate the discovery of sensitive data. So that could be your credit card numbers, healthcare records, a personal information of customers. So understanding where all that data is, is very important because that's the data that the criminals are going to go after and hold you host. So that's kind of step one. And then step two is again, leveraging machine learning, actually looking at how users are accessing and managing that data is also super important because that's going to help you identify potential anomalies, such as people sharing that data externally, which could be a threat. It could be in improper vault permissions, or other suspicious behaviors that could potentially signify data exfiltration or ransomware attack in progress. >> That's some great innovation. You got the data resiliency, of course, the control mechanism, but the AI piece machine learning is awesome. So congratulations on that innovation. Sabina, I'm listening to conversation and hear you talk. And it reminds me of our chat at re:Invent. And the whole theme of the conference was about the innovation and rapid innovations and how companies are refactoring with the cloud and this NextGen kind of journey. This is a fundamental pillar of AWS's rapid innovation concept with your partners. And I won't say it's new, but it's highly accelerated. How are you guys helping partners be with this rapid innovation, 'cause you're seeing benefits can come faster now, Agile is here. What are some of the programs that you're doing? How are you helping customers take advantage of the rapid innovation with the secret sauce of AWS? >> Yeah, so we have a number of leadership principles, John, and one of them, of course, is customer obsession. We are very focused on making sure we are developing things that our customers need. And we look for these very same qualities when we work with partners such as Cohesity. We want to make sure that it's a win-win approach for both sides because that's what will make the partnership durable over time. And this John, our leadership team at AWS, right from our CEO down believes that partners are critical to our success and as partners lean in, we lean in further. And that's why we signed the strategic collaboration agreement with Cohesity in April, 2020, where data management as a service solution was launch as part of that agreement. And for us, we've launched this solution now and as Doug said, what are the next things we could be doing, right? And just to go back a little bit when Cohesity was developing this solution with us, they used a number of our programs. Especially on the technical side, they used our SaaS factory program, which really helped them build this differentiated solution, especially focused around security compliance and cost optimizing the solution. Now that we've launched this solution, just like Doug mentioned, we are now focused on leveraging other services like security, AIML, and also our analytic services. And the reason for that is Cohesity, as we all know, protects, manages this data for the customer, but we want to make sure that the customer is extracting value from this data. That is why we continue to look, what can we do to continue to differentiate this solution in this market. >> That's awesome. You guys did a great job. I got to say, as it gets more scale, there's more needs for this rapid, I won't say prototyping, but rapid innovation and the Cohesity side does was you guys have been always on point on the back and recovery and now with security and the new modern application development, you guys are in the front row seats of all the action. So, I'll give you the final worry what's going on at Cohesity, give an update on what you guys are doing. What's it like over there these days? How's life give a quick plug for Cohesity. >> Yeah, Cohesity is doing great, right? We're always adding folks to the team, on our team, we have a few open racks open both on the marketing side, as well as the technology advocacy side. And of course, some of our other departments too, and engineering and sales and also our partner teams as well, working with AWS partners such as that. So, in our mind, the data delusion and growth is not going to slow down, right? So in this case, I think all tides raises all the boats here and we're glad to be innovative leader in this space and really looking to be really, the new wave of NextGen data management providers out there that leverages things like AI that leverages cybersecurity at the core and has an ecosystem of partners that we're working with, like AWS, that we're building out to help customers better manage their data. >> It's all great. Data is in the mid center of the value proposition. Sabina, great to see you again, thanks for sharing. And Douglas, great to see you too. Thanks for sharing this experience here in theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's AWS Partner Showcase special presentation, speeding innovation with AWS. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, welcome to the AWS Partner Showcase presented by theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. This is Showcase season one, episode two. I've got Danielle Greshock, Worldwide Director of ISV Partner Solutions Architects At AWS. Welcome to the kickoff, Speeding Innovation with AWS. Good to see you. >> Good to see you as well. Thanks, John. >> Okay, we've got some great companies we're presenting with this week, talking about kind of speeding innovation, really with the cloud. And obviously Amazon, you guys are number one and doing this has been the big theme from Reinvent, this past conference. A lot of people are refactoring in the cloud, from observability to new ways to counter ransomware, to even back up and recover. These were once point solutions, now they're not point solutions, they're part of the cloud platform that's powering new modern application. You know, from DS city pipelining, cloud native, it's out there now, it's now well known, people are looking at this and going, "okay, this is cloud next level," or "super cloud," or whatever we want to call it. It's happening, and people are having solutions and you're in the middle of it. So what's your take on this? Because you know, Veeam, Splunk Clumio and others, they're all doing great business and now refactoring in the cloud with AWS. >> Yeah, well I think that what a lot of companies are finding now is that moving to the cloud is really speeding their innovation. And of course there's been a faster move to the cloud because they realize the benefits that they can get from that movement. And, you know, companies like Veeam, like Clumio, they are building on top of AWS and coming up with new ways to solve customer problems. And then of course the other thing is that there's so much much access to data and insights that you weren't able to have before. But now that you can retain that data with the scale of the cloud, lots of companies are finding new and exciting things to do and innovate with that data that they are able to hang onto. >> You know, it's interesting, you see the entrepreneurial activity. I mean, I was reading- >> Yeah >> This is what I do on the weekends. I go back to 2006 and I look at the early Amazon posts of EC2 and S3. And that was a real great startup movement and that changed the game. Now, even today, the startups are out there. You look at Clumio, right? Poojan over there, he's been doing great stuff. He came from Nutanix, a hyperscale, and now he's got a startup that's growing like a weed out there and Amazon's powering that. You got Cohesity, they're almost going to go public, I believe. They've announced that, they're about to go public so they're going to be a public company. And you have Veeam, which has been in the ecosystems for many, many years, a decade. So these are a good mix of companies, and this is the makeup of the kind of customers you have. What's the thing that they have in common? Why should people pay attention to these companies and the relationship with Amazon web services? >> I mean, I think the thing that these companies really have in common is thinking about the cloud as this new paradigm that they are building for. You know, if I think about Veeam, you know we have really amped up a lot of, both our building and co-selling with Veeam and they're having a lot of success with small companies, medium companies big companies as well, just with their product. And so that is what I think is the difference is they are looking at us as an opportunity to innovate with their product and take advantage to what the opportunities the cloud provides there. >> What are you guys seeing as solution architects in your customer base? Look at AWS from a partnership standpoint. It used to be you get into the marketplace, you have some programs, okay, all good. You guys have shifted that. Can you give us an update on what you guys are doing with respect to offering new kinds of value as your customers change and grow? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely we've seen a lot of success with our SaaS factory program that is looking to, you know help companies make the transformation to SaaS. Also our workload migration program, helping ISVs to move even faster, their on premises business into AWS for sure. But I also just think that, you know, what our customers demand actually at this point is, they're really looking for full blown solutions. So us working with them on solutions, working closely with systems integrators who can help execute on those solutions. Those are all things that our successful ISVs are really leaning into. >> This month's featured companies all have one thing in common, they're all using data at scale and data as part of the developer process. You're seeing data being available, and they have to be available for machine learning and other things cause you have to be more agile. And the scale. So you got more flow and also scalable in terms of users and whatnot. So this is a common theme. What's happening from a customer standpoint as they start to rearchitect? Because you guys have to provide that now next level headroom. >> Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, again we're seeing a lot of companies wanting to do different things with the volume of data that they actually have, and things that they were never even considering in on-prem. So we talk about refactoring, it's not simply a lift and shift, they're looking to get some technology benefit out of the move, right? So just kind of having a net net from on-prem into the cloud is not going to be good enough. And so we're looking to add that value when they go and make that investment. >> You know, we've been always writing about and covering Snowflake as an example, bring them up. You know you have Redshift that's also, you know competing I guess, with Redshift. But they're a partner, they're growing. They built on AWS and became valuable because they did it differently in the cloud. We're using that, there's many other examples like that, they're companies are coming in and building and taking advantage of the gift called scale. CapEx gift from AWS. And also you got Silicon coming, so more and more goodness on the Amazon side, enabling the partners. So I have to ask you, and that's all kind of documenting that's happening in real time, but what it's teasing out is that the integrations are changing, right? So you're seeing a lot more tightly coupled engineering or solutions with AWS and your top partners. Can you share insight into what that looks like and how you guys think about that? >> Yeah, and definitely a lot of our top partnerships really do start with integrations. That's where we're able to, you know, find the value, that differentiated solution on AWS. So, you know, Snowflake, as an example, just talked about how their integration with private link and some of their serverless integrations were really the cornerstones of the new partnership that they've built with us. And same thing with other ISVs, they've really looked at the integrations to be core, building the value with AWS, with our services and for our AWS customers. Of course these are very bespoke, you know? What's going to be important to a data company isn't going to be the same thing that's important to a storage based company, but still being able to bring the full value of the innovation that AWS makes and have that better together story is really where we find a lot of value there. >> Yeah, and you're in the middle of it too. You have the keys to the kingdom. Solution architects are all where the action is right now. Everyone's looking, okay I got to build on what I got and also I got to build the architecture in real time. And build on top, it's not a tear down, it's a continuation of what they had. >> Yeah, and even our most mature solutions and partnerships, those that are full SaaS solutions, the companies that are innovating and continuing to bring new features to market are the ones that we end up finding to have the most success with. And that is really what my team does is building those integrations and new solutions on AWS. It is our core reason we exist and you know, what we feel is the cornerstone to great partnerships >> You know, Dave Vellante and I on our team, we're always commenting about how the cloud scale is a real benefit to anyone, whether it's leveling up talent, bias, and you know women in tech is coming up, international women's day coming up around the corner. >> Yeah. >> That's happening, so it's all good, right? So, whether you're a startup or a big company if you get that one feature right in the cloud you can and really change your business. And I think this always used to be elusive for the product marketing teams of the old way things were built. You know, you got to test it out and put it out there. Now you got real time information, and for companies that are ISVs out there, they really can be nimble. >> Well, and that's the thing too, is we try very hard to make sure our ISVs have access to customers, our customers, and that's how they can figure out like what is the right thing to build for them. >> Whether you're big or small, the cloud's great. So I got to ask you, this is season one of the AWS partner showcase, we're proud to present that with you guys. It's been a great partnership, we love getting the stories out there. Episode two is about this theme about, you got little data here, you got backup recovery you got ransomware, you know, old point solutions. We've had a great conversation. Why should people pay attention to this episode in your opinion? What's the big aha going on here in this episode? >> I mean, for me, I think ISVs ask me all the time, how can I innovate with AWS? How can I have a successful partnership? This series will give you that answer. You can see real world examples of what other companies are doing to be successful. So I mean, that is reason enough when it's a very competitive tech technology market. So, you know, lots of good ideas there to see. >> Great stuff, and of course, again, these are big ISVs, they're doing great stuff. They're software developers, they're building the next modern applications. Danielle, thanks for coming out. You're the worldwide director of the ISV Partner Solution Architects at AWS, you're in the middle of all the great action. Must be fun, isn't it? >> It's a lot of fun. I couldn't ask for a better job. >> Alright, well thanks for coming on this keynote kickoff. Appreciate it. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, you're watching, and we've got the whole series coming up, but this is the AWS Partner Showcase presented by theCUBE. Showcase season one, episode two, enjoy the great presentations. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Showcase season one, episode two with the ISV Startups partners. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're joined by Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk, and Danielle Greshock, who is the director of ISVs solution architects at AWS. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> And great. Thanks for having us. >> Great to see both of you, both theCUBE alumni, but the Splunk-AWS relationship has been going very, very well. You guys are doing great business enabling this app revolution. And cloud scale has been going extremely well. So let's get into it. You guys are involved in a lot of action around application revolution, around OpenTelemetry and open source. So let's get into it. What's the latest? >> Danielle, you go ahead. >> Well, I'll just jump in first. Obviously last year, not last year, but in 2020, we launched the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. The idea being essentially, we're able to bring in data from partners, from infrastructure running on AWS, from apps running on AWS, to really be able to increase observability across all cloud assets at your entire cloud platform. So, Morgan, if you want to chime in on how Splunk >> Morgan: Certainly. >> has worked out OpenTelemetry. >> Yeah. I mean, OpenTelemetry is super exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of partnership points between Amazon and Splunk, but OpenTelemetry is probably one of them that's the most visible to people who aren't already maybe using these two products together. And so, as Danielle mentioned, Amazon has their own distribution of OpenTelemetry, Splunk has their own, as well, and of course there's the main open source distribution that everybody knows and loves. Just for our viewers, just for clarity's sake, the separate distributions are fundamentally very similar to, almost identical to what's offered in the open source space, but they come preconfigured and they come with support guarantees from each company, meaning that you can actually get paid full support for an open source project, which is really fantastic for customers. And as Danielle mentioned, it's a great demonstration of the alliance between Splunk and Amazon Web Services. For example, the AWS Distro, when you use it, can export data to Amazon CloudWatch, various Amazon backed open source initiatives like Prometheus and others, and to Splunk Observability Cloud and to Splunk Enterprise. So it's a place that we've worked very closely together, and it's something that we're very excited about. >> So, Morgan, I want to get your take on the on the product management side and also how product are built these days. >> One of the big things we're seeing in cloud is that open source has been the big enabler for a lot of refactoring. And you got multiple distributions, but the innovations on top of that, can you talk about how you see the productization of new innovations with open source as you guys go into this market, because this is the new dynamic with cloud. We're seeing examples all over the place. Obviously, Amazon's going next level with what they're doing, and that open source, it's not a one game for all of it. You can have mix and match. Take us through the product angle. >> And in many ways, this is just another wave of the same thing, right? Like, if you think back in time, we all used and still use in many cases, virtual machines, most of those are based on Linux, right? Another large open source project. And so, open source software has been accelerating innovation in the cloud space and in the computing space generally for a very long time, which is fantastic. Our excitement with something like OpenTelemetry comes from both the project's capabilities but also what we can do with it. So for those who aren't already familiar with OpenTelemetry, OpenTelemetry allows you to extract really critical system telemetry, application signals and everything else you need from your own applications, from new services, from your infrastructure, from everything that you're running in a cloud environment. You can then send that data to another location for processing. And so John, you ask like, how does this accelerate innovation? What does it unlock? Well, the insight you can gain from this data means you can become so much more efficient as a development organization. You can make your applications so much more effective because when you send that data to something like Splunk Observability Cloud, to something like Amazon CloudWatch, to various other solutions on the market, they can give you deep, deep insight into your application's performance, to its structure, they can help you reduce outages. And so, it's very, very powerful because it allows organizations to use tools like Splunk, like Amazon, like other things to innovate so much more effectively. >> Danielle, can you comment >> If I could... >> on the AWS side because this is again on the big point. You guys are going next level, and you're starting to see patterns in the ISV world, certainly on the architecture side of partners doing things differently now on top of what they've already done. Could you share how AWS is helping customers accelerate? >> Well, just as Morgan was talking about what OpenTelemetry provides, you can see how from a partnership perspective, this is so valuable, right? What the partner team here at AWS is in the business of doing, is really enabling customer choice, right? And having that ability to plug in and pull data from different sources, post it to different sources, make it available for visibility across all of your resources is very powerful and it's something from the partner community that we really value because we want customers to be able to select best of breed solutions, what works for their business, which businesses are different and they may have different needs, and that also fosters that true innovation. A small company is going to develop and release software a lot differently than a large enterprise. And so, being able to support something like OpenTelemetry just enables that for all different kinds of customers. >> Morgan, add to that because the velocity of releases, certainly operational, stability, is key every predominant security, uptime, these are top concerns. And, you mention data too, >> And you mention challenges. >> You got the data in here. So you got a lot of data moving around, a lot of value. What's your take? >> Yeah. So, I'll speak with some specifics. So a challenge that developers have had for years when you're developing large services, which you can now do with platforms like AWS. So, it's very easy to go develop huge deployments. But a challenge they have is you go and build a mess, right? And like, I've worked earlier in my career in Web Services. And I remember in one of the first orgs I was in, I was one of the five people who really understood our ecommerce stack. Right? And so like, I would get dragged into all these meetings and I'd have to go draw like the 50 services we had, and how they interacted, and the changes that were made in the last week. And without observability tools like Splunk Observability Cloud, like the ones offered by Amazon, like the ones that are backed by the data that comes with OpenTelemetry, organizations basically rely on people like this, to go draw out their deployments so they understand what it is they've built. Well, as you can imagine, this crimps your development velocity, because most of your engineers, most of your tech leads, most of everyone else don't actually understand what it is they've built what it is they're running, because they need that global context. You get something like OpenTelemetry and the solutions that consume the data from it, and suddenly now, all your developers have that context, all of them when they're adding functionality to a service or they're updating their infrastructure, can actually understand how it interacts with the rest of the broader application. This lets you speed up your time to development, this lets you ship more safely, more securely. And finally, when things do go wrong, which will be less frequent, but when they do go wrong, you can fix them super rapidly. >> If I'm a customer, let me ask a question. I'm a customer and I say, "Okay, I love AWS, I love Splunk, I love OpenTelemetry. I got to have open sources, technology innovation is happening." What's the integration? What are some of the standards? Can you take us through how that's working together with you guys as a shared platform? >> Yeah. So let's take the Amazon distribution for OpenTelemetry or even the Splunk one. One of the first things they do is they include all of the receivers, all of the sort of data capture components that you need, out of box for platforms like AWS, right? And so, right away, you get that power and flexibility where you're getting access to all of these data sources, right? And so, that's part of that partnership. And additionally, once the data comes into OpenTelemetry, you can now send that to various different data sources, including, as Danielle mentioned, to multiple at the same time. So you can use whatever tools you want. And so when you talk about like what the partnership is actually providing to you as a customer and still, this is just within the context of OpenTelemetry, obviously there's a much broader partnership between these two companies than just that. But within the context of OpenTelemetry means you can download one of these distributions. It's fully supported. It works with both solutions and everything is just great, right? You don't need to go fiddle with that out of the box. To be clear, OpenTelemetry is a batteries included project, right? This means that even the standard distributions of OpenTelemetry include the components you need. You have to go directly, reference them and ensure that they're packaged in there, but they exist, right. But the nice thing about these distributions is that it's done, it's out of the box, you don't even have to worry about is something missing or do I need to include new exporters or new receivers? It's all there. It's preconfigured. It just works. And if something goes wrong and you have a support contact, you pick up the phone, you talk to someone to get it fixed. >> Danielle, what's the Amazon side 'cause agility and scale is one of the highlights you guys are seeing. How does this tie into that and how are you guys working backwards from the customers to support the partners? >> Well, I think just to add on essentially to what Morgan said, I think that AWS is a cloud platform, has always really had a focus on developers. And, we talk a lot about how AWS and Amazon as a whole really embraces this continuous integration and continuous deployment methods inside of our organization. And we talk about services, and observability is a huge part of that. The only way that you're actually able to release hundreds, thousands of times a day like Amazon does, is by having an observability platform, to be able to measure metrics, see changes in the environment, to be able to roll back if you need to, and to be able to quickly mitigate any challenges or anything that goes wrong at any part of the process. And so, when we preach that to our customers, I think it's something that we do that because we live it and breathe it. And so, things such as OpenTelemetry and such as the products that Splunk builds, those are also ways in which we believe our customers can achieve that. >> Yeah. And we can... I mean, as I mentioned before, this partnership goes well beyond OpenTelemetry, right? And so, if you go use like Splunk Enterprise, Enterprise Cloud, Splunk Observability Cloud, and you're running on AWS, you have excellent support and excellent visibility into your Amazon infrastructure, into the services and applications you've deployed on top of that infrastructure. We try and give you, and I think we do succeed in this. We give you the best possible experience, the deepest possible visibility, into what it is you've deployed on AWS, so that you can be even more successful as a business, and so that you can be even more successful on AWS as a platform. >> Yeah. This is a great conversation, Morgan. You mentioned the early days of Web Services. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services built on web services. So interesting throwback there, but made me think about the days of the early days of web services. And if you look at data, what's going on now, the top partners in AWS, you're seeing a lot of people thinking about data differently, they're refactoring, a lot of machine learning, a lot of AI going on at scale. So then, you got cloud native, things like Kubernetes and these new services being stood up and teared down with automation. A whole new operating model's coming. And so when you think about observability, the importance of it, I mean, can you share your perspective on this whole 'nother level? I mean, I always say that whole another level sounds cliche, but it is next level. I mean, this is completely different. What's your reaction? >> Yeah. There there's a ton of factors here, right? So as you point out, companies are totally shifting how they use their cloud infrastructure. And part of this you see during their cloud migrations, a part of it you see after, and they're shifting from their sort of stateful VMs that they may have had in the past to infrastructure that they tear down and put up regularly. And there's a lot more automation. With this, comes as I mentioned before, complexity, right? And also, with this comes more and more businesses becoming even more reliant on their digital infrastructure. And so, not having observability into your applications, into your services, into your infrastructure, to me, is akin to running a business, say running a large warehousing or distribution company, but not having any idea where you're shipping products or where things are, or not having any accounting or CFO, right? Like, business has become so digital. Business is so reliant on technology, and that's unlocked a ton of new things. It's great. But not having visibility into how that technology works or what it is that's deployed or how to fix it is akin to having no visibility to anything else in your business. It's nuts. And so, observability is super, super critical, particularly for customers who are adopting this new wave of cloud technologies on platforms like AWS. >> Danielle, on your side too, you're enabling this new capability so that businesses can do it, the partners do it, we're calling it super cloud. We've been calling it super cloud kind of dynamic where new things are happening with the data. And you guys are evolving with that. Can you share what you're seeing on your side as your partners start to go to the next level? What are you guys doing? How does it all come together? >> Well, we always talk about what has happened with data in the last couple of years, which the cloud has really enabled around, you know, variety and velocity and there's one other "V" that's escaping me right now, but essentially, all of this data is coming in and providing the ability for us to make better decisions, to build better products, to provide better experiences for customers. And so, I just think, the OpenTelemetry project, as well as what Splunk is doing is just another example of how we're taking this massive amount of data and being able to provide better experiences and outcomes for customers. >> And you guys have been working along together for long time, Splunk, and, it's been a great partners, if we're going back with that been covering it on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. So, we know that, the change is key observability. Can you imagine a company without a CFO, Morgan? That's just boggles your mind, but that's what it's like right now. So... >> It is, yeah. >> And the people who take advantage of that are winning, right? So it's like, that's the key. >> Yeah, I know. I mean, even in my own career, right, I've moved between different companies. And I remember, when I joined Google in particular, which is where I worked at previously, I was very impressed with their internal observability tools. And I'm certain, I haven't worked at Amazon. I'm certainly, I just assume inside of Amazon they're excellent as well, so a lot of the large cloud firms these days. But it was so refreshing going from an organization where if we had some outage or something went wrong, there were like a very small set of people who could actually understand what was going on. And then you would just have to manually dive through logs and correlate requests manually between services. It's very challenging. And so, when things went wrong, they went wrong for a long, long time. And so, the companies that understood this even in the past are already very successful as a result. I think now, the rest of the industry is really in the midst of adopting these observability practices and the tools that are required to implement them, because you're right. Otherwise your development velocity slows down. Now you're getting out competed by your competition. And then, when you have a problem, it blows up for ages. And once again, your competition can take advantage of it. >> And, can you just summarize the observability piece relative to the OpenTelemetry? Where is that going to go? Where do you see that evolving? >> Sure. >> I see open source is growing like crazy, we all know that. >> Of course. >> But OpenTelemetry in particular and open source, 'cause this is a big hot area. >> Yes. So to set the stage for people, OpenTelemetry, unlocks observability in many ways. As I mentioned earlier, OpenTelemetry is how you capture data out of your application. It doesn't process it. It's not a replacement for something like Amazon CloudWatch or any Splunk's products, but it's how we get the data out of your system, which is a remarkably difficult problem. I won't dive into it today, but, those who work in this space are very aware. That's why this project exists and it's so big, that actually extracting information, metrics, logs, distributed traces, profiles, everything else, from your applications and from your infrastructure is very, very difficult. So for OpenTelemetry, where it's going is just continually getting better at extracting more types of data from more sources, and doing that more effectively for people in a more standardized way. That will unlock firms like Splunk, firms, like Amazon and others to better process this data. In terms of where that's going, the sky's the limit, right? Like, everyone's familiar with APM, people are familiar with infrastructure monitoring, but there's a lot more capabilities coming there for security analytics, for network performance monitoring, for getting down all the way to single lines of coding your application, how they impact everything. There's just so much power that's coming to the industry right now. I'm really excited to see where things go in the next few years. >> And Danielle, you're in the middle of all the action as a solution architect, really set the stage for their companies and the ISVs, and this is a big, hot area. What are the patterns you're seeing and what are some of the best practices that you're doing will help companies? >> Right. So I think, summarizing our entire conversation, the big things that we're seeing in the market is essentially more and more companies are looking to move to a continuous deployment and a continuous integration environment. And they're looking to innovate faster and spend less time hot patching or hot fixing their environments and they want to spend more time innovating. And so, that you know, the patterns that we're seeing is... What I see and what I actually experience firsthand at re:Invent when I talk to probably over 40 or 50 ISVs, is customers want to know in their environment, where are their changes? Where are their security vulnerabilities? Where are their data changes, and what are customers really experiencing, whether it's latency, poor experience throughout their products, those types of things? So security, data, and observability are just key to all of that experience and that's what we're definitely seeing as patterns, what we're seeing with our customers and also what value our ISVs are providing in that space. >> That's awesome. And the other thing I would observe is that there's more of an integration story going on around joint projects, whether it's open source. >> Absolutely. >> Because this is where we want to get that services connected. And it's mutual beneficial. I mean, this is really >> Exactly. >> whole 'nother, new kind of interoperable cloud scale. >> Yeah, if I could say one thing else there, I think that, a lot of the customers who are trying to move into the cloud now are, maybe not technology forward companies and they really need that solution. And that's very important. I think COVID has pushed a lot of companies into the cloud maybe very quickly. And, that has been something else we've observed in the market. So, solutions and full solutions between ISVs and ISVs, or ISVs and AWS is just becoming more and more common thing that we see. >> And, you mentioned John, in the open source space as well. Like, we're certainly from Amazon to Splunk. So we're talking a lot about those, but there's a lot of other firms involved in projects like OpenTelemetry. And I think it's very endearing, very heartening to see how well they cooperate in this community and how, when their interests are aligned, how effective they can be. And it's been very exciting to work in the space and very pleasant, honestly, to see everything come together with this huge set of customers and partners. >> Yeah. The pleasant surprise of the pandemic has been that people come into the cloud and they like it and they, "Hey, this works," and they double down on it. Then they realize, there's more there and they refactor. So, you're seeing real examples of that. So, this is a great discussion, great success story. Congratulations Morgan, Danielle. >> Thank you. >> Great partnership between Splunk and AWS. We've been following for a long time. And again, this highlights this whole another level of integrating super cloud kind of experience where people are getting more capabilities and doing more together, so great stuff. >> And this is just one facet of that, right? Like, there's all the other connections of Splunk Enterprise, Splunk security analytics products, and others. It's a deep, deep partnership between these firms. >> Yeah. And the companies that innovate and get that new capability are going to have an advantage. And you're seeing... >> Yes. >> Right? >> Agreed. >> And this is awesome, and great stuff, thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations Morgan over there at Splunk, great stuff. And Danielle, thanks for coming on and sharing the AWS perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> And you guys are going to the next level. You moving up to stack as they say, all good stuff for customers. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> This is season one, episode two of the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Showcase season one, episode two with the ISV Startups partners. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're joined by Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk, and Danielle Greshock, who is the director of ISVs solution architects at AWS. Welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> And great. Thanks for having us. >> Great to see both of you, both theCUBE alumni, but the Splunk-AWS relationship has been going very, very well. You guys are doing great business enabling this app revolution. And cloud scale has been going extremely well. So let's get into it. You guys are involved in a lot of action around application revolution, around OpenTelemetry and open source. So let's get into it. What's the latest? >> Danielle, you go ahead. >> Well, I'll just jump in first. Obviously last year, not last year, but in 2020, we launched the AWS Distro for OpenTelemetry. The idea being essentially, we're able to bring in data from partners, from infrastructure running on AWS, from apps running on AWS, to really be able to increase observability across all cloud assets at your entire cloud platform. So, Morgan, if you want to chime in on how Splunk >> Morgan: Certainly. >> has worked out OpenTelemetry. >> Yeah. I mean, OpenTelemetry is super exciting. Obviously, there's a lot of partnership points between Amazon and Splunk, but OpenTelemetry is probably one of them that's the most visible to people who aren't already maybe using these two products together. And so, as Danielle mentioned, Amazon has their own distribution of OpenTelemetry, Splunk has their own, as well, and of course there's the main open source distribution that everybody knows and loves. Just for our viewers, just for clarity's sake, the separate distributions are fundamentally very similar to, almost identical to what's offered in the open source space, but they come preconfigured and they come with support guarantees from each company, meaning that you can actually get paid full support for an open source project, which is really fantastic for customers. And as Danielle mentioned, it's a great demonstration of the alliance between Splunk and Amazon Web Services. For example, the AWS Distro, when you use it, can export data to Amazon CloudWatch, various Amazon backed open source initiatives like Prometheus and others, and to Splunk Observability Cloud and to Splunk Enterprise. So it's a place that we've worked very closely together, and it's something that we're very excited about. >> So, Morgan, I want to get your take on the on the product management side and also how product are built these days. >> One of the big things we're seeing in cloud is that open source has been the big enabler for a lot of refactoring. And you got multiple distributions, but the innovations on top of that, can you talk about how you see the productization of new innovations with open source as you guys go into this market, because this is the new dynamic with cloud. We're seeing examples all over the place. Obviously, Amazon's going next level with what they're doing, and that open source, it's not a one game for all of it. You can have mix and match. Take us through the product angle. >> And in many ways, this is just another wave of the same thing, right? Like, if you think back in time, we all used and still use in many cases, virtual machines, most of those are based on Linux, right? Another large open source project. And so, open source software has been accelerating innovation in the cloud space and in the computing space generally for a very long time, which is fantastic. Our excitement with something like OpenTelemetry comes from both the project's capabilities but also what we can do with it. So for those who aren't already familiar with OpenTelemetry, OpenTelemetry allows you to extract really critical system telemetry, application signals and everything else you need from your own applications, from new services, from your infrastructure, from everything that you're running in a cloud environment. You can then send that data to another location for processing. And so John, you ask like, how does this accelerate innovation? What does it unlock? Well, the insight you can gain from this data means you can become so much more efficient as a development organization. You can make your applications so much more effective because when you send that data to something like Splunk Observability Cloud, to something like Amazon CloudWatch, to various other solutions on the market, they can give you deep, deep insight into your application's performance, to its structure, they can help you reduce outages. And so, it's very, very powerful because it allows organizations to use tools like Splunk, like Amazon, like other things to innovate so much more effectively. >> Danielle, can you comment >> If I could... >> on the AWS side because this is again on the big point. You guys are going next level, and you're starting to see patterns in the ISV world, certainly on the architecture side of partners doing things differently now on top of what they've already done. Could you share how AWS is helping customers accelerate? >> Well, just as Morgan was talking about what OpenTelemetry provides, you can see how from a partnership perspective, this is so valuable, right? What the partner team here at AWS is in the business of doing, is really enabling customer choice, right? And having that ability to plug in and pull data from different sources, post it to different sources, make it available for visibility across all of your resources is very powerful and it's something from the partner community that we really value because we want customers to be able to select best of breed solutions, what works for their business, which businesses are different and they may have different needs, and that also fosters that true innovation. A small company is going to develop and release software a lot differently than a large enterprise. And so, being able to support something like OpenTelemetry just enables that for all different kinds of customers. >> Morgan, add to that because the velocity of releases, certainly operational, stability, is key every predominant security, uptime, these are top concerns. And, you mention data too, >> And you mention challenges. >> You got the data in here. So you got a lot of data moving around, a lot of value. What's your take? >> Yeah. So, I'll speak with some specifics. So a challenge that developers have had for years when you're developing large services, which you can now do with platforms like AWS. So, it's very easy to go develop huge deployments. But a challenge they have is you go and build a mess, right? And like, I've worked earlier in my career in Web Services. And I remember in one of the first orgs I was in, I was one of the five people who really understood our ecommerce stack. Right? And so like, I would get dragged into all these meetings and I'd have to go draw like the 50 services we had, and how they interacted, and the changes that were made in the last week. And without observability tools like Splunk Observability Cloud, like the ones offered by Amazon, like the ones that are backed by the data that comes with OpenTelemetry, organizations basically rely on people like this, to go draw out their deployments so they understand what it is they've built. Well, as you can imagine, this crimps your development velocity, because most of your engineers, most of your tech leads, most of everyone else don't actually understand what it is they've built what it is they're running, because they need that global context. You get something like OpenTelemetry and the solutions that consume the data from it, and suddenly now, all your developers have that context, all of them when they're adding functionality to a service or they're updating their infrastructure, can actually understand how it interacts with the rest of the broader application. This lets you speed up your time to development, this lets you ship more safely, more securely. And finally, when things do go wrong, which will be less frequent, but when they do go wrong, you can fix them super rapidly. >> If I'm a customer, let me ask a question. I'm a customer and I say, "Okay, I love AWS, I love Splunk, I love OpenTelemetry. I got to have open sources, technology innovation is happening." What's the integration? What are some of the standards? Can you take us through how that's working together with you guys as a shared platform? >> Yeah. So let's take the Amazon distribution for OpenTelemetry or even the Splunk one. One of the first things they do is they include all of the receivers, all of the sort of data capture components that you need, out of box for platforms like AWS, right? And so, right away, you get that power and flexibility where you're getting access to all of these data sources, right? And so, that's part of that partnership. And additionally, once the data comes into OpenTelemetry, you can now send that to various different data sources, including, as Danielle mentioned, to multiple at the same time. So you can use whatever tools you want. And so when you talk about like what the partnership is actually providing to you as a customer and still, this is just within the context of OpenTelemetry, obviously there's a much broader partnership between these two companies than just that. But within the context of OpenTelemetry means you can download one of these distributions. It's fully supported. It works with both solutions and everything is just great, right? You don't need to go fiddle with that out of the box. To be clear, OpenTelemetry is a batteries included project, right? This means that even the standard distributions of OpenTelemetry include the components you need. You have to go directly, reference them and ensure that they're packaged in there, but they exist, right. But the nice thing about these distributions is that it's done, it's out of the box, you don't even have to worry about is something missing or do I need to include new exporters or new receivers? It's all there. It's preconfigured. It just works. And if something goes wrong and you have a support contact, you pick up the phone, you talk to someone to get it fixed. >> Danielle, what's the Amazon side 'cause agility and scale is one of the highlights you guys are seeing. How does this tie into that and how are you guys working backwards from the customers to support the partners? >> Well, I think just to add on essentially to what Morgan said, I think that AWS is a cloud platform, has always really had a focus on developers. And, we talk a lot about how AWS and Amazon as a whole really embraces this continuous integration and continuous deployment methods inside of our organization. And we talk about services, and observability is a huge part of that. The only way that you're actually able to release hundreds, thousands of times a day like Amazon does, is by having an observability platform, to be able to measure metrics, see changes in the environment, to be able to roll back if you need to, and to be able to quickly mitigate any challenges or anything that goes wrong at any part of the process. And so, when we preach that to our customers, I think it's something that we do that because we live it and breathe it. And so, things such as OpenTelemetry and such as the products that Splunk builds, those are also ways in which we believe our customers can achieve that. >> Yeah. And we can... I mean, as I mentioned before, this partnership goes well beyond OpenTelemetry, right? And so, if you go use like Splunk Enterprise, Enterprise Cloud, Splunk Observability Cloud, and you're running on AWS, you have excellent support and excellent visibility into your Amazon infrastructure, into the services and applications you've deployed on top of that infrastructure. We try and give you, and I think we do succeed in this. We give you the best possible experience, the deepest possible visibility, into what it is you've deployed on AWS, so that you can be even more successful as a business, and so that you can be even more successful on AWS as a platform. >> Yeah. This is a great conversation, Morgan. You mentioned the early days of Web Services. AWS stands for Amazon Web Services built on web services. So interesting throwback there, but made me think about the days of the early days of web services. And if you look at data, what's going on now, the top partners in AWS, you're seeing a lot of people thinking about data differently, they're refactoring, a lot of machine learning, a lot of AI going on at scale. So then, you got cloud native, things like Kubernetes and these new services being stood up and teared down with automation. A whole new operating model's coming. And so when you think about observability, the importance of it, I mean, can you share your perspective on this whole 'nother level? I mean, I always say that whole another level sounds cliche, but it is next level. I mean, this is completely different. What's your reaction? >> Yeah. There there's a ton of factors here, right? So as you point out, companies are totally shifting how they use their cloud infrastructure. And part of this you see during their cloud migrations, a part of it you see after, and they're shifting from their sort of stateful VMs that they may have had in the past to infrastructure that they tear down and put up regularly. And there's a lot more automation. With this, comes as I mentioned before, complexity, right? And also, with this comes more and more businesses becoming even more reliant on their digital infrastructure. And so, not having observability into your applications, into your services, into your infrastructure, to me, is akin to running a business, say running a large warehousing or distribution company, but not having any idea where you're shipping products or where things are, or not having any accounting or CFO, right? Like, business has become so digital. Business is so reliant on technology, and that's unlocked a ton of new things. It's great. But not having visibility into how that technology works or what it is that's deployed or how to fix it is akin to having no visibility to anything else in your business. It's nuts. And so, observability is super, super critical, particularly for customers who are adopting this new wave of cloud technologies on platforms like AWS. >> Danielle, on your side too, you're enabling this new capability so that businesses can do it, the partners do it, we're calling it super cloud. We've been calling it super cloud kind of dynamic where new things are happening with the data. And you guys are evolving with that. Can you share what you're seeing on your side as your partners start to go to the next level? What are you guys doing? How does it all come together? >> Well, we always talk about what has happened with data in the last couple of years, which the cloud has really enabled around, you know, variety and velocity and there's one other "V" that's escaping me right now, but essentially, all of this data is coming in and providing the ability for us to make better decisions, to build better products, to provide better experiences for customers. And so, I just think, the OpenTelemetry project, as well as what Splunk is doing is just another example of how we're taking this massive amount of data and being able to provide better experiences and outcomes for customers. >> And you guys have been working along together for long time, Splunk, and, it's been a great partners, if we're going back with that been covering it on theCUBE and SiliconANGLE. So, we know that, the change is key observability. Can you imagine a company without a CFO, Morgan? That's just boggles your mind, but that's what it's like right now. So... >> It is, yeah. >> And the people who take advantage of that are winning, right? So it's like, that's the key. >> Yeah, I know. I mean, even in my own career, right, I've moved between different companies. And I remember, when I joined Google in particular, which is where I worked at previously, I was very impressed with their internal observability tools. And I'm certain, I haven't worked at Amazon. I'm certainly, I just assume inside of Amazon they're excellent as well, so a lot of the large cloud firms these days. But it was so refreshing going from an organization where if we had some outage or something went wrong, there were like a very small set of people who could actually understand what was going on. And then you would just have to manually dive through logs and correlate requests manually between services. It's very challenging. And so, when things went wrong, they went wrong for a long, long time. And so, the companies that understood this even in the past are already very successful as a result. I think now, the rest of the industry is really in the midst of adopting these observability practices and the tools that are required to implement them, because you're right. Otherwise your development velocity slows down. Now you're getting out competed by your competition. And then, when you have a problem, it blows up for ages. And once again, your competition can take advantage of it. >> And, can you just summarize the observability piece relative to the OpenTelemetry? Where is that going to go? Where do you see that evolving? >> Sure. >> I see open source is growing like crazy, we all know that. >> Of course. >> But OpenTelemetry in particular and open source, 'cause this is a big hot area. >> Yes. So to set the stage for people, OpenTelemetry, unlocks observability in many ways. As I mentioned earlier, OpenTelemetry is how you capture data out of your application. It doesn't process it. It's not a replacement for something like Amazon CloudWatch or any Splunk's products, but it's how we get the data out of your system, which is a remarkably difficult problem. I won't dive into it today, but, those who work in this space are very aware. That's why this project exists and it's so big, that actually extracting information, metrics, logs, distributed traces, profiles, everything else, from your applications and from your infrastructure is very, very difficult. So for OpenTelemetry, where it's going is just continually getting better at extracting more types of data from more sources, and doing that more effectively for people in a more standardized way. That will unlock firms like Splunk, firms, like Amazon and others to better process this data. In terms of where that's going, the sky's the limit, right? Like, everyone's familiar with APM, people are familiar with infrastructure monitoring, but there's a lot more capabilities coming there for security analytics, for network performance monitoring, for getting down all the way to single lines of coding your application, how they impact everything. There's just so much power that's coming to the industry right now. I'm really excited to see where things go in the next few years. >> And Danielle, you're in the middle of all the action as a solution architect, really set the stage for their companies and the ISVs, and this is a big, hot area. What are the patterns you're seeing and what are some of the best practices that you're doing will help companies? >> Right. So I think, summarizing our entire conversation, the big things that we're seeing in the market is essentially more and more companies are looking to move to a continuous deployment and a continuous integration environment. And they're looking to innovate faster and spend less time hot patching or hot fixing their environments and they want to spend more time innovating. And so, that you know, the patterns that we're seeing is... What I see and what I actually experience firsthand at re:Invent when I talk to probably over 40 or 50 ISVs, is customers want to know in their environment, where are their changes? Where are their security vulnerabilities? Where are their data changes, and what are customers really experiencing, whether it's latency, poor experience throughout their products, those types of things? So security, data, and observability are just key to all of that experience and that's what we're definitely seeing as patterns, what we're seeing with our customers and also what value our ISVs are providing in that space. >> That's awesome. And the other thing I would observe is that there's more of an integration story going on around joint projects, whether it's open source. >> Absolutely. >> Because this is where we want to get that services connected. And it's mutual beneficial. I mean, this is really >> Exactly. >> whole 'nother, new kind of interoperable cloud scale. >> Yeah, if I could say one thing else there, I think that, a lot of the customers who are trying to move into the cloud now are, maybe not technology forward companies and they really need that solution. And that's very important. I think COVID has pushed a lot of companies into the cloud maybe very quickly. And, that has been something else we've observed in the market. So, solutions and full solutions between ISVs and ISVs, or ISVs and AWS is just becoming more and more common thing that we see. >> And, you mentioned John, in the open source space as well. Like, we're certainly from Amazon to Splunk. So we're talking a lot about those, but there's a lot of other firms involved in projects like OpenTelemetry. And I think it's very endearing, very heartening to see how well they cooperate in this community and how, when their interests are aligned, how effective they can be. And it's been very exciting to work in the space and very pleasant, honestly, to see everything come together with this huge set of customers and partners. >> Yeah. The pleasant surprise of the pandemic has been that people come into the cloud and they like it and they, "Hey, this works," and they double down on it. Then they realize, there's more there and they refactor. So, you're seeing real examples of that. So, this is a great discussion, great success story. Congratulations Morgan, Danielle. >> Thank you. >> Great partnership between Splunk and AWS. We've been following for a long time. And again, this highlights this whole another level of integrating super cloud kind of experience where people are getting more capabilities and doing more together, so great stuff. >> And this is just one facet of that, right? Like, there's all the other connections of Splunk Enterprise, Splunk security analytics products, and others. It's a deep, deep partnership between these firms. >> Yeah. And the companies that innovate and get that new capability are going to have an advantage. And you're seeing... >> Yes. >> Right? >> Agreed. >> And this is awesome, and great stuff, thank you for coming on and sharing that insight. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations Morgan over there at Splunk, great stuff. And Danielle, thanks for coming on and sharing the AWS perspective. >> Thanks for having me. >> And you guys are going to the next level. You moving up to stack as they say, all good stuff for customers. Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> This is season one, episode two of the AWS Partner Showcase. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)