>>Hello, and welcome to the cubes. Special showcase with unstoppable domains. I'm John furrier, your host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California and Matt Gould, who is the founder and CEO of unstoppable domains. Matt, great to come on. Congratulations on the success of your company on stumbled domains. Thanks for kicking off this showcase. >>Thank you. Happy to be here. So >>Love, first of all, love the story you got going on here. Love the approach, very innovative, but you're also on the big web three wave, which we know where that leads into. Metaverse unlimited new ways. People are consuming information, content applications are being built differently. This is a major wave and it's happening. Some people are trying to squint through the hype versus reality, but you don't have to be a rocket science to realize that it's a cultural shift and a technical shift going on with web three. So this is kind of the what's happening in the market. So give us your take. What's your reaction? You're in the middle of it. You're on this wave. >>Yeah. Well, I would say it's a torrent of change and the get unleashed just over a decade ago with Bitcoin coming out and giving people the ability to have a digital items that they could actually own themselves online. And this is a new thing. And people coming, especially from my generation of millennials, they spend their time online in these digital spaces and they've wanted to be able to own these items. Do you see it from, you know, gaming and Fortnite and skins and Warcraft and all these other places, but this is really being enabled by this new crypto technology to just extend a whole lot more, uh, applications for money, which everyone's familiar with, uh, to, uh, NFT projects, uh, like boarding school. >>You know, I was listening to your podcast. You guys got a great pot. I think you're on a 117 episodes now and growing, you guys do a deep dive. So people watching check out the unstoppable podcast, but in the last podcast, man, you mentioned, you know, some of the older generations like me, I grew up with IP addresses and before the web, they called it information super highway. It wasn't even called the web yet. Um, but IP was, was generated by the United States department of commerce and R and D that became the internet. The internet became the web back then it was just get some webpages up and find what you're looking for. Right. Very analog compared to what's. Now, today, now you mentioned gaming, you mentioned, uh, how people are changing. Can you talk about your view of this cultural shift? And we've been talking about in the queue for many, many years now, but it's actually happening now where the expectation of the audience and the users and the people consuming and communicating and bonding and groups, whether it's gaming or communities are expecting new behaviors, new applications, and it's a forcing function. >>This shift is having now, what's your reaction to that? What's your explanation? >>Yeah, well, I think, uh, it just goes back to the shift of peoples, where are they spending their time? And if you look today, most people spend 50% plus of their time in front of a screen. And that's just a tremendous amount of effort. But if you look at how much, how much of assets are digital, it's like less than 1% of their portfolio would be some sort of digital asset, uh, compared to, you know, literally 50% of every day sitting in front of a screen and simultaneously what's happening is these new technologies are emerging around, uh, cryptocurrencies, blockchain systems, uh, ways for you to track the digital ownership of things, and then kind of bring that into, uh, your different applications. So one of the big things that's happening with web three is this concept of data portability, meaning that I can own something on one application. >>And I could potentially take that with me to several other applications across the internet. And so this is like the emerging digital property rights that are happening right now. As we transitioned from a model in web to where you're on a hosted service, like Facebook, it's a walled garden, they own and control everything. You are the product, you know, they're mining you for data and they're just selling ads, right? So to assist them where it's much more open, you can go into these worlds and experiences. You can take things with you, uh, and you can, you can leave with them. And most people are doing this with cryptocurrency. Maybe you earn an in-game currency, you can leave and take that to a different game and you can spend it somewhere else. Uh, so the user is now enabled to bring their data to the party. Whereas before now you couldn't really do that. And that data includes their money or that includes their digital items. And so I think that's the big shift that we're seeing and that changes a lot and how applications, uh, serve up to user. So it's going to change their user experiences. For instance, >>The flip, the script has flipped and you're right on. I agree with you. I think you guys are smart to see it. And I think everyone who's on this wave will see it. Let's get into that because this is happening. People are saying I'm done with being mined and being manipulated by the big Facebooks and the LinkedIns of the world who were using the user. Now, the contract was a free product and you gave it your data, but then it got too far. Now people want to be in charge of their data. They want to broker their data. They want to collect their digital exhaust, maybe collect some things in a game, or maybe do some commerce in an application or a marketplace. So these are the new use cases. How does the digital identity architecture work with unstoppable? How are you guys enabling that? Could you take us through the vision of where you guys came on this because it's unique in an NFT and kind of the domain name concept coming together? Can you explain? >>Yeah. So, uh, we think we approach the problem for if we're going to rebuild the way that people interact online, uh, what are kind of the first primitives that they're going to need in order to make that possible? And we thought that one of the things that you have on every network, like when you log on Twitter, you have a Twitter handle. When you log on, uh, you know, Instagram, you have an Instagram handle, it's your name, right? You have that name that's that's on those applications. And right now what happens is if users get kicked off the platform, they lose a hundred percent of their followers, right? And theirs. And they also, in some cases, they can't even directly contact their followers on some of these platforms. There's no way for them to retain this social network. So you have all these influencers who are, today's small businesses who build up these large, you know, profitable, small businesses online, uh, you know, being key opinion leaders to their demographic. >>Uh, and then they could be D platform, or they're unable to take this data and move to another platform. If that platform raised their fees, you've seen several platforms, increase their take rates. You have 10, 20, 30, 40%, and they're getting locked in and they're getting squeezed. Right. Uh, so we just said, you know what, the first thing you're going to want to own that this is going to be your piece of digital property. It's going to be your name across these applications. And if you look at every computer network in the history of computing networks, the end up with a naming system, and when we've looked back at DDA desk, which came out in the nineties, uh, it was just a way for people to find these webpages much easier, you know, instead of mapping these IP addresses. Uh, and then we said to ourselves, you know, uh, what's going to happen in the future is just like everyone has an email address that they use in their web two world in order to, uh, identify themselves as they log into all these applications. >>They're going to have an NFT domain in the web three world in order to authenticate and, and, uh, bring their data with them across these applications. So we saw a direct correlation there between DNS and what we're doing with NFT domain name systems. Um, and the bigger breakthrough here is at NMT domain systems or these NFT assets that live on a blockchain. They are owned by users to build on these open systems so that multiple applications could read data off of them. And that makes them portable. So we were looking for an infrastructure play like a picks and shovels play for the emerging web three metaverse. Uh, and we thought that names were just something that if we wanted a future to happen, where all 3.5 billion people, you know, with cell phones are sending crypto and digital assets back and forth, they're gonna need to have a name to make this a lot easier instead of, you know, these long IP addresses or a hex addresses in the case of Porto. >>So people have multiple wallets too. It's not like there's all kinds of wallet, variations, name, verification, you see link trees everywhere. You know, that's essentially just an app and it doesn't really do anything. I mean, so you're seeing people kind of trying to figure it out. I mean, you've got to get up, Angela got a LinkedIn handle. I mean, what do you do with it? >>Yeah. And, and then specific to crypto, there was a very hair on fire use case for people who buy their first Bitcoin. And for those in the audience who haven't done this yet, when you go in and you go into an app, you buy your first Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever cryptocurrency. And then the first time you try to send it, there's this, there's this field where you want to send it. And it's this very long text address. And it looks like an IP address from the 1980s, right? And it's, it's like a bank number and no one's going to use that to send money back and forth to each other. And so just like domain names and the DNS system replace IP addresses in Ft domains, uh, on blockchain systems, replace hex addresses for sending and receiving, you know, cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever. And that's its first use case is it really plugs in there. So when you want to send money to someone, you can just, instead of sending money to a large hex address that you have to copy and paste, you can have an error or you can send it to the wrong place. It's pretty scary. You could send it to John furrier dot, uh, NFT. And uh, so we thought that you're just not going to get global adoption without better UX, same thing. It worked with the.com domains. And this is the same thing for the coin and other >>Crypto. It's interesting to look at the web two or trend one to two web one went to two. It was all about user ease of use, right? And making things simpler. Clutter, you have more pages. You can't find things that was search that was Google since then. Has there actually been an advancement? Facebook certainly is not an advancement. They're hoarding all the data. So I think we're broken between that step of, you know, a free search to all the resources in the world, to which, by the way, they're mining a lot of data too, with the toolbar and Chrome. But now where's that web three crossover. So take us through your vision on digital identity on web to Google searching, Facebook's broken democracy is broken users. Aren't in charge to web three. >>Got it. Well, we can start at web one. So the way that I think about it is if you go to web one, it was very simple, just text web pages. So it was just a way for someone to like put up a billboard and here's a piece of information and here's some things that you could read about it. Right. Uh, and then what happened with web two was you started having applications being built that had backend infrastructure to provide services. So if you think about web two, these are all, you know, these are websites or web portals that have services attached to them, whether that's a social network service or search engine or whatever. And then as we moved to web three, the new thing that's happening here is the user is coming on to that experience. And they're able to connect in their wallet or their web three identity, uh, to that app and they can bring their data to the party. >>So it's kind of like web one, you just have a static web page whip, two, you have a static web page with a service, like a server back here. And then with three, the user can come in and bring their database with them, uh, in order to have much better app experiences. So how does that change things? Well, for one, that means that the, you want data to be portable across apps. So we've touched on gaming earlier and maybe if I have an end game item for one, a game that I'm playing for a certain company, I can take it across two or three different games. Uh, it also impacts money. Money is just digital information. So now I can connect to a bunch of different apps and I can just use cryptocurrency to make those payments across those things instead of having to use a credit card. >>Uh, but then another thing that happens is I can bring in from, you know, an unlimited amount of additional information about myself. When I plug in my wallet, uh, as an example, when I plug in to Google search, for instance, they could take a look at my wallet that I've connected and they could pull information about me that I enabled that I share with them. And this means that I'm going to get a much more personalized experience on these websites. And I'm also going to have much more control over my data. There's a lot of people out there right now who are worried about data privacy, especially in places like Europe. And one of the ways to solve that is simply to not store the data and instead have the user bring it with them. >>I always thought about this and I always debated it with David laundry. My cohost does top down governance, privacy laws outweigh the organic bottoms up innovation. So what you're getting at here is, Hey, if you can actually have that solved before it even starts, it was almost as if those services were built for the problem of web two. Yes, not three. Write your reaction to that. >>I think that is, uh, right on the money. And, uh, if you look at it as a security, like if I put my security researcher hat on, I think the biggest problem we have with security and privacy on the web today is that we have these large organizations that are collecting so much data on us and they just become these honeypots. And there have been huge, uh, breaches like Equifax, you know, a few years back is a big one and just all your credit card data got leaked, right? And all your, uh, credit information got leaked. And we just have this model where these big companies silo your data. They create a giant database, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, if not, billions, to be attacked. And then someone eventually is going to hack that in order to pull that information. Well, if instead, and you can look at this at web three. >>So for those of the audience who have used the web three application, one of these depths, um, you know, trade cryptocurrencies or something, you'll know that when you go there, you actually connect to your wall. So when you're working with these web, you connect, you, you know, you bring your information with you and you connect it. That means that the app has none of that storage, right? So these apps that people are using for crypto trading cryptocurrency on depths or whatever, they have no stored information. So if someone hacks one of these DFI exchanges, for instance, uh, there's nothing to steal. And that's because the only time the information is being accessed is when the users actively using the site. And so as someone who cares about security and privacy, I go, wow, that's a much better data model. And that give so much more control of user because the user just permissions access to the data only during the time period in which they're interacting with the application. Um, and so I think you're right. And like, we are very excited to be building these tools, right? Because I see, like, if you look at Europe, they basically pass GDPR. And then all the companies are going, we can't comply with that and they keep postponing it or like changing a little bit and trying to make it easier to comply with. But honestly we just need to switch the data models. So the companies aren't even taking the data and then they're gonna be in a much better spot. >>The GDPR is again, a nightmare. I think it's the wrong approach. Oh, I said it was screwed up because most companies don't even know where stuff is stored. Nevermind how they delete someone's entering a database. They don't even know what they're collecting. Some at some level it becomes so complicated. So right on the money are good. Good call out there. Question for you. Is this then? Okay. So do you decouple the wallet from the ID or are they together? Uh, and is it going to be a universal wallet? Do you guys see yourselves as universal domains? Take me through the thinking around how you're looking at the wallet and the actual identity of the user, which obviously is super important on the identity side while it, is that just universal or is that going to be coming together? >>Well, I think so. The way that we kind of think about it is that wallets are where people have their financial interactions online. Right. And then identity is much more about, it's kind of like being your passport. So it's like your driver's license for the internet. So these are two kind of separate products we see longer term, uh, and they actually work together. So, you know, like if you have a domain name, it actually is easier to make deposits into your wallet because it's easier to remember to send money to, you know, method, rules dot crypto. And that way it's easier for me to receive payments or whatever. And then inside my wallet, I'm going to be doing defy trades or whatever. And doesn't really have an interaction with names necessarily in order to do those transactions. But then if I want to, uh, you know, sign into a website or something, I could connect that with my NFT domain. >>And I do think that these two things are kind of separate. I think there's, we're gonna still early. So figuring out exactly how the industry is gonna shake out over like a five to 10 year time horizon. And it may be a little bit more difficult and we could see some other emerging, uh, what you would consider like cornerstones of the crypto ecosystem. But I do think identity and reputation is one of those. Uh, and I also think that your financial applications of defy are going to be another. So those are the two areas where I see it. Um, and just to, you know, a note on this, when you have a wallet, it usually has multiple cryptocurrency address. So you're going to have like 50 cryptocurrency addresses in a wallet. Uh, you're going to want to have one domain name that links back to all those, because you're just not going to remember those 50 different addresses. So that's how I think that they collaborate. And we collaborate with several large wallets as well, uh, like blockchain.com, uh, and you know, another 30 plus of these, uh, to make it easier for sending out and receiving cryptocurrency. >>So the wallet, basically as a D app, the way you look at it, you integrate whatever you want, just integrate in. How do I log into decentralized applications with my NFT domain name? Because this becomes okay, I got to love the idea, love my identity. I'm in my own NFT. I mean, hell, this video is going to be an NFT. Soon. We get on board with the program here. Uh, but I do, I log into my app, I'm going to have a D app and I got my domain name. Do I have to submit, is there benchmarking, is there approval process? Is there API APIs and a SDK kind of thinking around it? How do you thinking about dealing with the apps? >>Yeah, so all of the above and what we're trying to, what we're trying to do here is build like an SSO solution. Uh, but that it's consumer based. So, uh, what we've done is adapted some SSL protocols that other people have used the standard ones, uh, in order to connect that back to an NFT domain in this case. And that way you keep the best of both worlds. So you can use these authorization protocols for data permissioning that are standard web to API APIs. Uh, but then the permissioning system is actually based on the user controlled in FTE. So they're assigning that with their private public key pair order to make those updates. Um, so that, that allows you to connect into both of these systems. Uh, we think that that's how technology typically impacts the world is it's not like you have something that just replaces something overnight. >>You have an integration of these technologies over time. Uh, and we really see these three components in MTU domains integrating nicely into regular apps. So as an example in the future, when you log in right now, you see Google or Facebook, or you can type in an email address, you can see not ensemble domains or NFT, uh, authorization, and you can SSO in with that, to that website. When you go to a website like an e-commerce website, you could share information about yourself because you've connected your wallet now. So you could say, yes, I am a unique individual. I do live in New York, uh, and I just bought a new house. Right. And then when you permission all that information about yourself to that application, you can serve up a new user experience for you. Um, and we think it's going to be very interesting for doing rewards and discounts, um, online for e-commerce specifically, uh, in the future, because that opens up a whole new market because they can ask you questions about yourself and you can deliver that information. >>Yeah. I really think that the gaming market has totally nailed the future use case, which is in game currency in game to engagement in game data. And now bringing that, so kind of a horizontally scalable, like surface areas is huge, right? So, you know, I think you're, that's huge success on the concept. The question I have to ask you is, um, you getting any pushback from ICANN, the international corporates have name and numbers. They got dot everything now.club, cause the clubhouse, they got dot, you know, party.live. I mean, so the real domain name people are over here, web too. You guys are coming out with the web three where's that connect for people who are not following along the web three trend. How do they, how do you rationalize the, the domain angle here? >>Yeah, well, uh, so I would say that NFTE domains or what domains on DNS were always meant to be 30 plus years ago and they just didn't have blockchain systems back in the nineties when they were building these things. So there's no way to make them for individuals. So what happened was for DNS, it actually ended up being the business. So if you look at DNS names, there's about 350 million registrations. They're basically all small business. And it's like, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, uh, who, uh, own the majority of these, uh, these.com or these regular DNS domain names. And that's their focus NFTE domains because all of a sudden you have the, uh, the Walton, if you have them in your wallet and your crypto wallet, they're actually for individuals. So that market, instead of being for small businesses is actually end-users. So, and instead of being for, you know, 20 to 50 million small businesses, we're talking about being useful for three to 4 billion people who have an internet connection. >>Uh, and so we actually think that the market size we're in a few domains and somewhere 50 to 100 X, the market size for traditional domain names. And then the use cases are going to be much more for, uh, individuals on a day-to-day basis. So it's like people are gonna want you on to use them for receiving cryptocurrency versus receiving dollars or payments or USCC point where they're going to want to use them as identifiers on social networks, where they're going to want to use them for SSO. Uh, and they're not gonna want to use them as much for things like websites, which is what web is. And if I'm being perfectly honest, if I'm looking out 10 years from now, I think that these traditional domain name systems are gonna want to work with and adopt this new NFC technology. Cause they're going to want to have these features for the domain next. So like in short, I think NMT domain names or domain names with superpowers, this is the next generation of, uh, naming systems and naming systems were always meant to be identity networks. >>Yeah. They hit a car, they hit a glass ceiling. I mean, they just can't, they're not built for that. Right. So I mean, and, and having people, having their own names is essentially what decentralization is all about. Cause what does a company, it's a collection of humans that aren't working in one place they're decentralized. So, and then you decentralize the identity and everything's can been changed so completely love it. I think you guys are onto something really huge here. Um, you pretty much laid out what's next for web three, but you guys are in this state of, of growth. You've seen people signing up for names. That's great. What are the, what are the, um, best practices? What are the steps are people taking? What's the common, uh, use case for folks we're putting this to work right now for you guys? Why do you see what's the progression? >>Yeah. So the, the thing that we want to solve for people most immediately is, uh, we want to make it easier for sending and receiving crypto payments. And I, and I know that sounds like a niche market, but there's over 200 million people right now who have some form of cryptocurrency, right? And 99.9% of them are still sending crypto using these really long hex addresses. And that market is growing at 60 to a hundred percent year over year. So, uh, first we need to get crypto into everybody's pocket and that's going to happen over the next three to five years. Let's call it if it doubles every year for the next five years, we'll be there. Uh, and then we want to make it easier for all those people to sit encrypted back and forth. And I, and I will admit I'm a big fan of these stable coins and these like, you know, I would say utility focused, uh, tokens that are coming out just to make it easier for, you know, transferring money from here to Turkey and back or whatever. >>Uh, and that's the really the first step freight FTE domain names. But what happens is when you have an NFTE domain and that's what you're using to receive payments, um, and then you realize, oh, I can also use this to log into my favorite apps. It starts building that identity piece. And so we're also building products and services to make it more like your identity. And we think that it's going to build up over time. So instead of like doing an identity network, top-down where you're like a government or a corporation say, oh, you have to have ID. Here's your password. You have to have it. We're going to do a bottoms up. We're going to give everyone on the planet, NFTE domain name, it's going to give them to the utility to make it easier to send, receive cryptocurrency. They're going to say, Hey, do you want to verify your Twitter profile? Yes. Okay, great. You test that back. Hey, you want to verify your Reddit? Yes. Instagram. Yes. Tik TOK. Yes. You want to verify your driver's license? Okay. Yeah, we can attach that back. Uh, and then what happens is you end up building up organically, uh, digital identifiers for people using these blockchain, uh, naming systems. And once they have that, they're gonna just, they're going to be able to share that information. Uh, and that's gonna lead to better experiences online for, uh, both commerce, but also just better user experiences. >>You know, every company when they web came along, first of all, everyone, poo-pooed the web ones. That was terrible, bad idea. Oh. And so unreliable. So slow, hard to find things. Web two, everyone bought a domain name for their company, but then as they added webpages, these permalinks became so long. The web page address fully qualified, you know, permalink string, they bought keywords. And then that's another layer on top. So you started to see that evolution in the web. Now it's kind of hit a ceiling here. Everyone gets their NFT. They, they started doing more things. Then it becomes much more of a use case where it's more usable, not just for one thing. Um, so we saw that movie before, so it's like a permalink permanent. Yeah. >>Yes. I mean, if we're lucky, it will be a decentralized bottoms up global identity, uh, that appreciates user privacy and allows people to opt in. And that's what we want to build. >>And the gas prices thing that's always coming. That's always an objection here that, I mean, blockchain is perfect for this because it's immutable, it's written on the chain. All good, totally secure. What about the efficiency? How do you see that evolving real quick? >>Well, so a couple of comments on efficiency. Uh, first of all, we picked domains as a first product to market because, you know, as you need to take a look and see if the technology is capable of handling what you're trying to do, uh, and for domain names, you're not updating that every day. Right? So like, if you look at traditional domain names, you only update it a couple of times per year. So, so the usage for that to set this up and configure it, you know, most people set up and configure it and then it'll have a few changes for years. First of all, the overall it's not like a game problem. Right, right, right. So, so that, that part's good. We picked a good place to start for going to market. And then the second piece is like, you're really just asking our computer, system's going to get more efficient over time. >>And if you know, the history of that has always been yes. Uh, and you know, I remember the nineties, I had a modem and it was, you know, whatever, 14 kilobits and then it was 28 and then 56, then 100. And now I have a hundred megabits up and down. Uh, and I look at blockchain systems and I don't know if anyone has a law for this yet, but throughput of blockchains is going up over time. And you know, there's, there's going to be continued improvements over this over the next decade. We need them. We're going to use all of it. Uh, and you just need to make sure you're planning a business makes sense for the current environment. Just as an example, if you had tried to launch Netflix for online streaming in 1990, you would have had a bad time because no one had bandwidth. So yeah. Some applications are going to wait to be a little bit later on in the cycle, but I actually think identity is perfectly fine to go ahead and get off the ground now. >>Yeah. The motivated parties for innovations here, I mean, a point cast failed miserably that was like the, they try to stream video over T1 lines, but back in the days, nothing. So again, we've seen those speeds double, triple on homes right now, Matt. Congratulations. Great stuff. Final tick, tock moment here. How would you summarize short in a short clip? The difference between digital identity in web two and web three, >>Uh, in, in web too, you don't get to own your own online presidents and in web three, you do get to own it. So I think if you were gonna simplify it really web three is about ownership and we're excited to give everyone on the planet a chance to own their name and choose when and where and how they want to share information about themselves. >>So now users are in charge. >>Exactly. >>They're not the product anymore. Going to be the product might as well monetize the product. And that's the data. Um, real quick thoughts just to close out the role of data in all this, your view. >>We haven't enabled users to own their data online since the beginning of the internet. And we're now starting to do that. It's going to have profound changes for how every application on the planet interacts with >>Awesome stuff, man, I take a minute to give a plug for the company. How many employees you got? What do you guys looking for for hiring, um, fundraising, give a quick, a quick commercial for what's going on, on unstoppable domains. Yeah. >>So if you haven't already check us out@ensembledomains.com, we're also on Twitter at unstoppable web, and we have a wonderful podcast as well that you should check out if you haven't already. And, uh, we are just crossed a hundred people. We've, we're growing, you know, three to five, a hundred percent year over year. Uh, we're basically hiring every position across the company right now. So if you're interested in getting into web three, even if you're coming from a traditional web two background, please reach out. Uh, we love teaching people about this new world and how you can be a part of it. >>And you're a virtual company. Do you have a little headquarters or is it all virtual? What's the situation there? >>Yeah, I actually just assumed we were a hundred percent remote and asynchronous and we're currently in five countries across the planet. Uh, mostly concentrated in the U S and EU areas, >>Rumor to maybe you can confirm or admit or deny this rumor. I heard a rumor that you have mandatory vacation policy. >>Uh, this is true. Uh, and that's because we are a team of people who like to get things done. And, but we also know that recovery is an important part of any organizations. So if you push too hard, uh, we want to remind people we're on a marathon, right? This is not a sprint. Uh, and so we want people to be with us term. Uh, we do think that this is a ten-year move. And so yeah. Do force people. We'll unplug you at the end of the year, if you have >>To ask me, so what's the consequence of, I don't think vacation. >>Yeah. We literally unplug it. You won't be able to get it. You won't be able to get into slack. Right. And that's a, that's how we regulate. >>Well, when people start having their avatars be their bot and you don't even know what you're unplugging at some point, that's where you guys come in with the NFD saying that that's not the real person. It's not the real human And FTS. Great innovation, great use case, Matt. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on and sharing the story to kick off this showcase with the cube. Thanks for sharing all that great insight. Appreciate it. >>John had a wonderful time. All right. Just the >>Cube unstoppable domains showcasing. We got great 10 great pieces of content we're dropping all today. Check them out. Stay with us for more coverage on John furrier with cube. Thanks for watching.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> When Facebook changed its name to Meta last fall, it catalyzed a chain reaction throughout the tech industry. Software firms, gaming companies, chip makers, device manufacturers, and others have joined in hype machine. Now, it's easy to dismiss the metaverse as futuristic hyperbole, but do we really believe that tapping on a smartphone, or staring at a screen, or two-dimensional Zoom meetings are the future of how we work, play, and communicate? As the internet itself proved to be larger than we ever imagined, it's very possible, and even quite likely that the combination of massive processing power, cheap storage, AI, blockchains, crypto, sensors, AR, VR, brain interfaces, and other emerging technologies will combine to create new and unimaginable consumer experiences, and massive wealth for creators of the metaverse. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in cyber expert, hacker gamer, NFT expert, and founder of ORE System, Nick Donarski. Nick, welcome, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, sir, glad to be here. >> Yeah, okay, so today we're going to traverse two parallel paths, one that took Nick from security expert and PenTester to NFTs, tokens, and the metaverse. And we'll simultaneously explore the complicated world of cybersecurity in the enterprise, and how the blockchain, crypto, and NFTs will provide key underpinnings for digital ownership in the metaverse. We're going to talk a little bit about blockchain, and crypto, and get things started there, and some of the realities and misconceptions, and how innovations in those worlds have led to the NFT craze. We'll look at what's really going on in NFTs and why they're important as both a technology and societal trend. Then, we're going to dig into the tech and try to explain why and how blockchain and NFTs are going to lay the foundation for the metaverse. And, finally, who's going to build the metaverse. And how long is it going to take? All right, Nick, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your background, your career. You started as a hacker at a really, really young age, and then got deep into cyber as a PenTester. You did some pretty crazy stuff. You have some great stories about sneaking into buildings. You weren't just doing it all remote. Tell us about yourself. >> Yeah, so I mean, really, I started a long time ago. My dad was really the foray into technology. I wrote my first program on an Apple IIe in BASIC in 1989. So, I like to say I was born on the internet, if you will. But, yeah, in high school at 16, I incorporated my first company, did just tech support for parents and teachers. And then in 2000 I transitioned really into security and focused there ever since. I joined Rapid7 and after they picked up Medis boy, I joined HP. I was one of their founding members of Shadowlabs and really have been part of the information security and the cyber community all throughout, whether it's training at various different conferences or talking. My biggest thing and my most awesome moments as various things of being broken into, is really when I get to actually work with somebody that's coming up in the industry and who's new and actually has that light bulb moment of really kind of understanding of technology, understanding an idea, or getting it when it comes to that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, and when you think about what's going on in crypto and NFTs and okay, now the metaverse it's you get to see some of the most innovative people. Now I want to first share a little bit of data on enterprise security and maybe Nick get you to comment. We've reported over the past several years on the complexity in the security business and the numerous vendor choices that SecOps Pros face. And this chart really tells that story in the cybersecurity space. It's an X,Y graph. We've shown it many times from the ETR surveys where the vertical axis, it's a measure of spending momentum called net score. And the horizontal axis is market share, which represents each company's presence in the data set, and a couple of points stand out. First, it's really crowded. In that red dotted line that you see there, that's 40%, above that line on the net score axis, marks highly elevated spending momentum. Now, let's just zoom in a bit and I've cut the data by those companies that have more than a hundred responses in the survey. And you can see here on this next chart, it's still very crowded, but a few call-outs are noteworthy. First companies like SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope and Darktrace. They were all above that 40% line in the previous chart, but they've fallen off. They still have actually a decent presence in the survey over 60 responses, but under that hundred. And you can see Auth0 now Okta, big $7 billion acquisition. They got the highest net score CrowdStrike's up there, Okta classic they're kind of enterprise business, and Zscaler and others above that line. You see Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft very impressive because they're both big and they're above that elevated spending velocity. So Nick, kind of a long-winded intro, but it was a little bit off topic, but I wanted to start here because this is the life of a SecOps pro. They lack the talent in a capacity to keep bad guys fully at bay. And so they have to keep throwing tooling at the problem, which adds to the complexity and as a PenTester and hacker, this chaos and complexity means cash for the bad guys. Doesn't it? >> Absolutely. You know, the more systems that these organizations find to integrate into the systems, means that there's more components, more dollars and cents as far as the amount of time and the engineers that need to actually be responsible for these tools. There's a lot of reasons that, the more, I guess, hands in the cookie jar, if you will, when it comes to the security architecture, the more links that are, or avenues for attack built into the system. And really one of the biggest things that organizations face is being able to have engineers that are qualified and technical enough to be able to support that architecture as well, 'cause buying it from a vendor and deploying it, putting it onto a shelf is good, but if it's not tuned properly, or if it's not connected properly, that security tool can just hold up more avenues of attack for you. >> Right, okay, thank you. Now, let's get into the meat of the discussion for today and talk a little bit about blockchain and crypto for a bit. I saw sub stack post the other day, and it was ripping Matt Damon for pedaling crypto on TV ads and how crypto is just this big pyramid scheme. And it's all about allowing criminals to be anonymous and it's ransomware and drug trafficking. And yes, there are definitely scams and you got to be careful and lots of dangers out there, but these are common criticisms in the mainstream press, that overlooked the fact by the way that IPO's and specs are just as much of a pyramid scheme. Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be more regulation, there should, but Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, cryptocurrency, and you think about, it's really the confluence of software engineering, cryptography and game theory. And there's some really powerful innovation being created by the blockchain community. Crypto and blockchain are really at the heart of a new decentralized platform being built out. And where today, you got a few, large internet companies. They control the protocols and the platform. Now the aspiration of people like yourself, is to create new value opportunities. And there are many more chances for the little guys and girls to get in on the ground floor and blockchain technology underpins all this. So Nick, what's your take, what are some of the biggest misconceptions around blockchain and crypto? And do you even pair those two in the same context? What are your thoughts? >> So, I mean, really, we like to separate ourselves and say that we are a blockchain company, as opposed to necessarily saying(indistinct) anything like that. We leverage those tools. We leverage cryptocurrencies, we leverage NFTs and those types of things within there, but blockchain is a technology, which is the underlying piece, is something that can be used and utilized in a very large number of different organizations out there. So, cryptocurrency and a lot of that negative context comes with a fear of something new, without having that regulation in place, without having the rules in place. And we were a big proponent of, we want the regulation, right? We want to do right. We want to do it by the rules. We want to do it under the context of, this is what should be done. And we also want to help write those rules as well, because a lot of the lawmakers, a lot of the lobbyists and things, they have a certain aspect or a certain goal of when they're trying to get these things. Our goal is simplicity. We want the ability for the normal average person to be able to interact with crypto, interact with NFTs, interact with the blockchain. And basically by saying, blockchain in quotes, it's very ambiguous 'cause there's many different things that blockchain can be, the easiest way, right? The easiest way to understand blockchain is simply a distributed database. That's really the core of what blockchain is. It's a record keeping mechanism that allows you to reference that. And the beauty of it, is that it's quote unquote immutable. You can't edit that data. So, especially when we're talking about blockchain, being underlying for technologies in the future, things like security, where you have logging, you have keeping, whether you're talking about sales, where you may have to have multiple different locations (indistinct) users from different locations around the globe. It creates a central repository that provides distribution and security in the way that you're ensuring your data, ensuring the validation of where that data exists when it was created. Those types of things that blockchain really is. If you go to the historical, right, the very early on Bitcoin absolutely was made to have a way of not having to deal with the fed. That was the core functionality of the initial crypto. And then you had a lot of the illicit trades, those black markets that jumped onto it because of what it could do. The maturity of the technology though, of where we are now versus say back in 97 is a much different world of blockchain, and there's a much different world of cryptocurrency. You still have to be careful because with any fed, you're still going to have that FUD that goes out there and sells that fear, uncertainty and doubt, which spurs a lot of those types of scams, and a lot of those things that target end users that we face as security professionals today. You still get mailers that go out, looking for people to give their social security number over during tax time. Snail mail is considered a very ancient technology, but it still works. You still get a portion of the population that falls for those tricks, fishing, whatever it might be. It's all about trying to make sure that you have fear about what is that change. And I think that as we move forward, and move into the future, the simpler and the more comfortable these types of technologies become, the easier it is to utilize and indoctrinate normal users, to be able to use these things. >> You know, I want to ask you about that, Nick, because you mentioned immutability, there's a lot of misconceptions about that. I had somebody tell me one time, "Blockchain's Bs," and they say, "Well, oh, hold on a second. They say, oh, they say it's a mutable, but you can hack Coinbase, whatever it is." So I guess a couple of things, one is that the killer app for blockchain became money. And so we learned a lot through that. And you had Bitcoin and it really wasn't programmable through its interface. And then Ethereum comes out. I know, you know a lot about Ether and you have solidity, which is a lot simpler, but it ain't JavaScript, which is ubiquitous. And so now you have a lot of potential for the initial ICO's and probably still the ones today, the white papers, a lot of security flaws in there. I'm sure you can talk to that, but maybe you can help square that circle about immutability and security. I've mentioned game theory before, it's harder to hack Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain than it is to mine. So that's why people mine, but maybe you could add some context to that. >> Yeah, you know it goes to just about any technology out there. Now, when you're talking about blockchain specifically, the majority of the attacks happen with the applications and the smart contracts that are actually running on the blockchain, as opposed to necessarily the blockchain itself. And like you said, the impact for whether that's loss of revenue or loss of tokens or whatever it is, in most cases that results from something that was a phishing attack, you gave up your credentials, somebody said, paste your private key in here, and you win a cookie or whatever it might be, but those are still the fundamental pieces. When you're talking about various different networks out there, depending on the blockchain, depends on how much the overall security really is. The more distributed it is, and the more stable it is as the network goes, the better or the more stable any of the code is going to be. The underlying architecture of any system is the key to success when it comes to the overall security. So the blockchain itself is immutable, in the case that the owner are ones have to be trusted. If you look at distributed networks, something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, where you have those proof of work systems, that disperses that information at a much more remote location, So the more disperse that information is, the less likely it is to be able to be impacted by one small instance. If you look at like the DAO Hack, or if you look at a lot of the other vulnerabilities that exist on the blockchain, it's more about the code. And like you said, solidity being as new as it is, it's not JavaScript. The industry is very early and very infantile, as far as the developers that are skilled in doing this. And with that just comes the inexperience and the lack of information that you don't learn until JavaScript is 10 or 12 years old. >> And the last thing I'll say about this topic, and we'll move on to NFTs, but NFTs relate is that, again, I said earlier that the big internet giants have pretty much co-opted the platform. You know, if you wanted to invest in Linux in the early days, there was no way to do that. You maybe have to wait until red hat came up with its IPO and there's your pyramid scheme folks. But with crypto it, which is again, as Nick was explaining underpinning is the blockchain, you can actually participate in early projects. Now you got to be careful 'cause there are a lot of scams and many of them are going to blow out if not most of them, but there are some, gems out there, because as Nick was describing, you've got this decentralized platform that causes scaling issues or performance issues, and people are solving those problems, essentially building out a new internet. But I want to get into NFTs, because it's sort of the next big thing here before we get into the metaverse, what Nick, why should people pay attention to NFTs? Why do they matter? Are they really an important trend? And what are the societal and technological impacts that you see in this space? >> Yeah, I mean, NFTs are a very new technology and ultimately it's just another entry on the blockchain. It's just another piece of data in the database. But how it's leveraged in the grand scheme of how we, as users see it, it can be the classic idea of an NFT is just the art, or as good as the poster on your wall. But in the case of some of the new applications, is where are you actually get that utility function. Now, in the case of say video games, video games and gamers in general, already utilize digital items. They already utilize digital points. As in the case of like Call of Duty points, those are just different versions of digital currencies. You know, World of Warcraft Gold, I like to affectionately say, was the very first cryptocurrency. There was a Harvard course taught on the economy of WOW, there was a black market where you could trade your end game gold for Fiat currencies. And there's even places around the world that you can purchase real world items and stay at hotels for World of Warcraft Gold. So the adoption of blockchain just simply gives a more stable and a more diverse technology for those same types of systems. You're going to see that carry over into shipping and logistics, where you need to have data that is single repository for being able to have multiple locations, multiple shippers from multiple global efforts out there that need to have access to that data. But in the current context, it's either sitting on a shipping log, it's sitting on somebody's desk. All of those types of paper transactions can be leveraged as NFTs on the blockchain. It's just simply that representation. And once you break the idea of this is just a piece of art, or this is a cryptocurrency, you get into a world where you can apply that NFT technology to a lot more things than I think most people think of today. >> Yeah, and of course you mentioned art a couple of times when people sold as digital art for whatever, it was 60, 65 million, 69 million, that caught a lot of people's attention, but you're seeing, I mean, there's virtually infinite number of applications for this. One of the Washington wizards, tokenized portions of his contract, maybe he was creating a new bond, that's really interesting use cases and opportunities, and that kind of segues into the latest, hot topic, which is the metaverse. And you've said yourself that blockchain and NFTs are the foundation of the metaverse, they're foundational elements. So first, what is the metaverse to you and where do blockchain and NFTs, fit in? >> Sure, so, I mean, I affectionately refer to the metaverse just a VR and essentially, we've been playing virtual reality games and all the rest for a long time. And VR has really kind of been out there for a long time. So most people's interpretation or idea of what the metaverse is, is a virtual reality version of yourself and this right, that idea of once it becomes yourself, is where things like NFT items, where blockchain and digital currencies are going to come in, because if you have a manufacturer, so you take on an organization like Nike, and they want to put their shoes into the metaverse because we, as humans, want to individualize ourselves. We go out and we want to have that one of one shoe or that, t-shirt or whatever it is, we're going to want to represent that same type of individuality in our virtual self. So NFTs, crypto and all of those digital currencies, like I was saying that we've known as gamers are going to play that very similar role inside of the metaverse. >> Yeah. Okay. So basically you're going to take your physical world into the metaverse. You're going to be able to, as you just mentioned, acquire things- I loved your WOW example. And so let's stay on this for a bit, if we may, of course, Facebook spawned a lot of speculation and discussion about the concept of the metaverse and really, as you pointed out, it's not new. You talked about why second life, really started in 2003, and it's still around today. It's small, I read recently, it's creators coming back into the company and books were written in the early 90s that used the term metaverse. But Nick, talk about how you see this evolving, what role you hope to play with your company and your community in the future, and who builds the metaverse, when is it going to be here? >> Yeah, so, I mean, right now, and we actually just got back from CES last week. And the Metaverse is a very big buzzword. You're going to see a lot of integration of what people are calling, quote unquote, the metaverse. And there was organizations that were showing virtual office space, virtual malls, virtual concerts, and those types of experiences. And the one thing right now that I don't think that a lot of organizations have grasp is how to make one metaverse. There's no real player one, if you will always this yet, There's a lot of organizations that are creating their version of the metaverse, which then again, just like every other software and game vendor out there has their version of cryptocurrency and their version of NFTs. You're going to see it start to pop up, especially as Oculus is going to come down in price, especially as you get new technologies, like some of the VR glasses that look more augmented reality and look more like regular glasses that you're wearing, things like that, the easier that those technologies become as in adopting into our normal lifestyle, as far as like looks and feels, the faster that stuff's going to actually come out to the world. But when it comes to like, what we're doing is we believe that the metaverse should actually span multiple different blockchains, multiple different segments, if you will. So what ORE system is doing, is we're actually building the underlying architecture and technologies for developers to bring their metaverse too. You can leverage the ORE Systems NFTs, where we like to call our utility NFTs as an in-game item in one game, or you can take it over and it could be a t-shirt in another game. The ability for having that cross support within the ecosystem is what really no one has grasp on yet. Most of the organizations out there are using a very classic business model. Get the user in the game, make them spend their money in the game, make all their game stuff as only good in their game. And that's where the developer has you, they have you in their bubble. Our goal, and what we like to affectionately say is, we want to bring white collar tools and technology to blue collar folks, We want to make it simple. We want to make it off the shelf, and we want to make it a less cost prohibitive, faster, and cheaper to actually get out to all the users. We do it by supporting the technology. That's our angle. If you support the technology and you support the platform, you can build a community that will build all of the metaverse around them. >> Well, and so this is interesting because, if you think about some of the big names, we've Microsoft is talking about it, obviously we mentioned Facebook. They have essentially walled gardens. Now, yeah, okay, I could take Tik Tok and pump it into Instagram is fine, but they're really siloed off. And what you're saying is in the metaverse, you should be able to buy a pair of sneakers in one location and then bring it to another one. >> Absolutely, that's exactly it. >> And so my original kind of investment in attractiveness, if you will, to crypto, was that, the little guy can get an early, but I worry that some of these walled gardens, these big internet giants are going to try to co-op this. So I think what you're doing is right on, and I think it's aligned with the objectives of consumers and the users who don't want to be forced in to a pen. They want to be able to live freely. And that's really what you're trying to do. >> That's exactly it. You know, when you buy an item, say a Skin in Fortnite or Skin in Call of Duty, it's only good in that game. And not even in the franchise, it's only good in that version of the game. In the case of what we want to do is, you can not only have that carry over and your character. So say you buy a really cool shirt, and you've got that in your Call of Duty or in our case, we're really Osiris Protocol, which is our proof of concept video game to show that this all thing actually works, but you can actually go in and you can get a gun in Osiris Protocol. And if we release, Osiris Protocol two, you'll be able to take that to Osiris Protocol two. Now the benefit of that is, is you're going to be the only one in the next version with that item, if you haven't sold it or traded it or whatever else. So we don't lock you into a game. We don't lock you into a specific application. You own that, you can trade that freely with other users. You can sell that on the open market. We're embracing what used to be considered the black market. I don't understand why a lot of video games, we're always against the skins and mods and all the rest. For me as a gamer and coming up, through the many, many years of various different Call of Duties and everything in my time, I wish I could still have some this year. I still have a World of Warcraft account. I wasn't on, Vanilla, Burning Crusade was my foray, but I still have a character. If you look at it that way, if I had that wild character and that gear was NFTs, in theory, I could actually pass that onto my kid who could carry on that character. And it would actually increase in value because they're NFT back then. And then if needed, you could trade those on the open market and all the rest. It just makes gaming a much different thing. >> I love it. All right, Nick, hey, we're out of time, but I got to say, Nick Donarski, thanks so much for coming on the program today, sharing your insights and really good luck to you and building out your technology platform and your community. >> Thank you, sir, it's been an absolute pleasure. >> And thank you for watching. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast", and you'll find them. I publish pretty much every week on siliconangle.com and wikibond.com. And you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter or comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can always email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR, happy 2022 be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(lively techno music) >> Announcer: Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering, DevNet Create 2017. Brought to you by Cisco. >> And welcome back to theCUBE, I'm Peter Burris and this is the last of two days of great presentations here at Cisco DevNet Create. A show set up specifically to help software developers and networking professionals start to co-mingle their ideas and look at business problems differently to create new ideas, new innovations, new inventions that can change the way the world does things so that we can improve the quality of digital business and life overall. And, I'm very excited that, our last session, we actually have a real live software engineer, here on theCUBE to talk about some of the things that are happening. And it's a very important one, 'cause it's in AppDynamics. Balwinder Kaur, nice to meet you and welcome to theCUBE >> Nice to be here. Thanks, Peter! >> So, Balwinder is a principal software engineer at AppDynamics, which is a Cisco property that came in within the last year. >> Yes. >> And has been especially important in thinking about how we're going to embed additional software controls and metrics into applications to make them more network-friendly. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, so let's start off by asking you this questions, Balwinder. You're a software engineer, you're a developer. You're at this show, first inaugural show that Cisco's put forward, what do you think of it? >> I think it's very interesting that Cisco is doing something for DevOps, for the cloud, for IoT that is not completely network-focused, so, it's great. >> Well, most of the content, as Cisco said, is coming out of the community. It's coming out of contributors, and others that are part of this process. Has there been any particular theme or message that you've seen from the community as it's kind of come together that surprised you or really resonated with you? >> Well, I definitely, Since we are very new to the Cisco family, I got a chance to meet with other companies and other parts of Cisco here. And I got a better picture of how different pieces, like Jasper and Meraki and AppDynamics together can provide a wonderful insight for the customer base and that's very valuable, whether it's insights into the networking layer, application layers. Again, within the applications, whether they're web applications, Java, .NET, or they're Android, iOS and embedded application, the Internet of Thing applications, whether they're multiple applications on one box or dedicated applications. So I think it's very exciting and the potential is just immense. >> Peter Burris: AppDynamics has been at the vanguard of thinking about this notion of network-ability of applications for quite some time. As AppDynamics has evolved and matured, and you almost had an exit that went to the public and you ended up with an exit that went to Cisco. How has the audience, the community around application development responded to AppDynamic's vision of the idea of better instrumenting applications to make them more successful on networks and have networks be more appropriate for application developers? >> So... your question was quite complicated. >> Peter Burris: True. >> (laughs) >> But hey, you got five minutes. >> I will try to answer it. So, definitely, the response with AppDynamics being part of Cisco has been positive from the customers because now there's a lot of backing from a very big company and definitely there are synergies. Cisco's big in the enterprise. AppDynamics is also big in the enterprise. And as applications become more and more of the business, definitely the customers like that part. And I don't know how closely you've been following what AppDynamics does, but we've gone from just application monitoring into business IQ, different parts of your business and providing more and more intelligence to our customers, so I think it's a good place and a good time to be. >> We like to say that digital business is really how you use your data. The difference between business and digital business is the idea that data is an asset and can be applied differentially to greater serve customers. And the trend to add new digital capabilities to business means that software and data are getting embedded deeper and deeper and deeper into business pieces. Both as process, for analytics and a number of other things. And it sounds as though AppDynamics, and this is for that core sort of enterprise customers, are also being embedded more deeply in the business as software takes on more responsibility for the core and differentiating capabilities that a business performs. Is that accurate? >> That's definitely one way of putting it. We like to say, at AppDynamics, that the application is becoming the business. So we have application-focused and more and more businesses are moving into the applications space and so IT organizations are not a support function, but getting to be more of the core function. So yes, it's two ways of representing, probably, what is very close. >> Peter Burris: So as you move from monitoring to monitoring and analytics for crucial software applications, what new approaches or what new insights is your customer base gaining about how best to set up these capture points and how to use the data associated with application performance? >> So, there's different paths of the application, right? And application architectures are changing, so you need to have solutions that can cater to all of them, for example microservices is a big trend now. Containers like Docker, and so you need your monitoring solutions to be able to cater to all of that. The other piece is the depth of instrumentation, so not just in the application layer; your database, your network monitoring. So the complete suite of all of this. And then, not isolated, right? Being able to correlate all the data. And that's sort of within the data center, but the outside world we call the end-user monitoring. We have browser and Android and iOS, but we're also building solutions now for the Internet of Things, which is basically traditionally connected embedded devices, but now they're talking to cloud services. And so, definitely a lot of these things are now very developer-centric. So just like Cisco has this conference geared toward developers, yes, we definitely understand that embedded systems, they need more and more developer-centric features where they have control of what performance data to pick up, what business data to pick up, when to send the data. And so, yeah, just having the wide, rich variety of support for different platforms, different form factors and different languages also, right? And then being able to all view it in a single pane, I think that's the strength of AppDynamics. >> Peter Burris: But you also need more developers, because there's going to have to be an enormous amount of software to bring all these devices, these IoT events, and everything else we're talking about when we think about digital business in under the umbrella of an AppDynamics or related type of technology. So, bringing new developers in and having them be familiar with the value that these kind of tools can bring to the party is crucial. How is AppDynamics looking at the challenges of attracting whole new classes of application developers into the fold so that you can, in fact, have greater end-to-end visibility about how applications are performing and behaving? >> Balwinder Kaur: So, we have dedicated teams now, which are looking at increasing developer mindshare and catering to them. Also, there's, especially in this whole Internet of Things, it's a very well-understood fact around the industry that you don't have as many embedded engineers to build all the applications and that's why there is all the platforms are now coming with more support for JavaScript developers, Java, which nobody used to think could run heavily on embedded devices. It's a big player. Python, Javascript. And so, I think catering, using embedded engineers to build tools so that the web application developers can write applications that turn on embedded devices is the trend and we recognize it and absolutely support all those developers. >> Peter Burris: So time is crucial, especially at the edge, where you have to be able to ... Often an event has to happen within a certain, prescribed period of time and the round-trip can be challenging. So, what is the role that monitoring, and metering, well not so much metering, but monitoring and event-management plays as we start to deploy these more complex applications, especially IoT-like applications? >> So, I just finished the talk here, recently. And basically, at design time, just you know how they say that security has to be built in at design time? Similarly, all solutions that get deployed now need to be built in with hooks for performance-monitoring, right? If your devices are now talking to the cloud, you need to be able to know that when your hundreds and thousands of devices are there, which one of them's are suffering from a network latency problem and which ones are not. And that is where AppDynamics comes in. You put the agents there, they correlate back and they correlate to all different parts of your businesses, whether the traffic is originating from a mobile device, a browser, or it's originating from an embedded device. And I think that's performance monitoring is absolutely crucial. It's not a luxury to have any more, it is a must-have and I think, as more and more solutions get deployed into the field, the realization will be there. I think right now, people are still in the IoT world, still focused more on other problems, like security, interoperability, connectivity. But this will become a growing pain once some of the other hurdles have been bypassed. >> Well, what are some of those lessons that you learn about how you appropriately embed performance-management and monitoring hooks into applications? Where should people be looking? >> So, if you're looking at the embedded side, then people should look at definitely small footprints. Agents should be configurable. Because different devices and use cases have different expectations. Some of the devices, they only want the performance data to be sent when they are done with whatever they are designed to do. Others don't want the battery to be up, so they want the performance data to be sent when they are powered up, not in deep-sleep mode. Then again, off-line mode also varies from application to application. There are some devices that go offline for up to weeks. And they just want to store local data and upload it later on. There are others that can not store more than one hour. So basically, you are looking for agents that are configurable. The developer can control when they want to send data, when do they want to store data, how much they want to store data. Then at the back end, you should be able to correlate all this. Because in isolation, it doesn't give you the problem. There is a lot of complexity on the end-user side as well as there's a lot of complexity on the web application side, right? There are micro services, Docker containers. So any solution that provides end-to-end monitoring and then is able to correlate data across different pieces to be able to give a true picture of performance is a good solution to have. >> So we want to make sure that the agent isn't forcing particular behaviors, but is in fact responsive and fits within the environmental constraints and considerations of whatever it is that that local device does. >> Balwinder Kaur: Yes. So, you're looking for a lot of flexibility on the embedded side. There are other where auto-instrumentation and ease of use, and not necessarily development time is important. There are other factors there, but for the Internet of Things side, this is what is important. >> So as we think about increasing, as we think about the evolution over the next few years of software, to what degree does the ability to re-use software get tied back to having visibility in how software performs? Being able to move from one cloud supplier to another, have depend upon, having greater visibility into how software performs. The ability to reapply software to new roles or purposes that weren't originally anticipated, dependent upon knowing how that software performs. It seems as though an AppDynamics tool is going to have a much greater set of propositions over the course of software as opposed to just at design time. Would you agree with that? >> Yes, absolutely, right? Because, so multi-cloud is definitely one. You want to be able to see your performance data, how your business is performing, right? Because your business is the application, how is it performing as solutions move across different clouds or performance of the different cloud change. So there're already conversations about multi-cloud for sure. And then, yes, absolutely, developers getting real-time feedback of their new deployments. Did it impact the performance or not? Yes, those are going to be very important trends. >> So, we've talked a lot over the past few days about DevOps and the role that DevOps is likely to play in digital business as well as within the way the entry is evolving. Can you just relate the role that AppDynamics and, again, this class of tools has to facilitating, collaboration, and communication, and working relationships between operations and development people? >> So, we already internally, we have applications, because we had a SAS solution tool. And so we are very acutely aware of, we have to keep our systems up as well. And we are acutely aware of how, when we develop and deploy new solutions, what does it mean? How the performance can be monitored and that's a trend that definitely we are keeping an eye on. But is there something to suggest that we have tools right now? I don't think that is something that we can ta-- >> But can the data be used by both parties? Does application performance data, can it be a lingua franca? For both operations and developers-- >> Absolutely. >> As they think about making sure that, operations people saying, "This is what works." And application developer saying, "This is what I need." That data can kind of start bringing them together and giving them a common thing to talk about. >> Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, right? >> Well, so, one last question here. This is the first, the inaugural Cisco DevNet Create. What do you think? You looking forward to future DevNet Creates? >> Absolutely. >> And what would you like to see coming out of this show as a consumer of the information, not as a presenter? But what would you like to see more of as these communities start to co-mingle and cross-pollinate ideas? >> I think some of the things that is a friction and will stay a friction until the embedded and operations teams come closer with the IT teams. And so I think best practices from both sides; being able to know what best practices are and then brainstorming and coming up with things that work for everybody is one. And maybe put people in each other's shoes, right? Like IT Ops doesn't always understand everything about what happens on the OT side and vice versa, so you know, like putting them in a situation where they get better hands-on, like a lab, right? Where they have better hands-on experience and now I understand what they are dealing with, right? Like, the people that have never been inside a NOC and they now can sit there and experience some of that. >> Which is not the most fun thing in the world to do. (laughs) >> Yeah, so then we need to make it more fun, right? >> (laughs) Yes. A NOC as World of Warcraft. >> (laughs) >> Alright, so, Balwinder Kaur, thank you very much. >> Thanks, Peter. >> Balwinder Kaur is the principal software engineer, or a principle software engineer at AppDynamics. And this is it, guys. Two days of Cisco DevNet Create. It's been a very successful conference. We've talked about some fascinating things. A lot of sessions on talking about DevOps. A lot of sessions on multi-cloud and the role that software's going to play inside businesses, digital business transform. This has been theCUBE. More of this in upcoming shows. Thank you very much for watching us over the course of the past couple days. For John Furrier, Peter Burris. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music) >> Hi, I'm April Mitchell and I'm the Senior Director of Strategy...