>>Yeah. >>All right. Welcome back to our third session, which is all about administering analytics at Global Scale. We're gonna be discussing how you can implement security data compliance and governance across the globe at for large numbers of users to ensure thoughts. What is open for everyone across your organization? So coming right up is Cheryl Zang, who is a senior director of product management of Thought spot, and Kendrick. He threw the sports sports director of Systems Engineering. So, Cheryl and Kendrick, the floor is yours. >>Thank you, Tina, for the introduction. So let's talk about analytics scale on. Let's understand what that is. It's really three components. It's the access to not only data but its technology, and we start looking at the intersection of that is the value that you get as an organization. When you start thinking about analytics scale, a lot of times we think of analysts at scale and we look at the cloud as the A seven m for it, and that's a That's an accurate statement because people are moving towards the cloud for a variety of reasons. And if you think about what's been driving, it has been the applications like Salesforce, Forcados, Mongo, DB, among others. And it's actually part of where we're seeing our market go where 64% of the company's air planning to move their analytics to the cloud. And if you think of stock spotted specifically, we see that vast majority of our customers are already in the cloud with one of the Big Four Cloud Data warehouses, or they're evaluated. And what we found, though, is that even though companies are moving their analytics to the cloud, we have not solved. The problem of accessing the data is a matter of fact. Our customers. They're telling us that 10 to 25% of that data warehouse that they're leveraging, they've moved and I'm utilizing. And if you look at in General, Forrester says that 60 to 73% of data that you have is not being leveraged, and if we think about why you go through, you have this process of taking enterprise data, moving it into these cubes and aggregates and building these reports dashboards. And there's this bottleneck typically of that be I to and at the end of the day, the people that are getting that data on the right hand side or on Lee. Anywhere from 20 to 30% of the population when companies want to be data driven is 20 to 30% of the population. Really what you're looking for now it's something north of that. And if you think of Cloud data, warehouse is being the the process and you bring Cloud Data Warehouse and it's still within the same framework. You know? Why invest? Why invest and truly not fix the problem? And if you take that out and your leverage okay, you don't necessarily have the You could go directly against the warehouse, but you're still not solving the reports and dashboards. Why investing truly not scale? It's the three pillars. It's technology, it's data, and it's a accessibility. So if we look at analytics at scale, it truly is being able to get to that north of the 20 to 30% have that be I team become enablers, often organization. Have them be ableto work with the data in the Cloud Data warehouse and allow the cells marking finding supplies and then hr get direct access to that. Ask their own questions to be able to leverage that to be able to do that. You really have to look at your modern data architecture and figure out where you are in this maturity, and then they'll be able to build that out. So you look at this from the left to right and sources. It's ingestion transformation. It's the storage that the technology brains e. It's the data from a historical predictive perspective. And then it's the accessibility. So it's technology. It's data accessibility. And how do you build that? Well, if you look at for a thought to spot perspective, it truly is taking and driving and leveraging the cloud data warehouse architectures, interrogated, essay behind it. And then the accessibility is the search answers pen boards and embedded analytics. If you take that and extend it where you want to augment it, it's adding our partners from E T L R E L t. Perspective like al tricks talent Matile Ian Streaming data from data brings or if you wanna leverage your cloud, data warehouses of Data Lake and then leverage the Martin capability of your child data warehouse. The augmentation leveraging out through its data bricks and data robot. And that's where your data side of that pillar gets stronger, the technologies are enabling it. And then the accessibility from the output. This thought spot. Now, if you look at the hot spots, why and how do we make this technology accessible? What's the user experience we are? We allow an organization to go from 20 to 30% population, having access to data to what it means to be truly data driven by our users. That user experience is enabled by our ability to lead a person through the search process. There are search index and rankings. This is built for search for corporate data on top of the Cloud Data Warehouse. On top of the data that you need to be able to allow a person who doesn't understand analytics to get access to the data and the questions they need to answer, Arcuri Engine makes it simple for customers to take. Ask those questions and what you might think are not complex business questions. But they turn into complex queries in the back end that someone who typically needs to know that's that power user needs to know are very engine. Isolate that from an end user and allows them to ask that question and drive that query. And it's built on an architecture that allows us to change and adapt to the types of things. It's micro services architecture, that we've not only gone from a non grim system to our cloud offering, in a matter of of really true these 23 years. And it's amazing the reason why we can do that, do that and in a sense, future proof your investment. It's because of the way we've developed this. It's wild. First, it's Michael Services. It's able to drive. So what this architecture ER that we've talked about. We've seen different conversations of beyond its thought spot everywhere, which allows us to take that spot. One. Our ability to for search for search data for auto analyzed the Monitor with that govern security in the background and being able to leverage that not only internally but externally and then being able to take thought spot modeling language for that analysts and that person who just really good at creating and let them create these models that it could be deployed anywhere very, very quickly and then taking advantage off the Cloud Data warehouse or the technology that you have and really give you accessibility the technology that you need as well as the data that you need. That's what you need to be able to administer, uh, to take analytics at scale. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna turn it over to Cheryl and she's gonna talk about administration in thought spot. Cheryl, >>thank you very much Can take. Today. I'm going to show you how you can administrator and manage South Spot for your organization >>covering >>streaming topics, the user management >>data management and >>also user adoption and performance monitoring. Let's jump into the demo. >>I think the Southport Application The Admin Council provides all the core functions needed for system level administration. Let's start with user management and authentication. With the user tab. You can add or delete a user, or you can modify the setting for an existing user. For example, user name, password email. Or you can add the user toe a different group with the group's tab. You can add or delete group, or you can manage the group setting. For example, Privileges associated with all the group members, for example, can administrate a soft spot can share data with all users or can manage data this can manage data privilege is very important. It grants a user the privileges to add data source added table and worksheet, manage data for different organizations or use cases without being an at me. There is also a field called Default Pin Board. You can select a set of PIN board that will be shown toe all of the users in that group on their homepage in terms off authentication. Currently, we support three different methods local active directory and samel By default. Local authentication is enabled and you can also choose to have several integration with an external identity provider. Currently, we support actor Ping Identity, Seaside Minor or a T. F. S. The third method is integration with active directory. You can configure integration with L DAP through active directory, allowing you to authenticate users against an elder up server. Once the users and groups are added to the system, we can share pin board wisdom or they can search to ask and answer their own questions. To create a searchable data, we first need to connect to our data warehouses with embraced. You can directly query the data as it exists in the data warehouse without having to move or transfer the data. In this page, you can add a connection to any off the six supported data warehouses. Today we will be focusing on the administrative aspect off the data management. So I will close the tap here and we will be using the connections that are already being set up. Under the Data Objects tab, we can see all of the tables from the connections. Sometimes there are a lot of tables, and it may be overwhelming for the administrator to manage the data as a best practice. We recommend using stickers toe organize your data sets here, we're going to select the Salesforce sticker. This will refined a list off tables coming from Salesforce only. This helps with data, lineage and the traceability because worksheets are curated data that's based on those tables. Let's take a look at this worksheet. Here we can see the joints between tables that created a schema. Once the data analyst created the table and worksheet, the data is searchable by end users. Let's go to search first, let's select the data source here. We can see all of the data that we have been granted access to see Let's choose the Salesforce sticker and we will see all of the tables and work ship that's available to us as a data source. Let's choose this worksheet as a data source. Now we're ready to search the search Insight can be saved either into a PIN board or an answer. Okay, it's important to know that the sticker actually persist with PIN board and answers. So when the user logging, they will be able to see all of the content that's available to them. Let's go to the Admin Council and check out the User Adoption Pin board. The User Adoption Pin board contains essential information about your soft spot users and their adoption off the platform. Here, you can see daily active user, weekly, active user and monthly active user. Count that in the last 30 days you can also see the total count off the pin board and answers that saved in the system. Here, you can see that unique count off users. Now. You can also find out the top 10 users in the last 30 days. The top 10 PIN board consumers and top 10 ad hoc searchers here, you can see that trending off weekly, active users, daily, active users and hourly active users over time. You can also get information about popular pin boards and user actions in the last one month. Now let's zoom in into this chart. With this chart, you can see weekly active users and how they're using soft spot. In this example, you can see 60% of the time people are doing at Hawk search. If you would like to see what people are searching, you can do a simple drill down on quarry tax. Here we can find out the most popular credit tax that's being used is number off the opportunities. At last, I would like to show you assistant performance Tracking PIN board that's available to the ad means this PIN board contains essential information about your soft spot. Instance performance You this pimple. To understand the query, Leighton see user traffic, how users are interacting with soft spot, most frequently loaded tables and so on. The last component toe scowling hundreds of users, is a great on boarding experience. A new feature we call Search Assist helps automate on boarding while ensuring new users have the foundation. They need to be successful on Day one, when new users logging for the first time, they're presented with personalized sample searches that are specific to their data set. In this example, someone in a sales organization would see questions like What were sales by product? Type in 2020. From there are guided step by step process helps introduce new users with search ensuring a successful on boarding experience. The search assist. The coach is a customized in product Walk through that uses your own data and your own business vocabulary to take your business users from unfamiliar to near fluent in minutes. Instead of showing the entire end user experience today, I will focus on the set up and administration side off the search assist. Search Assist is easy to set up at worksheet level with flexible options for multiple guided lessons. Using preview template, we help you create multiple learning path based on department or based on your business. Users needs to set up a learning path. You're simply feeling the template with relevant search examples while previewing what the end user will see and then increase the complexity with each additional question toe. Help your users progress >>in summary. It is easy to administrator user management, data management, management and the user adoption at scale Using soft spot Admin Council Back to you, Kendrick. >>Thank you, Cheryl. That was great. Appreciate the demo there. It's awesome. It's real life data, real life software. You know what? Enclosing here? I want to talk a little bit about what we've seen out in the marketplace and some of them when we're talking through prospects and customers, what they talk a little bit about. Well, I'm not quite area either. My data is not ready or I've got I don't have a file data warehouse. That's this process. In this thinking on, we have examples and three different examples. We have a company that actually had never I hadn't even thought about analytics at scale. We come in, we talked to them in less than a week. They're able to move their data thought spot and ask questions of the billion rose in less than a week now. We've also had customers that are early adoption. They're sticking their toes in the water around the technology, so they have a lot of data warehouse and they put some data at it, and with 11 minute within 11 minutes, we were able to search on a billion rows of their data. Now they're adding more data to combine to, to be able to work with. And then we have customers that are more mature in their process. Uh, they put large volumes of data within nine minutes. We're asking questions of their data, their business users air understanding. What's going on? A second question we get sometimes is my data is not clean. We'll talk Spot is very, very good at finding that type of data. If you take, you start moving and becomes an inner door process, and we can help with that again. Within a week, we could take data, get it into your system, start asking business questions of that and be ready to go. You know, I'm gonna turn it back to you and thank you for your time. >>Kendrick and Carol thank you for joining us today and bringing all of that amazing inside for our audience at home. Let's do a couple of stretches and then join us in a few minutes for our last session of the track. Insides for all about how Canadian Tire is delivering Korean making business outcomes would certainly not in a I. So you're there

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel AWS and our community partners. Welcome everyone to the Cube virtual and our coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, which is part of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we're talking about the green Cloud and joining me is Kishore Dirk. He is Accenture Senior Managing director Cloud First Global Services lead. Thank you so much for coming on the show Key Shore. >>Nice to meet you, Rebecca. >>Great to have you. Yeah. So I want to start by asking you what it is that we mean when we say green cloud. We know the sustainability is a business imperative. So many organizations around the world are committing to responsible innovation lowering carbon emissions. But what does this? What does it? What does it mean when they talk about cloud from a sustainability perspective? >>E think it's about responsible innovation. Green Cloud is a thoughtful cloud first approach that helps boost profits and benefit the clients for helping reduce carbon emissions. Think about it this way. And you have a large number of data centers and each of these data centers are increasing by 14% every year, and this double digit growth comes with the price of Becca. What you're seeing is these global data centers consume a lot of power on the consumption is nearly pull into the consumption of a country like Spain. So the magnitude off the problem that is out there and and how do we pursue a green approach if you look at this hour? Accenture Analysis In terms of the migrations to public crowd, we have seen that we can reduce that by 59 million tons of CO two per year and with just the 5.9% reduction in top lighting emissions. And he creates this toe 22 million cars off the road. And the magnitude of reduction can go a long way. Meeting climate change commitments, particularly poor data sensitive businesses. >>Wow, that's incredible. What you're the numbers that you're putting forward are absolutely mind blowing. So how does it work? Is it a simple cloud migration? So, you know, >>when companies begin their cloud journey and and then they confront off with them a lot of questions. The decision to make uh, in this particular element sustainable in their solution and benefits. They drive and they had to make vice choices. And then they will gain unprecedented level of innovation, leading to both greener planet as well as a a green of balance sheet. I would say eso effectively. It's all about ambition. Greater the ambition, greater the reduction in carbon emissions. So from a cloud migration perspective, we look at it as a simple solution with approaches and sustainability. Benefits are that very based on things. It's about selecting the right cloud provider, very carbon thoughtful provider and the first step towards a sustainable cloud journey. And here we're looking at clown operators. You know, obviously they have different corporate commitments towards sustainability and that determines how they plan, how they build their the data centers, how they our and consume connections that operate there and how they retire their data centers. Then, uh, the next element that you want to do is how do you build it? Ambition, You know, for some of the companies, on average on Prem drives about 65% energy reduction and the carbon emission reduction of about 84% which is kind of OK and good I would say, But then, if you could go up to 98% by configuring applications to the cloud, that is significant benefit for for the world. And obviously it's a greener cloud that we're talking about. And then the question is, How far can you go? And, you know, obviously the companies have to unlock greater financial, societal environmental benefits. And essential has this cloud based circular operations and sustainable products and services that that you bring into play. So it's a It's a very thoughtful, broader approach that we're bringing and in terms off just a simple concept off migration s. >>So we know that in the covert era, shifting to the cloud has really become a business imperative. How is Accenture working with its clients at a time when all of this movement has been accelerated? How do you partner and what is your approach in terms of helping them with their migrations? >>Yeah, I mean, let me talk a little bit about the pandemic and the crisis that is there today, and and if you really look at that in terms of how your partner with a lot of our clients in terms of the cloud first approach. I'll give you a couple of examples. We've worked with Rolls Royce, McClaren, DHL and others as part of the ventilator UK Charon Consortium again to, uh, coordinate production of medical ventilators urgently needed for the UK Health Service. Many of these firms have taken similar initiatives in terms off, you know, from perfume manufacturers hand sanitizers. And to answer it is, is and again leading passion levels, making BP and again at the U. N. General Assembly. We launched the end to end integration Guy that helps company essentially to have a sustainable development goes. And that's how we're parting at a very large scale. Andi, if you really look at how we work with our clients and what's Accenture's role there? Uh, you know, from in terms of our clients, you know there are multiple steps that we look at. One is about planning, building, deploying and managing an optimal green color solution. And Accenture has this concept off helping clients for the platform to kind of achieve that goal. And here we're having. We're having a platform called Minor, which has a model called Green Clad Advisor, and this is the capability that helps you provide optimal green cloud, you know, a business case and obviously blueprint for each of our clients. And right from the start in terms off, how do we complete lower migration recommendation toe on improve solution accuracy to obviously bringing in the end to end perspective? You know, with this green clad adviser capability, we're helping our clients capture what we call it the carbon footprint for existing data centers and provide, uh, I would say the current cloud C 02 emissions core that you know, obviously helps them with carbon credits that can further their green agenda. So essentially, this is about recommending a green index score reducing carbon footprint for migration, migrating for green a cloud. And it really look at how accentuate itself is practicing. What we preached. 95% of the applications are in the cloud, and this migration has helped us. Uh, toe lied to about $42.5 million in benefit and in the third year, and and another three million analyzed costs that are saved through rightsizing service consumption. So it's a very broad umbrella and a footprint in terms of having engage societally with the U. N our clients. And what is it that we exactly bring to our clients in solving a specific problem? >>Accenture isn't is walking the walk as you say? >>Yes, So that that is that we we practice what we preach, and that is something that we take it to heart. We want toe have a responsible business and we want to practice it. And we want to advise our clients around that >>you are your own use case, and so they they know they can take your advice. So talk a little bit about the global, the cooperation that's needed. We know that conquering this pandemic is going to take a coordinated global effort and talk a little bit about the great reset initiative. First of all, what is that? Why don't we? Why don't we start there? And then we could delve into it a little bit more. >>Okay, so before we get to how we're cooperating, the great recent initiative is about improving the state of the world, and it's about a group of global stakeholders cooperating to simultaneously manage the direct consequences of their Cohen 19 prices andan spirit of this cooperation that you're seeing during Court 19 which will obviously either toe post pandemic project will the worth pressing issues. As I say, we're increasing companies to realize combined potential of technology and sustainable impact, to use enterprise solutions to address with urgency and scale and obviously multiple challenges that are facing our world. One of the ways that you're increasing, uh, companies to reach their Venus cloud with extensions cloud strategy is to build a solid foundation that is resilient. I would prefer to faster to the current as well as future times. Now, when you think of Cloud as the foundation that drives the digital transformation, it's about scale, speed, streamlining your operations and obviously reducing costs. And and as these businesses sees the construct of cloud first, they must remain obviously responsible and trusted. Now think about this right as part of our analysis that profitability can co exist with responsible and sustainable practices. Let's say that on the data centers migrated from on from the cloud based, we estimate, you know, that would reduce carbon emissions globally by 60 million tons for years. Andi, think about it this way, right? Easier Metric will be taking out 22 million cars off the road Thea Other examples that you've seen right in terms off the NHS work that they're doing in UK to build, uh, you know, a Microsoft teams were in based integration and the platform he rolled out for 1.2 million in it. Just users Onda. About 16,000 users there were able to secure instant messages, you know, obviously complete audio video calls and host working meetings across England. So this this work that we did with NHS is is something that we're collaborating with a lot of fools and powering businesses, not marriage. >>Well, you're vividly describing the business case for sustainability. What do you see as the future of cloud when thinking about it through this lens of sustainability and also going back to what you were talking about in terms of how you are helping your fostering cooperation within these organizations? >>That's a very good question, because so if you look at today, right, businesses are obviously environmentally aware, and they are expanding efforts to decrease power consumption, carbon emissions, and they want to run a sustainable operational efficiency across all elements of the business. And this is an increasing trend. And there is that option off energy efficient infrastructure in the global market. And this trend is the cloud. First thinking and with the right cloud migration that we've been discussing is what unlocking new opportunity, like clean energy transitions enabled, enabled by cloud based geographic analysis, material based reductions and better data insights. And this is something that, well, we'll drive with obviously faster analytics platform that is out there now. The sustainability is actually the future of business, which is companies that have historically different the financial security or agility benefits to cloud. Now sustainability becomes an imperative for them and our own experience. Accenture's experience with cloud migrations We have seen 30 to 40% total cost of ownership savings on its driving. Ah, greater workloads, flexibility, better service, somebody utilization and obviously more energy efficient public clouds that cost obviously well, that that drive a lot of these enterprise own data centers. So in our view, what we're seeing is that this this, uh, sustainable cloud position helps helps companies to a drive a lot of the goals, in addition to their financial and other goals. >>So what should organizations who are who are watching this interview and saying, Hey, I need to know more. What do you recommend to them and what? Where should they go to get more information on Green Cloud. >>You know, if you're if you're a business leader and you're thinking about which cloud provider is good, how should applications be modernized to meet our day to day needs Which cloud driven innovation should be priorities? Uh, you know, that's why Accenture, uh, from the Cloud First organization and essentially to provide the whole stack of cloud services to help our clients become a cloud first business. You know, it's all about exhibition. The digital transformation innovating faster, creating differentiated and sustainable value for our clients. And we're powering it up with 70,000 cloud professionals, $3 billion investment and bringing together unmasked depth and breadth of cloud services for our clients in terms of plant solutions and obviously the ecosystem partnership that we have that we're seeing today, Andi assets that help our clients realize that goes on and again toe do reach out to us way can help them to two men, obviously an optimal, sustainable cloud for solution that meets the business needs and being unprecedented levels of innovation. Our experience will be an advantage. And now more than ever, Rebecca. >>So just closing us out here, Do you have any advice for these companies who are navigating a great deal of uncertainty? We What? What do you think? The next 12 to 24 months. What do you think that should be on the minds of CEOs as they go >>forward. So as CEOs are thinking about rapidly leveraging cloud migrating to cloud off, one of the elements that we want them to be thoughtful about is can they do that with unprecedented level of innovation, but also build a greener planet and a greener balance sheet? If we can achieve this balance and and kind off have, ah, have, ah, world, which is greener. I think the world will win and we all along with extension of clients, will win. That's what I will say, Rebecca. >>That is an optimistic outlook, and I will take it. Thank you so much. Key shore for coming on the show. >>Thank you so much. >>That was Accenture's Key Shore. Dirk Rebecca. Night. Stay tuned for more of the Cube virtual coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody Dave Volante here with Stu minumum we have some breaking analysis we're gonna break down the acquisition of IBM Red Hat by IBM was announced today that it closed Stu was originally announced in October a 34 billion dollar acquisition so not a surprise surprise that it closed a little bit earlier than people thought people would thinkin you know well into the second half closed in July they got through all the all the issues in Europe what does this mean in your view to the industry yeah so Dave we did a lot of analysis when the deal was announced absolutely the the cloud and the ripples of change that are happening because of cloud are the impetus for this and you know the the question we've been having for years Dave is you know how many companies can stay kind of independent in you know their swimlane to what they're doing or are we going to see more massive consolidations we're not that far off of the 67 billion dollar acquisition of Dell buying EMC to go heavily into the enterprise market and of course there are cloud implications what happened there and you know we're watching the growth of cloud what's happening in the developer world you know we've watched Red Hat for a long time and you know Red Hat has a nice position in the world and it carved themselves out a nice role into what has been emerging as hybrid and multi cloud and in my opinion that's you know the number one reason why arvind and the IBM team you know when to take that 20-year partnership and turn it into you know now just part of the IBM portfolio Arvind Krishna executive at IBM a longtime player there so the the the deal is so you talked about Dells acquisition we've talked a lot about the VMware model keeping the company separate and of course Red Hat is not going to be a separately traded public company it is going to be a distinct unit inside of IBM's cloud and cognitive software group as I understand it is that right so the question is will it be reported separately or is it going to be oh we're gonna throw everything into our cloud number yeah so Dave this is where all of us that have watched and known IBM you know for our entire careers because they've been around over a hundred years on ask what's going to happen so from a reporting structure Jim Whitehurst reports to Ginny from a Wall Street standpoint it sounds like it's gonna be just thrown into the cloud piece you know Dave isn't it that the the the standard practice today that you throw lots of stuff in there so we can't figure out what your cloud business really is I mean let's look at Oracle or even Microsoft and what they had you know Amazon's probably the only one that clearly differentiates you know this is revenue that we all understand is cloud and can you know touch and feel it so sure I IBM you know you've got all of the the piece that used to be soft layer it's now the IBM cloud piece there are lots of software pieces in that mix the cloud and cognitive is a big umbrella and you know Red Hat adds a few billion dollars worth of revenue into that stream so IBM's assumptions here juni talks a lot about chapter two chapter one was a lot of front-end systems that sort of the growth was everybody thought everything was going into the cloud that's really not the way it is 80% of the workloads are still on Prem and in Chapter two was all about you know connecting those to any cloud multi-cloud heard her words the IBM cloud or the Amazon Google or Microsoft cloud etc etc she made the statement that that we are the only hybrid multi-cloud open source company okay I guess that's true does it matter that they're the only hybrid multi-cloud open source company and are they yeah so I mean Dave anytime a vendor tries to paint themselves as the number one or you know leader in the space it's you know that's how they're defining it that's not how customers think of it customers you know don't think is much about whether it's multi cloud or hybrid cloud they're doing cloud and they're working with you know more than one supplier it is very rare that you find somebody I'm all-in and then you dig in oh yeah wait I'm using office 365 and Salesforce and oh wait there was that cool new thing that Google announced that somebody off on the sides doing so we understand that today it's a multi cloud world tomorrow to be a multi cloud we're absolutely open source is growing you know at great leaps and bounds Red Hat is you know the you know best example we've had of that that trend something I've been watching for the last 20 years and you know it is impressive to see it but you know even when you talk to customers of you know most customers are not you know flag-waving I must do everything open-source you know that they have a little bit more nuanced view of it sure lots of companies are participating in contributing to open source but you know I've yet to talk to too many companies that were like well when I'm making this decision you know this is absolutely what it is am i concerned about my overall costs and I'm concerned about transparency am i concerned about you know security and how fast I can get things resolved and by the way open-source can help with a lot of those things that's what they need to think about but look IBM you know had a longtime partnership with Red Hat Red Hat has a strong position in the marketplace but they're not the only ones there you know you mentioned VMware Dave VMware cross has a strong play across multi cloud environments you know we see Red Hat at all of the cloud shows you see yeah IBM at many of the cloud shows but you've got Cisco out there with their play it is still you know this this chapter - if you agree with Ginny's terminology we are relatively early in that but you know IBM I believe is strengthened in their positioning I don't think it radically changes the landscape just because you know Red Hat is still going to stay you know working with the Amazons and Microsoft and Google's and and and other players out there so it doesn't dramatically change the landscape it just consolidates two players that already worked closely let me ask a question so I mean was clearly positioning this as a cloud play you know generally and you know in a multi cloud specifically is this a cloud play okay um so I'll say yes but Dave so absolutely the future and where the growth for Red Hat and where IBM and for this thirty four billion dollars to be successful the tip of the spear is open shift and therefore you know how does that new cloud native multi cloud environment you know where do they play but at its core you know red heads still Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux you know is it stills you know that is the primary driver of revenue and Linux isn't going away as a matter of fact Linux is growing Microsoft you know just revealed that there are more Linux workloads sitting in Azure than there are windows we already knew that there were you know strong Linux out there and Microsoft is embrace Linux we saw Satya Nadella at Red Hat summit and you know we've seen that proliferation of linux out there so linux is still you know growing in it where it's being used out there and in the cloud you know linux is what most people are using so the reason why I think this acquisition is interesting Jim Whitehurst today said publicly that it was a great deal that IBM was getting but then he couched he said of course it's a great deal for our shareholders too so and Ginni chimed in and said yes it was a fair deal okay fine 34 billion you know we'll see the reason why I think IBM likes this deal and IBM you know generally has been been good over in history with acquisitions you know clearly some mega acquisitions like PwC which was transformative me we have time to talk about that Cognos and some of the other software acquisitions done quite well not a hundred percent but the reason why I think IBM likes this deal is because it's a good cash flow deal so I think in many ways and they don't talk about this because it's not sexy marketing but iBM is a services company over 60% of the company's revenue comes from professional services IBM loves complexity because they can bring in services throw the big blue blanket around you and do a lot of integration work and the reason is that I think this is an interesting acquisition from from a financial standpoint and Ginny says this all the time this is not about cost synergies this is about revenue opportunities when you try to put everything in the cloud you always run into the back-end systems and her point is that those back-end systems need to be modernized how do you modernize those back-end systems openshift it's not trivial to do that you need services and so iBM has a large install base probably by my estimate you know certainly tens of billions of dollars of opportunity there to modernize back-end systems using Red Hat technology and that means that it's a front-loaded deal from a cash flow standpoint that they will find automatically revenue Cyn to plug in to IBM's captive install base what are your thoughts yeah Dave III think that your analysis is spot-on so RedHat has been one of these most consistent you know revenue companies out there you steadily when they went from a billion dollars to now they're right around three billion dollars they had the March to five billion dollars they had a couple of minor blips in their quarterly earnings but if you plug in that IBM services organization you really have the opportunity to supercharge this is not the opportunity is to have that that huge IBM services organization really helped you know grow those engagements do more openshift you know get more Linux help ansible you know really become the standard for you know automation in the modern workplace the challenge is that too many IBM people get involved because the the thing that everybody's a little worried about is IBM's done well with a lot of those acquisitions but they don't leave them stand alone even you know VMware for many years was a standalone company today VMware in Dell they're one company they're in lockstep from a management standpoint and they're working closely together what differentiates RedHat is you know iBM has groups that are much larger than RedHat that do some of the same things but RedHat with their open-source mission and and where they're driving things and the innovation they drive they move a little bit faster than IBM traditionally does so can will the Red Hat brand the Red Hat people and Red Hat still stay independent enough so that they can till you know hop on that next wave you know they they jumped early into kubernetes and that was the wave that really helped them drive for what they're doing the open shift you know even Dave you know Red Hat ahead bought core OS which was a smaller company moving even faster than Red Hat and while they've done a really good job of integrating those people absolutely from what I've heard it is slowed things down a little bit just because Red Hat compared to core OS was a much bigger company and of course IBM is a be a myth compared to Red Hat so will they throw these groups together and you know who will be making the decisions and can they you know maintain that that culture and that growth mindset well the point is structure we bring up VMware a lot as the model and of course when EMC bought VMware for paltry six hundred million six thirty five million dollars it folded it in and then spun it back out which was the right move certainly allowed the ecosystem to blossom I don't think IBM is gonna take that same approach blue wash is the term they'll probably blue wash that now cuz no Dave they said iBM has said they will not blue eyes there's no purple red stay separate absolutely there's concerns you know so to get those revenue synergies there's there's you're gonna have to plug into IBM systems and that requires some some work and IBM generally good at that so we'll see we'll keep our eyes on that it's but but I would predict that IBM is not going to do a VMware like well it's going to be some kind of hybrid Dave one of the other things is you talked about so Jim Whitehurst you know executive respective had him on the cube a lot he's reporting to Ginny you know the question is is this Ginny's last big move and who replaces her yeah let's talk about succession planning so a lot of a lot of rumors that Whitehurst is is next he's 52 years old I've said I don't I don't think they would do that but but let's talk about it first of all just you know Jim white her side sort of interviewed him the number of times but but you know I'm quite well you think even watch the job so you know I talked with Jim a little bit at red hat summit you know he kind of makes light of it he said you know knowing IBM the way we all know IBM IBM has always taken somebody from inside to do that he feels that he has a strong mission still to drive Red Hat he is super passionate about Red Hat he wrote a book book about the open source culture and is still driving that so I think from everything I see from him that's still the job that he loves and wants to do and you know it's a very different challenge to run IBM I'm not saying he would turn it down if that was the direction that it went if it went down to it but I did not see him angling and positioning like that would be where he wants to go well and of course you know Jim is from North Carolina he's got that kind of southern folksy demeanor you know comes across as the so the nicest guy in the room he's also the smartest guy in the room but oh we'll see we'll see what happens there I've said that I think Martin Schroder is going to be the next CEO of IBM Martin Schroder did three years of combat duty as the CFO in in what was a tough time for IBM to be a CFO they were going through those big transitions talking about you know they had to had to do the the SoftLayer acquisition they had to put together those strategic initiatives and so he's has he has CFO chops so he understands finance deeply he ran you know when IBM's big services business he's now responsible for IBM's revenue generation he's a spokesperson you know in many ways for the company he's like the prototypical choice he would not be surprising at all to see IBM plug him right in a little bit of history as you know still him a bit of a history historian of the industry have been around for a while John Akers back in the early 1990s when IBM's mainframe business was was tanking and the whole company was was tanking and it was at the risk of actually believe it or not running out of money they were gonna split up the company because the industry was breaking apart Intel and microprocessors Microsoft and software C gated disk drives you know Oracle and databases and to be more competitive from a product standpoint they were gonna split the company up into pieces Gerstner came in and said no way Gerson it was you know CEO of American Express said no that's not how customers want to buy he bought PwC for a song compared to what Carly Fiorina at HP a Carly Fiorina at HP wanted to pay I think 15 billion for it I want to say IBM paid five billion or maybe even less for PwC it completely transformed the company it transformed IBM into a services company and that's where what IBM is today they don't like when you say that but that's where the revenue was coming from what that did now and they also started to buy software companies IBM was restricted from getting into applications for years and years and years because of the DOJ because they owned the mainframe they had a monopoly while Microsoft and Intel changed all that IBM started to buy software companies and bought lots of them so they became a services company with a collection of software assets and the main mainframe and you know the power they have a storage business and you know Finance I'd be a global finance business etc etc so my my point is I'm not sure Jim Whitehurst would want to run that you know it's it's kind of messy now what you need run that is somebody who really understands finance knows how to turn the knobs and that's why I think you know Martin Schroeder is actually an excellent pick for that to keep the cash flow going to keep the dividend going to keep the stock buybacks going it's still in my view not a growth play I think there's certainly near-term growth that can be had by modernizing applications but I don't look at IBM as a growth company I look at IBM as a portfolio company that throws off a lot of cash and if and when the market stops rewarding growth and profit list growth a company like IBM will become more favorable to investors yeah and the question at the end of the day is after spending thirty four billion dollars for red hat does IBM help weather the storm of what is happening with the phenomenal growth of AWS the changes happening in Microsoft build more of a relationship than they've already had with Google and help position themselves for this next wave of IT there's IBM helped create a lot of the waves that you know happen in IT well the pure play cloud players are in it for the long game you know you know Amazon's philosophy is give tools to builders and allow them to disrupt the you know traditional old guard whether it's old guard technology companies or old guard industry players and you've seen the stat of how many Fortune 1000 companies or you know have gone out of business in the last 20 or 30 years or whatever it is that's going to continue and Amazon and and certainly Google and Microsoft want to support that disruption by providing cloud tooling and put the data in the hands of people that allows them to create new business models now that doesn't mean everybody's gonna throw up there mainframes it's it's not gonna happen it's certainly not gonna happen overnight and probably will never happen but I just don't see how IBM becomes a growth company in that scenario the growth is going to be continue to be with the cloud well but Dave we had seen IBM I'd say struggle a little bit when it comes to the the developers these days and the Red Hat acquisition is definitely going to be a boon to them in this space because Red Hat all about the developers that that's what you know that their customers are so you know that that's such a huge community that they've already tapped into so Ginny has said this hybrid multi-cloud is a chapter two with a trillion dollar opportunity so who else is going after that trillion dollar opportunity let's let's lay it out there who are the multi cloud players VMware obviously IBM Red Hat with open shift is in there Google with anthos Cisco is coming at it from a network perspective so they have coming at it from their position of strength even though you know you know they're relatively new entrants well ever everybody wants to be the new management layer in this multi cloud environment what VMware had done is had you know vCenter became you know the console for everyone as they were consolidating all of their silos and when I go to a multi cloud environment right where do I live you know Microsoft has a strong play there that's the other you know VMware IBM Red Hat anthos Google Mentos Cisco and Microsoft yeah and of course the one that while they won't say that they are multi cloud you can't talk about multi cloud without talking about Amazon because Amazon is a piece of everyone's cloud environment we were seeing what they're doing with outpost there so they are the kind of Spectre looming over this entire multi-cloud discuss yeah right on I think you got to put Amazon into that mix they will be an entrance into this multi cloud play and it's not gonna be a winner-take-all deal I could say cisco is coming at it from a position of networking strength Microsoft has its software estate and it's gonna do very well there IBM Red Hat coming at it from a standpoint of modernizing applications and there's a services could play and services component there and VMware of course coming at it from the the infrastructure operating system I don't see Oracle as interested in that market there may be some smaller players like turbo anomic you know who probably get gobbled up by one of these guys that we just mentioned but that really is the landscape and this is you know five six companies a trillion dollars there's plenty to go around all right Stu final thoughts on on the the Red Hat news the IBM news that they've finalized the Red Hat acquisition yes so you know what you want to look for is you know first of all you know what's happening organizationally you know if open shift is the primary you know the the tip of the sphere what we're talking about here for this you know cloud native multi-cloud world you know what does you know the IBM Cloud messaging looked like they're gonna have an analyst event here in a couple of weeks that you know that they've invited all the analysts to going into what does that cloud portfolio looks like how do they sort through all of the kubernetes options that they've had today do they try to elevate IBM cloud to be a stronger player or will they let Red Hat continue to play across all of the cloud environments that they have so you know organization and product positioning of the two things that I'm looking at the most Tom Siebel said publicly yesterday that IBM is a great company national international treasure but they miss cloud and they missed a I I wouldn't agree totally they didn't miss cloud they were late to cloud they had to buy software they're in cloud just like Oracle's in cloud not as competitive as the AWS cloud but they're they've got a cloud yeah HP doesn't have a cloud Dell doesn't have a cloud these these two companies that I just mentioned do AI yeah they're not sound of generalized AI like what Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft are doing IBM's trying to solve you know big chewy problems iBM is a services company as they said so you know Watson you see a lot of negative stories about Watson but Watson requires a lot of services to make it work and it's as they say solving different problems so they're a player in AI multi cloud is new and this move the acquisition of red hat yes thirty four billion dollars expensive it's not gonna be pretty on the balance sheet but they get good cash flow so they'll deal with that over time it puts them right in the mix as a leader in multi cloud so thanks to for breaking down the the acquisition and thank you for watching this is Dave Volante what's do min and then we'll see you next time

(upbeat music) >> Hello there and welcome to a special Cube conversation here at The Cube's Palo Alto studios, I'm John Furrier. Join with me for this special Cube Conference, Stu Miniman with Wikibon and The Cube co-host as well just up at Amazon Web Services Summit. Stu, great to see you again. Our next guest is Ben Golub, who's the executive chairman and interim CEO of Storj, pronounced storage. So it's a really hot cryptocurrency, blockchain based storage solution. I should say decentralized storage, not necessarily cryptocurrency, but tokens are involved, encryption. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's good to be back. >> Formerly Docker CEO and now advising at Mayfield Fund as a venture partner and also interim CEO of a hot-- >> Yeah really exciting company. And I'm really excited to talk to you about it today. >> So let's just jump into it. So obviously the ICO craze is awesome and we've always speculated that the blockchain and the decentralized applications are coming is going to be the real action. But yet it's going to create efficiencies where there's inefficiencies. >> Sure. >> Venture capital is one of them and that's why the ICO craze is going. People are raising a boatload of money that they probably wouldn't have gotten that amount. >> Wouldn't have gotten, yeah no dilution, things like that. It's interesting yeah. >> So give us an update on Storj or storage. How much in ICO did they raised, whitepapers out there? It's peer to peer, give a quick, take a minute to explain what the company's doing. >> Yeah well I guess that I should probably start by saying that I think that blockchain is bigger than just cryptocurrency, and decentralized is bigger than blockchain, and Storj is primarily a decentralized storage company. So we're about decentralized apps and the whole thing would absolutely work even if we were just using dollars. But I think it does make it a whole lot more exciting. And so the company, kind of unique in the crypto space in that we actually had a running service that was providing real value, before we did the large token sale. And the token sale raised about $30 million. Fortunately they took about 10 of that in Ethereum and Bitcoin which rose up. So there's a good deal more than that in the bank account right now. >> John: Hopefully they converted to fiat currency. >> And then they converted to fiat along the way. >> It's at an all-time high of $20,000 right now. It's like $7,000, something like that. >> Yeah, so you know, didn't sell everything at the peak, but didn't sell at the-- >> Yeah, so we've been having many blockchain and crypto or token-based economic kind of things. But the real question is what's happening? Now we know the action's been on the infrastructure side. We look at all the top hedge funds, Polychain, amongst others. They love these deals because it's infrastructure. Is that where the action is and how are you guys looking at that because at the same time, there's a wave of decentralized applications also known as Dapps coming on. So there's a relationship going on between how fast the infrastructure can go, and then how applications are going to work with either on chain or off chain dynamics. >> Sure, sure. So maybe it would be helpful to give you a sense of what it is that we do. 'Cause I think that if you do that, then I think it makes sense in the context of decentralized infrastructure, decentralized apps, but also actually traditional infrastructure as well. I've always been searching for a company that I could describe at Thanksgiving. I've never succeeded, so I always end up saying that I'm in computers, and fixing somebody's printer. (laughing) But I guess if I were to describe Storj at Thanksgiving, I'd say it's basically the Airbnb of storage, or the Airbnb of disc drives. So Airbnb, people have lots of condos or vacation properties that aren't being used all the time, and so Airbnb brings them together with people who want to rent those, and they're the largest hotel company in the world, without owning a single property. And we're kind of doing the same thing with Storj, in that there is, first of all, this explosion in the amount of data that's getting created. It would fill a stack of CD-ROMs to Mars and back this year. Yet the price of cloud storage hasn't come down. And 90% of all the disc drives that are out there are only about 10% utilized. So seems like a problem that needs a solution. And that's what we've done. We've basically brought together a very large network of individuals and companies that have spare storage capacity and matched them up with people who need storage. The really cool aspect, there are many cool aspects about it, but one of them is that basically if you want to store on the Storj network, we take your file, you encrypt it, so we never hold the keys. You encrypt it, it's all scrambled up, we break it up into between 20 and 80 pieces, and we spread those out across 150,000 or so nodes that we have in our network. So it's super cheap, but it's also super secure. Great performance because the data's way out at the edge. And super available because there's no storm or power outage or idiot tripping over a power cord that can take out your storage. >> So, Ben, you touched on, first question I was going to ask, of course, trust and security. Storage I absolutely have to worry about, so it sounds like that's at the core, but there's a number of dynamics going on in the industry. Object storage was great, let's spread it out, let's make it more decentralized, but most of the core storage industry is speeds and feeds and latency's super important, and even when you start getting to distributed architecture, I worry about that latency. So what are kind of the use cases, what are some of the key customer issues? Is price a big piece of it? Or what solutions does Storj solve that others can't? >> I always said when I was at Cluster, which was a storage company that there were four things that mattered in storage. There's certainly price; there was security; as in I don't want anybody to be able to access it; there's availability, I never want to drop or lose files; and finally there's performance, how fast I can get it. And so for a huge range of use cases that involve files, basically everything that object storage is kind of used for today, the design of our system is actually much better because we've encrypted it locally and then spread it out, you really can't attack it. First of all, you'd have to figure out... So a would-be attacker who wanted to find one of your files in the storage network would have to figure out which of the 80 or the 20 nodes out of 150,000 it's located on. If they found one of those, and they got the small portion of the file that's there, they wouldn't be able to do anything with it 'cause it's encrypted. Even if they were somehow able to decrypt it by stealing the key from you, not from us... >> So encryption and immutability... >> And immutability, right. So you get all of that. So for the security piece, it's great. For the availability piece, I never lose a file. It's really, really good, because if you just look at the math, the chances that somehow... You can basically lose 10 out of 20 nodes and still be able to recover your files. And all of our nodes are run by different people, different power supply. >> So let's take a step back. How many nodes are on the network now, you said? >> 150,000 now, run by 70,000 farmers, is what we call them. They're not miners, 'cause they're not just solving that problem, they're just producing something of value. 70,000 farmers, and then we have on the network right now, over 50 petabytes of data, which is a really large amount, and yet, we don't run a single data center. >> Have you guys raised any venture at all, or is it all ICO proceeds? >> There was a small seed round that was done, before the ICO craze. But other than that, it's all-- >> And how many people are working on the company? >> 25. >> So you guys are a classic startup. The working product, how does that look now? Is it on the blockchain, is it off the chain, how's it working, Bitcoin? >> So I've described to you what the product does. So far nothing I've described to you involves blockchain. The way the economics work is that as a user, somebody who wants to store on our network, we quote a price in dollars. You can either pay us in dollars or in the Storj token, and as a farmer, you get compensated with a Storj token. And that's done, of course, using blockchain we're actually part of Ethereum. >> Is that ERC-20 token? >> ERC-20 token, yeah. There are also interesting things that we are working on using blockchain for things like you just mentioned, data integrity, so I can make sure that if I'm doing a snapshot of a database, and I want to make sure that it's exactly what it is, nobody can tamper with it, et cetera, then that's a perfect use of blockchain. But using blockchain for the stuff I was talking about before, like figuring out where the shards are and making sure that they're uptime and reliable, that's actually stuff where blockchain isn't the best answer. >> Ben, tell us a little bit about the customers that you find there, 'cause storage administrators, that role's been changing a lot, but the typical storage administrator, if you tell them, "Oh yeah, I'm doing some distributed thing, "somewhere else, and paying in crypto-currency," they'd be like, are you kidding me? I want this thing that I can lock and hold and guard with a gun. >> This is like anything else, there's an adoption curve, and right now it's clearly very much early adopters. And actually similarly to Docker and similar to the cloud in general, it's developers who are leading the way. Developers are saying, oh, wow, I can write to the storage network in the same way that I would have written to S3, only it's cheaper, for many use cases, more performing, and not centralized, so I'm not trusting one cloud provider. So for certain use cases, this is fantastic. >> Are there certain cloud native apps that you're finding have strong affinity here? >> Yeah, so basically what we have affinity with right now, and let's be clear, this is early days. I wouldn't recommend that people store their most sensitive data on this, but-- >> Not Oracle certified yet, is what you're saying? >> We're not Oracle certified, no. (laughing) Basically anything involving a large file that you're not writing to very frequently, but you're reading a lot, or that's getting read by lots of people around the world, we're a really good solution. It's one of the things I think I mentioned to you. So we've got 150,000 nodes. They're located in I think it's now 180 countries, and all over the U.S. So if you want to get your data close to the edge, the people who are consuming your data are really close to the edge, this is actually really good. And because it's spread across so many, you get the benefit of parallelism, so it's super fast, in addition to being super safe and super secure. >> How does it work for the farmers? Because we have video files, so we would love to spread our video files on the Storj network. So let's just say... >> I'd do a special deal for you, too, you know. >> Of course, yeah, get a little token action going on both sides, Cube coins. But the availability thing is concerning. Whose computers is it being stored on? Is it extra capacity? Is it servers? Is it people's home computers? What's the, is it that kind of model? >> Sure, so basically yeah, we, just as Airbnb measures reputation, we measure reputation, too. And so if you don't have a good reputation, certain characteristics, we won't send data to you. What it basically means is you've got to have dedicated hardware and a dedicated connection. So we do have people who are running things in their home, but it's not a laptop, it's not on your phone. But if you have a disc drive that's connected with reasonably high capacity and reasonably well connected, then you'll establish good reputation. But what we are seeing is we are seeing a lot of universities, a lot of small businesses, some data center operators who have spare capacity or just want to use us as like, be both a farmer and a user. So backup and get stuff on their capacity as a good idea. And interestingly enough, we also are getting a lot of people who were Bitcoin miners and bought equipment, which is good quality equipment, but there's such an arms race in doing that. >> So they abandoned, because it was too hard for them to get coins. >> It's too hard to make money, right, and very expensive, specialized equipment, and in our case, basically general high quality equipment works well. >> What's the profit model? How do the farmers make money? Take our Cube videos, as an example, so I'm paying you guys, and you're distributing those tokens? >> You're paying us and you're paying us either in dollars or tokens. And then farmers get compensated in tokens. Right now, about 60 cents on every dollar goes to farmers. And farmers get more storage based off of their reputation. We charge people based on both how much you're storing as well as how much bandwidth egress that you're doing, and we compensate farmers exactly the same way. >> It's handled through a consensus protocol that you guys have? >> Yeah, yeah, so the payment and assessing reputation we actually use good distributed blockchain as well there, right, so you're not counting on Storj to be in the middle there. Now, with the remaining 40 cents, which I think is actually the really interesting part, we keep some of that, we put some back into the network, but what I'm really excited about is that this is now a way for us to economically empower demand partners as well. The first thing we announced was FileZilla, but we have lots of other open source projects waiting in the wings, and we're happy to share with them. So as opposed to centralized cloud, where it's really hard to make money as an open source company, we're not an open source project in our case, right? We're happy if you're sending us users and data, to give you a really meaningful percentage. >> Any kind of freemium model you guys are playing with? I can imagine this being pretty interesting, because S3 democratized and lowered the cost barrier, obviously with cloud. >> S3 has been great for many things. >> How low are you in terms of the disruption? You guys are probably going to have to come in and undercut S3, is that the strategy? Or is that the price value? >> I think what I learned from my time in storage, is price is important but you have to be really safe and available and reliable, 'cause people's data is really important. But we looked across a pretty broad set of use cases, in comparing us to the traditional cloud providers we're probably a third. And we could go lower. What I think is really interesting in our case is that the economics just work really well. So from our perspective, if you're a farmer, you've already got, it's spare capacity, you don't need any more electricity to run this thing, you've got bandwidth, right? You don't need to hire any more people. So it's almost pure margin for a farmer, which is great for them. And so we can give economic value to farmers, we can give economic value to our customers, we can give economic value to partners. >> Any kind of economic models you can share in terms of what someone would make? Let's just say that I had this big music library that's not being used anymore, and I had a-- >> Well, as a customer of course, if you've got data that you want to store on our network, you'll save a lot of money, and it's probably a third of what you might pay. >> But is there any kind of, if I'm a farmer, I want to join the network? >> But if you're a farmer. >> How much am I going to make? >> It really depends on how much you're storing and how good your connection is, but as a farmer, I think you can make decent money. This could probably be I don't know off the top of my head, $20, $30 a month per drive, which isn't bad, and certainly much easier than making money-- >> So it kind of depends like the Airbnb model, depends how well you're using-- >> How well you're used. So some people earn less, some people earn more. And again, for most of the farmers, this is pure margin. >> Great, we got a couple back to back rooms, Stu. We should get some drives up there and get on board. We could pay for the cameras. >> And look, I think for videos, you guys would actually be a perfect use case with a lot of the stuff that's going to be coming out later this year. You get both storage and CDN like things for free, in the sense that because-- >> I'm really glad you brought that up, 'cause I want to ask you about Videocoin, 'cause Halsey Minor has Videocoin, another ICO, he raised $50 million. We covered that on Silicon Angle. But he's trying to democratize Acromi. Is that similar to what you guys are doing? >> I guess you could say yeah, we're further democratizing object storage, democratizing S3, but I think we can also democratize Acromi, we can democratize Isilon, there's certain other really exciting things that are-- >> What other services, you mentioned CDN, so it's not just storing the information, but that global dispersion, what does that enable? >> It used to be that people had a really big difference between archival which is slow, hard to get at, and CDN, right? And but actually, given the way that we're doing this thing, we can be pretty seamless. Pay archival for stuff that's staying in archival, but go up market if you're going to be having a lot of people read it. >> So I got to ask you about the, obviously, security. You're looking at it for additional services around redundancy, I can see that being a nice headroom for you. On a personal note, you've been involved in a lot of industry companies that have done very well, entrepreneurial success. >> Ben: Why am I doing this? (laughing) >> I can tell you're having fun. How could you not have fun, it's a whole 'nother generation of innovation, disruption coming, a whole 'nother price point. So what's it like, are you having fun? And if you could talk to your 22-year-old self right now, 'cause I wish I was 22 right now in this market-- >> Are you saying I'm not 22? >> How do you explain this? And when you go to parties, even in the Valley, and people say, "Man, you're crazy, it's a fricken' "scam out there," how do you explain to 'em this revolution? Because this is like a special, unique wave. How would you talk about that? >> Actually I describe it the same way to people in the Valley the same way that I described at the beginning, which is that blockchain is bigger than cryptocurrency, and decentralized is much bigger than blockchain. And Storj is first and foremost decentralized. It's about decentralized computing, decentralized storage, supporting decentralized apps, keeping the internet from ending up in the hands of just three people, three companies, which I think is really important. But also I feel very good that, to the extent that Storj does touch on cryptocurrency, that we've done it the right way. We had the service working first before we did the token sale. We raised what now appears to be a modest amount in the token sale, tried to be very transparent and at the forefront. >> You probably could've gotten more if you wanted to. >> Probably, right? But we were trying to be forefront in terms of governance and transparency, and I think that it'll probably be a good thing, just as it was kind of a good thing that the bubble burst in the late '90s and you got rid of a lot of such not great companies and not such great operators. I think that the current corrections, or whatever, in the crypto market I think will-- >> Like pets.com is gone, but DogeCoin still exists. (laughing) >> So I'm sure that somebody has a crypto base pets.com or webvan lurking in the wings somewhere. Kodak just did it. >> I got to ask you, you're super smart. You went to some really good schools, I think Princeton, Harvard Business School. So you got a good education, so I got to get your take on the whole token economics vision. 'Cause this is, if you look at outside the tech trends, there's actually new economic models that are coming out. Have you looked at token economics? New liquidity on the one side, you've got sovereignty, you've got consensus. These are not just tech issues, these are society issues. What's your vision around that? How are you viewing it? What's the upside? How is this shaping the future? >> Yeah, I think if you're a token network, you sort of have to have some central bank chops as well, right? And we actually have a central banker. >> John: So you have a chief economic officer? >> So we don't, no, we have an advisor-- >> John: Public policy. >> I actually had a degree in public policy at one point. But we need to think about the token supply in the same way you'd think about the money supply. We're backed by something real, so it's sort of like having currencies backed by gold. We need to make sure that the market grows and the network grows. And my fundamental belief is that the more the network grows, the more people use it, the more value that we're able to provide, that'll be good for token economics in the long run. In the short run, though, what we've done, is again, we price based off of dollars, and we compensate farmers based off the token based off of the spot price. So for farmers, we've tried to remove any need to worry about volatility or things like that. >> So I want your reaction-- >> Or the price. >> I've said on The Cube multiple times that in the old days of venture startups, the CTO was everything. You had to have a great CTO or VP of engineering and great senior executive team on the entrepreneurial team. Now it's almost like the chief economic officer is a critical piece, 'cause you've got public policy intersecting with economics. You've got new kinds of math that's not technical algorithm but it's kind of business algorithms. >> It is, business algorithms. Just like any economy, the money supply matters. And people's trust in that money matters. And the supply matters. All that stuff like that, and stability matters. So I think absolutely this new breed of network based token companies will have to worry about that, and probably should think about a chief economics officer, but it doesn't mean that you don't also have to have a great CTO and great technology, 'cause that's how you make the network valuable and grow. And one of the reasons that gave me both excitement and comfort about going to Storj is that the economic model works, fundamentally, even if the crypto's not there. >> John: 'Cause technology is decentralized. >> Decentralized storage makes sense even if you're buying and selling it with dollars or pounds or rubles, or whatever. >> Ben, great to see you, thanks for coming in and sharing the Ben Golub School of Economics, Public Policy for Tokens. You can give a class at Stanford on that soon, although that's the competition's school. >> Maybe, yes. Slightly different. We still like them. >> Great to see you, congratulations. Storj, pronounced storage. Great, successful ICO, hot startup, really, an example of the infrastructure opportunities of a new decentralized infrastructure that can be and will soon, we think, it will be critical infrastructure in a whole new way. Great to see you. >> Ben: Really good to see you, great to be back with you. >> It's the Cube Conversation, I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live From Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE covering Polycon 18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Hello and welcome back to our live coverage of Polycon 18. We are in the Bahamas. It's theCUBE's coverage of the cryptocurrency, ICO's, blockchain, the entire industry on token economics. This is sponsored by Polymath, they're the host, hosting us here. They make a securitized token platform to help people tokenize their business. I'm here with Dave Vellante, and we're here with Al Burgio, Cube alumni, one of the only Cube alumni here. Now we're adding more, good to see you. >> Thank you for having me, guys. >> Thanks for coming on, Al, you're the CEO/founder of a blockchain venture, Fusechain, and open-source project, DigitalBits. >> Correct. >> DigitalBits.io, we talked about this on studio in Palo Alto, around the project, how's it going? Are you doing an ICO, what's happening, what's the momentum, talk about what's going on. >> Well the momentum is great, um, as we can see by an event like this. I mean, the attendance in phenomenal, the discussions are great, and there's definitely an ongoing movement towards blockchain, cryptocurrencies and so forth. And we're obviously very excited to be a part of it, and equally so been experiencing phenomenal success while we've been in stealth mode, and we're excited to be sharing that in the coming weeks to the public. >> I always try to get data out of you, but you're like an iron trap, man. You like, will not reveal it. I saw you in the hallways this morning, and even last night at dinner, I mean, surrounded by investors you're getting, and people throwing their cards at you. That's a good sign, I mean, but it's still early. This is an emerging ecosystem, and you're a senior entrepreneur, so you're attracting that kind of interest in the venture solid. What's the story, what's the story of these investors? What are they interested in, why are they approaching you, why the appetite for your project? And how are you approaching as a seasoned ICO, most people want to promote the hell out of their opportunities. You're not, you're taking a different approach. >> Well we definitely, obviously we'll turn on the marketing engine with a full tank of gas. And you'll see that in the coming weeks, but we've been able to definitely have, you know, a significant number of conversations while in the stealth mode phase. Really I think what's attracting a lot of the interest is that we've identified a massive market opportunity. And really where blockchain technology can help, among other things, bring a liquidity to a space that does lack liquidity, and that for us, is the loyalty rewards market. It's a multi-billion dollar market, and we feel that what we've built with the DigitalBits protocol and the DigitalBits network is really going to solve a big problem out there for businesses, enterprises, as well as consumers. And you know, we're excited to be bringing that to life, and with phenomenal support from ecosystem partners, among others. >> Let's talk about the show. We're going to bring you back tomorrow when we wrap up, cause I know you got a lot of meetings and scheduling, you got to check out the sessions, so I want to get your take on the show after the fact. But going into the show, you have some early conversations, some early data's coming in from these hallway conversations and interviews. What are you seeing, I mean, what's the bottom line? Is it ICOs are hot, the SEC is coming down and putting out subpoenas, a wave of subpoenas recently. The advisor role, you got venture capitalists, it's unregulated, they're selling, they're pumping, they're dumping. You know I know of a couple people that are in some coin deals that are, you know, venture funds, but they're also marketing. >> Yeah. >> The same thing, so they're getting their hand slapped. What's the state of the industry? >> I think, you know, there's high energy in the space. It's moving really fast, and some organizations are getting overly anxious, moving perhaps a little too fast without getting their ducks in a row, and maybe perhaps that's resulting in some wrist slapping. But overall, you know, this is a big evolution that's happening. And what we're seeing obviously is a new asset class, but it can take the shape of perhaps the security, or utility, and you know, the law applies to these things differently. And so, you know, people need to do their homework. >> So you were at the VideoCoin event last night. That had been very successful. We're going to have Halsey Minor come on shortly for an interview, seasoned entrepreneur, he's back at the game. I mean, this market's attracting pros. We had the Goldman Sachs guys now run BlockTower, institutional investors, you got pro entrepreneurs coming on, and you got the young guns coming up. I mean this is really kind of a really robust, fertile environment. >> I think it's only the beginning. We're going to see a tremendous amount of ongoing pedigree enter this space. Every day we're seeing evidence of ongoing validation, and you know, it's by no coincidence that we're already seeing some phenomenal pedigree, and I think you know, like I said, it's just going to continue. >> What's the one observation that you would share to people that are watching about this event? Obviously lot of Canadians here, you're Canada living in the U.S., but it's not just Canadians, it's a global economy, what's your observation? >> Sorry? >> What's your observation of the show? >> There's definitely, if I look at the attendee list here, it's this convergence that's happening. So you have Wall Street or the Canadian equivalent, which is Bay Street, you know traditional investment banking, brokerage-type institutions that are here, very curious in terms of how blockchain will impact the securities markets. And then you have the innovators that are on the forefront of this really driving the technology that's going to support and help even that industry evolve. So there's a lot of talk here, in particularly as it relates to that category of things. >> Lot of whales, a lot of influencers, a lot of advisors, a lot of money here, lot of action. >> Lot of action. >> All right, Al Burgio is the founder and CEO of Fusechain, and the sponsors of DigitalBits.io, it's a great open-source project, check it out. I'm going to still try to get some information out of you, cause you're still in stealth mode, but you're good. >> Thanks for having me, guys. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Cube alumni here in Bahamas for theCUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. More coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas, it's theCUBE, covering Polygon 18, brought to you by Polyman. >> Welcome back everyone, we're here live with theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Polycon '18. We're in the Bahamas, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, co-founders and co-hosts of theCUBE. We're here with special guest Halsey Minor, entrepreneur, serious serial entrepreneur here on theCUBE. Halsey, great to have you. You're the founder and CEO of VideoCoin, a successful ICO. You had an event last night, kind of an investor thank you event out in the Bahamas Country Club, there, you're here. Man, you're a pro, you're back in the game with this crypto. This is the wave, I mean, I want to get your perspective 'cause you see waves. You've seen CNET, you started that from scratch before online news was anything, you were the pioneer in that. First investor, first operator in salesforce.com, a variety of other successful entrepreneurial adventures. You've got a nose for the waves. So just put it in perspective, what is this wave? >> Yeah, so I actually have an interesting story because I've actually started around 2012, and I launched my first business in 2013. So, the first problem that I saw was, how do you get your money from your bank account and buy Bitcoin? Still a problem, hasn't been fixed, right? So I tried to fix that. Oh well, I did to a certain extent, I did fix the problem. So what I did was created effectively a coin-based converter, and I started out and was going to make it very easy for you to take your bank account, connect it up, seemed logical, and then buy, you know, the currency. The company was called Bit Reserve at the time. So, no bank would touch anybody named Bit in their name. And it was even worse than that, all of us who put our company name into our bank account, we had our bank accounts basically shut down, right? So, I started getting an idea how difficult this was going to be, you know, Coinbase getting a Silicon Valley bank account early on to become a conduit, was very fortuitous. It ultimately took two and a half years and buying a big chunk of New Jersey Bank before we were able to allow you to connect your US bank and your European bank into Uphold to buy currency. So it's really Uphold, Coinbase, maybe like Gitbit, very, very few who've been able to crack that problem. We literally had to buy part of a bank to do it. So that's where I started. So I really looked at it very much as money, as a new monetary system. And I still see unlimited opportunities in that area. It wasn't until really a couple years later that I saw the block chain as the new architecture for the computer, and what I mean by that, is what Bitcoin proved was that if you gave people software and they ran it on their computer and they got paid in some funny kind of digital money, they would convert that money back into fee hock, you know, dollars, and they go buy more computers. And nobody asks anybody to be a Bitcoin miner, they just come and showed up the more, the bigger it got, the bigger the opportunity. And what's most interesting is when you make money or lose money, depends on your cost of power. So for most of these Bitcoin miners, they're near hydroelectric dams. So what I realized, and VideoCoin is in the area of video. It's a direct competitor with Amazon web services, everything they do in video. So there's, it's called encoding which is compress it, there's storage and there's streaming, three basic pieces. So what I realized was, two things: first of all, 20% of servers and data centers are not used at all. They're called zombies, right? So all of these people, the Airbnb, Uber model, they can all of a sudden start earning on assets that are doing nothing. But even if you look out into the future, if video mining, which is what we call it, ends up being like bitcoin mining, then what happens is that the whole thing works on the cost of power. It's not good for Amazon, if they have to be competitive solely based on the cost of power. >> Dave, so he's got an ICO going on, we looked Filecoin, right? So Filecoin was storage and that's infrastructure. You go to VideoCoin, we're streaming right now, we've got video. This is kind of like an interesting digital media infrastructure ... >> Well ... >> What's your take compared to Filecoin? >> What's interesting to me is that I'd love to get Halsey's input on, because you've got the full spectrum here. You started in publishing and now-- >> With five TV shows. >> Dave: Okay. >> Yeah, CNET had five TV shows. >> So right, and so very digital from the beginning and relatively ripe for disruption and then now into banking, which really hasn't been disrupted, but we all think it's coming. So that's an interesting spectrum. It's not Negroponte, I don't think, bits versus atoms, because you've seen, you know tax season get disrupted. That's atoms. So what are the factors that make an industry ripe for disruption? >> Well, I mean the obvious thing is really disruptive technologies, right? And so for the Internet, for me, it was, I started the company in '93 to be on commercial online services like AOL and I saw, I guess, the first browser in '93 and, actually at Sun, and it made me believe the Internet was going to be this incredible thing. And it was really seeing information coming in, and, you know, the Internet wasn't that big back then but I watched a gif of a storm, you know, from one of the weather centers, and so I realized that this information thing was incredibly interesting. And so what all of us did, the way I thought about it and seen it, is we're cracking open databases and we're just letting people have the information. And it was silly things like the ability for me to live in San Francisco but know what the weather was in New York and pack appropriately. This was the magic, I mean, we take all of this for granted. This was magic, right, at the time. You had to go out and buy a USA Today-- >> Check the stock price. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Call your friends in New York. >> Yeah, that was magic. So at a very high level, it was just access to information. At a very high level, what this is is combining information and money into a packet. Right? So now what we can do is, I can gather information from servers about what they're really doing and I can also be paying them at the same time. So you know, it would have actually solved a lot of problems around the Internet, because on the Internet getting paid was hard. And there were so many times we'd go into a meeting and we'd agree on the partnership but we didn't know who was paying who. You know? (laughing) Am I paying you for traffic or are you paying me for content or you know, how is that going? So this kind of comes with a built-in payment system, which I think is what makes it so incredible as a system. >> So we're-- >> And more stable, I am inferring, long-term anyway. Because that whole system that you just described on the Internet all blew up when the funding dried up. >> It blew up and I think, you know, I think there are certainly a lot of risks. The number one thing I would tell everybody in this area is, you know, be very cautious about what in you invest in. There were a lot of companies that, uh-- so my whole description was sort of the Internet bubble was that people say that, well, you know, nine trillion dollars was lost in investing. >> With everything that happened though. >> And when I-- >> The plus.com happened, everything happened. >> And what I said to the people is that it would be great if people had just invested in the survivors, but who knew what they were? The only reason the United States emerged, with, you know, with Salesforce and Ebay and Amazon, etc., the only reason that we emerged dominating the world was 'cause we invested in them all. Right? And so-- >> Even all those things that were called silly ideas actually happened. >> And they ended up happening. It was all a matter of timing, yeah. So you know, what's happening now is very much the same thing. You know, a lot of people are going to invest in a lot of bad ideas, right? But this is all necessary for the good ideas to get funding and for something big to come out of this. >> So I want to get your take on with the VideoCoin and in comparison, you mentioned Amazon, right? So our observation, obviously we're recording all these shows, Amazon web service, among others, the big guys are sucking all the oxygen out of the room. Look at the big whales, Google, Facebook, Amazon, I mean, we can't even run any ads on our site. We actually prefer to just push the content all over the world because it's hard to build a destination site. I mean, people going out of business in the media business. Video, your choices are Ustream now owned by IBM, Twitch TV became Amazon which was Ustream before that. Build your own custom player, set up a CDN, which is actually hard and expensive. Okay, so do I do Facebook live, again controlled by Facebook? So there's an opportunity that you're pursuing. Did you have that in mind? I mean, we see it every day and we know this, but luckily we have a good deal with Ustream, but the point is that is going to be up too. What's the alternative producers, content producers who have streaming, whether it's a pro set like this or someone who's going to have unlimited access to video streaming? >> So the real issues are cost and innovation, okay? And so Hanno Basse, who's the CTO of 20th Century Fox and one of our advisors, right? And all these media companies have the same problem. Nobody is watching broadcast anymore that'll cost them nothing and everybody's now streaming in, which is one-to-one and has a cost associated with it. So that's why, and even worse, videos going to 4k, 8k, VR, data that's going up like this-- >> Data isn't growing as fast either. >> So all these companies are confronted with all these costs and they can't monetize them. Google can monetize it, Amazon can monetize it. >> Tel cos ... >> Netflix, yeah. >> Ouch. >> But they can't monetize it, so it's all cost effectively and no revenue. So the one thing that we offered to VideoCoin by using all this research is we cut the cost 60 to 80%, so that's huge. The other thing is, in the early days, everybody bought Salesforce because it was cheaper. It was 1/10th of the cost. And I used to say to people, in the long run, it's going to be way more innovation, right? Because they're constantly, every quarter, rolling out a new version, right? And they're going to have the ability to connect, an API effectively, and the ability to connect, and the whole ecosystem can arise around that. And that's why their conference has 140,000 people, Dreamforce, because there's a whole ecosystem. >> It's sticky as hell too. >> That's right. >> Hard to get out. >> That's right. So while we are 60 to 80% lower cost, we're also effectively open source at the same time. So the ability to have a community arise and develop software. And so right now, you've seen this huge consolidation because it's actually kind of hard to build new kinds of apps on top of Amazon web services, right? But if you have this open system, and you have all these people are contributing code to it, all of a sudden, there are apps, video apps, that they'll be literally a whole new-- >> So you're going to have an open source contribution piece to your ... ? >> Yeah, I mean basically, everything we build is open source, right, so you know, all the way through to the network. So it creates a palate for people to start innovating in video. Because really what's happening is a lot of innovation is getting hurt by the fact these big guys totally dominate it, right? They don't want to see any innovation outside of the funds they bring you, right? >> Right, so you've heard my rap on this. I'd love to get Halsey's thoughts. So the big guys, you're right, have won. It's like centralization and victory. People here are saying, "No, we want to take it back." The premise that I hear a lot is there's been no innovation in protocols in, you know ... Google built gmail on SMPT, HTTP, DNS, it's all government-funded or academia. >> Yeah. >> And it's just a lack of innovation. >> That's right. >> And now, this is why I counter Warren Buffet and Charlie Monger, is no, we're building out a new set of infrastructure. >> That's right. >> Okay, so where do you guys fit into that? What are your thoughts, first of all, on that premise? And where do you guys fit? >> Yeah, I mean, look, you've got these huge companies that are totally dominant and even though they are, in fact, you know, innovative Silicon Valley companies by label, okay, they have all the same issues-- like I say to people, nobody today believes that anybody can put Amazon web services at risk. If I went to somebody and said, "You know Amazon web services which are worth 3/4 "of the value of the company, or 5/6, "depending on who you talk to, "there's going to be something after that." It would literally be a new concept because everybody's convinced this is Amazon's-- >> John: The winner. >> Yeah, this is their big, this is the way they make all their money-- >> Alright it's over-- >> Right, and if you say to somebody there is going to be a next thing, they would look at you like, you know, like you're foolish. But the reality is when you start changing some basic, underlying infrastructure in the Internet and you start doing things, decentralization, this is the word we're going to be using, you know, we're going to see it in solar power. And solar power is, you know, on a cost to benefit like this so, you know, it isn't going to be long before we're going to have power in our house legitimately, not like, you know, some science-fiction thing, we'll be legitimately powering most of our needs with solar that we connect because the cost is coming down so much. So we're going to see all of this decentralization happening. And in the world of computing, decentralization means that this is going to be the most efficient that computing can ever be. Because just compare using the Uber and Airbnb model of saying anything that's excess, let's turn into value. And I've heard that for every Uber driver, 15 cars go away, right? So the decentralization is going to have a profound effect on the economy and it's going to have a profound effect on these big guys. >> Oh, even those guys are going to get disrupted. >> They're going to get disrupted. And they're 20 years old, it's time for them to get disrupted, I mean, you know ... >> E-commerce is a 20, 30-year-old stack, some say 20, 20-year-old stack on e-commerce, all these things are ready, even what we would consider modern, you know, the miracle of saying oh the weather in New York. I mean that magic is here now in a new way. So I got to ask you the question-- >> Taken for granted. >> I got to ask you a question because you brought up that point. In your history of your career as an entrepreneur because you're doing stuff that's always new and cool, and probably before anyone else sees it, can you talk about some of the ideas that you've seen, not necessarily your ideas, as well others, where the investor said, "That's the dumbest idea "I ever heard"? What billion dollar opportunities have you seen emerge that investors have said, "That's the dumbest idea "I've ever heard"? >> Well, actually, the one that is Salesforce. No VC would put money in. It was really kind of backed by Larry Ellison and me early on. And what's so-- >> John: Google was a dumb idea. We want portals, not search. >> Yeah, so the bet that nobody would take in 2000 was that companies would take their sales information and they would put it in the cloud. Nobody would believe that. Not anyone. And so I used to joke, I used to say the only way it's going to happen is if the sales guy's been waiting two years to get his sales management system in place actually runs over the head of security in the parking lot. That's what it's going to take because it's outsourcing and, you know, the security guys say, "Oh, no, no, no, "we're going to lose all of our data", right? It didn't matter that Salesforce had way more security guys, you know, than these guys had and better, you know, working internally. Nobody believed in it. Literally nobody believed in it. >> This is your point about the decentralization, no one's going to believe, "Wait a minute, "that could never happen." So, in a way, the investor thesis should be, "I want to invest in the dumbest ideas," because that might be the best idea. >> It is. I mean the big, obvious ones that attract billions and billions of dollars, I mean, how many of those end up actually not turning into anything? Right? A lot of them, right? So CDAT was profitable on nine million dollars. I believe that Yahoo was profitable on three million dollars. I think Google was somewhere around 12 to 15 million dollars, right? So there are a lot of these business-- Amazon's obviously the outlier. >> John: It's still not profitable. >> Yeah, it's the outlier. But you know, a lot of these businesses were started by people who used a relatively small amount of money and were very creative. You know, you're going to hear this over and over again. Microsoft never needed any money. They accepted five million dollars from-- >> John: (mumbles) >> Yeah, so this happens a lot. And in fact, I think it's very dangerous when in year five, you're losing three hundred million dollars, right? I mean, five hundred, or whatever it is. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. >> What's the role of community? Because we heard the guy from Locktower Capital say something I thought was really profound, "I don't need VC because, if you're a startup, "you don't have to waste your energy on board meetings "and other things, you can build your business "and use the community as your benchmark." So this plays to your whole picking up the slack kind of thing in efficiency. So entrepreneurs can be more efficient in these communities. This is where the cryptocurrency Blockchain is thriving. What's your thoughts to that and how do you see that community interaction progressing? >> In my career, there's been a sea change in sort of the culture of technology and really everything, right? You know, when I started out, everything was very hierarchical. You know, it's like how far up the chain you got that measured how successful you were. Now it's how big is your network, right? And you know, I was talking to somebody the other day who said VCs are going in and they're measuring these companies' success by how many Instagram and Twitter accounts they have and there's massive fraud going on because people are buying these accounts to pump up their numbers, right? So people are starting to value by the breadth of your network. >> John: Reputable network. >> Reputable, yeah. >> John: Not fake network. >> Yeah, but what I heard is there's actually a Twitter application which I haven't seen that'll go in and tell how many of 'em are real and how many of 'em are not now. So really the community becomes almost the measuring stick for your value. You know, before I'd seen it, I had users. Today, everybody has community members. And so, it becomes sort of, kind of like everything I guess. >> And our media model is all community-based which is, we just naturally go there because that's where the data is. >> That's right. >> That's where the feedback is. >> That's right. >> I mean, I can't get feedback from Facebook and Google, they own the data, right? There's no letters to the editor on Facebook. There's only hate comments. >> But you know before Microsoft and all these came, you know, IBM dominated the world. Nobody ever thought they would go away. AT&T dominated the world and nobody ever thought that they would go away, you know. >> Alright, personal question for you, I got to wrap because I know you got to go. Appreciate your time, by the way. Great story, we could go on for another hour. Personal note, what is the most compelling thing that's moved you, as an entrepreneur, in the crypto market? Like, something that, it could be an anecdote, it could be a situation. When you look at this opportunity, as the world's going to eventually be re-instrumented with data, with new open source and community, what's something that's surprised you or moves you as an entrepreneur saying, "This is freakin' awesome"? >> So this hasn't been done yet but it will be done. So this is what actually motivated me to start Uphold was the ability to turn your phone into your bank and to be able to exchange money and primarily really solving the ability for the poor to be able to move money around without having 10 to 20 to 30% of it taken away. Everybody's talked about this, remittance, and so far, nobody has actually solved that problem. That problem is going to get solved. I mean it's inevitable that the phone becomes the bank. There are so many regulations that are designed to stop that and it's extraordinary. Once you get into it and you see all the ways that have been set up-- >> Byzantine system. >> this problem should have been solved long ago, right? And every phone should be a bank. I mean, it can be connected to a bank, but every phone should have my money in it. I should be able to send it to you instantaneously. >> It shouldn't be like getting into Fort Knox. >> Yeah. I mean, computers, banks have computers, they could make this happen today. They just don't want to. So I think the most profound thing for me is the problem is still not solved, that the problem I set out to solve, which is really creating a more equitable financial system. And we live in a country where the banks make about 37 billion dollars a year in bounced check fees. Think about that. Thirty-seven billion dollars in bounced check fees. So if you just take that out, you just take out, 'cause it all affects people in the lower socioeconomic scale, you create a revolution. Just getting rid of the bank fees that you'll pay for bouncing checks. >> Well, I mean the narratives, like the narrative of taking down gatekeepers or central authorities, is the premise of this ecosystem and you could take that example and apply it to thousands of use cases. >> And banks are rapacious, flat out. American banks are the most rapacious 'cause no other country would allow 37 billion dollars to be taken away in bounced check fees. >> Halsey, congratulations on your success again and great to see you on theCUBE. You're now a Cube alumni, so ... >> Congratulations. >> We hope you'll come back again. >> Yeah, thank you guys. >> We're going to get you in our telegram group, now you'll be 42 members, we just turned on last night. (everyone laughs) We appreciate it and congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for your insight and experience and commentary. Halsey Minor, experienced entrepreneur, pro, here in the trenches, establishing a great new venture. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nassau in the Bahamas. It's the Cube, covering Polycon 18. Brought to you by Polymath. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here, live in the Bahamas for Polycon 18. It's the Cube's exclusive coverage for day one, wrapping up the segment here. I'm John Furrier with my coach Dave Vellante, co-founder with me at SiliconANGLE media at the Cube. Our guest wrap-up, old co-host. Anthony Di Iorio, co-founder of Ethereum also CEO of Jaxx and Decentral. We had a great chat yesterday. Welcome to joining our wrap-up for day one. >> Thanks for having me on again. >> Yeah, we do live this time. >> Alright that's a lot better. >> Kay, got it, genies out of the bottle on everything so we had bloopers on the last segment, little water break but on serious note, Dave and I want to wrap up the show. We do this every time. Day one, a lot of excitement from the panels. People in the hallway were buzzing, people doing deals. A lot of intimate conversations, Dave we see this early on at these shows. Anthony you've been out hallways, in sessions, talking to people in meetings, getting things done. What's the day one wrap-up for you like? What's happened here? >> So I'm a little bit different at events, I don't attend many of the sessions, I never have. This is more of a way for me to connect with people that I haven't seen for a while. I try not to do too many conferences anymore. I've been doing this for six years now, in the Blockchain space and I realized a couple years ago, it's really about focusing on what I need to do. So this was a little bit different. I did the keynote here yesterday and I'd asked if I could send my hologram instead but they're like, no, you got to come. We can't do that. So generally at my conferences, I don't really do many of the sessions. I'm, you know, just chilling out and kind of use them as vacation times too but it has been pretty busy. It has been good, I've had a number of meetings and yeah it's quite a good buzz. >> What are some of the things you're talking with your friends and colleagues and partners in the business and the industry? Is it tech? You talking tech, you talking personal? What are some of the things going on here? Because these events have a mishmash of all that. >> Yeah, I try to keep them both ways. There's business and personal stuff. I think, business I'm just going to get drained too much and it's nice to make things a little bit lighter. A lot of my meetings have been with people that are, they're looking to know what's going on. People, you know think about security tokens now and it's a change from the traditional utility tokens and it's a lot of just trying to pick my brain about what's happening, what am I seeing, what am I investigating, what are the different things that I'm looking for. It's that. Meeting people that I haven't been able to connect with for a while which is always good. Aligning other events and things coming up and then also spending quite a bit of day by the pool and catching up on emails. You got to make sure you do that stuff. >> Good, I wish I could have been there. We're doing interviews all day but we're doing whatever it takes get the videos out there. We had some interesting guests on, We'll get your reaction to. We had Hartej Sawhney who's, Oshi.io, co-founder, they do audits on smart contracts. >> Yeah. >> And some other folks. But the general observation, I don't think he said this but he was kind of validating and other things that Ethereum is by far the most developer-oriented chain. It has a lot more traction and smart contracts are getting better and better. We've been trying to get, kind of an answer, just kind of order-of-magnitude relevant to developer communities, what is a ballpark order-of-magnitude percentage in your mind of developers on the platforms? Is it is the Ethereum the largest? >> Yeah I'd say so, it was really interesting. We were really good at setting up the communities and we really were focused on devs. There was a lot of setup in the initial structures that was more business oriented but after the crowd sale, everything was down to developers building up communities because that's what we needed. People to actually develop on the platform. >> John: Yeah, of course. >> And Ethereum just had a way, I think it's mostly because of Italic, because of Gavin. They just was a developer project and I think that's what attracted a lot of the people to start building smart contracts, building things on it. And yeah, it's tough to raise the community with developers and I think a Ethereum has done a super job of that and it really is is that developer focus. I mean their event is DevCon right? Or the event is for developers. That's what they're focused on, on their massive conferences that they do. It's all for the developers. So that's definitely been the focus for them. >> It's still tons of upside right? I mean, you said yesterday, that you really don't look for Blockchain developers, you look for good devs >> Mm-hmm and I said to you afterwards, it's probably 'cause there aren't enough of Blockchain devs. >> That's not it really, for us it's that, I didn't... We've already solved a lot of our problems. We've created a platform that goes across many platforms. It syncs very easily, it integrates many platforms in. We don't work on the protocol level of the platforms. Like we're not actually trying to solve problems and create those, creating a platform from scratch that maybe will be valuable a few years. We're letting all of our partners and platforms do that. We're an app that is a... It's something that's not necessarily requiring Blockchain devs to integrate. We do connect to Blockchains, that's fine but we're looking for more traditional stuff that we're doing that actually going to monetize right now and it's based on stuff and technology that doesn't have to be created yet. So we're not looking for those massive problem solvers to develop protocols that need to solve major problems. So we can have good JavaScript developers that's what we require and we need and we can teach them internally what the skills they need on Blockchain. So actually we don't necessarily need Blockchain or we'd be looking for Blockchain devs. We're looking for good JavaScript developers. >> So guys like in traditional enterprise is that right? >> Yeah that's right. That's why it's easy for us to get those in but if you're looking to solve a problem, you're looking to do this core stuff, working on protocol level stuff then you need someone who's been in the Blockchain space for a number of years that can actually help you with that stuff and they're very hard to find right now. >> Yeah and they're also full-stack developers. It's really a unique skill set. New language, full-stack, they've got jobs. >> Yeah they're working tons of projects. They're demanding tons of money. Guys that have been developing on protocol stuff for five years. There's very, very few. There's so much more and they're so high in demand and also they want a lot more, you know, a lot more freedom in the work they're doing because they're so high in demand and I have one guy that's that's it that's a rock star. He works just a few hours a week and when we do have critical issues or critical problems, he's our like consultant that can help us 'cause he's been in the space for a while. He teaches, he's got an Ethereum developer meetup that he runs in Toronto. So he's our go-to guy but we're also just not about Ethereum. We develop, we work with 75 different projects. It's a wide range of things and we can also tap their communities, when we have problems. We go directly to you know the Dash community, hey, there's something going on here. Can you make sure that we're in the loop with this and we'll go right with them and find the >> You should run your, Dave's got a, we always talked about digital transformation. Dave talks about a unique perspective. Share your digital transformation, the role of the developer because that in the impact and get his reaction because we think that the developer on the district line applications is probably the most important trend that I don't think mainstream is talking about. Because it also doesn't really conflict with any other developer movement. It just adds more headroom but we see it from a transformation standpoint. >> Our scenario is that you know, you talk with Cloud, SAS, big data, mobile, social, Web 2.0. That stuff's yesterday's news right and in Blockchain and the developments going on in conferences like these really underscore that momentum and we see that organizations that are succeeding today and taking advantage of that momentum, they have data as their foundational, it's at their core. And there's so many traditional companies where human expertise is the core and data sort of bolted on and that's a big gap so we see Blockchain and this digital transformation converging and developers building this, new web, whatever you want to call it but this matrix of digital services which they tap to build new companies and so the role of the developer is, it's always been critical but now it's >> They got to build it up. >> Their stakeholders and in ways that we've never seen before globally. >> Yeah and they're also, I look at it as these technologies are still very new. They're going to take a long time to displace and disrupt other sectors and I think some people are thinking that they're doing, you know we're going to go from A to Z right away. I've taken the approach that we're going to use a lot of traditional stuff right now and we're going to build and make sure that we can monetize and make sure it's growing. We're going to slowly be adding things in. Where I think if you take a too long approach, you're not be able to actually last. So a lot of stuff is doing what, you're actually building traditional stuff right now too. That's what we do, like we use AWS quite a bit in the stuff that we do. We're not going to centralized storage for how we're storing it's just not proven yet, it's not scalable yet. It's good take a long time to let stuff is and until then you have to make sure that you're actually staying in business, you make sure you doing well. So it's a using a mixture of both things and not going right to the end game. >> You have to de-risk that yeah and take advantage of cloud economics that are that are there today. >> Yeah I mean, if you think about in the space right now. What sector has been disrupted by Blockchain? What has been made faster, better, cheaper? Right now in Blockchain. I can't think of anything. >> Crypto kitties (laughs) >> Yes that's a really important point. >> There hasn't been much value. >> But that's why I bring it back to digital transformation because you think about what's been transformed by you know, digital. Obviously you know publishing, books, you know, ads and I thought well is it bits versus atoms? >> Well is it digital or is it information transfer? >> Well its information transfer that has disrupted that. Now it's value transfer, that's what is coming right? >> Yes and so, but then you'd assume that Blockchain, banking but banking hasn't been disrupted yet? >> Not yet, it's going to take a lot of time. >> And so insurance, healthcare and these industries. >> Well I would say VCs have been disrupted. >> But that's >> I get it. >> Here's my premise, is that risk is the factor that will determine disruption. Maybe it's a little bit of bits versus atoms but it's the risk factors associated with banking, healthcare, insurance, defense, government stuff. The high risk, highly entrenched businesses, organizations but eventually they will be disruptive. >> There'll be signals. >> Yeah but it' a lot of, when we first started Ethereum, there was, we had shirts, at the back would say, Dropbox in five lines and that's just not true. You know at the time this was the goal but when you realize when you try to do it, this isn't scalable this, isn't going to be a done-it, it's going to be too expensive to actually do it if you're actually paying for Ether' to do it. It doesn't make any sense, so that was actually, even I was thinking that's what we're going to be able to do. We're a ways off for that. A problem need to be solved, scalability, biggest problem. Interoperability between all the different chains and how they're all going to work together that needs to be solved. How you going to stop these forking operations that happen at split communities when it went actually a coin forked or something happens you get these battles. Those are problems need to be solved now. So we solved the problem with smart contracts. Now that's the second generation. Now we're looking for other things like Cardan says they're looking at the third generation stuff. It's solving those problems and we're a ways off. So that's why until then you got to still do things with tradition and don't be afraid to use things that are that are proven and work right now in order to get there, yeah. Aright Anthony, well great to have you on the wrap-up. That's day one,we're seeing a lot of great stuff. We had Halsey Minor on, another industry pro. You seeing pros come into this business, you see you know the old dogs, the new dogs, the young guns. I mean, it's a really an amazing community. I got to say reminds me of a lot of trends kind of coming together and that's awesome work that you guys have done. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you of having me on again. >> We appreciate it. That's the wrap-up a day one, here at the Polycon 18. Token Economics, Cryptocurrency, Blockchain. All the players are here, doing deals, making making it all happen. It's the Cube, it's a wrap up. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

(bright music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans. It's The Cube! Covering VeeamON 2017. Brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back. Eric Bassier is here. He's the senior director of data center products at Quantum, Veeam partner. Big announcement this week. Eric, good to see you again. Thanks for coming back on. >> Thank you guys for having me. >> So, big theme of this event is, of course, the ecosystem. Veeam sells exclusively through channel partners. Very partner-friendly. Obviously, you guys are the leader in the backup in data protection space. Give us the lowdown on what you guys have announced this week, and we'll get into the partnership. >> Yeah, absolutely. Really excited about what we've announced this week. We've announced new integration with Veeam, both with our DXi deduplication appliances, as well as with our scalar tape products, and we can kind of talk about both individually. On the DXi side, we've integrated with Veeam's data mover service. And what that means is that some of the advanced features that Veeam has, like instant VM recovery, synthetic full backup creation. Historically, we haven't been able to support that on the DXi. And with this latest integration, we've improved performance quite a bit to where we can support those advanced features. And, you know, happy to talk more about that. We think this is a, it's a big step for us. It's a bit of a gap we've had with our DXi a little bit with Veeam. And I think it's going to bring a lot more value to Veeam customers using that deed of appliance. >> Eric, you know, there's always in the keynote, tape gets mentioned, and there's some people that are excited, and some people that look at it sideways and say, "Wait, we still use tape?" I saw tweets going out there, tape and VTL both alive and well, doing there. But, what are you seeing? Maybe help clear up any misconceptions. >> You know, I had a conversation today at VeeamON with a joint Quantum and Veeam customer, and it was an interaction that perfectly summed it up. And they said they were planning to move away from tape and get rid of it. And the events of this last weekend changed their mind. Verbatim. >> Ransomware. >> Ransomware. And Veeam has been good, actually, about promoting why they love tape and why it's important to their customers, and they talk not so much about low cost, long term retention, right? I think there's a really good place for tape as long-term storage for massive scale unstructured data. That's more on kind of the other side of our business. But in the data protection realm, it's about that offline or air-gapped copy to protect against ransomware. And we're seeing, I would almost say, a resurgence in relevance, just from that perspective. It's changing how people use tape, but from that perspective, I think it's as relevant as ever. >> Are your customers actually thinking that way and actually deploying tape in that context? And how does that all work? I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, I think they are. I think many of them have been doing it for a number of years. We, at this show, and for a while with Veeam, we've been promoting the old rule or adage, 3-2-1 data protection best practices. I think a lot of our customers that use tape follow that practice. And... You know, they... They're probably not... We've certainly seen customers use less tape for backup. No doubt about it. They're consolidating it in the data centers, but they still create that offline copy. And then they keep it either offsite, or even just on premise, and it's got that air gap. It's not on the network, so it's not susceptible to these ransomware viruses. >> So I want to unpack that a little bit. I had a conversation with Edward, our buddy Edward Helekiel, give him credit for this idea. And I was sort of making that argument that it has that air gap, and his point was, "Well, yeah, but you got to recycle the backups, "the offline tape." And I said, "Okay." His point was, if you... 'Cause my understanding is with ransomware, everything starts to get encrypted. And then you got to pay for the keys. So if you're backing up encrypted data, eventually you're in trouble, unless you have a way to detect it. So, is that part of the... Again, we're sort of veering off into a tangent of ransomware. >> No, that's all right. >> But you would think that a backup supplier like Veeam would be able to detect anomalies because you're doing incremental change data every day or multiple times per day, and if you're starting to see some uptick in anomalous activity, say, "Whoa, hold on!" Maybe that's a signal. Is that the right way to think about it? >> You know, I do think, I think that Veeam, and I think that some of the other data protection applications are starting to build a little bit of intelligence and to try to detect it. I don't know... I'm not an expert on that. I can't speak to it. I would say that, we would advocate as a best practice that customers should be making that offline copy on tape with adequate frequency so that the feel like they're protected. Because I wouldn't say that you need to rotate the tapes, but I would think about it as if you create tapes once a day, and then you get hit with a ransomware attack, the data that's going to be susceptible is any new data that's been created since the last backup you made on tape a day ago. It's kind of that old backup rule a little bit. >> Dave: So your RPO is one day? >> That's right, and so... But once you've got that offline copy created on tape, it can be on premise, or it can be offsite at a vault or something, and keep it there for as long as you need to keep it there. It's offline, it's not on the network. >> And the backup software vendor is in a good position to provide visibility to those anomalies. Okay, let's go back to the appliance that you had asked. >> Before I do, actually, just so we're on the segue, it actually goes, let's stick with tape for a second. >> Dave: Yeah, be happy to. >> And... We can come back to dedup side. The cool thing we've done is, for Veeam customers, historically, it's been difficult to create tape in a Veeam environment because they've required an external physical tape server. And, of course, their customers are largely virtualized, right? Well, we've solved that. So what we've done is we've, we just announced what we call our Scalar iBlade for our new scalar tape libraries. It's an embedded intel-based blade server that fits in the back of our library chassis. And it comes with a Windows operating system on that. And... What it does, we've designed it so it can actually host a Veeam tape server, a Veeam proxy server. Really easy to install, and I can talk more about that. Net for customers is, they can now create tape in a Veeam environment without this external dedicated physical server. >> Dave: You just utilize the resource on your appliance. >> So on the one hand, it's not anything super revolutionary. On the other hand, there's nobody else in the market that has anything like this for tape. I joke that it's converge tape, or it's hyper converge tape, because we built the compute in. But... It's more of a marketing thing. I think for customers, it is providing a really good value. Because they're able to create tapes in a Veeam environment now, really easy way, and if they're in a 100% virtualized environment, they can do that without having to install that separate physical server. So that's iBlade. That was one of the big things we announced, and certainly sort of a cornerstone of what we talk about for 3-2-1 data protection. >> So Eric, of course, one of the big announcements this morning was the version 10 of the Veeam Availability Suite. What does that mean to your customers and kind of joint development? >> There's a few things. There's one minor thing that I'll put a plug in, in that, in Veeam version 10, we'll actually have the, our DXi appliance be added to the Veeam user interface. So kind of a user usability enhancement. >> Simplifies things. >> Yeah, it simplifies things. I'm excited about the direction Veeam is taking in terms of... In fact, I just saw Jason talk about it a little bit. It's kind of this progression from backup to availability, and now to almost data management and getting more value out of that secondary storage. And when I think about Quantum, our focus is about secondary storage. It's about data protection and archive storage. And we've got some unique solutions there. I think we can have a hardware or storage portfolio that complements Veeam really well. It will be able to kind of bring that much more to the table for their customers. I'm excited about the direction that they talked about. I'm interested in learning more about it, but I'm excited about it. >> So, let's go back to the dedup appliance. You were saying that you've made really some enhancements to be able to exploit some of the things that the features at Veeam has been introducing over the years. Can you explain that a little bit further? >> Yeah, we... We... So the DXi's an inline variable dedup appliance. So the benefits of that, really good data reduction, et cetera, et cetera. One of the sort of gaps that we had was we just needed to make communication more efficient between a Veeam proxy server and our dedup appliance. And we've been working with the Veeam engineering team on this for about a year or something. We decided to go the route where we were going to use their data mover service. And so we've now announced that integration. The way it works from a customer perspective, pretty simple. Configure the DXi as a target. Once that backup job kicks off, Veeam actually installs a little data mover agent right on the DXi. And then we can use their data mover protocol to be able to communicate between the proxy and the dedup target. Net for a customer, it just makes operations, like instant VM recovery or creating a synthetic full backup 10 times faster or 20 times faster than where we were previously. >> Which was using a different data mover. >> Yeah, it was just a using a CIFS, NFS, or just standard kind of-- >> So not really a high-speed data mover designed to, okay. >> And we've done some things in our software through our, just our learnings, and the work that we've collaborated on with the Veeam engineering team. We've done some things in our DXi software to try to optimize reads and kind of how we do that under the covers, just to speed up things like instant VM recovery. So we've done some things there that I think will have a good benefit in terms of improved performance. >> I'm hearing a lot of just really practical activities going on in the partnership ecosystem, which says, "Okay, we got this big TAM. "How do we actually penetrate it? "How do we increase our ability to capture that TAM?" A perfect example here. >> Eric: Yeah, that's right. >> So where do you guys go from here? >> You know, I think we've been partnered with Veeam for a number of years now. We've got a lot of joint customers. I think this integration is just kind of, kind of the next step in our partnership, and... I think that given Veeam's direction, I just think we have even more opportunity to integrate with them, and I think it's going to be in the areas of not just data protection, but archive and kind of managing data over its life. You know, and I mean, that's... We already talk about that in terms of some of the things we do for our customers in different industries, like broadcast or post-production. I'm excited to kind of bring that into the data protection realm and the data center. And I think we'll be able to do some really cool things with it. >> Last question I have for you is sort of customer interactions. What are you hearing from them these days? Beyond the digital transformation bromide. What are some of the hardcore gnarly things that they want you to solve? >> You know, when I'm out talking to customers, I think it's... It seems to be all about Flash. It's all about the Cloud, and it's kind of all about convergence or hyper convergence. I think our customers, especially in IT, they're wrestling with this completely new infrastructure design. And what's the right roadmap for them to kind of go from here to there? And that's where, you know, that's where we're investing. That type of a transition doesn't happen overnight. And so, I think we just want to be there to help our customers kind of along that roadmap and along that journey. Embrace the Cloud and embrace these new technologies. Help 'em get to where they need to go. (chuckles) >> Excellent, well, Eric, thanks for sharing your announcements, and congratulations on all the hard work you're getting to market. We know how much goes into that, so we really appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thank you guys very much. Thank you. >> You're welcome, all right, so that's a wrap for us today. We'll be back tomorrow. We start at, what time do we start tomorrow, Stu? >> Stu: Right after the keynote. >> Right after the keynote. >> Stu: So, 11 o'clock. >> 11 a.m. local time. We're in New Orleans. >> Stu: Central. (chuckles) >> So that's central. And check out siliconangle.tv for all the videos today. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. And we'll see you tomorrow, everybody. Thanks for watching. (energetic music) (typing) (plane engine accelerating)