(camera shutters) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Denver, Colorado at the DJI Airworks conference. It's their second conference, about 550, 600 people. Really interesting, all about commercial drones. Everybody knows DJI for the Maverick Pro and the Spark and all their consumer stuff. But there's a whole industrial play and commercial play, enterprise play... We're excited to be here, these are really fun kind of shows 'cause everybody's into it and we're excited. Our first guest, Yariv Geller, he is the CEO of vHive. Welcome. >> Hey. Great talking to you. >> Absolutely, so what is vHive all about? >> So, as you mentioned, there are a lot of commercial users, enterprises, who want to use drones. And while it's really fun flying a drone as a consumer, enterprises don't really care about the fun factor. It's all about making stuff scalable, and autonomous. Now, we're taking it to the next level, so not just using a single drone. Once we've computerized a system that can fly a drone autonomously, we're actually looking at a swarm or a fleet of drones that are flying in unison. So, a user can define a mission, and the system will manage multiple drones that are actually collaborating on the same mission. Getting the work done much faster, any scale. Stuff that organizations really look for in an ongoing basis. >> So you're here, you know it's a DJI event... It's a really interesting approach that they've taken to break this thing up. You know, people probably don't think there's a platform. There's the flight platform, there's the payload, and then they opened up the SDKs. Not only in the controller in the mobile app, but also inside the unit itself. So, clearly it's something you're taking advantage of. Putting your software energy in, using the SDKs and leveraging that to create kind of a new flight pattern, I would imagine, and a new inter-drone communication system. >> Right, I think this is a very smart move that DJI is doing, we've seen it before. Take Apple for example, a company that builds wonderful hardware. And they said the best efficient way for us to sell this hardware is to create a platform where people can create amazing applications. So, they've created the environment and the ecosystem to support their wonderful hardware. I think DJI is doing the same kind of approach, where they say we have cutting-edge hardware that nobody else has. We can take this hardware to a certain limit with our focus, and then we'd like to develop an ecosystem around our platforms that can actually make use in different industries and take the applications forward. >> Right, so a lot of industries' really being highlighted at this show. Construction, energy, residential... You just had the Menlo Park Fire Department, next door to my house at home, talking about using it in security. So, for your application, it's interesting. Before we turned on the cameras, you talked about the distinction between a fleet and a hive... >> Right. >> And a swarm, excuse me, a swarm. Which obviously you think of bees, right? A smart swarm of bees doing crazy things. So, what are the type of applications that your customers are using your solution for? >> Right, so what we help customers do on a typical application is to digitize the field. Is to bring the field into the organization. So, if I'm a company who has large-scale field operations and it cost me a lot to send out people to the field, and actually understand what's going on, and bring piece by piece information inwards, this new domain of drones enables us to capture the field and to bring the information so the entire organization can view it very effectively. Now, one of the limitations that the industry is seeing is there's this paradigm of a single person, a single drone, which is kind of limited in scale. So, typically people will complain drone only has 20 minutes worth of battery. I can cover only so much, it takes me some time to do larger scale work. We're looking at this next phase. Of how do organizations actually cover more in less time, and more effectively. So, we work well with companies in infrastructure. wWich include civil engineering companies. So, not just construction where I focus on a building or a small area, but I want to look at an entire neighborhood, or a 15 mile stretch of road that's being constructed. We work with utility companies. So, we've done a lot of work with water utilities where they want to look at pipelines and infrastructure that they need to gauge over time. And they want to understand if there is an issue or a problem that they need to pay attention to. We work on infrastructure like cell towers and so on. Where instead of sending a person to climb up on a 200 feet tower with all the risk and safety issues associated and insurance costs. You can send a few drones to cover your infrastructure much more effectively. So, we're excelling in areas where scale is of importance, time is of importance, and costs. Which is everywhere pretty much. And I think one of the basic things that we say is very simple math. Throw a second drone into your mission, you cut time by half. You cut cost by half of being in the field. So, this scales up for organizations to do any kind of mission, any scale, any size, at half the time or less. >> Right, except you got to have the good software or else you start adding communication overhead and management overhead. So, it doesn't always equal one plus one makes two. Sometimes you have demission returns. But, just an opportunity for you. It's fascinating to me, this concept too, came up in the keynote earlier of taking physical data via the sensors on the drones. Whether that be photography or IR or... Lord knows what other kind of sensors you put on this. And really converting it into digital data that you can now almost treat as log data to feed into digital systems that we've been very familiar with in IT and manufacturing and other businesses. But now the drone becomes this interface between the physical world and the digital world in a space that's not necessarily wired. 'Cause it's new construction or it's a water pipeline. It's a really fascinating way to attack the problem and be able to apply analytic software, data-driven analytics to what was never... You couldn't do that before, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, and I think you're touching on a few points here that are important. First of all, in the end of the day, the drone is not the goal. The drones are the means, right? In the end of the day what companies are interested in is an acquiring data, processing data, and managing data. So that they can make smarter decisions in the end of the day. Manage projects and save cost and so on. So, drones are really enabling that. Another point that you touch upon, is drones generate a lot of data. So, every time we fly a mission for a customer, we're generating gigabytes and terabytes of information. And there needs to be a way to manage that effectively. Some of the organizations felt the pain, originally, by sending out drones and then piling up tons of information. And software solutions like ours generate the IT environment to manage all this data so that you're both able to drill down through it, link between it, and collaborate within your organization outside on that data. So, we're seeing, for example, companies in civil engineering, who both use the data internally for planning purposes. They use it to manage contractors in the field so that they can monitor what's going on from a bird's-eye view, and manage to compare between actual and planned activities. And they're also using it to manage upwards where they need to share information with whoever's investing in the project. They can show them actual progress, visual progress. Instead of sending them a written report, we're on track, check mark, and actually view progress over time. >> Right, right. So, as you look ahead to 2018, we're almost done with 2017. Is there any significant challenges, you know, that need to be overcome? Is it just people are afraid of 'em, is it privacy issues? Is it the software's still not up to snuff? Is it flight times and batteries? What are some of the, not giant challenges, but short-term challenges that the industry as a whole will be able to really address in 2018? >> So, first of all, the part of the industry that's our customers'... They're on this accelerating ramp up of adopting this new technology. So, we're seeing companies who have already identified drones as an excellent solution for them to acquire information from the field. We're seeing them starting to test out how they can use drones in making decisions that this is a good technology for them. And now they're experiencing some of the pains of how do you scale up. And I think, again this is a theme that we've heard today a lot. And this is probably the most immediate challenges. Moving from adoption to scaling up operations. So, I think we're going to see a lot of solutions that help organizations take drones to the next step. It's not just, yes we want the drone, yes we have a person or a group in our organization that's going to handle these. It's creating then their workflows and the infrastructure that lets them do this on a daily basis, in a repeated way. In a way that actually makes commercial sense, in terms of scale. And I think that's one of the key interesting challenges that we're going to see, as the industry grows from naissance to actual adoption. >> Right, well Yariv, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your time. Look forward to watching what happens at vHive, and a really exciting industry to be a part of. >> Thanks a lot, my pleasure. >> Alright, he's Yariv Geller, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Airworks, in Denver, Colorado. Thanks for watching. (camera shutters)