>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson, day four of MWC '23. Show's winding down a little bit, but it's still pretty packed here. Lot of innovation, planes, trains, automobiles, and we're talking 5G all week, private networks, connected breweries. It's super exciting. Really happy to have Warren Jackson here as the Edge Gateway Product Technologist at Dell Technologies, and Scott Waller, the CTO of the 5G Open Innovation Lab. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. >> Good to be here. >> Really interesting stories that we're going to talk about. Let's start, Scott, with you, what is the Open Innovation Lab? >> So it was hatched three years ago. Ideated about a bunch of guys from Microsoft who ran startup ventures program, started the developers program over at Microsoft, if you're familiar with MSDN. And they came three years ago and said, how does CSPs working with someone like T-Mobile who's in our backyard, I'm from Seattle. How do they monetize the edge? You need a developer ecosystem of applications and use cases. That's always been the thing. The carriers are building the networks, but where's the ecosystem of startups? So we built a startup ecosystem that is sponsored by partners, Dell being one sponsor, Intel, Microsoft, VMware, Aspirant, you name it. The enterprise folks who are also in the connectivity business. And with that, we're not like a Y Combinator or a Techstars where it's investment first and it's all about funding. It's all about getting introductions from a startup who might have a VR or AI type of application or observability for 5G slicing, and bring that in front of the Microsoft's of the world, or the Intel's and the Dell's of the world that they might not have the capabilities to do it because they're still a small little startup with an MVP. So we really incubate. We're the connectors and build a network. We've had 101 startups over the last three years. They've raised over a billion dollars. And it's really valuable to our partners like T-Mobile and Dell, et cetera, where we're bringing in folks like Expedo and GenXComm and Firecell. Start up private companies that are around here they were cohorts from our program in the past. >> That's awesome because I've often, I mean, I've seen Dell get into this business and I'm like, wow, they've done a really good job of finding these guys. I wonder what the pipeline is. >> We're trying to create the pipeline for the entire industry, whether it's 5G on the edge for the CSPs, or it's for private enterprise networks. >> Warren, what's this cool little thing you got here? >> Yeah, so this is very unique in the Dell portfolio. So when people think of Dell, they think of servers laptops, et cetera. But what this does is it's designed to be deployed at the edge in harsh environments and it allows customers to do analytics, data collection at the edge. And what's unique about it is it's got an extended temperature range. There's no fan in this and there's lots of ports on it for data ingestion. So this is a smaller box Edge Gateway 3200. This is the product that we're using in the brewery. And then we have a bigger brother of this, the Edge Gateway 5200. So the value of it, you can scale depending on what your edge compute requirements are at the edge. >> So tell us about the brewery story. And you covered it, I know you were in the Dell booth, but it's basically an analog brewery. They're taking measurements and temperatures and then writing it down and then entering it in and somebody from your company saw it and said, "We can help you with this problem." Explain the story. >> Yeah, so Scott and I did a walkthrough of the brewery back in November timeframe. >> It's in Framingham, Mass. >> Framingham, Mass, correct. And basically, we talked to him, and we said, what keeps you guys up at night? What's a problem that we can solve? Very simple, a kind of a lower budget, didn't have a lot money to spend on it, but what problem can we solve that will realize great benefit for you? So we looked at their fermentation process, which was completely analog. Somebody was walking around with a clipboard looking at analog gauges. And what we did is we digitized that process. So what this did for them rather than being completely reactive, and by the time they realized there was something going wrong with the fermentation process, it's too late. A batch of scrap. This allowed them to be proactive. So anytime, anywhere on the tablet or a phone, they can see if that fermentation process is going out of range and do something about it before the batch gets scrapped. >> Okay. Amazing. And Scott, you got a picture of this workflow here? >> Yeah, actually this is the final product. >> Explain that. >> As Warren mentioned, the data is actually residing in the industrial side of the network So we wanted to keep the IT/OT separation, which is critical on the factory floor. And so all the data is brought in from the sensors via digital connection once it's converted and into the edge gateway. Then there's a snapshot of it using Telit deviceWISE, their dashboarding application, that is decoding all the digital readings, putting them in a nice dashboard. And then when we gave them, we realized another problem was they're using cheap little Chromebooks that they spill beer on once a week and throw them out. That's why they bought the cheap ones 'cause they go through them so fast. So we got a Dell Latitude Rugged notebook. This is a brand new tablet, but they have the dashboarding software. So no matter if they're out there on the floor, but because the data resides there on the factory they have access to be able to change the parameters. This one's in the maturation cycle. This one's in the crashing cycle where they're bringing the temperature back down, stopping the fermentation process, getting it ready to go to the canning side of the house. >> And they're doing all that from this dashboard. >> They're doing all from the dashboard. They also have a giant screen that we put up there that in the floor instead of walking a hundred yards back behind a whole bunch of machinery equipment from a safety perspective, now they just look up on the screen and go, "Oh, that's red. That's out of range." They're actually doing a bunch of cleaning and a bunch of other things right now, too. So this is real time from Boston. >> Dave: Oh okay. >> Scott: This is actually real time from Boston. >> I'm no hop master, but I'm looking at these things flashing at me and I'm thinking something's wrong with my beer. >> We literally just lit this up last week. So we're still tweaking a few things, but they're also learning around. This is a new capability they never had. Oh, we have the ability to alert and monitor at different processes with different batches, different brews, different yeast types. Then now they're also training and learning. And we're going to turn that into eventually a product that other breweries might be able to use. >> So back to the kind of nuts and bolts of the system. The device that you have here has essentially wifi antennas on the back. >> Warren: Correct. >> Pull that up again if you would, please. >> Now I've seen this, just so people are clear, there are also paddle 5G antennas that go on the other side. >> Correct. >> That's sort of the connection from the 5G network that then gets transmogrified, technical term guys, into wifi so the devices that are physically connected to the brew vats, don't know what they're called. >> Fermentation tanks. >> Fermentation tanks, thank you. Those are wifi. That's a wifi signal that's going into this. Is that correct? >> Scott: No. >> No, it's not. >> It's a hard wire. >> Okay, okay. >> But, you're right. This particular gateway. >> It could be wifi if it's hard wire. >> It could be, yes. Could be any technology really. >> This particular gateway is not outfitted with 5G, but something that was very important in this application was to isolate the IT network, which is on wifi and physically connected from the OT network, which is the 5G connection. So we're sending the data directly from the gateway up to the cloud. The two partners that we worked with on this project were ifm, big sensor manufacturer that actually did the wired sensors into an industrial network called IO-Link. So they're physically wired into the gateway and then in the gateway we have a solution from our partner Telit that has deviceWISE software that actually takes the data in, runs the analytics on it, the logic, and then visualizes that data locally on those panels and also up to their cloud, which is what we're looking at. So they can look at it locally, they're in the plant and then up in the cloud on a phone or a tablet, whatever, when they're at home. >> We're talking about a small business here. I don't know how many employees they have, but it's not thousands. And I love that you're talking about an IT network and an OT network. And so they wanted, it is very common when we talk about industrial internet of things use cases, but we're talking about a tiny business here. >> Warren: Correct. >> They wanted to separate those networks because of cost, because of contention. Explain why. >> Yeah, just because, I mean, they're running their ERP system, their payroll, all of their kind of the way they run their business on their IT network and you don't want to have the same traffic out on the factory floor on that network, so it was pretty important. And the other thing is we really, one of the things that we didn't want to do in this project is interrupt their production process at all. So we installed this entire system in two days. They didn't have to shut down, they didn't have to stop. We didn't have to interrupt their process at all. It was like we were invisible there and we spun the thing up and within two days, very simple, easy, but tremendous value for their business. >> Talk about new markets here. I mean, it's like any company that's analog that needs to go digital. It's like 99% of the companies on the planet. What are you guys seeing out there in terms of the types of examples beyond breweries? >> Yeah, I could talk to that. So I spent a lot of time over the last couple years running my own little IoT company and a lot of it being in agriculture. So like in Washington state, 70% of the world's hops is actually grown in Washington state. It's my hometown. But in the Ag producing regions, there's lack of connectivity. So there's interest in private networks because the carriers aren't necessarily deploying it. But because we have the vast amount of hops there's a lot of IPAs, a lot of hoppy IPAs that come out of Seattle. And with that, there's a ton of craft breweries that are about the same size, some are a little larger. Anheuser-Busch and InBev and Heineken they've got great IoT platforms. They've done it. They're mass scale, they have to digitize. But the smaller shops, they don't, when we talk about IT/OT separation, they're not aware of that. They think it's just, I get local broadband and I get wifi and one hotspot inside my facility and it works. So a little bit of it was the education. I have got years in IT/OT security in my background so that education and we come forward with a solution that actually does that for them. And now they're aware of it. So now when they're asking questions of other vendors that are trying to sell them some type of solution, they're inherently aware of what should be done so they're not vulnerable to ransomware attacks, et cetera. So it's known as the Purdue Model. >> Well, what should they do? >> We came in and keep it completely separated and educated them because in the end too we'll build a design guide and a starter kit out of this that other brewers can use. Because I've toured dozens of breweries in Washington, the exact same scenario, analog gauges, analog process, very manual. And in the end, when you ask the brewer, what do they want out of this? It keeps them up at night because if the temperature goes out of range, because the chiller fails, >> They ruined. >> That's $30,000 lost in beer. That's a lot to a small business. However, it's also once they start digitizing the data and to Warren's point, it's read-only. We're not changing any of the process. We augmented on top of their existing systems. We didn't change their process. But now they have the ability to look at the data and see batch to batch consistency. Quality doesn't always mean best, it means consistency from batch to batch. Every beer from exhibit A from yesterday to two months from now of the same style of beer should be the same taste, flavor, boldness, et cetera. This is giving them the insights on it. >> It's like St. Louis Buds, when we were kids. We would buy the St. Louis Buds 'cause they tasted better than the Merrimack Buds. And then Budweiser made them all the same. >> Must be an East coast thing. >> It's an old guy thing, Dave. You weren't born yet. >> I was in high school. Yeah, I was in high school. >> We like the hops. >> We weren't 21. Do me a favor, clarify OT versus IT. It's something we talk about all the time, but not everyone's familiar with that separation. Define OT for me. >> It's really the factory floor. You got IT systems that are ERP systems, billing, you're getting your emails, stuff like that. Where the ransomware usually gets infected in. The OT side is the industrial control network. >> David: What's the 'O' stand for? >> Operation. >> David: Operation? >> Yeah, the operations side. >> 'Cause some people will think objects 'cause we think internet of things. >> The industrial operations, think of it that way. >> But in a sense those are things that are connected. >> And you think of that as they are the safety systems as well. So a machine, if someone doesn't push the stop button, you'd think if there's a lot of traffic on that network, it isn't guaranteed that that stop button actually stops that blade from coming down, someone's going to lose their arm. So it's very tied to safety, reliability, low latency. It is crafted in design that it never touches the internet inherently without having to go through a security gateway which is what we did. >> You mentioned the large companies like InBev, et cetera. You're saying they're already there. Are they not part of your target market? Or are there ways that you can help them? Is this really more of a small to mid-size company? >> For this particular solution, I think so, yeah. Because the cost to entry is low. I mean, you talk about InBev, they have millions of dollars of budgets to spend on OT. So they're completely automated from top to bottom. But these little craft brewers, which they're everywhere in the US. Vermont, Washington state, they're completely manual. A lot of these guys just started in their garage. And they just scaled up and they got a cult kind of following around their beers. One thing that we found here this week, when you talk around edge and 5G and beer, those things get people excited. In our booth we're serving beer, and all these kind of topics, it brings people together. >> And it lets the little guy compete more effectively with the big giants. >> Correct. >> And how do you do more with less as the little guy is kind of the big thing and to Warren's point, we have folks come up and say, "Great, this is for beer, but what about wine? What about the fermentation process of wine?" Same materials in the end. A vessel of some sort, maybe it's stainless steel. The clamps are the same, the sensors are the same. The parameters like temperature are key in any type of fermentation. We had someone talking about olive oil and using that. It's the same sanitary beverage style equipment. We grabbed sensors that were off the shelf and then we integrated them in and used the set of platforms that we could. How do we rapidly enable these guys at the lowest possible cost with stuff that's at the shelf. And there's four different companies in the solution. >> We were having a conversation with T-Mobile a little earlier and she mentioned the idea of this sounding scary. And this is a great example of showing that in fact, at a relatively small scale, this technology makes a lot of sense. So from that perspective, of course you can implement private 5G networks at an industrial scale with tens of millions of dollars of investment. But what about all of the other things below? And that seems to be a perfect example. >> Yeah, correct. And it's one of the things with the gateway and having flexibility the way Dell did a great job of putting really good modems in it. It had a wide spectrum range of what bands they support. So being able to say, at a larger facility, I mean, if Heineken wants to deploy something like this, oh, heck yeah, they probably could do it. And they might have a private 5G network, but let's say T-Mobile offers a private offering on their public via a slice. It's easy to connect that radio to it. You just change the sims. >> Is that how the CSPs fit here? How are they monetized? >> Yeah, correct. So one of our partners is T-Mobile and so we're working with them. We've got other telco partners that are coming on board in our lab. And so we'll do the same thing. We're going to take this back and put it in the lab and offer it up as others because the baseline building blocks or Lego blocks per se can be used in a bunch of different industries. It's really that starter point of giving folks the idea of what's possible. >> So small manufacturing, agriculture you mentioned, any other sort of use cases we should tune into? >> I think it's environmental monitoring, all of that stuff, I see it in IoT deployments all over the world. Just the simple starter kits 'cause a farmer doesn't want to get sold a solution, a platform, where he's got to hire a bunch of coders and partner with the big carriers. He just wants something that works. >> Another use case that we see a lot, a high cost in a lot of these places is the cost of energy. And a lot of companies don't know what they're spending on electricity. So a very simple energy monitoring system like that, it's a really good ROI. I'm going to spend five or $10,000 on a system like this, but I'm going to save $20,000 over a year 'cause I'm able to see, have visibility into that data. That's a lot of what this story's about, just giving visibility into the process. >> It's very cool, and like you said, it gets people excited. Is it a big market? How do you size it? Is it a big TAM? >> Yeah, so one thing that Dell brings to the table in this space is people are buying their laptops, their servers and whatnot from Dell and companies are comfortable in doing business with Dell because of our model direct to customer and whatnot. So our ability to bring a device like this to the OT space and have them have that same user experience they have with laptops and our client products in a ruggedized solution like this and bring a lot of partners to the table makes it easy for our customers to implement this across all kinds of industries. >> So we're talking to billions, tens of billions. Do we know how big this market is? What's the TAM? I mean, come on, you work for Dell. You have to do a TAM analysis. >> Yes, no, yeah. I mean, it really is in the billions. The market is huge for this one. I think we just tapped into it. We're kind of focused in on the brewery piece of it and the liquor piece of it, but the possibilities are endless. >> Yeah, that's tip of the spear. Guys, great story. >> It's scalable. I think the biggest thing, just my final feedback is working and partnering with Dell is we got something as small as this edge gateway that I can run a Packet Core on and run a 5G standalone node and then have one of the small little 5G radios out there. And I've got these deployed in a farm. Give the farmer an idea of what's possible, give him a unit on his tractor, and now he can do something that, we're providing connectivity he had never had before. But as we scale up, we've got the big brother to this. When we scale up from that, we got the telco size units that we can put. So it's very scalable. It's just a great suite of offerings. >> Yeah, outstanding. Guys, thanks for sharing the story. Great to have you on theCUBE. >> Good to be with you today. >> Stop by for beer later. >> You know it. All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team, we're here live at the Fira in Barcelona MWC '23 day four. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>> TheCUBE presents Ignite 22 brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everyone. We're glad you're with us. This is theCUBE live at Palo Alto Ignite 22 at the MGM Grant in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante, day one of our coverage. We've had great conversations. The cybersecurity landscape is so interesting Dave, it's such a challenging problem to solve but it's so diverse and dynamic at the same time. >> You know, Lisa theCUBE started in May of 2010 in Boston. We called it the chowder event, chowder and Lobster. It was a EMC world, 2010. BJ Jenkins, who's here, of course, was a longtime friend of theCUBE and made the, made the transition into from, well, it's still data, data to, to cyber. So >> True. And BJ is back with us. BJ Jenkins, president Palo Alto Networks great to have you back on theCUBE. >> It is great to be here in person on theCube >> Isn't it great? >> In Vegas. It's awesome. >> And we can tell by your voice will be, will be gentle. You, you've been in Vegas typical Vegas occupational hazard of losing the voice. >> Yeah. It was one of the benefits of Covid. I didn't lose my voice at home sitting talking to a TV. You lose it when you come to Vegas. >> Exactly. >> But it's a small price to pay. >> So things kick off yesterday with the partner summit. You had a keynote then, you had a customer, a CISO on stage. You had a keynote today, which we didn't get to see. But talk to us a little bit about the lay of the land. What are you hearing from CISOs, from CIOs as we know security is a board level conversation. >> Yeah, I, you know it's been an interesting three or four months here. Let me start with that. I think, cybersecurity in general is still front and center on CIOs and CISO's minds. It has to be, if you saw Wendy's presentation today and the threats out there companies have to have it front and center. I do think it's been interesting though with the macro uncertainty. We've taken to calling this year the revenge of the CFO and you know these deals in cybersecurity are still a top priority but they're getting finance and procurements, scrutiny which I think in this environment is a necessity but it's still a, you know, number one number two imperative no matter who you talked to, in my mind >> It was interesting what Nikesh was saying in the last conference call that, hey we just have to get more approvals. We know this. We're, we're bringing more go-to-market people on board. We, we have, we're filling the pipeline 'cause we know they're going to split up deals big deals go into smaller chunks. So the question I have for you is is how are you able to successfully integrate those people so that you can get ahead of that sort of macro transition? >> Yeah I, you know, I think there's two things I'd say about uncertain macro situations and Dave, you know how old I am. I'm pretty old. I've been through a lot of cycles. And in those cycles I've always found stronger companies with stronger value proposition separate themselves actually in uncertain, economic times. And so I think there's actually an opportunity here. The message tilts a little bit though where it's been about innovation and new threat vectors to one of you have 20, 30, 40 vendors you can consolidate become more effective in your security posture and save money on your TCOs. So one of the things as we bring people on board it's training them on that business value proposition. How do you take a customer who's got 20 or 30 tools take 'em down to 5 or 10 where Palo is more central and strategic and be able to demonstrate that value. So we do that through, we're making a huge investment in our people but macroeconomic times also puts some stronger people back on the market and we're able to incorporate them into the business. >> What are the conditions that are necessary for that consolidation? Like I would imagine if you're, if you're a big customer of a big, you know, competitor of yours that that migration is going to be harder than if you're dealing with lots of little point tools. Do those, do those point tools, are they sort of is it the end of the subscription? Is it just stuff that's off the books now? What's, the condition that is ripe for that kind of consolidation? >> Look, I think the challenge coming into this year was skills. And so customers had all of these point products. It required a lot more human intervention as Nikesh was talking about to integrate them or make them work. And as all of us know finding people with cybersecurity skills over the last 12 months has been incredibly hard. That drove, if you know, if you think about that a CIO and a CISO sitting there going, I have all all this investment in tools. I don't have the people to operate 'em. What do I need to do? What we tried to do is elevate that conversation because in a customer, everybody who's bought one of those, they they bought it to solve a problem. And there's people with affinity for that tool. They're not just going to say I want to get consolidated and give up my tool. They're going to wrap their arms around it. And so what we needed to do and this changed our ecosystem strategy too how we leverage partners. We needed to get into the CIO and CISO and say look at this chaos you have here and the challenges around people that it's, it's presenting you. We can help solve that by, by standardizing, consolidating taking that integration away from you as Nikesh talked about, and making it easier for your your high skill people to work on high skill, you know high challenges in there. >> Let chaos reign, and then reign in the chaos. >> Yes. >> Andy Grove. >> I was looking at some stats that there's 26 million developers but less than 3 million cybersecurity professionals. >> Talked about that skills gap and what CISOs and CIOs are facing is do you consider from a value prop perspective Palo Alto Networks to be a, a facilitator of helping organizations deal with that skills gap? >> I think there's a short term and a long term. I think Nikesh today talked about the long term that we'll never win this battle with human beings. We're going to have to win it with automation. That, that's the long term the short term right here and now is that people need people with cybersecurity skills. Now what we're trying to do, you know, is multifaceted. We work with universities to standardize programs to develop skills that people can come into the marketplace with. We run our own programs inside the company. We have a cloud academy program now where we take people high aptitude for sales and technical aptitude and we will put them through a six month boot camp on cloud and they'll come out of that ready to really work with the leading experts in cloud security. The third angle is partners, right, there are partners in the marketplace who want to drive their business into high services areas. They have people, they know how to train. We give them, we partner with them to give them training. Hopefully that helps solve some of the short-term gaps that are out there today. >> So you made the jump from data storage to security and >> Yeah. >> You know, network security, all kinds of security. What was that like? What you must have learned a lot in the last better part of a decade? >> Yeah. >> Take us through that. >> You know, so the first jump was from EMC. I was 15 years there to be CEO of Barracuda. And you know, it was interesting because EMC was, you know large enterprise for the most part. At Barracuda we had, you know 250,000 small and mid-size enterprises. And it was, it's interesting to get into security in small and mid-size businesses because, you know Wendy today was talking about nation states. For small and mid-size business, it's common thievery right? It's ransomware, it's, and, those customers don't have, you know, the human and financial resources to keep up with the threat factor. So, you know, Nikesh talked about how it's taken 'em four and a half years to get into cybersecurity. I remember my first week at Barracuda, I was talking with a customer who had, you know, breached data shut down. There wasn't much bitcoin back then so it was just a pure ransom. And I'm like, wow, this is, you know, incredible industry. So it's been a good, you know, transition for me. I still think data is at the heart of all of this. Right? And I have always believed there's a strong connection between the things I learned growing up at EMC and what I put into practice today at Palo Alto Networks. >> And how about a culture because I, you know I know have observed the EMC culture >> Yeah. >> And you were there in really the heyday. >> Yeah. >> Right? Which was an awesome place. And it seems like Palo Alto obviously, different times but you know, similar like laser focus on solving problems, you know, obviously great, you know value sellers, you know, you guys aren't the commodity >> Yeah. For Product. But there seemed to be some similarities from afar. I don't know Palo Alto as well as I know EMC. >> I think there's a lot. When I joined EMC, it was about, it was 2 billion in in revenue and I think when I left it was over 20, 20, 21. And, you know, we're at, you know hopefully 5, 5 5 in revenue. I feel like it's this very similar, there's a sense of urgency, there's an incredible focus on the customer. you know, Near and Moche are definitely different individuals but the both same kind of disruptive, Israeli force out there driving the business. There are a lot of similarities. I, you know, the passion, I feel privileged as a, you know go to market person that I have this incredible portfolio to go, you know, work with customers on. It's a lucky position to be in, but very I feel like it is a movie I've seen before. >> Yeah. And but, and the course, the challenges from the, the target that you're disrupting is different. It was, you know, EMC had a lot of big, you know IBM obviously was, you know, bigger target whereas you got thousands of, you know, smaller companies. >> Yes. >> And, and so that's a different dynamic but that's why the consolidation play is so important. >> Look at, that's why I joined Palo Alto Networks when I was at Barracuda for nine years. It just fascinated me, that there was 3000 plus players in security and why didn't security evolve like the storage market did or the server market or network where working >> Yeah, right. >> You know, two or three big gorillas came to, to dominate those markets. And it's, I think it's what Nikesh talked about today. There was a new problem in best of breed. It was always best of breed. You can never in security go in and, you know, say, Hey it's good I saved us some money but I got the third best product in the marketplace. And there was that kind of gap between products. I, believe in why I joined here I think this is my last gig is we have a chance to change that. And this is the first company as I look from the outside in that had best of breed as, you know Nikesh said 13 categories. >> Yeah. >> And you know, we're in the leaders quadrant and it's a conversation I have with customers. You don't have to sacrifice best of breed but get the benefits of a platform. And I, think that resonates today. I think we have a chance to change the industry from that viewpoint. >> Give us a little view of the voice of the customer. You had, was it Sabre? >> Yeah. >> That was on >> Scott Moser, The CISO from Sabre. >> Give us a view, what are you hearing from the voice of the customer? Obviously they're quite a successful customer but challenges, concerns, the partnership. >> Yeah. Look, I think security is similar to industries where we come up with magic marketing phrases and, you know, things to you know, make you want to procure our solutions. You know, zero trust is one. And you know, you'll talk to customers and they're like, okay, yes. And you know, the government, right? Joe, Joe Biden's putting out zero trust executive orders. And the, the problem is if you talk to customers, it's a journey. They have legacy infrastructure they have business drivers that you know they just don't deal with us. They've got to deal with the business side who's trying to make the money that keeps the, the company going. it's really helped them draw a map from where they're at today to zero trust or to a better security architecture. Or, you know, they're moving their apps into the cloud. How am I going to migrate? Right? Again, that discussion three years ago was around lift and shift, right? Today it's about, well, no I need cloud native developed apps to service the business the way I want to, I want to service it. How do I, so I, I think there's this element of a trusted partner and relationship. And again, I think this is why you can't have 40 or 50 of those. You got to start narrowing it down if you want to be able to meet and beat the threats that are out there for you. So I, you know, the customers, I see a lot of 'em. It's, here's where I'm at help me get here to a better position. And they know it's, you know Scott said in our keynote today, you don't just, you know have layer three firewall policies and decide, okay tomorrow I'm going to go to layer seven. That, that's not how it works. Right? There's, and, and by the way these things are a mission critical type areas. So there's got to be a game plan that you help customers go through to get there. >> Definitely. Last question, my last question for you is, is security being a board level conversation I was reading some stats from a survey I think it was the what's new in Cypress survey that that Palo Alto released today that showed that while significant numbers of organizations think they've got a cyber resiliency playbook, there's a lot of disconnect or lack of alignment at the boardroom. Are you in those conversations? How can you help facilitate that alignment between the executive team and the board when it comes to security being so foundational to any business? >> Yeah, it's, I've been on three, four public company boards. I'm on, I'm on two today. I would say four years ago, this was a almost a taboo topic. It was a, put your head in the sand and pray to God nothing happened. And you know, the world has changed significantly. And because of the number of breaches the impact it's had on brand, boards have to think about this in duty of care and their fiduciary duty. Okay. So then you start with a board that may not have the technical skills. The first problem the security industry had is how do I explain your risk profile in a way you can understand it. I'm, I'm on the board of Generac that makes home generators. It's a manufacturing, you know, company but they put Wifi modules in their boxes so that the dealers could help do the maintenance on 'em. And all of a sudden these things were getting attacked. Right? And they're being used for bot attacks. >> Yeah. >> Everybody on their board had a manufacturing background. >> Ah. >> So how do you help that board understand the risk they have that's what's changed over the last four years. It's a constant discussion. It's one I have with CISOs where they're like help us put it in layman's terms so they understand they know what we're doing and they feel confident but at the same time understand the marketplace better. And that's a journey for us. >> That Generac example is a great one because, you know, think about IOT Technologies. They've historically been air gaped >> Yes. >> By design. And all of a sudden the business comes in and says, "Hey we can put wifi in there", you know >> Connect it to a home Wifi system that >> Make our lives so much easier. Next thing you know, it's being used to attack. >> Yeah. >> So that's why, as you go around the world are you discerning, I know you were just in Japan are you discerning significant differences in sort of attitudes toward, towards cyber? Whether it's public policy, you know things like regulation where you, they don't want you sharing data, but as as a cyber company, you want to share that data with you know, public and private? >> Look it, I, I think around the world we see incredible government activity first of all. And I think given the position we're in we get to have some unique conversations there. I would say worldwide security is an imperative. I, no matter where I go, you know it's in front of everybody's mind. The, on the, the governance side, it's really what do we need to adapt to make sure we meet local regulations. And I, and I would just tell you Dave there's ways when you do that, and we talk with governments that because of how they want to do it reduce our ability to give them full insight into all the threats and how we can help them. And I do think over time governments understand that we can anonymize the data. There's, but that, that's a work in process. Definitely there is a balance. We need to have privacy, we need to have, you know personal security for people. But there's ways to collect that data in an anonymous way and give better security insight back into the architectures that are out there. >> All right. A little shift the gears here. A little sports question. We've had some great Boston's sports guests on theCUBE right? I mean, Randy Seidel, we were talking about him. Peter McKay, Snyk, I guess he's a competitor now but you know, there's no question got >> He got a little funding today. I saw that. >> Down round. But they still got a lot of money. Not of a down round, but they were, but yeah, but actually, you know, he was on several years ago and it was around the time they were talking about trading Brady. He said Never trade Brady. And he got that right. We, I think we can agree Brady's the goat. >> Yes. >> The big question I have for you is, Belichick. Do you ever question Has your belief in him as the greatest coach of all time wavered, you know, now that- No. Okay. >> Never. >> Weigh in on that. >> Never, he says >> Still the Goat. >> I'll give you my best. You know, never In Bill we trust. >> Okay. Still. >> All right >> I, you know, the NFL is a unique property that's designed for parody and is designed, I mean actively designed to not let Mr. Craft and Bill Belichick do what they do every year. I feel privileged as a Boston sports fan that in our worst years we're in the seventh playoff spot. And I have a lot of family in Chicago who would kill for that position, by the way. And you know, they're in perpetual rebuilding. And so look, and I think he, you know the way he's been able to manage the cap and the skill levels, I think we have a top five defense. There's different ways to win titles. And if I, you know, remember in Brady's last title with Boston, the defense won us that Super Bowl. >> Well thanks for weighing in on that because there's a lot of crazy talk going on. Like, 'Hey, if he doesn't beat Arizona, he's got to go.' I'm like, what? So, okay, I'm sometimes it takes a good good loyal fan who's maybe, you know, has >> The good news in Boston is we're emotional fans too so I understand you got to keep the long term long term in mind. And we're, we're in a privileged position in Boston. We've got Celtics, we've got Bruins we've got the Patriots right on the edge of the playoffs and we need the Red Sox to get to work. >> Yeah, no, you know they were last, last year so maybe they're going to win it all like they usually do. So >> Fingers crossed. >> Crazy worst to first. >> Exactly. Well you said, in Bill we trust it sounds like from our conversation in BJ we trust from the customers, the partners. >> I hope so. >> Thank you so much BJ, for coming back on theCUBE giving us the lay of the land, what's new, the voice of the customer and how Palo Alto was really differentiated in the market. We always appreciate your, coming on the show you >> Honor and privilege seeing you here. Thanks. >> You may be thinking that you were watching ESPN just now but you know, we call ourselves the ESPN at Tech News. This is Lisa Martin for Dave Vellante and our guest. You're watching theCUBE, the Leader and live emerging in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>>Okay, welcome back to the Cube coverage of Dr Khan 2021. I'm John for your host. Had a great guest here. Dana Lawson. Vice president. Engineering and technology partnerships that get up dana. Welcome to the cube. You're leading the engineering team over at GIT hub. Been been around the block in the cloud enterprise area. Congratulations. Welcome to the cube. >>Well, thanks for having me. Don, I am super excited. Dr. 2021 Wow. I can't believe it's been that long. Right. >>Got the keynote coverage automation. The top trend here in the world. DevoPS DEP sec apps, developer productivity, modern errors here, a lot of action uh and dr conscious more attendance every year, containers setting up the cloud native. You know the tsunami of new ways that people are programming. New way teams are formed new way people are being super productive with the pandemic. We've seen developers really lead the charge in the virtual work environment. So a lot of action. So first tell us what's going on in the developer community right now, give us your take, >>I mean, my take on it is the developer teams are just working closer than ever before. You know, we see this across all industries, whether you're going through your own digital transformation and trying to streamline your workflow, um you know, we have this concept of devops now for about a decade and and we all were hopeful I was one of those early adopters that like, yes, this will change the world, as you can imagine, and like we're seeing it materialized and I feel like in this historic year, uh it's on steroids, we see teams working across the aisle doing things we've never experienced before with this concept of interconnected tools. And so we're seeing really the, I would say the practice of devops really going across every member of the team and not being just a practice that maybe one person on your team did. You know, this trend has been ongoing for a while. But with these new key technologies out there, it's really on fire in my opinion, >>outside of just the whole cloud native awesomeness that's happening. You see kubernetes enabling a lot of new things, the virtual work environment with the pandemic developers, just like just the way we've been working a long time. Finally, it just got standardized for the rest of the world, the world. Um they didn't really miss a beat and, and combined again with the cloud scale and we saw the earnings from all the big companies, the developers have been super productive this year. Do you see um that continuing and what, how is it going to change in your opinion as the pandemic kind of lifts a little bit and now the new normal gets back to real life. Certainly those benefits came out is what's your take on this engineering dynamic going on. >>I mean you said it they're like this is a common kind of workflow that people had pre pandemic, especially in the open source community where it's literally a bunch of random people around the world that don't obviously get to talk as as quickly and as uh you know, synchronously and so a saint communications gone up in what we've seen there is teams really tuning in their automation, right? So whereas you may have had it in your backlog to say, you know what, I should probably go automate that workflow now that we have been forced. Even even companies that haven't haven't thought about in the past to say, okay, how do I get code from A to B. Seamlessly? There's spending time on those workflows. and I think that we're seeing that naturally, you know, in the keynote where I mentioned some of the Research that we've done is we're seeing developers work more but we're seeing them work more on open source projects and the things that they want to work on not necessarily going and saying I'm going to go and spend 20 hours at work. But really it's that that continuation of like hey instead of automation being an afterthought we're gonna make it something that is at the forethought of what we're doing. And so what it's really done is just increase the time spent on writing great code and hopefully having a better up time. I am a I am a DEvops SRE sys admin, whatever you wanna call it at heart forever will be. Um and so you know, getting to have more time to spend on S. L. O. S. And really the, you know like I call it the safety guards, the rails of your system so that you can just really go in there and allow everybody to contribute. And that's what I think we're seeing and we're going to continue to see that as things just get easier as stuff happens out of the virtual box. >>I mean simple or easy. It's always a good strategy. I was just reporting for our team on the cube con and cloud native con. There's more cloud native con going on than cube con because kubernetes got kind of boring. Um, and enabled more cloud native development. And then the other trend that we've been reporting on is end user contribution to open sores. You're starting to see end users, not just the usual suspects like lift and whatnot. You're seeing like real enterprises like having teams contributing into open source in a big way. This is a kind of a new, interesting dynamic. What's your take on that? Is that a signal of simplicity? What does it mean? >>I'm going to tell you, I think that companies and big names that realized they were using open source and they have been all along, um, it's been around for a minute. Some of our most favorite libraries and frameworks have been open source from the beginning. You hear me talking about Java and Tomcat that's open source. And so it's really this understanding of the workflow. So I want to say that what we see now is there should be an investment because the world's team of open source developers are powering our technology and why shouldn't we as companies embrace and actually get back and spend that quality time because us innovating together on open source privately and publicly just makes everything better for everybody. And so I I think we're going to continue to see this trim. I'm excited about it. GIT hub has done some amazing work in this space by with get up sponsors because we want open source to continue to enable the innovation and having people participate. And now we're seeing it with businesses alike. And so I think we're going to see this practice continue on and really take a look not only of the technology they're using, but the open source practices like how do these maintainers and these open source teams shit reliable quality code that is changing the world. And how can we put those practices within our own development teams on what we're building for our customers? So you're just going to continue to see this. And I think also with that being said because the barrier of entry has has lowered some by the advancement. What we're seeing the rise of the citizen developer as well. So we're seeing you know people all within the company and some that are much more further along with their transformations participate in a way they never have before. Whether it's like you know the design part in the design thinking of it to like how do you curate and have a great experience for your customers. We're just seeing participation at all levels of development stack and that also is the stuff outside of the actual code being written because it's so interconnected and so I I don't know I'm excited. I'm excited to see what we're going to unlock by having people participate more so than ever and then having companies invest in that participation. >>I love your enthusiasm. I agree. I think it's a great time for open source because it has democratized, it is bringing in new people. The aperture of the personas coming in >>is not >>just computer science and engineering. This hybrid SRE rolls developing and then you've got creative. There's a creativity aspect coming back and I've been riffing on this for a few years but I'm kind of seeing this development, love to get your thoughts used to be like craftsmanship was involved in building software and then Agile came in ship fast and iterate. Um and now craft is coming back. You're starting to see creativity and the developer experience through collaboration tools and kind of this democratization. What's your thoughts on this? And no, I know you I know you think about this as an engineering leader. Um Craft agile bring them both together. Speed and quality is craft coming back. >>Craft is definitely coming back and I think it is because we we melt the mundane stuff, right? Like, you know, we're all hyper focused on like you want to be the bush out there, you gotta ship immediately agile, agile, agile. But what we know is like you can ship a bunch of stuff, nobody wants very fast, you can ship a bunch of stuff that hasn't been curated to really, you know, solve the problem now, you'll be fast but will be awesome. I think people demand more. And I really believe that because we've embraced some of these frameworks, workflows and tool sets, that we get a focus on the craft and that's what we're trying to do, right? Ultimately we want every person that builds to be an innovator and not just an innovator for innovation state, but because they're changing and affecting somebody's life, right? And so when we dig deep and focusing on the craft, and we still have these expertise, we're just gonna be applying that in a very intentional way versus okay, hurry up. Bill, Bill Bill, hurry up, hurry up. Bill Bill, Bill, go, go, go, because now it's connected. And so we're seeing the rise of that craft and what I think is going to in turn happen is we're all going to have a better experience, we're all going to reap the benefits of having that expertise. You know, there's a spirit sometimes when we talk about automation and devops and, you know, interconnected tool systems that maybe you're taking somebody's job that they were doing before the daily task. No way. All we're doing is saying like, cool, take the repeatable thing that you're doing over and over and over, and let's focus on that craft, lets you know if your security person and you want to get down and deep and understand where vulnerabilities are going to come from and things that people haven't even thought of. Cool, let's take away some of the other things that we know can be caught and solved without you paying attention in some aspects. I think we just need along the whole stack. So it's pretty exciting times. >>Yeah, I did it and we call that different, undifferentiated heavy lifting, you know, just get it out of the way since you brought that up. Let's take automation down that road of experience. What does it mean for the developer? Because this is really an opportunity. Right. So the phrase I've heard is if you do it more than a few times, just automated away. So when is the right time to automate where this automation play into the developer experience? When does it make it more productive? Where's the innovation angle you share your thoughts on when people look through the prism of automation productivity versus innovation? What's the what's the automation view there? >>I mean, you know it is it is a good like, you know, little metric could be done it five times and it's the same thing over and over and over. Your question is now like do you have to be doing that? I mean you should because you're doing it. So I think it's about finding and defining your own boundary for what you need, right? I mean it's hard to get out there and say every workflow like we can go and apply the stamp. We already tried that with agile frameworks for like everybody you're gonna do scrum, we're going to combine, you know what? It doesn't work. What we really need to do is have teams understand their workflows, right, understand and do some diagnosis and saying like we're in the system and I think that's powerful metrics and insights of going like where are we having a slowdown? Where are people spending their time if people are spending their time doing break fix or they're spending their time continuously trying to jam something into a certain pipeline, you have to ask yourself, is this something that we should be spending that time on? What if we had that time freed up? And so I do think you can go and put some good boundaries in there, whatever yours may be. I love I love some of those rule sets but really you know, deadlocks and automation starts with the process, right? We think about it and when I developed software always think about it through that design. Thinking lands of how will this work when I get to it. And so if we're focusing on the design aspect and the user experience, then we start looking at the pieces in between from that code to having people use it and say what do I need to do? And sometimes you know depending on your industry, you may have these other needs that not everybody has. So it's hard to say there's a one size fits all. But there is a good rule like if you've done the same repeatable thing over every every day, uh numerous days like you probably should just go spend the time to automate that. And I think it's the convincing point, right? Like if we go and and a lot of us are are nerds and engineers at heart and I love freaking math. So it's that like okay if we spend two hours building maybe a hub action for a doctor one time instead of somebody happened to repeat this process no matter what it is. Like you're giving that time back in that time is mental capacity, mental capacity that can be applied to something that's more important and hopefully the more important thing is the user experience. Um So yeah, I mean you know we all have those little systems out there. I say use them but take a step back. I think the bigger, the harder part is like yes, you will have to slow down for a minute, which is scary to go and build something repeatable so that you can speed back up. You know, >>it's awesome. Great, great inside love, love the energy a lot to ask you while you're here because this is something I've been thinking about. I'm hearing a lot of developers talking about, understand the workflow you mentioned that's a key thing. I love that. Getting in and understanding the customer experience working backwards, but that brings up the whole. How do you form the teams? How do you think about team formation? Because at cloud scale with cloud native, you can use building blocks, You have automation, you can easily compose and then build intellectual property around things. Use containers, make things easier. So as you start thinking about teams, is it better to have teams focus on, say workflows and then decoupled teams? Is there a strategy for general purpose teams or how do you look at the team formation from the developer perspective to make the experience great, high quality. Is there a state of the art in your opinion, given the compose ability and all the ease of use going on? I mean, what's the ideal way to think this through? What's your thoughts? >>Oh, you know, there's, I'm going to say there's not one team team to rule them all, there's not one team kind of foundation that's gonna be able to be applicable, it's all different, right? Like even within the same company, especially at scale, you may have these different compositions of your team and I think it comes down to like, what problems are you trying to solve within your workflow? What are you trying to accomplish? I think when we, when we step back and we think about our Ci cd pipelines and really code from idea into cloud that I believe in a unified system, because I don't want developers worrying about it and doing one offs, I'm like, you don't need to know that, and that's been an argument that's going on, you know, I'm a huge kubernetes fan and so it's been like, should, should, should the feature developers understand the entrance of kubernetes? I'm gonna say something controversial, I'm gonna say no, I'm gonna say they don't need to know, they need to know how to monitor alert and how to have smart rollbacks and have a system that does it for them. That's why we have Orchestration, that's why we have dr containers, that's why we have world class eight PM and monitoring systems in place because we've done that, we've done that hard work. So I would say no, they don't need to know that, so, but you still need these needs, right? Depending upon where you are in this transformation, right? Maybe you're still like, you know, integrating some of these cloud needed principles and toolsets and so you need some smes I do really love the SRE embedded model, not embedded, like on your, you know, like embedded, like a chip set, but embedded in the team, because that person really should be a mentor and should be a force multiplier. You don't want to fall in the trap and be like oh we have an SRE on the team. They're going to do all the devops stuff. No no no no they're going to go and help you think about your product through a customer lens right there. They're the experts going like whoa maybe we should have an S. L. A. Because this is a tier one feature lets go and make sure we build that automation so that we curate this feature with the highest level availability but then teach the team how to do that. So now you have this practice as a part right? Like you're honing your craft, you have this practice now. Does that mean they need to go learn everything about like the monitoring sweet and tools are used. No, but they should understand how to read the output of that. And so there's not one team size to rule them all. Unfortunately, I personally, I'll tell you what I'm a fan of is like I think that you should have flexibility. Like once again think about the points where you need to have the connective unified system, right? And then you have this opportunity for developers to have some agency and creative freedom because maybe you've been on a team that's been working on, I don't know, let's say your audit service. I think every every software has some component of audit uh, you know, in some ability because you want to know what he was using one well after they've done their tour of duty because most of the cool stuff, they've already fixed and made a feature set. Let them go roll into something else because then you have that connective tissue on the inner points of your system that are always the same, right? We want really repeatability. We want them just to focus on writing the code. And I think because of these advancements we are unlocking opportunity for developers to think broader, right? Like maybe you've been on the platform team and you want to go dip your toes into writing features well, 90 okay, maybe not 90 but also 80% of that, you know, every day repeatable task, like focus on that and get that shit out. But then you have the sme and you're really thinking holistically as a customer obsessed team of what you're building and why. So I love that. No one way. >>Yeah, I love the idea of the platform person just having more flex out because that brings a platform mindset to the other pieces, but also feature acceleration versus product strategy. Thinking through the arc of why you're building in the first place, Right? So and then the embedded SRE great point there, great call out there because everything's cloud scale now, you gotta have pen tests built in automation, >>who's gonna >>design that. So I think it's really interesting how you're putting that together and I think that's very relevant. Um and any um new things that you see happening now with with cloud Native, you mentioned cabernets, I think you know the story that we've been telling is kubernetes got boring and that's good. Right? So, >>meaning its meaning it's working >>and people like it, it's interoperability or frustration. It feels like a unifying connective tissue between under the hood and above at the application layer. So it's nice but the consequence of that is there's more cloud native going on, so that means more services are going to be connected and torn down. You mentioned observe ability and monitoring. That's important too. So as an engineering leader, that's not another department. Right? That's gonna be core to the developers. What's your thoughts on how to integrate observe ability now there's a zillion companies doing it now but is that you know >>there is a zillion. My thoughts are like heck yeah. Like conservative observe ability isn't at the end of the stack. Right, observe ability is apart just like qualities apart. Just like when we think about agile, let me just throw it this way right? Like when dr came right, we had it basically have this maybe this baby os encompassed on servers. So you can have multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple distributed. Right? I think of like let's let's say that like your team is that Docker container man, you want everything in their right? It is a part of the practice. You want your learning, you want your logging, you want it all wrapped up in this nice little bow and you want lots of them all working together harmoniously. The same thing can be said about our teams. We want them to be their own little micro operating system where they have all the resources available for them to go and do the thing that they are intending to do and not have to worry about that subset. But it also gives them that control. Right? So it's building in that layer of abstraction that's needed but also understanding why it's important. So it's a little bit of both. Right? We're not going to curate deep subject matter experts. You know, I'm, you know the Oh yes, I model and every aspect right? Like we're not going to turn a friend and engineer necessarily into a network engineer. But utilizing the tool sets, having a playbook where it is controlled, maintained in a part of your culture. All that's gonna do is allow you to move faster and it's allow you to see what's really running out there in the wild. And I see these trends happening. I think we're continuing to see the rise of cloud native technologies because applications now are really a set of a P. I. S. That go across the world and in and out. And so the way that we develop is slightly different. And so we need to think about, well, how is it orchestrated and deployed? Well, if you have a repeatable pattern once again, if we go back to that and think of our team and I promise nobody asked me to come up with this as like a little darker, a little docker container itself. You know, you're gonna write that image into what makes sense for you and have all the resources available and you're gonna rinse and repeat that over and over and over again. And so I mean, we're just seeing, seeing this continue this continuation of, you know, monitoring devops? S sorry, it's not a problem. It's a culture, right? It's not one person's job or a role. It's a part of how you build great software. It's just a practice. >>You mentioned abstraction layer used to be conventional wisdom that they were good. But there's trade offs whose performance tradeoffs or some overhead. Not anymore. It's good. You can basically build an abstraction layer and say, hey, I don't want to deal with networking anymore. It's gonna make it programmable. >>That's cool. No >>problem. So you start to see these new innovation patterns. Right. So what are you most excited about when you start to see these new kinds of things of being brought on that were limited years ago? Like you start an abstraction layers, you see the role of the SRE you're seeing um the democratization of new developers coming in that are bringing new perspectives. She's seeing all these new kinds of ways that's re factoring how people write code. But what are you seeing is the most exciting >>for me? Honestly, it's like the opportunity for anybody to really be a builder maker developer, right? You don't have to have a traditional CS degree if you do that's awesome, Like come and teach us awesome stuff that we probably should know. That's foundational. I don't have a CS degree. You know, we're moving on from these opportunities where it's self taught to where you actually 100% can go and learn and build and create. We're seeing the rise in these communities. I feel like these toolsets are really just lowering the barrier of entry for those people that don't have advantage to go to like a four year school and get a degree for people that are just like have a great idea what excites me is that next developer, You know, we talk about the 100 million developer sitting somewhere in the world, just going, I have a great idea and I'm gonna change the world and I don't know how to get started, but they do, they have it at their hands now. You know, if you can go onto a website, get a little bit dangerous with these tool sets, you can go and get your idea to the masses and what we're going to end up doing is like you said, democratizing tech, it's going to bring in new ways to think it's going to change how we interact with systems. We get we get our blinders on sometimes, especially, you know, I live in Portland on the West Coast, the US, we know that the world is vast, majorly huge, dynamic, awesome place. The things that work for me may not work for somebody on the other side of the world. The things that I do may not be relevant. But we're going to find that human connection. We're going to continue to say, well, wait a minute. How can we optimize for any human anywhere? How can we help take all these differences but doing them in a repeatable pattern. So like for me that's exciting is these toolsets that we've been working on for years, are now going to put put in people's hands that never thought they could. And that is exciting. And like to see to see the rise of just creativity is what really makes humans special because we build and make >>and the fact that it's more inclusive now becoming more inclusive on all aspects of inclusive whether it's individuals and coders types of code. So uh integration is the new normal right integrating in uh data control planes, all that goodness coming in because of the ease of use of developer experience. Super awesome. Um dana you're awesome. Great to have you on the cube and sharing your energy and insight. Great call outs on many topics. A lot of gems being dropped. Their thanks for coming on the cube. >>Well thanks for having me. It's been awesome and doctor comes been great. I can't wait to see the rest of the show. >>Dr khan 2021 Virtual real life coming back maybe in physical next year or hybrid for sure. Just the cube coverage of Dr khan 2021. I'm sean for your host. Thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, and welcome to this Cube conversation. We're going to dig into some of the more specific and sometimes gory details of managing the nuances of database, database management systems. You know, it's a lot of fun to get it to the daily buzz of cloud and database competition and get a little snarky on Twitter, but there are a lot of mundane issues that you have to address to really do proper database sizing, capacity planning, and you know whether or not database consolidation makes sense. These are not trivial issues. And decades ago they spawned an entire role around the database administrator. They had to do the dirty work of database management so that users and customers would be satisfied. And while automation and cloud are changing that role, at the end of the day, somebody actually has to make the databases work in the cloud and make sure that the business doesn't feel any impact on the transition along the way. So on that note, we have with us Oracle senior director of product management for mission critical databases. He works in Juan Loaiza's group, Chris Craft, and Steve Zivanic whom we know well on the cube says this guy is the Jedi master when it comes to consolidating databases in the cloud. Nobody knows more on the face of the planet Earth. So we're really excited Chris, to have you inside the Cube. Welcome. >> Thanks, thanks Dave. >> That's a very humble thanks. So when it comes to running databases in the cloud can you explain the difference between sizing and capacity planning? Aren't they two sides of the same coin? >> Yeah, you know, they really are. It's like, you know sizing is really part of capacity to planning. It's really, I look at sizing as a one-time effort whereas capacity planning is more your ongoing. You perform sizing initially when the application is deployed. And then, then when you're changing platforms, like going from on-prem to the Cloud you're going to go through a sizing exercise 'cause you're looking at going to a new platform. That's more of a one-time effort, and then ongoing, you're looking at your capacity management over time. So yeah, they are very related so. >> Okay, thank you. So we're going to talk about database consolidation. A lot of people would say, look the cloud makes consolidating databases maybe not irrelevant, but maybe not the best strategy because I got all these different purpose-built databases. Why consolidate databases if they're already going to consolidate it in the cloud in one location? >> Yeah. So, so we're really talking about in in the cloud, you're running virtual machines but consolidation still applies on the virtual machines. So if you have a virtual machine that's dedicated to a database that database is that server, that virtual machine is going to be under utilized over time. So what we're doing with consolidation is running multiple databases within a virtual machine or what it, Oracle virtual cluster. We do everything on clusters. So multiple machines multiple databases within that will drive up the utilization and improve your cost structure. So it's a sizing it's it's absolutely critical on even in the cloud. >> Okay. But, but wouldn't it, I might say to that, wouldn't it be better to have each database have a dedicated VM? I mean, from a performance perspective, it doesn't try to make the database do too much affect performance. >> Yeah. It, so whenever, so we know historically that a database on a dedicated server back in the day that was a physical server, today it's a virtual machine. When you do that, your utilization will be in the range of 15 to 20%. And that's, you know very highly under utilized systems when you do that. So we don't need to isolate things onto dedicated virtual machines for a performance perspective. There are other ways that we can manage that we have resource management built into Oracle and the Oracle database. And then on Exadata we have an integrated IO resource management as well so we can deal with that different ways. >> Okay. So you're basically proposing that you're putting these databases onto a single VM and managing it accordingly. Is there additional details you can provide on that? >> So, you know, we don't put everything into you know, literally one, one VM. You want to have some isolation built in there, but see and take a more pragmatic approach. You know, like every single database in one VM that's the wrong way to go. Each database in a dedicated VM is also the other extreme, also the wrong way to go. So we're kind of right down the middle and be more pragmatic about it, and do some level of consolidation to drive up utilization. >> I remember when I first started following tech I was studying up on, you know kind of how disc drives work and so forth. And there was probably like I can't even remember what it was. It was like probably like 10 megabytes under an actuator. And people were saying, Oh my God, that's so much data. You, you got your blast radius is, is so big. You got to split that up. So it's the same concept, apply with availability. Some would say, there's a problem because you're consolidating all this data and you've got this blast radius that increases. How do you address that? >> And so, you know, redundancy. So we have redundancy at all levels. So if you look at a single, so we're talking about Exadata here, taught in an Exadata machine we can lose up to 24 disc drives out of 30. 30 machines with 36 disc drives, we can use 24 of those. So that'd be 12 per storage cell. You can lose two storage cells as 24 out of 36 drives so we can lose and keep on running. We can also, we also cluster, we also do clustering. So the database servers are clustered together for high availability. So we can take, we can suffer multiple simultaneous failures and keep on running without performance impact either. So it's, so recovery, we handle that in different ways. So it's, look at blast radius from a standpoint, you want some, some isolation for blast radius but we have physical failures is just not something that we're concerned with. >> Why do you deal with taking down a VM? Doesn't that normally mean there's going to be some kind of disruption? >> Oh, so you know, the, so Oracle database, you're talking about real application clusters on on Oracle database, on Exadata. We've got, we have a very fast detection of of failures and then resolution of the failure. So we're looking at a small blip in performance, you know we're looking at a few milliseconds to detect failure and then maybe up around three seconds to actually affect the failover. So the applications that are not getting disconnected, they continue operating in the, in that kind of condition. So that's kind of unique to the Exadata platform. And so, you know, in our cloud, we're running Exadata. We have this built in there. So we're, we're resilient to that type of failure, so. >> And sorry, you mentioned real application clusters. You're saying because you're running real application clusters that's how you're able to become more resilient? >> So yeah, so we have, so Oracle database real application clusters runs on top of a clustered virtual machines on Exadata. We have integration then optimizes the fail over times of that clustering. So it's, it's not the cluster same, it's the optimizations are only built into Exadata. So we have much much faster, much better tighter integration, so much more scalability because of that, that integration that we have. >> Can I run rack in other clouds? Can I put that into Amazon's cloud? >> So, so real application clusters requires two things. It's a, you require shared storage in a fast interconnect, a fast networking interconnecting. And those things just don't exist in the other clouds. We have those built into Exadata in our cloud. And we also, we also allow real application clusters in our relational database, our database cloud service offering as well. But it's, really the highest implementation of that is in Exadata. >> Well, of course I was tongue in cheek joking but this is, this is why, you know, I was listening to Arvind Krishna the other day in IBM Think. And he was saying only 25% of mission critical applications have moved into the cloud. I didn't think it's that high. I mean, but, but what you're doing is basically building a mission critical, you know, cloud or a cloud for mission critical databases. And that's, that's unique. I mean, I would expect other cloud vendors that eventually you know, are going to get there, but you're kind of starting with the hard stuff and working backwards. But, that is what I've always interpreted is unique to Oracle, but how does that affect cost? Isn't that more expensive? >> Actually, no. We're taking services that that start out at a very similar price point. And then we drive. So what we've seen from other customers that are running in like Amazon, for example, we see databases on dedicated virtual machines that run anywhere from 15 to 20% utilization. So what we do is, that low, low utilization, what we do is take that and triple that. So we run, so we run maybe 50% utilization. At that point we still have full redundancy, but we've now made the service one third of the cost. So we're starting at a third, we're starting at a very similar cost. And then we drive it to, you know three times a utilization. This is not crazy numbers. This is, you know, 50% is, is fine and retain the redundancy at that level as well. >> Got it, well so. >> What we've seen is about a third the cost. >> Really? Okay. Well, so, but, what about, like for instance, on AWS, couldn't I run this in a multi availability zone, running RDS or some other cloud database? >> So, so you can run a Multi-AZ environment like in in Amazon, for example, you can run locals. That's what we call local standby. If you do that, you're now instead of being one third, instead of being three times more expensive, you're now six times more expensive. Because that is another copy of the entire platform, the entire instance, the storage, everything on the other availability zone instead of being three times more, it's now six. >> Because you're essentially replicating everything in a brute force mode, right? >> Yeah. It's a data guard standby, local standby in another AZ, or what we call availability domain in our cloud. >> So let's maybe geek out a little bit. So, let's talk more about availability. You know, for years, I mean, I remember going back to reading about this stuff with tandem computers, you know, coincident failures. How are you dealing with those in today's modern world? >> So what we call simultaneous failures is, so we, we deal with that with redundancy in the system. So we have redundancy at all layers in the storage. Like I said earlier, we can take across, you know, two storage cells and each storage cell has a dozen drives. So that's 24 disc drives. That's eight flashcard failures simultaneously. And we keep on running no data loss, no loss of service. That's at the storage layer. We have multiple, multiple redundant networking switches at that, at the networking layer, the internal network. Then we go up into the database server. We then have redundancy across the nodes of a cluster. You have multiple virtual machines that comprise a virtual cluster. So it's at each and every level, we have redundancy. And then we drive the redundancy into the application using what's called application continuity. So the application connections have knowledge of the failure, failure modes of the database. They can follow to the surviving node, and continue operating. >> And you do this with math, you're doing some kind of magic bit slicing, or how do you do that? >> That, so that is that particular thing, application continuity, so technology that's been built into Oracle database since, since 12c, and that it's been around for quite a long time. And it allows the application to follow the rack cluster, any kind of issues with the rack cluster. We can drain connections off. It's very well-proven technology in, you know, prior to to proactive maintenance, we can drain connections over and then it will also handle a failure of a connection as well. And the application following that, yes. >> I learned from my old mainframe days and hanging around with David Floyer. It's always ask, what happens when something goes wrong and it's all about recovery. And you guys have the gold standard there. I mean, we've talked about this a lot. So you got Exadata. That's what is behind your Exadata cloud service, X8M I think you call it, and you've got autonomous database. I'm not great with model numbers, but, but talk about the way you can handle simultaneous failures. I mean, are there like triple redundancies that you've built in? >> Yeah. So everything what we do in our cloud is everything is triple redundancy by default. So we, you can suffer, that way we can suffer two failures and continue operating. So the, the other thing, so recovery, if you look at transaction recovery, when a failure occurs a transaction will flip that session, will flip to the machine that keeps running. It'll reposition all in the work that's in flight, any kind of inflight transactions, any in flight queries that are going on, reposition and continue operating. >> So you've essentially created like the old three site data centers, but you're in a single platform because you're synchronous. But, that same concept in a package. >> It's, you know, it's a lot of times you show a picture of an Exadata. It looks like a single box, but in the box there's some redundancy built in the box. And in fact, in the cloud it's actually across an entire aisle. So it's, we kind of obscure that a little bit, from your provisioning, you know, our database nodes and our storage cells and in the cloud but it's actually across an entire aisle of a dataset. >> Okay, and of course, that's within a synchronous location. Let's talk about disaster recovery, and what you're doing in that area, around Oracle Cloud What are my options there? What's different from other cloud providers we were talking earlier about, AZs, how are you different and what are you doing there? >> Yeah, so we, we talked earlier about the Multi-AZ deployment, what we call it availability domain, AD, so a little different terminology. But we can deploy another, another copy of the database into another availability domain, if you like. It's not often that you lose an entire AZ or AD, it's more, we're protecting from regional failures. So across another region. And that's where we look at, we really look at that as that technology, as a standby, as a data, disaster recovery solution not for HA. HA, we build HA into the machine itself. >> So you're saying, we were talking earlier about AZ, you're saying that's for HA versus DR. Is that, is that what you're contending? >> Yeah, like, you know again, pick on Amazon for a second here. Amazon uses a standby database. What we would normally use for disaster recovery, they're using that for availability. And you're looking at a few minutes of time to flip over to another AZ, whereas within an Exadata frame, we can flip over in milliseconds. We keep continue running. There is no loss of conductivity. And then we use the standby in another region for disaster. That's a true disaster solution. >> As opposed to incurring that penalty of latency, or whatever, to spin up the other resource. >> Right, right. >> Okay, so that's clear how kind of you guys address that, that challenge. Last question, maybe you could give us your take, again folks, coming out of Oracle's mouth, but what's the bottom line cost Delta based on your experience between your service and competitive services? I love these conversations because you're not afraid to talk about the competition, so bring it on. >> I've seen, so we've just based on what we've seen with customers deploying databases in Amazon, versus what, you know we've replaced that within, in our cloud service. We're seeing from just a list price perspective. Now, you know, we discount, I know Amazon discounts, but the only thing I can really speak to is list price perspective. It's about a third the cost. So we're talking about a more powerful platform, runs faster. We get these incredible, we haven't even talked about performance here. Talk about availability, performance where we're getting IO rates, IO latencies in the 19 microsecond range. Now with Exadata, that's going to be 50 times faster than what you get with these traditional cloud vendors. So much, much faster, and a third the cost. >> So talk about discounts, I mean, I know Oracle discounts, Oracle from list price, Oracle provides significant discounts. I'm not as familiar with your cloud pricing but I mean, Amazon's discounts are really in the form of like reserved instances. Is your pricing similar in that regard or different? I mean, if I'm just paying on demand, I'm paying through the nose. I presume it's same with you. If I, but if I buy in bulk getting a discount, is that what you mean by discount? Or is it more similar to the way you've traditionally discounted, you know large customers, the more you spend, the more you you get kind of thing. >> It's a, there's a discount structure. So it's, we don't have the same kind of lock-in like with reserved instance structure, but yeah, it's, there are discounts and that's going to be very customer specific. >> Right. >> So, but I think that the end result we're starting at, a three X differential on the price. >> But the reason I'm asking the question is that the stats you gave me are for list price, right? >> Yeah, yes, yeah. >> Okay, and sure, you're saying that at list price you're, you're less expensive. I, and again, my contention would be just by experiences that your discounts would be more aggressive traditionally in Oracle's traditional business. You know, I've done a lot of Oracle negotiation in my days. And if you're, you know, if you're a big customer you can get good deals. And again, I'm not as familiar with the cloud pricing, but still that's, that's good. If you're doing it on a list price basis, to me, that's a conservative statement if that makes any sense. >> Right, that's where it starts. We know that's where it's starting out. So I, you know, once you get into discounts, it's very customer specific. >> Right. >> We know the starting point is at three X differential. Before you do something in the Multi-AZ would be a six X differential, by the way, so. >> Yeah, okay. All right, Chris. Well, Hey, I appreciate you taking us through this, good stuff, and best of luck, good work. You know, you guys keep, I always say Oracle invest you guys spend a lot of money in RD and, and, you know you're quiet for a while in the cloud and all of a sudden you came out like you invented it. So good job! >> All right. >> All right, thanks. Thanks for coming on. All right. >> Thanks. >> Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for Cube conversations. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with Kirsten Craft, who's the global head of business development and marketing at Prolifics. Kirsten, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much, John. It's great to be here. >> I love the fact that we're getting the content out there. We're still remote. Soon in real life's coming back, but what a time it's been in the past year and a half or so. A lot of change, a lot of action. You guys are in the middle of it here at IBM Think. Let's get into it. But first, take a minute to explain what you guys do at Prolifics, and your business model. >> Sure. So thanks, John. So Prolifics... We've been in business, actually, for over 40 years, which is pretty amazing when you think about technology and everything that's happened in 40 years. We are a global service provider. We've got over 1,000 people worldwide. And we are 100% focused on software, and almost 100% focused on IBM, right? Of course, nobody's focused on a single technology stack these days, so we work with our customers across many different products, but we've been with IBM for a very long time. When we look at our business model, when we talk with our clients, we find that organizations today, they've got really complex challenges, especially now, right, in what all is happening right now. They've got a lot of really interesting opportunities, as well as problems that they have to solve in front of them. And those types of situations, they can't just be addressed by just buying a product. And Prolifics' approach is we work with our clients to get really above the technology conversation, and to really understand what are they trying to accomplish, right? At the end of the day, why is this an important initiative for you? And we help them develop roadmaps, and then we help them get there. So of course we're selling technology along the way, and in that implementation path. So I would say from a business model perspective, we're very services focused. We're very consultative. And of course our resulting technologies are running on IBM. >> About eight years ago, Dave Vellante and I started a little small little section of SiliconANGLE called ServicesANGLE, and our premise was is that services were going to be a big driver. Now, what we missed was cloud had to set up first, and it did, and now we're seeing a boom in services, but cloud services, you're seeing new kinds of services with the edge and other things. So what's your take on this? Because now IBM has this global view. The pandemic has proven that the scale of virtual and digital is so much more compelling. No one's going back. The economics are too good. The value is being realized as clear visibility and to unit economics of projects. Projects, some are obvious double down on. Some not to, maybe. So a lot of these things are going on. What's your take on all this? >> So it is interesting, cause that is both an opportunity as well as a challenge, right, for clients. At Prolifics, we've been-- We were actually pretty blessed because we're very virtual. We're a virtual company anyway, right? So we didn't have one facility where all of our developers are housed. So it was really kind of business as usual for us in terms of how we work with our customers, with the exception of the fact we couldn't go into their offices, right, anymore, which is a bit of a challenge. But as they look at how do they really harness the cloud, how do they harness those technologies? IBM, as well as business partners like Prolifics, we're in a great position to help them with that, because a lot of where IBM is going with cloud packs and containerization, that's where our customers want to be. Now, some of them are a little bit more aggressive than others in terms of how quickly they want to adopt that technology, which is where road mapping comes into place, and helping them really set up, not just for short-term, how do they solve what's in front of their face, but let's look a year or two years down the line. How do you make sure that you're really building an agile type of environment that's going to work across data, which is really the center of all things nowadays, as well as working across other systems. >> I've been covering IBM for very long time. Actually was once an employee as a co-op student back in college. Remember those glory days. (chuckles) And you mentioned you guys have been with IBM for a very, very long time. You got to.... They've always had a business focus. They've always had great technology. They got great technologists and experts there, but I think now more than ever you're seeing the theme at the show this year as hybrid cloud edge data AI as a kind of a underlying system software for business. So you're starting to see a new era of software driving business at a level that's been completely transformed. As an IBM platform software provider, you've been there for all the IBM over the years. What's it like? What's your... What's your take on this? What opportunities do you see with the hybrid cloud? You got Red Hat now under the covers. You've got, you mentioned, containers. Is it a pinch-me moment where people were like, "Wow. There's so much here to integrate," or cloud is going to provide a new clean sheet of paper to do things. What's your... What's the vibe? What's the sentiment? >> It's interesting. We're actually seeing more customers starting to look at themselves as technology companies. So even companies that don't think that historically they're not in a technology industry, they're now identifying internally. They're talking to their staff about... We don't sell widgets. We're a technology company that happens to sell widgets. So it's really an interesting dynamic, and I would also mention that one of the themes we're seeing across a lot of customers, almost all of our customers, is this insane focus on data. I say insane in like a good way, right? So how do we use our data to help inform our processes? How do we make sure that we're sharing data effectively and efficiently with all of our trading partners? We're seeing a lot of modernization when it comes to integration, but again, integration is all about exchanging data. We're seeing customers start to dabble more with AI in terms of how can we get smarter by using the data that we have available to us? Again, I think that's going to be the next wave, because we're seeing a lot of our customers start to dabble in that but not fully embrace it just yet. But they really want to get that underlying platform around data and integration ready to go so that they can do some amazing things in the future. >> How is the hybrid cloud and data impacting Prolifics business? Where does this take you guys for the next chapter? >> Well, it's actually... (chuckles) It's actually perfect for us, because that's almost 100% of what we do. So we... As I mentioned earlier, we are 100% focused on software, right? Software and software-based solutions. We're not a hardware provider. We don't have a data center, but we help customers design and implement software-based systems. And our expertise is squarely in data, business intelligence, analytics, AI, and also integration and business process automation. Those are really our core, especially as it comes to IBM technology. Now, we also have a testing practice, which is technology agnostic, but it's really critical as you... Especially as you look at rapid development cycles, cause that's another theme we're seeing with customers, right? Nobody's got the patience to go through a long waterfall model, right? You've got to get into production. It's the Apple model, right? Get it into production, get feedback, make modifications, and go. But if it gets out there and it's completely broken. Guess what? You just stepped all over yourself. So we integrate testing into everything that we do as well. But the data and the hybrid cloud message, and all of the innovation that IBM is doing, it fits perfectly in with what we're seeing with our customers and where we've invested for so long as far as skills and expertise. >> That testing example really kind of speaks to what's state-of-the-art right now, because people can get into production with the cloud and then they realize that they're adding services pretty quickly and things break. They call it "day-two operations," is a term that there've been kicking around. I call it essentially DevSecOps, but there's a lot of kind of new things that you just got to kind of watch, which recently, IT-like functions that are now cloud ops, cloud operations, so super new. How are you guys seeing that with the customer base that you guys have? As they start to see benefits, does it impact their staffing, their support levels? What's the impact to the customer when they start to realize some of these benefits, but then understanding that with scale comes a whole nother set of operating challenges. >> Yeah. It is interesting. With that scale, it does... It does present other challenges, as you mentioned, from an operations perspective. And we have seen customers that go out there, go live. Well, you remember the commercial? I think there was a commercial many, many years ago back when the internet was kind of a new thing where it was a startup company, and they put an e-commerce site out there, right? And they were like, "Oh, yay! We got our first order." And they're like, "Yay! We have 10. Oh, crap! We have 10,000." Right? So you see customers like this, they get excited to put something out there, but they haven't fully performance tested it, right? So that's... That's also where we try to help our customers take that step back and say, "Okay. How are you going to actually plan, not just for day one, to get it out there, but longer term?" And that's where we also put our performance testing as a part of all of our solutions, because you know that yes, it's a good problem to have, but you really don't want to have that problem in the first place, so how do you make sure that you plan and prepare for that, and incrementally deploy, and make sure that your underlying technology is prepared to support that kind of volume. >> So Kirsten, I want to ask you kind of the important question this day and age in the modern era with cloud and now this new cloud scale, and it's always kind of been true in the past. But now more than ever you're starting to see the role of the ecosystem of partners as super important, because now integrations are happening. You're bringing point solutions into a platform where tools are integrating with other tools. So as a partner of IBM, how is the ecosystem role that you guys are playing, and how important is that, and what are the new things that are needed to be successful in the ecosystem with the premise that rising tide floats all boats, which is kind of... Well, we're seeing that happen now. Certainly, coming out of the pandemic it's going to be a whole new game, but there are ecosystems that are now evolving around IBM, around these big mega trends like cloud edge and data. What's your take? >> Mm-hm. Mm-hm. So first of all, you mentioned IBM's focus on ecosystem, right? And so Arvind has been very vocal about the importance of the ecosystem and how he really wants to change IBM's model out there to embrace partners. And I have to say, I think that's... That's one of the smartest things I think I've heard IBM say in years. And I know that that sounds self-serving because we are a partner, but the reality is there's several different layers where that's really important. One is the value of the partner. And you mentioned that there's a need to integrate across different systems, right? So IBM is not... Gone are the days when customers only have IBM technology. It's just not a thing. And so partners have the ability to work across different vendors, very hybrid, very unique types of environments, and make sure that the IBM interest, the IBM footprint, is well-deployed, well-represented, and set up for future success so that customer's going to want to buy more in the future, but in the context of what that customer's overall landscape is. So that's a big reason why IBM wants business partners involved with customers, and we're a little bit more... Or at least we can work with customers from a consultative perspective, right, and make sure that they are comfortable with the decisions that they're making. That isn't just the manufacturer telling them to buy our stuff. From a partners perspective, one of the biggest things that we struggle with in the marketplace is being known, right? I mean, we're... We're a decent-sized partner with over 1,000 employees, but at the end of the day, how many people know Prolifics as a brand name versus how many people know IBM? So opening those doors, partnering with the IBM sellers that have kind of an easier way in to introduce a partner and give us the credibility that, "Hey. We know Prolifics. We've seen them be successful and help very large companies that are just like you be successful with our technology. Let them help you end to end," is a... It's just a really good synergy as far as how you can actually, how IBM can scale with their customers, and how customers can realize that benefit of a broader ecosystem as well, and skillsets. >> Yeah. Great point. Arvind is very savvy on cloud. I know he loves hybrid cloud. He loves the cloud model. He's changing it with Red Hat. I think you're so smart and accurate on this whole changeover around network effects, organic ecosystems playing a power dynamic in how people buy and nurture themselves. So I think there's going to be a nice change over there. I think you're onto something pretty big with that, because look it, it's multi-vendor at many levels now. IBM has to integrate here, and you're a partner. You're well-known now. You're on theCUBE. So we're going to get the word out here. But it's- (chuckles) You're on a team. It's a group. It's not just... It's about the customer. This is now a different mindset. This is what customers want, because they're out in the organic field too. They're not just getting the emails sent to them. They're out and engaging. This is a new model. >> And one of the things that's interesting that we're seeing from our customers as well is they're no longer looking to buy a product and then have somebody come in, install, and implement. They're actually looking for guidance, right? They want ideas. "Here's what I'm trying to do with my business. How can you help me?" They're looking for an answer to that, and that requires a very different skillset, right? It's not just somebody who knows how to come in and spin up CDs and do some configurations. It's somebody who's worked in their industry before, has worked with similar types of customers, has a little bit of that road rash, can provide some of that guidance. And in order to really do that, you can't find that just in one organization. So I would tell you, actually, I mean Prolifics is a... We're a pretty good-sized company with a wide skillset, but even we partner. We also partner with other partners to help complement our skills when there's a particular expertise that's needed. So it really is a very interesting ecosystem development, and a different way of thinking, that it's not just about you and being able to do everything. It's about you being able to bring the right solution and the right ideas to a customer, and to help them be successful for the long-term. >> Awesome insight, Kirsten Craft, global head of business development and marketing at Prolifics. Great to have you on, and power of networks, power of partnerships, power of the ecosystem. The new world is here. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Okay. This is IBM Think 2021 coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (smooth music)

(slow music playing) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think Virtual 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here with Kirsten Craft who's the global head of Business Development & Marketing at Prolifics. Kirsten, great to see you thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much, John, it's great to be here. >> Yeah, I would love the fact that we're getting the content out there we're still remote soon in real lives coming back but what a time has been in the past year and a half or so, a lot of change, a lot of action, you guys were in the middle of it here at IBM Think, let's get into it, but first take a minute to explain what you guys do at Prolifics and your business model. >> Sure, so thanks John. So Prolifics, we've been in business actually for over 40 years which is pretty amazing when you think about technology and everything that's happened in 40 years. We are a global service provider, we've got over a thousand people worldwide and we are a hundred percent focused on software and almost a hundred percent focused on IBM. Right, of course nobody's focused on a single technology stack these days, so we work with our customers across many different products but we've been with IBM for a very long time. You know, we look at our business model, you know, when we talk with our clients, we find that organizations today they've got really complex challenges, especially now, right? In what all is happening right now, they've got a lot of really interesting opportunities as well as problems that they have to solve in front of them. And those types of situations they can't just be addressed by just buying a product. In Prolifics approach is we work with our clients to get really above the technology conversation and to really understand what are they trying to accomplish, right, at the end of the day, why is this an important initiative for you? And we help them develop roadmaps and then we help them get there. So of course we're selling technology along the way in that implementation path, so I would say from a business model perspective, we're very services focused, we're very consultative, and of course our resulting technologies are running on IBM. >> You know, about eight years ago, Dave Vellante and I started small little section of SiliconANGLE called services angle and our premise was is that services were going to be a big driver. Now, what we missed was cloud had to set up first and it did, and now we're seeing a boom in services, but cloud services, you're seeing new kinds of services with the edge and other things, so what's your take on this because now IBM has this global view, the pandemic has proven that the scale of virtual and digital is so much more compelling, no one's going back, the economics are too good, the value is being realized as clear visibility into unit economics of projects, projects to some are obvious, they double down on some not to, maybe. So a lot of these things going on, what's your take on all this? >> So it is interesting 'cause that is both an opportunity as well as a challenge, right, for clients. At Prolifics we've been, we were actually pretty blessed because we're very virtual, we're a virtual company anyway, right? So we didn't have one facility where all of our developers are housed. So it was really kind of business as usual for us in terms of how we work with our customers with the exception of the fact we couldn't go into their offices, right, anymore which is a bit of a challenge. But as they look at how do they really harness the cloud? How do they harness those technologies? You know, IBM as well as business partners like Prolifics we're in a great position to help them with that. Because a lot of where IBM is going with cloud Paks and containerization, that's where our customers want to be. Now, some of them are a little bit more aggressive than others in terms of how quickly they want to adopt that technology which is where roadmapping comes into place and helping them really set up, not just for short term, how do they solve what's in front of their face. But let's look a year or two years down the line, how do you make sure that you're really building an agile type of environment that's going to work across data which is really the center of all things nowadays as well as working across other systems? >> You know, I've been covering IBM for very long time, actually was once an employee as a co-op student back in college, I remember those glory days, and you mentioned, you guys have been with IBM for a very, very long time. They've always had a business focus, they've always had great technology, a great technologist and experts there, but I think now more than ever, you're seeing the theme at the show this year as hybrid, cloud, edge data AI as a kind of an underlying system software for business. So you starting to see a new era of software driving business at a level that's been completely transformed. As an IBM platform software provider, you've been there for all the IBM over the years, what's it like, what's your take on this? What opportunities do you see with the hybrid cloud? You've got Red Hat now under the covers, you've got, you mentioned containers, you got, is it a pinch me moment where people were like, wow, there's so much here to integrate or cloud is going to provide a new clean sheet of paper to do things, what's the vibe, what's the sentiment? >> You know, it's interesting. We're actually seeing more customers starting to look at themselves as technology companies. So even, you know, companies that don't think that historically they're not in a technology industry, they're now identifying internally, they're talking to their staff about, you know, we don't sell widgets, we're a technology company that happens to sell widgets, so it's really an interesting dynamic. And I would also mention that one of the themes we're seeing across a lot of customers, almost all of our customers, is this insane focus on data, I say insane and like a good way, right? So how do we use our data to help inform our processes? How do we make sure that we're sharing data effectively and efficiently with all of our trading partners? We're seeing a lot of modernization when it comes to integration, but again, integration is all about exchanging data. We're seeing customers start to dabble more with AI in terms of how can we get smarter by using the data that we have available to us. Again, I think that's going to be the next wave 'cause we're seeing a lot of our customers start to dabble in that but not fully embrace it just yet, but they really want to get that underlying platform around data and integration ready to go so that they can do some amazing things in the future. >> How is the hybrid cloud and data impacting Prolifics business? Where does this take you guys for the next chapter? >> Well, it's actually perfect for us because that's almost a hundred percent of what we do. So we, as I mentioned earlier, we are a hundred percent focused on software, right? Software and software based solutions, we're not a hardware provider, we don't have a data center, but we help customers design and implement software based systems. And our expertise is squarely in data, business, intelligence, analytics, AI, and also integration and business process automation. Those are really our core especially as it comes to IBM technology. Now we also have a testing practice which is technology agnostic but it's really critical especially as you look at rapid development cycles 'cause that's another theme we're seeing with customers, right? Nobody's got the patience to go through a long waterfall model, right? You've got to get into production as the Apple model, right, get it into production, get feedback, make modifications, and go. But if it gets out there and it's completely broken, guess what, you just stepped all over yourself. So we integrate testing into everything that we do as well, but the data and the hybrid cloud message and all of the innovation that IBM is doing it fits perfectly in with what we're seeing with our customers and where we've invested for so long as far as skills and expertise. >> Yeah, that testing example really kind of speaks with state-of-the-art right now because people can get into production with cloud and then they realize that they're adding services pretty quickly and things break. They call it a day to operations is a term that there've been kicking around, I call it essentially DevSecOps but there's a lot of kind of new things, you just got to kind of watch that were traditionally IT like functions that are now cloud ops, cloud operations, so super new. How are you guys seeing that with the customer base that you guys have as they start to see benefits, does it impact their staffing, their support levels, what's the impact to the customer when they start to realize some of these benefits, but then understanding that with scale comes a whole another set of operating challenges? >> Yeah, you know it is interesting with that scale, it does present other challenges as you mentioned from an operations perspective. And we have seen customers that they go out there, go live, well, you remember the commercial? I think there was a commercials many, many years ago back when the Internet was kind of a new thing where it was a startup company and they put an e-commerce site out there. Right, and they were like, oh yeah, we got our first order, and they're like, yay, we have 10. Oh crap, we have 10,000, right, so, you know, you see customers like this they get excited to put something out there but they haven't fully performance tested it, right? So that's also where we try to help our customers take that step back and say, okay, how are you going to actually plan not just for day one to get it out there, but longer term, and that's where we also put our performance testing as a part of all of our solutions because you know, that, yes, it's a good problem to have, but you really don't want to have that problem in the first place, so how do you make sure that you plan and prepare for that and incrementally deploy and make sure that your underlying technology is prepared to support that kind of volume? >> Also Kirsten, I want to ask you kind of the important question this day and age in the modern era with cloud and now this new cloud scale, and it's always kind of been true in the past but now more than ever, you're starting to see the role of the ecosystem of partners as super important because now integrations are happening, you're bringing point solutions into a platform where tools are integrated with other tools. So as a partner of IBM, how is the ecosystem role that you guys are playing, and how important is that, and what are the new things that are needed to be successful in the ecosystem? You know, with the premise that rising tide floats all boats which is kind of what we're seeing that happen now, certainly coming out of the pandemic is going to be a whole new game, but there are ecosystems that are now evolving around IBM, around these big mega trends like cloud, edge and data, what's your take? >> So first of all, you mentioned IBM's focus on ecosystem, right? And so Arvind has been very vocal about the importance of the ecosystem and how he really wants to change IBM's model out there to embrace partners. And I have to say, I think that's one of the smartest things I think I've heard IBM say in years. And I know that that sounds self-serving because we are a partner, but the reality is there's several different layers where that's really important. One is the value of the partner, you know, and you mentioned that there's a need to integrate across different systems, right? So IBM is not, gone are the days when customers only have IBM technology, it's just not a thing. And so partners have the ability to work across different vendors, very hybrid, very unique types of environments, and make sure that the IBM interests, the IBM footprint is well deployed, well-represented, and set up for future success that that customer is going to want to buy more in the future, but in the context of what that customer's overall landscape is. So that's a big reason why IBM wants business partners involved with customers. And we're a little bit more, or at least, you know, we can work with customers from a consultative perspective, right, and make sure that they are comfortable with the decisions that they're making, that isn't just the manufacturer telling them to buy our stuff. From a partners perspective, one of the biggest things that we struggle with in the marketplace is being known, right? I mean, we're, you know, we're a decent sized partner with over a thousand employees but at the end of the day, how many people know Prolifics as a brand name versus how many people know IBM. So opening those doors, partnering with the IBM sellers that have kind of an easier way in to introduce a partner and give us the credibility that, hey, we know Prolifics, we've seen them be successful and help very large companies that are just like you be successful in our technology, let them help you end to end, it's just a really good synergy as far as how you can actually, how IBM can scale with our customers and how customers can realize that benefit of a broader ecosystem as well and skillsets. >> Yeah, great point. Arvind is very savvy on cloud, I know he loves hybrid cloud, and he loves the cloud model, he's changing it with Red Hat. I think you're so smart and accurate on this whole changeover around network effects, organic ecosystems playing a power dynamic in how people buy and nurture themselves. So, you know, I think there's going to be a nice changeover there, I think you're onto something pretty big with that because look at, it's multi-vendor at many levels now, it's IBM has to integrate here, and you're a partner. You will know now you're on theCUBE, so we're going to get the word out here, but it's, you're on a team, it's a group, it's not just, it's about the customer. This is now a different mindset, this is what customers want because they're out in the organic field too, they're not just getting an email sent to them, they're out and engaging, this is a new model. >> And you know, one of the things that's interesting that we're seeing from our customers as well is they're no longer looking to buy a product and then have somebody come in, install and implement. They're actually looking for guidance, right, they want ideas, here's what I'm trynna do with my business, how can you help me? They're looking for an answer to that and that requires a very different skillset, right? It's not just somebody who knows how to come in and spin up CDs and do some configurations, it's somebody who's worked, you know, in their industry before, has worked with similar types of customers, has a little bit of that road rash, can provide some of that guidance. And in order to really do that, you can't find that just in one organization, so I would tell you actually I mean, Prolifics is a, you know, we're a pretty good sized company with a wide skillset, but even we partner. We also partner with other partners to help compliment our skills when there's a particular expertise that's needed, so it really is a very interesting ecosystem development and a different way of thinking, that it's not just about you and being able to do everything, it's about you being able to bring the right solution and the right ideas to a customer and to help them be successful for the long-term. >> Awesome insight, Kirsten Craft, global head of Business Development & Marketing at Prolifics. Great to have you on and power of networks, power of partnerships, power of the ecosystem, the new world is here, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> Okay, this is IBM Think 2021 coverage, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music) (slow music playing)

>> Announcer: Live from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to you buy Blockchain Industries. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to our exclusive coverage here in Puerto Rico with theCUBE on the ground for extensive two days of coverage for Blockchain Unbound in Puerto Rico where all the action is. It's a global conference where investors, entrepreneurs, thought leaders are all coming together to check out the future and set the agenda for Blockchain cryptocurrency and the decentralized internet. My next guest is John Hartigan, Executive Vice President in Intiva Health. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> So we were talking yesterday with Hash-Craft, CTO, you guys are part of that ecosystem, you guys are doing some of these things with health. Take a minute to explain what you guys are working on and your value proposition. >> Sure, so, Intiva Health is a career and credential management platform for physicians and all licensed medical professionals, and it streamlines and automates the credential management process that they have to go through every time that they either change positions or take on temporary work. And the Hash-Craft integration is allowing us to do instantaneous credential verification. Currently the state of affairs in the granting of privileges at a particular hospital or a facility can take literally weeks and in some cases months to complete. It's a very analog process, and with our integration with Hash-Craft, it will take seconds. >> So I was watching The New York Times today, an our Wall Street Journal article about verification of work history. This Blockchain is certainly a good example of that, but you're now getting it into more of health, what is the use case, what's the low hanging fruit that you guys are going after with your solution, and how does that evolve and how you see that evolving? >> Well, so, like I mentioned, the current verification process for the granting of privileges in a hospital setting, it is pretty much unchanged since the 1950s. The internet helps a lot but what you're talking about is somebody getting a credential paper file with 25 or 30 documents, and opening the file and picking up the phone and calling, and verifying the reputation and provenance of that particular physician. And it's truly a bureaucratic nightmare. It's red tape to the nth degree. And so that represents thousands and hundreds of thousands of hours and billions and billions of dollars in waste that could be reallocated to better patient care for example. >> The big use case we're seeing education, the workplace, but now healthcare. I see a perfect storm for innovation. Healthcare is not known for moving fast. >> John: Correct. >> HIPAA regulations in the past couple decades really put a damper on data sharing for privacy reasons. At that time it seemed like a good call. Has things like HIPAA, has the cloud computing model opened up new avenues for health because everyone wants great healthcare, but the data is stuck in some silo, database. >> Database, absolutely. >> That's the problem. >> That's absolutely a problem. >> So what's your reaction to that? >> So the approach that we're seeing a lot of organizations take is they are attempting to go after the EHRs and the EMRs, the Electronic Health Records for Patients. Of course that is something that needs to be fixed. However the medical space is truly influenced, the main stakeholders are the physicians. They sit on all the committees, they run all the budgets, they make the policy. So it's imperative that we address the physicians and get their buy into any kind of significant change. And what you're seeing now is states, as well as other organizations including the federal medical board, the Federal Association of Medical Boards, as well as the State of Illinois, Wyoming is here, as a matter of fact, representing, and they are all looking at Blockchain solutions for this verification problem for the medical space and remaining HIPAA compliant. >> Let's talk about security because hospitals and healthcare organizations have been really good targets for ransomware. >> John: Absolutely. >> And so we're seeing that mainly because their IT systems have been kind of ancient in some cases, but they're right in the target of, they don't have a lot of IT support. One of the things about Blockchain, it makes these things immutability. So is that something that is on the radar, and how is, I mean, not necessarily ransomware, that's one example of many security issues 'cause you got Internet of Things, you have a slew of cloud-edge technologies-- >> John: Yes. >> That are emerging, that opened up a surface area for a text. So what's your thoughts on that? >> So, as you mentioned, the traditional models have been layered on top of each other overtime. It's a patchwork situation. And because it's a patchwork situation, there is vulnerabilities all over the place, in facilities a lot of times. And besides that, the medical space is probably 10 years behind the times when it comes to technology, maybe five at a minimum. The model that we're using, you mentioned earlier that there are siloed information in these different facilities and hospitals, and that's absolutely true. So all of that information, you have facility A, facility B, facility C, they all have information on one particular provider or physician, but they don't talk to each, and that information is at different levels of accuracy and timeliness, you mentioned time and date stamps. So our model works where the information follows the provider, okay, it's all built around the provider themselves, and then the individual facilities can tap into that information, and also they can influence the information, they can update it. So everybody will then be talking to each other in an anonymous fashion around the one provider updating that information and making it the most accurate in the market, and we get away from the old SaaS model. >> Before we deep dive in here, I'm going to ask you one more thing around as you walked into healthcare providers and then the healthcare industry, you're a different breed, you have Blockchain, you got different solution, the conversation that they're having is, let's put a data leg out there, again, centralized data leg. ISPs are doing that. We know with cybersecurity, any time you have centralized data resources, it's just an easier target to hack. >> John: Correct. >> So it's clear that centralized is not going to be the ideal architecture, and this entire movement is based upon the principles of decentralized data. >> John: Yes. >> So what's it like when you go in there? It must be like, do you have like three heads to them? Or are you like a martian, you're like speaking some foreign language? I mean what is it like, are there people receptive to what you talk about? Talk about some of the experiences you had when you walked in the door and knocked on the front door and walked in and talked to them. >> So it is an interesting situation. When I speak with CEOs and when I speak with COOs, they understand that they're vulnerable when it comes to their data, and they understand how expensive it is if, for example, if they have a HIPAA breach, it's $10,000 per occurrence. Now that means if somebody texts patient information to somebody else on a normal phone, that $10,000 every time that happens, okay. And so if it's a major data breach, and a record of files if they have 50,000 files lost, I mean it could be a killing, a business killing event under the right circumstances. So I tried to educate them about-- >> Do they look at Blockchain as a solution there? Or are they scratching their heads, kicking the tires? What's the reaction? >> They're interested, they don't understand exactly how we can apply Blockchain, and we're trying to educate them as to how that is, we are capable of doing so. We're explaining about the vast security improvements by decentralizing the information, and they are receptive, they're just reticent because they're very, tend to be more conservative. So as these organizations like the State of Illinois and the Federal Association of Medical Boards, as they start to adopt the hospitals and facilities, they're starting to look in and oh say, "Hey, this is a real thing, "and there may be a real application here." >> Talk about your business, you market, you go on after obviously healthcare, product specifically in the business model, where are you guys? How big are you? Are you funded? Are you doing an ICO? How are you using token economics? How is it working? Give us a status on the company. >> Sure, so, we've been in business for approximately two years. We're a funded startup out of Austin, Texas. We are born actually out of a practice management company which is an important point because a technology company trying to solve this problem would really struggle because there is a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of nuance in how the system operates because it is evolved overtime. So that gives us a very significant advantage. We have an operating platform that has been out for a little over a year now, and we have thousands and thousands of physicians and other licensed medical professionals that use the platform now. >> Are they paying customers or are they just users? >> No, so the model works like this, it's free to the providers, it's also free to the facilities and medical groups, and so we allow that platform, that utility for them to use. How we monetize is we have other curated goods and services for the providers along their career journey. So, for example, continuing medical education. All providers are required to take so many units a year, and we have a very robust online library of CME. And we also have partnerships with medical malpractice organizations. >> So it's a premium model. You get them using the platform. >> Correct, that's right. >> Where does tokens fit in? Where does the cryptocurrency fit in? Do you have a token as a utility, obviously, it's a utility token. I mean explain the model. >> Correct. Yeah so we just announced last Friday. in South by Southwest that we are launching a token, a utility token, and it'll go on sale April 19th. And basically how it works is the providers, the physicians will earn tokens by taking actions in the platform that update their data for example, or if they look for a job on our platform, or if they do different tasks in the platform that improve the veracity of their data, and then they will be able to use those tokens to purchase the continuing medical education courses, travel courses, medical malpractice insurance, a number of different resources. >> Token will monitor behavior, engage behavior, and then a two-sided marketplace for clearing house. >> Exactly. >> How does the token go up in value? >> We have multiple partners that are involved, so the partners will be also purchasing advertising time, or it's a sponsorship model, so they'll be able to sponsor within the platform. So the more partners we bring in, the more providers we have, the value-- >> So suppliers, people who want to reach those guys. So >> Exactly. >> You get the coins, you see who's doing what. You get a vibe on who's active and then >> Exactly. That's a signal to potential people who want to buy coins. >> Yeah, and when we announced that we were doing this token, we had multiple partners that we have been in business with for the last two years, saying, "We want in, we want to do this, "we want to get involved." Oh another thing that we're doing with the token, we have an exclusive relationship with the National Osteoporosis Foundation, and we put forth to them that we would like to set them up with a crypto wallet so that they can accept donations, and then we would also match those donations up to a certain point that they receive in crypto. So we want to help our organizations, our not-for-profits by facilitating crypto acceptance. >> So talk about your relationship with Hash-Craft. It's two days old but it's been around for two years, they announced a couple days ago. It got good feedback, a lot of developers are using it. It's not a theorem but that's the compatibility to a theorem. You're betting on that platform. How long have you worked with these guys, and why the bet on Hash-Craft? >> So we were looking at Blockchain Technologies about two years ago because we realized, as you mentioned earlier, the security issues we have. We have to be very aware of the type of data that we're holding. So at the time though, there were significant issues with speed, significant issues with storage, and how it would work by actually putting a credential packet into Blockchain, and the technology frankly just wasn't there, and so we started looking for alternatives. Thankfully we were in Texas, and we happened to run into Hash-Craft, and they explained what they were doing, and we thought this must be too good to be true. It checked off all of our boxes. And we had multiple conversations about how we would actually execute an integration into our current platform with Hash-Craft. So we've been in talks with them for, I think, a little over five or six months, and we will actually, it looks like be one of the very first applications on the market integrating Hash-Craft. >> It's interesting, they don't really have a Blockchain-based solution, it's a DAG, a directed acyclic graphic model. Did that bother you guys? You don't care, it's plumbing. I mean does it matter? >> So actually the way that it is established, it has all of the benefits of Blockchain, and none of the fat and sugar, so to speak. I mean there are a number of things that they do that Blockchain-- >> You mean performance issues and security? >> Performance, speed is a big one, but also fairness on the date and timestamps, because with the verification system, you have to prove, you have to be able to prove and show that this date and timestamp is immutable, and that it has been established in a fair manner. And they have been able to solve that problem, where the Blockchain model, there is still some question about, if you have some bad actors in there, they can significantly influence the date and timestamps. And that was very significant for our model. >> Alright, well, congratulations. What's next for the company? What are you guys doing? What's the plan, what's the team like? Well, excited obviously. What's next? >> So we are going to be announcing some very big partnerships that we've established here late spring. I was hoping to do it here now, however we've-- >> Come on, break it out then. >> I would like to but I have to be careful. So we have some big partnerships we're going to be announcing, and of course we have the token sale coming up so there'll be a big-- >> Host: When is that sale happening? >> So it starts April 19th, and it'll run for about six weeks. >> What's the hard cap and soft cap? >> Yeah, we prefer not to talk about that, but let's say, soft cap, about 12 million. And we have some interested parties that want to do more, and so we're looking at what our best options are as far as setting the value to the token, and what the partnerships that are going to significantly impact it will be. >> Well, great job, congratulations. One of the big concerns to this market is scams versus legit, and you're starting to see clearly that this is a year, flight to quality, where real businesses are tokenizing for real reasons, to scale, provide value. You guys are a great example of that. Thanks for sharing that information. >> We're really excited, and it's very exciting to bring this to the healthcare space which is, as we said, conservative and somewhat traditional. And we believe that we will be setting the standard moving forward for primary source verification. >> And you can just summarize the main problem that you solve. >> Yeah, it is that analog primary source verification of the credential documents, and when our platform goes live, we will literally be putting hours of time a day, something like eight hours back into the providers' lives, and back to the money of that, associated with that back to their pockets, which we hope translates into better patient care. >> So verification trust and they save time. >> John: Absolutely. >> It's always a good thing when you can reduce the steps to do something, save time, make it easy. That's a business model of success. >> Absolutely and more secure. >> John Hatigan, who's with Intiva, Executive Vice President from Austin, Texas here in Puerto Rico for theCUBE coverage. Day Two of two days of live coverage here in Puerto Rico, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE host. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

(Latin music) >> Narrator: Live, from San Juan, Puerto Rico, it's theCUBE! Covering Blockchain Unbound. Brought to by Blockchain Industries. (Latin music) >> Welcome back to our exclusive Puerto Rico coverage, here, this is theCUBE for Blockchain Unbound, the future of blockchain cryptocurrency, the decentralized web, the future of society, the world, of work, et cetera, play, it's all happening right here, I'm reporting it, the global internet's coming together, my next guest is Fred Krueger, a founder and CEO of a new innovative approach called WorkCoin, the future of work, he's tackling. Fred, great to see you! >> Thank you very much, John. >> So we saw each other in Palo Alto at the D10e at the Four Seasons, caught up, we're Facebook friends, we're LinkedIn friends, just a quick shout out to you, I saw you livestreaming Brock Pierce's keynote today, which I thought was phenomenal. >> Yeah, it was a great keynote. >> Great work. >> And it's Pi Day. >> It's Pi Day? >> And I'm a mathematician, so, it's my day! (Fred laughs) >> It's geek day. >> It's geek day. >> All those nerds are celebrating. So, Fred, before we get into WorkCoin, I just want to get your thoughts on the Brock Pierce keynote, I took a video of it, with my shaky camera, but I thought the content was great. You have it up on Facebook on your feed, I just shared it, what was your takeaway of his message? I thought it was unedited, obviously, no New York Times spin here, no-- >> Well first of all, it's very authentic, I've known Brock 10 years, and, I think those of us who have known Brock a long time know that he's changed. He became very rich, and he's giving away, and he really means the best. It's completely from the heart, and, it's 100% real. >> Being in the media business, kind of by accident, and I'm not a media journalist by training, we're all about the data, we open our datas, everyone knows we share the free content. I saw the New York Times article about him, and I just saw it twisted, okay? The social justice warriors out there just aren't getting the kind of social justice that he's actually trying to do. So, you've known him for 10 years, I see as clear as day, when it's unfiltered, you say, here's a guy, who's eccentric, smart, rich now, paying it forward? >> Yep. >> I don't see anything wrong with that. >> Look, I think that the-- >> What is everyone missing? >> There's a little jealously, let's be honest, people resent a little bit, and I think part of it's the cryptocurrency world's fault. When your symbol of success is the Lamborghini, it's sort of like, this is the most garish, success-driven, money-oriented crowd, and it reminds me a little bit of the domain name kind of people. But Brock's ironically not at all that, so, he's got a-- >> If you look at the ad tech world, and the domain name world, 'cause they're all kind of tied together, I won't say underbelly, but fast and loose would be kind of the way I would describe it. >> Initially, yes, ad tech, right? So if you look at ad tech back in say, I don't know, 2003, 2004, it was like gunslingers, right? You wanted to by some impressions, you'd go to a guy, the guy'd be like, "I got some choice impressions, bro." >> I'll say a watch too while I'm at it. >> Yeah, exactly. (John laughs) That was the ad tech world, right? And that world was basically replaced by Google and Facebook, who now control 80% of the inventory, and it's pretty much, you go to a screen, it's all service and that's it. I don't know if that's going to be the case in cryptocurrencies, but right now, initially, you sort of have this, they're a Wild West phenomenon. >> Any time you got alpha geeks, and major infrastructure application developer shift happening, which is happening, you kind of look at these key inflection points, you need to kind of have a strong community self-policing policy, if you look at the original DNS days, 'cause you remember, I was there too, Jon Postel, rest in peace, godspeed, we all know what he did, Vint Cerf with TCP/IP, the core dudes, and gals, back then, they were tight! So any kind of new entrants that came in had to prove their worth. I won't say they were the most welcoming, 'cause they were nervous of people to infect the early formation, mostly they're guys, they're nerds. >> Right, so I think if you look back at domain names, back in the day, a lot of people don't know this, but Jon Postel actually kept the list of domain names in a text file, right? You had basically wanted a domain name, you called Jon up, and you said, "I'd like my name added to the DNS," and he could be like, "Okay, let me add it "to the text file." Again, these things all start in a very sort of anarchic way, and now-- >> But they get commercial. >> It gets commercial, and it gets-- >> SAIC, Network Solutions, in various time, we all know the history, ICANN, controlled by the Department of Commerce up until a certain point in time-- >> Uh, 'til about four years ago, really. >> So, this is moving so fast. You're a student of the industry, you're also doing a startup called WorkCoin, what is the formula for success, what is your strategy, what are you guys doing at WorkCoin, take a minute to explain what you guys are doing, your team, your approach-- >> So let's start with the problem, right? If you look at freelancing, right now, everybody knows that a lot of people freelance, and I don't think people understand how many people freelance. There are 57 million people in America who freelance. It's close to 50%, of us, don't actually have jobs, other than freelancing. And so, this is a slow moving train, but it's basically moving in the direction of more freelancers, and we're going to cross the 50% mark-- >> And that's only going to get bigger, because of virtual work, the global workforce, no boundaries-- >> Right, and so it's global phenomena, right? Freelancing is just going up, and up, and up. Now, you would think in this world, there would be something like Google where you could sit there, and go type patent attorney, and you could get 20 patent attorneys that would be competing for your business, and each one would have their price, and, you could just click, and hire a patent attorney, right? Is that the case? >> No. >> No, okay. >> I need a patent attorney. >> So, what if you have to hire a telegram manager for your telegram channel? Can you find those just by googling telegram manager, no. So basically-- >> The user expectation is different than the infrastructure can deliver it, that's what you're basically saying. >> No, what I'm saying is it should be that way, it is not that way, and the reason it's not that way is that basically, there's no economics to do that with credit cards, so, if you're building a marketplace where it's kind of these people are find each other, you need the economics to make sense. And when you're being charged 3.5% each way, plus you have to worry about chargebacks, buyer fraud, and everything else, you can't built a marketplace that's open and transparent. It's just not possible. And I realized six months ago, that with crypto, you actually could. Not that it's going to be necessarily easy, but, technically, it is possible. There's zero marginal cost, once I'm taking in crypto, I'm paying out crypto, in a sort of open marketplace where I can actually see the person, so I could hire John Furrier, not John F., right? >> But why don't you go to LinkedIn, this is what someone might say. >> Well, if you go to LinkedIn, first of all, the person there might not be in the market, probably is not in the market for a specific service, right? You can go there, then you need to message them. And you just say, "Hey, your profile looks great, "I noticed you're a patent attorney, "you want to file this patent for me?" And then you have to negotiate, it's not a transactional mechanism, right? >> It's a lot of steps. >> It's not transactional, right? So it's not click, buy, fund, engage, it just doesn't work that way. It's just such a big elephant in the room problem, that everybody has these problems, nobody can find these good freelancers. What do you end up doing? You end up going to Facebook, and you go, "Hey, does anybody know any good patent attorneys?" That's what you do. >> That's a bounty. >> Well, it's kind of, yeah. >> It's kind of a social bounty. "Hey hive, hey friends, does anyone know anything?" >> It's social proof, right? Which is another thing that's very important, because, if John, if you were-- >> Hold on, take a minute to explain what social proof is for the folks. >> Social proof is just the simple concept that it's a recommendation coming from somebody that you know, and trust. So, for example, I may not be interested in your video services, John, but I know you, and I am in the business of a graphic designer, and you're like, "Fred, I know this amazing graphic designer, "and she's relatively cheap." Okay, well that's probably good enough for me to at least start looking at her work, and going the next step. On the other hand, if I'm just looking at 100 graphic designers, I do not know. >> It's customized contextual data, around a specific transaction from a trusted source. So you socially, are connected to, or related. >> It, sort of, think about this, it doesn't even have to be a source that you know, it could be just a source that you know of, right? So, to use the Brock example again, Brock's probably not going to be selling his services on my platform, but what if he recommends somebody, people like giving the gift of recommendation. So Brock knows a lot of people, may not be doing as well as him, right? And he's like, "Well, this guy could be a fantastic guy "to hire as social media manager," for example. Helping out a guy that needs a little bit of work. >> And endorsement's a major thing. >> It is giving something, right? You're giving your own brand, by saying, "I stand behind this person." >> Alright, so tell me about where you are with WorkCoin, honestly, people might not know your background, if you check him out on LinkedIn, Fred Krueger, mathematician, Stanford PhD, well-educated, from a centralized organization, like Stanford, has a good reputation, you're a math guy, is there math involved? Obviously, Blockchain's math related, you got crypto, how are you guys building this out, share a little bit of, if you can, show a little leg on the tech-- >> The tech is sort of simple. So basically the way it is, is right now it's built in Google Cloud, but we have an interface where you can fund the thing, and so it's built, first of all, that's the first thing. We built it on web and mobile. And you can basically buy WorkCoins from the platform itself, using Ethereum, and also, we've integrated with Sensei, a different token. So, we can integrate with different tokens, so you're using these tokens to fund the coin, to fund your account, right? And then, once you have the tokens in your account, you can then buy services with them, right? And then the service provider, the minute they finish delivery of the service, to your expectation, they get the coin in their account, and then they can transfer that coin back into Ethereum, or Bitcoin, or whatever, to cash out. >> Okay, so wait, now that product's built, has the coins been issued? Are you guys doing an ICO? Are you raising money? >> So we're in the middle of an ICO-- >> Private? >> Private, only for now. So we've raised just under $4,000,000-- >> Great, congratulations. >> I have no idea if that's good or not-- >> Well, it's better than a zero (laughs). >> It's better than zero, right? It is better than zero, right? >> So there's interest obviously. >> Yeah, so look, we've got a lot of interest in our product, and I think part of the interest is it's very simple. A lot of people can go, "I think this thing makes sense." Now, does that mean we're going to be completely successful in taking over the world, I don't know. >> Well, I mean, you got some tailwinds at your back. One, the infrastructure in e-commerce, and the things that you're going after, are 20-year-old stacks. Number two, the business model, and expectation of the users, is shifting radically, and expectations are different, and there's no actual product that does it (laughs), so. >> So a lot of these ICOs, I think they're going to have technical problems actually building into the specification. 'Cause it's difficult, when you're dealing with the Blockchain, first of all, you're building on some movable platform, right? I met some people just today who are building on Hash-Craft, now, that's great, but Hash-Craft is like one day old, you know? So you're building on something that is one day old, and they've just announced their coin five minutes ago, you know. Again, that's great, but normally as a developer myself, I'm used to building on things that are years old, I mean, even something that's three years old is new. >> This momentum going on, that someone might want to tout Hash-Craft for is, 'cause it's got momentum-- >> It's got total momentum. >> They're betting on an ecosystem. But that brings up the other thing I want to get your thoughts on, because we've observed this at Polycon, we've been watching the industry landscape now, onto our 10th year, there's almost an ecosystem stake in the ground. The good news is, ecosystem's developing. You got entrepreneurs, you got projects, you got funding coming in, but as it's going to be a fight for the ecosystem, because you can't have zillion ecosystems, eventually they have to be-- >> Well, you know-- >> Or can you? >> Here's the problem, that everybody's focused on the plumbing right now, right, the infrastructure? But, what they should be focusing it on is the app. And I've a question for you, and I've asked this question to my advisors and investors, which are DNA Fund, and I say-- >> Let's see if I get it right, it's a test here on the spot, I love this, go. >> Okay, so here's the question, how many, in your wallet right now, on your mobile phone, show me how many Blockchain apps you have right now. >> Uh, zero, on my phone? >> Okay, zero. >> Well I have a burner phone for my other one, so (laughs). >> But on any phone, on any phone that you possess, how many Blockchain apps do you have on your phone? >> Wallet or apps? >> An app that you-- >> Zero. >> An app, other than a wallet, zero, right? Every single person I've asked in this conference has the same number, zero. Now, think about this, if you'd-- >> Actually, I have one. >> Uh, which one? >> It's called Cube Coin. >> Okay, there you go, Cube Coin. But, here's the problem, if you went to a normal-- >> Can I get WorkCoin right now? >> Yeah, well not right now, but I have it on my wallet. So for example, it's in test flight, but my point is I have a fully functional thing I can go buy services, use the coin, everything, in an app. I think this is one of the things-- >> So, hypothetically, if I had an application that was fully functional, with Blockchain, with cryptocurrency, with ERC 2 smart contracts, I would be ahead of the game? >> You would be ahead of the game. I mean, I think-- >> Great news, guys! >> And I think you absolutely are thinking the right thinking, because, everybody's just looking at the plumbing, and, look, I love EOS, but, it's sort of a new operating system, same as Hash-Craft, but you need apps to run on your thing-- >> First of all, I love chatting with you, you're super smart, folks out there, Fred is someone you should check out, you got great advisor potential. You're right on this, I want to test something out with you, I've been thinking about this for a while. If you think about the OSI model, OSI stack, for the younger kids, that was a key movement that generated the key standards in the stack for inner networking, and physical devices. So, it was started from the bottom up. The top of the stack actually never standardized, it became the presentation session layer, they differentiated, then eventually became front end. If you look at what's happening now, the top of the stack is really the ones that's standardizing, or standardizing with business logic, the bottom of the stack has many different versions of say, Blockchain, so the question is is that, it might be the world that will never have a TCP/IP moment, it might be that the business app logic will dictate to some sort of abstraction layer, down to programmable plumbing. You see this with cloud with DevOps. So the question is, do see it that way? I'm thinking out loud here, but when I'm seeing the trend here, it's just that, people who make the business logic decisions first, and nail those, that they're far more successful swapping out and hedging on the plumbing. >> Look, I think you mentioned the word alpha geek, and I think you've just defined yourself as an alpha geek. Let's just go in Denzel Washington's set in the movie Philadelphia, talk to me like I'm a five year old, okay? What is the problem you're solving? >> The app, you said it, it's the app! >> My point is like, everybody is walking around with apps, if the thing doesn't fit on an app, it's not solving any problem, that's the bottom line. I don't care whether you're-- >> You're validating the concept that all that matters is the app, the plumbing will sort itself out. >> I think so. >> Is that a dependency, or is it an interdependency? >> What do you need in a plumbing? Here's how I think you should think. Do I need 4,000 transactions per second? I would say, rarely, most people are not sitting there going, "I need to do 4,000 transactions per second." >> If you need that, you've already crossed the finish line, you probably want a proprietary solution. >> Just to put things in perspective, Bitcoin does 300,000 transactions per day. >> Well, why does Ripple work? Ripple works because they nailed the business model. >> I'll tell you what I think of Ripple-- >> What's your take? >> Why ripple works, I think all, and I'm not the first person to say this, but I think that, the thing that works right now, the core application of all this stuff, is money, right? That's the core thing. Now, if you're talking about documents on the Blockchain, is that going to be useful, perhaps. In a realist's say in the Blockchain, perhaps. Poetry on the Blockchain, maybe. Love on the Blockchain? Why ban it, you know? >> Hey, there's crypto-kiddies on the Blockchain, love is coming next. >> Love is coming next. But, the core killer app, the killer app, is money. It's paying people. That is the killer app of the Blockchain right now, okay? So, every single one of the things that's really successful is about paying people. So what is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is super great, for taking money, and moving it out of China, and into the United States. Or out of Nigeria, and into Switzerland, right? You want to take $100,000 out of Nigeria, and move it to Switzerland? Bitcoin is your answer. Now, you want to move money from bank A to bank B, Ripple is your answer, right? (John laughs) If you want to move money from Medellin, Colombia, that you use in narcos, Moneiro is probably your crypto of choice, you know? (John laughs) Business truly anonymous. And I think it's really about payment, right? And so, I look at WorkCoin as, what is the killer thing you're doing here, you're paying people. You're paying people for work, so, it's designed for that. That's so simple. >> The killer app is money, Miko Matsumura would say, open source money, that's his narrative, love that vision. Okay, if money's the killer app, the rest is all kind of window dressing around trying to race to-- >> I think it's the killer, it's the initial killer app. I think we need to get to the point where we all, not all of us, but where enough of us start transacting, with money, with digital money, and then after digital money, there will be other killer apps, right? It's sort of like, if you look at the internet, and again, I'm repeating somebody else's argument-- >> It's Fred Krueger's hierarchy of needs, money-- >> Money starts, right? >> Money is the baseline. >> The initial thing, what was the first thing of internet? I was on the internet before it was the internet. It was called the ARPANET, at Stanford, right? I don't know if you remember those days-- >> I do remember, yeah, I was in college. >> But the ARPANET, it was email, right? We had the first versions of email. And that was back in 1986. >> Email was the killer app for 15, 20 years. >> It was the killer app, right? And I think-- >> For 15 or 20 years. >> Absolutely, well before websites, you know? So I think, we got to solve money first. And I bless everybody who has got some other model, and maybe they're right, maybe notarization of documents on the internet is a-- >> There's going to be use cases for Blockchain, some obvious low-hanging fruit, but, that's not revolutionary, that's not game-changing, what is game-changing is the promise of a new decentralized infrastructure. >> Here's the great thing that's absolutely killer about what this whole world is, and this is why I'm very bullish, it's, if you look at the internet of transmitting value, from one node to another node, credit cards just do not do a very good job of that, right? So, you can't put a credit card inside a machine, very well, at all, right? It doesn't work! And very simple reason, why? Because you get those Amex fraud alerts. (John laughs) Now the machine, if he's paying another machine, the second machine doesn't know how to interpret the first machine's Amex fraud alerts. So, the machine has to pay in, the machine's something that's immutable. I'm paying you a little bit of token. The classic example is the self-driving car that pays the gas pump, 'cause it's a gas self-driving car, it pays it to fill up, and the gas pump may have to pay its landlord in rent, and all of this is done with tokens, right? With credit cards, that does not work. So it has to be tokens. >> Well, what credit cards did for other transactions a little bit simplifies your things, there's a whole 'nother wave coming, that just makes it easier and reduces the steps. >> It reduces the friction, and that's why I think, actually, the killer app's going to be marketplaces, because, if you look at a marketplace, whether it's a marketplace like ours, for freelancers, or your marketplace for virtual goods, and like wax, or whatever it is, right? I think marketplaces, where there's no friction, where once you've paid, it's in. There's no like, I want my money back. That is a killer app, it's an absolute killer app. I think we're going to see real massive consumer adoption with that, and that's ultimately, I think, that's what we need, because if it's all just business models, and people touting their 4,000 transactions a second, that's not going to fly. >> Well Fred, you have a great social graph, that's socially proved, you got a great credentials, in mathematics, PhD from Stanford, you reinvent nine, how many exits? >> Nine exits. >> Nine exits. You're reinventing freelancing on the Blockchain, you're an alpha geek, but you can also explain things to a five year old, great to have you on-- >> Thank you very much John. >> Talk about the WorkCoin, final word, get the plugin for WorkCoin, can people use it now, when is it going to be available-- >> Look, you can go check out our platform, as Miko said, Miko's an advisor, and Miko said, "Fred, think of it as a museum, "you can come visit the museum, "you're not going to see a zillion, "but you can do searches there, you can find people." The museum is not fully operational, right? You can come and check it out, you can take a look at the trains at the museum, the trains will finally operate once we're finished with our ICO, we can really turn the thing on, and everything will work, and what I'd like you to do, actually, you can follow our ICO, if you're not American, you can invest in our ICO-- >> WorkCoin dot-- >> Net. >> Workcoin.net >> Workcoin.net, and, really, at the end, if you have some skill that you can sell on the internet, you're a knowledge worker, you can do anything. List your skill for sale, right? And then, that's the first thing. If you're a student at home, maybe you can do research reports. I used to be a starving student at Stanford. I was mainly spending my time in the statistics department, if somebody said, "Fred, instead of grading "undergrad papers, we'll pay you money "to do statistical work for a company," I would be like, "That would be amazing!" Of course, nobody said that. >> And anyways, you could also have the ability to collaborate with some quickly, and do a smart contract, you could do some commerce, and get paid. >> And get paid for it! >> Hey, hey! >> How 'about that, so I just see-- >> Move from the TA's grading papers payroll, which is like peanuts-- >> And maybe make a little bit more doing something that's more relevant to my PhD. All I know is there's so many times where I've said, my math skills are getting rusty, and I was like, I'd really wish I could talk to somebody who knew something about this distribution, or, could help me-- >> And instantly, magically have them-- And I can't even find them! Like, I have no idea, I have no idea how I would go and find people at Stanford Institute, I would have no idea. So if I could type Stanford, statistics, and find 20 people there, or USC Statistics, imagine that, right? That could change the world-- >> That lowers the barriers, friction barriers, to-- >> Everybody could be hiring graduate students. >> Well it's not just hiring, collaborating too. >> Collaborating, yeah. >> Everything. >> And any question that you have, you know? >> Doctor doing cancer research, might want to find someone in China, or abroad, or in-- >> It's a worldwide thing, right? We have to get this platform so it's open, and so everybody kind of goes there, and it's like your identity on there, there's no real boundary to how we can get. Once we get started, I'm sure this'll snowball. >> Fred, I really appreciate you taking the time-- >> Thanks a lot for your time. >> And I love your mission, and, we support you, whatever you need, WorkCoin, we got to find people out there to collaborate with, otherwise you're going to get pushed fake news and fake data, best way to find it is through someone's profile on WorkCoin-- >> Thanks. >> Was looking forward to seeing the product, I'm John Furrier, here in Puerto Rico for Blockchain Unbound, Restart Week, a lot of great things happening, Brock Pierce on the keynote this morning really talking about his new venture fund, Restart, which is going to be committed 100% to Puerto Rico, this is where the action will be, we will be following this exclusive story, continuing, we'll be back with more, thanks for watching. (soothing electronic music)

live from Las Vegas it's the cute covering knowledge 16 brought to you by service now hear your host dave vellante and Jeff Frick we're back this is the cube silicon angles flagship production we go out to the events we extract the signal from the noise the signal here at servicenow knowledge 16 is the extension of service management across the enterprise Brian Andrews is here is a vice president of IT it's stone brewing cube alum bride great to see you again thank you it's great to be here nice to see you guys another knowledge you know I thought happened a good energy this year yeah you know I spent third knowledge how's this week been for you oh it's a blast yeah incredible energy and growth and excitement from the company the partners it's been fun so third nology that service now for two years yeah right and so what the first knowledge was sort of come and kicking yeah exactly talking all the customers is this stuff Rio exactly last year we got to speak and this year were in the customer showcase which is new one of four and telling our story about what we did and meeting other customers and partners it's fun so give us the update what's the story um you guys are growing yeah yeah so stone brewing we're the 10th largest craft beer company in the country and growing double-digit growth so yeah we're now opening a second brewery in Richmond Virginia and a third in Berlin Germany doing two at the same time which is pretty nuts for us it's a du Bois so it's a large focus for the company we're actually the first American craft brew company to open a brewery anywhere in Europe and to operate it we're on right to Berlin and in Germany hell with us I know right right into the fire I doubt well I talk about that business decision to go into Germany I mean beer central I know I know well crap beer starting to really take off in Europe and we were looking at sites all through Europe and really fell in love with this property in brillion it's a old gas works facility brick a neat place for garden inside it's just really a neat place but the crappier movements has a lot of energy there and we feel like that can be our European hub to brew and distribute throughout Europe so it's a great spot a great place to come visit and spend the day and enjoy the gardens and that's gonna be a lot of time we have a really a large bistro going in as well so it could be a place you want to stay and hang all day yeah girls that's right that's right and house I'm just curious we don't find you know kind of the German purity laws are there special you know Germany's a very special place to do business for a whole lot of reasons HR reasons and data privacy reasons and this that and the other from the brewery perspective you know we hear about their purity laws do you have to you have to follow those is your new animal as an American craft beer manufacturer how does that work well so most of our beer that we do the core beers they do fit right into that our stone IPA arrogant bastards they fit in but we do a lot that do not fit in because we add in espresso or tangerine or good stuff like that so we're purposely going to be knocking down that bureaucracy and being rebellious we had a event last week where we served only beers that did not comply with the law true to our culture were rebels and it's exciting for us so i have to say i mean german beer is special I'd consume a lot of German of year in my day and somehow the next day you just feel great yeah absolutely is that the experience with stone yeah yeah it's gonna be you know I think a new to get the strong you know bitter forward hot forward IPAs that we serve will be different that's awesome now you guys you find you saying brought in service now from the business side yeah first we did an NIT but you but you led that acquisition so two years ago we were looking at putting in a set of systems for the business each group had their own needs and they had selected systems they want to bring in the brew ops maintenance was number one that we needed to serve as a use case so the demand was really growing for our beer as it's been we need to keep up with the demand and so we can't have the brewing and down we were turning to a 24-7 operation and the brewery anytime a piece of equipment was down we're not getting beer to our fans I'm not serving our customers so we we needed something for planned maintenance to keep that equipment rolling facilities wanted something as well for maintaining the facilities and HVAC units and all that safety I wanted something for reporting incidents they were all all those groups were outlook and excel and so they needed a system they didn't have one we had some project management needs in our marketing group and of course I T wanted a great system too so we looked at those and said we can collapse all these down into one system with service now because in the end they had a common set of requirements they wanted workflow and reporting and visibility work order management so we did some proof of concepts and they bought in and we deployed service now to the business first because they had nothing at least I t had something it was antiquated we had something so we serve we serve them first and so you're one was all about putting those platforms in place to crawl walk and then you're too we're optimizing and now we report some with some terrific results that have come out now by using it I get a triple it and take it overseas no you go right straight to the run that's right that's right and fly haha so as you grow what role do you see service now playing I mean have you been able to sort of sense or measure the productivity impacts and we've had some great results that come out of this so our brewing department as I said they need to keep that equipment rolling any downtime was hurting us we cut the downtime in half by using planned maintenance and so we use not only the corrective work orders but planning's we have 2200 items from the brewery and packaging in our cmdb we're unplanned maintenance against those now half of the work orders that were completing our plan preventative in nature those were a very small percentage earlier it was more reactive and corrective moving to planned we're more on top of things more proactive and the equipment's up and running longer so she's meant to the CMDB so you if you've got a single cmdb or you there we do yeah single cmdb for all the brewing and packaging equipment and it's all as a nice data hierarchy so we can know that it's the escondido brewery it's brewhouse one and it's the latter ton and that has valves and pumps and sensors now those items might be used at other pieces of equipment too so we can put those assign them to different items in the CMDB but it's all in there and organized and we can you know see how we're doing on cost control and when we need to replace equipment or maintain it and on the preventative is it implementing you know suggested best practices by the manufacturer of those components or did you guys come up with your own kind of maintenance schedule based on operating experience etc yeah primarily from the maintenance from the manufacturer so we have those in is knowledge articles as well and then week but we have around procedures that we also would put in there and those those are put through in the work order so the technicians can see those and then one thing that's really nice is when we have down time in the brewery for maybe the brewing team is doing training we can see all the planned maintenance coming up and accelerate some so we may have something for next week we can move it up by a few days or something we may want to delay so we can have less downtime and group it together and do that maintenance all at once what kind of modifications have you did you have to make or did you have to make bringing in service now well we were a little on the bleeding edge in some cases a couple years ago as we were putting in the facilities maintenance and the planned maintenance so that was just starting to come out with service now so we had to build some custom tables and are we want to make sure it made sense for the the context so we had crafting assets and crafting systems those kinds of things so the business contact makes sense but those are now coming in out of the box so we're starting to pull back on the customization so it was not too bad a few things now as we excited the facilities and safety we want to make sure we could tag items if there's a leaking valve or exposed why are those kinds of things we can tag it as a facilities issue a brewing ops issue but also note it as a safety issue Safety's big it's down we're going to make sure it's a safety safe environment for our team we've cut injuries in half by having a focus on people and training the processes but also having this too well now to make all the issues visible and real-time so we're having a hundred percent increase in safety issues reported to us so we can see more they were out there before and weren't being reported or lost an email in Excel so we're seeing those now more proactive fixing and cut injuries in half we're really proud of that talk about the process behind that because we always talk about the you know the people process technology technologies one piece a fool with a tool you have blob of ulva all the little idioms but you're using service now as a platform to enter those incidents those safety incidents but somebody's got to actually do that right so then is it the person who got injured and what's the incentive for them doing that or explain the process behind that while safety is woven into our culture so we want to make sure day one everyone knows that's critical for us we want to leave as safe as healthy as you were when you started your day so what we have is that that form is available through our Service Catalog along with IT requests facilities request burry there's a safety incident you can report those come through from the team member that saw it so it could be the person that experienced it or someone who saw something and maybe they're working at the packaging line and they see something that could be an issue so those those could be sent through easily on a tablet or from their workstations and then the safety manager gets alerted to that works the q's runs the reports passes it to who's in charge it may be fixed by the facility's team or an engineer so they pass those tickets along that's a real plus for us having that on one system because originally the brewing folks wanted their system they were used to and that was different than what facilities had used before or safety in their previous companies but bringing it all together in one they can pass those tickets long and tracking a lot easier in one system then you're able to identify commonalities and an attack like they showed this morning's keynote the big red box you know that's right and so you were able to drill down into those and then try to put in new processes yeah remedi eight and of course all the categories what types of injuries are happening you can focus on the top ones you know is it slip and falls or lifting or forklift and those tie into then training and certification and getting people recertified so it starts the tide of learning management program as well but the other thing we hear over and over is that in the the implementation and execution with service and out and in department a and then it integrates over to b c and d and they start to say hey we want to do this two of every are you seeing a proliferation beyond kind of what your core initial delivery was oh absolutely yeah people are there's a conga line we like to say people waiting to get on our next is going to be project management for getting a new beer released so that's a seven month process or so to get from concept to actually getting the beer out the door and so we're going to be putting that all in service now for project management and having those tasks visible for everyone involved it's a really cross-functional effort to get a beer released and many different groups have to collaborate and making that visible in a single place single plan having dependencies in there and what we love about the project management suite is that the work being done is in the project plan but it's also the tasks that could assign the people to do the work and if they're getting production support or incidents that come through they can see that and there my work use along with their project work all in one place so we're really excited about putting in project management ago what are you using today for project management well for that new beer process that's a lot of Excel spreadsheets and email some document word docs those kinds of things but we have MS project and project server that we're using for construction projects but there's a lot of manual work that goes with that yet will you and have you when we will start with have you when you brought in service now were you able to retire some systems did you get rid of stuff well for IT we had a system it was the tracking system from BMC so that's one we wanted to replace so we're rolling it out for IT was a big win and that's now gotten pretty far wording incidents and change we'd like to get into problem and really start to mature that but we put the business first so I t's taking the backseat on resources but it's definitely we're well past where we were before so we'll be putting the assets in the database for IT as we've done for the brewing equipment and the facilities equipment and really build out IT ahead but ms project will definitely be retired as you move and most of the other ones the media department has a system they used called a sauna and they use that for project management that will also go when we have the new beer system getting launched with project management do you how do you deal with the organization or is their organizational friction people say want to hang on to the last user ah the other stretcher right right how do you deal with that ah well so most of the folks were using outlook and excel so those are pretty easy they really they needed something and didn't have it so those were easier wins but you know there's some the change management interesting because when you look in the magic quadrant you know what's the best maintenance management systems or project management systems and service now yet isn't out there right because it's the best in service management but getting people to see that it can also be a terrific system for project management or maintenance is a bit of a stretch right so you have to show them really well what is it you really need what are those requirements so let me show you so we've done some proof of concepts and that's been helpful to get people to see as well and believe because they see it as an IT system mostly when they go look it up but we've shown what we're doing and they get it it's exciting so we started last year we talked about time to value when we sort of joked time to beer right have you been able to actually quantify that do you see faster time to beer well it's like having that brewery equipment up and running has been big for us and cutting that in half of the down time we're getting the beer out the door so that has been the biggest win for us really I think with the seven-month new beer release process although cutting that time down isn't the number one driver of that it's more about getting it visible and collaboration and people working Heather I think that that's will be pleasantly surprised with how that's going to decrease so give us the road map over the next 12 12 months what do you be working on what's what's exciting you yeah so a couple of big things so we'll be doing that new beer project management we're also gonna be integrating with our ERP system so for the team that's getting those that maintenance requests in for the brewery they want to get those parts consumed from our European get the parts in we can track the total cost of the maintenance that's going on but also trigger reorders for the parts based on min values in our ERP so that'll be a nice integration will do the new beer and then we want to get IT mature through the IT Service Management and we're seeing so many great things with that performance analytics that's exciting to us because we're getting a lot of data good operational reports but we'd love to get some of that predictive business intelligence coming so those are a couple areas we're really looking at this year and I think also making take advantage of that the tools to make the user interface really nice-looking will be great so our service portal Service Catalog has a lot of great items on there but it doesn't look that great yes we're gonna make it look slick with some of the new tools and I guess helsinki's got some really good so you service now for that ui/ux yeah and yep NP you say bringing forth part parts of Helsinki yeah yeah so we're upgrading later this summer we're moving to Geneva in a couple of weeks and then we'll be really focusing later in the summer and making that service catalogue look good now stones got some beautiful imagery we have great shots of the beer and our facilities really great external when people see stone has really just terrific images and videos we want to make that look as good on the inside as it does on the outside for a fan so people come in and join the company and see how good we are on the inside too that's important to us so who does that beautification do you have a UI UX team that does that or is it just what you guys are pretty small team only 17 and IT that take care of a thousand team members so we have we're stretched pretty thin we have a terrific system administrator who also does development you and another gentleman that works on our websites so I think collaborating together and the tools that are available I think we'll be able to make it look good internally and we feel you have some great partners as well awesome yeah all right Brian listen thanks for coming back to the the cube and sharing your stories it's we love having stone brewing on any time so you'll appreciate it thank you very much guys appreciate being here logo all right I keep right there buddy right the cube would be back right after this at knowledge 16 Vegas right back every once in a while

okay we're back at vmworld twenty twelve i'm john fairy with SiliconANGLE calm this is the cube this is our flagship telecast we go out to the events extract a signal from the noise and share that with you i'm joe and stu miniman my co-host with this segment and martine casado the co-founder of nicera you guys are ranking number one on our trending tool that we built under networking because it moved up to the top of the list because of vmworld company had spent a billion dollars for you guys jaishree from Arista called you guys the Instagram of networking kind of tongue-in-cheek on the huge buyout but hey congratulations great wired story today SR with you guys we've done about the talent you have and you brought over the vmworld and you're the top story here so congratulations thank you welcome to the cube thank you so take us through the logic and your motion around past year okay up until the buyout what a roller coaster so just share with us personally from Europe as an entrepreneur what was it like what highlights of what happened well I guess I've been very focused on changing networking right so for me it's been largely a technical ride and since we started the company five years ago we've been focusing on developing core technology and we did that for the first three years and then the last year to us was primarily about execution and customer engagement and so you know we've spent a lot of time proving the technology getting into production doing the support and fixing out that model and so it turned out is a very natural transition point when the acquisition happened because we had gotten traction we had starting to realize how difficult it is to address a market as large as this within a small start-up and so it was very welcome to come join a much larger company where we can kind of provide this as a much box so you guys have some big backers obviously you know they're all it's all well documented in the valley but every entrepreneur has that moments like wait a minute is this what I wanted is this tea but the dollars was so good and vmware's asti growing company what clicked for you what made you go is this the right thing take us through that decision you know absolutely so I mean like to me business guides behavior and at the end of the day the goal is is how do you change networking and have a very very firm belief that the access layer to that network is moving from within the network towards the edge and so we wanted to develop technologies that can use this position to re-implement networking and software and so once you get the core technology done once you prove it out with large customers once you prove out the market the question is is kind of what is the best way to have the biggest impact and I think in some respects you can look at vmware is one of the largest networking companies in the in the world just based on port count right the number of virtual ports that they control is as large as any large networking vendor so this is the opportunity of a lifetime to change in industry so like I've been doing this now you know sdn since those doing my PhD at stanford for so going on 10 years now and this is the the opportunity of a lifetime to actually have broad broad like planet scale impact well congratulations certainly you disrupted the market not only in the validation of the acquisition but as you guys were moving out and talking about some of the deployments you guys were doing it just came out of left field for most people but in the inside baseball sure people knew it was going on in terms of like how you guys are disrupting so so congratulations thank you here I want to talk about is also the messaging here at vmworld very solid around suffered to find datacenter sure and that really kind of brings you into a whole nother beyond networking so you know we've been covering converged infrastructure that's looking a look upon you know around house storage servers and networking so its bigger now than just networking right so now you're taking it to a whole nother leg of the journey so connect the dots out there for the folks between software virtualization and software-defined networking to this to the data center help them understand what is going to happen under that next leg of the journey yeah of course so we're all familiar with compute virtualization right I mean this is how vmware initially changed the world where the time it takes to provision a workload when from weeks to literally minutes like two minutes however I t isn't about single workloads ideas about applications and all the network services that those applications require for example firewalling or security or or monitoring debugging and so even though we reduce the time it took to provisional workload from weeks two minutes you still took days to do everything else that was required so if we take a broad scope if we take a broad look at a thai tea we still realize it still takes days to provision new applications and to provision new workloads and so the only way to get past this the next step that we want to take is to virtualize every aspect of infrastructure and so there's three of those there's there's compute which is virtualized their storage which we're making good progress on and there's network and network really is a pivot piece right it's the one piece that touches everything right it is between the compute in the storage it is between the different types of compute and so if you look at large data centers even cloud data centers the long pole in the tent and provisioning is the network so we must must virtualize that so the goal is the software-defined data center that's like everything's in software everything's totally dynamic you create it on demand you can move it its liquid it's like water it'll go anywhere but in order for this dream to be realized we've got to get the network out of the way and that's what the sierra does we've been talking about going to go and Wikibon we've just kicked up a whole kind of research section on what we're calling data infrastructure and really highlighting this modern era right and we kind of use a lot of sports analogies but you know a modern era meaning the new way not the old way right so you're a classic example of disruption in a new way so talk about the enablement that you see happening from a from a marker play standpoint just you know open your mind and share the crowds and vision around what you will enable with this because networking is has to be dynamic it has that makes total sense you guys have done it what's going to happen next in your mind's eye in terms of what the possibilities are yeah yeah absolutely so I think ultimately this is where we want to get to we want to build a platform that will provide that will recreate you know every Network Service and functionality in a virtualized manner in software from the edge and that means that there can be any service available anywhere over any type of hardware at any scale that's needed and it can be done all at virtualization timeframe so this is like you do an API call you get a virtual network abstraction you add a firewall to it you you configure ackles to it and so all of network configuration all of network services all of network operations become soft state it becomes like a VM image and it's available anywhere that you want it to and so that is the first step so I believe these transformations and systems and this happened many times in the past happen in two steps the first one is you virtualize and when you virtualize you offer the same thing but in a more flexible manner like when you virtualize compute you offered an x86 cpu but you did it in software after you virtualize you can actually change the operational paradigm like when you when they created compute virtualization they didn't immediately get to migration or snapshot or rewind all these other kind of operational benefits these came later so the first step is any networking anywhere you want at any scale automatically and then the second step is like drastically changing the operational paradigm so you can do things like better security so you can rewind configuration state I mean things that we can't even think about today because now we have this ultimate point of indirection that's virtualized this virtualized layer and who's the candidate for these developers just admins net admins all the above is it going to be software programmatic I mean how does that it takes DevOps right to a level of functionality that is just mind-boggling so yeah who's the new personnel yeah it was like who's life does this impact think what happens called a CI easy out there well I mean it's a good question whose life does this impact I mean I mean immediately anybody that's building out a data center like a cloud architect is going to have this this primitive that that they can use to architect better system just like you gave them a virtual machine they use that as a primitive for building better data centers now we're giving them virtual networks as a primitive build virtual data centers so the cloud architects job gets easier application developers don't have to worry about the basics of you know the way networks work our network configuration operations will have a lot more flexibility and the virtual layer of where they can move things around as far as the physical networking layer the problem actually becomes quite a bit simpler but you still have to focus the on the problem of building a physical network so for example when server virtualization came around you didn't like reduce the need for servers you needed more servers and just like the same thing will happen with with network virtualization which is you'll still need physical networks and they're going to probably have to be better physical networks but the problem now is more of how do you build a physical network with high capacity that can support any workload and less about doing all the operational stuff you do today how does an impact we just had chris hoffman from juniper who's now a worker he's been a big security buff a great guest for us but we just were just riffing on the security problems right so give us your perspective on how this new canvas of software-defined virtualization is gonna impact security paradise yeah so I mean I think there are a couple of answers i actually think ultimately the security model is improved honestly so yeah the original work was done with the intelligence community actually the the original funding for nasira came from the intelligence community my background I used to work for the intelligence agencies and when you move everything to software we already have a fundamental security paradigm which is crust consolidation in the hypervisor right and with network virtualization you follow the same paradigm which is you you entrust the hypervisor to enforce things like isolation enforce the security but now you've got a strongly authenticated endpoint there you're not guessing about things but but it requires the security community to evolve with the virtualization community so I think that there's much more of a socialization hurdle more of a social hurdle than a technical hurdle like all of the technology is there to do good security in the cloud I think getting the traditional vendors to evolve their tools into of all they're thinking it's much more difficult so I've got one more thing to add I actually think there's an opportunity to do security in entirely new ways ones that again can transform the industry so for example with virtualization you've got deep semantics into the workloads I mean you're in the hypervisor you can look inside the VMS you know who's using them know what applications they're using guy you could even know what the documents are being sent or or read or passed around and because you have this information at the edge if you virtualize the network as well you can pass this context into the network so now instead of like looking at packets and kind of trying to guess what application there is by looking at traffic you can actually get past like the ground truth information from the hypervisor so I think we have the potential so it's like drastically improved security that's Martine if you look at the networking industry there's lots of companies that have tried to change it in the past when you talk about innovation standards have a lot of times slow things down yep you know there's the legacy thought set you know great respect for ccie s but you know they have their install base in their way of doing things so you know there's there's so many pieces that make up networking and even the first time I saw your solution there's multiple standards and open you know groups working on this so you know how do you guys tease through and work through all of these issues yeah so clearly a very complex and multifarious question so I'm going to I'm going to attack one piece of it and we can go from there one of the primary benefits of actual virtualization like actual virtualization is that what you end up with should look like what you started with right so like if you're fundamentally changing an operational paradigm you're probably not doing virtualization so for example in a network virtualization solution the physical network is still a physical Network and it needs to be managed like a physical network with physical networking tools and in order to be fully virtualized the virtual abstraction I give you if I give you a virtual network that should also look like the networks that you've kind of grown to love as a child right they should have all the counters all the debugging the ability to interpose services right and so from from that standpoint you're still preserving the interfaces that people are used to it says there's more of them so like for example when I talk to a network operator today they're like oh this is confusing I've got virtualization I say actually instead of having one network that's really complicated you've got em and simple networks now you've got a very simple physical Network and if you got any virtual networks and they all all of the same interfaces that you use to manage it however there's one catch and that one catch is is there's an additional bit of information which is how do you map this virtual world to the physical world which happened in compute virtualization as well so like everybody understood a virtual machine everybody understood the physical machine but people weren't entirely sure how you debug the mapping between the two and that's incumbent as US is software providers and solution providers to provide that to provide the ability to to map from this kind of you know like platonic virtual reality down to this kind of gritty physical reality okay so from a standard standpoint you I mean you guys helped invent OpenFlow you guys created the open V switch you're heavily involved in OpenStack Andy there's been a lot of buzz since the acquisition about you know the involvement in OpenStack and yeah yeah kind of God how many people today everything in what's your thoughts on it yeah so let me also teach a tease apart you know two things before I get to that one so in networking standards are really important and like in the way standards work he's got a bunch of people that kind of go and talk about things and they design things they agree on them that's actually quite different than open source right and like their different processes different communities different rules of engagement so let me focus on the open source first then we'll go back to the standards thank you because I perfect just to give you a little bit foreshadowing like I hope the world goes open source not open Stan so can we do to it so but we'll get there right so as far as open source yes so I wrote the first version of open flow I mean it came out of my thesis right the first three employees of nicera created the first craft of open flow and it was it was just something that we wanted to use to control switches right i mean we wrote the first reference implementation the first open flow controller you know we seeded the stanford stuff of course i'm a consulting a faculty at stanford so i was involved there we also are the primary developers behind open V switch it's in the linux kernel you know we've probably put you know many millions of dollars in developing that it's used by competitors and partners alike that's used in many clouds and then we've heavily participated in an OpenStack in particular you know where the Delete on quantum which is the networking portion of OpenStack we've done a lot of development bear so as far as the merger is concerned the acquisitions concerned none of that will change we're fully committed to open V switch to OpenStack will continue and even escalate our contribution there quick quick note on OpenStack i was told that something for folks have actually entered some code into the OpenStack of storage just kind of curious about that so and we touched many areas of OpenStack and again the the networking piece touches everything and you know we do a lot of the development on quantum and we run actually nasira internally randa an openstack cloud for internal dev cloud and we've got thousands of VMs on it that we use it and so we're heavily we're like heavy users and contributors to both OpenStack and linux I mean if you look in Linux we've actually fixed a lot of the veal and issues in the kernel right so like and we're very very involved in open source but we're involved as users right like we don't sell you know linux we don't sell OpenStack but we do believe for to have a vibrant ecosystem is nice to have these tools out there and as we use the tools we fix them and we contribute it back okay what about multi hypervisor environments because that was one of the things that really impressed me about like the open D switch is it really doesn able kind of that that multi hypervisor even more than kind of heterogeneous switches it's the multi hypervisor piece yeah that's right so if you kind of zoom away like I think we've had like a fairly myopic focus in the industry on servers over the last 10 years and it's like if you zoom away from the server to a data center you end up in this realm of heterogeneous technologies multiple cloud management systems multiple hypervisors and so when we came up with our our initial strategy of building a network virtualization layer we knew networks touch everything we must support all of those technologies and so it was like a fundamental tenant of the technology that we might support all hypervisors and physical hardware switches as well because there are workloads that are not july's and so you know open V switch itself which is the V switch that we use it's in sports in kvm bare metal linux it's been ported to bsd it's been ported to other operating systems it's been ported to top-of-rack hardware switches so we can use all of them to do to do network virtualization so mark can I want to ask you about the sufferer define partnering strategy from a technical perspective obviously we're really big believers in open source as well they love that we'd love to think it's great and it's now a business model in the industry so it's great to see all that work as vmware now with you guys in the family there go to other unifying clouds so they took a multiple clouds at this point so you know what would you bring to the table from hyper Microsoft hyper-v environment and other big vendors HP Dell yeah Microsoft what can you bring to the table in working with those guys or are you outgoing are you talking to them and and if you were having those conversations what does what would those conversations be well so the product itself that we're developing and we we do bring to market now we will continue is a network virtualization platform that's multi hypervisor right and so the goal is to have something that you can deploy into any cloud environment regardless of what CMS are running and regardless of what of what hypervisors they're using now we have many many partners whether their system integrators with the solution partners and so you know we don't have any religion on on the type of technologies in play we want to provide the best virtual networking solution in the industry and that's really our primary our primary focus let me ask you about it Trent some trends in the in the tech community in in academia and the research areas obviously at this example just randomly low-level virtual machines that kind of those kinds of shifts are happening could you talk about just what you're tracking right now that your get your eye on in terms of what's going on at some of the top university obviously low-level virtual machines at the University of Illinois and in Chicago so what other areas can you share with us that you monitoring listen this is a great question to ask a nap academic and I'm going to totally disappoint you in that I you know I i I'm on a lot of pcs and I follow a lot of research I mean you know I submit papers you know all the time and like I've mostly lost faith in the academic process on the research side lately which i haven't relevant so in terms of trends no but that's exactly the point I think that there's enough vision to last for a century and like now it's time to do work and if it were up to me we would all be taking these ideas that we've come up with over the last 10 years there's very few new ones in my opinion and we'd be executing like crazy and so well again while i'm on the pcs and while i do review the papers i do submit the papers i think we should all focus on like changing infrastructure into software executing like hell and changing the world that way and so and I don't have a really bad attitude about this especially as abuse or but it's a bad attitude okay we say it we hit it all hang out so final question for me and if she wants to get one more in and don't you can't say the acquisition as the answer what is the biggest surprise that that that you fell out of your chair over the past 24 months around you in the industry in your entrepreneurial venture here now at VMware and it could be like a surprise and this trend didn't happen that happened that you know these are the things that happened it could be good or bad what's the biggest surprise that caught you off guard this year that's 24 months yeah it's a good question I think the one that actually been a little the most shocking is how how difficult is being just very honest is how difficult to manage perception in the industry and if you look at kind of social media and you look at a lot of the buzz in the rags so much of it is generated by non disinterested parties so invested parties and so I think it's possible to be a perfectly good citizen and then get paint in a very negative light or be a very negative citizen and be painted in a very good light and it's been counterintuitive to me how you manage this effectively like almost a dynamic feedback system so for example this year has been an enormous contributor to open source I think we've contributed more than anybody in our space by you know factor of 10 or more we contributed most of the core technologies and often people like well but it's a proprietary solution on the other hand there sometimes we're like okay this is a closer source product people like we should use this here because it's the open solution and so well I think that definitely felt on both sides you know being both open source and close or sometimes it's worked for us and for the wrong reasons sometimes it's not worked for us for the right reasons and so that dynamic has been the least intuitive to me so I'm not sure I fell off my chair but definitely it's been the most surprising yeah and you know and that's what we're trying to solve a SiliconANGLE as we say we're agile media and ultimately with social media the whole media business is changing so we know one of the things that we care about here so that's why we have the qubits we just this is raw data we want to share be provocative be edgy is too it's a data-driven world and we believe the media business is absolutely screwed up beyond all recognition so so because of just lack of fact-checking just old techniques aren't working and but it's the same game right so it's just so things circulate things get branded and we've seen a time and time again I've seen great people show up as like almost painted as criminals yeah so it's just a sad state of reporting and media so would agree with you there okay John so if I if I can have that one last question your machine you know the networking industries is a big community and when you talk about kind of the jobs that people are doing today what's your recommendation to folks out there in the networking industry what should what should they start to you know we'd or you know start playing with to kind of understand where things are going down the line honestly I don't want to say a cliche but I actually really believe this one I think I think networking networks are evolving to become proper systems and proper systems in an end-to-end manner meaning that goes a very well-defined hardware a software layer they all work together and I think the data center is is becoming a large computer and I think the most important thing is to view the industry and that lens meaning you know I would get as much information as I could on how guys like Google or Amazon or Facebook build their data centers and you realize that if you do a cross-section of these things like the Capital savings the operational savings the flexibility of the software like that's changing the world and if it's not changing the world directly by changing infrastructure it's changing the world to the surfaces they deliver and understanding that model in your bones I think is the beacon going forward so if it were me the first thing I do is I really understand why they make those decisions what the benefits are and I would use that to guide my learning going forward okay Martinez out of this co-founder of this year now at do you have a title at VMware yet or do you I mean did i do I don't know my head honcho of the Sierra am where Thanks coming inside the cube really preciate it we right back with our next guest we're going to wrap up try to wrap up the day as they start to bon jovi soundcheck here at V emerald 2012 this is SiliconANGLE calm and Wikibon doors continues coverage at vmworld great thank you