>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the CUBE, coming to you from our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. we've got a couple of a CUBE alumni veterans who've been on a lot of times. They've got some exciting announcements to tell us today, so we're excited to jump into it, So let's go. First we're joined by Eric Herzog. He's the CMO and VP worldwide storage channels for IBM Storage, made his time on theCUBE Eric, great to see you. >> Great, thanks very much for having us today. >> Jeff: Absolutely. And joining him, I think all the way from North Carolina, Sam Werner, the VP of, and offering manager business line executive storage for IBM. Sam, great to see you as well. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> Absolutely. So let's jump into it. So Sam you're in North Carolina, I think that's where the Red Hat people are. You guys have Red Hat, a lot of conversations about containers, containers are going nuts. We know containers are going nuts and it was Docker and then Kubernetes. And really a lot of traction. Wonder if you can reflect on, on what you see from your point of view and how that impacts what you guys are working on. >> Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We talk, everybody hears about containers constantly. Obviously it's a hot part of digital transformation. What's interesting about it though is most of those initiatives are being driven out of business lines. I spend a lot of time with the people who do infrastructure management, particularly the storage teams, the teams that have to support all of that data in the data center. And they're struggling to be honest with you. These initiatives are coming at them, from application developers and they're being asked to figure out how to deliver the same level of SLAs the same level of performance, governance, security recovery times, availability. And it's a scramble for them to be quite honest they're trying to figure out how to automate their storage. They're trying to figure out how to leverage the investments they've made as they go through a digital transformation and keep in mind, a lot of these initiatives are accelerating right now because of this global pandemic we're living through. I don't know that the strategy's necessarily changed, but there's been an acceleration. So all of a sudden these storage people kind of trying to get up to speed or being thrown right into the mix. So we're working directly with them. You'll see, in some of our announcements, we're helping them, you know, get on that journey and provide the infrastructure their teams need. >> And a lot of this is driven by multicloud and hybrid cloud, which we're seeing, you know, a really aggressive move to before it was kind of this rush to public cloud. And that everybody figured out, "Well maybe public cloud isn't necessarily right for everything." And it's kind of this horses for courses, if you will, with multicloud and hybrid cloud, another kind of complexity thrown into the storage mix that you guys have to deal with. >> Yeah, and that's another big challenge. Now in the early days of cloud, people were lifting and shifting applications trying to get lower capex. And they were also starting to deploy DevOps, in the public cloud in order to improve agility. And what they found is there were a lot of challenges with that, where they thought lifting and shifting an application will lower their capital costs the TCO actually went up significantly. Where they started building new applications in the cloud. They found they were becoming trapped there and they couldn't get the connectivity they needed back into their core applications. So now we're at this point where they're trying to really, transform the rest of it and they're using containers, to modernize the rest of the infrastructure and complete the digital transformation. They want to get into a hybrid cloud environment. What we found is, enterprises get two and a half X more value out of the IT when they use a hybrid multicloud infrastructure model versus an all public cloud model. So what they're trying to figure out is how to piece those different components together. So you need a software-driven storage infrastructure that gives you the flexibility, to deploy in a common way and automate in a common way, both in a public cloud but on premises and give you that flexibility. And that's what we're working on at IBM and with our colleagues at Red Hat. >> So Eric, you've been in the business a long time and you know, it's amazing as it just continues to evolve, continues to evolve this kind of unsexy thing under the covers called storage, which is so foundational. And now as data has become, you know, maybe a liability 'cause I have to buy a bunch of storage. Now it is the core asset of the company. And in fact a lot of valuations on a lot of companies is based on its value, that's data and what they can do. So clearly you've got a couple of aces in the hole you always do. So tell us what you guys are up to at IBM to take advantage of the opportunity. >> Well, what we're doing is we are launching, a number of solutions for various workloads and applications built with a strong container element. For example, a number of solutions about modern data protection cyber resiliency. In fact, we announced last year almost a year ago actually it's only a year ago last week, Sam and I were on stage, and one of our developers did a demo of us protecting data in a container environment. So now we're extending that beyond what we showed a year ago. We have other solutions that involve what we do with AI big data and analytic applications, that are in a container environment. What if I told you, instead of having to replicate and duplicate and have another set of storage right with the OpenShift Container configuration, that you could connect to an existing external exabyte class data lake. So that not only could your container apps get to it, but the existing apps, whether they'll be bare-metal or virtualized, all of them could get to the same data lake. Wow, that's a concept saving time, saving money. One pool of storage that'll work for all those environments. And now that containers are being deployed in production, that's something we're announcing as well. So we've got a lot of announcements today across the board. Most of which are container and some of which are not, for example, LTO-9, the latest high performance and high capacity tape. We're announcing some solutions around there. But the bulk of what we're announcing today, is really on what IBM is doing to continue to be the leader in container storage support. >> And it's great, 'cause you talked about a couple of very specific applications that we hear about all the time. One obviously on the big data and analytics side, you know, as that continues to do, to kind of chase history of honor of ultimately getting the right information to the right people at the right time so they can make the right decision. And the other piece you talked about was business continuity and data replication, and to bring people back. And one of the hot topics we've talked to a lot of people about now is kind of this shift in a security threat around ransomware. And the fact that these guys are a little bit more sophisticated and will actually go after your backup before they let you know that they're into your primary storage. So these are two, really important market areas that we could see continue activity, as all the people that we talk to every day. You must be seeing the same thing. >> Absolutely we are indeed. You know, containers are the wave. I'm a native California and I'm coming to you from Silicon Valley and you don't fight the wave, you ride it. So at IBM we're doing that. We've been the leader in container storage. We, as you know, way back when we invented the hard drive, which is the foundation of almost this entire storage industry and we were responsible for that. So we're making sure that as container is the coming wave that we are riding that in and doing the right things for our customers, for our channel partners that support those customers, whether they be existing customers, and obviously, with this move to containers, is going to be some people searching for probably a new vendor. And that's something that's going to go right into our wheelhouse because of the things we're doing. And some of our capabilities, for example, with our FlashSystems, with our Spectrum Virtualize, we're actually going to be able to support CSI snapshots not only for IBM Storage, but our Spectrum Virtualize products supports over 500 different arrays, most of which aren't ours. So if you got that old EMC VNX2 or that HPE, 3PAR or aNimble or all kinds of other storage, if you need CSI snapshot support, you can get it from IBM, with our Spectrum Virtualize software that runs on our FlashSystems, which of course cuts capex and opex, in a heterogeneous environment, but gives them that advanced container support that they don't get, because they're on older product from, you know, another vendor. We're making sure that we can pull our storage and even our competitor storage into the world of containers and do it in the right way for the end user. >> That's great. Sam, I want to go back to you and talk about the relationship with the Red Hat. I think it was about a year ago, I don't have my notes in front of me, when IBM purchased Red Hat. Clearly you guys have been working very closely together. What does that mean for you? You've been in the business for a long time. You've been at IBM for a long time, to have a partner you know, kind of embed with you, with Red Hat and bringing some of their capabilities into your portfolio. >> It's been an incredible experience, and I always say my friends at Red Hat because we spend so much time together. We're looking at now, leveraging a community that's really on the front edge of this movement to containers. They bring that, along with their experience around storage and containers, along with the years and years of enterprise class storage delivery that we have in the IBM Storage portfolio. And we're bringing those pieces together. And this is a case of truly one plus one equals three. And you know, an example you'll see in this announcement is the integration of our data protection portfolio with their container native storage. We allow you to in any environment, take a snapshot of that data. You know, this move towards modern data protection is all about a movement to doing data protection in a different way which is about leveraging snapshots, taking instant copies of data that are application aware, allowing you to reuse and mount that data for different purposes, be able to protect yourself from ransomware. Our data protection portfolio has industry leading ransomware protection and detection in it. So we'll actually detect it before it becomes a problem. We're taking that, industry leading data protection software and we are integrating it into Red Hat, Container Native Storage, giving you the ability to solve one of the biggest challenges in this digital transformation which is backing up your data. Now that you're moving towards, stateful containers and persistent storage. So that's one area we're collaborating. We're working on ensuring that our storage arrays, that Eric was talking about, that they integrate tightly with OpenShift and that they also work again with, OpenShift Container Storage, the Cloud Native Storage portfolio from, Red Hat. So we're bringing these pieces together. And on top of that, we're doing some really, interesting things with licensing. We allow you to consume the Red Hat Storage portfolio along with the IBM software-defined Storage portfolio under a single license. And you can deploy the different pieces you need, under one single license. So you get this ultimate investment protection and ability to deploy anywhere. So we're, I think we're adding a lot of value for our customers and helping them on this journey. >> Yeah Eric, I wonder if you could share your perspective on multicloud management. I know that's a big piece of what you guys are behind and it's a big piece of kind of the real world as we've kind of gotten through the hype and now we're into production, and it is a multicloud world and it is, you got to manage this stuff it's all over the place. I wonder if you could speak to kind of how that challenge you know, factors into your design decisions and how you guys are about, you know, kind of the future. >> Well we've done this in a couple of ways in things that are coming out in this launch. First of all, IBM has produced with a container-centric model, what they call the Multicloud Manager. It's the IBM Cloud Pak for multicloud management. That product is designed to manage multiple clouds not just the IBM Cloud, but Amazon, Azure, et cetera. What we've done is taken our Spectrum Protect Plus and we've integrated it into the multicloud manager. So what that means, to save time, to save money and make it easier to use, when the customer is in the multicloud manager, they can actually select Spectrum Protect Plus, launch it and then start to protect data. So that's one thing we've done in this launch. The other thing we've done is integrate the capability of IBM Spectrum Virtualize, running in a FlashSystem to also take the capability of supporting OCP, the OpenShift Container Platform in a Clustered environment. So what we can do there, is on-premise, if there really was an earthquake in Silicon Valley right now, that OpenShift is sitting on a server. The servers just got crushed by the roof when it caved in. So you want to make sure you've got disaster recovery. So what we can do is take that OpenShift Container Platform Cluster, we can support it with our Spectrum Virtualize software running on our FlashSystem, just like we can do heterogeneous storage that's not ours, in this case, we're doing it with Red Hat. And then what we can do is to provide disaster recovery and business continuity to different cloud vendors not just to IBM Cloud, but to several cloud vendors. We can give them the capability of replicating and protecting that Cluster to a cloud configuration. So if there really was an earthquake, they could then go to the cloud, they could recover that Red Hat Cluster, to a different data center and run it on-prem. So we're not only doing the integration with a multicloud manager, which is multicloud-centric allowing ease of use with our Spectrum Protect Plus, but incase of a really tough situation of fire in a data center, earthquake, hurricane, whatever, the Red Hat OpenShift Cluster can be replicated out to a cloud, with our Spectrum Virtualize Software. So in most, in both cases, multicloud examples because in the first one of course the multicloud manager is designed and does support multiple clouds. In the second example, we support multiple clouds where our Spectrum Virtualize for public clouds software so you can take that OpenShift Cluster replicate it and not just deal with one cloud vendor but with several. So showing that multicloud management is important and then leverage that in this launch with a very strong element of container centricity. >> Right >> Yeah, I just want to add, you know, and I'm glad you brought that up Eric, this whole multicloud capability with, the Spectrum Virtualize. And I could see the same for our Spectrum Scale Family, which is our storage infrastructure for AI and big data. We actually, in this announcement have containerized the client making it very simple to deploy in Kubernetes Cluster. But one of the really special things about Spectrum Scale is it's active file management. This allows you to build out a file system not only on-premises for your, Kubernetes Cluster but you can actually extend that to a public cloud and it automatically will extend the file system. If you were to go into a public cloud marketplace which it's available in more than one, you can go in there click deploy, for example, in AWS Marketplace, click deploy it will deploy your Spectrum Scale Cluster. You've now extended your file system from on-prem into the cloud. If you need to access any of that data, you can access it and it will automatically cash you on locally and we'll manage all the file access for you. >> Yeah, it's an interesting kind of paradox between, you know, kind of the complexity of what's going on in the back end, but really trying to deliver simplicity on the front end. Again, this ultimate goal of getting the right data to the right person at the right time. You just had a blog post Eric recently, that you talked about every piece of data isn't equal. And I think it's really highlighted in this conversation we just had about recovery and how you prioritize and how you, you know, think about, your data because you know, the relative value of any particular piece might be highly variable, which should drive the way that you treated in your system. So I wonder if you can speak a little bit, you know, to helping people think about data in the right way. As you know, they both have all their operational data which they've always had, but now they've got all this unstructured data that's coming in like crazy and all data isn't created equal, as you said. And if there is an earthquake or there is a ransomware attack, you need to be smart about what you have available to bring back quickly. And maybe what's not quite so important. >> Well, I think the key thing, let me go to, you know a modern data protection term. These are two very technical terms was, one is the recovery time. How long does it take you to get that data back? And the second one is the recovery point, at what point in time, are you recovering the data from? And the reason those are critical, is when you look at your datasets, whether you replicate, you snap, you do a backup. The key thing you've got to figure out is what is my recovery time? How long is it going to take me? What's my recovery point. Obviously in certain industries you want to recover as rapidly as possible. And you also want to have the absolute most recent data. So then once you know what it takes you to do that, okay from an RPO and an RTO perspective, recovery point objective, recovery time objective. Once you know that, then you need to look at your datasets and look at what does it take to run the company if there really was a fire and your data center was destroyed. So you take a look at those datasets, you see what are the ones that I need to recover first, to keep the company up and rolling. So let's take an example, the sales database or the support database. I would say those are pretty critical to almost any company, whether you'd be a high-tech company, whether you'd be a furniture company, whether you'd be a delivery company. However, there also is probably a database of assets. For example, IBM is a big company. We have buildings all over, well, guess what? We don't lease a chair or a table or a whiteboard. We buy them. Those are physical assets that the company has to pay, you know, do write downs on and all this other stuff, they need to track it. If we close a building, we need to move the desk to another building. Like even if we leasing a building now, the furniture is ours, right? So does an asset database need to be recovered instantaneously? Probably not. So we should focus on another thing. So let's say on a bank. Banks are both online and brick and mortar. I happened to be a Wells Fargo person. So guess what? There's Wells Fargo banks, two of them in the city I'm in, okay? So, the assets of the money, in this case now, I don't think the brick and mortar of the building of Wells Fargo or their desks in there but now you're talking financial assets or their high velocity trading apps. Those things need to be recovered almost instantaneously. And that's what you need to do when you're looking at datasets, is figure out what's critical to the business to keep it up and rolling, what's the next most critical. And you do it in basically the way you would tear anything. What's the most important thing, what's the next most important thing. It doesn't matter how you approach your job, how you used to approach school, what are the classes I have to get an A and what classes can I not get an A and depending on what your major was, all that sort of stuff, you're setting priorities, right? And the dataset, since data is the most critical asset of any company, whether it's a Global Fortune 500 or whether it's Herzog Cigar Store, all of those assets, that data is the most valuable. So you've got to make sure, recover what you need as rapidly as you need it. But you can't recover all of it. You just, there's just no way to do that. So that's why you really ranked the importance of the data to use sameware, with malware and ransomware. If you have a malware or ransomware attack, certain data you need to recover as soon as you can. So if there, for example, as a, in fact there was one Jeff, here in Silicon Valley as well. You've probably read about the University of California San Francisco, ended up having to pay over a million dollars of ransom because some of the data related to COVID research University of California, San Francisco, it was the health care center for the University of California in Northern California. They are working on COVID and guess what? The stuff was held for ransom. They had no choice, but to pay them. And they really did pay, this is around end of June, of this year. So, okay, you don't really want to do that. >> Jeff: Right >> So you need to look at everything from malware and ransomware, the importance of the data. And that's how you figure this stuff out, whether be in a container environment, a traditional environment or virtualized environment. And that's why data protection is so important. And with this launch, not only are we doing the data protection we've been doing for years, but now taking it to the heart of the new wave, which is the wave of containers. >> Yeah, let me add just quickly on that Eric. So think about those different cases you talked about. You're probably going to want for your mission critically. You're going to want snapshots of that data that can be recovered near instantaneously. And then, for some of your data, you might decide you want to store it out in cloud. And with Spectrum Protect, we just announced our ability to now store data out in Google cloud. In addition to, we already supported AWS Azure IBM Cloud, in various on-prem object stores. So we already provided that capability. And then we're in this announcement talking about LTL-9. And you got to also be smart about which data do you need to keep, according to regulation for long periods of time, or is it just important to archive? You're not going to beat the economics nor the safety of storing data out on tape. But like Eric said, if all of your data is out on tape and you have an event, you're not going to be able to restore it quickly enough at least the mission critical things. And so those are the things that need to be in snapshot. And that's one of the main things we're announcing here for Kubernetes environments is the ability to quickly snapshot application aware backups, of your mission critical data in your Kubernetes environments. It can very quickly to be recovered. >> That's good. So I'll give you the last word then we're going to sign off, we are out of time, but I do want to get this in it's 2020, if I didn't ask the COVID question, I would be in big trouble. So, you know, you've all seen the memes and the jokes about really COVID being an accelerant to digital transformation, not necessarily change, but certainly a huge accelerant. I mean, you guys have a, I'm sure a product roadmap that's baked pretty far and advanced, but I wonder if you can speak to, you know, from your perspective, as COVID has accelerated digital transformation you guys are so foundational to executing that, you know, kind of what is it done in terms of what you're seeing with your customers, you know, kind of the demand and how you're seeing this kind of validation as to an accelerant to move to these better types of architectures? Let's start with you Sam. >> Yeah, you know I, and I think i said this, but I mean the strategy really hasn't changed for the enterprises, but of course it is accelerating it. And I see storage teams more quickly getting into trouble, trying to solve some of these challenges. So we're working closely with them. They're looking for more automation. They have less people in the data center on-premises. They're looking to do more automation simplify the management of the environment. We're doing a lot around Ansible to help them with that. We're accelerating our roadmaps around that sort of integration and automation. They're looking for better visibility into their environments. So we've made a lot of investments around our storage insights SaaS platform, that allows them to get complete visibility into their data center and not just in their data center. We also give them visibility to the stores they're deploying in the cloud. So we're making it easier for them to monitor and manage and automate their storage infrastructure. And then of course, if you look at everything we're doing in this announcement, it's about enabling our software and our storage infrastructure to integrate directly into these new Kubernetes, initiatives. That way as this digital transformation accelerates and application developers are demanding more and more Kubernetes capabilities. They're able to deliver the same SLAs and the same level of security and the same level of governance, that their customers expect from them, but in this new world. So that's what we're doing. If you look at our announcement, you'll see that across, across the sets of capabilities that we're delivering here. >> Eric, we'll give you the last word, and then we're going to go to Eric Cigar Shop, as soon as this is over. (laughs) >> So it's clearly all about storage made simple, in a Kubernetes environment, in a container environment, whether it's block storage, file storage, whether it be object storage and IBM's goal is to offer ever increasing sophisticated services for the enterprise at the same time, make it easier and easier to use and to consume. If you go back to the old days, the storage admins manage X amount of gigabytes, maybe terabytes. Now the same admin is managing 10 petabytes of data. So the data explosion is real across all environments, container environments, even old bare-metal. And of course the not quite so new anymore virtualized environments. The admins need to manage that more and more easily and automated point and click. Use AI based automated tiering. For example, we have with our Easy Tier technology, that automatically moves data when it's hot to the fastest tier. And when it's not as hot, it's cool, it pushes down to a slower tier, but it's all automated. You point and you click. Let's take our migration capabilities. We built it into our software. I buy a new array, I need to migrate the data. You point, you click, and we automatic transparent migration in the background on the fly without taking the servers or the storage down. And we always favor the application workload. So if the application workload is heavy at certain times a day, we slow the migration. At night for sake of argument, If it's a company that is not truly 24 by seven, you know, heavily 24 by seven, and at night, it slows down, we accelerate the migration. All about automation. We've done it with Ansible, here in this launch, we've done it with additional integration with other platforms. So our Spectrum Scale for example, can use the OpenShift management framework to configure and to grow our Spectrum Scale or elastic storage system clusters. We've done it, in this case with our Spectrum Protect Plus, as you saw integration into the multicloud manager. So for us, it's storage made simple, incredibly new features all the time, but at the same time we do that, make sure that it's easier and easier to use. And in some cases like with Ansible, not even the real storage people, but God forbid, that DevOps guy messes with a storage and loses that data, wow. So by, if you're using something like Ansible and that Ansible framework, we make sure that essentially the DevOps guy, the test guy, the analytics guy, basically doesn't lose the data and screw up the storage. And that's a big, big issue. So all about storage made simple, in the right way with incredible enterprise features that essentially we make easy and easy to use. We're trying to make everything essentially like your iPhone, that easy to use. That's the goal. And with a lot less storage admins in the world then there has been an incredible storage growth every single year. You'd better make it easy for the same person to manage all that storage. 'Cause it's not shrinking. It is, someone who's sitting at 50 petabytes today, is 150 petabytes the next year and five years from now, they'll be sitting on an exabyte of production data, and they're not going to hire tons of admins. It's going to be the same two or four people that were doing the work. Now they got to manage an exabyte, which is why this storage made simplest is such a strong effort for us with integration, with the Open, with the Kubernetes frameworks or done with OpenShift, heck, even what we used to do in the old days with vCenter Ops from VMware, VASA, VAAI, all those old VMware tools, we made sure tight integration, easy to use, easy to manage, but sophisticated features to go with that. Simplicity is really about how you manage storage. It's not about making your storage dumb. People want smarter and smarter storage. Do you make it smarter, but you make it just easy to use at the same time. >> Right. >> Well, great summary. And I don't think I could do a better job. So I think we'll just leave it right there. So congratulations to both of you and the teams for these announcement after a whole lot of hard work and sweat went in, over the last little while and continued success. And thanks for the, check in, always great to see you. >> Thank you. We love being on theCUBE as always. >> All right, thanks again. All right, he's Eric, he was Sam, I'm I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's The Cube. With digital coverage of Ansible Fest 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Ansible Fest 2020. This is The Cube. Cube Virtual. I'm your host, John Furrier with The Cube and Silicon Angle. Two great guests here. Two engineers and architects. Michael McCarthy who is a architect at Delivery Engineering, who's giving a talk with Gamesys and Jurgen Grech who's a technical architect for the platform engineering team at Gamesys. Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on. >> Hello. >> Nice to see you. >> Coming in from London, coming in from Malta, you guys are doing a lot of engineering. You're a customer of Ansible, want to get into some of the cool things you're doing obviously Kubernetes automation, platform engineering, this is what everyone's working on right now that's going to be positioned for the future. Before we get started though, tell me a little bit about what Gamesys does and you guys' role. Michael, we'll start with you. >> Sure, so we're a gaming operator, we run multiple bingo-led and casino-led gaming websites, some of them are B2B, some are B2C. I think we've been doing it now for probably 14 or 15 years at least. I've been there for 12 and a half of those. So we essentially run gaming websites where people come and play their favorite games. >> And what's your role there? What do you do? >> So I'm in the operation side of things, I used to be a developer for 12 or so years. We make sure that everything's kind of up and running, we keep the systems running. My team in particular focuses on the speed of delivery for developers so we're constantly looking at, how long has it taken to get things in front of the customers, can we make it faster, can we make it easier, can we put cool stuff out there quicker? So it's a kind of platformy type role that I do, and I enjoy it a lot, so it's good. >> Jurgen you're platform engineering that sounds deep. >> Yes. >> Which is your role? (laughing) >> Well, I've been with Gamesys also for eight and a half years now. I hold the position of technical architect at the moment within this platform engineering group which is mostly tasked with all things ops related. I am responsible for designing, implementing and validating strategies for continuous deployment, whilst always ensuring high availability on both production and pre-production systems. I'm also responsible for the design and implementation of automated dynamic environment to support the needs of the development teams and also collaborating with other architects, especially those on the development floors in order to optimize the deployment and operational strategies for both existing and new types of services alike. >> Awesome, thanks for sharing that. Good, good context. Well, I mean, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that when you talk about gaming it's uptime and a high availability is critical. You know, having people, being the login you got to have the right data strategies, it can't be down, right. (laughs) It's a critical app. People are not going to enjoy it if they're not at, so I can see how scale's huge. Can you guys talk about how Ansible fits in because automation's been the theme here, you guys have been having a journey with automation. What's been your automation solution with Ansible? >> I'll go Michael. >> Yeah sure. >> So, basically back in July 2014, we started to look at Ansible to replace those commonly used, day to day, best scripts, which our ops team use to execute and which could lead to some human error. That was our main original goal of using Ansible at the time. At the time was our infrastructure looked considerably different. Definitely much, much smaller than the current private cloud footprint. And as I said, as early adopters within the operations team it was imperative for us to automate as much as possible. Those repetitive tasks, which involved the execution of various scripts and were prone to human error. Since then however, aware Ansible usage, it worked quickly. Since 2014, we went through two major infrastructure overhauls and automation using Ansible was always at the heart of each of those overhauls. In fact, our latest private cloud which is based on OpenStack is completely built from the ground up using Ansible code. So this includes the provision and co-visual machines, our entire networking stacks, so switches, routers, firewall, the SDN which OpenStack is built up on, our internal DNS system. Basically all you need to have a fully functional private cloud. At Gamesys we also have some workloads running in two different public clouds. And even in this case, we are running against the build code to set up all the required infrastructure components. Again, since we were fairly new adopters at the time of this technology, without all of those Ansible code, using the original as the case, cover now this has worked considerably and with enhancements of litigated modules polished public cloud, we've made the code look much cleaner, readable and ad approved. >> You made some great progress. Michael, you want to weigh in on this? Any thoughts on? >> Yeah, I think it's kind of, I mean, adding to what Jurgen said I think it's kind of everywhere. So, you know, you mentioned, you mentioned high availability, you mentioned kind of uptime, you know, imagine the people that operate the infra, the people who get called out and they're working 24 seven, you know, a lot of the things that they would do, the kind of run books they would use to, you know, restart something they're Ansible as well. So it's the deployment scripts, it's the kind of scripts that keep things running, it's the stuff that spins up the environments as Jurgen said. I've noticed a lot on the development side where, you know, we look at continuous delivery, people are running their own build servers. A lot of the scripting that people do, which, you know you'd imagine, might be done with say Bash, I think I've seen a lot of Ansible being used there amongst developers, I guess. Yeah, it's got an easy learning curve. It's all of those modules. A lot of the scripting around CD I think is Ansible. It plays quite nicely, you know, URI module and file modules and yeah, I think it's kind of everywhere I think. It's quite pervasive. >> Once again I said, when to get something going. Good, it's awesome. >> Yeah. Automation get great success. So it's been a big theme of Ansible Fest 2020 automation collectors, et cetera. But the question I have for you guys as customers, is how large of an IT estate were you looking to automate and where was the most imperative places to automate first? >> The most imperative items we wanted to automate first as I said, were those operational day to day tasks handled by our network operations team. Our estate is massive. So we are running our infrastructure across five different data centers around the world, thousands of virtual machines, hundreds of network components. So we, we deal with customers all around the world. So our point of presence is spread out around the world as well. And you can't really handle such kind of size without some sort of automation. And Ansible fit the bill perfectly, in my opinion. >> And so your goal is to automate the entire landscape. Are you there now? Where are you on that progress? >> I would say we're at a very advanced stage in that process. Since 2014 we've made huge strides. All of our most recent private cloud setups as I said, have been built from the ground up using Ansible. And I would say a good 90% plus of our operational tasks are handled using some kind of Ansible playbook. >> Yeah, that makes total sense. Michael you brought up the, you start early in people's, it spreads. Those are my words, but you were saying that. What kind of systems do people tend to start with at Ansible? And what's, where's that first sticky moment where it lands and expands and which teams jump on it first? Is it the developers? Is it more the IT? Take us through some of the how this all gets started and how it spreads. >> I think in the, the first time I remember using it was probably I think 2014, 2015. And it was what Jurgen mentioned. I was on the Dev side and we wanted a way to have consistency in how we deployed. We wanted to be able to deploy the exact same way, you know into earlier environments, into Dev environments as we did in staging and production. And, you know, someone kind of found Ansible and then someone in operations kind of saw it and they were happy with it and they felt comfortable using the, kind of getting up to speed. And I think it was hard to know where it really started first, but you sort of looked around and every team, every team kind of had it. So, you know, who actually started I'm not sure, but it's all over the place. >> He did. (laughs) >> Yeah. I think, you know, where people start with it first it probably depends if you're on the ops or the dev side, I think on the dev side you know, we're encouraging people to own their own deployment playbooks you know, you're responsible for the deployment of your system to production. Obviously you've got the network operations the not group sort of doing it for you, but you know, your first exposure is probably going to be writing a playbook to deploy your app or maybe it's around some build tooling, spinning up your own build environment but that's something you'll be doing. I know with Ansible and it's especially around this point of stuff because everything's in git, there's that collaboration which I never saw, obviously I saw people chatting over kind of slack in teams but in terms of being able to sort of raise PR's having developers raise PR's, having operations comment on them the same the other way around, that's been a massive change which I think has come from using Ansible. >> The collaboration piece is huge. And I think it's one of those things early on out of all the Ansible friends that I know that use it and customers and in the company product was just good. It just word of mouth, spreads it around and be like, this is workable, saves a lot of time and it's a pain point remover. Also enables some things to happen with now automation, but now it's mature. Right? So Jurgen I got to ask you in the maturation of all this automation you're talking about scale, you mentioned it. OpenStack, you guys got the private clouds, people use it for public cloud, I now see Red Hat has a angle on that. But when you think about the current modern state of the art today, you can't go anywhere without talking about Kubernetes. >> Yup. >> Kubernetes has really emerged on the scene to manage these clusters but yet it's just getting started. You have a lot of experience with Ansible and Kubernetes. Can you share your journey with Kubernetes and Ansible, and what's your reaction to that? >> Yes, so back in June 2016 Gamesys was developing a new gaming platform which was stood on now Kubernetes. Kubernetes at the time was fairly new to many at an enterprise level with only a handful of production systems online. So we were tasked to assess how we're going to bring Kubernetes into production. So we first, we identified the requirements to set up a production grade cluster and given our experience with Ansible, we embarked on a journey to automate the installation process. Again using Ansible this would ensure that all the required installation and configuration parameters as Michael mentioned, we are committing it, the code is shared with all the respective development teams for ease of collaboration and feedback. And we decided to logically divide our code into two. And we said, we're going to have an installation code in order to provide Kubernetes as a service. So this basically installs Docker onto every worker node. It installs cube lit, all the master playing components of Kubernetes installs core DNS, the container storage interface, and they full blown and cluster monitoring stack. Then we also had our configuration code which basically sets up name spaces, it labels nodes for specific uses at certain security policies according to the cluster use case and creates all the required role based access configurations. This need to split the code in two came about really with the growing adoption of Kubernetes because at the inception stage we only had the one team which had a requirement to use Kubernetes. However, with various teams getting on board each required their own flavor with their particular unique configurations. This is of course well managed quite easily to reduce of different Ansible inventories. And it's all integrated now within Ansible Tower with different unique drop templates to install and configure the Kubernetes clusters. We started as I said with just one pre-production or staging cluster in 2010 16. Today we manage 42 different Kubernetes clusters including six which are in production. >> What problems >> So, as I mentioned earlier >> I got to ask you 'cause Kubernetes certainly when it came out, I mean, that was a big fan boy of that. I was promoting Kubernetes from the beginning. I saw it as a really great opportunity to bring things together with containers. It turns out that developers love it for that reason. What, so getting your hands on is great, but as you moved it in to practice, what problems did it solve for you? >> So using Ansible, definitely solve the problem of ensuring that all of our 42 clusters across all the different data centers are running the same configuration. So they're running the same version. They're running the same security policies. They're running the same name space, according to the type. Each team has a similar deployment token. And it's very, very convenient to roll out changes and upgrades especially when all of our code has been integrated with Ansible Tower through a simple user interface click. >> How's Ansible Tower working for you? Is that going well? Ansible Tower? >> Eh, I would say so, yes. Most of our code now is integrated with Ansible Tower. It's allowed us to also share some of the tasks with a wider group of people. Within Peg we are the guardians of the production environments really. However, we share the responsibility of staging environments with the respective development teams, who primarily those environments. So as such, through the use of Ansible Tower we've managed to also securely and consistently share the same way how they can install and upgrade these clusters themselves without our involvement. >> Thank you. Michael you're giving, oh sorry go ahead. Go ahead Jurgen. >> Sorry is no no. >> Michael, you're giving a presentation breakout session at Ansible Fest. Can you give us a sneak peek >> Yup. >> Of what you're going to talk about? >> Yeah sure. So we, I said we've been using Tower for a long time. We've been using it since 2015 I think. Think we've probably made some mistakes along the way, I guess, or we've learned a lot of stuff from how we started then to now. So what it does is it follows this sort of timeline of how we started, why there was this big move to making an effort to put all of our deployment playbooks in Ansible. Why you would go to Tower over and above Ansible itself. It talks about our early interactions with quite an old version of Tower and now version two, things that we struggled with, then we saw version three came out there was loads and loads of really good stuff in version three. And it's really about kind of how we've used the new features, how it's worked out for us. It's kind of about what Gamesys have done with Tower but I think it's probably applicable to everyone and anyone that uses Tower I think will, they'll probably come across the same things, how do I scale it for multiple teams? How do I give teams the ownership to kind of own their own playbooks? How do I automate Tower itself? It talks about that. Sort of check pointing every few years about where we'd got to and what was going well and what was going less well. So, and a bit of a look forward to, what's going to come next with Tower. So we're constantly keeping up to date and we've got kind of roadmap for where we want to go. >> What's interesting about you guys is you think about look at OpenStack and then how Cloud came on the scene and Private Cloud has emerged with hybrid and obviously public, you guys are right on the wave of all this large scale stuff and your gaming app really kind of highlights that. And you've been through the paces with Ansible. So I guess my question, and you've got a lot of scar tissue and you got success to show for it too, a lot of great stuff. What advice would you give people who are now getting on the new wave, the bigger wave that's coming which is more users, more scale, more features more automation, microservices are coming around the corner. As long as I get more scale. What advice would you give someone who's coming on board with Ansible for the first time? >> I think there was, you were talking before about Kubernetes and it was so where we were, I think we'd got into containers kind of relatively early. And we were deploying Docker and we had some pretty big, kind of scary playbooks and they managed low balances and deployed Docker containers. And it was always interesting thinking how is this all going to change when Kubernetes comes along? And I think that's been really smooth. I think there's a really nice Ansible module that's just called gates. And I think it's really simple actually, it simplified a lot of the playbooks. And I think that the technologies can coexist quite happily. I don't think you have to feel like Kubernetes is going to change all of the investment you've made into Ansible. Even if you go down the route of Kubernetes operators, you can write them in Ansible. So I still think it's a very relevant tool even with Kubernetes being so kind of prevalent. >> Jurgen what's your thoughts on folks getting in now, who want to jump in and take advantage of the automation, all the cool stuff with Ansible? What advice would you give them? >> Yes, I would definitely recommend to look at their infrastructure set ups as they would look at their code. So break it down into small manageable components, start small, build your roles, make sure to build your roles properly for each of that small component. And then definitely look at Ansible Tower as a way to visualize and control the execution of your code. Make sure you're running it with the proper security policies with the proper credentials and all, they're not, of course so break anything which is at the production level. >> Michael McCarthy, Jurgen Grech two great engineers at Gamesys. Congratulations on your success and love to unpack the infrastructure and the scale you have and certainly automation, great success path. And it's going to get easier. I mean, that's what everyone's saying, it's going to get easier. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate the conversation. Thank you very much. >> Thank you, welcome >> Thank you, take care. Bye bye. >> I'm John Furrier with The Cube here in Palo Alto California. We're virtual, The Cube virtual for Ansible Fest 2020 virtual. Thank you for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience brought to you by HPE. >> Hi everybody. Welcome back. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and this is our coverage of discover 2020, the virtual experience of HPE discover. We've done many, many discoveries, as usually we're on the show floor, theCUBE has been virtualized and we talk a lot at HPE discovers, a lot of storage and server and infrastructure and networking which is great. But the conversation we're going to have now is really, we're going to be talking about helping the world solve some big problems. And I'm very excited to welcome back to theCUBE Dr. Eng Lim Goh. He's a senior vice president of and CTO for AI, at HPE. Hello, Dr. Goh. Great to see you again. >> Hello. Thank you for having us, Dave. >> You're welcome. And then our next guest is Professor Joachim Schultze, who is the Professor for Genomics, and Immunoregulation at the university of Bonn amongst other things Professor, welcome. >> Thank you all. Welcome. >> And then Prasad Shastry, is the Chief Technologist for the India Advanced Development Center at HPE. Welcome, Prasad. Great to see you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> So guys, we have a CUBE first. I don't believe we've ever had of three guests in three separate times zones. I'm in a fourth time zone. (guests chuckling) So I'm in Boston. Dr. Goh, you're in Singapore, Professor Schultze, you're in Germany and Prasad, you're in India. So, we've got four different time zones. Plus our studio in Palo Alto. Who's running this program. So we've got actually got five times zones, a CUBE first. >> Amazing. >> Very good. (Prasad chuckles) >> Such as the world we live in. So we're going to talk about some of the big problems. I mean, here's the thing we're obviously in the middle of this pandemic, we're thinking about the post isolation economy, et cetera. People compare obviously no surprise to the Spanish flu early part of last century. They talk about the great depression, but the big difference this time is technology. Technology has completely changed the way in which we've approached this pandemic. And we're going to talk about that. Dr. Goh, I want to start with you. You've done a lot of work on this topic of swarm learning. If we could, (mumbles) my limited knowledge of this is we're kind of borrowing from nature. You think about, bees looking for a hive as sort of independent agents, but somehow they come together and communicate, but tell us what do we need to know about swarm learning and how it relates to artificial intelligence and we'll get into it. >> Oh, Dave, that's a great analogy using swarm of bees. That's exactly what we do at HPE. So let's use the of here. When deploying artificial intelligence, a hospital does machine learning of the outpatient data that could be biased, due to demographics and the types of cases they see more also. Sharing patient data across different hospitals to remove this bias is limited, given privacy or even sovereignty the restrictions, right? Like for example, across countries in the EU. HPE, so I'm learning fixers this by allowing each hospital, let's still continue learning locally, but at each cycle we collect the lumped weights of the neural networks, average them and sending it back down to older hospitals. And after a few cycles of doing this, all the hospitals would have learned from each other, removing biases without having to share any private patient data. That's the key. So, the ability to allow you to learn from everybody without having to share your private patients. That's swarm learning, >> And part of the key to that privacy is blockchain, correct? I mean, you you've been too involved in blockchain and invented some things in blockchain and that's part of the privacy angle, is it not? >> Yes, yes, absolutely. There are different ways of doing this kind of distributed learning, which swarm learning is over many of the other distributed learning methods. Require you to have some central control. Right? So, Prasad, and the team and us came up together. We have a method where you would, instead of central control, use blockchain to do this coordination. So, there is no more a central control or coordinator, especially important if you want to have a truly distributed swamp type learning system. >> Yeah, no need for so-called trusted third party or adjudicator. Okay. Professor Schultze, let's go to you. You're essentially the use case of this swarm learning application. Tell us a little bit more about what you do and how you're applying this concept. >> I'm actually by training a physician, although I haven't seen patients for a very long time. I'm interested in bringing new technologies to what we call precision medicine. So, new technologies both from the laboratories, but also from computational sciences, married them. And then I basically allow precision medicine, which is a medicine that is built on new measurements, many measurements of molecular phenotypes, how we call them. So, basically that process on different levels, for example, the genome or genes that are transcribed from the genome. We have thousands of such data and we have to make sense out of this. This can only be done by computation. And as we discussed already one of the hope for the future is that the new wave of developments in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We can make more sense out of this huge data that we generate right now in medicine. And that's what we're interesting in to find out how can we leverage these new technologies to build a new diagnostics, new therapy outcome predictors. So, to know the patient benefits from a disease, from a diagnostics or a therapy or not, and that's what we are doing for the last 10 years. The most exciting thing I have been  through in the last three, four, five years is really when HPE introduced us to swarm learning. >> Okay and Prasad, you've been helping Professor Schultze, actually implements swarm learning for specific use cases that we're going to talk about COVID, but maybe describe a little bit about what you've been or your participation in this whole equation. >> Yep, thank. As Dr Eng Lim Goh, mentioned. So, we have used blockchain as a backbone to implement the decentralized network. And through that we're enabling a privacy preserved these centralized network without having any control points, as Professor explained in terms of depression medicines. So, one of the use case we are looking at he's looking at the blood transcriptomes, think of it, different hospitals having a different set of transcriptome data, which they cannot share due to the privacy regulations. And now each of those hospitals, will clean the model depending upon their local data, which is available in that hospital. And shared the learnings coming out of that training with the other hospitals. And we played to over several cycles to merge all these learnings and then finally get into a global model. So, through that we are able to kind of get into a model which provides the performance is equal of collecting all the data into a central repository and trying to do it. And we could really think of when we are doing it, them, could be multiple kinds of challenges. So, it's good to do decentralized learning. But what about if you have a non ID type of data, what about if there is a dropout in the network connections? What about if there are some of the compute nodes we just practice or probably they're not seeing sufficient amount of data. So, that's something we tried to build into the swarm learning framework. You'll handle the scenarios of having non ID data. All in a simple word we could call it as seeing having the biases. An example, one of the hospital might see EPR trying to, look at, in terms of let's say the tumors, how many number of cases and whereas the other hospital might have very less number of cases. So, if you have kind of implemented some techniques in terms of doing the merging or providing the way that different kind of weights or the tuneable parameters to overcome these set of challenges in the swarm learning. >> And Professor Schultze, you you've applied this to really try to better understand and attack the COVID pandemic, can you describe in more detail your goals there and what you've actually done and accomplished? >> Yeah. So, we have actually really done it for COVID. The reason why we really were trying to do this already now is that we have to generate it to these transcriptomes from COVID-19 patients ourselves. And we realized that the scene of the disease is so strong and so unique compared to other infectious diseases, which we looked at in some detail that we felt that the blood transcriptome would be good starting point actually to identify patients. But maybe even more important to identify those with severe diseases. So, if you can identify them early enough that'd be basically could care for those more and find particular for those treatments and therapies. And the reason why we could do that is because we also had some other test cases done before. So, we used the time wisely with large data sets that we had collected beforehand. So, use cases learned how to apply swarm learning, and we are now basically ready to test directly with COVID-19. So, this is really a step wise process, although it was extremely fast, it was still a step wise probably we're guided by data where we had much more knowledge of which was with the black leukemia. So, we had worked on that for years. We had collected many data. So, we could really simulate a Swarm learning very nicely. And based on all the experience we get and gain together with Prasad, and his team, we could quickly then also apply that knowledge to the data that are coming now from COVID-19 patients. >> So, Dr. Goh, it really comes back to how we apply machine intelligence to the data, and this is such an interesting use case. I mean, the United States, we have 50 different States with 50 different policies, different counties. We certainly have differences around the world in terms of how people are approaching this pandemic. And so the data is very rich and varied. Let's talk about that dynamic. >> Yeah. If you, for the listeners who are or viewers who are new to this, right? The workflow could be a patient comes in, you take the blood, and you send it through an analysis? DNA is made up of genes and our genes express, right? They express in two steps the first they transcribe, then they translate. But what we are analyzing is the middle step, the transcription stage. And tens of thousands of these Transcripts that are produced after the analysis of the blood. The thing is, can we find in the tens of thousands of items, right? Or biomarkers a signature that tells us, this is COVID-19 and how serious it is for this patient, right? Now, the data is enormous, right? For every patient. And then you have a collection of patients in each hospitals that have a certain demographic. And then you have also a number of hospitals around. The point is how'd you get to share all that data in order to have good training of your machine? The ACO is of course a know privacy of data, right? And as such, how do you then share that information if privacy restricts you from sharing the data? So in this case, swarm learning only shares the learnings, not the private patient data. So we hope this approach would allow all the different hospitals to come together and unite sharing the learnings removing biases so that we have high accuracy in our prediction as well at the same time, maintaining privacy. >> It's really well explained. And I would like to add at least for the European union, that this is extremely important because the lawmakers have clearly stated, and the governments that even non of these crisis conditions, they will not minimize the rules of privacy laws, their compliance to privacy laws has to stay as high as outside of the pandemic. And I think there's good reasons for that, because if you lower the bond, now, why shouldn't you lower the bar in other times as well? And I think that was a wise decision, yes. If you would see in the medical field, how difficult it is to discuss, how do we share the data fast enough? I think swarm learning is really an amazing solution to that. Yeah, because this discussion is gone basically. Now we can discuss about how we do learning together. I'd rather than discussing what would be a lengthy procedure to go towards sharing. Which is very difficult under the current privacy laws. So, I think that's why I was so excited when I learned about it, the first place with faster, we can do things that otherwise are either not possible or would take forever. And for a crisis that's key. That's absolutely key. >> And is the byproduct. It's also the fact that all the data stay where they are at the different hospitals with no movement. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Learn locally but only shared the learnings. >> Right. Very important in the EU of course, even in the United States, People are debating. What about contact tracing and using technology and cell phones, and smartphones to do that. Beside, I don't know what the situation is like in India, but nonetheless, that Dr. Goh's point about just sharing the learnings, bubbling it up, trickling just kind of metadata. If you will, back down, protects us. But at the same time, it allows us to iterate and improve the models. And so, that's a key part of this, the starting point and the conclusions that we draw from the models they're going to, and we've seen this with the pandemic, it changes daily, certainly weekly, but even daily. We continuously improve the conclusions and the models don't we. >> Absolutely, as Dr. Goh explained well. So, we could look at like they have the clinics or the testing centers, which are done in the remote places or wherever. So, we could collect those data at the time. And then if we could run it to the transcripting kind of a sequencing. And then as in, when we learn to these new samples and the new pieces all of them put kind of, how is that in the local data participate in the kind of use swarm learning, not just within the state or in a country could participate into an swarm learning globally to share all this data, which is coming up in a new way, and then also implement some kind of continuous learning to pick up the new signals or the new insight. It comes a bit new set of data and also help to immediately deploy it back into the inference or into the practice of identification. To do these, I think one of the key things which we have realized is to making it very simple. It's making it simple, to convert the machine learning models into the swarm learning, because we know that our subject matter experts who are going to develop these models on their choice of platforms and also making it simple to integrate into that complete machine learning workflow from the time of collecting a data pre processing and then doing the model training and then putting it onto inferencing and looking performance. So, we have kept that in the mind from the beginning while developing it. So, we kind of developed it as a plug able microservices kind of packed data with containers. So the whole library could be given it as a container with a kind of a decentralized management command controls, which would help to manage the whole swarm network and to start and initiate and children enrollment of new hospitals or the new nodes into the swarm network. At the same time, we also looked into the task of the data scientists and then try to make it very, very easy for them to take their existing models and convert that into the swarm learning frameworks so that they can convert or enabled they're models to participate in a decentralized learning. So, we have made it to a set callable rest APIs. And I could say that the example, which we are working with the Professor either in the case of leukemia or in the COVID kind of things. The noodle network model. So we're kind of using the 10 layer neural network things. We could convert that into the swarm model with less than 10 lines of code changes. So, that's kind of a simply three we are looking at so that it helps to make it quicker, faster and loaded the benefits. >> So, that's an exciting thing here Dr. Goh is, this is not an R and D project. This is something that you're actually, implementing in a real world, even though it's a narrow example, but there are so many other examples that I'd love to talk about, but please, you had a comment. >> Yes. The key thing here is that in addition to allowing privacy to be kept at each hospital, you also have the issue of different hospitals having day to day skewed differently. Right? For example, a demographics could be that this hospital is seeing a lot more younger patients, and other hospitals seeing a lot more older patients. Right? And then if you are doing machine learning in isolation then your machine might be better at recognizing the condition in the younger population, but not older and vice versa by using this approach of swarm learning, we then have the biases removed so that both hospitals can detect for younger and older population. All right. So, this is an important point, right? The ability to remove biases here. And you can see biases in the different hospitals because of the type of cases they see and the demographics. Now, the other point that's very important to reemphasize is what precise Professor Schultze mentioned, right? It's how we made it very easy to implement this.Right? This started out being so, for example, each hospital has their own neural network and they training their own. All you do is we come in, as Pasad mentioned, change a few lines of code in the original, machine learning model. And now you're part of the collective swarm. This is how we want to easy to implement so that we can get again, as I like to call, hospitals of the world to uniting. >> Yeah. >> Without sharing private patient data. So, let's double click on that Professor. So, tell us about sort of your team, how you're taking advantage of this Dr. Goh, just describe, sort of the simplicity, but what are the skills that you need to take advantage of this? What's your team look like? >> Yeah. So, we actually have a team that's comes from physicians to biologists, from medical experts up to computational scientists. So, we have early on invested in having these interdisciplinary research teams so that we can actually spend the whole spectrum. So, people know about the medicine they know about them the biological basics, but they also know how to implement such new technology. So, they are probably a little bit spearheading that, but this is the way to go in the future. And I see that with many institutions going this way many other groups are going into this direction because finally medicine understands that without computational sciences, without artificial intelligence and machine learning, we will not answer those questions with this large data that we're using. So, I'm here fine. But I also realize that when we entered this project, we had basically our model, we had our machine learning model from the leukemia's, and it really took almost no efforts to get this into the swarm. So, we were really ready to go in very short time, but I also would like to say, and then it goes towards the bias that is existing in medicine between different places. Dr. Goh said this very nicely. It's one aspect is the patient and so on, but also the techniques, how we do clinical essays, we're using different robots a bit. Using different automates to do the analysis. And we actually try to find out what the Swan learning is doing if we actually provide such a bias by prep itself. So, I did the following thing. We know that there's different ways of measuring these transcriptomes. And we actually simulated that two hospitals had an older technology and a third hospital had a much newer technology, which is good for understanding the biology and the diseases. But it is the new technology is prone for not being able anymore to generate data that can be used to learn and then predicting the old technology. So, there was basically, it's deteriorating, if you do take the new one and you'll make a classifier model and you try old data, it doesn't work anymore. So, that's a very hard challenge. We knew it didn't work anymore in the old way. So, we've pushed it into swarm learning and to swarm recognize that, and it didn't take care of it. It didn't care anymore because the results were even better by bringing everything together. I was astonished. I mean, it's absolutely amazing. That's although we knew about this limitations on that one hospital data, this form basically could deal with it. I think there's more to learn about these advantages. Yeah. And I'm very excited. It's not only a transcriptome that people do. I hope we can very soon do it with imaging or the DCNE has 10 sites in Germany connected to 10 university hospitals. There's a lot of imaging data, CT scans and MRIs, Rachel Grimes. And this is the next next domain in medicine that we would like to apply as well as running. Absolutely. >> Well, it's very exciting being able to bring this to the clinical world And make it in sort of an ongoing learnings. I mean, you think about, again, coming back to the pandemic, initially, we thought putting people on ventilators was the right thing to do. We learned, okay. Maybe, maybe not so much the efficacy of vaccines and other therapeutics. It's going to be really interesting to see how those play out. My understanding is that the vaccines coming out of China, or built to for speed, get to market fast, be interested in U.S. Maybe, try to build vaccines that are maybe more longterm effective. Let's see if that actually occurs some of those other biases and tests that we can do. That is a very exciting, continuous use case. Isn't it? >> Yeah, I think so. Go ahead. >> Yes. I, in fact, we have another project ongoing to use a transcriptome data and other data like metabolic and cytokines that data, all these biomarkers from the blood, right? Volunteers during a clinical trial. But the whole idea of looking at all those biomarkers, we talking tens of thousands of them, the same thing again, and then see if we can streamline it clinical trials by looking at it data and training with that data. So again, here you go. Right? We have very good that we have many vaccines on. In candidates out there right now, the next long pole in the tenth is the clinical trial. And we are working on that also by applying the same concept. Yeah. But for clinical trials. >> Right. And then Prasad, it seems to me that this is a good, an example of sort of an edge use case. Right? You've got a lot of distributed data. And I know you've spoken in the past about the edge generally, where data lives bringing moving data back to sort of the centralized model. But of course you don't want to move data if you don't have to real time AI inferencing at the edge. So, what are you thinking in terms of other other edge use cases that were there swarm learning can be applied. >> Yeah, that's a great point. We could kind of look at this both in the medical and also in the other fields, as we talked about Professor just mentioned about this radiographs and then probably, Using this with a medical image data, think of it as a scenario in the future. So, if we could have an edge note sitting next to these medical imaging systems, very close to that. And then as in when this the systems producers, the medical immediate speed could be an X-ray or a CT scan or MRI scan types of thing. The system next to that, sitting on the attached to that. From the modernity is already built with the swarm lending. It can do the inferencing. And also with the new setup data, if it looks some kind of an outlier sees the new or images are probably a new signals. It could use that new data to initiate another round up as form learning with all the involved or the other medical images across the globe. So, all this can happen without really sharing any of the raw data outside of the systems but just getting the inferencing and then trying to make all of these systems to come together and try to build a better model. >> So, the last question. Yeah. >> If I may, we got to wrap, but I mean, I first, I think we've heard about swarm learning, maybe read about it probably 30 years ago and then just ignored it and forgot about it. And now here we are today, blockchain of course, first heard about with Bitcoin and you're seeing all kinds of really interesting examples, but Dr. Goh, start with you. This is really an exciting area, and we're just getting started. Where do you see swarm learning, by let's say the end of the decade, what are the possibilities? >> Yeah. You could see this being applied in many other industries, right? So, we've spoken about life sciences, to the healthcare industry or you can't imagine the scenario of manufacturing where a decade from now you have intelligent robots that can learn from looking at across men building a product and then to replicate it, right? By just looking, listening, learning and imagine now you have multiple of these robots, all sharing their learnings across boundaries, right? Across state boundaries, across country boundaries provided you allow that without having to share what they are seeing. Right? They can share, what they have lunch learnt You see, that's the difference without having to need to share what they see and hear, they can share what they have learned across all the different robots around the world. Right? All in the community that you allow, you mentioned that time, right? That will even in manufacturing, you get intelligent robots learning from each other. >> Professor, I wonder if as a practitioner, if you could sort of lay out your vision for where you see something like this going in the future, >> I'll stay with the medical field at the moment being, although I agree, it will be in many other areas, medicine has two traditions for sure. One is learning from each other. So, that's an old tradition in medicine for thousands of years, but what's interesting and that's even more in the modern times, we have no traditional sharing data. It's just not really inherent to medicine. So, that's the mindset. So yes, learning from each other is fine, but sharing data is not so fine, but swarm learning deals with that, we can still learn from each other. We can, help each other by learning and this time by machine learning. We don't have to actually dealing with the data sharing anymore because that's that's us. So for me, it's a really perfect situation. Medicine could benefit dramatically from that because it goes along the traditions and that's very often very important to get adopted. And on top of that, what also is not seen very well in medicine is that there's a hierarchy in the sense of serious certain institutions rule others and swarm learning is exactly helping us there because it democratizes, onboarding everybody. And even if you're not sort of a small entity or a small institutional or small hospital, you could become remembering the swarm and you will become as a member important. And there is no no central institution that actually rules everything. But this democratization, I really laugh, I have to say, >> Pasad, we'll give you the final word. I mean, your job is very helping to apply these technologies to solve problems. what's your vision or for this. >> Yeah. I think Professor mentioned about one of the very key points to use saying that democratization of BI I'd like to just expand a little bit. So, it has a very profound application. So, Dr. Goh, mentioned about, the manufacturing. So, if you look at any field, it could be health science, manufacturing, autonomous vehicles and those to the democratization, and also using that a blockchain, we are kind of building a framework also to incentivize the people who own certain set of data and then bring the insight from the data into the table for doing and swarm learning. So, we could build some kind of alternative monetization framework or an incentivization framework on top of the existing fund learning stuff, which we are working on to enable the participants to bring their data or insight and then get rewarded accordingly kind of a thing. So, if you look at eventually, we could completely make dais a democratized AI, with having the complete monitorization incentivization system which is built into that. You may call the parties to seamlessly work together. >> So, I think this is just a fabulous example of we hear a lot in the media about, the tech backlash breaking up big tech but how tech has disrupted our lives. But this is a great example of tech for good and responsible tech for good. And if you think about this pandemic, if there's one thing that it's taught us is that disruptions outside of technology, pandemics or natural disasters or climate change, et cetera, are probably going to be the bigger disruptions then technology yet technology is going to help us solve those problems and address those disruptions. Gentlemen, I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE and sharing this great example and wish you best of luck in your endeavors. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having me. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is theCUBE's coverage of HPE discover 2020, the virtual experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From New York, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. >> Hello, I'm John Furrier, here in New York City, for on the ground coverage of Consensus 2018, it's part of Blockchain Week, New York. All the action's happening here, sold out show, tons of events happening in New York City. You got the New York City crowd, you got the Hollywood crowd, you got the tech crowd, all kind of coming together, entrepreneurs, the entire ecosystem. My next guest I Lars Rensing, who's the co-founder of Arc.io, its own blockchain, its own coin, CFO. Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks John for having me here. >> So your signs everywhere I see, Arc.io, you're a big sponsor, top-tier sponsor. Congratulations. >> Thanks, thanks. >> Why sponsoring this event? >> Because it's a big event, lots of commitments, lots of people will be here, lots of important people are in this space, so like this is a good area to be and show ourselves more. >> You guys have a lot of traction with your offering, your project. Can you take a minute to explain Arc, >> Yeah sure. >> What is it? What is Arc coin, what's the development plans? You have multiple moving parts to this opportunity. Take a minute to explain. >> So what we're trying to build is the interoperability between blockchains, because we see that every use case probably needs their own blockchain, otherwise, you get one single point of failure. Where you you see them clogging up, old projects watered down because we have more blockchain. So every use case should have their own blockchain really. >> And also blockchain has different developer ecosystems too. You might want to have certain developers, like JavaScript might like Hyperledger, right? >> Yeah, exactly. Once every, like that's also what we are building with our SDKs, every developer in their own language, getting into blockchain is important, because there are not that much blockchain developers at all >> What's going on now? Obviously you guys are a blockchain platform. Developers really are engaging. What's your strategy with developers? >> So far we are working on our new V2. We started from scratch because we saw some limitations in our code, so okay, we needed to start from scratch, build a new V2, and we are internal testing that right now and working on that. >> Do you guys publish your roadmap? >> We publish a roadmap but we don't give dates. (John chuckles) Because we feel like we launch when it's ready, not when we set a date. We launch when it's ready. >> What's the community like for Arc? What's it like, what's the vibe? >> Really good, really commitment, working together. We're working actively with the community because we ask feedback from them. Like, with the V2 when we publish, okay, we're going to work on this project or on a V2, we ask community what's your feedback on it, and we actively took feedback from them and made it into the, in our development. So you're the CFO and co-founder, and you got a lot of co-founders, I know you got some other co-founders. >> Yeah. >> But I just love having a CFO that's not talking speeds and feeds on the spreadsheet. You also know the technology, you're in the community. I've been saying on theCUBE many times now that a new role's emerging in these companies of Chief Economic Officer. >> Yeah. >> 'Cause the token economics and the developer, there's interplay now between the business and the technology. Can you talk about that? >> Yeah sure. When we started, we really looked into the economics, how are we going to build it, how are we going to look into our Arc, the token is economize. How are people going to use it. So we saw that if you do an infinite supply of new tokens, because people are burning money. In this space it's still, insecure to sometimes lose you best basis. So money is still burnt. So you need some inflation to keep running your tokenization. >> You guys have an ecosystem? >> Yeah. >> What is your ecosystem strategy? You have developers. >> Yeah. >> Anyone else in the ecosystem that's notable? >> So far we are working on our core code, and when we are done with that, we are looking into partnerships and expanding our ecosystem with different projects. One of them is currently is Persona, which is a personal identity on the blockchain >> Lars, how did you get into all this? I mean, did you just fall out of a boat one day and fall in the water and say, hey blockchain? Was there a project, was it open source? Did you come in for a certain... Did you have an itch you were scratching? How did you guys get into this? >> I got into this because I have always had, my background is in construction, but I always had a passion for IT, and the new developments in that. So I started reading more about blockchain, and how it works and how it can change the world. So I said, okay, this vision is so great, I want to do something with it, and work more on this than my real job, and at the time I was not really practical to do both anymore, so I said okay, I'm going to full-time with this because I love this. >> When did Arcs all come together? What year, when did it all kind of come together? >> August or September 2016 we started. >> So you guys a couple of years ago, good. So it's a couple of years under the belt. So I got to ask you the question that comes up a lot here on theCUBE in my Cube conversations is, you have people looking at the new wave. >> Yeah. >> The infrastructure's changing completely over from old e-commerce web stack to a whole new network effect, decentralized and distributed, distributed computing's still very relevant, cloud computing of the source, now you've got decentralized. People are asking themselves, is a blockchain and decentralized apps a fit for me? So the question to you is, how do you answer that question? When someone says, "Why blockchain?" what's the answer? >> Depends, because you know always, blockchain is not always the answer. I think some people are putting too much blockchain on projects were are not really needing blockchain. And so I think it really depends on the use case or if it's needed. It's a solution to a problem. It's not always the... Not always needed, in that sense. >> John: Well, it's got to be a good fit. >> Exactly. >> You can't just say I'm doing blockchain and just throw it on top of it. >> No. >> It's got to be decentralized, it's got to be some... Well it kind of depends on the token too. Can you explain the token strategy? So let's just say, okay, I have a decentralized vision, architecture, but now I have to make my economic model match my token model. So there's certain coins, you have work coins for utility, you have you know Burn-and-Mint Equilibrium. So there's different approaches. What's your vision on how that's going to play out? Will it sort itself out? Is there a certain swim lane or a certain token model that fits a certain use case? Is there any patterns emerging? >> I think it really depends on what is needed, where are you looking at, where it's used for, is it just for utility, is it for security, it's really different but... So we said like, every use case would have their own blockchain, but because if you want to do something specific for your token, you can adapt to it, and not be stuck with the project you're working with. >> So you got to think it through. >> Yeah. >> Really do some deep thinking. >> Yeah. >> It's almost like designing an architecture for an OS. I mean it's really an operating system kind of decision to the business logic. Okay, so back to the event, you're a big sponsor. What's going on here for you? Obviously you've got great visibility. You guys doing any activities, are you showing anything, what's the big focus for the show for Arc? >> Just more, being out more to the world, bring everyone more, seeing what we are building and showing us like, and educating everyone what you are building and what you are doing and that we are actively working even with the French government about Arc. >> Why is Arc exciting for your contributors? What are they saying about you? What are some of the community mem... What's the feedback? >> That we are really engaged with the community, and that the community's even here, and we are actively talking with each other and even discussing the development with them, and even brainstorming with them. So we are really engaged with the community. >> Is there a differentiator that you have on your blockchain, is it faster, is it better, is it, what's the... What's the core thing that you tell people on why they should work with you? >> We are dedicated proof of stake, but in the vision that we are not vote multiple times, which your stake, you can only vote one time, and maybe that 80% of the coins in circulation are used for voting. So, and 51% to take is almost impossible, and there's lots of decentralization that delegates even. >> What does that mean for them? What's the impact to your partners and customers and users? >> The delegates are really helping because of their... Not only they provide a service to securing the network, they're also actively promoting our... Doing meetups, just everything, it's creating a great community. >> So it's growing? >> Yeah. >> Lars, thanks for coming on. Congratulations, you're a true entrepreneur. Love the hustle, love the fact you took a bold move in the big sponsorship. That was a tough decision, no, probably easy decision? >> No, it's a tough one. >> Big money. Good luck, Lars, with Arc.io, great project, got a good success, very community focused. Check 'em out online at Arc.io. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. theCUBE.net is our URL, we're out in the open, we're in the open here on the floor at Consensus 2018, part of Blockchain Week New York. Thanks for watching, more live coverage after this short break.

San Francisco it's the Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat okay welcome back everyone this is the cube live in San Francisco for Red Hat summit 2018 I'm John for the co-host of the cube and this week for three days of wall-to-wall coverage my co-host analyst is John Tory the co-founder of check reckoning and advisory and community development services firm industry legend formerly VMware's Bentley he was at the Q in 2010 our first ever cube nine years ago John Day one wrap up let's analyze what we heard and dissect and and put Red Hat into day one in the books but you know clearly it's a red-letter day for red hat so to speak your thoughts big day for open shift I think and hybrid cloud right we just saw a lot of signs here that we'll talk about that it's real there's real enterprises here real deployments in the cloud multi-cloud on-site hybrid cloud and i think there's really no doubt about that they really brought a brought the team out and you know red hat's become a bellwether relative to the tech industry because if you look at what they do there's so many irons on the fires but more the most important is that they have huge customer base in the enterprise which they've earned over a decades of work being the open source renegade to the open source darling and Tier one citizen they got a huge install basin they got to manage this so they can't just throw you know spaghetti at the wall they gotta have big solutions they're very technical company very humble but they do make some good tech bets absolutely we'll be talking with the folks from core OS tomorrow they have a couple of other action you know things we'll be talking about a lot of interesting partnerships the the most you know the thing here Linux is real and it's is the 20-year growth and that it's real in the enterprise and I mean the top line think the top line slowed and John is is is kubernetes than the gnu/linux for the cloud and I got to say there's some reality there yeah it's there's no doubt about it I mean then I've got my notes here just my summary for the day is on that point the new wave is here okay the glue layer that kubernetes and containers provide on top of say Linux in this case OpenShift a you know alternative past layer just a few years ago becomes the centerpiece of red hats you know architecture really providing some amazing benefits so I think what's clear is that this new shift this new wave is massive and we've heard on the cube multiple references to tcp/ip HTTP these are seminal moments where there's a massive inflection point where the games just radically changes for the better wealth creation happens startups boom new brands emerged that we've never heard of that just come out of the woodwork entrepreneurial activity hits an all-time high and they all these things are coming yeah I said John I was really impressed if we talk to a number of folks who are involved with technologies that some people might call legacy right we the Java programmers the IBM WebSphere folks they've been you you look at these technologies solid proven tested but yet still over here and adapted for today right and they talked about how they're fitting into openshift how they're fitting into modern application development and you're not leaving those people behind they're really here and you know the old joke going back to say Microsoft when Steve Ballmer was the CEO hell will freeze over when Linux isn't in in Microsoft ecosystem look today no further than what's going on in their developer Commerce called Microsoft build where Linux is the centerpiece of their open-source strategy and Microsoft has transformed themselves into a total open-source world so you know now you got Oracle with giving up Java II calling a Jakarta essentially bringing Java into an the Eclipse community huge move it's a kind of a nuance point but that's another signal of the shifts going on out in the open where communities aren't just yesterday's open source model a new generation of open source actors are coming in a new model I think the CNC F is showing it the Linux Foundation proves that you can have commercialization downstream with open source projects as that catalyst point as a big deal and I think that is happening at a new new level and it's super exciting to see yeah I mean open source is the new normal sure that that works it's in the enterprise but that doesn't mean that open source disappears it actually means that open source and communities and companies coming together to drive innovation actually gets more and more important I kind of thought well you know it's open source well everybody does open source but actually the the dynamics we're seeing of these both large companies partnering with small companies foundations like you talked about the Linux cutlasses various parts the Linux Foundation cloud boundary foundation etc right are really making a big impact well we had earlier on assistant general counsel David Levine and bringing about open source I think one key thing that's notable is this next generation of open source wave comes is the business model of open source and operationalizing it in not just server development lifecycle but in the business operation so for example spending resources on managing proprietary products with that have open source components separate from the community is a resource that you don't have to spend anymore if you just contribute everything to open source that energy can go away so I think open source projects and the product monetization component not new concepts is now highlighted as a bonafide competitive advantage across the company not just proven but like operationally sound legally verified certified and I think also you have to look at the distribution of open source versus the operation and management of open source we see a lot of management managed kubernetes coming out and in fact we didn't talk about today Microsoft big announcement here at the show Microsoft is on Azure is running a managed open ship not not kubernetes they already have kubernetes they're running a managed open ship another way of adding value to an open open source platforms to date directly to the IT operator honestly do you think these kind of deals would happen if you go back four years three years ago oh no way as you're running an open shift absolutely I mean were you crazy the you know the kingdom is turned upside down absolutely this is a notable point I want to get your reaction is because I see this absolutely as validation to the new wave being here with kubernetes containers as a de facto rallying point an inflection point big deals are happening IBM and Red Hat big deal we just talked about them with the players here two bellwether saying we're getting behind containers and two bays in a big way from that relationship essentially it changes the game literally overnight for IBM changes the game for Red Hat I think a little bit more for IBM than Red Hat already gets a ton of benefit but IBM instantly gets a cloud strategy that has a real scalable product market to it Arvind the the head of research laid that out and IBM now can go and compete with major players on deals with the private cloud more deals are coming absolutely this is the beginning now that everyone snapped into place is saying okay kubernetes and containers we now understand this the rallying cry a de facto standard I think a formation is going to happen in the next six to 12 months of major major major players now I mean we are in a not one size does not fit all world John so I mean we will continue to see healthy ecosystems I mean mesosphere and DT cos is still out there Dockers still out there right you will see very functional communities and and functioning application platforms and cloud platforms but you got to say the momentum is here I mean look at amine docker mace those fears look at when things like this happened this is my opinion so I'm just gonna say it out there when you have de facto standards that happen like this it's an opportunity to differentiate so I think what's gonna happen is docker meso sphere and others including the legacy guys like IBM and in others they have to differentiate their products they have to compete software companies so I think docker I think is come tonight at docker con but my opinion looking at from the outside is I think Dockers realized looking we can't make money from containers kubernetes is happening we're a great standard in that let's be a software company let's differentiate around kubernetes so this is just more pressure or more call-to-action to deliver good software hey it's never been of somebody said it's never been a better time to be an IT and IT infrastructure right this is a you think that the tools we have available to us super-powerful another key point I want to get your reaction on with kubernetes and containers this kind of de facto standardization is breathing new life into good initiatives and legacy projects so you think about OpenStack okay OpenStack gets a nice segmented approach is now clear with a where the swim lanes are you're an app developer you go over here and if you are a network and infrastructure guy you're going here but middleware a from talk to the Red Hat guys here we talk to IBM those legacy and apps can put a container around it and don't have to be thrown away and take their natural course now I think it's gonna be a three line through this holy a second life is for legacy and stuff and then to cloud is and it's in second inning because now you have the enablement for cloud your reaction the enablement of cloud Ibn iBM has cloud and then the market shares of nm who you believe they're not in that they're in the top three but they're not double digits according to synergy research and he bought us a little bit higher but still if you compare public cloud they're small they look at IBM's and tire and small base and saying if they have a specialty cloud that can be assembled quit Nellie yeah and scaled and maybe instantly successfully overnight yeah I think a few years ago you know there was a lot different always a few years back it always looks confusing right a few years back we were still arguing public cloud private cloud as private cloud ed is what is a true private cloud is that even valuable I still see people on Twitter making fun of everything anybody who's not 100% into the full public cloud which means they must not have talked to you know a lot of IT folks who have to business to run today so I think you're saying it's a it's a it's a multivalent world multi-cloud there's going to be differentiated clouds there's going to be operational clouds there's gonna be financial clouds and just it's it seems clear that you know from the perspective of right now here in San Francisco and 2018 that that you know the purpose of public-private hybrid seems pretty clear just like the purpose of like I said we're gonna in two weeks we'll be an openstack summit I mean the purpose of that seems pretty clear it's it's funny it's like I had this argument and each Assateague he thinks everything should go the public cloud goes eaten has one of the public clouds but he's kind of right and I and I and we talked about this way I with him I said if everything is running cloud operation we're talking about cloud ops we're talking about how its managed how its deployed code bases across the board if everything is clarified from an OP raishin standpoint the Dearing on Prem and cloud and IOT edge is there's no difference stuffs moving around so you almost treats a data center as an edge network so now it's sexually all cloud in my mind so then and also you do have to keep in mind time time horizons right anybody who has to do work the today this quarter right has to keep in mind what's what what portfolio of business deeds and tools do I have right now versus what it's gonna look like in a few years all right so I want to get your thoughts on your walk away from today I'll start my walk away from day one was talking some of the practitioners Macquarie Bank and Amadeus to me they're a tell signed the canary in the coalmine what's happening horizontally scalable synchronous infrastructure the new model is here now we're seeing them saying things like it's a streaming world not just Kafka for streaming data streaming services levels of granularity that at workers traded with containers and kubernetes up and down the stack to me architects who think that way will have a preferred advantage over everybody else that to me was like okay we're seeing it play out I guess I totally agree right the future isn't evenly distributed my takeaway though is there's certainly a future here and the people we talked to today are doing real-world enterprise scale multi-cloud micro services and modern architectures incorporating their legacy applications and components and that and they're just doing it and they're not even breaking a sweat so I think IT has really changed ok day one coverage continues day two tomorrow we have three days of wall-to-wall coverage day two and then finally day three Thursday here in San Francisco this is the cubes live coverage go to the cube dotnet to check out all the videos they're gonna be going up as soon as they are done live here and check out all the cube alumni and check out Silicon angle comm for all news coverage then of course you got tech reckoning Jon's company's the co-founder of for John Fourier and John Shroyer that's day one in the books thanks for watching see you tomorrow

>> Hello and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. We're here in Sundance 2018 at the Intel Tech Lounge for a panel discussion with experts on the topic of The New Creative. We believe a new creative renaissance is coming in application development and also artistry. The role of craft and the role of technology and software coming together at the intersection. You're seeing results in the gaming industry. Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. A new wave is coming and it's really inspiring, but also there's a few thought leaders at the front end of this big wave setting the trends and they're here with us in this special panel for The New Creative. Here with us is Brooks Browne, Global Director of VR at Starbreeze Studios, a lot to share there, welcome to the panel. Lisa Watt, VR Marketing Strategist at Intel, Intel powering a lot of these VR games here. And Winslow Porter, co-founder and director of The New Reality Company. Many submissions at Sundance. Not this year, but a ton of experience talk about the role of Sundance and artistry. And then we have Gary Radburn who's a director of commercial VR and AR from media within Dell, Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to this panel. Lisa, I want to start off with you at Intel. Obviously the Tech Lounge here, phenomenal location on Main Street in Sundance. Really drawing a massive crowd. Yesterday it was packed. This is a new generation here and you're seeing a younger demographic. You're seeing savvier consumers. They love tech, but interesting Sundance is turning into kind of an artistry tech show and the game is changing, your thoughts on this new creative. >> Yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I've been here for, this is my third year coming back with VR experiences. And it's really just been incredible to see. Sundance has been on the leading edge of exploring new technologies for a long time and I think this is, I feel like you know this feels like the break out year really. I mean, it's been successful the last few years, but something about this year feels a little bit different. And I think maybe it's the people are getting more familiar with the technology. I think the artists are getting more comfortable with how to push the boundaries. And then we certainly are getting a lot out of seeing what they're doing and how we can improve our products in the future. >> We were talking yesterday, Lisa, about the dynamic at Sundance. And you were mentioning that you see a few trends popping out. What is the most important story this year for the folks who couldn't make it, who might be watching this video that you see at Sundance? Obviously it's a great day today, it's snowing, it's a white day, it's beautiful powder, greatest snow on Earth. But there's some trends that are emerging. We had a march this morning, the Women's March. You're seeing interesting signals. What's your view? >> I think there's a lot less desire to put up with subpar experiences. I mean I think everyone is really starting to push the boundaries, I mean, we saw a lot of 360 video which we love for a linear narrative. But they're really breaking out and really exploring what does it mean to have autonomy especially in the virtual reality experiences, a lot more social is coming to the forefront. And then a lot more exploration of haptics and the new ways of extending into more 4D effects, etc. So I think it's very very exciting. We're really excited to see all the new innovations. >> Winslow, I want to ask you, if you can comment, you've been an active participant in the community with submissions here at Sundance. This year you're kind of chilling out, hanging out. You've been on the front lines, what is your take on the vibe? What's the sentiment out there? Because you're seeing the wave coming, we're feeling it. It feels early. I don't know how early it is, and the impact to people doing great creative work. What's that take? >> Well yeah, it's kind of like VR years are like dog years, you know. Like a lot can happen in a month in the VR space. So I had a piece here in 2014 called Clouds. It was an interactive documentary about Creative Code, but that was back when there was only two other VR pieces. It's interesting to see how the landscape has changed. Because CCP Games had a piece there. An early version of E Valkyrie. And unfortunately in the last three months, they had to close their VR wing. So, and then Chris Milk also had a Lincoln piece with Beck. Which was a multi camera 360, actually it was a flash video that they recorded to the DK1. And so that was, seeing that everyone was, saw the potential. The technology was still pretty rudimentary or crude even, we should say. Before any tracking cameras. But every year people learned from previous Sundances and other festivals. And we're seeing that Sundance kind of raises the bar every year. It's nice that it's in January because then there's all these other festivals that sort of follow through with either similar content, newer versions of content that's here, or people have just sort of learned from what is here. >> So I got to ask you. You know, obviously Sundance is known for pushing the boundaries. You see a lot of creative range. You see a lot of different stuff. And also you mentioned the VR. We've seen some failures, you've seen some successes, but that's growth. This market has to have some failures. Failures create opportunities to folks who are reiterating in that. What are some of the things that you can point to that are a positive? Things that have happened whether they're failures and/or successes, that folks can learn from? >> Well, I think that this year there's a lot more social VR. We're connecting people. Even though they're in the same space, they're able to be in this new virtual world together. There's something amazing about being able to interact with people in real life. But as soon as you have sort of a hyper reality where people are able to be experiencing a Sufi ritual together. Things that you wouldn't normally... That they're not possible in the real world. And also, I think that there's issues with lines too. Obviously every year, but the more that we can have larger experiences with multiple people, the more people we can get through. And then more impact we can make on the audience. It's really... We were in claim jumper last year. And we could only get one person in every 10 minutes. And that makes things pretty tricky. >> And what are you doing at Sundance this year? You've obviously got some stuff going on with some of the work you've done. What's your focus? >> So yeah we have a company called New Reality Company where we produce Giant and Tree. It's part of a trilogy where Breathe is going to be the third part. We're going to be completing that by the end of this year. And right now, I would say the best thing about Sundance is the projects, but also the people. Being able to come here, check in, meet new people, see partners that we've been working with in the past. Also new collaborations, everywhere you turn, there's amazing possibilities abound. >> I want to talk about empathy and social. I mentioned social's interesting in these trends. I want to go to Brooks Brown, who's got some really interesting work with Starbreeze and the Hero project. You know, being a pioneer, you've got to take a few arrows in your back, you've got to blow peoples' minds. You're doing some pretty amazing work. You're in the front lines as well. What's the experience that you're seeing? Talk about your project and its impact. >> Well for us, we set out with our partner's ink stories, Navid Khonsari, a wonderful creative, and his entire team to try to create that intensely personal experience kind of moving the opposite direction of these very much social things. The goal, ultimately being to try to put a person inside of an event rather than a game style situation where you have objective A, B, or C. Or a film that's a very, very hyper linear narrative. What is that sort of middle ground that VR itself has as unique medium? So we built out our entire piece. Deep 4D effects, everything is actually physically built out so you have that tactility as you walk around. Things react to you. We have smell, temperature, air movement, the audio provided by our partners at DTS is exceptional. And the goal is ultimately to see if we put you in a situation... I'm doing my best not to talk about what that situation is. It's pretty important to that. But to watch people react. And the core concept is would you be a hero? All over the world, every day people are going through horrific stuff. We're fortunate because we're the kind of people who, in order to experience, say a tragedy in Syria, we're fortunate that we have to go to Park City, Utah and go in virtual reality to experience something that is tragic, real, and deeply emotional. And so our goal is to put people through that and come out of it changed. Traumatized actually. So that way you have a little bit more empathy into the real world into the actual experiences they went through. >> And what's the goal? This is interesting because most of the some stuff you see, the sizzle out there is look at the beautiful vistas and the beaches and the peaks and you can almost be there. Now you're taking a different approach of putting people in situations that probe some emotional responses. >> Yeah. It's a big deal to us. The way Navid like to put it, and I'm going to steal this from him, is you see a great deal of people prototyping on hardware and all of these things, and it's great cause we need that. We need to be able to stand on the shoulders of those giants to be able to do these things. But you see very few people really prototyping what is the concept of story as per VR? We've been doing, at Starbreeze, we've been doing location based for some time now and I've been getting thousands upon thousands of pitches. And whenever you get a pitch, you can pretty much identify, oh you come from a film background, you come from a games background. There's very few people who come down that middle line and go, well this is what VR is supposed to be. This is that interesting thing that makes it very deeply unique. >> What's the confluence and what's the trend in your mind as this changes? Cause you mentioned that gamers have affinity towards VR. We were talking about that before we came on the panel. You know, pump someone in mainstream USA or around the world who does email, does work, may not be there, you're seeing this confluence. How is that culture shifting? How do you see that? Cause you're bringing a whole nother dimension. >> We're trying to go back to a little bit, something about this Sundance being a little bit different. I think in general in VR, you're seeing this sort of shift from a few years ago it was all potentiality. And I think a lot of us, the projects were great, but a lot of us who work in VR were like oh I see what they're trying to do. And people like my dad would be like I don't. I don't see what they're trying to do. But that is shifting. And you're seeing a larger shift into that actuality where we're not quite there yet where we can talk about the experiences every day Americans are going to have. What is the real ready player one that we're actually going to have existing. We're not there yet, but we're much closer every time. And we're starting to see a lot of these things that are pushing towards that. Final question before I go to some of the speeds and feeds questions I want to get with Intel and Dell on is what is the biggest impact that you're seeing with your project and VR in general that will have the most important consequences for societal impact? >> Well, we were fortunate yesterday we had a number of people come through Hero. And a number of them simply actually couldn't handle it. Had to come out. We had to pull people out. The moment we took the headset off, they were, tears were streaming down their face. There's a level of emotional impact VR is extremely able to cut through. It's not that you're playing a character. It's not that you're in a separate world. You are you inside of that space. And that is a dangerous but very promising ability of VR. >> Winslow, could you take a stab at that, I'd like to get your reaction to that because people are trying to figure out the societal impact in a positive way and potentially negative. >> Yeah I mean, so with that, whenever you traumatize somebody else or have the ability to possibly re-traumatize somebody... In Giant, we made sure that we gave them a trigger warning because yeah these things can be intensely intimate or personal for somebody who already has that sort of baggage with them or could be living in a similar experience. In Giant, we witnessed the last moments of a family. As they're convincing their daughter that the approaching bomb blast is a giant that actually wants to play with her. And so we put haptics in the chair so the audience was also surprised. But we let them know that it was going to be taking place in a conflict zone. So if that was something that they didn't want to participate in, that they could opt out. But again, like we didn't know... We had to go and buy tissues like right off the bat because people were crying in the headset. And that's kind of a... It's an interesting problem to have for the sake of what are sort of the rules around that? But also it makes it more difficult to get people through the experience in a timely fashion as well. But yeah, but we're seeing that as things become more real then there's also a chance to possibly impact people. It's the... >> So it's social for you? You see it as a social impact? >> Well, I mean if everyone's experiencing the same thing that can be social, but again if it's a one on one experience, it's sort of like up to the filmmaker to make sure that they have the scruples that they are playing by the rules. Cause there's right now most every piece of content is being released through Oculus, Steam, or Viveport. But there will be... It's heavily regulated right now, but as soon as there's other means of distributing the content, it could take a different sort of face. >> Certainly some exciting things to grab on, great stuff. I want to get to the commercial angle. Then we're going to talk more about the craft and the role of artistry in the creating side of it. Gary, you're the commercial VR expert at Dell. You're commercializing this. You're making the faster machines. We want faster everything. I mean everyone... Anyone who's in VR knows that all the graphics cards. They know the speeds and feeds. They're totally hardware nerds. What's going on? Where's the action? >> Okay, that's such a large question. I mean we've had some great stuff here that I also want to comment on as well. But inside the commercial side, then yeah everybody wants bigger, stronger, better, faster. And to Winslow's comment about the dog years, that really puts the pressure on us to continue that innovation and working with partners like Intel to get those faster processors in there. Get faster graphics cards in there so that we can get people more emotionally bought in. We can do better textures, we can get more immersion inside the content itself. We're working a lot around VR in terms of opening peoples' eyes for societal impact. So VR for good for instance. Where we're taking people to far flung corners of the Earth. We work with Nat Geo explorer Mike Libecki to show the plight of polar bears in Greenland and how they're gradually becoming extinct for an edutainment and a learning tool. The boundaries are really being pushed in entertainment and film. That's always been the case. Consumer has always really pushed that technology. Commercial's always been a bit of a lagger. They want stability in what's going on. But the creation that's going on here is absolutely fantastic. It's taken what is essentially a prosumer headset and then taking it into that commercial world and lit it up. 360 video, its very inception, people are using it for training inside of their businesses and so that's now going out into businesses now. We're starting to see advances in 360 video with more compute power needed. Where, to the point about immersion and getting people emotionally bought in. Then you can start doing volumetric, getting them in there. And then we're also working with people like Dr. Skip Rizzo who was on our panel yesterday where we're starting to go into, okay, we can treat PTSD. Help people with autism, through the medium of VR. So again, that buys into... >> These are disruptive use cases that are legit? >> Yeah. >> These are big time, market moving, helping people... >> Absolutely. And that where it becomes really, really powerful. Yes, we want our companies to embrace it. Companies are embracing it for training. But when you start seeing the healthcare implications and people crying inside of headsets. That's effecting you deeply, emotionally. If you can make that for good, and change somebody's trigger points inside of PTSD, and the autism side of helping somebody in interview techniques to be able to be more self sufficient, it's absolutely awesome. >> This is the new creative. So what's your take on the new creative? What's your definition? Cause you're talking about a big range of use cases beyond just film making and digital artistry. >> Yeah, absolutely so the new creative is like with all the great work that's here, people are looking at film and entertainment. Now the world really is the oyster for all the creatives out there. People are clamoring out for modelers, artists, story tellers, story experiencers to be able to use that inside their commercial environments to make their businesses more effective. But they're not going to have a 360 video production company inside of their commercial organization. And it's then leveraging all of the creative here and all of the great stuff here. Which is really going to help the whole world a lot. >> Lisa, I want to get your thoughts on this cause you guys at Intel here at the Tech Lounge have a variety of demos, but there's a range of pro and entry level tools that can get someone up and running quickly to pro. And so there's a creative range not only just for digital artistry, but also business we're hearing. So what's the... Cause AI's involved in a lot of this too though. It's not just AI, it's a lot of these things. What's the Intel take on this. >> Well I think it's really an interesting time for us at Intel because one of the things that we have that I think probably nobody else has. We have this amazing slate of products that really cover the end to end process. Both from the creation side of the house all the way to the consumption side. And we talk a lot about our processors. We worked on an amazing project, a couple of huge scenes inside of the Sansar environment. Which is a great tool for really democratizing the creation of spaces. It's a cloud hosted service but it utilizes this amazing client-server architecture. We created four huge spaces in a matter of eight weeks to launch at CES. And some of the technologies that Gary was referring to just in pure processing power like two generations old processors were taking three hours to render just a small portion of a model where our newest generation Core i9s with our opting technology took that time to 15 minutes. So when we think about what we can do now, and those technologies are going to be available in even portable laptop form factors. We've got the piece where we were working here SPHERES. They were able to actually make some corrections and some tweaks basically immediately without having to send them off to some render farm. They were able to do those things. And I know Winslow has talked about that as well. What does it mean to you to be able to react real time. And be able to do your creative craft where you are and then be able to share that so readily. And then you know... I just think that's kind of an amazing equalizer. It's really democratizing the creation process. >> Okay the next question that begs for everyone to address is where are we in this progression? Early? What work needs to get done? Where are we holding back? Is it speeds and feeds? Is it the software? Is it the routines, libraries, art? Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't it going faster? Or is it going faster? >> I would, and I'm sure the team would agree here, I would say that one of the key things is the creator tools themselves, right. They are still somewhat cumbersome. We were talking to another filmmaker. He was like I can't even, I have to play the whole piece from the beginning, I can't just go in and edit, you know change control, being able to collaborate on these pieces with other people. I mean, if you can collaborate in a real world space, you should be able to also collaborate in VR and have change control and all those sorts of things that are necessary to the iteration of a project. So we're trying to work with our software partners. They're all doing a really great job of trying to iterate that, but it's going to take some time. I mean I think that's probably the bigger thing that's holding everything back. We're going to be right there with the processing power and the other technologies that we bring to the table. OEM partners are going to be right there with the best devices. I really think it's something we've all got to push for as far as those tools getting better. >> Brooks, comment on anything? You're in the... >> So for me, the thing that's holding back VR in general is actually the art form itself. One of the great challenges, if you look back, at say the history of film... We're at Sundance, so it's probably fairly apropo. Very early on in the early movies, aside from penny arcade machines that you'd actually stare at, they were 10 minute almost like plays that people would go to almost a playhouse and they'd watch this thing. There were not cuts, there were no angles. It was a single wide shot. Great Train Robbery came around and there was this crazy thing they did called an edit. Where they spliced film together. And if you go back and you read, and they did these dolly shots. People will have no idea what they're watching. There's no way people will be able to follow that. Like people were not happy with it at the time. Now it's stuff that children do on their iMacs at home. They do iMacs all the time, they do it on their iPhones, on their Android devices. These are normal languages of film that we have. VR doesn't have that yet. And there's not a great deal of effort being made in that direction. There's people here doing that. So I'm kind of speaking in the middle of the group, but outside of these people, there's only a handful who are really doing that and it's a significant challenge. When people who are the mainstream consumer put on a VR headset, it needs to be more than just a magic trick where they go oh that's cool. And that tends to be the vast majority of experiences. So what is the thing that is going to make someone go oh I get why we have VR as a medium. And we're not there yet. We're in the direction, but that's >> So you mentioned earlier the point where you can tell if someone's from film or gaming or whatever when you talk to them about VR. Who is the future VR developer? Is it a filmmaker? Is it a gamer? Is it a digital artist? What is this evolving? >> It's a kid in his basement who no one knows and is screwing around with it and is going to do something that everyone thinks is stupid. Like, it's going to be that. Basically every major leap in gaming is kind of the same thing. It's when we understand how ludonarrative dissonance works inside of telling how people move around a space. It's about how we do Dutch angle suddenly in film. And these things get invented. It's going to be some kid who's just screwing around who doesn't have the baggage of the language of film. A lot of the people I know in VR have been fortunate to work in film, in games and interactive or web dev. So you come from a lot of places but someone's going to come along who has none of that baggage. And they're going to be... >> Well you guys are pioneers and you're doing it. So for the first person out there that's in their basement, that inspirational soundbite or comment. How can you guys talk to that person or that group? Because this is the democratization, this is what's happening. It's not the gatekeepers. It's real creatives out there that could come from anywhere. YouTube generation, Twitch generation, gaming. What would you say to that person to motivate them and to give them that passion? >> Well it's only going to get easier, faster, cheaper, all these things are happening. But again, yeah I totally agree with what Brooks said. It's really about the culture and about educating the audience and getting them up to speed. There are some VR experiences that as soon as they put on the headset, like somebody who's never done it before, immediately will take it off cause they'll get nauseated. And then there's people, like kids who are like jet fighters. They've seen everything. You could throw like a 30 frames per second experience at them and that doesn't even phase them. They can be, all of a sudden their worlds are changing and they're like bring it because they're ready for that. So I think it's sort of about raising the bar for what the audience is comfortable with, familiar with, educating the community. There's a lot of tools right now, you know with Unreal and Unity that allow people who have very little... They don't need to know C# or C++, they can get started in a lot of like visual. What you see is what you get. Being able to drag things into a virtual room. And the windows headsets that are out. They refer to them as mixed reality, but just even having the ability to flip up the screen and transition from the virtual world to the real world in milliseconds, it allows you to be able to create things more at the speed of thought instead of coming up with an idea, coding it, and making sure it works, and then eventually putting on the headset. The sooner that we can actually be ideating inside this virtual environment is when things will get really interesting. >> So the next question is to take to the next level is what's the playbook? How does someone get involved? How does someone ingratiate into a community? If I'm an artist, I want to get, and I'm proficient with technology, or maybe not, how do they get involved? Is it community driven? Is it social? You guys mentioned seeing social's a big trend here. How do people get involved? What's the track? >> Well yeah you don't just need to go to a grad school or... There's a lot of programs out there that are popping up. Almost every single major state school has like an interactive art program now. And that wasn't the case like two or three years ago. So we're seeing that that's a big shift in the culture. But again, VR is still... It's expensive and it's you know, like VR, I refer to it's in the stage of it's almost like in the neo geo phase, maybe a little before that. But it's the really expensive thing that your friend's neighbor has. Or his older brother or something. You get to play it a little bit, you're like that's great but there's no way in hell I'm going to... You know, I can't afford that or like that just doesn't really work with my lifestyle right now so it needs to incorporate itself into our everyday, our habits. And it needs to be something that... If we're all doing it then it makes sense for us to do it together not just somebody in their basement doing it by themselves. >> Yeah feel free to comment, this is a good topic. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So what we're doing is sort of about democratization and accessibility. So for people to get into the then they're going to need a rig, they're going to need a headset and previously it's actually been quite expensive to actually take that first plunge into it. So now by democratizing and bringing price points down, it makes it more accessible. That helps content creators because there's now more of an audience that can now consume that content. And the people that can then play with the medium and consume it now have a better reason to do it. So we're working on that. We're also working on the education pieces like Key. It's actually going out there to schools and actually letting them experience VR and play with VR. Because it is a whole new different medium. We've seen film directors and filmmakers go into the VR space and things that worked in 2D film like fast pans and whatever else so the points have already been made don't really translate into VR without somebody losing their lunch. So it is going to be somebody who's coming up who hasn't got the baggage of previous skill sets inside of 2D doing it inside of VR. So we're going to see that. And in terms of the technology, everybody's wanting things to progress. That shows the level of excitement out there. And everybody wants to get into it. Everybody wants to see it go further. And I'm reminded of the mobile phone. Mobile phone, 30 years ago? Two suitcases for batteries, a large brick on the ear and a car antennae. Okay, so where we are now, if you had a time machine and you went back in time to talk to the inventor of the mobile phone, well, I'd be a lot richer because I know sports results and all, but that aside, but you go back and talk to them and you said do you know in 30 years time, everybody is going to be carrying that device? Everybody's going to be dependent on that device? They're going to get social anxiety and separation anxiety if they lose it. And they will probably laugh in your face. >> Alright so since you brought up the phone analogy, since I love that example, are we in the Blackberry moment of VR and no one yet has built the iPhone? Because the iPhone was the seminal moment for smartphones. And you see what happened there. Is VR needing that kind of break? Or is it there? >> I think we're on the cusp. Where we are at the moment with technology, we've had the headsets, which I say have been more in the consumer space, they've been designed to hit a certain price point. We had CES the other week where we've had advancements now in the resolutions of headset that are now coming out. One of the issues was well I can't see texts, I can't read texts. So from a working environment, if you're actually using tools that you would normally use on a 2D screen, you can now translate that and read that text. However, in terms of the tools that people use, why are we trying to put 2D screens into a VR headset? We've got a whole new way of interacting with data. We've got a whole new way of doing things that are going to be more intuitive than the mouse and keyboard interaction that we're used to. Why just translate that. Let's push that envelope and those are the developments that we're pushing our partners and our ISVs to really embrace. >> So it's an evoution. >> It's absolutely an evolution. >> You guys have any thoughts on that comment. That we have that inflection point, are we hitting that, will we see it soon, is it here? >> Well I think it's a very interesting symbiotic relationship between multiple factors. So you know, we hear the cost factor, we hear the technology factor, then we have the content factor. You know I saw an interesting evolution at CES we had created this virtual booth experience so that you could still come to the CES Intel booth without actually having to be there. And I met a guy in there and I was like hey where are you? He goes I've been in here like all week. (laughter) And I was like oh yeah, where do you live? He goes oh I'm in my basement in Nebraska. But he had just, this was Friday when I met him. He'd been in there all week, but in 2D mode. And he had gone out the night before and bought a headset just so he could come back and go in VR mode. And I think, yes, all these factors have to kind of line up, but I do think that content, those experiences that are going to keep people coming back for more. Like these guys literally kept coming back to our booth. Right, to see... >> Content gain. >> To see who was there. And to them at that point, it wasn't really a barrier of cost. It was like there is something that I want to consume therefore I am going to go get what I need to consume it. And I use the analogy of HDTV, right. When we kind of moved over that hump where there was enough content people didn't really care how much that television cost. >> Sports was great. Sports really highlighted HD. >> Yeah. >> But this is a good point. This is a good question to ask. Brooks, I'd love to get your thoughts. Content drives experiences, amazing experiences, but we're building the scaffolding of everything at the same time. So where are we, what's your opinion? >> So here on the Starbreeze side, we're fortunate because we have our own headset. We have the StarVR headset we've been building with Acer. 5K all of that stuff and we're upgrading it over the next year. Our focus has been, we skipped the consumer market very much. We went straight to location based and enterprise. And the reason we did that is because there's a promise of VR at a basic, I don't want to say technology stand point, but from an experience perspective, when it comes to that resolution, when it comes to that field of view, when it comes to these things people expect. Average consumers who go to a movie and they see these giant screens. They want that translated. They don't have the understanding like we do of well, LED panels are actually a pain in the ass to build and it takes a little bit and they flip at their own speeds. Time to photon is not a thing my dad will ever see in his life. But there's a reality that people have a need for that. And it is extremely expensive. It's again the reason we went straight to LBE. But for us it's about marrying the two and consistently trying to match what's happening. So when we're talking about, as I mentioned earlier the technology and how we're standing on the shoulders of giants very very quickly, someone who's doing technology is going to see what we're doing content wise and go well I can do that better technology wise. And then we're just going to keep leap frogging. And it's very similar to the phone in the same way that we're not at the final stage of the phone. Like we're at our stage of the phone and no doubt in 30 years people will laugh at us for carrying anything. The same way we laugh about the briefcases and the giant batteries in the cars we had to pull with us. So it's one of those things that's continually transitional. And VR's in an odd, amazing place. >> Well you know, it was a lot of waves that we've all seen. You mentioned the mobile phone, that's a good one to point to. It feels like the PC revolution to me because the same culture of entrepreneurs and pioneers come from a bunch of different backgrounds. So I'd like to get Brooks perspective and Winslow's perspective on this because I think there's an entrepreneurial culture out there right now that's just emerging very fast. It's not like your classic entrepreneur software developer. So in this movement, in this wave, the entrepreneur is the filmmaker, it could be the kid in the basement, could be the gamer. Those entrepreneurs are trying to find a path. >> Yeah, it's a weird mix. VR is at this odd point where not only is it the people who are wanting to be cutting edge in terms of content or technology, but also that first mover strategy from the business side of things. And so everyone wants to be those guys who are charging ahead because in reality, if you look at the financials around all of this, VR is one of those things that you don't want to finance. It's not nearly as safe as say Marvel Avengers or the next Call of Duty. >> You've got to be, you've got to hustle. >> Yeah you've got to hustle. You've got to make... >> What's your advice? >> Start doing it. That's really it. It's the same advice I used to give to game makers when people would be like well I want to learn how to make games. It's like go to YouTube, download a thing and go do it. There's literally no reason why you can't. >> Are there meetups or like the Homebrew Computer Club that spawned the Mac. >> There are, there are infinite groups of VR people who are more than happy to give you all the terrible and wonderful opinions that come with that. There's no shortage of people. There's no shortage and it's an amazingly helpful group. Because everyone wants someone else to figure out something so they can steal that and then figure out something else. >> Winslow, your advice to entrepreneurs out there that are young and/or 14 to 50, what should they do? Jump right in obviously is a good one. >> Well yeah, experiment, break things, that's really the only way to learn. I would say watch as much VR as you can because sometimes bad VR is the best VR. Because you can learn don't do that. And if you learn, if you put all that together, you can really... It's like this lexicon that you can really follow. Also, I think we... As people in tech, we kind of get obsessed with things like resolution, frame rate, and these are very important, but it's also good to remember, or at least for me, I watch some of the best experiences from storytelling when I was a kid, eight years old on a 12 inch screen that was 640 by 480. You know, like scan lines on the VHS. But for me the story still resonated and it's important to think of story first, but obviously it's a dance between the story and the technology. They kind of have to both organically work together. And if they don't, one thing in the story that doesn't work because the tech isn't supporting it, can throw you out of the experience. >> Other concern entrepreneurs might have is financing. How do I get someone to help me build it? And then doing relationships. Finding relationships that could... One plus one equals more than two, right. So how do you? >> You have to get really creative when it comes to funding right now. Unless you're doing location based, which also requires a certain amount of investment to get it up to a bar where you want to be showing it to people with all the haptic effects when it's heat, smell, vibration, stuff like that. You know, it's not cheap to develop. But as far as like working with film foundations, we're fortunate enough to be sponsored by Fledgling Fund and Chicken and Egg. But we also were able to get partnerships with people like Intel and NVidia. And also work with people who come from a traditional film background. There's not one way to successfully fund a project. There's a million. And that's why it's interesting that the technology's innovating, but also the market place is as well. >> One of the things I want to ask is as any new industry gets building, is cultures form early. DNA forms in the entrepreneurs, in the pioneers. And one of the big hottest topics in the creative world is inclusion and diversity. So what's the makeup of the culture of this new generation? Because democratization means everyone can participate, everyone's involved. What's the state of the community vis a vis diversity, inclusion, and the role of the actors in the community. >> Well I think it's important to understand that VR has a profound ability to place you in somebody else's shoes. The trick though is to make sure that those feel like they're your shoes. But I think that we're learning a lot more about story telling techniques and we're able to empower people that their voices you know were previously not heard. The tricky thing is being able to yeah, educate all different groups of people how to use the technology, but once they're enabled and empowered to do it, it's amazing what you can experience inside the headset. >> So VR can be an enabler for education, outreach, a variety of things? >> Yes, I mean the term empathy, empathy machine gets thrown around a lot. You could do a drinking game around it. For panels when people are talking about it. But it's important to know there is a truth to that. And it's, yeah the perspective shift from looking at a screen, a 16 by 9 screen where you can look away, then dissolving the screen and becoming that person. Becoming the director, the actor, the camera person, the editor. When you're in the first person perspective, there's so much more... It feels more personal and that's a really interesting angle that we're going to continue to explore. >> So you could walk in someone's shoes, literally? >> Yes, you literally can. You just have to make sure that you got a... The tracking system's proper or else you'll look like there's... It can be come a horror movie pretty quickly if your leg is behind your head. >> Lisa, your thoughts on this, I know it's important to you. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's fascinating because I've been in tech for a really long time. And seen many, many trends. I mean the first job I had at Intel I was a PC tech and as you can imagine as a female, I think there was one other tech female in the department at the time and I would get funny looks when I would show up with my bag. They were like hi can I help you? I'm like I'm not here to deliver coffee, I'm here to fix your computer, you know. So I've seen a lot of trends and it's super exciting to me to see so much diversity cross culture, cross country, I mean we're having... We had guys come in from all over the world. From even war torn, they've escaped their country just several years ago and they're coming and they're bringing all that creativity to the market. We're seeing very, very strong female contingent from the filmmaker perspective so it's this wonderful, wonderful just primordial soup of people that I think are growing their own voice and their own power. They're breaking molds as far as how you actually get content produced. Distribution is kind of crazy right now. I mean, how do you get it distributed? There's like so many different ways. But all of those things are so important to the evolutionary and biological process of this. Yes, we need to let it go and sometimes we're frustrated. We're like where's the standards? Where's the one ring to rule them all? Where there's not going to be one. And it's good for us that there's not right now. It's frustrating from a business perspective sometimes. You're like, I can't peanut butter myself around all of these places, but I think it's just a very unique time where so many people are... The technology is accessible, that means that so many creators can now bring their fresh voice to this space and it's just going to be fascinating to continue to watch. >> That's awesome. Well two more questions and I'll give you some time to think about the last one which is your perspective on Sundance, what's happening this year, your personal view of what you think's happening, what might happen during this year. But the question I have for you now is to go down the line. We'll start with Brooks here, and talk about the coolest thing that you're involved in right now. >> It actually has to be Hero. We're debuting it here at Sundance. We've been working on it and not talking about it for about nine months. And it's been very difficult. Again it's sacrosanct to the experience that you don't know literally what you're getting in to. And the emotional response has been essentially our goal, trying to find out how far can we take that. You actually being in a space, moving around, having that interactivity, doing what you would do. But it being your story and how deeply we can absolutely effect a human being. And again, watching people come out, it's one of those things, I've been doing game development, I've worked on films, I've done all kinds of stuff. And you usually get a chance when someone experiences something you've made, you walk up to them and you go so what'd you think? And that's not at all what we can do with ours. >> How has it impacted you, that reaction? >> Well, I personally suffer significant PTSD and I've had some traumas in my life. And so it's been incredibly powerful to be able to share these things with people. Share this emotion in a deeply profound, yet amazingly personal way. Which I'm amazingly fortunate to be able to be a part of it. >> Alright thanks for sharing. Coolest thing that's going on with you right now here at Sundance. >> Just the fact that I'm here at all. I mean, it's incredible right? Personally was able to be an advisor on the SPHERES project that is premiering here with Eliza McNitt. She's someone who was an Intel Science Fair winner back in high school and kind of came back to us. So just to see the evolution of an artist really from the beginning to the point where they've been able to come here to Sundance. I'm also very passionate about the work that we're doing with Sansar. I kind of consider myself one of the chief storytellers at Intel around Virtual reality and this new move into social where people are like well what's this game. I'm like, it's not a game. It's you are the game, you are the interactivity. You become the person that makes the space interesting. We're just really setting the scene for you. And there's so many... You know there's a lot of different people kind of chasing this be togetherness. But what we've been able to produce there. And just to be able to explore some of my own personal ideas has just been such a gift. Then to be working with guys like these on the panels and see what they're doing and just be in touch is really just an exciting time. >> John: Awesome. >> Probably what, other than the people on the projects, or the projects that are being shown here, we're working on our new project, which we would have loved to premiere here, but we did... Basically when you get in, you have two months to create a piece, so you have a demo and you have to finish it, so we're taking a little bit more time. This one's going to be about a year development cycle. It's called Breathe where we take you from where Giant left off, where, in Giant, the ceiling collapses on a family. They're in front of you. In this experience, we use a breathing apparatus to basically bring yourself back to life. And then you realize you're trapped under rubble and you remove the... We actually want to have physical objects on top of you that are going to be tracked. So you're moving rubble from you and you realize that you're a six year old girl. You're the survivor from Giant. And you get to witness what it's like to be a future refugee sort of in different key moments of her life that use breath. Whether it's a flirtatious moment, blowing a dandelion, seeing your own breath in snow as a drone shows you a message that your parents pre-recorded on your 18th birthday. This is all in the future, obviously, but every time you walk around an object, you actually grow 10 to 15 years older in the experience. As you get older, the world becomes smaller. And then we witness what's like for her last breath. From being six years old to being 90 years old. But it's a profound personal experience. >> John: That sounds cool, cool. Gary, coolest thing that you're involved in right now at Sundance. >> Wow. I could say it's all cool that would be a bit trite. They say if you enjoy what you do, is it really a job? And I'm lucky enough to be in that position. Because working with all these guys here and like people around the place, they're doing such great things that every day I wake up and I'm astounded of where the industry's going. In terms of what we're doing here at Sundance, then we're really starting to push those envelopes as well. I've been lucky enough to be involved with Dunkirk and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Like last year, so some great pieces there. And moving out into this year, we've got some other developments which I can't mention at this point, but we're showing things like AR and VR mashup. So we haven't talked much about augmented reality here. It's an evolutionary, it's not a replacement. Both can be used and we've started to really start to blend those two technologies now. So you can still see the outside world. Just touching on the commercial side, and health care's very big for me. That's where I think the really cool stuff is happening. Entertainment is great and that's really pushing the envelope and allowing us to then take it for the good of human kind. >> It happens everywhere, it's not just entertainment. >> Yeah absolutely. You start looking at MRI scans inside of VR or AR. Talking a patient through it so they can actually see exactly what you're talking about. You're now no longer pointing at flat things on a screen. You're now actually taking them through it. If you're using AR, you can actually judge the responses of the patient as for how they're reacting to the news. And effectively, inside of the VR, and what's really cool for me is seeing people's reaction to that content and to the entertainment content. >> That's awesome. Okay final question. This is a little bit of self serving because I'd like you to help me do my job at SiliconANGLE. If you were a reporter and you were going to report the most important stories happening this year at Sundance or really kind of what's really happening versus what's kind of being billed to be happening here. What's the story? What is the story this year at Sundance 2018 in your personal perspective? We'll go down the line and share your observations. >> Well, mine here, I'm a Sundance newbie. This is my first year of being here. I'm absolutely astounded by the community spirit that's around. I go to a lot of technical trade shows and technical presentations. People coming here with a willingness to learn. Wanting to learn from other people. It's been touched on already. It's the pool of knowledge that's available inside of Sundance that everybody that comes here can actually tap into to create better content, to learn not what to do as well as learn what to do. And I just think that's brilliant because in that community spirit, that's really going to help enable this industry quickly. >> John: Winslow, you've got some experience, what's your thoughts? >> Obviously, this Intel house, just a little plug for you Lisa. (laughter) Tech Lounge. We got that? Okay good. I mean, yeah, the people that's here. Every year we come here and see where the high water mark is. All these people are... Some of these teams first started with two people and then they grew to six and then by the end of it, there's 100 people working around the clock, pulling all-nighters to be able to give the latest and greatest of what's available with these current tools. So it's amazing because the work itself doesn't really mean anything until people get to experience it. So that's nice that they make a big splash. The people here are very attentive to it. It's a very nice audience and this will continue the momentum for future festivals throughout the year, but also will excite people that have never done VR before. People who have never been to Sundance before. We're seeing that there's a lot of new people. And that will continue to influence many years to come. >> John: So you think VR is the top story here being told? >> As far as like just to generalize, I would say last year kind of the big VR year. This is kind of the big AR year. Next year's going to be the AI year. Then after that we're going to start putting them all together. >> John: Great, great feedback. >> I think it's just exciting for Intel just to be back here. I think Intel hasn't been here in quite some time. Dell coming in here probably one of the breakout years for us to come back and really talk to creators what we're doing from the Intel Studios all the way through to the stuff you can take home and do at home. And I think coming in, we're coming back here with a purpose really, not just to be here to be seen. We're really here with real things and want to have real conversations on how tech can enable what people are doing. Not just from a brand perspective, but from a real hands on point of view. >> John: Yeah, some great demos too, phenomenal tech. >> Really just, yeah everything from the AI stuff we have to the social to the great new pieces that have been submitted here like we mentioned with SPHERES. So I think, yeah, it doesn't feel gratuitous to me you know that Dell or Intel is here this year. We've really come with a purpose. >> You guys are moving the needle, it's really awesome. We need more horsepower. >> Brooks, your thoughts on Sundance this year. Observation, the vibe, what would you tell your friend back home when you get back? >> If, for me, I think it's almost the non-story. It's like the opposite of a story. It's just the deep integration of VR into the normal Sundance flow I think has been interesting. Some people have been here for a few years. And back in the day when it was one or two, it was a lot of oh, you do VR? What's that then? Whereas now, you see a lot more people who are crossing over. Going to see documentaries, then they come to see a VR piece and it's just a part of the normal flow. And the team at New Frontier has done exceptional work to kind of make sure that they have this ridiculous high level of broad content for all kinds of people. All kinds of experiences, all high end things. But it's not that VR's here. Oh good, we have a VR section. It's a lot more of an integrated set up. And it's been really encouraging to see. >> Well you guys have been great. It's been very inspirational. Great information. You guys are reimagining the future and building it at the same time so entrepreneurially and also with content and technology. So thanks so much for sharing on this panel The New Creative. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage of Sundance 2018 here at the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube, covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017, brought to you by Red Hat, the Linux Foundation, and The Cube's ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone, we are here live in Austin, Texas for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2017. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage, I'm John Furrier, the co-founder, of SilconANGLE Media, analyst here with SilconANGLE Media, next guest, Justin Garrison, co-author of the Cloud Native Infrastructure book. How about us wrap up day one with two days of live coverage, Justin, welcome to The Cube. >> Justin: Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Stu, day one wrap-up, guys what are you seeing? Justin, what's your perspective? >> There are a ton of announcements today, it was kind of crazy. It's amazing being part of the CNCF community and everything, and everything happens in the open, but then there's so much other stuff in the ecosystem that just happens and gets announced. >> I mean, real accelerated growth, if you look at KubeCon, this is the second year doing the event, last year's kind of an inaugural event, the first year before that was just an idea, side break out kind of thing going on, just forming, and then just took off. Obviously containers with DockerCon, and Container Ecosystem, kina floating that boat up. Kubernetes, I mean those tracks are huge, the agenda looks like, it's like a university of geeks here, I mean, this has been ramped up pretty fast. What's your take on that? >> I mean, I was at KubeCon last year, and about a thousand people was a great little environment, and a lot of stuff that was still emerging, and being discovered, and now it's everyone is in the middle of it, and trying to learn as fast as they can to pick up these projects, and see how to actually make this stuff production-ready, and how to actually use it. And not just in the environments that they used to be, they're rewriting all of their environments, it's no longer a here's how I run my app the old way, and a VM statically, it's I you know, we're beyond running containers, and they realize that's not the end goal anymore. >> Justin, when we were talking to you before the segment here, and you're like oh, I've been working on Kubeternes for like two years more and everything, and it's funny in the career. It's like oh, well two years, in some ways it's a long time, in CloudNative time it's a long time, in career wise, it's a rather short time, give us a little bit about what you've been seeing, you know, what's interesting, you mentioned there's a whole lot of announcements, I mean, obviously new projects spinning up, new, new releases, so you know, if you could give us a little bit of a historical view. >> Yeah, I mean from last year, it was really hard to get a cluster. It was something that was really, like you had to know what you were doing to make Kubernetes run, and make it highly available and production-ready. And now, club dividers give you a button, you click it, how big do you want it, how much do you want to auto-scale it, and it's all about the application, and bringing business value to whoever's running it to say, like, my application runs here, and now there's more involved with Istio and these network proxies that give you more resiliency in the claw providers, because people don't run their own infrastructures much anymore, it's all in a cloud, and they don't care about the underlying infrastructure, they care about their apps. >> Yeah, so you tell them about CloudNative infrastructure, so one of the things we're teasing out here is, you know, Kubernetes, all this CloudNative stuff will make it easy to be able to do the application, but you know, infrastructure, it matters. I love Dan Cone's line in the Keynote this morning is you know, it's exciting times for boring infrastructure, so you know, talk about that layer, what's important about infrastructure, and bring us in a little bit, you know, why you wrote the book with Kris Nova, and you know, how that fit. >> Really wanted to write it to help people not make a lot of mistakes to help them kind of level up and get a head start in building the infrastructure in the cloud, cause it's not something that they own anymore, it's not this server that they rack, and they take care of it for years. It's something that comes and goes, it's quick, you know, you have to design for failure and resiliency, and that layer of infrastructure isn't important because you don't run it anymore, but it is important to build a platform on top of that that your applications are still resilient. There's no more scheduled down-times in the cloud, like websites aren't gone, you know, Sundays at midnight. >> Yeah, don't you have to be pretty brave, cause you don't own it anymore, but if something goes wrong, you know, you're the one whose job's on the line. >> You own the failure. >> Justin, talk about the feedback that you might have for the industry. Stu and I were looking at the growth, we certainly love the excitement, but they're still running as fast as they can, they're pedaling as fast as they can, they're trying to introduce all these services. You see some good news here, some new releases coming out, some key services for monitoring, tracing, and whatnot, but what do they need to do better, in your opinion as a practitioner, someone who's out in the trenches, what's the critical analysis, in a good way, constructive criticism, what needs to happen? >> Right, moving forward, I mean there was this, you know, since configuration management, everyone said infrastructure is code, and really we need to level up to be, Kris actually coined this to me in the book, was infrastructure is software. Where it is a piece of software that's running that you declare that has a two-way relationship. It's not get repository that statically defines things, it's a declarative thing that mutates the infrastructure and talks back to the user so that things can auto-scale, and have same defaults and you don't have to do every last little piece of it, but the declarative nature and policy-based roles in all the infrastructure you're building, and everything around your application, and with your application need to be defined and controlled by software and not people anymore. >> But what needs to happen to make that, obviously STN, software-defined data center, we've seen a lot of that go on at the network level's door right now, are they there, what's the progress meter on that? How would you peg the progress of the evolution, making that happen, cause that's really what people want, I mean at the end of the day, that's what Lambda is for Amazon, that's what serverless is, that's what virtual Cubelets are for. >> Yeah, and it's funny, cause you can run Lambda in a very non-CloudNative way, I mean you can have, you know, individual deploying code to Lambda, and not checked in to get anywhere, you can do all those things, you can go against the CloudNative model very easily, and so it's interesting just seeing that evolution as well, of people actually adopting how Netflix has been doing it for a long time. >> Yeah, we should call it SoftwareNative. (laughter) I mean, but this is kind of what we're getting at, I mean, people on the buyer side are looking and saying oh, I get it, I see the new wave coming, I want to get out there, I want to ride this, and they want to kind of vet out whose pretender, who's the player, how should businesses evaluate the pretenders and the players in your mind? >> Moving to the cloud should be, you know, and easy sell. Like people building data centers anymore, you have to have immense scale to really care about those things, and really get any sort of benefit. If you can beat Amazon and Google and Microsoft at the pricing game, then you're still not ahead because you still have all the people managed. They have so many thousands of people that are doing this stuff that you can't keep up. And so, I mean, just adopting one of those clouds, and not worrying about the vendor lock-in. But yes, Kubernetes brings a lot that you can move from cloud to cloud, but really it's about moving to a cloud provider that provides what your application needs, and at the rate of innovation that you need, and if you can match those two things, if you can stay innovation-matched, I mean Amazon is probably going to pull ahead of you, because they're doing this as their job. >> If I hear you correctly, what I'm hearing is that look for people that are players, that are constantly introducing more innovative services? >> If that's what you need, if that's what you need. If you do not need a high rate of innovation, if you have a lot of policy, or a lot of rules and regulations around your industry, then you probably will get lost in Amazon, and they'll move ahead, they'll move too far for you. And so, you need to find what matches for your industry, and your application. >> Justin, 4,000 people here, over 4,000 people here, for those that didn't come, what are they missing, what's exciting you the most, you know, is it the hallway track, is it, you know, some of the special interest groups, you know, what are you excited that you've seen so far, and are looking forward to seeing? >> Really missing out, I just love the community. I mean, every talk is recorded, if you really care, like, go watch them on YouTube, they're great, like every one of these things is fantastic, but engaging with people, meeting face to face, cause a lot of people are online. Like I mean, on Twitter, or on social networks, like thousands of people here, aren't, and you get to meet those people and find out what their struggles are and what they're working on, and then learn from them, either you know, where they're headed, or where they were before. >> I mean, you can meet the people who write the code, and they're going to give you the straight scoop, or tell you they don't know it, it's real authentic. >> Yeah, any things that you're hearing, kind of what's the buzz, what's the pain point, you know, that you're hearing from the community so far? >> A lot of people still aren't in cloud, they're still doing it themselves, standing up a cluster on pram, you know, has struggles, Kubernetes cluster that is. I mean, you can't really adopt some of these patterns, until you have an API that declares all of your infrastructure, and that's still hard for people. And OpenStack was going to bring some of that stuff, and sometimes it did, sometimes it didn't, but really it's about people and processes, and getting those things right, and being able to change the culture of your environment, and for your applications, that's what's important for the business, and that's where you can learn from people face-to-face and actually talk to them, and not just read a blog post about it, and just hear a one-way tell me what you did, I need feedback, and I need this feedback from whoever's doing it to say, well, why did you do that, and that's really important in the community to learn. >> Well, one of the preferential I was looking for, it's one thing to say, you know, some of these CloudNative companies, like, you see in Netflix, you see in Lyft, you know these are companies where, you know, digital is their business. What about, you know, more traditional businesses, you know, are they able to make that change, is it too challenging for them, you know, what are you seeing? >> The people and the culture's the hardest thing to change, it always is. And if they can change the people, the Keynote today, Netflix was talking about the tools influence your culture, and if you can influence your culture positively, and do that intentionally to actually change the people, then absolutely, they totally can pivot and make that change, but again, do they need to? I mean, if there's other government restrictions, or something else that like, they could move too fast and cause other problems for their industry. >> What's a practitioner dream scenario right now out there that you see, cause you made a good point, sometimes you might want to have more services, sometimes you might want to pull back so it kind of depends on the perspective, but generally speaking, CloudNative Kubernetes, offers an opportunity, what's the nirvana, what's the ideal use case for practitioners these days, what's the key things that need to be rolled out or on the table should be taken advantage of? >> You mean as far as technology goes, or? >> Whether it's technology, whether it's mindset, culture, people, personnel, package, ops. >> I mean, if we can change the people mindset of how they do things, how they deploy applications, and how they manage those applications, the technology would fall into place, I believe, because the people would drive towards this way of working, and then they would build those tools just naturally. A lot of times, like with Kubernetes, Google was in that mindset, and so they did that, they had that culture, and now they're trying to share that with everyone else, and then everyone else has to learn from the tool, rather than the people building. >> Did you see the Netflix talk on the Keynote was culture and tech, and I think that's a real good point, because if you think about your other point, if you got a lot of compliance issues, you might not want to go fast, you really want to move fast, or you like a, you know, fast dot com or web services company, you might want to compete on value and services. Know your culture and hire right. >> Know what your benefit is of your application, and what environment it plays in, and then you can, from there, figure out. >> Well that's been a struggle for the DevOps world is they're taking a square and trying to put it in a round hole, you know what I'm saying? >> Everyone want to move fast, but should everyone move fast, I don't know. It depends. >> Yeah, alright Justin, well thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Biggest surprise in this whole Kubernetes movement for you, just in terms of shock factor, or blew you away, did you fall out of your chair, share some color, personal perspective. >> The community is just humongous now. I mean, joining it a couple years ago, it was pretty small, and things were really difficult, and now I play with, you know, clusters in Amazon and Google and Microsoft and just one quick button, I play with it for a few hours and I throw it away, and I got a bill for like four cents, I was like that was amazing, like this would take so long, you know, a couple years ago, and the growth of the community around that, just to be able to say like this is easy now, let's level up what we're doing and working on, and figuring out where the benefit is. >> When we were talking earlier in The Cube, and we've been saying for a couple months, this is going to bring back more time for the developers, to bring craftsmanship back to the development process, bringing artistry and artisan kind of, real software development, not like UX stuff, but like really solution-driven. >> Focus on the business application, where's the application in the business struggle and don't worry about the infrastructure. >> Justin Garrison, co-author of the Cloud Native Infrastructure book, it's on the web, check it out, thanks for coming on The Cube, thanks for sharing your perspective. Day one wrap- up here in Austin Texas for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching, see you tomorrow for day two coverage. Thanks for watching.

(loud click) >> I'm Stu Miniman and this theCUBE and we're here at The Winslow Technology Group Dell EMC User Group. Happen to have with us Rick Gouin, who is the CTO of WTG. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about, as CTO of really a channel partner for a lot of technology vendors, we talked to Scott earlier about the solutions that you help put together, what's your role inside the organization, how long you've been there, what's your background? >> Sure, so I started at the Winslow Technology Group four years ago, at this event, actually. Prior to joining Winslow, I was at Dell, as a Enterprise Technologist. Came to Dell via Compellent, and prior to that, I was on the customer side, a technology director at a large insurance company down in Hartford. >> Okay, so obviously, Winslow Technology Group started very much with Compellent, has gone through the maturations of Compellent into Dell, Dell now into EMC, so, tell us a little bit about your role, what kind of things do you look at to help pick what technologies and expansion that you go into with the organization. >> So, obviously, Dell has a very broad portfolio and there's just not enough technology expertise to know everything about everything, so we have to spend a good amount of time keeping an eye on the market and sort of focusing in our resources on what we want to gain expertise in and what we want to really bring to our customers. So it's a lot about where we feel like these different market spaces are moving and we deal with a relatively specific segment in that our customers fall into a couple of different profiles and we really have that in mind when we're looking at the various technologies. We're really trying to picture this group of people that's here, and what do we think they would get excited about? >> So we're in an interesting state of the industry today. On the one hand, there's no shortage of challenges for storage. Storage is always one of those things that we need expertise, we need to fix things, yet on the other hand, companies want simplicity. They don't want to think about it, I'm deploying hyper-converged or cloud environments where storage is in there, so how do you look at that especially with your background and WTG's background, as it fits in the entire picture? >> Yeah, so coming from Compellent myself, and coming from a strong Compellent reseller, we're obviously a little bit biased when it comes to storage. With that said, as we continue to talk to different customers and they come to these inflection points where they've got to make a decision about refreshing a traditional storage environment versus taking a look at a hyper-converged environment, we're finding more and more customers are willing to take that chance on a hyper-converged environment and like you mentioned, a lot of it comes down to the simplicity. A lot of it comes down to a specific skill set that they see you have to have for a storage environment that you might be able to not worry about anymore when you go to a hyper-converge environment. >> Storage has always been not only complicated at the individual level, but you look at a company like Dell and they've got a portfolio, and it's because no one solution can fit everywhere. There's price points, there's scalability, there's featured functionality. How do you look at where we are in the market today, how do you help simplify that portfolio beyond just kind of HCI? >> Yep, and you've really pinpointed I think a big part of the value we provide to our end customers, cause you see this huge, broad portfolio, lot of different things that do the same thing, and so we really try to guide that decision-making process in a couple of different ways. We think that, like you mentioned, there's a different fit, all of these different technologies have their place, no one is right for everyone, and there's room for all of them. We don't think hyper-converge is going to completely replace midrange storage, we think that there's room for both, different customers are going to want different things. A lot of the decision making comes down to one, where are they in their life cycle of the gear they have? Switching platforms, say, to hyper-converge requires replacing perhaps some storage, perhaps some servers. Where are they in their depreciation cycle? Are those things least assets? All those different things really come into play, so it's not always a purely technical discussion. There's a lot of different things that factor in. But we feel like, every time it makes sense to look at all the options, and a vendor like us, like partnered with Dell, we can provide a solution in the traditional infrastructure, that you're used to using today. We can give you the pricing for it, and what the implementation would look like, and then we can give you the same thing on a hyper-converge infrastructure. Tell you how the implementation would go, let you compare those costs, talk about the pros and the cons, and then you can make a really informed decision. And we feel like, without taking a look at both, and doing some actual metrics-based analysis of the two options, you're not going to be able to make an informed decision. >> Rick, over the last decade or so, virtualization has really been one of those waves that's driven a lot of the technology discussions we have. It feels like, well, of course Vmware and virtualization are by no means going away. The new wave of cloud in all of its forms, there's containerization, all of these new things kind of bringing on this next generation. What's exciting you and what as a CTO do you look at and say, "Oh, boy. Here we go again! "We're going to have to go fix all these problems "like we did last time?" >> So two things you said really jumped out at me. First, I hear from a lot of my customers a push to get everything into the cloud. At the same time, I'm starting to see the other end of that curve with things coming back in. I think a lot of our customers are finding a sweet spot in hybrid cloud solutions, whether we've got an on-prem component coupled with some cloud storage, or some off-prem components. We think that's the sweet spot, and that really allows us to take advantage of the key...really, the key thing for cloud infrastructures is that elasticity, right? It allows us to put our elastic workloads out there, and then once they settle down into a predictable sort of state, we can bring them back on-prem, where we really want them, anyway. So, we think, we see a lot of our customers settling down into a hybrid sort of scenario. Luckily, whether it's Dell Nutanix, VxRail, they've all got great solutions for on-prem coupled with off-prem stuff. The other thing that's really interesting to me is these alternate hypervisors. I love seeing the adoption of options, I think we've seen a marketplace that has been dominated by an 800 pound gorilla for a long time, and it's a great, super powerful portfolio, basically ubiquitous. I love seeing a couple different options that can bring some actual different business value and making customers think about, maybe I don't just go status quo here, here's an opportunity to maybe do something a little different. >> Rick, really appreciate you sharing with us everything going on in your environment and we'll be back with more coverage here from the WTG Dell EMC User Group event. You're watching theCUBE. (loud click)

>> Voiceover: Live from New Orleans, it's The Cube. Covering VeeamOn 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. (funky electronic theme music) >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract a signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with Stu Miniman. Ratmir Timashev is here, he's the co-founder of Veeam and he's joined by Peter McKay who's the co-CEO and president. Gentleman, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Welcome to the Cube, congratulations on the great keynote this morning. >> Great to see you, Dave. >> Seemed like you guys were having fun out there. >> Yeah it is, it's a lot of fun, it's a great, great time. >> So Ratmir, I want to start with you. A lot of people in our audience may not be familiar with Veeam. We've been sort of sharing with them, the rapid ascendancy of the company. But come, go back ten years, why did you start, you and your co-founder, start the company? >> Yeah, the company's ten years old. Last year we celebrated ten years, it was started in 2006 by me and my partner who is the technology side. He's my technology genius. I'm on the sales and marketing. So we started the company with the simple idea to build the new version, or new generation data protection for virtualized environments. VMware was getting hot back in 2005, 2006, 2007. It kept more and more penetration within enterprise. Back then the cloud was like, 10 or 20 percent penetrated, but we saw that, it's going to be 90 eventually, so we wanted to ride this big wave, technology revolution wave. And now I think we, looking back ten years I think we're in a very similar spot with the cloud. Cloud is where visualization was 10 years ago so and we want to ride this new wave or the cloud wave the same way exactly that we rode the VM wave, visualization and hyper-V wave. >> You know that's interesting, I was explaining to the audience this morning that your ascendancy coincided with Vmware and what happened was we consolidated resources and the one resource that was so precious was for backup and everybody had to re architect their backup and you guys were the, were an answer and obviously one of the more popular answers. Now we're into this cloud era and you see a similar opportunity, you're messaging sort of focuses on that and there's an emergent strategy that you're >> Yeah. >> putting forth. >> I mean I think everybody is moving into a multi cloud environment, right? Where there's going to be, their data's going to be all over the place, they're going to be on premise or manage service providers or in AWS or Azure and so and for us we need to be able to make it available and always on and so that's our focus is to make it very easy for our customers to store their data and run their applications and always be available no matter what the environment is. On premise, off, no matter what the infrastructure is. >> So we talk about digital transformation a lot on The Cube, every event we go to, it's digital transformation, you guys had a little bit different spin on that, digital life, always on, availability, capabilities. You're having fun with green. (laughs) >> Ratmir: Yeah. >> Peter: Oh yeah. >> Green is, >> We always have fun with green. >> Green is go. >> As you can tell. >> A lot of things you can do with green is go, color of money >> Celtics, right? Boston Celtics. >> Boston Celtics. Number one pick. >> Veeam green team. Veeam green machine. >> Veeam green machine, love it. So give us your perspective on this whole digital life. What is that all about? >> Yeah so our message in the last 10 years has evolved. Originally when we started our message was very simple. We're number one VMware backup. That message really resonated and we did deliver on the purpose of number one VMware backup. I remember first time when we introduce that concept, our competitors look at us like who knows them? But then we did in fact become the number one VMware backup, so And our message has evolved over time so from technical message to, that is focused on our core customer which is IT prone. The person that really understands the modern technologies, responsible for the modern data center. Understands the modern storage cloud technologies and visualization technologies. But that message has evolved as we are growing, becoming bigger, and we're going more into a enterprise so now solution become bigger and broader. That covers cloud. So we had to evolve our message so right now our message is, has become more consumer centric, more emotional, touching our digital life. Because we believe that that's at the end of the day, that's what we do. We enable our customers, our businesses to provide this seamless digital life experience for their users. That's what we do. >> So I love it when a successful company brings in a new leader. Because as opposed to things are bad and they have to make a change, we saw this last week, I mentioned I was at ServiceNow Knowledge, Frank Slootman, incredibly successful CEO, stepped aside, brought in a new, and part of that transition was about reaching a new constituency, so my question to you, Peter, is traditionally the Veeam audience is hardcore operational people. Your messaging is much higher level in the organization so how are you dealing with that sort of bifurcated personas, who are you targeting in this sort of new messaging? >> So as the, in the early days of Veeam it started in kind of that SMB market and kind of expanded into commercial and now very focused on the enterprise and so a lot of the enterprise are kind of working through this transition. The digital life and the new, staying relevant to the new users that are coming online and so we've found that our message needed to evolve as well and it needs to be, lines in business now are getting more involved in some of the decision making so our message wasn't where it needed to be in terms of evolving it for that enterprise customer and one that we think will foster that digital transformation for a lot of our companies customers and so we view this was the right time, especially with version 10, version 9.5 which was very successful and version 10 which really expands our enterprise capability but also we needed to, it broadens a lot of the applications down to things that we could do in an enterprise and we needed that message to also be kind of that enterprise in a broad strategic message. >> Peter, when I talk to customers these days, it's a very fragmented market out there, I think, as Ratmir said you rode that VMware wave, now customers adopting lots of sass, they're doing multiple public clouds, they're trying to figure out how they modernize their private cloud. Before it was VMware, therefore I need backup. Now it's how much does their choice on where they put their data and their application drive to you, how much do you have kind of the brand Veeam out there to kind of pull into those other environments and do customers turn to you for help in sorting out that kind of multi cloud world? >> Yeah actually I was talking to a friend of mine who is a key analyst at ESG, Jason Buffington, you know Jason. >> Yeah he's coming on. >> He had a great point about the industry, that our data industry or storage industry or data protection industry, he said that every new wave you go from mainframe to client server, from client server to visualization, from visualization to cloud. There is always a new backup leader. Because the technology changes so much and the people or the company that doesn't have this old baggage with the old technology, old agent based or supporting all these legacy platforms, that can move much faster and that's what Veeam has demonstrated with visualization. The only exception is the transition from visualization to cloud because cloud is based on visualization. So and based on the concept of the data mobility, and that's, from the mental concept to visualization and so we believe that we are very well set with our leadership position in visualization to also dominate cloud market because our technologies are modern technologies specifically built for visualization and cloud. >> And is the argument then that an Amazon or an Azure won't dominate that, because essentially they are a cloud stovepipe, is that right, can you expand on that a little bit? >> That's the way we look at it, I mean it's choice. People want to put, they should be able to put their data wherever they want or their applications, and we should make it very easy for them to do that. If they want to do an Azure, but it's not only just putting it in Azure, it's being able to get after it, get it and move it and transfer data no matter where wanted to so for us it's about providing the flexibility to move the data or run the apps no matter where you want at any time. >> Peter you ran a company that Vmware acquired that was an Azure service. Veeam has some Azure service solutions, customers often times are trying to switch from there's no more shrink wrap software anymore, models for buying it, where do you see customers in that adoption? Curious of your old role and kind of today what you're seeing. >> It's interesting, so Desktone was very much of a platform for managed service providers and cloud providers and so in coming to Veeam, a big part of our business, which is very different than I think a lot of the other people in the market is focusing on those cloud providers. Not just Amazon, Azure, the public, but also we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers and cloud providers that run our platform as a business. And so when we rolled out a number of features here that if, unless you were a managed service provider or a cloud provider, you wouldn't get the multi-tenancy and the things that we built on scalability that are really changing the game we believe for the managed service providers. But it's also, what we saw at Desktone that went into Veeam. It's, our customers are also doing it as a service within their organization. Things like multi-tenancy are things that they need and scalability are things that they need as a business, so it's a lot of similarities between the world that I lived in and Desktone and VMware to where we are today. >> One of the impressive stats, you said 2016, 231,000 customers that you have. Are all of those paying customers, you have the free version, can you give us any insight as to how many pay versus free >> It's actually over 245,000, that was at the end of the year, so we're adding 4,000 new customers every month and those are all paid. We don't count the people who downloaded the free version of it. >> That's good to know, you could have millions of >> We have millions so far our other free products, yes. >> Awesome. >> Millions of users. >> That's important. >> And another stat you put out in the keynote was an NPS of 73 which is really, really good. Can we talk about that a little bit? Ratmir you were making the point off camera that it rose from the low 60s. What's going on there? >> Yeah so last year it was 61, the year before it was 62, so we were kind of very high but flat, so and this year it actually jumped to 73 and the reason that I personally contribute that to is because we had extremely powerful release 9.5 and customer are extremely happy with the improvements, and the easy of operate and using all these new capabilities, it was the most, the smoothest upgrade, the smoothest release and with the powerful features. The second reason I think our NPS, net promoter score, rose that much is because Peter came on board. (laughs) So in the last 10 month, Peter really, really strengthen our team. I thought that we are moving very fast but now, so we have the concept of Veeam speed, that means moving really fast but now we, actually with Peter we are moving 10 times faster, all of magnitude faster. >> I don't believe it's me but I think what Veeam has always done is done a really good job of listening to our customers and communicating with our customers on a regular basis. We built at a customer success business, part of our business that we're investing in, but we have a whole, a team of people who just solicit and communicate with our partners, and our customers on a regular basis, so they know what we're doing, it's rare that they don't really get a good sense of where we're going and the vision and strategy of Veeam so I think that goes a long way in driving our NPS score. >> We got to break but last thing we really haven't double clicked on is the ecosystem, maybe a quick word on that and then we'll wrap. >> That's a big, obviously, a partner community, we have 45,000 partners, we have 15, over 15,000 managed service providers in cloud. Probably the area that is impacting our business quite a bit now recently is a lot of the alliance partnerships that have. Today we have Veeamware, we have Cisco, very strong and successful, we announced HPE which not only is a development partnership but also a resell partnership and go to market which is dramatically impacing >> Former competitor. >> Yes yes which has opened up a tremendous amount of opportunities for us so we're going to continue to expand into other companies, we're, because 50% of this market is changing over in 2017 and 18, from legacy solutions to new, in the hardware is a piece of that and we're trying to embed as much of that into one sales motion, one bundle for our customers, making it easy to try and buy Veeam. >> Okay, founder gets the last word, bumper sticker when the buses are pulling away, the trucks are pulling away from New Orleans, what's the bumper sticker on VeeamOn 2017? >> See you in 2018. (laughs) Let's have another great year, and another stick with Veeam. >> We find out I think Thursday where 2018 is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Alright so stay with us alright thanks Gents for coming to The Cube. >> Excellent, thanks for having us. >> You're welcome alright keep it right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest, The Cube are live from VeeamOn in New Orleans, be right back. (funky electronic theme music)

okay welcome back live in Las Vegas is the cube ibm's information on demand conferences q exclusive coverage SiliconANGLE will keep on here live I'm John furry the founder of silicon Hank I'm Joe mykos Dave vellante co-founder Wikibon org our next guest is a Fred Balboni global leader business analytics optimization IBM GBS global business services you know obviously big data is powering the world I mean just can demand for information and solutions is off the charts afraid welcome to the cube anything there's a services angle here where you know services matters because one in the channel partner is this good gross profit for helping customers implement solutions that they have demand for so you've a combination of a market that's exploding with demand people know it's a game changer with big data analytics cloud is obviously right there in the horizon in terms of on prem of Prem then you've got now see mobile devices bring your own device to work which is thrown off more data okay and then people want to be in all the different channels the social business so you know CIO to CEO says hey this new wave is here if we don't think about it now and get a position and understand it the consequences of not doing anything might be higher than they are so we've heard that how do you look at that and what are you guys doing what's the strategy give us a quick update and from from GBS i think that the to make this successful first of all it services is important it's the last mile you know that means the point you may it's the last mile and without without that you cannot ever deliver the value the the really interesting challenge that every executive faces is you need to be able to we can easily get our head around big data technology and I shouldn't trivialize that but you can go and understand the technology what's possible in big data you can also get your head around analytics and the analytics algorithms and the kind of insights that can be drawn from that the real challenge is how do you articulate what's kind of possible to a client because many of the use cases are very niche and so clients often say yet that's right but it's big it's possibly bigger than that yeah that's right it's possibly bigger than that the other issue or the other challenge to get we've got a hurdle we've got a jump on me articulate this to the businesses clients businesses think in terms of process you don't think in terms of data you know you don't go talk to a CIO CEO and say you know tell us what's the key attributes of your customer and they don't think that way they can talk to you about servicing a customer or selling to a customer or managing customer complaints so that the processes but the data it's a tough thing so the first part the services is so crucial in this is being able to articulate the value of analytics and big data to a client in the businesses terms so it becomes a boardroom conversation kind of so that's that gets the program started and then quickly being able to fill in with use cases because clients don't want this to be they don't want to start from a blank sheet of paper and they don't like going to give me some quick wins here so it's kind of those timetable what kind of timetables mmmm back in the 80s 90s when client-server rolled out it was months and months yeah project management meetings roll out the Oracle systems roll out the big iron now I mean I'll see maybe shorter spurts little different hurdles what's the timetable only some of these horizons for these quick wins okay so project implementation I come on now let's let's know it's it's I think that that we're measuring project implementations in weeks I think cloud-based technology allows us to provision environments on the order of a couple of weeks and that used to be on the order of five to six months so I think that's going to that accelerates everything and that also allows you to do a lot of a lot more speed to value get applications or analytics use cases up there much more rapidly one two as you start to build these portfolio of use cases and if they're built on acceleration tools I mean acceleration so you've got those code sets that are already there that you can add you can jump on top of I mean you can get these use cases up there in 6-8 weeks we have one we have an example a really large major company i'd rather not i'd rather not because it's not externally referenceable but a really a significant client that had on the order of more than more than 5 million discreet customers and doing detailed customer analytics on their customer base against their products and we were able to get that baby up and running in three and a half months now that two to three years ago traditional logic would have told you that was a nine to twelve month project and by the way you know ten years ago that would have been a 18 to 24 month project yeah so I think that yeah we're moving much more rats the expectation now too I mean the customers realize that too right the absolute not but but there's one thing I want to talk about this it's still this is the one thing that if you'd asked me what's most important this speed thing allows you to go rapidly to places but you you better have a navigation roadmap on where you're going because if you're going to do all kinds of little code drops that's great but you want to make sure you're getting leverage so you're going somewhere so therefore there's a scale but this is where roadmapping becomes really really important for every the technology side of the business you have to have a technology roadmap the other thing that's really important out of this is if you don't let's use the client-server example you used because this kind of has a you know we've all been here right here we've all lived seen this movie before yeah if you if you don't in the build this roadmap another thing that happens do you remember when CIOs finally said okay I'm taking control this client servicing sure what do they end up with they ended up with all these departments of computing in the costs work going astronomical so if you've got a road map you can also address the issues of managed services because you don't the least thing you want to be is having all these data Mart's that are scattered everywhere because you get no economies you get no economies of it but a cloud would bring you you get Noah kind you get no economies and being able to do that and you end up having to have all these maintenance teams you know that maintenance and by the way analytics by its nature has constant maintenance little adjustments and changes you're getting new economies of that because they're all managed is discrete units so therefore there's a lot to be as you build this roadmap you've got to think about the managed services environment as well so Fred you talked about earlier clients don't think in terms of data they think in terms of their business process is that a blind spot for clients because there are some companies Google for example that does think in terms of data in your view should clients increasingly be thinking in data terms or does our industry have to evolve to make the data map to business process I actually I kind of just take it as a thick I don't I don't I don't choose to question why I just accept it um i but i would say i which i would say customer's always right I just I just think the industry i thought that definitely but i think just the industries at a stage where you know we've always you know back in the old days of you know i'm going to show my age here but you know the procedure division in the data division oh my god looked at all and and and we you know the procedure division is where you actually did all the really and i think if the reason is we got understand the paradigm under which modern computing was created I don't to be like we go into history lesson but the paradigm under which modern computing was created was that we use computers to automate tasks so we've always taken this procedural approach which went then we went to process reengineering and that became a boardroom conversation so just I think we've conditioned over the last 40 years businesses to think about using technology to gain business efficiency they've always thought in terms of process so that's why this data element yeah companies like Google founded on analytics clearly have got a whole different headset in a different way to approach these which gives them a built-in bias when they address the problems they've got in their businesses sure but you don't come a decline saying hey you got to rethink the way in which you look at data you come in and say let's figure out how we can exploit data in your biz erect what we do it two ways we do it two ways first of all let me not dress let me not dress monton up as lamb at the end of the day it's its data its data okay now the question is how you articulate that and it's twofold we tend to I like to use a metaphor to describe the data so if its customer that the metaphor we've been using recently is DNA DNA strands to be able so you use a metaphor that there's a language that the business can relate to and you can create a common language very easy one in that way you can have an account because you're never going to drag a CEO into your fourth normal form data model so so therefore you've got to you've got to talk a language one number two you talk about as a collection of use cases so you use use cases as a vehicle to have the process conversation and because with the use case you also can talk business outcomes benefits and you can tell kind of a story you don't have to drag them through the details of the process but you can tell them a story whether it's you know I if you can understand called detailed called detailed data records and the affinities you can understand the social networks and therefore you can reduce churn within your telco customer base as an example quick but if you follow I do so you talked about its little use cases and they begin to understand wow what's possible and then you talk about their data as a DNA chain and they get I got it I actually need to get the DNA chain if I'm going to actually think about think about my customer base or my product base or whatever the lingua franca the business is still the businesses language it doesn't result of data but data can enrich the conversation in a way that can lead to new outcomes the data in rich's the conversation when you talk about the business outcomes that are created as the part of the use case well it's like a three third order differential equation but i go back i watch this yeah i just go say your tweet your epic soundbite machine just can't type fast enough on the crowd chat it's good for good for Twitter viewing yeah I've just opened a Twitter account please look me up I'm looking for friends I promise to start posting you got people watching all right all right so so in terms of customers right give us a little bit peak of some of the customer responses when you when you open the kimono show them the road map you know the messaging around on IBM right now is pretty tight here at IOD last year was good this year is better you look really unified face to the customer when you show them the road map what's the feeling they get it they feel like okay I got some trust IBM's got some track record history do they is the is the emotion more of okay where do I jump in how do I jump in there doing it and this little shadow IT going on all over the place we know with Amazon out the area so so when you're in there you've got to have these are conversations what do they like and what's that what's the level of response you get from CIOs and then also the folks in the trenches so there's always a question which there's a couple of questions first of all is how can I get how can I get value from this and that in that and that's you know a I'm tightly coupled to my existing transaction processing which is kind of like if you will call that turbocharged bi and and which is which is where so many people have come from is this turbocharged bi environment and listen that's an important part of your reporting business you need to do that to keep the wheels on the question is as you move to this notion of analytics giving you great insight then then you've got to say okay I need to go from turbocharged bi to really augmented components so clients I'd say there's a large there's a large group of people that are right now moving from turbocharged bi to the notion advanced use cases so there's this some disco a large discussion right now how do I show me do use cases by which i can I can rapidly that would be advanced how to linux up the calling advance limit well no we have well 60 60 use cases industry-based use cases that we as a services business put together on top of that we have about seven or eight key code fragments that we uses accelerators I mean we call them wink we call them assets and we just them up as accelerators but their code fragments that we bring to a client as the basis that we put on top of the the blue stack of technology to actually get them a speed to value because we really want to be able to get clients up and running within this notion of non idealities it's like literally being best practices in the form of technology to the customers well you're on an IBM thing I mean dare I called an application no I wouldn't dare call it an application we're not in that business but the point is is that it is it's starting to feel like an application because it's really moving down these unreal integrated solution is really where we going it's an accelerant this code correct so it's leverage the economies of scale is every success breeds that's exactly it more and then on top of that we would have that just don't throw a few other things that we do to accelerate these things we actually have five what we call signature solutions which is services software together with a piece of services code coming together to solve a problem we've got that round risk and fraud around customers I mean some specific very narrow things if somebody wants to you know because often IT departments they want to buy something they want to buy something they don't want to go down the parts they want to buy something and so fine here's a package solution let's go buy something um and then last but not least one thing we haven't talked much about but I always like to throw this out there because I think this is one of the things they and we didn't talk about it much in the main 10 or any better sessions but let's not forget about IBM research I'm really proud to report to you now since we started this category we've done 61st of a kinds with IBM Research so this is about client says I've got this problem i think it's unachievable i cannot solve this problem you know help me map in my oil exploration like things that are considered big problems big problems let's let's apply this group that does patent factory you know that IBM is but 15 years in a row let's apply those people to my our problems and we have 60 we have 16 so we do about 15 to 20 a year so it's not like we like we're not cranking these out like I'm hundreds of thousands of licenses but it's where basically our services business our software business and IBM Research go work on solving a client specific problem you heard Tim Buckman this morning when he was asked to know why IBM that was said IBM Research was the first answer that's right he gave we talked to him about that on the cube you know in his is insane me as a customer and we you know we always love to hear from customers I mean you know the splunk conference just had was just last week as an emerging startup because probably well aware of those guys they have customers that just say just glowing reports you get to the same same set of customers you know he is someone of high-caliber at the command and control in his healthcare mission and he's automating himself he it's and essentially creating this new data model that allows it to be pushed down to be listen you've got to do this and I'll tell you why you remember the the governance discussion is it was well I'm most excited about is the governance discussion five to eight years ago was an arcane discussion available of data modelers and like what do we do the governance discussion is quickly moving into the language of our business people and the reason is because they're beginning to do you remember the days of accounting systems when they say we want our accounting department to focus on analyzing the numbers and not collecting and forming the numbers well we're here again and if you've got good data governance you can focus on creating the insights and determining what actions you want from the insights as opposed to questioning the numbers and questioning the validity and the heritage of the number the validity and the heritage of the numbers and in this place everywhere yep financial services companies are the most stressed about it because the validity and heritage is required when you want to prove a compliance to a federal statute yes but it means everywhere if you're a consumer packaged goods company and you don't believe that sales are down in a certain market or a certain chain store first thing they do is they start challenging the numbers if you have good governance you can now start that you can now start to trust these systems of record but let's talk about data quality data quality but it's also the governess in the death of mindset is much broader iteration right how we said the first you know that folks from the nonprofit said you want to go on the record but he's basically saying I'll say basically when you put stuff out when you package and then bring it out it still might have some flaws in the data quality but it's the iteration is transformational but once that's in market saying that's changing he things prepare pre-packaging data and then bringing it in is not the better approach but I want to ask you about the your what you just said about this governance conversation that is date the core of this debate around the data economy what is the data economy in your mind given what you do the history that you've lived through we've seen those movies now the cutting edge new wave that will create new well for new ways change from transform business all that stuff's great but what is the data conn what does that mean to business executives that they're focusing on outcomes is is it changing data governance is it changing the value chains is it changing what's your thoughts on that the data economy is about discovering those points of leverage that that the data tells you that your instincts don't the data tells you that your instincts don't one of my favorite stories three years ago four years ago we were called in and clients said this is my problem the going and problem was I got to take 200 million dollars out of my advertising spend budget two hundred million dollars out of my advertising spend was he's a retailer end and the problem is is out of my 600 million dollar advertising budget the problem I have is also have all kinds of interesting theories and models that my agencies have told me I'm not quite sure do I just take 200 off the board across the board do I take 200 off to minimize my risk just spread it around how do i how do I manage the process and what we actually did was we built a super super set of sophisticated analytics which tied to their transaction systems but also tied to their social media system so we also understood and what we did was we were able to understand which customer cohorts responded to which media types then we added one more parts of the model which is we understood the trending in the cost of free-to-air cable radio internet all the different media types and as we looked at the cost models of them and we understood which customer cohorts responded to which media types we suddenly realized that they were super saturated in certain media types they could like doubled their spin and they wouldn't got want any lift in the advertised in their in their sales what we did was we got 200 million out of their budget and increase they got 300 million incremental sales that Christmas season because we help them get really smart about the play let me tell you I tell us privately i maked media buyers look at me like like I'm like a pariah yeah but but it is actually really you know really started to rethink now there's just a really great example because I think we've all can relate to that but that's the data economy where you find these veins of gold in these simple correlations and from that simple correlation you can instantly go and your business you can get the lift listen I can get five percent I IBM get five percent ten percent lift in some small segment business I've got the volume that's going to make a significant difference to my share one small piece of data could open up a window kind of had with Jodie Foster we would contact words like one piece of data opens up a ton of new data I mean that totally is leverage and it changes the game for that customer and and that to me is that is the guts of the data economy identifying those correlations and and what we're finding is our most recent study we just released it here the thing the IB the IBM Institute for business value big data and analytics study w IBM com it's the Institute for bit I bv study on big data just released and said 75 percent of all companies that are outperforming their peers have said big data analytics is one of the key reasons and the human component not to put are all on machines it's really about it's an ardent science its a mix of both the math and the human piece well you know there's this notion of not only do you create the insight but you've got to take action on the insight you know it's not enough to know if I could predict for you who's going to win tonight's basketball game you still got to place the bet you still have to take action on the inside and so therefore this notion of action to insight is all about trust trust in the insight trust in the data and trust in the technology that the business trust the technology and it's until you take that leap of faith remember when the Indiana Jones movie when he liked the leap of faith and you've got to like to step out and take that leap of faith once you take that leap of faith in you suddenly have trust in the data so that's that trust to mention and that's a human thing that's not a that's that's not a that's an organizational thing that is not a lot of technology in that one okay Fred we gotta wrap up i'll give you the final word for the folks out there quickly put a bumper sticker on iod this year's and put on my car when I Drive home what's that bumper sticker say for this year it's not all about the technology but it starts with the technology ok we're here live in Las Vegas we're going to take about that bet that was going to win the games and I will be the sports book later this is the cube live in Las Vegas for information on demand hashtag IBM iod this tequila right back with our next guest if the short break exclusive coverage from information on demand ibm's premier conference we write back the q