(intro music) >> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (gentle music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. As you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, 'cause you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about Open RAN. You've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests join Dave and me. Abdullah Abuzaid, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellmann, VP Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program guys. >> Thank you. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question, and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. >> Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not a new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long a time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at examples for the Open RAN ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It bring a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers, from this outcome where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify, or run deployment, operation, and lifecycle management and sustain it. >> And who are the customers, by the way? >> Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment, or a seamless cloud experience from Core to RAN, these are the customers we are working with them. >> You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership, and the capabilities that you're enabling, the CSPs with that. >> Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona, when we set together, and started to look at the, you know, the industry, the adoption of Open RAN, and the challenges. And Open RAN brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you desegregate. In the past, you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at Open RAN, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, application, and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges. And the challenges of integration, of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winder River set together and say, "How can we ease this? "How we can make it simpler?" And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market, that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete lifecycle management from the day zero deployment, through the day two operation, everything done through location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application, on top of this infrastructure. >> So what is the, what is the Wind River secret sauce in this, in this mix, for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? >> Yes, absolutely. So Wind River, for many, many don't know, we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years. We specialize high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life. From the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not virtualized, not throughout the fight today, using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into desegregation in cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, "Okay, everything is evolving. Instead of a device that included the application, the hardware, everything fused together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS, okay. It's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment. But we took basically our experience, the same experience that, you know, we used in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer, and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge, that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance, and address all the telco needs. >> So I, Abdullah, maybe you can a answer this. >> Yeah. >> What is the, what does the go-to-market motion look like, considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately. What does that, what does that look like if you're approaching a possible customer who is, who's knocking on the door? >> How does that work? >> Exactly. And this effort is a Dell turnkey sales service offering, or solution offering to our customers. Where Dell, in collaboration with Wind River, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as engineered system, knock door on our customer who are trying to transform to Open RAN or open ecosystem. We can help you to go through that seamless experience, by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero touch provisioning, and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in, in operate, in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. >> Okay. So I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. >> Exactly. >> Okay. So start with Dell, and level one, level two. And if there are complex issues related to the cloud core itself, then Wind River will be on our back supporting us. >> Talk a little bit about a cust, a CSP example that is, is using the technology, and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. >> Vodafone is a great example. We're here in Barcelona. Vodafone is the first ora network in Europe, and it's using our joint solution. >> What are some of the, the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? >> Faster time to market. As you see, they already started to deploy the ORAN in commercial network, and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there. We're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize. So the outcome, it's just simplifying it, and you know, ready to go. Using experience that we have, Wind River is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world. This is with Verizon. We're at the very large scale. We started this deployment in late '20 and '19, the first site. And then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale. We have a lot of experience learning from it, which what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale. Many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade. So the whole day two operation, and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now, and which allowed them... If I, if I look at my engagement with Verizon, started years before we started. And it took quite some time until we got stuff running. And if you look at the Vodafone time schedule, was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment. And I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here by KDI, for example. It's another one moving even faster. So it's accelerating the whole movement to Ora. >> We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week. I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you know, you, you just mentioned two huge names in Telco, Vodafone and Verizon. >> Yep. >> Talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by 7. >> Not exactly. And this, we go back to the challenges in Open ecosystem. Managing multiple vendors at the same time, is a challenge for our customers. And that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by have, by being a trusted partner, working with our customer through all the journey. We started with Dish in their 5G deployment. Also with Vodafone. We're finding the right partners working with them proactively before getting into, in front of the customer to, we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the RAN in particular, we are talking with the 5g. We have ran the simplification, but they still have on the other side, limited resources and skillset can support it. So, bringing a pro, ahead of time engineer system, with a zero touch of provisioning enablement, and sustainable life cycle management, it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improved margins for our customers, and faster business revenue for their end users. >> Solid outcomes. >> And, and what you just just described, justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating, which is the way that Gill referenced it, which I think is great because you're not, you're not, you're not re-aggregating, (laughs) you're reintegrating, and you're creating something that's better. >> Exactly. >> Moving forward. Otherwise, why would you do it? >> Exactly. And if you look at it, the player in the ecosystem, you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers, but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my raci, this is what I'm responsible for. I, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else while we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem to... Let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers, so we make it end-to-end seamless experience, not only on the technical part, but also on the business aspect side of it. >> So, so the partnership, it's about reducing the pen. I will say eliminating it. So this is the, the core of it. And you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great, but if you look at the premises of a 5G network, it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, the ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it. And basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer. And for this, you need a ultra low, reliable low latency communication. You need a 5G network. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you know, we think about, "Well we just have to be connected all the time." But those are some of the emerging technologies that are going to be potentially lifesaving, and, and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So, really great stuff there, but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Wind River? And, and when you're in conversations with prospective CSP's, what is the superpower that you deliver together? I'd love to get both of your perspectives. >> So, if you look at it, number one, customers look at it, last savings and their day-to-day operation. In 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of ORAN. This is still picking up. But there is a mutualization and densification of ORAN. And this is where we're talking on monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase, we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction. Where I want to move not only ORAN, I want to bring the edge at the same side, I want to define the advanced use cases of edge, where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day, 5G as a girl mentioned earlier, is not about a good better phone coverage, or a better speed robot, but what customized SLA's I can deliver. So it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. >> Yeah. >> So yeah. I will say there are two pens. One, it's the technology side. So for an example, energy efficiency. It's a very big pin point. And sustainability. So we work a lot around this, and basically to advance this. So if you look at the integrated solution today, it's very highly optimized for resource consumption. But to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA. So this is one side. The other side, it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better. It's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications. So, it's not just easy to deploy an ORAN network, but it's easy to deploy those applications. >> I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this, in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds (clears throat) the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards ORAN, adopting VRAN, an amazing, you know, a plethora of new services that can be delivered, but will these operators have the appetite to take that, make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon? Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So if you look at the early days or ORAN introduction in particular, most of the entrepreneurs of ORAN and Virtual RAN ran into the challenges of not only the complexity of open ecosystem, but the integration, is like the redos of the work. And that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting it to the customers. Per our result or outcomes we get, we are talking about 30 to 50% savings on the optics. We are talking 110 ROI for our customers, simply because we are reducing the redos, the time spent to discover and explore. Because we've done that rework ahead of time, we found the optimization issues. Just for example, any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors, but how I can bring them together and give, deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize, that's, that's where it brings the value for our customer, and accelerate the deployment and the operation of the network. >> Do you have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? >> Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) >> Absolutely. I would say, we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale. And the data supports performance. It's the same or better than traditional system. And the cost of operation, it's as good or better than traditional. Unfortunately, I can't provide more specific data. But the point is, when something is unknown in the beginning, of course you're more afraid, you take more conservative approach. Now the data starts to flow. And from here, the intention needs to go even better. So more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system, both to operate as well as to build up. But it's definitely the data that we have today says, the, ORAN system is at part, at the minimum. >> So, definite ROI there. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open, but to your point, eliminating them. We appreciate your time and, and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. Live from MWC23. We'll be back after a short break. (outro music)

>>Welcome back to Falcon 2022. This is Dave LAN. We get a special presentation segment for you today. This is Walter Wall day one of day two's cube coverage, JC Herrera. Here's my designated cohost. Who's the chief human resource officer at CrowdStrike. Craig Neri is to my left. He's the beneficiary and the beneficiary trustee and ambassador of, of operation Motorsport and former us air force. Thank you for your service. Thank you. And Deel Lauder, who is CEO and co-founder of operation Motorsport. Jen, welcome to the cube. Thanks so much for coming on. Great to be JC set this up for us. Explain your role, explain the corporate giving the whole student connection and the veterans take us through that. >>Yeah, sure. Yeah. So as, as head of HR, one of the, one of the things that we do is, is help manage part of the corporate giving strategy. And, and one of those things that, that we love to do is to also invest in students and in our veterans, it's just a part of our giving program. So this partnership with operation Motorsport is really critical to that. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that, we just see that there's a gigantic skills gap in cyber security. And so when we, when there's over millions of open roles around the world and 700,000 of 'em in the us alone, we've gotta go close that gap. And so our next gen scholarships that come out of the, that are giving funds are, are awarded to students who are studying cyber security or AI. And the other side of that is that this partnership with operation motor sport, then we get the opportunity to do some internships with veterans through operation motor sport as well, the >>Number 700,000 now, but pre pandemic. I remember number 3 50, 300 50,000. It's it's doubled now just in the us. Amazing. All right, diesel, tell us about the mission of operation motor sport, like who are the beneficiaries let's get into it. >>So operation motor sport engages ill, injured, wounded service members, those that are medically retiring from the service or disabled veterans, these individuals be taken out of their units. They lose their team identity, their purpose. And, and what we do is those that apply to the program and have a desire to work around shiny objects and fast cars and all the great smells or just car guys or gals that we have some of those as well. They, we, we bring them onto the teams as beneficiaries. So embed them into a race team and give them opportunity to find something new. We're a recovery program. We're not about, you know, finding jobs for these folks. It's about networking and getting outta that, you know, outta the dark places where some of them end up going, because this is a, a huge change for them. And, and in doing so, we now expose them to crowd strike. You know, that's, that's one of the new relationships that, that we have where potentially if they want to, they can pursue new opportunities in areas like cyber security. >>And they're chosen through an application process. You're I'm, I'm inferring. >>Yeah. They just go online and say, you know, through word of mouth or through a friend or through the, the USO and other organizations, they go online and they click the apply here and they fill it out. And our beneficiary trustee, Craig, and calls 'em up and says, Hey, tell me about what you're looking for. And, and we, we pair them up with the race team and Craig, >>You're also a, a beneficiary in addition to being the beneficiary trustee. So explain that, what's your story? >>Right. So I started in this organization as a beneficiary. I was the one that hit the button on the website. And, and then a few minutes later, I got a phone call from then Tiffany Lader, diesel's wife, who's our executive director in the organization. And, and I had that same conversation that I now have with beneficiaries today. I did a, I did a full season with them last year in 2021 as a beneficiary. But at the end I realized how big of an impact that this has with folks. Transition can be very difficult, especially if they're ill injured or wounded. And so I asked if I could help if I could give back, cuz it meant such it had such a big impact on me. I'd like to, to help other veterans as well. Can I >>Ask you what made you hit that button? What made you apply? >>That's a great question. So I was one of the very fortunate ones that had a transition coach. I was in the military for 29 years and had a lot of great connections in the military and, and was connected to a coach, a transition coach and just exploring, you know, what that, what that would look like. And she was the one who said, Hey, why don't we, why don't we explore this passion of Motorsports that you have? My family had been going to, to Motorsports events for, you know, 50 years. And so, so I thought back, all right, this is, I like this idea. Let's, let's pursue this. So a quick Google search and operation Motorsport popped up and I hit the button and >>What programs are available in operation >>Motorsport? Yeah. So diesel kind of outline outlined it. We have basically three different programs. We have the, our immersion program, which is exactly what diesel described, where we take that veteran. And we actually immerse them in a race team. They're doing the, exactly what I was doing, doing tires and fuel and whatever the team needs them to do. We also have our emo sports program where folks who can't do the immersion program, immersion program is takes a pretty big time commitment sometimes. And so they just don't have the capacity or abilities to be able to do those. We could put 'em in our emo sports program where they can do it all virtually we're actually, we have a season going on right now where we, we have veterans racing in that emo sports program. And then we have a, a diversionary therapy program where we have a, a Patriot car corral set up at all these tracks. So they can go out with like-minded individuals and spend the day out there with those folks, other veterans. And we do pit pit tours and, and we get 'em out on the track for a little bit of a, you know, highway speeds, nothing ridiculous. But we, we did doing some highway speeds. So we have a, a few, few different ways for them to be >>Involved. So, so the number three is like a splash in the pond, whereas number ones, the, to like full immersion. Right? Correct. And so what are you doing in the full immersion? What is, what is that like? I mean, you're literally changing tires and, and, and you're >>Yeah. You name it. You're >>In the you're you're you're in that sort of sphere of battle, if you will. Right. >>The beauty of this is we could take somebody's capabilities and skill set and we can match it to whatever that looks like on a race team. Some people come in and have no experience whatsoever. And so we find a team that needs, you know, that has a development opportunities where they could come in, their, their initial job might be to fuel fuel cans or, you know, take tires off the car, wipe the car down, it's little things in the beginning. And then slowly as they start to grow and learn, then they take on bigger roles. But we also have different positions. They can be immersed in, in teams, but they can also be immersed in the series. So we have folks that are doing like tech inspections. We have folks that are doing race control up in the, up in the tower, directing race operations. So we have lots of opportunities, tons of potential. We, we foster those relationships and take the folks, whatever their capabilities and, and abilities are and find the right position for >>'em think, thinking about your personal experience, how, how did it, how would you say it affected you? >>Yeah. To understand that you really have to understand military transition. And I think that's where a lot of the folks that have never experienced this really struggle transition from the military is really difficult. And it's really difficult, even if you're, if you're not broken or you don't have some kind of illness or injury, but you add that factor into at the same time and it could be extremely difficult. And that's why we see like the 22, a day suicide rates with veterans, it's very, very high. Right? And so when you, when you come into this program, it, it is a little bit of a leap of faith, right? This is very new experience for somebody, right? For somebody like myself who had 29 years of experience in the military, very senior person in the military. And now you're at the bottom of the totem pole and trying to figure it all out again, it's, it's a, it's a big jump. But what you realize really quickly is a lot of the things that you experience in the military, you experience in that Pata, same exact things, lots of small team environment, lots of diversity, lots of challenges, lots of roadblocks ups downs, you, you deploy just like you would deploy in, in the military, you bring the cars to a track, you execute a mission, then you pack it up and bring it home. So it's, there's so many similarities in >>The process. I mean, yeah. Diesel hearing Craig explained that there are the similarities sound very clear, but, but, but how did how'd you come up with this idea? It makes sense now in retrospect, but somebody just said, Hey, you know, we have this and we have this and we can marry him or no, not >>Really. And it it's a funny story because I always said, I, I, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel, I believe in stealing the car. And so there's a sister organization that we have in the UK called mission Motorsport. And, and, and they invented this five years before we did. And, and they were successful. And I was, you know, through, through friendships and opportunities, I got to witness it in, in 2016. So went over to, to Wales in the UK and, and watched it in action. And we were there for one race weekend, race of remembrance, which is where we go back to, we'll be going back to November, taking 13 beneficiaries over to race in our own race team for a 12 hour race. And that's a whole other story, but that's where it all started. You know, we, we saw the opportunities and said, wow, they're changing lives through recovery, you know, through motor sport and the similarities and what they were achieving. >>Our initial goal was let's just come back and do this again next year, because we need to bring north American transitioning members over to, to witness this and take part. And then fast forward, we said, why stop there? And we stood up an organization. Now I'll tell you that the organization is not what it was, the, the initial vision. This is not where, I mean, I never imagine that we get to this point this day, especially with the announcement this morning, you know, with the partnership with CrowdStrike, it it's huge for us, but we've evolved into something that was very similar to the initial vision. And that was helping, helping medically transitioning service members with their own personal struggles and recovery. You know, the reason we call it operation Motorsport is because operations have no beginning and no end and our, and what we do makes us so different in that we're not a one and done, we take care of these guys. Even when they become alumni, they, they still come back. They, they come back to volunteer, they come back to check in their friends and, and all kinds. It's really, really neat. And, >>And JC of course, CrowdStrike has an affinity for Motorsports, right? You got the logo on the Mercedes. You you've got the safety car at, this is, I think it's called the safety car. Right. That's it? Yeah. So, okay. So that's an obvious connection, but, but where did the idea germinate for this partnership? >>There's so many things, but first and foremost, I think that the, the values of CrowdStrike and those of operation motors were very much aligned. If you think about it, we, we focus a lot on teamwork. There's no way we do these jobs without the teamwork part. We all love data. These guys are all in the data all the time, trying to figure out, you know, what your adversaries are doing. So there's that kind of component to it. And I'd say the last bit is critical thinking. So when we think about our organizations and how well aligned they are, that was a, that was a no brainer. And into the other side of it, we get the opportunity to do mentorship programs. I mean, I think both ways, hopefully I get invited to the Patriot corral. At some point I can go, go work on a car, but we'll do those both ways or mentorship opportunities. If folks from operation motor sport win a team up with a crowd striker. So >>Do you ever get to drive the car? Or is that just an awful question? No, that's >>A good question. Actually I do from the, from the track to the pits, very slow >>Speeds. They don't let you out in the train. That's right. No, I don't get to go out on the track. Diesel, you ever, you ever drive one >>Of these? I, I, I I've been on, on the track on, on different cars, not in the race cars that, that, that, that are on the team, but something that's unique in the Patriot corral, for instance, because JC brought that up is that when we do these Patriot corrals, part of that program at lunchtime is, is taking the individuals and doing parade laps. And now, you know, a parade lap. Well, what's the fun in that, but you drive highway speeds on a racetrack and your own personal car, following a pace car. That's a pretty cool experience. Cool. >>Yeah, that's very cool guys. Congratulations on this program and all your success and all the, the giving that you do for the community and, and your peers really appreciate you guys coming on the cube and telling me great story. Thanks >>For having, thanks for the opportunity. You're very >>Welcome. All right. Keep it right there. Everybody. Dave ante and Dave Nicholson, we'll be back from Falcon 2022 at the area in Las Vegas. You watching the cube.

>> Welcome back to FalCon 2022. This is Dave Vellante. We get a special presentation segment for you today. This is Walter Wall day one of day two's cube coverage. JC Herrera is here, he's my designated cohost. He's the chief human resource officer at CrowdStrike. Craig Neri is to my left. He's the beneficiary and the beneficiary trustee and ambassador of, of operation Motorsport and former US air force. Thank you for your service. >> Thank you. >> And Diezel Lodder, who is CEO and co-founder of operation Motorsport. Gents, welcome to the cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >> Thank you, Great to be here >> JC, set this up for us. Explain your role, explain the corporate giving, the whole student connection, and the veterans, take us through that. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, so as, as head of HR, one of the one of the things that we do is, is help manage part of the corporate giving strategy. And, and one of those things that, that we love to do is to also invest in students and in our veterans, it's just a part of our giving program. So this partnership with operation Motorsport is really critical to that. And if you want to dive a little bit deeper into that we just see that there's a gigantic skills gap in cybersecurity. And so when we, when there's over millions of open roles around the world and 700,000 of them in the us alone, we've got to go close that gap. And so our next gen scholarships that come out of the, are giving funds are, are awarded to students who are studying cyber security or AI. And the other side of that, is that this partnership with operation Motorsport then, we get the opportunity to do some internships with veterans through operation Motorsport as well. >> The number is 700,000 now, but pre pandemic I remember number 350, 350,000. It's, it's doubled now just in the US, amazing. All right, diezel, tell us about the mission of operation Motorsport like who are the beneficiaries let's get into it. >> So operation Motorsport engages ill, injured wounded service members, those that are medically retiring from the service or disabled veterans these individuals will be taken out of their units. They lose their team identity, their purpose. And, and what we do is those that apply to the program and have a desire to work around shiny objects and fast cars and all the great smells or just car guys or gals that we have some of those as well. They, we, we bring them onto the teams as beneficiaries. So embed them into a race team and give them opportunity to find something new. We're a recovery program. We're not about, you know, finding jobs for these folks. It's about networking and getting out of that, you know out of the dark places where some of them end up going because this is a, a huge change for them. And, and in doing so, we now expose them to CrowdStrike. You know, that's, that's one of the new relationships that, that we have where potentially if they want to they can pursue new opportunities in areas like cybersecurity. >> And they're chosen through an application process you're, I, I'm inferring. >> Yep. They just go online and say, you know through word of mouth or through a friend or through the, the USO and other organizations, they go online and they click the apply here and they fill it out. And, our beneficiary trustee Craig, and calls them up and says, Hey, tell me about what you're looking for. And, and we, we pair them up with the race team. >> And Craig you're also a, a beneficiary in addition to being the beneficiary trustee. So explain that, what's your story? >> Right. So I started in this organization as a beneficiary. I was the one that hit the button on the website. And, and then a few minutes later, I got a phone call from then Tiffany Lodder, Diezel's wife, who's our executive director in the organization. And, and I had that same conversation that I now have with beneficiaries today. I did a, I did a full season with them last year in 2021 as a beneficiary. But at the end I realized how big of an impact that this has with folks. Transition can be very difficult, especially if they're ill injured or wounded. And so I asked if I could help if I could give back cause it meant such, it had such a big impact on me. I'd like to, to help other veterans as well. >> Can I ask you what made you hit that button? What made you apply? >> Oh, that's a great question. So I was one of the very fortunate ones that had a transition coach. I was in the military for 29 years and had a lot of great connections in the military and, and was connected to a coach, a transition coach and just exploring, you know what that, what that would look like and she was the one who say, why don't we, why don't we explore this passion of Motorsports that you have? My family had been going to, to Motorsports events for you know, 50 years. And so, so I thought back, all right, this is I like this idea. Let's, let's pursue this. So a quick Google search and operation Motorsport popped up and I hit the button. >> And what programs are available in operation Motorsport? >> And so, Diezel kind of outline, outlined it. We have basically three different programs. We have the, our immersion program, which is exactly what Diezel described, where we take that veteran and we actually immerse them in a race team they're doing the, exactly what I was doing, doing tires and fuel and whatever the team needs them to do. We also have our E-motor sports program where folks who can't do the immersion program, immersion program is takes a pretty big time commitment sometimes. And so, they just don't have the capacity or abilities to be able to do those. We could put them in our E-motor sports program where they can do it all virtually. we're actually, we have a season going on right now where we're, we have veterans racing in that E-motor sports program. And then we have a, the diversionary therapy program where we have a, a Patriot car corral set up at all these tracks so, they can go out with like-minded individuals and spend the day out there with those folks, other veterans. And we do pit, pit tours and, and we get 'em out on the track for a little bit of a, you know, highway speeds nothing ridiculous, but we, we been doing some highway speeds. So we have a, a few, few different ways for them to be involved. >> So, so the number three is like a splash in the pond whereas number one's the, like full immersion. >> Yeah, correct, yes. >> And so what are you doing in the full immersion? What is, what is that like? I mean you're literally changing tires and, and you're, >> Yeah. You name it. >> In the, you're, you're in that sort of sphere of battle, if you will. >> The beauty of this is we could take somebody's capabilities and skill set and we can match it to whatever that looks like on a race team. Some people come in and have no experience whatsoever. And so we find a team that needs, you know, that has a development opportunities where they could come in, their, their initial job might be to fuel fuel cans or, you know, take tires off the car or wipe the car down, it's little things in the beginning. And then slowly as they start to grow and learn then they take on bigger roles. But we also have different positions. They can be immersed in, in teams, but they can also be immersed in the series. So we have folks that are doing like tech inspections. We have folks that are doing race control up in the, up in the tower, directing race operations. So, we have lots of opportunities, tons of potential. We, we foster those relationships and take the folks and whatever their capabilities and, and abilities are and find the right position for them. >> Think, thinking about your personal experience, how, how did it, how would you say it affected you? >> Yeah, um, to understand that you really have to understand military transition. And I think that's where a lot of the folks that have never experienced this really struggle. transition from the military is really difficult. And it's really difficult, even if you're, if you're not broke and, or you don't have some kind of illness or injury but, you add that factor into it at the same time and it could be extremely difficult. And that's why we see like the 22 a day suicide rates with veterans, it's very, very high, Right? And so when you, when you come into this program, it's, it is a little bit of a leap of faith, right? This is very new experience for somebody, right? For somebody like myself who had 29 years of experience in the military, very senior person in the military. And now you're at the bottom of the totem pole and trying to figure it all out again, it's, it's a it's a big jump. But, what you realize really quickly is a lot of the things that you experience in the military you experience in that paddock, same exact things, lots of, small team environment, lots of diversity, lots of challenges, lots of roadblocks ups downs, you, you'd deploy just like you would deploy in, in the military you bring the cars to a track, you execute a mission then you pack it up and bring it home. So it's, there's so many similarities in the process. >> I mean, yeah. Diezel hear, hearing Craig explained that there are, the similarities sound very clear, but, but, but how did how'd you come up with this idea? (Diezel laughs) It makes sense now in retrospect, but, somebody just said Hey, you know, we have this and we have this and we can marry them or... >> No, not really. And it, it's a funny story because I always said, I, I, I don't believe in reinventing the wheel I believe in stealing the car. And so there's a sister organization that we have in the UK called mission Motorsport. And, and, and they invented this five years before we did. And, and they were successful. And I was, you know, through, through friendships and opportunities, I got to witness it in, in 2016. So went over to, to Wales in, in the UK and, and watched it in action. And we were there for one race weekend, race of remembrance which is where we go back to we'll be going back to November, taking 13 beneficiaries over to race in our own race team for a 12 hour race. And that's a whole other story but that's where it all started. You know, we, we saw the opportunities and said, wow they're changing lives through recovery, you know through Motorsport and the similarities and what they were achieving, our initial goal was let's just come back and do this again next year, because we need to bring north American transitioning members over to, to witness this and take part. And then fast forward, we said, why stop there? And we, stood up an organization. Now, I'll tell you that the organization is not what it was the initial vision, this not where, I mean I never imagine that we get to this point this day especially with the announcement this morning, you know with the partnership with CrowdStrike, it it's huge for us but, we've evolved into something that was very similar to the initial vision. And that was, helping, helping medically transitioning service members with their own personal struggles and recovery. You know, the reason we call it operation Motorsport is because operations have no beginning and no end and our, and what we do makes us so different in that we're not a one and done, we take care of these guys. Even when they become alumni, they, they still come back. They, they come back to volunteer they come back to check in their friends and, and all kinds, it's really, really neat. >> And, and JC of course CrowdStrike has an affinity for Motorsports, right? You got the logo on the Mercedes. You, you've got the safety car at this. I think it's called the safety car, right? >> That's it, yeah. >> So, okay. So that's an obvious connection, but, but where did the idea germinate for this partnership? >> There's so many things, but first and foremost, I think that the, the values of CrowdStrike and those of operation motors were very much aligned. If you think about it, we, we focus a lot on teamwork. There's no way we do these jobs without the teamwork part. We all love data. These guys are all in the data all the time trying to figure out, you know, what your adversaries are doing. So there's that kind of component to it. And I'd say the last bit is critical thinking. So when we think about our organizations and how well aligned they are, that was a, that was a no brainer. And into the other side of it, we get the opportunity to do mentorship programs. I mean, I think both ways, hopefully I get invited to the Patriot corral at some point I can go, go work on a car but, we'll do those both ways or mentorship opportunities. If folks from operation Motorsport win a team up with a CrowdStrikers. >> Do you ever get to drive the car? Or is that just an awful question? >> No, it's a good question. Actually I do from the from the track to the pits at, you know, very slow speeds. >> They don't let you out on the track? >> That's right, no, I don't get to go out the track. >> Diezel You ever, you ever drive one of these? >> I, I, I, I've been on, on the track on, on different cars not in the race cars that, that, that that are on the team, but something that's unique in the Patriot corral, for instance, because JC brought that up, is that when we do these Patriot corrals part of that program at lunchtime is, is taking the individuals and doing parade laps. And I'll, you know, a parade lap, well, what's the fun in that? but you drive highway speeds on a racetrack and your own personal car following a pace car, that's a pretty cool experience. >> Yeah, that's very cool. Guys, congratulations on this program and all your success and all the, the giving that you do for the community and, and your peers, really appreciate you guys coming on The Cube and telling your story. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for the opportunity. >> You're very welcome. All right, keep it right there everybody. Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson, we'll be back from FalCon 2022, at the ARIA in Las Vegas. You're watching the cube. (relaxing music)

(futuristic music) >> Hey everyone. Lisa Martin here for theCUBE back with you, three guests join me. Dan Molina is here, the co-president and chief technology officer at NTH Generation. And I'm joined once again by Terry Richardson, North American channel chief for AMD and Dr. John Fry, chief technologist, sustainable transformation at HPE. Gentlemen, It's a pleasure to have you on theCUBE Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Dan. Let's have you kick things off. Talk to us about how NTH Generation is addressing the environmental challenges that your customers are having while meeting the technology demands of the future. That those same customers are no doubt having. >> It's quite an interesting question, Lisa, in our case we have been in business since 1991 and we started by providing highly available computing solutions. So this is great for me to be partnered here with HPE and the AMD because we want to provide quality computing solutions. And back in the day, since 1991 saving energy saving footprint or reducing footprint in the data center saving on cooling costs was very important. Over time those became even more critical components of our solutions design. As you know, as a society we started becoming more aware of the benefits and the must that we have a responsibility back to society to basically contribute with our social and environmental responsibility. So one of the things that we continue to do and we started back in 1991 is to make sure that we're deciding compute solutions based on clients' actual needs. We go out of our way to collect real performance data real IT resource consumption data. And then we architect solutions using best in the industry components like AMD and HPE to make sure that they were going to be meeting those goals and energy savings, like cooling savings, footprint reduction, knowing that instead of maybe requiring 30 servers, just to mention an example maybe we're going to go down to 14 and that's going to result in great energy savings. Our commitment to making sure that we're providing optimized solutions goes all the way to achieving the top level certifications from our great partner, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Also go deep into micro processing technologies like AMD but we want to make sure that the designs that we're putting together actually meet those goals. >> You talked about why sustainability is important to NTH from back in the day. I love how you said that. Dan, talk to us a little bit about what you're hearing from customers as we are seeing sustainability as a corporate initiative horizontally across industries and really rise up through the C-suite to the board. >> Right, it is quite interesting Lisa We do service pretty much horizontally just about any vertical, including public sector and the private sector from retail to healthcare, to biotech to manufacturing, of course, cities and counties. So we have a lot of experience with many different verticals. And across the board, we do see an increased interest in being socially responsible. And that includes not just being responsible on recycling as an example, most of our conversations or engagements that conversation happens, 'What what's going to happen with the old equipment ?' as we're replacing with more modern, more powerful, more efficient equipment. And we do a number of different things that go along with social responsibility and environment protection. And that's basically e-waste programs. As an example, we also have a program where we actually donate some of that older equipment to schools and that is quite quite something because we're helping an organization save energy, footprint. Basically the things that we've been talking about but at the same time, the older equipment even though it's not saving that much energy it still serves a purpose in society where maybe the unprivileged or not as able to afford computing equipment in certain schools and things of that nature. Now they can benefit and being productive to society. So it's not just about energy savings there's so many other factors around social corporate responsibility. >> So sounds like Dan, a very comprehensive end to end vision that NTH has around sustainability. Let's bring John and Terry into the conversation. John, we're going to start with you. Talk to us a little bit about how HPE and NTH are partnering together. What are some of the key aspects of the relationship from HPE's perspective that enable you both to meet not just your corporate sustainable IT objectives, but those of your customers. >> Yeah, it's a great question. And one of the things that HPE brings to bear is 20 years experience on sustainable IT, white papers, executive workbooks and a lot of expertise for how do we bring optimized solutions to market. If the customer doesn't want to manage those pieces himself we have our 'As a service solutions, HPE GreenLake. But our sales force won't get to every customer across the globe that wants to take advantage of this expertise. So we partner with companies like NTH to know the customer better, to develop the right solution for that customer and with NTH's relationships with the customers, they can constantly help the customer optimize those solutions and see where there perhaps areas of opportunity that may be outside of HPE's own portfolio, such as client devices where they can bring that expertise to bear, to help the customer have a better total customer experience. >> And that is critical, that better overall comprehensive total customer experience. As we know on the other end, all customers are demanding customers like us who want data in real time, we want access. We also want the corporate and the social responsibility of the companies that we work with. Terry, bringing you into the conversation. Talk to us a little about AMD. How are you helping customers to create what really is a sustainable IT strategy from what often starts out as sustainability tactics? >> Exactly. And to pick up on what John and and Dan were saying, we're really energized about the opportunity to allow customers to accelerate their ability to attain some of their more strategic sustainability goals. You know, since we started on our current data center, CPU and GPU offerings, each generation we continue to focus on increasing the performance capability with great sensitivity to the efficiency, right? So as customers are modernizing their data center and achieving their own digital transformation initiatives we are able to deliver solutions through HPE that really address a greater performance per watt which is a a core element in allowing customers to achieve the goals that John and Dan talked about. So, you know, as a company, we're fully on board with some very public positions around our own sustainability goals, but working with terrific partners like NTH and HPE allows us to together bring those enabling technologies directly to customers >> Enabling and accelerating technologies. Dan, let's go back to you. You mentioned some of the things that NTH is doing from a sustainability approach, the social and the community concern, energy use savings, recycling but this goes all the way from NTH's perspective to things like outreach and fairness in the workplace. Talk to us a little bit about some of those other initiatives that NTH has fired up. >> Absolutely, well at NTH , since the early days, we have invested heavily on modern equipment and we have placed that at NTH labs, just like HPE labs we have NTH labs, and that's what we do a great deal of testing to make sure that our clients, right our joint clients are going to have high quality solutions that we're not just talking about it and we actually test them. So that is definitely an investment by being conscious about energy conservation. We have programs and scripts to shut down equipment that is not needed at the time, right. So we're definitely conscious about it. So I wanted to mention that example. Another one is, we all went through a pandemic and this is still ongoing from some perspectives. And that forced pretty much all of our employees, at least for some time to work from home. Being an IT company, we're very proud that we made that transition almost seamlessly. And we're very proud that you know people who continue to work from home, they're saving of course, gasoline, time, traffic, all those benefits that go with reducing transportation, and don't get me wrong, I mean, sometimes it is important to still have face to face meetings, especially with new organizations that you want to establish trust. But for the most part we have become a hybrid workforce type of organization. At the same time, we're also implementing our own hybrid IT approach which is what we talk to our clients about. So there's certain workloads, there are certain applications that truly belong in in public cloud or Software as a Service. And there's other workloads that truly belong, to stay in your data center. So a combination and doing it correctly can result in significant savings, not just money, but also again energy, consumption. Other things that we're doing, I mentioned trading programs, again, very proud that you know, we use a e-waste programs to make sure that those IT equipment is properly disposed of and it's not going to end in a landfill somewhere but also again, donating to schools, right? And very proud about that one. We have other outreach programs. Normally at the end of the year we do some substantial donations and we encourage our employees, my coworkers to donate. And we match those donations to organizations like Operation USA, they provide health and education programs to recover from disasters. Another one is Salvation Army, where basically they fund rehabilitation programs that heal addictions change lives and restore families. We also donate to the San Diego Zoo. We also believe in the whole ecosystem, of course and we're very proud to be part of that. They are supporting more than 140 conservation projects and partnerships in 70 countries. And we're part of that donation. And our owner has been part of the board or he was for a number of years. Mercy House down in San Diego, we have our headquarters. They have programs for the homeless. And basically that they're servicing. Also Save a Life Foundation for the youth to be educated to help prevent sudden cardiac arrest for the youth. So programs like that. We're very proud to be part of the donations. Again, it's not just about energy savings but it's so many other things as part of our corporate social responsibility program. Other things that I wanted to mention. Everything in our buildings, in our offices, multiple locations. Now we turn into LED. So again, we're eating our own dog food as they say but that is definitely some significant energy savings. And then lastly, I wanted to mention, this is more what we do for our customers, but the whole HPE GreenLake program we have a growing number of clients especially in Southern California. And some of those are quite large like school districts, like counties. And we feel very proud that in the old days customers would buy IT equipment for the next three to five years. Right? And they would buy extra because obviously they're expecting some growth while that equipment must consume energy from day one. With a GreenLake type of program, the solution is sized properly. Maybe a little bit of a buffer for unexpected growth needs. And anyway, but with a GreenLake program as customers need more IT resources to continue to expand their workloads for their organizations. Then we go in with 'just in time' type of resources. Saving energy and footprint and everything else that we've been talking about along the way. So very proud to be one of the go-tos for Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the GreenLake program which is now a platform, so. >> That's great. Dan, it sounds like NTH generation has such a comprehensive focus and strategy on sustainability where you're pulling multiple levers it's almost like sustainability to the NTH degree ? See what I did there ? >> (laughing) >> I'd like to talk with all three of you now. And John, I want to start with you about employees. Dan, you talked about the hybrid work environment and some of the silver linings from the pandemic but I'd love to know, John, Terry and then Dan, in that order how educated and engaged are your employees where sustainability is concerned? Talk to me about that from their engagement perspective and also from the ability to retain them and make them proud as Dan was saying to work for these companies, John ? >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we see in technology, and we hear it from our customers every day when we're meeting with them is we all have a challenge attracting and retaining new employees. And one of the ways that you can succeed in that challenge is by connecting the work that the employee does to both the purpose of your company and broader than that global purpose. So environmental and social types of activities. So for us, we actually do a tremendous amount of education for our employees. At the moment, all of our vice presidents and above are taking climate training as part of our own climate aspirations to really drive those goals into action. But we're opening that training to any employee in the company. We have a variety of employee resource groups that are focused on sustainability and carbon reduction. And in many cases, they're very loud advocates for why aren't we pushing a roadmap further? Why aren't we doing things in a particular industry segment where they think we're not moving quite as quickly as we should be. But part of the recognition around all of that as well is customers often ask us when we suggest a sustainability or sustainable IT solution to them. Their first question back is, are you doing this yourselves? So for all of those reasons, we invest a lot of time and effort in educating our employees, listening to our employees on that topic and really using them to help drive our programs forward. >> That sounds like it's critical, John for customers to understand, are you doing this as well? Are you using your own technology ? Terry, talk to us about from the AMD side the education of your employees, the engagement of them where sustainability is concerned. >> Yeah. So similar to what John said, I would characterize AMD is a very socially responsible company. We kind of share that alignment in point of view along with NTH. Corporate responsibility is something that you know, most companies have started to see become a lot more prominent, a lot more talked about internally. We've been very public with four key sustainability goals that we've set as an organization. And we regularly provide updates on where we are along the way. Some of those goals extend out to 2025 and in one case 2030 so not too far away, but we're providing milestone updates against some pretty aggressive and important goals. I think, you know, as a technology company, regardless of the role that you're in there's a way that you can connect to what the company's doing that I think is kind of a feel good. I spend more of my time with the customer facing or partner facing resources and being able to deliver a tool to partners like NTH and strategic partners like HPE that really helps quantify the benefit, you know in a bare metal, in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and a TCO tool to really quantify what an implementation of a new and modern solution will mean to a customer. And for the first time they have choice. So I think employees, they can really feel good about being able to to do something that is for a greater good than just the traditional corporate goals. And of course the engineers that are designing the next generation of products that have these as core competencies clearly can connect to the impact that we're able to make on the broader global ecosystem. >> And that is so important. Terry, you know, employee productivity and satisfaction directly translates to customer satisfaction, customer retention. So, I always think of them as inextricably linked. So great to hear what you're all doing in terms of the employee engagement. Dan, talk to me about some of the outcomes that NTH is enabling customers to achieve, from an outcomes perspective those business outcomes, maybe even at a high level or a generic level, love to dig into some of those. >> Of course. Yes. So again, our mission is really to deliver awesome in everything we do. And we're very proud about that mission, very crispy clear, short and sweet and that includes, we don't cut corners. We go through the extent of, again, learning the technology getting those certifications, testing those in the lab so that when we're working with our end user organizations they know they're going to have a quality solution. And part of our vision has been to provide industry leading transformational technologies and solutions for example, HPE and AMD for organizations to go through their own digital transformation. Those two words have been used extensively over the last decade, but this is a multi decade type of trend, super trend or mega trend. And we're very proud that by offering and architecting and implementing, and in many cases supporting, with our partners, those, you know, best in class IT cyber security solutions were helping those organizations with those business outcomes, their own digital transformation. If you extend that Lisa , a Little bit further, by helping our clients, both public and private sector become more efficient, more scalable we're also helping, you know organizations become more productive, if you scale that out to the entire society in the US that also helps with the GDP. So it's all interrelated and we're very proud through our, again, optimized solutions. We're not just going to sell a box we're going to understand what the organization truly needs and adapt and architect our solutions accordingly. And we have, again, access to amazing technology, micro processes. Is just amazing what they can do today even compared to five years ago. And that enables new initiatives like artificial intelligence through machine learning and things of that nature. You need GPU technology , that specialized microprocessors and companies like AMD, like I said that are enabling organizations to go down that path faster, right? While saving energy, footprint and everything that we've been talking about. So those are some of the outcomes that I see >> Hey, Dan, listening to you talk, I can't help but think this is not a stretch for NTH right? Although, you know, terms like sustainability and reducing carbon footprint might be, you know more in vogue, the type of solutions that you've been architecting for customers your approach, dates back decades, and you don't have to change a lot. You just have new kind of toys to play with and new compelling offerings from great vendors like HPE to position to your customers. But it's not a big change in what you need to do. >> We're blessed from that perspective that's how our founders started the company. And we only, I think we go through a very extensive interview process to make sure that there will be a fit both ways. We want our new team members to get to know the the rest of the team before they actually make the decision. We are very proud as well, Terry, Lisa and John, that our tenure here at NTH is probably well over a decade. People get here and they really value how we help organizations through our dedicated work, providing again, leading edge technology solutions and the results that they see in our own organizations where we have made many friends in the industry because they had a problem, right? Or they had a very challenging initiative for their organization and we work together and the outcome there is something that they're very, very proud of. So you're right, Terry, we've been doing this for a long time. We're also very happy again with programs like the HPE GreenLake. We were already doing optimized solutions but with something like GreenLake is helping us save more energy consumption from the very beginning by allowing organizations to pay for only what they need with a little bit of buffer that we talked about. So what we've been doing since 1991 combined with a program like GreenLake I think is going to help us even better with our social corporate responsibility. >> I think what you guys have all articulated beautifully in the last 20 minutes is how strategic and interwoven the partnerships between HP, AMD and NTH is what your enabling customers to achieve those outcomes. What you're also doing internally to do things like reduce waste, reduce carbon emissions, and ensure that your employees are proud of who they're working for. Those are all fantastic guys. I wish we had more time cause I know we are just scratching the surface here. We appreciate everything that you shared with respect to sustainable IT and what you're enabling the end user customer to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> My pleasure. From my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. In a moment, Dave Vellante will return to give you some closing thoughts on sustainable IT You're watching theCUBE. the leader in high tech enterprise coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE coverage of women in tech. International Women's Day 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Karla Wong joins me next. Country Sales Leader for the Commercial Sector in Peru at AWS. Karla, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you so much Lisa and thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be with you today. >> I'm looking forward to chatting with you. You've been in the tech industry for more than 20 years, you've been a leader in tech and sales and customer service, partners, organizations. Talk to me a little bit about your background. >> I am a system engineer. I have some studies from enterprise direction with a university in Savannah, Columbia and I have a digital transformation certified with MIT in Boston. >> Fantastic, were you always interested in technology or STEM or was it something that you pivoted into somewhere during your career? >> Yes, you know what? Since I was little, I was just fascinated with the technology and all the time I was just trying to figure out how to do things and how to build that things and I remember once I was just, of course many time long ago, I was with this BHS, right? An equipment and I tried to do and tried to understand how this works and just figure out I was with many parts of that equipment and then I didn't realize how to join that parts but it was really funny because all the time I was trying to understand what is behind that kind of equipment, how this works and all the time I was asking and my dad said, I was just feeling so curiosity about that and asking many questions and I have uncles that they are engineers. So I was just all the time asking about that and they said, you know what? You are good in math, maybe you can just decide for an engineering career. They were encouraged me for doing that. So I guess that was my first clue that I'm interested in technology. >> Well, you sounds like you have a natural curiosity that you had great role models in your parents and probably others along your educational route and your career route that kind of encouraged that curiosity and being curious is one of the things that's important to being at AWS. Am I right? >> Yes, it's really important because we promote, you know, our, one of the main leadership principles that you read is learn to be curious and they promote that one, right? They're encouraging you to innovate, to learn more, to try to understand more about our solutions, our customers, how to make the things better and you have the space to propose new things, to do the things better. So they encourage you and they empower you to do that and you feel like your curiosity that you have very natural here's improved and they just promote that you continue to do that. >> That curiosity is so important. I mean, when we think about women in technology and we think about bringing in more thought diversity and DEI, it's important to be curious, to be able to bring different thoughts in so that the organization can be more well rounded, it can learn, you also not only do you lead the sales organization, but you are someone that's very active in volunteering. Tell me a little bit about that and how do you balance leading a sales organization and volunteering at the same time? >> You know, when you talk about this is more like work life balance, right? And when we talk about that you can feel like you need it, right? You need to work on that. It's more like an attitude of it's extremely important to think about mental health for everyone because that of course have impact in your physical health and when you talk about this, it not only matters in terms of attitude, it's action and disciplines as well and you have to keep in mind that. The first thing I believe and all the time I do it give the right value for this balance because it's something that a lot of people want more than anything and I have more than some professional decision thinking about this precisely and I have to thinking of me as a person, my family, how to help the community and you cannot imagine the impact when you decide to go for a volunteering activities how can benefit you and not in only the personal way, in your professional way. Even though you didn't start a volunteering, trying to figure out how this help you in your professional life, you receive a lot of benefits from the volunteering activities and it's amazing how that one's impacting your professional life also. When you are a volunteer, you'll receive new and meaningful experiences. Volunteering can be an excellent getaway to find unique and valuable experiences that you are very difficult to find in a day to day basis, right? And you develop your real life skills, openness to criticism, responsibility, humility, commitment, service, attitude, many things that you can proactively include in your job with your team and you can join with them in teamwork and try to figure out how to engage with them in your activities. This is another way to motivate your team, to build your team, right? Talking with this very valuable experiences and also I find out that that improves your health and mood. >> Sounds very-- >> We talk having-- >> Sorry. >> I'm sorry, no don't worry. >> That's very complimentary, that the volunteer work with leading the sales organization that there's so much value that you're bringing into your sales leadership role from the volunteering that you do. I'm just curious, can you describe some of the volunteer organizations that you work with? I think it's pretty impressive. >> Yes, I started my volunteering 14 years ago I guess but I was in the volunteering activities from the school and my dad was a really strong influence for that because I joined, I remember joining with him and go to do some volunteering activities that he led and I start 14 years I went with Operation and Smile group and then in the last two or three years I start with Project of Love. We are focused on kids with cancer and try to help them to build the last wishes they have because they pass away and at the end of this, this two years ago, I start with local activity that we do for patients with rare diseases and we just try to join two great passion that I have. One is the dance that we have here. The name of our national dance is Marinera Norteña and we are just doing this with a group that they are passion at the same time with this volunteering activities and the dance and we just trying to be the ambassador for and the voice for these patients, try to share with the community, the hard health journey that they have trying to obtain a fair treatment, a fair diagnostic, because they are rare disease and here is very difficult that they investigate about that. So that's why we are just doing this using dance as a way to broadcast our voice and just share happiness and hope and health. >> Happiness and hope. Those are two great things. So as the female leader in the tech industry, what are some of the main challenges that you have found regarding cultural aspects, regarding geographical aspects and LATAM? Talk to me about some of those challenges. >> Let me share with you my personal journey. My challenges started with the moment I decided to start engineering. A career that is traditional considered for men only, although this changes over the time, you will realize that the stereotype remains in many people minds right? It happens not only in Peru I can see it in Latin America. Someone once asked me if I wouldn't like to study something easier for a woman, right? And I just, when I received that question, that helping me to reaffirm that it was taking the right decision and I have the fortune to work with companies that believe in female leadership and the importance of our contribution and empower me to do things differently. Although I must confess that this was not always like this. I experienced the situation when I have to show that I'm so much and more capable and prepared than a man to take a major challenge. So despite the fact in the recent years you have had the great advances in integration of women in the field of science and technology, the gap in equality in equality in this sector still continues and many times the attitude towards women is discriminatory considering that we don't have enough knowledge and we don't have enough strength to overcome challenge without the ability to give the extra mile that is often required, or simply because of a gender issue. And generally speaking, opportunities that they're not equal. Neither in salaries. Several studies have revealed that in the same position since at position level within company, men's salary or benefits are higher than the woman. In addition, sometimes the position for a woman is not necessarily for merit it's just to feel fulfill a gender quota and when it's fulfilled, there's no more opportunities. So it's still a long way to go. We are working in that, we are trying to inspire more women to be part of this world. This is an amazing world and this world needs our leadership, judgment, ambition, as a woman. So that's why we try to inspire and try to be a role model for some young ladies that they are thinking about this career in technology. >> Right, you bring up a great point though about one of the things in terms of hiring for quotas. And as we think about this International Women's Day, this year's theme is Breaking the Bias. Where do you think we are with that? >> I think we have a lot long, long way to go to. Today we don't see that we have more women in some leadership roles in technology. We see more young ladies studying engineering but you know what, when you talk about stereotypes we need to understand, or the bias, the bias is not only what the society it's giving you, it's also your own bias because we need to understand that technology careers is not only for men it's also for a woman. And we need to understand and change the perspective that we see the challenges that we have in our life because sometimes that could be a really stopper in your professional life. And for me, we don't, we really need to understand that it's important. We cannot stop believing in ourself and we can achieve whatever we want. So we never stop pursuing our goals and achieve what you really need to achieve and as I said all the time, get inspired by women with great achievements who have changed this world technology. We have many examples of that for many years. We have Eva Maria Kiesler, the core inventor of Wi-Fi, Radia Joy Perlman, known as the the mother of the internet and Ada Lovelace who became the first female computer programmer. So we have many examples in this story to understand that the limit is on you. So the bias we need to break the first one is the bias that you have of yourself. >> That's a good point. That's a really good point there. I'm curious, what would your recommendation be? You obviously had, you had that natural curiosity that we talked about. You also seems like you had great parents who were very encouraging of all of the different things that you were interested in. What do you recommend for women maybe starting out in the STEM area or in tech in particular? How do they get that courage to just try? >> You know what, the main thing I guess as I mentioned before, is to put aside the stereotypes, right? And get out of your head, the standing out career like science, technology and engineering is only for a man. All the time I have this list for me, that is lesson learned. And my lesson learned is please don't think that you cannot do it. Try it. If you go and the things do not work well, try it again and try it again. So don't feel stopped because you face your first challenge and the challenge it's very difficult, because we have the courage to do that and you know what? It is very and interesting to understand that women has resilience, we have the courage to do anything, we are multi tasking all the time they say women can do many things at the same time and we have this particular way to communicate. We are very inclusive. We make empathy. We're just leading with a cohesion concept of a team. So we need to explore more about our strengths and try to encourage from them. And one of the main things for me is don't feel afraid and transform, you know, when you feel like that, transfer that as your power, you're encouraged to continue. So we need to transform our fears in our, I always said our gasoline to continue and then your motive to be successful. So transform your fears. >> I love that. >> That's my main focus. >> Transform your fear. That's great advice there is. And I will say no, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask a question 'cause I guarantee you, many people in the room whether it's a physical room these days or it's a virtual video conferencing room, probably have the same question. Be the one to raise your hand and ask. But I love how you're saying transform that fear 'cause it's there. Don't be afraid to fail but also we need to have those female role models, mentors and sponsors that we can see that can have help us kind of in that transformation process, that mentorship is really critical to help guide that along. >> Yes, yes, yes, that's correct and I will, I am, I was really fortunate because I have real role models in my life not only, as I mentioned my dad and also one of the things that I recognize in this company that I work for that empower leadership from women and I identify some role models I want to follow and I ask her in each particular company to be my coach and to be my mentor, because of course you are starting in the technology side and you need more from others that they can share with you her wisdom, right? And try to give you advice, how to work on that. And I always said, and I will always repeat because I sometimes I have the opportunity to mentor young ladies that they are very curious about the technology side and I share with them my experience, my lesson learned so they can build their own story to do this and I share all the time don't compete in a male environment in a gray suit. You have your own personality, you have your own strengths, you're a woman and you have your strength as a woman. Show that, be, you know, the black point in the middle of the white environment because you're different, your leadership is different. You have to understand that, value that and explore more about that so you can inspire others and you can inspire yourself and it's fair to say, please identify your achievements and value them because you deserve that, you fight for them and you have to be celebrate for that. >> Right. >> So that's the main, you know, the main idea when I share with these ladies but it's right, it's fair to be recognized for that. It's your effort, it's your way to do the things differently and it's very appreciated. >> Very appreciated and very inspiring. Thank you so much Karla for sharing your story, how you are balancing work life volunteerism, how it's complimentary. I found this conversation very inspiring so thank you so much for joining me today. >> Thank you. No, thank you so much Lisa. It was really a pleasure for me to be with you today. >> Excellent, likewise. For Karla Wong, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of women in tech, International Women's Day 2022. 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(upbeat electronic music plays) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to theCube's coverage of .NEXT 2021 Virtual. I'm John Furrier, hosts of theCube. We have two great guests, Rajiv Mirani, who's the Chief Technology Officer, and Thomas Cornely, SVP of Product Management. Day Two keynote product, the platform, announcements, news. A lot of people, Rajiv, are super excited about the, the platform, uh, moving to a subscription model. Everything's kind of coming into place. How are the customers, uh, seeing this? How they adopted hybrid cloud as a hybrid, hybrid, hybrid, data, data, data? Those are the, those are the, that's the, that's where the puck is right now. You guys are there. How are customers seeing this? >> Mirani: Um, um, great question, John, by the way, great to be back here on theCube again this year. So when we talk to our customers, pretty much, all of them agreed that for them, the ideal state that they want to be in is a hybrid world, right? That they want to essentially be able to run both of those, both on the private data center and the public cloud, and sort of have a common platform, common experience, common, uh, skillset, same people managing, managing workloads across both locations. And unfortunately, most of them don't have that that tooling available today to do so, right. And that's where the platform, the Nutanix platform's come a long way. We've always been great at running in the data center, running every single workload, we continue to make great strides on our core with the increased performance for, for the most demanding, uh, workloads out there. But what we have done in the last couple of years has also extended this platform to run in the public cloud and essentially provide the same capabilities, the same operational behavior across locations. And that's when you're seeing a lot of excitement from our customers because they really want to be in that state, for it to have the common tooling across work locations, as you can imagine, we're getting traction. Customers who want to move workloads to public cloud, they don't want to spend the effort to refactor them. Or for customers who really want to operate in a hybrid mode with things like disaster recovery, cloud bursting, workloads like that. So, you know, I think we've made a great step in that direction. And we look forward to doing more with our customers. >> Furrier: What is the big challenge that you're seeing with this hybrid transition from your customers and how are you solving that specifically? >> Mirani: Yeah. If you look at how public and private operate today, they're very different in the kind of technologies used. And most customers today will have two separate teams, like one for their on-prem workloads, using a certain set of tooling, a second completely different team, managing a completely different set of workloads, but with different technologies. And that's not an ideal state in some senses, that's not true hybrid, right? It's like creating two new silos, if anything. And our vision is that you get to a point where both of these operate in the same manner, you've got the same people managing all of them, the same workloads anyway, but similar performance, similar SaaS. So they're going to literally get to point where applications and data can move back and forth. And that's, that's, that's where I think the real future is for hybrid >> Furrier: I have to ask you a personal question. As the CTO, you've got be excited with the architecture that's evolving with hybrid and multi-cloud, I mean, I mean, it's pretty, pretty exciting from a tech standpoint, what is your reaction to that? >> Mirani: %100 and it's been a long time coming, right? We have been building pieces of this over years. And if you look at all the product announcements, Nutanix has made over the last few years and the acquisitions that made them and so on, there's been a purpose behind them. That's been a purpose to get to this model where we can operate a customer's workloads in a hybrid environment. So really, really happy to see all of that come together. Years and years of work finally finally bearing fruit. >> Furrier: Well, we've had many conversations in the past, but it congratulates a lot more to do with so much more action happening. Thomas, you get the keys to the kingdom, okay, and the product management you've got to prioritize, you've got to put it together. What are the key components of this Nutanix cloud platform? The hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy that's in place, because there's a lot of headroom there, but take us through the key components today and then how that translates into hybrid multi-cloud for the future. >> Cornely: Certainly, John, thank you again and great to be here, and kind of, Rajiv, you said really nicely here. If you look at our portfolio at Nutanix, what we have is great technologies. They've been sold as a lot of different products in the past, right. And what we've done last few months is we kind of bring things together, simplify and streamline, and we align everything around a cloud platform, right? And this is really the messaging that we're going after is look, it's not about the price of our solutions, but business outcomes for customers. And so are we focusing on pushing the cloud platform, which we encompasses five key areas for us, which we refer to as cloud infrastructure, no deficiencies running your workloads. Cloud management, which is how you're going to go and actually manage, operate, automate, and get governance. And then services on top that started on all around data, right? So we have unified storage, finding the objects, data services. We have database services. Now we have outset of desktop services, which is for EMC. So all of this, the big change for us is this is something that, you know, you can consume in terms of solutions and consume on premises. As Rajiv discussed, you know, we can take the same platform and deploy it in public cloud regions now, right? So you can now get no seamless hybrid cloud, same operating model. But increasingly what we're doing is taking your solutions and re-targeting issues and problems at workers running native public clouds. So think of this as going, after automating more governance, security, you know, finding objects, database services, wherever you're workload is running. So this is taking this portfolio and reapplying it, and targeting on prem at the edge in hybrid and in christening public cloud in ATV. >> Furrier: That's awesome. I've been watching some of the footage and I was noticing quite a lot of innovation around virtualized, networking, disaster, recovery security, and data services. It's all good. You guys were, and this is in your wheelhouse. I know you guys are doing this for many, many years. I want to dive deeper into that because the theme right now that we've been reporting on, you guys are hitting right here what the keynote is cloud scale is about faster development, right? Cloud native is about speed, it's about not waiting for these old departments, IT or security to get back to them in days or weeks and responding to either policy or some changes, you got to move faster. And data, data is critical in all of this. So we'll start with virtualized networking because networking again is a key part of it. The developers want to go faster. They're shifting left, take us through the virtualization piece of how important that is. >> Mirani: Yeah, that's actually a great question as well. So if you think about it, virtual networking is the first step towards building a real cloud like infrastructure on premises that extends out to include networking as well. So one of the key components of any cloud is automation. Another key component is self service and with the API, is it bigger on virtual networking All of that becomes much simpler, much more possible than having to, you know, qualify it, work with someone there to reconfigure physical networks and slots. We can, we can do that in a self service way, much more automated way. But beyond that, the, the, the notion of watching networks is really powerful because it helps us to now essentially extend networks and, and replicate networks anywhere on the private data center, but in the public cloud as well. So now when customers move their workloads, we'd already made that very simple with our clusters offering. But if you're only peek behind the layers a little bit, it's like, well, yea, but the network's not the same on the side. So now it, now it means that a go re IP, my workloads create new subnets and all of that. So there was a little bit of complication left in that process. So to actual network that goes away also. So essentially you can repeat the same network in both locations. You can literally move your workloads, no redesign of your network acquired and still get that self service and automation capabilities of which cookies so great step forward, it really helps us complete the infrastructure as a service stack. We had great storage capabilities before, we create compute capabilities before, and sort of networking the third leg and all of that. >> Furrier: Talk about the complexity here, because I think a lot of people will look at dev ops movement and say, infrastructure is code when you go to one cloud, it's okay. You can, you can, you know, make things easier. Programmable. When, when you start getting into data center, private data centers, or essentially edges now, cause if it's distributed cloud environment or cloud operations, it's essentially one big cloud operation. So the networks are different. As you said, this is a big deal. Okay. This is sort of make infrastructure as code happen in multiple environments across multiple clouds is not trivial. Could you talk about the main trends and how you guys see this evolving and how you solve that? >> Mirani: Yeah. Well, the beauty here is that we are actually creating the same environment everywhere, right? From, from, from point of view of networking, compute, and storage, but also things like security. So when you move workloads, things with security, posture also moves, which is also super important. It's a really hard problem, and something a lot of CIO's struggle with, but having the same security posture in public and private clouds reporting as well. So with this, with this clusters offering and our on-prem offering competing with the infrastructure service stack, you may not have this capability where your operations really are unified across multicloud hybrid cloud in any way you run. >> Furrier: Okay, so if I have multiple cloud vendors, there are different vendors. You guys are creating a connection unifying those three. Is that right? >> Mirani: Essentially, yes, so we're running the same stack on all of them and abstracting away the differences between the clouds that you can run operations. >> Furrier: And when the benefits, the benefits of the customers are what? What's the main, what's the main benefit there? >> Mirani: Essentially. They don't have to worry about, about where their workloads are running. Then they can pick the best cloud for their workloads. It can seamlessly move them between Cloud. They can move their data over easily, and essentially stop worrying about getting locked into a single, into a single cloud either in a multi-cloud scenario or in a hybrid cloud scenario, right. There many, many companies now were started on a cloud first mandate, but over time realized that they want to move workloads back to on-prem or the other way around. They have traditional workloads that they started on prem and want to move them to public cloud now. And we make that really simple. >> Furrier: Yeah. It's kind of a trick question. I wanted to tee that up for Thomas, because I love that kind of that horizontal scales, what the cloud's all about, but when you factor data into it, this is the sweet spot, because this is where, you know, I think it gets really exciting and complicated too, because, you know, data's got, can get unwieldy pretty quickly. You got state got multiple applications, Thomas, what's your, what can you share the data aspect of this? This is super, super important. >> Absolutely. It's, you know, it's really our core source of differentiation, when you think about it. That's what makes Nutanix special right? In, in the market. When we talk about cloud, right. Actually, if you've been following Nutanix for years, you know, we've been talking a lot about making infrastructure invisible, right? The new way for us to talk about what we're doing, with our vision is, is to make clouds invisible so that in the end, you can focus on your own business, right? So how do you make Cloud invisible? Lots of technology is at the application layer to go and containerize applications, you know, make them portable, modernize them, make them cloud native. That's all fine when you're not talking of state class containers, that the simplest thing to move around. Right. But as we all know, you know, applications end of the day, rely on data and measure the data across all of these different locations. I'm not even going to go seconds. Cause that's almost a given, you're talking about attribution. You can go straight from edge to on-prem to hybrid, to different public cloud regions. You know, how do you go into the key control of that and get consistency of all of this, right? So that's part of it is being aware of where your data is, right? But the other part is that inconsistency of set up data services regardless of where you're running. And so this is something that we look at the cloud platform, where we provide you the cloud infrastructure go and run the applications. But we also built into the cloud platform. You get all of your core data services, whether you have to consume file services, object services, or database services to really support your application. And that will move with your application, that is the key thing here by bringing everything onto the same platform. You now can see all operations, regardless of where you're running the application. The last thing that we're adding, and this is a new offering that we're just launching, which is a service, it's called, delete the dead ends. Which is a solution that gives you visibility and allow you to go and get better governance around all your data, wherever it may live, across on-prem edge and public clouds. That's a big deal again, because to manage it, you first have to make sense of it and get control over it. And that's what data answer's is going to be all about. >> Furrier: You know, one of the things we've we've been reporting on is data is now a competitive advantage, especially when you have workflows involved, um, super important. Um, how do you see customers going to the edge? Because if you have this environment, how does the data equation, Thomas, go to the edge? How do you see that evolving? >> Cornely: So it's yeah. I mean, edge is not one thing. And that's actually the biggest part of the challenge of defining what the edge is depending on the customer that you're working with. But in many cases you get data ingesting or being treated at the edge that you then have to go move to either your private cloud or your public cloud environment to go and basically aggregate it, analyze it and get insights from it. Right? So this is where a lot of our technologies, whether it's, I think the object's offering built in, we'll ask you to go and make the ingest over great distances over the network, right? And then have your common data to actually do an ethics audit over our own object store. Right? Again, announcements, we brought into our storage solutions here, we want to then actually organize it then actually organize it directly onto the objects store solution. Nope. Using things, things like or SG select built into our protocols. So again, make it easy for you to go in ingest anywhere, consolidate your data, and then get value out of it. Using some of the latest announcements on the API forms. >> Furrier: Rajiv databases are still the heart of most applications in the enterprise these days, but databases are not just the data is a lot of different data. Moving around. You have a lot a new data engineering platforms coming in. A lot of customers are scratching their head and, and they want to kind of be, be ready and be ready today. Talk about your view of the database services space and what you guys are doing to help enterprise, operate, manage their databases. >> Mirani: Yeah, it's a super important area, right? I mean, databases are probably the most important workload customers run on premises and pretty close on the public cloud as well. And if you look at it recently, the tooling that's available on premises, fairly traditional, but the clouds, when we integrate innovation, we're going to be looking at things like Amazon's relational database service makes it an order of magnitude simpler for our customers to manage the database. At the same time, also a proliferation of databases and we have the traditional Oracle and SQL server. But if you have open source Mongo, DB, and my SQL, and a lot of post-grads, it's a lot of different kinds of databases that people have to manage. And now it just becomes this cable. I have the spoke tooling for each one of them. So with our Arab product, what we're doing is essentially creating a data management layer, a database management layer that unifies operations across your databases and across locations, public cloud and private clouds. So all the operations that you need, you do, which are very complicated in, in, in, in with traditional tooling now, provisioning of databases backing up and restoring them providing a true time machine capabilities, so you can pull back transactions. We can copy data management for your data first. All of that has been tested in Era for a wide variety of database engines, your choice of database engine at the back end. And so the new capabilities are adding sort of extend that lead that we have in that space. Right? So, so one of the things we announced at .Next is, is, is, is one-click storage scaling. So one of the common problems with databases is as they grow over time, it's not running out of storage capacity. Now re-provisions to storage for a database, migrate all the data where it's weeks and months of look, right? Well, guess what? With Era, you can do that in one click, it uses the underlying AOS scale-out architecture to provision more storage and it does it have zero downtime. So on the fly, you can resize your databases that speed, you're adding some security capabilities. You're adding some capabilities around resilience. Era continues to be a very exciting product for us. And one of the things, one of the real things that we are really excited about is that it can really unify database operations between private and public. So in the future, we can also offer an aversion of Era, which operates on native public cloud instances and really excited about that. >> Furrier: Yeah. And you guys got that two X performance on scaling up databases and analytics. Now the big part point there, since you brought up security, I got to ask you, how are you guys talking about security? Obviously it's embedded in from the beginning. I know you guys continue to talk about that, but talk about, Rajiv, the security on, on that's on everyone's mind. Okay. It goes evolving. You seeing ransomware are continuing to happen more and more and more, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. What do you guys, how are you guys helping customers stay secure? >> Mirani: Security is something that you always have to think about as a defense in depth when it comes to security, right? There's no one product that, that's going to do everything for you. That said, what we are trying to do is to essentially go with the gamut of detection, prevention, and response with our security, and ransom ware is a great example of that, right. We've partnered with Qualys to essentially be able to do a risk assessment of your workloads, to basically be able to look into your workloads, see whether they have been bashed, whether they have any known vulnerabilities and so on. To try and prevent malware from infecting your workloads in the first place, right? So that's, that's the first line of defense. Now not systems will be perfect. Some, some, some, some malware will probably get in anyway But then you detect it, right. We have a database of all the 4,000 ransomware signatures that you can use to prevent ransomware from, uh, detecting ransom ware if it does infect the system. And if that happens, we can prevent it from doing any damage by putting your fire systems and storage into read-only mode, right. We can also prevent lateral spread of, of your ransomware through micro-segmentation. And finally, if you were, if you were to invade, all those defenses that you were actually able to encrypt data on, on, on a filer, we have immutable snapshots, they can recover from those kinds of attacks. So it's really a defense in depth approach. And in keeping with that, you know, we also have a rich ecosystem of partners while this is one of them, but older networks market sector that we work with closely to make sure that our customers have the best tooling around and the simplest way to manage security of their infrastructure. >> Furrier: Well, I got to say, I'm very impressed guys, by the announcements from the team I've been, we've been following Nutanix in the beginning, as you know, and now it's back in the next phase of the inflection point. I mean, looking at my notebook here from the announcements, the VPC virtual networking, DR Observability, zero trust security, workload governance, performance expanded availability, and AWS elastic DR. Okay, we'll get to that in a second, clusters on Azure preview cloud native ecosystem, cloud control plane. I mean, besides all the buzzword bingo, that's going on there, this is cloud, this is a cloud native story. This is distributed computing. This is virtualization, containers, cloud native, kind of all coming together around data. >> Cornely: What you see here is, I mean, it is clear that it is about modern applications, right? And this is about shifting strategy in terms of focusing on the pieces where we're going to be great at. And a lot of these are around data, giving you data services, data governance, not having giving you an invisible platform that can be running in any cloud. And then partnering, right. And this is just recognizing what's going on in the world, right? People want options, customers and options. When it comes to cloud, they want options to where they're running the reports, what options in terms of, whether it be using to build the modern applications. Right? So our big thing here is providing and being the best platform to go and actually support for Devers to come in and build and run their new and modern applications. That means that for us supporting a broad ecosystem of partners, entrepreneur platform, you know, we announced our partnership with Red Hat a couple of months ago, right? And this is going to be a big deal for us because again, we're bringing two leaders in the industry that are eminently complimentary when it comes to providing you a complete stack to go and build, run, and manage your client's applications. When you do that on premises, utilizing like the preferred ATI environment to do that. Using the Red Hat Open Shift, or, you're doing this open to public cloud and again, making it seamless and easy, to move the applications and their supporting data services around, around them that support them, whether they're running on prem in hybrid winter mechanic. So client activity is a big deal, but when it comes to client activity, the way we look at this, it's all about giving customers choice, choice of that from services and choice of infrastructure service. >> Furrier: Yeah. Let's talk to the red hat folks, Rajiv, it's you know, it's, they're an operating system thinking company. You know, you look at the internet now in the cloud and edge, and on-premise, it's essentially an operating system. you need your backup and recovery needs to disaster recovery. You need to have the HCI, you need to have all of these elements part of the system. It's, it's, it's, it's building on top of the existing Nutanix legacy, then the roots and the ecosystem with new stuff. >> Mirani: Right? I mean, it's, in fact, the Red Hat part is a great example of, you know, the perfect marriage, if you will, right? It's, it's, it's the best in class platform for running the cloud-native workloads and the best in class platform with a service offering in there. So two really great companies coming together. So, so really happy that we could get that done. You know, the, the point here is that cloud native applications still need infrastructure to run off, right? And then that infrastructure, if anything, the demands on that and growing it since it's no longer that hail of, I have some box storage, I have some filers and, you know, just don't excite them, set. People are using things like object stores, they're using databases increasingly. They're using the Kafka and Map Reduce and all kinds of data stores out there. And back haul must be great at supporting all of that. And that's where, as Thomas said, earlier, data services, data storage, those are our strengths. So that's certainly a building from platform to platform. And then from there onwards platform services, great to have right out of the pocket. >> Furrier: People still forget this, you know, still hardware and software working together behind the scenes. The old joke we have here on the cube is server less is running on a bunch of servers. So, you know, this is the way that is going. It's really the innovation. This is the infrastructure as code truly. This is what's what's happened is super exciting. Rajiv, Thomas, thank you guys for coming on. Always great to talk to you guys. Congratulations on an amazing platform. You guys are developing. Looks really strong. People are giving it rave reviews and congratulations on, on, on your keynotes. >> Cornely: Thank you for having us >> Okay. This is theCube's coverage of.next global virtual 2021 cube coverage day two keynote review. I'm John Furrier Furrier with the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Hello, welcome to the special Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host to the cube here and our special Napa Valley remote location, connecting with Palo Alto as well as in Massachusetts, and VMware in Palo Alto. We've got a great conversation about edge technology with Dell technologies and VMware and the cube of course. Here Pierluca Chiodelli, vice-president product manager at the edge at Dell. And Munyeb Minhazuddin, VP of edge computing at VMware, joining me for this edge conversation, gentlemen, thank you for joining us in the cube. >> Thank you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So it's like the edge is the hottest thing we've been talking about forever. Now it's important because you're starting to see the technologies come together with multicloud on the horizon, and hybrid cloud in full enterprise mode right now with 5G, consumer size expanding. On the business side, connecting the edge is becoming a cloud product cloud operations product. That also includes the on premises components. So we're in full distributed computing mode right now. And everyone's not denying this a lot too. Everyone's agreeing on it. So it's happening. So let's get into what's going on at the edge. How do you guys see edge evolving in the marketplace right now? >> Yeah, let me get started there, John pleasure to be here and partnering with your Pierluca. What's happened through the pandemic, I know you kind of said we're all sitting far apart and talking, right? So a lot of the edge has been here forever, but the pandemic has accelerated a lot of the edge initiatives, right? So people started working from home remotely, workloads now starting to move towards towards the edge. So as every industry retailers think about socially disintermediated, omni-channel retail experiences. Manufacturers think about, localized supply chains and efficiencies of that. As their global supply chains get all stressed, they're all, inventing and doing two things at the edge. So what's this driven, even though it has been there all along, it's to driving innovation towards the edge. Business processes, outcomes, new applications, we call them edge native applications are being built, now purpose for business outcomes at the edge. That's kind of a big change and acceleration the last, 15 months that we've seen. >> What's the trends driving this because you know, obviously that is making a lot of sense and modernization of the enterprise, it's happening a lot faster than many people had predicted, day one operations, day two operators are buzzwords now. I mean, day one just basically means cloud and innovation. But now there's an operating aspect to this. What's the trend driving this edge native mindset and product requirement. Can you guys share that, any thought on reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think the main trend as Munyeb said, the restoration is bream because they use case and the transformation that needs to happen at the edge. This is, was thinking before, right? All of us, when we go to a store now we interact in different way. When we buy online, when we do all the normal things in life that we need today, we doing different. This is required to bring more things at the edge. If you look at some data, we know that 50% of what is going to be happening in 2023, will be at the edge with 90% of what is from an application point of view, exploding at the edge. That to your point, why is that as important, as you see around all the verticals, manufacturing, and also other verticals, for example, the machinery manufacturing was not connected because at that time there was no need to be connected. Now we see more and more machinery need to be connected, not only on the manufacturing floor, but also send things outside of manufacturing floor connected to other compute. So the necessity to bring more close, in Dell, we have this notion of, well, what is the edge you wear a lot? What is the edge? The edge is everything where you need to act upon the information that you create. It's really makes sense to bring things more there because you need to act on them. And so the necessity to have more compute latency, it's very big things that we need to solve. Security, and also the days operation day one day, two operation, and be able to drive everything from the cloud to the edge in the same way and same experience. >> Yeah. I mean, you basically laid out the enterprise requirements for most things, which is pretty complicated, but it has to run at scale, but also, Munyeb was as mentioning edge native. So I want to get your guys' reaction to our thoughts around this concept. I love this edge native conversation, but as customers much migrate to the cloud, okay. Migration workloads with containerization, stateful data, these are real issues. So migrating is one thing, but now if I migrate, what's (indistinct) migrating an app or workloads versus edge native, and how does someone get from migrating or re-platforming to edge native? Can you guys share your thoughts on this evolution of migrating and then becoming truly edge native? >> Yeah, John, I think it's an interesting thing, right? So it's not, it's easy to say, I have a continuum from data center to the public cloud, to the edge. What we're finding is some of the applications you've migrated to the cloud. If you think about it, both data center and clouds are very centralized compute models, right? So when you actually re-platforming refactoring applications for the cloud, what you're doing is you're fundamentally, building for elastic scale, elastic growth of compute, elastic shrink of compute. When you actually moving.. So it's more compute heavy, and you know, the plasticity of compute. When you actually moving these workloads towards the edge, they're actually data dense, they are data heavy, because to what Pierluca was saying before as well, there's a huge volume of data coming at you. And that volume of data needs to be processed. That volume of data needs to be in real-time and streamed and outcomes driven out of that. Now, do you want to take a lot of that data and then push it all the way to the cloud or the data center to get processed? Or do you want to get it processed locally and come to some actions? Now Pierluca's example of the manufacturing plant, that time delay in latency could cost you millions of dollars of bad quality product, because you missed the quality control in not replacing parts fast enough. So what we're seeing in this emergence of this new edge native applications is people are having to re-platform, refactor applications to work them at the edge because of the attributes being different, higher data density, real-time process requirements, scale. We talked about scale. We're all used to doing thousands of maybe hundreds of data centers, but not tens of thousands of edge locations. Right? So it's a different level of scale and security that you need. And that's where, when we call edge native, is fundamentally it has to operate, very closely with the operation technology rather than the typical IT stance we take. >> You're looking at it. I mean, tell about the product features that are requirements there, because you mentioned a few things in there. I'll just jump, pick one thing out, which is data. Moving data around is very expensive and everyone knows that. But you got to move compute now and with serverless, okay. And in the cloud, you want that same kind of agility and capability at the edge. So you got to have the devices at the edge, be smart enough and be software enabled to handle this. How do you deal with this in the product management side of things? Because you've got to prioritize all this. >> Absolutely John to take on what Munyeb was saying, we think of why someone should look at the Dell and VMware together is because for be successful, there are a lot of POC going on and a lot of try and buy in a lot of also verticalization of the use case. So what gear to offer is really what they say, generate insight, where they need, and also consolidate it. Cause we hear more, as Munyeb pointed out, you buy on the edge for the outcome, you buy for, security, you buy for an outcome. For example, for predictive maintenance. Now that buy of the outcome also prescribe a certain orchestration in a certain out and in software that need to run, right? If certain deployment model now in the same place, you can buy an outcome, for example, for smart buildings. All of us that we have in the advanced or most of it at home right now, but think about the buildings where you need to control that you have solar panel and stuff like that. So that outcome, if you buy today, it runs on another thing. So you end up with a very silos approach where you have a prolification actually of infrastructure. What we are proposing here is really that we need to simplify. We need to start with the building block approach that allow us to also bring the security. As you can think it, as the devices expand as the compute, you pointed out the expanding thousands or hundreds of thousand, security becomes a big deal. And in some place you need to also be, I've got things away because you don't want even to go to the internet at all. So that's a very important is this is how we perceive the things that we need to simplify the edge for our customers. >> Let's get specific now. How can customers, whether they're Dell technologies and VMware customers or new customers, leverage the combination of VMware and Dell technologies for the edge, what is the solution? What can they do? What are the things they can start with today? >> Pierluca, you want to get started with the platform on the app side. Go ahead. >> Today what really is the approach we have is, building block approach, as I said. So in Dell, we can cover a lot of things for the edge. We can cover from as small as a gateway, to large, to a plaster to multiple plasters forming an entire data center and connect all of that. And then don't forget about our apex project, where you can buy all of these as a service as well. So that layer that we have where we have ruggedized server, we have the gateways, we have also software assets that they are very important for the edge like our streaming data platform. So you need to collect this data. We need to stream this data and collect and have insight about this data. So we can bring our streaming data platform, in all of these, by the way, it runs on top of VMware. So that's where VMware is coming to play. >> Yeah, no, I think, you know, building on the foundation there, John is really about, us providing then, having the platform T-shirt sizing, as you know, pure Pierluca went from small to large is important because what we recognize is not one size fits all at the edge because they're going to be all sizes requirements. Second, what we're doing is providing the multi-cloud connectivity, multilevel cloud services that VMware knows. So bringing our software layer on top, providing developers to build applications, both VMs and containers on the edge when they can use services from any cloud provider to build those applications. So VMware provides that multi-cloud platform, which gives the ability for folks to build applications and get services from any choice of their cloud providers and run it on top of Dell, portfolio and connect that all together with, very importantly I would say, in a distributed lifecycle management and operations everywhere. Because you're not going to find IT skillsets at the edge. This is at a retail store, at a manufacturing plant. So what you don't get is very, skilled IT skillsets. So the control plane happens to be in the cloud, which is centrally operated. Whereas the data plane is all running at the edge and we're able to between VMware and Dell, bring our portfolios together to effectively deliver upon this and provide what I would call, a secure software supply chain. You can build applications securely and, deliver them from the data center to the cloud, to the edge and manage it provision it and troubleshoot it end to end. That's only possible with VMware and Dell technologies, right? >> And John, let me call it out that one of the most important things, obviously with VMware, our VxRail product, obviously is our running horse for most of the edge use case, including our server, ruggedized server. But I will say that on the VMware we are spending with the satellites nodes, that they are basically nodes that you can put in your edge location and centralized, you can manage and you can do all the life cycle management, also if you don't need the storage part. So that's a key things that expand the as with the common also reference, if you guys will follow our session, we have a joint customer actually explain our such industry, how you will run the entire things with the edge and run VMware across with the VxRail. So great example. >> That's a great answer, great call out to one of the things that's impressive. And I think this better together message comes out in that conversation is that you have a building block approach. You have a platform, these two things work together. And I think one of the things that's interesting to me, just as a, student of the industry over the years, it's kind of an operating system in itself, it's the cloud, right? It's like one big thing. So the customers can build applications on top of it and get the benefits of it. I think this is kind of a systems thinking mindset, not just design thinking, but it's a systems architecture, if you will. it's not directly a systems like a computer system, but holistically, you can look at it as a systems design problem. So customers are having more and more of these conversations around systems thinking. Can you guys share your reaction to that? Because we all saw the benefits of design thinking, oh yeah. Design thinking, you know, greatest movement. Now we're in a new era I think where, we're starting to see people talk about the systems thinking. >> You, you actually, it's a great thing, John. I think you have to have system thinking, everything we're been talking about so far is, if you don't have system thinking you won't scale to tens of thousands of locations, in a systematically, right? So design thinking is brilliant because it gives you a very user interface, user experiences where users and developers get in and have a flexibility on usage and all of that. What you're talking about here is tens of thousands of locations. And those locations don't have any skilled IT folks. So we're not used to breaking things down. So what do you want to think about is more of a scalable system design, which is like cookie cutter, push it out, and then, it has got zero touch provisioning, zero trust for architecture, with security built in and distributed lifecycle management. So you are making the edge simple to operate for that to happen, you need system thinking where it is, scalable, secure, and scalable not large, small, and highly distributed in a lot of locations, you have a proper system thinking and design system put in, then it'll operate itself. This is how we've done industry for a long time. Right? >> And the consequences have to be factored in. If something breaks there's consequences in systems, it's a ripple effect or network of what kinds of things are going on. Great stuff. You're looking at a comment on the systems thinking, I'd love to get your reaction to that. >> Yeah. Let me say one things about the system thinking. So system thinking is very important also on top of the solution that we put together, as we discussed before, right? Normally in the vertical, like the manufacturing, people by outcome. So at the end of the day, the people, they interact directly with the outcome, they look at the solution and we will offer together the solution. So we have the VMware layer, we are partnering with other people to, offer an end to end solution, to Munyeb's point The manufacturing floor person will not really care if he's interact with VxRail or VMware, but he wants to interact with the end application. So that's why it's very important beside that we need to make the infrastructure transparent and easy. So that's really good point. That's how the things going. That's why you need to system architect the things and system think the things. >> I think this edge conversation is bringing up a new modern era of opportunity and there are problems to solve and work the problem. The data is when we talked earlier. Are there considerations that you guys see out there for how architects in the enterprise who are thinking about the future of their business, how they want to set themselves up for the modern era? It's coming as here for edge for low latency, built insecurity. These are table stake enterprise features now. So, also the data obviously the cost of data and the tsunami of more data. Local data to be processed, leveraging the benefits of the cloud in a systematic way. These are all new hard problems that if solved create huge opportunities. Or as Jerry Chen, former VMware CTO of the cloud said, castles on the cloud. You can have the best of the cloud if you do this right. What are some considerations that people should think about from an architecture standpoint? >> I think from my perspective, and then let Munyeb speak about this. Think about how you can standardize from the beginning. So don't end up with the thousand of different option because then it's difficult to manage. And then have a wide approach, look at all the different edge sites, as a building block of that big edge thing. And also look at how you can not only scale, but bring security in all the things that you think, right. This is fundamental. In the past we always left security as the last of things that we thought about, at the edge is fundamental. And edge is changing, the requirement. As I explained at the beginning of this interview, edge has a very different requirement. And if we satisfy those requirement, then we are successful not only at the edge, but we are successful at the core and in the cloud, because we can bring as many application in and out, in and out where it's needed. So with that, Munyeb you want to say something about that? >> Sure, Thanks Pierluca And I think, Pierluca was absolutely right. I think you have to standardize, you have to scale, only then you can standardize easily without doing (indistinct). As an architect, one of the key things to consider, also there is, you know, I think, John you brought up 5G at the beginning, but we didn't follow up with that. Right? So we actually do believe that the service provider market for building out the next generation 5G, they have capacity, they have connectivity closest to the edge as well. So I actually do think that as architects think about it, a player as you build out your data center, your cloud, and now towards the edge, the last mile between the cloud and the edge is actually owned by the service providers, the service providers will play a critical role in placing these workloads closer to the edge, but not necessarily all far away from the cloud. So, architect design think about scalability, intrinsic security, and having different sizes. But one important factor, I actually do believe that the service providers have the opportunity of a lifetime in front of them to become like the hyper scalers for the edge, because if they can provide not just infrastructure network services, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, they will be able to deliver extensively whole amount of edge compute services for the enterprises, which is something that architects have to think about to actually not make a bottleneck, to all go up to the cloud where they can actually be distributed as the service provider. >> Yeah. I totally agree. The service providers, they have the real estate, they got the facilities, they've got the connectivity at the edge and the footprint, what used to be a base station is becoming smaller and smaller and higher density. So it's going to start to see, and there is by the way more edges. It's not the one tower anymore. It's everywhere. These little points of access points, are thousands of points of millions of points of light, if you will to the network. Huge. Okay, gentlemen, thank you so much. I want to just say, I really appreciate this conversation. A systems thinking, edge it's the future and an edge is an architectural shift where there's only advantages, not a lot of downside if you plan it right. The opportunity with the cloud is amazing. So thank you so much for coming on and sharing your insights here on the Cube conversation. >> Thank you very much John. >> Thank you for having us John. >> This is John Furrier with the cube here in Napa remotely in Palo Alto and Palo Alto in Massachusetts for a remote interview. Great conversation with great guests. Thanks for watching.

>> Hello, my name is Daniel Wichs, I'm a senior scientist at NTT research and a professor at Northeastern University. Today I want to tell you about incompressible encodings. This is a recent work from Crypto 2020 and it's a joint work with Tal Moran. So let me start with a question. How much space would it take to store all of Wikipedia? So it turns out that you can download Wikipedia for offline use and some reasonable version of it is about 50 gigabytes in size. So as you'd expect, it's a lot of data, it's quite large. But there's another way to store Wikipedia which is just to store the link www.wikipedia.org that only takes 17 bytes. And for all intents and purposes as long as you have a connection to the internet storing this link is as good as storing the Wikipedia data. You can access a Wikipedia with this link whenever you want. And the point I want to make is that when it comes to public data like Wikipedia, even though the data is huge, it's trivial to compress it down because it is public just by storing a small link to it. And the question for this talk is, can we come up with an incompressible representation of public data like Wikipedia? In other words can we take Wikipedia and represent it in some way such that this representation requires the full 50 gigabytes of storage store, even for someone who has the link to the underlying Wikipedia data and can get the underlying data for free. So let me actually tell you what this means in more detail. So this is the notion of incompressible encodings that we'll focus on in this work. So incompressible encoding consists of an encoding algorithm and a decoding algorithm, these are public algorithms. There's no secret key. Anybody can run these algorithms. The encoding algorithm takes some data m, let's say the Wikipedia data and encodes it in some probabilistic randomized way to derive a codeword c. And the codeword c, you can think of it as just an alternate representation of the Wikipedia data. Anybody can come and decode the codeword to recover the underlying data m. And the correctness property we want here is that no matter what data you start with, if you encode the data m and then decode it, you get back the original data m. This should hold with probably one over the randomness of the encoding procedure. Now for security, we want to consider an adversary that knows the underlying data m, let's say has a link to Wikipedia and can access the Wikipedia data for free does not pay for storing it. The goal of the adversary is to compress this codeword that we created this new randomized representation of the Wikipedia data. So the adversary consists of two procedures a compression procedure and a decompression procedure. The compression procedure takes its input the codeword c and output some smaller compressed value w and the decompression procedure takes w and its goal is to recover the codeword c. And a security property says that no efficient adversary should be able to succeed in this game with better than negligible property. So there are two parameters of interest in this problem. One is the codeword size, which we'll denote by alpha, and ideally we want the codeword size alpha to be as close as possible to the original data size. In other words we don't want the encoding to add too much overhead to the data. The second parameter is the incompressibility parameter beta and that tells us how much space, how much storage and adversary needs to use in order to store the codeword. And ideally, we want this beta to be as close as possible to the codeword size alpha, which should also be as close as possible to the original data size. So I want to mention that there is a trivial construction of incompressible encodings that achieves very poor parameters. So the trivial construction is just take the data m and add some randomness, concatenate some randomness to it and store the original data m plus the concatenated randomness as the codeword. And now even an adversary that knows the underlying data m cannot compress the randomness. So the incompressibility, so we ensure that this construction is incompressible with incompressibility parameter beta that just corresponds to the size of this randomness we added. So essentially the adversary cannot compress the red part of the codeword. So this gets us a scheme where alpha the size of the codeword, is the original data size m plus the incompressible parameter beta. And it turns out that you cannot do better than this information theoretically. So this is not what we want for this we want to focus on what I will call good incompressible encodings. So here, the codeword size should be as close as possible to the data size, should be just one plus little o one of the data size. And the incompressibility should be as essential as large as the entire codeword the adversary cannot compress the codeword almost at all, the incompressible parameter beta is one minus little o one of the data size or the codeword size. And in essence, what this means is that we're somehow want to take the randomness of the encoding procedure and spread it around in some clever way throughout the codeword in such a way that's impossible for the adversary to separate out the randomness and the data, and only store the randomness and rely on the fact that it can get the data for free. We want to make sure it's impossible that adversary accesses essentially this entire code word which contains both the randomness and data and some carefully intertwined way and cannot compress it down using the fact that it knows the data parts. So this notion of incompressible encodings was defined actually in a prior work of Damgard-Ganesh and Orlandi from crypto 2019. They defined a variant of this notion, they had a different name for it. As a tool or a building block for a more complex cryptographic primitive that they called Proofs of Replicated Storage. And I'm not going to talk about what these are. But in this context of constructing these Proofs of Replicated Storage, they also constructed incompressible encodings albeit with some major caveats. So in particular, their construction relied on the random Oracle models, the heuristic construction and it was not known whether you could do this in the standard model, the encoding and decoding time of the construction was quadratic in the data size. And in particular, here we want to apply this, we want to use these types of incompressible encodings on fairly large data like Wikipedia data, 50 gigabytes in size. So quadratic runtime on such huge data is really impractical. And lastly the proof of security for their construction was flawed or someone incompleted, didn't consider general adversaries. And the slope was actually also noticed by concurrent work of Garg-Lu and Waters. And they managed to give a fixed proof for this construction but this required actually quite a lot of effort. It was a highly non-trivial and subtle proof to proof the original construction of Damgard-Ganesh and Orlandi secure. So in our work, we give a new construction of these types of incompressible encodings, our construction already achieved some form of security in the Common Reference String Model come Random String Model without the use of Random Oracles. We have a linear encoding time, linear in the data size. So we get rid of the quadratic and we have a fairly simple proof of security. In fact, I'm hoping to show you a slightly simplified form of it and the stock. We also give some lower bounds and negative results showing that our construction is optimal in some aspects and lastly we give a new application of this notion of incompressible encodings to something called big-key cryptography. And so I want to tell you about this application, hopefully it'll give you some intuition about why incompressible encodings are interesting and useful, and also some intuition about what their real goal is or what it is that they're trying to achieve. So, the application of big-key cryptography is concerned with the problem of system compromise. So, a computer system can become compromised either because the user downloads a malware or remote attacker manages to hack into it. And when this happens, the remote attacker gains control over the system and any cryptographic keys that are stored on the system can easily be exfiltrated or just downloaded out of the system by the attacker and therefore, any security that these cryptographic keys were meant to provide is going to be completely lost. And the idea of big-key cryptography is to mitigate against such attacks by making the secret keys intentionally huge on the order of many gigabytes to even terabytes. And the idea is that by having a very large secret key it would make it harder to exfiltrate such a secret key. Either because the adversary's bandwidth to the compromised system is just not large enough to exfiltrate such a large key or because it might not be cost-effective to have to download so much data of compromised system and store so much data to be able to use the key in the future, especially if the attacker wants to do this on some mass scale or because the system might have some other mechanisms let's say firewall that would detect such large amounts of leakage out of the compromised system and block it in some way. So there's been a lot of work on this idea building big-key crypto systems. So crypto systems where the secret key can be set arbitrarily huge and these crypto systems should testify two goals. So one is security, security should hold even if a large amount of data about the secret key is out, as long as it's not the entire secret key. So when you have an attacker download let's say 90% of the data of the secret key, the security of the system should be preserved. And the second property is that even though the secret key of the system can be huge, many gigabytes or terabytes, we still want the crypto system to remain efficient even though the secret is huge. And particularly this means that the crypto system can even read the entire secret key during each cryptographic operation because that would already be too inefficient. So it can only read some small number of bits of the secret key during each operation, then it performs. And so there's been a lot of work constructing these types of crypto systems but one common problem for all these works is that they require the user to waste a lot of their storage the storage on their computer in storing this huge secret key which is useless for any other purpose, other than providing security. And users might not want to do this. So that's the problem that we address here. And the new idea in our work is let's make the secret key useful instead of just having a secret key with some useless, random data that the cryptographic scheme picks, let's have a secret key that stores let's say the Wikipedia data at which a user might want to store in their system anyway or the user's movie collection or music collection et cetera and the data that the user would want to store on their system. Anyway, we want to convert it. We want to use that as the secret key. Now we think about this for a few seconds. Well, is it a good idea to use Wikipedia as a secret key? No, that sounds like a terrible idea. Wikipedia is not secret, it's public, it's online, Anyone can access it whenever they want. So it's not what we're suggesting. We're suggesting to use an incompressible encoding of Wikipedia as a secret key. Now, even though Wikipedia is public the incompressible encoding is randomized. And therefore the accuracy does not know the value of this incompressible encoding. Moreover, because it's incompressible in order for the adversary to steal, to exfiltrate the entire secret key, it would have to download a very large amount of data out of the compromised system. So there's some hope that this could provide security and we show how to build public encryption schemes and the setting that make use of a secret key which is an incompressible coding of some useful data like Wikipedia. So the secret key is an incompressible encoding of useful data and security ensures that the adversary will need to exfiltrate almost entire key to break the security of this critical system. So in the last few minutes, let me give you a very brief overview of our construction of incompressible encodings. And for this part, we're going to pretend we have something a real beautiful cryptographic object called Lossy Trapdoor Permutations. It turns out we don't quite have an object that's this beautiful and in the full construction, we relax this notion somewhat in order to be able to get our full construction. So Lossy Trapdoor Permutation is a function f we just key by some public key pk and it maps end bits to end bits. And we can sample the public key in one of two indistinguishable modes. In injective mode, this function of fPK is a permutation, and there's in fact, a trapdoor that allows us to invert it efficiently. And in the Lossy mode, if we sample the public in Lossy mode, then if we take some value, random value x and give you fpk of x, then this loses a lot of information about x. And in particular, the image size of the function is very small, much smaller than two to the n and so fpk of x does not contain all the information about x. Okay, so using this type of Lossy Trapdoor Permutation, here's the encoding of a message m using long random CRS come random string. So the encoding just consists of sampling the public key of this Lossy Trapdoor Permutation in injected mode, along with the trapdoor. And the encoding is just going to take the message m, x over it with a common reference string, come random string and invert the trapdoor permutation on this value. And then Coding will just be the public key and the inverse x. So this is something anybody can decode by just taking fpk of x, x over it with the CRS. And that will recover the original message. Now, to add the security, we're going to in the proof, we're going to switch to choosing the value x uniformly at random. So the x component of the codeword is going to be chosen uniformly random and we're going to set the CRS to be fpk of x, x over the message. And if you look at it for a second this distribution is exactly equivalent. It's just a different way of sampling the exact same distribution. And in particular, the relation between the CRS and X is preserved. Now in the second step, we're going to switch the public key to Lossy mode. And now when we do this, then the Codeword part, sorry then the CRS fpk of x, x over m only leaks some small amount of information about the random value x. In other words, even if that resists these, the CRS then the value x and the codeword has a lot of entropy. And because it has a lot of entropy it's incompressible. So what we did here is that we actually start to show that the code word and the CRS are indistinguishable from a different way of sampling them where we placed information about the message and the CRS and the codeword actually is truly random, has a lot of real entropy. And therefore even given the CRS the Codeword is incompressible that's the main idea behind the proof. I just want to make two remarks, our full constructions rely on a relaxed notion of Lossy Trapdoor Permutations which we're able to construct from either the decisional residuoisity or the learning with errors assumption. So in particular, we don't actually know how to construct trapdoor permutations from LWE from any postquantum assumption but the relaxed notion that we need for our actual construction, we can achieve from post quantum assumptions that get post quantum security. I want to mention two caveats of the construction. So one is that in order to make this work, the CRS needs to be long essentially as long as the message size. And also this construction achieves a weak form of selective security where the adversary decides to choose the message before seeing the CRS. And we show that both of these caveats are inherent. We show this by black-box separation and one can overcome them only in the random oracle model. Unless I want to just end with an interesting open question. I think one of the most interesting open questions in this area all of the constructions of incompressible encodings from our work and prior work required the use of some public key crypto assumptions some sort of trapdoor permutations or trapdoor functions. And one of the interesting open question is can you construct and incompressible encodings without relying on public key crypto, using one way functions or just the random oracle model. We conjecture this is not possible, but we don't know. So I want to end with that open questions and thank you very much for listening.

>>thank you so much that sake for inviting me to the Entity Research Summit. And I'm really excited to talk to all of them today. So I will be talking about achieving indistinguishability obfuscation from well founded assumptions. And this is really the result of a wonderful two year collaboration with But now it's standing. Graduate student I use chain will be graduating soon on my outstanding co author, Rachel Lynde from the University of Washington. So let me jump right into it. We all know that constructing indistinguishable the obfuscation. Constructing Io has been perhaps the most consequential open problem in the foundations of photography. For several years now, they've seen over 100 papers written that show how to use Iot to achieve a number of remarkable cryptographic goals. Um, that really expand the scope of cryptography in addition to doing just remarkable, really interesting new things. Unfortunately, however, until this work, I told the work I'm about to tell you about all known constructions of Iove. All required new hardness, assumptions, heart assumptions that were designed specifically to prove that Iowa secure. And unfortunately, uh, this has a torture of history. And many of the assumptions were actually broken, which led to just a lot of doubt and uncertainty about the status of Iot, whether it really exists or doesn't exist. And the work I'm about to tell you about today changes that state of affairs in the continental way in that we show how to build io from the combination of four well established topographic assumptions. Okay, let me jump right into it and tell you how we do it. So before this work that I'm about to tell you about over the last two years with Rachel and Ayush, we actually constructed a whole sequence of works that have looked at this question. And what we showed was that if we could just build a certain special object, then that would be sufficient for constructing Io, assuming well established assumptions like L W E P R g s and M C zero and the 68 assumption of a violin. Your mouths. Okay, So what is this object? The object first starts with a P. R G and >>S zero. In other words, of trg with constant locality that stretches end bits of seed to M bits of output where am is ended one plus Epsilon for any constant Epsilon zero. Yes, but in addition to this prg, we also have these l w we like samples. So as usual, we have an elder Bluey Secret s which is random vector z b two k, where K is the dimension of the secret, which is much smaller than any way also have this public about vectors ai which are also going to be okay. And now what is given out is are the elderly samples where the error is this X I that is just brilliant value. Uh, where these excise air Also the input to our prg. Okay, unfortunately, we needed to assume that these two things together, this y and Z together is actually pseudo random. But if you think about it, there is some sort of kind of strange assumption that assumes some kind of special leakage resilience, property of elderly, we where elderly samples, even with this sort of bizarre leakage on the errors from all debris, is still surround or still have some surrounding properties. And unfortunately, we had no idea how to prove that. And we still don't have any idea how to prove this. Actually, So this is just a assumption and we didn't know it's a new assumption. So far, it hasn't been broken, but that's pretty much it. That's all we knew about it. Um and that was it. If we could. If this is true, then we could actually build. I'll now to actually use this object. We needed additional property. We needed a special property that the output of this prg here can actually be computed. Every single bit of the output could be computed by a polynomial over the public. Elder Louise samples Why? And an additional secret w with the property that this additional secret w is actually quite small. It's only excise em to the one minus delta or some constant delta gradients. Barroso polynomial smaller from the output of the prg. And crucially, the degree of this polynomial is on Lee to its violin e er can this secret double that's where the bottle in your mouth will come. Okay. And in fact, this part we did not approve. So in this previous work, using various clever transformations, we were able to show that in fact we are able to construct this in a way to this Parliament has existed only degree to be short secret values. Double mhm. So now I'm gonna show you how using our new ideas were actually gonna build. That's a special object just like this from standard assumptions. We're just gonna be sufficient for building io, and we're gonna have to modify it a little bit. Okay? One of the things that makes me so excited is that actually, our ideas are extremely simple. I want to try to get that across today. Thanks. So the first idea is let's take thes elder movie samples that we have here and change them up a little bit when it changed them up. Start before I get to that in this talk, I want you to think of K the dimension of the secret here as something very small. Something like end of the excellent. That's only for the stock, not for the previous work. Okay. All right. So we have these elderly samples right from the previous work, but I'm going to change it up instead of computing them this way, as shown in the biggest slide on this line. Let's add some sparse hair. So let's replace this error x i with the air e i plus x I where e is very sparse. Almost all of these IIs or zero. But when the I is not zero is just completely random in all of Z, pizza just completely destroys all information. Okay, so first I just want to point out that the previous work that I already mentioned applies also to this case. So if we only want to compute P R g of X plus E, then that can still be computer the polynomial. That's degree to in a short W that's previous work the jail on Guess work from 2019. I'm not going to recall that you don't have time to tell you how you do it. It's very simple. Okay, so why are we doing this? Why are we adding the sparse error? The key observation is that even though I have changed the input of the PRG to the X Plus E because he is so sparse, prg of explosive is actually the same as P. R. G of X. In almost every outlet location. It's only a tiny, tiny fraction of the outputs that are actually corrupted by the sparse Arab. Okay, so for a moment Let's just pretend that in fact, we knew how to compute PRGF X with a degree to polynomial over a short seeking. We'll come back to this, I promise. But suppose for a moment we actually knew how to compute care to your ex, Not just scared of explosive in that case were essentially already done. And the reason is there's the L. P n over zp assumption that has been around for many years, which says that if you look at these sort of elderly like samples ai from the A, I s but plus a sparse air e I where you guys most zero open when it's not serious, completely random then In fact, these samples look pseudo random. They're indistinguishable from a I r r. I just completely uniform over ZP, okay? And this is a long history which I won't go because I don't have time, but it's just really nice or something. Okay, so let's see how we can use it. So again, suppose for the moment that we were able to compute, not just appeared you've explosive but appeared to you that well, the first operation that since we're adding the sparse R E I This part the the L P N part here is actually completely random by the LP an assumption so by L P and G. P, we can actually replace this entire term with just all right. And now, no, there is no more information about X present in the samples, The only place where as is being used in the input to the prg and as a result, we could just apply to sit around this of the prg and say this whole thing is pseudo random and that's it. We've now proven that this object that I wanted to construct it is actually surrounded, which is the main thing that was so bothering us and all this previous work. Now we get it like that just for the snap of our fingers just immediately from people. Okay, so the only thing that's missing that I haven't told you yet is Wait, how do we actually compute prg attacks? Right? Because we can compute p r g of X plus e. But there's still gonna be a few outputs. They're gonna be wrong. So how can we correct those few corrupted output positions to recover PRGF s? So, for the purpose of this talks because I don't have enough time. I'm gonna make sort of a crazy simplifying assumption. Let's just assume that in fact, Onley one out the position of P r g of X plus e was correct. So it's almost exactly what PR gox. There's only one position in prg of Ecstasy which needs to be corrected to get us back to PR gox. Okay, so how can we do that? The idea is again really, really simple. Okay, so the output of the PRG is an M. Becker and so Dimension and Becker. But let's actually just rearrange that into a spirit of them by spirit of them matrix. And as I mentioned, there's only one position in this matrix that actually needs to be corrected. So let's make this correction matrix, which is almost everywhere. Zero just in position. I j it contains a single correction factor. Why, right? And if you can add this matrix to prg of explosive, then we'll get PR dribbles. Okay, so now the Onley thing I need to do is to compute this extremely sparse matrix. And here the observation was almost trivia. Just I could take a spirit of em by one maker That just has why in position I and I could take a one by spirit of them matrix. I just have one in position J zero everywhere else. If I just take the tensor product was music the matrix product of these two of these two off this column vector in a row vector. Then I will get exactly this correction matrix. Right? And note that these two vectors that's called them you and be actually really, really swamped their only spirit of n dimensional way smaller than them. Right? So if I want to correct PRGF Expo see, all I have to do is add you, Tenzer V and I can add the individual vectors u and V to my short secret w it's still short. That's not gonna make W's any sufficiently bigger. And you chancery is only a degree to computation. So in this way, using a degree to computation, we can quickly, uh, correct our our computation to recover prg events. And now, of course, this was oversimplifying situation, uh, in general gonna have many more areas. We're not just gonna have one error, like as I mentioned, but it turns out that that is also easy to deal with, essentially the same way. It's again, just a very simple additional idea. Very, very briefly. The idea is that instead of just having one giant square to them by sort of a matrix, you can split up this matrix with lots of little sub matrices and with suitable concentration bound simple balls and pins arguments we can show that we could never Leslie this idea this you Tenzer v idea to correct all of the remaining yet. Okay, that's it. Just, you see, he's like, three simple >>ah ha moments. What kind of all that it took, um, that allowed >>us to achieve this result to get idol from standard assumptions. And, um, of course I'm presenting to you them to you in this very simple way. We just these three little ideas of which I told you to. Um, but of course, there were only made possible because of years of struggling with >>all the way that didn't work, that all that struggling and mapping out all the ways didn't work >>was what allowed us toe have these ideas. Um, and again, it yields the first I'll construction from well established cryptographic assumptions, namely Theo Elgon, assumption over zp learning with errors, assumption, existence of PR GS and then zero that is PR juice with constant death circuits and the SX th assumption over by linear notes, all of which have been used many years for a number of other applications, including such things as publicly inversion, something simple public inversion that's the That's the context in which the assumptions have been used so very far from the previous state of affairs where we had assumptions that were introduced on Lee Professor constructing my own. And with that I will conclude, uh and, uh, thank you for your attention. Thanks so much.

>>live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Splunk dot com. 19. Brought to you by spunk >>Welcome back Everyone's two cubes Live coverage from Las Vegas. Four Splunk dot com 2019 The 10th anniversary of their and user conference I'm John Free host of the key that starts seventh year covering Splunk Riding the wave of Big Data Day three of our three days were winding down. Our show are great to have on next guest Didn't Medoc executive director be Ibis Intelligence? Advanced Data Analytics at Clemson University Big A C C. Football team Everyone knows that. Great stadium. Great to have you on. Thanks for spending the time to come by and on Day three coverage. >>Thanks, John, for having me over. >>So, you know, hospitals, campuses, some use cases just encapsulate the digital opportunities and challenges. But you guys air have that kind of same thing going on. You got students, you got people who work there. You got a I ot or campus to campus is you guys are living the the real life example of physical digital coming together. Tell us about what's going on in your world that Clemson wouldn't your job there. What's your current situation? >>So, like you mentioned, we have a lot of students. So Clemson's about 20,000 undergraduate, children's and 5000 graduate students way faculty and staff. So you're talking about a lot of people every semester. We have new devices coming in. We have to support the entire network infrastructure, our student information systems on and research computing. So way we're focused on how convene make students lives better than experience. Better on how convene facilitated education for them. So way try toe in my role. Specifically, I'm responsible for the advanced eight analytics, the data that we're collecting from our systems. How can we? How can you use that on get more insides for better decision making? So that's that's >>Is a scope university wide, or is it specifically targeted for certain areas? >>So it does interest divide. So we have. We have some key projects going on University wide way, have a project for sure and success. There's a project for space utilization and how how, how we can utilize space and campus more efficiently. And then we're looking at energy energy usage across buildings campus emergency management idea. So we've got a couple of projects, and then Pettersson projects that most hired edge motion overseas work on this father's retention enrollment, graduation rates. How how the academics are. So so we're doing the same thing. >>What's interesting is that the new tagline for Splunk is data to everything. You got a lot of things. Their data. Ah, lot of horizontal use cases. So it seems to me that you have, ah, view and we're kind of talking on camera before we went live here was Dana is a fluid situation is not like just a subsystem. It's gotta be every native everywhere in the organization on touched, touches everything. How do you guys look at the data? Because you want to harness the data? Because data getting gathering on, say, energy. Your specialization might be great data to look at endpoint protection, for instance. I don't know. I'm making it up, but data needs to be workable. Cross. How do you view that? What's what's the state of the art thinking around data everywhere? >>So the key thing is, we've got so many IOC's. We've got so many sensors, we've got so many servers, it's it's hard when you work with different technologies to sort of integrate all of them on in the industry that have bean Some some software companies that try to view themselves as being deking, but really the way to dress it does you look at each system, you look at how you can integrate all of that, all of that data without being deking. So you basically analyze the data from different systems. You figured out a way to get it into a place where you can analyze it on, then make decisions based on that. So so that's essentially what we've been focused on. Working on >>Splunk role in all this is because one of things that we've been doing spot I've been falling spunk for a long time in a very fascinated with law. How they take log files and make make value out of that. And their vision now is that Grew is grow is they're enabling a lot of value of the data which I love. I think it's a mission that's notable, relevant and certainly gonna help a lot of use cases. But their success has been about just dumping data on display and then getting value out of it. How does that translate into this kind of data space that you're looking at, because does it work across all areas? What should what specifically are you guys doing with Splunk and you talk about the case. >>So we're looking at it as a platform, like, how can we provide ah self service platform toe analysts who can who can go into system, analyze the data way not We're not focusing on a specific technology, so our platform is built up of multiple technologies. We have tableau for visual analytics. We're also using Splunk. We also have a data warehouse. We've got a lot of databases. We have a Kafka infrastructure. So how can we integrate all of these tools and give give the choice to the people to use the tools, the place where we really see strong helping us? Originally in our journey when we started, our network team used to long for getting log data from switches. It started off troubleshooting exercise of a switch went down. You know what was wrong with it? Eventually we pulled in all for server logs. That's where security guard interested apart from the traditional idea of monitoring security, saw value in the data on. And then we talked about the whole ecosystem. That that's one provides. It gives you a way to bring in data withdrawal based access control so you can have data in a read only state that you can change when it's in the system and then give access to people to a specific set of data. So so that's that's really game changing, even for us. Like having having people be comfortable to opening data to two analysts for so that they can make better decisions. That's that's the key with a lot of product announcements made during dot com, I think the exciting thing is it's Nargis, the data that you index and spunk anymore, especially with the integration with With Dew and s three. You don't have to bring in your data in response. So even if you have your data sitting in history, our audio do cluster, you can just use the data fabric search and Sarge across all your data sets. And from what I hear that are gonna be more integrations that are gonna be added to the tool. So >>that's awesome. Well, that's a good use. Case shows that they're thinking about it. I got to ask you about Clemson to get into some of the things that you guys do in knowing Clemson. You guys have a lot of new things. You do your university here, building stuff here, you got people doing research. So you guys are bringing on new stuff, The network, a lot of new technology. Is there security concerns in terms of that, How do you guys handle that? Because you want to encourage innovation, students and faculty at the same time. You want gonna have the data to make sure you get the security without giving away the security secrets are things that you do. How do you look at the data when you got an environment that encourages people to put more stuff on the network to generate more data? Because devices generate data project, create more data. How do you view that? How do you guys handle that? >>So our mission and our goal is not to disrupt the student experience. Eso we want to make it seem less. And as we as we get influx of students every semester, we have way have challenges that the traditional corporate sector doesn't have. If you think about our violence infrastructure. We're talking about 20 25,000 students on campus. They're moving around. When, when? When they move from one class to another, they're switching between different access points. So having a robust infrastructure, how can we? How can we use the data to be more proactive and build infrastructure that's more stable? It also helps us plan for maintenance is S O. We don't destruct. Children's so looking at at key usage patterns. How what time's Our college is more active when our submissions happening when our I. D. Computing service is being access more and then finding out the time, which is gonna be less disruptive, do the students. So that's that's how we what's been >>the biggest learnings and challenges that you've overcome or opportunities that you see with data that Clemson What's the What's the exciting areas and or things that you guys have tripped over on, or what I have learned from? We'll share some experiences of what's going on in there for you, >>So I think Sky's the limit here. Really like that is so much data and so less people in the industry, it's hard to analyze all of the data and make sense of it. And it's not just the people who were doing the analysis. You also need people who understand the data. So the data, the data stores, the data trustees you need you need buy in from them. They're the ones who understand what data looks like, how how it should be structured, how, how, how it can be provided for additional analysis s Oh, that's That's the key thing. What's >>the coolest thing you're working on right now? >>So I'm specifically working on analyzing data from our learning management system canvas. So we're getting data informer snapshots that we're trying to analyze, using multiple technologies for that spunk is one of them. But we're loading the data, looking at at key trends, our colleges interacting, engaging with that elements. How can we drive more adoption? How can we encourage certain colleges and departments, too sort of moved to a digital classroom Gordon delivery experience. >>I just l a mess part of the curriculum in gym or online portion? Or is it integrated into the physical curriculum? >>So it's at this time it's more online, But are we trying to trying to engage more classes and more faculty members to use the elements to deliver content. So >>right online, soon to be integrated in Yeah, you know, I was talking with Dawn on our team from the Cube and some of the slum people this week. Look at this event. This is a physical event. Get physical campuses digitizing. Everything is kind of a nirvana. It's kind of aspiration is not. People aren't really doing 100% but people are envisioning that the physical and digital worlds are coming together. If that happens and it's going to happen at some point, it's a day that problem indeed, Opportunity date is everything right? So what's your vision of that as a professional or someone in the industry and someone dealing with data Clemson Because you can digitize everything, Then you can instrument everything of your instrument, everything you could start creating an official efficiencies and innovations. >>Yes, so the way I think you you structure it very accurately. It's amalgam of the physical world and the digital world as the as the as the world is moving towards using more more of smartphones and digital devices, how how can we improve experience by by analyzing the data on and sort of be behind the scenes without even having the user. The North is what's going on trading expedience. If the first expedience is in good that the user has, they're not going to be inclined to continue using the service that we offer. >>What's your view on security now? Splunk House League has been talking about security for a long time. I think about five years ago we started seeing the radar data. Is driving a lot of the cyber security now is ever Everyone knows that you guys have a lot of endpoints. Security's always a concern. How do you guys view the security of picture with data? How do you guys talk about that internally? How do you guys implement data without giving me a secret? You know, >>way don't have ah ready Good Cyber Security Operation Center. That's run by students on. And they do a tremendous job protecting our environment. Way monitored. A lot of activity that goes on higher I deserve is a is a challenge because way have in the corporate industry, you can you can have a set of devices in the in the higher education world We have students coming in every semester that bringing in new, important devices. It causes some unique set of challenges knowing where devices are getting on the network. If if there's fishing campaigns going on, how can be, How can we protect that environment and those sort of things? >>It is great to have you on. First of all, love to have folks from Clemson ons great great university got a great environment. Great Great conversation. Congratulations on all your success on their final question for you share some stories around some mischief that students do because students or students, you know, they're gonna get on the network and most things down. Like when when I was in school, when we were learning they're all love coding. They're all throwing. Who knows? Kitty scripts out there hosting Blockchain mining algorithms. They gonna cause some creek. Curiosity's gonna cause potentially some issues. Um, can you share some funny or interesting student stories of caught him in the dorm room, but a server in there running a Web farm? Is there any kind of cool experiences you can share? That might be interesting to folks that students have done that have been kind of funny mistress, but innovative. >>So without going into Thio, I just say, Like most universities, we have, we have students and computer science programs and people who were programmers and sort of trying to pursue the security route in the industry. So they, um, way also have a lot of research going on the network on. And sometimes research going on may affect our infrastructure environment. So we tried toe account for those use cases and on silo specific use cases and into a dedicated network. >>So they hit the honeypot a lot. They're freshmen together. I'll go right to the kidding, of course. >>Yes. So way do we do try to protect that environment on Dhe. Makes shooting experience better. >>I know you don't want to give any secrets. Thanks for coming on. I always find a talk tech with you guys. Thanks so much appreciated. Okay. Cube coverage. I'm shot for a year. Day three of spunk dot com for more coverage after this short break

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering answerable best 2019. Brought to you by Red hat. >>Hey, welcome back to the Cuban Live coverage in simple fest. Two days of coverage. Day one, wrapping up. I'm John forwards. Accused Too many men. My guest co host today, our next two guests at his van. Van Velzen. Okay, welcome to the Cube. You're an engineer at I n G Bank and Robert de Bock, product owner, engineer I n g. Bank. Hey, guys, Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Have the practitioner on. Well, first of all, we have a lot of great feedback from the practitioners here. And also people in deploying answerable and other other cool Dev ops Tools on automation is at the top of the list. Yes, More efficient. Getting things done. Focus. You got satisfaction in job because things go awaiting time savings. I'm saving security drives a conversation and re skilling opportunities. Love. These are cutting edge. Things you got to do is take a minute to explain what you guys do. What a night. What a night. Angie bank. >>Yeah. I work in a team that provides redhead images for other teams. in 90 to consume to use two insane she ate way. Also live from playbooks, amendable code and rolls to manage those things. And he's very scattered, which sort of decentralized, which is a good thing. In my opinion, it's ready for scaling. In that case, I used to work with Dennis are lots in the tower team, so take it away. >>Okay, so I still work at the answer, built our squad What we do, it's ah, We make sure that the instable tower service keeps running 24 7 and we also ensure that we, uh, provide updates next to all this. We also have unanswerable community where we basically support our end users, which are their love. So, uh, from some numbers, I heard we have 1200 applications teams that are using our service. Um, and they all have, like, answerable playbook, sensible rolls, questions, difficulties with, uh, with anything. And we're basically there to support them as well. >>So 1200 teams are using answerable, Yes, inside the bank. Yes. Yeah, like >>it's set up very decentralized. And I think what I hear from instable fest that is not very common. I still think it's very good thing to do. We try to basically give these teams all the tools they need to do their stuff on. What I hear hear mostly is that there's essential team off administrators pushing the buttons for them. Towers. Great answer was great in that case, I think, for our case is really it's a perfect fit. >>E guess help Explain. Is this do you provide? You know, he said it's not centralized, but is this you know, here's best practices here. Some play boat out. How do you end? You support them? Because they're a little bit those relationships. >>Okay. Okay. Um so what we do is we basically all the rules and get ah ah, good lap. So it's an own premise. Get environment. You can search in this. Get for rules. Uh, not like all rules are easily to be found when searching for them. So that's why there are these communities to share what you have made. Um, >>plus these teams, they can themselves pick and choose. Some will try to rewrite everything That's fine. Others can can benefit from existing coat, so it's just a good trick. Thio enable these team to participate on it really different. Some people make it all themselves another >>next to this. So we basically have these 12 on the teams do their own thing. But next to this, we also have a self service portal where they can choose, like from, uh, generic finks like us. But your machine at new disc. So New capacity Cp use memory. That's all being done through a portal s so they don't need to do anything on their own for this they can, but most of them choose the easy way off using this portal. This portal basically doesn't a vehicle to instable tower, which executes a sensible playbook and some other stuffs. Maybe some AP eyes. And this is one of the things you guys create A manage these books. So, um >>and if you go back in time so the alternative way, which we happily got rid off, is to do it ourselves. I think it was before we we work together. Way had batch weekends, for example, and it >>was no very different. No life. Oh, that's working on weekends, >>weekends and, for example, he used to patch machine some 10,000 or so, and we were not aware what was important. What? Not so you you'd stop the whole pitch. Oh, this machine has a problem. Let's stop everything in focus and that's >>not important. Was like a complete order. >>And the other way around Also this machine. I guess it's not that important. Let's just >>continue this >>Sunday morning. Oh, my God. Everything's broken. >>Can you give us a little flavor of kind of the spectrum of solutions that you leverage answerable on >>tap? Yeah. We, uh I think what we see Moses for Lennox machines, eso fetching is a big one. We got a second operation, so there's a few of them. The deployment also depends on and small. So if you order a new machine, answer was involved somewhere to do to make it happen on network on board and the Windows teams are very interested. I'm not sure if we notice on board yet. To >>be honest, I know we did some book in the boss so a couple of months ago, using wind around when you needed set on policies there, But you can see that the networking teams were getting more momentum. Uh, five. There's some suffer suffer to find switches Bob. I don't know. The, uh Never mind the name, but ah, you can see some momentum in the in the networking. Uh, it's not Morgan departments >>configuration network networking with the activists. So that's where the action is in the >>network. Um, there were some cool talks also here on five workshops. So you can see there is, um, that there is some attention on these modules and integrations as well. >>What's your guy's goal here for the show? What brought you here? I'll see Big user. >>Yeah. So what do you think was like sharing our own thing? We did. They talk this morning. Ah, regarding and programming A really cool we wanted to share. It is this behavioral thing, and and >>we'll talk about take a minute and programming. >>So, um, basically, it's, ah programming with the whole team and making sure that you get something done with all the knowledge in the team. So you don't have to align off the words or if some other if you're Kulik says from basically session, you can do better using this staying. It's all, um it's It's all done during the decision >>as basically a good way to get a team up to speed. So in a team that's probably a few few people that are very quick and understand the concept and few starters or so So >>you guys decentralized, which makes sense for scale. I get that. So this sounds like you can operate decentralized, but where danceable. You can still have that common a book Switch >>teams, for example. So it used to be very specific. H team would have their own type of coat. Now that more answers used people can switch a little easier to to another product of surface because the languages have lied, shared, steal it, steal. It's quite >>well happy with this, right? I am. I really, really have to work on the weekend. That's good. I think >>the good thing is that you have one generic way of working. So his playbook is readable by all engineers. And if you want to learn this thing, you just do the inevitable course. So you know what this thing is? A mosque and roll, and it's all like >>way. We do see horrible >>koto. Come on, don't throw your college under the bus. But here's the international tough question can see is what we have been here. I want you guys to test this. We hear that there's a lot of time savings involved. Yes, with answer. True or false. That's true order of magnitude. What? What kind of saving way talking about? I >>think it depends on the thing because we saw a huge I don't know, except numbers. But this this os patching that Really? Really Uh, >>yes. Now, especially waas. Two people working a full time basically collecting, who needs to do what? The win. And then for a weekend, 10 15 people or so. So, uh, that's reduced now to sort of nothing. Yes, some maintenance to that playbook and roll. But I mean, yeah, it's difficult to express what message? So >>no one's getting phone call? Hey, come in on the weekend. So 15 people on the weekend jam and then to Fulton will just managing it all Go away. >>Yeah, not needed, but not needed. But they basically they can do something else, so those people are still there. But now they're not doing Os patching and doing all the excel sheets and keeping order off. The systems are important, and this shall be the first, and then they because way are basically doing the thing they know better. This application team knows their dependency, so they know they. But first I need to patch the database machine and then there during the front end or Andi. It's difficult to do this so they do it themselves. >>That's Dev Ops. That's that's the way it's supposed to be, right? >>So you've matured this thes deployments over time. As you look back, What key learnings do you have that maybe you'd recommend to your peers toe? You know how things could run a little bit smoother >>next time, a good amount of time. So they're stools. That's not the problem, So answer is great, but there's others to their great Give it time to sink in with the people. So you start something and you have to have a pretty strong team to do the long the long stretch with it and give it some time, maybe a year or so before everyone's on board it. In our case, in the beginning, we spend lots of time on this community model where we basically organized small meet ups or get together, too, show things or to hear problems and try to express them. That really helped a lot. And by now it's starting to get normal, more normal. So all the teams do sensible, basically. And problem starts slowly disappearing. Also. So So >>one of the things, um, that will be better. Probably in our scenario. Housekeeping metrics. So what are the improvements over time? I don't know how to measure this. No, no, no aspect. But it will be better if you had, like, better numbers like we did hair Very good. Or this is something like, what did the community thing bring way indirectly what the results are Because the engineers are doing things really, really things. They're really patching the replication. And they're really, um, restarting their own machines, for example, when there is something wrong. Whatever. Um, but our days related to our community thing or all that's really related to Sensible Tower >>last. I think we we are very technical focus. So So we like it as a nerd, so to say, to do things but what the business value is, for example, I'm not so interested or less interested so way typically, like the technology, so it could be good to have some someone onboard and your team that says, Yeah, but this is the problem. It's crossed. This amount of money and that solved now are improved. >>Well, they assume the applications are doing a good job. So you guys helped those guys out. They get to do their own thing. They do the heavy lifting. They're doing the coding anyway for those guys that were coming in managing full time on the 15 or so on the weekend. What are they doing now? >>Most are spread across. All the application teams go back. But the other side there is now it's our team that was not there s. So that's the price you have to pay. And that's a serious team. I mean, it's far six people now 86 people and 100 machines or so. So it is a serious amount of time, but it makes it at least much more constant. So people are not surprised by machines being patched, and Monday they come back into the half broken or so. So it's a lot more control now, so I don't know if you can express it in price, but at least it's more stable >>more consistent. >>Well, one of the things that we hear here and I want to get your thoughts as we wrap up is as you go forward, you got answerable 1200 teams using it. You got a lot of collaboration. The work cultures change. Sounds like a shower. Team steps service everything else. So some scale building out what's next? Because as it becomes a platform. Okay, you have to enable something. There has value there. Okay, technical nerd value and then business value >>scaling, uh, because we continuously see this thing growing like more application teams are adapting answerable, invincible tower. So, um, right now we have, like, a cluster. We have different clusters running. Go into much detail, but we can see that the load is getting higher and higher, so we need to skill. Um, and this is sort of difficult, but red. That is really supporting in this because they're going to change some things at the application level two to allow scaling even better. Um, >>plus, also, for most teams, they're starting their configuration. Everything is coat process. They're not there yet. As soon as they discover the power of it, I'm sure that's being used a lot. A lot more. And plus, there's other countries that are going to be connected. So you have a lot of work >>because your engineering doing some getting down and dirty with the code, automating everything. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, um, what else do we >>Oh, what's the coolest thing you've done that you've automated? >>Uh >>uh, Pick your favorite. >>So but the child during Encircle Tower and with answerable, um, let me think about this. >>I I really like the patching that saved us so much work. And, uh, I think also one of the next goes to make much more simpler. So we as a company, we're complex and the people also like complexity. That's wrong. We should change >>that. Patching up our >>offense, Melissa Simplicity. So we should really use that. >>You don't want any open holes in the network housely and assistance >>about your previous question. Like I have sort of a finger and all these small things. So it's sort of what I did. It's more like an A team thing. We created the OS patch playbooks, the configure stuff, the second day offs. So we did this as a team >>like sports but the playbooks together run the play. Some defense on security >>and programming. So you're doing >>this as a team, which is very cool. Has a scoreboard look good? Winning? >>Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're looking at the graphite. Uh, it's girl. >>Final question. How you enjoying the show here? Having a good time? What's the vibe here? What's it like here? Share for the people who aren't here. What's going on? What's the vibe with >>a conversation? It's great. We went to some sessions yesterday really technical stuff with developers. And this was really amazing because you heard details that that are not in the India in the talks today and tomorrow. Um, yeah, it's great. It's great community. It's just I really I really enjoy it because you can. It's You can have, like one on one conversations go into depth. I was showing something I created, and this guy's we'll hold. This is really great in the It's cool. It's just if you it's really great. It's really >>cool. Really? Yeah, for me also, it feels like coming home, So I know these people and I think the first day, the collaboration day, what's it called and I'm not sure you community, that's it's great because it's been a bit rough and unpolished in today's more polished and more presented and prepared to, uh, both are great. >>Good. Give the hard feedback. >>Yeah, you meet all the people. So, for example, I used instable a lot, and then I'm getting up. I see all these names. Like, who would that be there walking here and shake hands like, Oh, that's >>why guys like your code looking good. Yeah. Looks good. A contributor. Summit contributed. Okay. Sorry. After it for >>anyone that goes to visit that day, too. That's just great. >>It's great to see people face to face that, you know, online for their digital identity or the code >>you can You can't complain about stuff out on. Do you know that you don't hurt them or something with just commenting on get like after this issue and this issue and this issue. Then you can see them in person. And then you >>him a high five assault, you know? Hey, >>it's really very cool. >>Guys. Great conversations were coming on cue. Thanks, Dennis. Appreciate Robert. Thanks for coming on. Skew coverage here Day one of two days of live coverage here inside the Cube here in Atlanta, Georgia for Ansel Fest is the cute I'm John 1st 2 minute. Thanks for watching.

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. HOLLOWAY ALTO, California It is a cube conversation. >> Hi! And welcome to the Cube studios from the Cube conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry on hosted a Peter Burress. What are we talking about today? One of the key indicators of success and additional business is how fast you can translate your data into new value streams. That means sharing it better, accelerating the rate at which you're running those models, making it dramatically easier to administrate large volumes of data at scale with a lot of different uses. That's a significant challenge. Is going to require a rethinking of how we manage many of those data assets and how we utilize him. Notto have that conversation. We're here with Le'Ron v. Bell, who was the CEO of work a Iot leering. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having >> me. So before we get to the kind of a big problem, give us an update. What's going on at work a Iot these days? >> So very recently we announced around CIA financing for the company. Another 31.7 a $1,000,000 we've actually had a very unorthodox way of raising thiss round. Instead of going to the traditional VC lead round, we actually went to our business partners and joined forces with them into building a stronger where Collier for customers we started with and video that has seen a lot of success going with us to their customers. Because when Abel and Video to deploy more G pews so they're customers can either solve bigger problems or solve their problems faster. The second pillar off the data center is networking. So we've had melon ox investing in the company because there are the leader ofthe fast NETWORKINGS. So between and Vidia, melon, ox and work are yo u have very strong pillars. Iran compute network and storage performance is crucial, but it's not the only thing customers care about, so customers need extremely fast access to their data. But they're also accumulating and keeping and storing tremendous amount of it. So we've actually had the whole hard drive industry investing in us, with Sigi and Western Digital both investing in the company and finally one off a very successful go to market partner, Hewlett Pocket enterprise invested in us throw their Pathfinder program. So we're showing tremendous back from the industry, supporting our vision off, enabling next generation performance, two applications and the ability to scale to any workload >> graduations. And it's good money. But it's also smart money that has a lot of operational elements and just repeat it. It's a melon ox, our video video, H P E C Gate and Western Digital eso. It's It's an interesting group, but it's a group that will absolutely sustain and further your drive to try to solve some of these key data Orient problems. But let's talk about what some of those key day or data oriented problems where I set up front that one of the challenges that any business that has that generates a lot of it's value out of digital assets is how fast and how easily and with what kind of fidelity can I reuse and process and move those data assets? How are how is the industry attending? How's that working in the industry today, and where do you think we're going? >> So that's part on So businesses today, through different kind of workloads, need toe access, tremendous amount of data extremely quickly, and the question of how they're going to compare to their cohort is actually based on how quickly and how well they can go through the data and process it. And that's what we're solving for our customers. And we're now looking into several applications where speed and performance. On the one hand, I have to go hand in hand with extreme scale. So we see great success in machine learning, where in videos in we're going after Life Sciences, where the genomic models, the cryo here microscopy the computational chemistry all are now accelerated. And for the pharmacy, because for the research interested to actually get to conclusion, they serve to sift through a lot of data. We are working extremely well at financial analytics, either for the banks, for the hedge funds for the quantitative trading Cos. Because we allow them to go through data much, much quicker. Actually, only last week I had the grades to rate the customer where we were able to change the amount of time they go through one analytic cycle from almost two hours, four minutes. >> This is in a financial analytics >> Exactly. And I think last time I was here was telling you about one of their turn was driving companies using us taking, uh, time to I poke another their single up from two weeks to four hours. So we see consistent 122 orders of monk to speed time in wall clock. So we're not just showing we're faster for a benchmark. We're showing our customer that by leveraging our technology, they get results significantly faster. We're also successful in engineering around chip designed soft rebuild fluid dynamics. We've announced Melon ox as an idiot customer. The chip designed customers, so they're not only a partner, they have brought our technology in house, and they're leveraging us for the next chips. And recently we've also discovered that we are great help for running Noah scale databases in the clouds running ah sparkles plank or Cassandra over work. A Iot is more than twice faster than running over the Standard MPs elected elastic clock services. >> All right, so let's talk about this because your solving problems that really only recently have been within range of some of the technology, but we still see some struggling. The way I described it is that storage for a long time was focused on persisting data transactions executed. Make sure you persisted Now is moved to these life life sciences, machine learning, genomics, those types of outpatients of five workloads we're talking about. How can I share data? How can I deploy and use data faster? But the historian of the storage industry still predicated on this designs were mainly focused on persistent. You think about block storage and filers and whatnot. How is Wecker Io advancing that knowledge that technology space of, you know, reorganizing are rethinking storage for the types, performance and scale that some of these use cases require. >> This is actually a great question. We actually started the company. We We had a long legacy at IBM. We now have no Andy from, uh, metta, uh, kind of prints from the emcee. We see what happens. Page be current storage portfolio for the large Players are very big and very convoluted, and we've decided when we're starting to come see that we're solving it. So our aim is to solve all the little issues storage has had for the last four decades. So if you look at what customers used today, if they need the out most performance they go to direct attached. This's what fusion I awards a violin memory today, these air Envy me devices. The downside is that data is cannot be sure, but it cannot even be backed up. If a server goes away, you're done. Then if customers had to have some way of managing the data they bought Block san, and then they deployed the volume to a server and run still a local file system over that it wasn't as performance as the Daz. But at least you could back it up. You can manage it some. What has happened over the last 15 years, customers realized more. Moore's law has ended, so upscaling stopped working and people have to go out scaling. And now it means that they have to share data to stop to solve their problems. >> More perils more >> probably them out ofthe Mohr servers. More computers have to share data to actually being able to solve the problem, and for a while customers were able to use the traditional filers like Aneta. For this, kill a pilot like an eyes alone or the traditional parlor file system like the GP affair spectrum scale or luster, but these were significantly slower than sand and block or direct attached. Also, they could never scale matter data. You were limited about how many files that can put in a single, uh, directory, and you were limited by hot spots into that meta data. And to solve that, some customers moved to an object storage. It was a lot harder to work with. Performance was unimpressive. You had to rewrite our application, but at least he could scale what were doing at work a Iot. We're reconfiguring the storage market. We're creating a storage solution that's actually not part of any of these for categories that the industry has, uh, become used to. So we are fasted and direct attached, they say is some people hear it that their mind blows off were faster, the direct attached, whereas resilient and durable as San, we provide the semantics off shirt file, so it's perfect your ability and where as Kayla Bill for capacity and matter data as an object storage >> so performance and scale, plus administrative control and simplicity exactly alright. So because that's kind of what you just went through is those four things now now is we think about this. So the solution needs to be borrow from the best of these, but in a way that allows to be applied to work clothes that feature very, very large amounts of data but typically organized as smaller files requiring an enormous amount of parallelism on a lot of change. Because that's a big part of their hot spot with metadata is that you're constantly re shuffling things. So going forward, how does this how does the work I owe solution generally hit that hot spot And specifically, how are you going to apply these partnerships that you just put together on the investment toe actually come to market even faster and more successfully? >> All right, so these are actually two questions. True, the technology that we have eyes the only one that paralyzed Io in a perfect way and also meditate on the perfect way >> to strangers >> and sustains it parla Liz, um, buy load balancing. So for a CZ, we talked about the hot sport some customers have, or we also run natively in the cloud. You may get a noisy neighbor, so if you aren't employing constant load balancing alongside the extreme parallelism, you're going to be bound to a bottleneck, and we're the only solution that actually couples the ability to break each operation to a lot of small ones and make sure it distributed work to the re sources that are available. Doing that allows us to provide the tremendous performance at tremendous scale, so that answers the technology question >> without breaking or without without introducing unbelievable complexity in the administration. >> It's actually makes everything simpler because looking, for example, in the ER our town was driving example. Um, the reason they were able to break down from two weeks to four hours is that before us they had to copy data from their objects, George to a filer. But the father wasn't fast enough, so they also had to copy the data from the filer to a local file system. And these copies are what has added so much complexity into the workflow and made it so slow because when you copy, you don't compute >> and loss of fidelity along the way right? OK, so how is this money and these partnerships going to translate into accelerated ionization? >> So we are leveraging some off the funds for Mohr Engineering coming up with more features supporting Mohr enterprise applications were gonna leverage some of the funds for doing marketing. And we're actually spending on marketing programs with thes five good partners within video with melon ox with sick it with Western Digital and with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. But we're also deploying joint sales motion. So we're now plugged into in video and plugged, anted to melon ox and plugging booked the Western Digital and to Hillary Pocket Enterprise so we can leverage their internal resource now that they have realized through their business units and the investment arm that we make sense that we can actually go and serve their customers more effectively and better. >> Well, well, Kaio is introduced A road through the unique on new technology into makes perfect sense. But it is unique and it's relatively new, and sometimes enterprises might go well. That's a little bit too immature for me, but if the problem than it solves is that valuable will bite the bullet. But even more importantly, a partnership line up like this has got to be ameliorating some of the concerns that your fearing from the marketplace >> definitely so when and video tells the customers Hey, we have tested it in our laps. Where in Hewlett Packard Enterprise? Till the customer, not only we have tested it in our lab, but the support is going to come out of point. Next. Thes customers now have the ability to keep buying from their trusted partners. But get the intellectual property off a nor company with better, uh, intellectual property abilities another great benefit that comes to us. We are 100% channel lead company. We are not doing direct sales and working with these partners, we actually have their channel plans open to us so we can go together and we can implement Go to Market Strategy is together with they're partners that already know howto work with them. And we're just enabling and answering the technical of technical questions, talking about the roadmap, talking about how to deploy. But the whole ecosystem keeps running in the fishing way it already runs, so we don't have to go and reinvent the whales on how how we interact with these partners. Obviously, we also interact with them directly. >> You could focus on solving the problem exactly great. Alright, so once again, thanks for joining us for another cube conversation. Le'Ron zero ofwork I Oh, it's been great talking to you again in the Cube. >> Thank you very much. I always enjoy coming over here >> on Peter Burress until next time.

>> live from Miami Beach, Florida It's the que covering demon 2019. Brought to you, by the way, >> Welcome back to Vima on 2019 in Miami. Everybody, we're here at the Fountain Blue Hotel. This is Day two of our coverage of the Cube, the leader in live Tech. And I'm David Dante with Peter Bors. Pippen. Jay Raj is here. He's the vice president and CEO of Make A Wish America. Just that awesome foundation nonprofit people. Thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thank you for having me appreciate it. >> So make a wish. Children with wishes and have terminal illnesses. You guys make them come true. It's just a great organizations. Been around for a long time, I think, since the early eighties, right, >> 39 years and going >> years and hundreds of thousands of wishes made. So just how did you get Teo make a wish that all come about >> it? It wasn't interesting journey. I was consulting in I t for multiple big companies. And, you know, two years back, it was through a recruiting channel that I got an opportunity to start some conversations as the CIA and make a wish. Uh, the thing that got me in the opportunity was predominately about enterprises and just to give you a little bit off, make official operations. Make a Wish was Founded and Phoenix, Arizona. And but we also operate a 60 chapters across the United States that it is 60 chapters each of the chapter there 501 C three companies themselves with the CEO and abort. Essentially, it is 60 plus one. The national team kind of managing. All of the chapters are helping the chapters. National does not do any wish. Granting all the wish planning happens to the chapters. But National helps the chapters with the distribution of funding models brand. And thanks for That's a couple of years back in the national board talked about in our dream and mission, which is granting every eligible child the notion ofthe enterprise. You know, working as an enterprise came into four and it being a great piece off providing shared services and thanks for that. So I was brought on board and we took on I would call as the leader today said and dashes dream off. Bringing together all the 60 chapters and the city chapter's essentially are split across 120 locations. So Wade took on a project off. You know, combining our integrating all of their infrastructure needs into one place. And Phoenix without ada, sent a provider. You know, we worked with a partner. Phoenix. Now fantastic partners >> there. We had them on the other day. >> Yep, yep. Yeah, MacLaren. I mean, and the team, they did a great job. And, you know, when we had to move all of the data, everything from the 60 chapters applications everything into a centralized data center, locations that we managed right now from Make a Wish National office and provide a service back to the chapters That gives you a little bit off. You know, from behind the scenes. What happened? >> You provide the technical overview framework for all the 60 chapters. >> It almost sounds like a franchise model. >> It's what we call a Federated model back in the nonprofit. >> But but but but because make a wish is so driven by information. Yep. Both in the application as well as the programs to deliver thie brand promise. And the brand execution has got to be very, very closely tied to the quality of a shared services you provide >> exactly. Exactly. And like I said, the reason I talked about them being a separate companies themselves is you know, as I always say to my 60 CEOs, Ah, I should be able to provide the services because they wanted, because they have a choice to go outside and have their own partner. Another thing for that which they can. But they would want to work with the national team and get my, you know, work through our services rather than having have to because of the very it's A. It's a big difference when it comes to, but I've been lucky on privileged to you have these conversations with the CEO's. When I start talking to them about the need for centralization, the enterprise society assed much, there are questions when he start leading with the mission and the business notion of why we need to do that, it's It's fantastic. Everybody is in line with that. I mean, there's no question, then, as toe Hey, guys, uh, let me do all the Operation Manisha fight and leave it to me and I'll in a handler for you, and I let you guys go to what you do best. which is granting wishes. So then it becomes it doesn't become a question off, you know, should be a shouldn't way. And of course, to back that up. But I was talking to the dean, folks, It just solutions. Like VMware, Veeam. It makes it much simpler even from a cost prospect. You not for me to manage a bigger team s so that I can take those dollars and give it back to the business to grant another wish. So it's it's pretty exciting that >> way. So you set the standards. Okay, here's what you know, we recommend and then you're you're saying that adoption has been quite strong. Yeah, I remember Peter. Don't say easy. I used to run Kitty Sports in my local town in which is small town. And there was, you know, a lot of five or six or seven sports, and I was the sort of central organization I couldn't get six sports to agree that high man is 60 different CEO's. But that's okay. So not easy. But so how were you able to talk leadership or leading as we heard from Gino Speaker today? How were you able to get those guys, you know, aligned with your vision. >> Uh, it's it's been fantastic. I've had a lot ofthe good support from our executive came from a leadership team because leadership is always very important to these big initiatives are National board, which comprises off some of the that stuff best leaders in America and I have the fortune toe be mentored by Randy Sloan, who used to be the CEO of Southwest. And before that, you see a global CEO for, uh, you know, Popsicle. You know, he always told me, but but I mean CIA job. One thing is to no the technology, but completely another thing. Toe building relationships and lead with the business conversation. And so a typical conversation with the CEO about Hey, I need to take the data that you have all the I t things that you have and then me doing it. And then there are questions about what about my staff and the's conversations. Because you know, it's a nonprofit is a very noble, nice feeling, and you wouldn't want the conversations about, you know, being rift and things like that are being reduced producing the staff and thinks of that. But you know as he walked through that and show the benefits of why we doing it. They get it. And they've been able to repurpose many off the I. D functions back in tow, revenue generation model or ofhis granting in our team. And in many cases, I've been ableto absolve some off their folks from different places, which has worked out fine for me, too, because now I have kind of a power user model across the United States through which I can manage all these 120 locations. It's very interesting, >> you know, site Reliable and Engineering Dev Ops talks about thie error budget or which is this notion of doo. You're going tohave errors. You're going to have challenges. Do you want it in the infrastructure you wanted the functions actually generating value for the business? I don't know much about Make a wish. I presume, however, that the mission of helping really sick kids achieve make achieve a wish is both very rewarding, very stressful. He's gotta be in a very emotional undertaking, and I imagine it part of your message them has got to be let's have the stress or that emotional budget be dedicated to the kids and not to the technology >> completely agree. That's that. That's been one of my subjects, as you asked about How is it going about? It's about having the conversation within the context of what we talked about business and true business. Availability of data. You know, before this enterprise project data was probably not secure enough, which is a big undertaking that we're going down the path with cyber security. And you know, that is a big notion, misplaced notion out there that in a non profits are less vulnerable. Nobody. But that's completely untrue, because people have found out that nonprofits do not probably have the securing of walls and were much more weight being targeted nonprofits as a whole, targeted for cyber security crimes and so on and so forth. So some of these that I used to, you know, quote unquote help or help the business leaders understand it, And once they understand they get it, they ableto, you know, appreciate why we doing it and it becomes the conversation gets much more easier. Other What's >> the scope of the size of the chapters is that is a highly variable or there is. >> It is highly variable, and I should probably said, That's Thesixty chapters. We look at it as four categories, so the cat ones are what we call the Big Ice, the Metro New Yorkers and Francisco Bay Area. They're called Category one chapters anywhere between 4 1 60 to 70 staff. Grant's close to around 700 wishes you so as Make a Wish America, we ran close toe 15,600 wishes a year, and cat ones do kind of close to 700 15,600 400 to 700. And then you get into care to scare threes and cat for scat force are anywhere between, you know, given example Puerto Rico or Guam territory there. Cat Force New Mexico is a cat for three staff members Gammas operated by two staff members and 20 volunteers. They grant about 3 2 20 12 to 15 which is a year, so it's kind of highly variable. And then, you know, we talk about Hawaii chapter. It's a great example. They cat once predominate because of the fact that you know, they they do. There's not a lot ofthe wishes getting originated from how I but you know, Florida, California and how your three big chapters with a grand are a vicious ist with a lot of grant, you know, wish granting. So there's a lot off, you know, traffic through those chapters >> so so very distributed on diverse. What's the relationship between data and the granting of wishes? Talk about the role of data. >> Should I? I was say this that in a and I probably race a lot of fibrosis and my first introductory session a couple of years back when I John make a wish with the CEO's uh, when we had the CEO meeting and talk to them about I leaders the days off making decisions based on guts are gone. It has to be a data driven decision because that's where the world is leading to be. Take anything for that matter. So when we talk about that, it was very imperative going back to my project that the hall we had all of the data in one place or a semblance off one single place, as opposed to 60 different places to make decisions based on wish forecast, for example, how many wishes are we going to do? How many wishes are coming in? How's the demand? Was the supply matching up one of the things that we need to do. Budget purposes, going after revenue. And thanks for that. So data becomes very important for us. The other thing, we use data for the wish journeys. Essentially, that's a storytelling. You know, when I you know, it was my first foray into for profit Sorry, nonprofit. And me coming from a full profit is definitely a big culture shock. And one of the things they ask us, what are we selling? Its emotions and story. And that's our data. That is what you know. That's huge for us if we use it for branding and marketing purposes. So having a good semblance off data being ableto access it quickly and being available all the time is huge for us. >> Yeah, and you've got videos on the site, and that's another form of data. Obviously, as we as we know here, okay. And then, from a data protection standpoint, how do you approach that? Presume you're trying to standardize on V maybe is way >> are actually invested in veeam with them for a couple of years right now, as we did the consolidation of infrastructure pieces Veeam supporters with all of the backup and stories replication models. Uh, we're thinking, like Ratmir talked about act one wi be a part of the journey right now, and we're looking at active. What that brings to us. One of the things that you know, dream does for us is we have close to 60 terabytes of data in production and close to another 400 terabytes in the back of things. And, uh, it's interesting when they look about look at me equation, you think about disaster recovery back up. Why do you need it? What? The business use cases case in point. This classic case where we recently celebrated the 10th anniversary ofthe back wish bad kid in San Francisco, we have to go back and get all the archives you know, in a quick fashion, because they're always often requests from the media folks to access some of those. They don't necessarily come in a planned manner. We do a lot of things, a lot of planning around it, but still there are, you know, how How did that come about? What's the story behind? So you know, there are times we have to quickly go back. That's one second thing is having having to replicate our data immediately. Another classic case was in Puerto Rico. There was a natural disaster happened completely. Shut off. All the officers work down. We had to replicate everything what they had into a completely different place so that they could in a vpn, into an access that other chapters and our pulled in to help. They were close to 10 wish families close to 10 which families were stranded because of that. So, you know, gaining that data knowledge of where the family is because the minute of his journey starts. Everything is on us till the witch's journey ends. So we need to make sure everything is proper. Everything goes so data becomes very crucial from those pants >> you're tracking us. I mean, if you haven't been on the make a Wish site is some amazing stories. There I went on the other day. There's a story of ah, of 13 year old girl who's got a heart condition. Who wanted to be a ballerina. A kid with leukemia five years old wants to be a You want to be a chef. My two favorites, I'll share What? It was this kid Brandon a 15 year old with cystic fibrosis. I wanted to be a Navy seal. You guys made that happen. And then there was this child. Colby was 12 years old and a spinal muscular issue. You want to be a secret agent so very creative, you know, wishes that you ran >> way had another wish a couple of years last year in Georgia, where they wish kid wanted to go to Saturn. Yes, yes, it was huge. I mean, and you know the best part about us once we start creating those ideas, it's amazing how much public support we get. The community comes together to make them wish granting process. Great. Now. So I got involved in that. They gave the wish Kato training sessions to make sure that he is equipped when he goes into. And we had a bushel reality company create the entire scene. It was fabulous. So, you know, the way you talk about data and the technology is now some of the things I'm very excited about us usage off thes next Gen technology is like our winter reality to grant a wish. I mean, how cool would that be for granting a wish kid who is not able to get out of the bed. But having able to experience a the Hawaii is swimming. Are being in Disney World enough a couple of days? That's That's another use case that we talked about. That other one is to put the donors who pay the money in that moment off granting, you know, they are big major gift, uh, donors for make a wish. Sometimes we were not able to be part of a fish, but that would be pretty cool if you can bring the technology back to them and you know not going for them. You know pretty much everybody and make the ass through that rather than a PowerPoint or a storytelling, when the storytelling has to evolve to incorporate all of that so pretty excited >> and potentially make a participatory like, say, the virtual reality and then even getting in more into the senses and the that the smells. And I mean this is the world that we're entering the machine intelligence, >> which you still have to have, But you still have to be a functioning, competent, operationally sound organization. There've been a number of charities, make a wish is often at the top of the list of good charities. But there were a number of charities where the amount of money that's dedicated to the mission is a lot less an amount of money, dedicated administration of fundraising, and they always blame it. Systems were not being able to track things. So no, it's become part of the mission to stay on top of how information's flowing because it's not your normal business model. But the services you provide is really useful. Important. >> Sure, let me percent you the business conundrum that I have personally as a 90 leader. It takes close to $10,400 on an average to grant a wish. Uh, and, uh, partly because of me. But being part of the mission, plus me as a 90 leader wanting to understand the business more, I signed up. I'm a volunteer at the local Arizona chapter. I've done couple of expanding myself, and, uh, the condom is, if asked, if you want to go, uh, you know, do the latest and greatest network upgrade for $10,400 are what do you want to, uh, you know and make the network more resilient cyber security and all that stuff. What do you want to go grant? Another wish as a 90 leader probably picked the former. But as a volunteer, I would be like, No, it needs to go to the kid. It's Ah, it's It's an interesting kind of number, you know? You have to find the right balance. I mean, you cannot be left behind in that journey because at many points of time s I talked about it being a cost center. It being a back office. I think those days have clearly gone. I mean, we we evolved to the point where it is making you steps to be a participant b A b a enabler for the top line to bring in more revenues, tow no augment solutions for revenue and things. For that sofa >> rattles the experience or exact role citizens. And in your case, it's the experience is what's being delivered to the degree that you can improve the experience administratively field by making operations cheaper. Great. But as you said, new digital technologies, they're going to make it possible to do things with the experience that we could even conceive of. Five >> wears a classic example. Williams and Beam. I couldn't have taken the data from 60 chapters 120 locations into one single location manageable, and it reduced the cost literally reduce the cost of the 60 instances in one place without technology is like, you know what Sharia virtual machines. And and then to have a backup robust backup solution in a replication off it. It's fantastic. It's amazing >> there. And that's against here. You could give back to the dash chapters and backing, But thanks so much for sharing your story. You Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there. Buddy. Peter and I were back with our next guest. You watching the Cube live from V mon from Miami? 2019. We're right back. Thank you.

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. Brought to you by Pure Storage. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back to The Cube, we are live at Pure Accelerate 2018 at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, moonlighting as Prince today, joined by Dave Vellante, moonlighting as The Who. Should we call you Roger? >> Yeah, Roger. Keith. (all chuckling) I have a moon bat. (laughing) >> It's a very cool concert venue, in case you don't know that. We are joined by a couple of guests, Cube alumnae, welcoming them back to The Cube. Rajiev Rajavasireddy, the VP of Product Management and Solutions at Pure Storage and Siva Sivakumar, the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco. Gentlemen, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Rajiev: Happy to be here. >> So talk to us about, you know, lots of announcements this morning, Cisco and Pure have been partners for a long time. What's the current status of the Cisco-Pure partnership? What are some of the things that excite you about where you are in this partnership today? >> You want to take that, Siva, or you want me to take it? >> Sure, sure. I think if you look back at what brought us together, obviously both of us are looking at the market transitions and some of the ways that customers were adopting technologies from our site. The converged infrastructure is truly how the partnership started. We literally saw that the customers wanted simplification, wanted much more of a cloud-like experience. They wanted to see infrastructure come together in a much more easier fashion. That we bring the IT, make it easier for them, and we started, and of course, the best of breed technology on both sides, being a Flash leader from their side, networking and computer leader on our side, we truly felt the partnership brought the best value out of both of us. So it's a journey that started that way and we look back now and we say that this is absolutely going great and the best is yet to come. >> So from my side, basically Pure had started what we now call FlashStack, a converged infrastructure offering, roughly about four years ago. And about two and a half years ago, Cisco started investing a lot in this partnership. We're very thankful to them, because they kind of believed in us. We were growing, obviously. But we were not quite as big as we are right now. But they saw the potential early. So about roughly two-and-a-half years ago, I talked about them investing in us. I'm not sure how many people know about what a Cisco validated design is. It's a pretty exhaustive document. It takes a lot of work on Cisco's site to come up with one of those. And usually, a single CVD takes about two or three of their TMEs, highly technical resources and about roughly three to six months to build those. >> Per CVD? >> Per CVD. >> Wow. >> Like I said, it's very exhaustive, I mean you get your building materials, your versions, your interoperability, your, you can actually, your commands that you actually use to stand up that infrastructure and the applications, so on and so forth. So in a nine-month span, they kind of did seven CVDs for us. That was phenomenal. We were very, very thankful that they did that. And over time, that investment paid off. There was a lot of good market investment that Cisco and Pure jointly made, all those investments paid off really well in terms of the customer adoption, the acquisition. And essentially we are at a really good point right now. When we came out with our FlashArray X70 last April, Cisco was about the same time, they were coming out with the M5 servers. And so they invested again, and gave us five more CVDs. And just recently they've added FlashBlade to that portfolio. As you know, FlashBlade is a new product offering. Well not so new, but relatively new, product offering from PR, so we have a new CV that just got released that includes FlashArray and Flash Blade for Oracle. So FlashArray does the online transaction processing, FlashBlade does data warehousing, obviously Cisco networking and Cisco servers do everything OLTB and data warehouse, it's an end to an architecture. So that was what Matt Burr had talked about on stage today. We are also excited to announce that we had that we had introduced AIRI AI-ready infrastructure along with Nvidia at their expo recently. We are excited to say that Cisco is now part of that AIRI infrastructure that Matt Burr had talked about on stage as well. So as you can tell, in a two and half year period we've come a really long way. We have a lot of customer adoption every quarter. We keep adding a ton of customers and we are mutually benefiting from this partnership. >> So I want to ask you about, follow up on the Oracle solution. Oracle would obviously say, "Okay, you buy our database, "buy our SAS, buy the Red Stack, "single throat to choke, "You're going to run better, "take advantage of all the hooks we have." You've heard it before. And it's an industry discussion. >> Rajiev: Of course. >> Customer have it, Oracle comes in hard. So what's the advantage of working with you guys, versus going with an all-Red Stack? Let's talk about that a little bit. >> Sure. Do you want to do it? >> I think if you look at the Oracle databases being deployed, this is a, this really powers many companies. This is really the IT platform. And one of the things that customers, or major customers standardize on this. Again, if they have a standardization from an Oracle perspective, they have a standardization from an infrastructure perspective. Just a database alone is not necessarily easy to put on a different infrastructure, manage them, operate them, go through lifecycle. So they look for a architecture. They look for something that's a overall platform for IT. "I want to do some virtualization. "I want to run desktop virtualization. "I want to do Oracle. "I want to do SAP." So the typical IT operates as more of "I want to manage my infrastructure as a whole. "I want to manage my database and data as its own. "I want its own way of looking." So while there are way to make very appliancey behaviors, that actually operates one better, the approach we took is truly delivering a architecture for data center. The fact that the network as well as the computer is so programmable it makes it easy to expand. Really brings a value from a complete perspective. But if you look at Pure again, their FlashArrays truly have world-class performance. So the customer also looks at, "Well I can get everything from one vendor. "Am I getting the best of breed? "Am I getting the world-class technology from "every one of those aspects and perspectives?" So we certainly think there are a good class of customers who value what we bring to the table and who certainly choose us for what we are. >> And to add to what Siva has just said, right? So if you looked at pre-Flash, you're mostly right in the sense that, hey, if you built an application, especially if it was mission-vertical application, you wanted it siloed, you didn't want another application jumping in and kind of messing up the performance and response times and all that good stuff, right? So in those kind of cases, yeah, appliances made sense. But now, when you have all Flash, and then you have servers and networking that can actually elaborates the performance of Flash, you don't really have to worry about mixing different applications and messing up performance for one at the expense of the other. That's basically, it's a win-win for the customers to have much more of a consolidated platform for multiple applications as opposed to silos. 'Cause silos are always hard to manage, right? >> Siva, I want to ask you, you know, Pure has been very bullish, really, for many years now. Obviously Cisco works with a lot of other vendors. What was it a couple years ago? 'Cause you talked about the significant resource investment that Cisco has been making for a couple of years now in Pure Storage. What is it that makes this so, maybe this Flash tech, I'm kind of thinking of the three-legged stool that Charlie talked about this morning. But what were some of the things that you guys saw a few years ago, even before Pure was a public company, that really drove Cisco to make such a big investment in this? >> I think they, when you look at how Cisco has evolved our data center portfolio, I mean, we are a very significant part of the enterprise today powered by Cisco, Cisco networking, and then we grew into the computer business. But when you looked at the way we walked into this computer business, the traditional storage as we know today is something we actually led through a variety of partnerships in the industry. And our approach to the partnership is, first of all, technology. Technology choice was very very critical, that we bring the best of breed for the customers. But also, again, the customer themself, speaking to us, and then our channel partners, who are very critical for our enablement of the business, is very very critical. So the way we, and when Pure really launched and forayed into all Flash, and they created this whole notion that storage means Flash and that was never the patterning before. That was a game-changing, sort of a model of offering storage, not just capacity but also Flash as my capacity as well as the performance point. We really realized that was going to be a good set of customers will absorb that. Some select workloads will absorb that. But as Flash in itself evolved to be much more mainstream, every day's data storage can be in a Flash medium. They realize, customers realized, this technology, this partner, has something very unique. They've thought about a future that was coming, which we realized was very critical for us. When we evolved network from 10-gig fabric to 40-gig to 100-gig, the workloads that are the slowest part of any system is the data movement. So when Flash became faster and easier for data to be moved, the fabric became a very critical element for the eventual success of our customer. We realized a partnership with Pure, with all Flash and the faster network, and faster compute, we realized there is something unique that we can bring to bear for the customer. So our partnership minds had really said, "This is the next big one that we are going to "invest time and energy." And so we clearly did that and we continue to do that. I mean we continue to see huge success in the customer base with the joint solutions. >> This issue of "best of breed" versus a kind of integrated stacks, it's been around forever, it's not going to go away. I mean obviously Cisco, in the early days of converged infrastructure, put a lot of emphasis on integrating, and obviously partnerships. Since that time, I dunno what it was, 2009 or whatever it was, things have changed a lot. Y'know, cloud was barely a thought back then. And the cloud has pushed this sort of API economy. Pure talks about platforms and integrating through APIs. How has that changed your ability to integrate "best of breed" more seamlessly? >> Actually, you know, I've been working with UCS since it started, right? And it's perhaps, it was a first server system that was built on an API-first philosophy. So everything in the Cisco UCS system can be basically, anything you can do to it GUI or the command line, you can do it their XML API, right? It's an open API that they provide. And they kind of emphasized the openness of it. When they built the initial converged infrastructure stacks, right, the challenge was the legacy storage arrays didn't really have the same API-first programmability mentality, right? If you had to do an operation, you had a bunch of, a ton of CLI commands that you had to go through to get to one operation, right? So Pure, having the advantage of being built from scratch, when APIs are what people want to work with, does everything through rest APIs. All function features, right? So the huge advantage we have is with both Pure, Pure actually unlocks the potential that UCS always had. To actually be a programmable infrastructure. That was somewhat held back, I don't know if Siva agrees or not, but I will say it. That kind of was held back by legacy hardware that didn't have rest space APIs or XML or whatever. So for example, they have Python, and PowerShell-based toolkits, based on their XML APIs that they built around that. We have Python PowerShell toolkits that we built around our own rest APIs. We have puppet integration installed, and all the other stuff that you saw on the stage today. And they have the same things. So if you're a customer, and you've standardized, you've built your automation around any of these things, right, If you have the Intuit infrastructure that is completely programmable, that cloud paradigms that you're talking about is mainly because of programmability, right, that people like that stuff. So we offer something very similar, the joint-value proposition. >> You're being that dev-ops kind of infrastructure-as-code mentality to systems design and architecture. >> Rajiev: Yeah. >> And it does allow you to bring the cloud operating model to your business. >> An aspect of the cloud operating model, right. There's multiple different things that people, >> Yeah maybe not every single feature, >> Rajiev: Right. >> But the ones that are necessary to be cloud-like. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Dave: That's kind of what the goal is. >> Let's talk about some customer examples. I think Domino's was on stage last year. >> Right. >> And they were mentioned again this morning about how they're leveraging AI. Are they a customer of Flash tech? Is that maybe something you can kind of dig into? Let's see how the companies that are using this are really benefiting at the business level with this technology. >> I think, absolutely, Domino's is one of our top examples of a Flash tech customer. They obviously took a journey to actually modernize, consolidate many applications. In fact, interestingly, if you look at many of the customer journeys, the place where we find it much much more valuable in this space is the customer has got a variety of workloads and he's also looking to say, "I need to be cloud ready. "I need to have a cloud-like concept, "that I have a hybrid cloud strategy today "or it'll be tomorrow. "I need to be ready to catch him and put him on cloud." And the customer also has the mindset that "While I certainly will keep my traditional applications, "such as Oracle and others, "I also have a very strong interest in the new "and modern workloads." Whether it is analytics, or whether it is even things like containers micro-services, things like that which brings agility. So while they think, "I need to have a variety "of things going." Then they start asking the question, "How can I standardize on a platform, "on an architecture, on something that I can "reuse, repeat, and simplify IT." That's, by far, it may sound like, you know, you got everything kind of thing, but that is by far the single biggest strength of the architecture. That we are versatile, we are multi-workload, and when you really build and deploy and manage, everything from an architecture, from a platform perspective looks the same. So they only worry about the applications they are bringing onboard and worry about managing the lifecycle of the apps. And so a variety of customers, so what has happened because of that is, we started with commercial or mid-size customers, to larger commercial. But now we are much more in enterprise. Large, many large IT shops are starting to standardize on Flash tech, and many of our customers are really measured by the number of repeat purchases they will come back and buy. Because once they like and they bought, they really love it and they come back and buy a lot more. And this is the place where it gets very exciting for all of us that these customers come back and tell us what they want. Whether we build automation or build management architecture, our customer speaks to us and says, "You guys better get together and do this." That's where we want to see our partners come to us and say, "We love this architecture but we want these features in there." So our feedback and our evolution really continues to be a journey driven by the demand and the market. Driven by the customers who we have. And that's hugely successful. When you are building and launching something into the marketplace, your best reward is when customer treats you like that. >> So to basically dovetail into what Siva was talking about, in terms of customers, so he brought up a very valid point. So what customers are really looking for is an entire stack, an infrastructure, that is near invisible. It's programmable, right? And it's, you can kind of cookie-cutter that as you scale. So we have an example of that. I'm not going to use the name of the customer, 'cause I'm sure they're going to be okay with it, but I just don't want to do it without asking their permission. It's a healthcare service provider that has basically, literally dozens of these Flash techs that they've standardized on. Basically, they have vertical applications but they also offer VM as a service. So they have cookie-cuttered this with full automation, integration, they roll these out in a very standard way because of a lot of automation that they've done. And they love the Flash tech just because of the programmability and everything else that Siva was talking about. >> With new workloads coming on, do you see any, you know, architectural limitations? When I say new workloads, data-driven, machine intelligence, AI workloads, do we see any architectural limitations to scale, and how do you see that being addressed in the near future? >> Rajiev: Yeah, that's actually a really good question. So basically, let's start with the, so if you look at Bare Metal VMs and containers, that is one factor. In that factor, we're good because, you know, we support Bare Metal and so does the entire stack, and when I say we, I'm talking about the entire Flash tech servers and storage and network, right. VMs and then also containers. Because you know, most of the containers in the early days were ephemeral, right? >> Yeah. >> Rajiev: Then persistent storage started happening. And a lot of the containers would deploy in the public cloud. Now we are getting to a point where customers are kind of, basically experimenting with large enterprises with containers on prem. And so, the persistent storage that connects to containers is kind of nascent but it's picking up. So there's Kubernetes and Docker are the primary components in there, right? And Docker, we already have Docker native volume plug-ins and Cisco has done a lot of work with Docker for the networking and server pieces. And Kubernetes has flex volumes and we have Kubernetes flex volume integration and Cisco works really well with Kubernetes. So there are no issues in that factor. Now if you're talking about machine learning and Artificial Intelligence, right? So it depends. So for example, Cisco's servers today are primarily driven by Intel-based CPUs, right? And if you look at the Nvidia DGXs, these are mostly GPUs. Cisco has a great relationship with Nvidia. And I will let Siva speak to the machine learning and artificial intelligence pieces of it, but the networking piece for sure, we've already announced today that we are working with Cisco in our AIRI stack, right? >> Dave: Right. >> Yeah, no, I think that the next generation workloads, or any newer workloads, always comes with a different set of, some are just software-level workloads. See typically, software-type of innovation, given the platform architecture is more built with programmability and flexibility, adopting our platforms to a newer software paradigm, such as container micro-services, we certainly can extend the architecture to be able to do that and we have done that several times. So that's a good area that covers. But when there are new hardware innovations that comes with, that is interconnect technologies, or that is new types of Flash models, or machine-learning GPU-style models, what we look at from a platform perspective is what can we bring from an integrated perspective. That, of course, allows IT to take advantage of the new technology, but maintain the operational and IT costs of doing business to be the same. That's where our biggest strength is. Of course Nvidia innovates on the GPU factor, but IT doesn't just do GPUs. They have to integrate into a data center, flow the data into the GPU, run compute along that, and applications to really get most out of this information. And then, of course, processing for any kind of real-time, or any decision making for that matter, now you're really talking about bringing it in-house and integrating into the data center. >> Dave: Right. >> Any time you start in that conversation, that's really where we are. I mean, that's our, we welcome more innovation, but we know when you get into that space, we certainly shine quite well. >> Yeah, it's secured, it's protected, it's move it, it's all kind of things. >> So we love these innovations but then our charter and what we are doing is all in making this experience of whatever the new be, as seamless as possible for IT to take advantage of that. >> Wow, guys, you shared a wealth of information with us. We thank you so much for talking about these Cisco-Pure partnership, what you guys have done with FlashStack, you're helping customers from pizza delivery with Domino's to healthcare services to really modernize their infrastructures. Thanks for you time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. >> For Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube live from Pure Accelerate 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's TheCUBE, covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. Always excited when we get to talk to some of the users. And joining me this segment is Adam Furtado, who is the Chief of Product with Kessel Run at US Air Force. Adam, you were saying you're not a big Star Wars guy, but was the name come from the derivation of the famous Millennium Falcon Kessel Run? Yes, I am a Star Wars geek, you know. >> It certainly was and the rest of our team are Star Wars nuts, so I've had to pick up things along the way so I like to joke that we're delivering capability to our users in 12 parsecs or quicker. >> Yeah, and if you're not a, whether you are or aren't a Star Wars fan, you look at it and say, parsecs is a measure of distance, not time. That's still infuriating for us to watch. Adam, tell us a little bit about your background and what your group does that the US Air Force that we don't need to explain the US Air Force. >> Sure, so my background is actually an intelligence professional as a warfighter enlisted in the Air Force for ten years. From there, I started working in IT systems and I got out of the Air Force and really was on the acquisition side of the house where we were the provider for capabilities for our warfighters. So, over that time, I learned a lot about how we struggle with getting capability to our users with any kind of speed or quality. Kessel Run is an effort to revolutionize the way that we build and deliver software to our warfighters and we are well on our way. >> That sounds like an awesome project. Can you give us just roughly how do you get your arms around how big this is, how many applications or people are involved in it or, you know, the scope of what you're doing. >> Sure. We set out to modernize the Air and Space Operation Center so we have AOCs all around the world that basically are where all the planning for air warfare takes place. So it's a large legacy system that is under a lens. So, they've really struggled in modernizing that baseline system. We've been designing a brand new system to modernize for about ten years and we just haven't been able to get it to the field for a ton of DoD bureaucratic and acquisitions reasons. So basically, Congress told us to figure something new out. So we had a small team that was tired of working this way and tired of not being able to provide this capability to the warfighters. We got together and we looked at industry to be quite frank. And found that the other bureaucratic regulated industries were able to take steps to move closer towards our digital transformation. So we kind of followed along and took some practices that we learned from them and tried to apply it to the government. >> Yeah, fascinating space. Governments' big focus this week at the show, there was the announcement about Cloud.gov. There is a whole track on government here. But, I want you to talk about your Cloud Foundry usage. Button General? How's the thinking of modernization, digitalization, there was a big Cloud First initiative from the federal government for a while. How do those forces play together? >> Sure, yeah, there's a ton of innovation type of activities taking place throughout the government and the DoD. With Cloud Foundry, we just found that because of our, we frankly have a lack of software development and engineering talent that's inherent to the Air Force. We have actually a career field for software developers that's been dwindling over the years. So being able to find that talent's been really hard. So with our Cloud Foundry commercial platform, being able to abstract the technical complexity that it does allows us to grow our software developers in a different way, focusing on identifying the character traits, the empathy and learning mindset that we can take and grow them by having that platform as a backbone to kind of be our foundation, I guess, is really was the emphasis of us going in this direction. It's really worked out so far. >> Yeah, just going through my head are all these discussions that we've had for years about how we need to go from monolithic, hierarchical to distributive architectures and that's been happening in the military a lot too. >> Very much so, yeah. What we're trying to replace is that massive monolithic system that takes us ten years to design and develop with no meaningful user input and at the end of the day, if we even get it out to the field, it's not the right thing. 96% of federal IT projects are over budget or over schedule and 40% of them never see a user at all, never get fielded. There's a lot of room for improvement in this space. We've been able to kind of tackle some of the, some of the easier things, but also tackle some more complex things. Similar to technology. But the policy, the testing of the security behind it as well that we've been kind of focusing on to move the entire DoD and entire Air Force forward. >> Yeah. So, security, I would think, is a major concern. How does that fit in to your thinking and how does security fit in to your architecture? >> We're always thinking about security. Cyber security is obviously really important to the DoD and our space. We feel that with, being able to automate more of the security with utilizing a platform and the pipelines that we have gets to a better place and we're more secure today than we were yesterday. We're always learning too, right? So, we're more secure today than we were literally yesterday. And we're going to be more secure tomorrow by learning how to move forward and learn more about cyber security. That's always something on our mind and we feel like we're in a good place. >> The majority of Cloud Foundry users are doing, they're a private or private hosted environment. Can you share, do you leverage public clouds at all? Or is it all kind of in-house data centers? How does that fit into the mix? >> So our unclassified developments is the AWS gov cloud and then we have hybrid solutions that we use on other networks. >> Okay, yeah. AWS just launched that, I believe it's their secret region, too, so that they're capable, but I guess your team or you can't talk about it, isn't leveraging it yet. >> Yeah, I'd rather not go there. (laughs) >> No worries. So, you're speaking at this show. What's your experience, what kind of things are you sharing and working on? >> We're really heavily relying on culture. So we had a couple of our team members speak this morning, giving more of an overview of our efforts and what we've been able to achieve so far. I'm focusing on how we can overcome some of the challenges that are inherent to the DoD. I mentioned earlier, native engineering development and talent. How we can change the way that we do organizational management. Our traditional hierarchal top down way of organizing doesn't breed innovation normally, right? So we're looking at different ways to organize our own team. So one of those reasons, all of our dev teams work in a balanced team concept with no uniforms, all on a first name basis. So we're basically taking, uniforms are really to strip the individualism away from people, but we kind of need that for creativity and to be able to solve conflicts, problems, and things like that. So we're really focusing on lifting the psychological safety needed to be creative and have our lowest ranking people feel as comfortable as our highest ranking people and IDA and coming up with ways to do things. >> That's fascinating actually. We've been talking a lot about relationships between the groups and the devs and the operators, but you start putting rank in there, which any company has some of that inherently, but the military very much is physical when you see them all the time. >> Absolutely. It's actually, our airmen have really adapted to it and they love it. It's one of those things where it's interesting, maybe a little bit different than commercial industry in that our airmen are our developers and our airmen are also our users so there's invested interest in improving things for the better for their fellow airmen. It's been really great to see and people have really dove in and embraced it. Developers are doing really well. >> What kind of lessons learned would you share? That you're sharing in your speech and talking to your peers. What kind of things would you share with them? >> I think the biggest thing I'm talking about today is to avoid getting in this trap of trying to find the perfect person with the right technical acumen. I think having a foundation is important, but more important is finding people who have empathy for users and learning mindsets and are able to get out of their comfort zone and learn new things. Building cloud innovative applications and 12 factor applications are inherently new to the DoD effectively. It's funny, we talk about how dev options, you know, innovative in our world when the commercial industry probably scoffs at that, but innovation is defined as the instruction of something new. It really is innovative in the DoD space to work in this way. We're seeing a lot of momentum throughout the services, and the DoD and we're really heading in the right direction. >> It's great to hear. Innovation and government can happen. We've done lots of interviews over the last few years to talk about it. Anything you'd like to share about ways that your organization or peer organizations are moving things forward that people might be surprised to hear about? >> I'd say the most important thing is finding the right people. A lot of the times, we've found that our most senior leadership in the government is very much interested in innovating and moving things forward in the right way and there's this innovation ecosystem below that is driving things. So it's basically the education that needs to happen at the middle level of that frozen middle. That sometimes can thwart innovation by a lack of that knowledge, I guess, or the lack of understanding of what we're doing. We've got what feels like a parade of education and trying to share the things we've learned with other people in the government. It helps us remove some of those bureaucratic barriers and then it's like really progress where we need to. >> Alright, Adam, last question I have for you. Something we're all struggling with, the pace of change these days. Seems every time you get on a new technology, the next one's there. You mentioned, you know, like, well, dev ops, we've been talking about for years but you're getting on. How does your organization look at that? How do you keep up with what's happening in the world? >> So I think, Cloud Foundry is an example of how these commercial solutions have helped us do that. Now, we say like, speed is the new security, we're able to be truly agile in that we're able to change and adapt to things as we need to. I think in the old model, it took us so long to adapt and get things out into the field that change was almost impossible. Whereas in this way of working, we're able to learn things every single day, keep our learning loops very short, and then react to them. So I think it's been a great way to take some of the things we've learned and implement them. >> Adam Furtado, I really appreciate you sharing your story from the US Air Force. Fascinating stuff. We'll be back with more coverage here at the Cloud Foundry Summit 2018. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE. (bouncy music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering IBM Think 2018. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome to The Cube here in IBM Think 2018, I'm John Furrier. It's The Cube, our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal in the noise. We're the number one live event coverage. We're here with The Cube with IBM Think 2018. Our next guess is Jesse Lund who's the vice president of IBM Blockchain. He's in the financial services side. Into blockchain, into crypto, into token economics, seeing the future, how money flows, Jesse great to have you on The Cube, thanks for joining me. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. >> We were talking before on camera about blockchain, and we love blockchain, IBM certainly put it out there as part of the innovation sandwich. Blockchain, data, AI, kind of making that innovation, but it's really what it enables, and I want to talk to you about. You are involved in payments. We've been saying on The Cube that the killer app is money in this market. >> I agree, yeah. >> You agree, and you talk about it. This is a new market, so a stack is kind of developing. You got blockchain, then you got crypto which as protocols and you got infrastructure, then you got decentralized applications which you could call ICOs up top, certainly a little bit scammy and bubbly, but that's as arbitraging and optimizing the capital markets, you could argue that. But so this is a really big dynamic. Your thoughts on this trend. >> Sure, well so I joined IBM from 18 years at Wells Fargo. I spent really the majority of my career in financial services and when blockchain came along, I sort of immediately saw the impact, the potential for, I'll call it positive disruption, disruption in the positive sense. Transformational paradigm shift kind of stuff in terms of how money moves around the world and how we classify assets and how we transfer ownership of assets, I mean that's just, it's, the possibilities are limitless. And you're right, IBM is the place where I think blockchain has started as a mainstream focus for enterprises around building private networks, but that's really just the beginning. What we talked about earlier was it gets really interesting when data and money are connected together and they move at high velocities together. >> Let's get into that. I mean first let's just address the IBM thing. They got to put a stake in the ground, blockchain, it's a safe harbor to say supply chain stuff because that's their business, they've been building technologies for supply chains for companies, that's what enterprises do, that's IBM. But the game is where the money is and that's where the businesses are going to be transformed. We're talking about disrupting structural industries. This is where the money power comes in. Money's flowing, I mean if you want to move money from China, go to bitcoin. If you want to move it from anywhere, this is what's happening. >> Yeah, so think about bitcoin. It's kind of what started it all. It's a little bit of a bad word in banks and in regulated financial circles, but let's face it, the only real mainstream blockchain application today is still bitcoin, but you know we're only three years in to the blockchain industry, right? I mean think about when we were three years in to the internet industry, where we were still talking about which browser is going to win and then it went on to which application server's going to win, and it wasn't til a decade later we were really focused on what are the applications, the killer apps that are enabled by an interconnected world and that's exactly what's happening now. Other industries have already been completely disrupted. Look at retail, it's just, it's banking's turn. It's financial services turn. >> One of the founders, the co-founders of Ethereum, Anthony Diiorio, who I interviewed a couple weeks ago at the Bahamas, he said "While it is the new browser," to your points, browser wars, if you think about the payment, wallets are now becoming part of the mechanism for money transfer. If you don't have a wallet, if you want to send me some Ripple, you want to send me some Ethereum, I need a wallet. This is a no brainer, right? I mean if you want to leverage any money, that's one thing. The second thing I want to get your thoughts on besides the wallets, the fiat conversion, right? These are two threshold conversations that are going on. Your thoughts, wallet and conversion to fiat. >> Well I mean I think wallets are really important because this whole thing is based on key management, this whole concept is based on cryptography. It only works on a public, private key notion and you got to keep that private key private, but you got to keep it, right? You got to keep it safe and you got to keep it, it's like your wallet. You've got a wallet, you've got cash in your wallet, you lose your wallet, you lose your cash. It's the same kind of analogy, so wallets are really important and you're going to want to turn to providers who have made their business in encryption, who have made their business in security, I mean-- >> And cold storage, old school is kind of coming back, people are taking their keys and they're spreading them across multiple lock boxes, multiple states. People are getting broken into their house or their PCs are getting broken into. >> Right, yeah. >> I mean security, going old school. >> And why not? I mean, it works. >> Because if someone knows you got 100 million dollars in your house, they're going to get it if you don't lock it. Okay back to the reality of the money transfer. We were talking before you came on, I've been saying on The Cube, token economics really is where the action is, at least in my opinion. I want to get your thoughts because really the business model innovation is on the table because whoever can innovate the business model has more of a chance to disrupt an existing industry. This is where tokenization becomes part of the money piece of it, so how do you convert that value into capture? Is that token? Is that where you see it? What's your thoughts? >> Yeah so well first of all, I mean if you think of tokens as another form of currency, and by the way, I think we have to be careful about what we say, cryptocurrencies, the industry talks about thousands of cryptocurrencies out there where there's really not. There's maybe dozens and they're all derivatives of just a few models, bitcoin being one prominent model and there's a lot of offshoots off of that. But the rest of what we call cryptocurrencies are really tokens that represent primarily securities, which is why the SCC's getting involved. But the really interesting thing about this is these tokens move at high velocity because they're digital and so, but these digital things represent a claim on real world value, and that's where it becomes really interesting. IBM's built and launched as kind of its first foray into the solution space of financial services where IBM is an investor in this technology, a cross-border payment solution that inherently re-engineers this whole correspondent banking, this international wire process, and where FX, foreign exchange, becomes a real time capability in a series of operations that execute as an atomic unit. That's novel today. When you want to send money from here to somewhere else in the world, you go to your bank, your bank sends an instruction to another bank, and they respond and say "Yeah you know it's okay "because the person you're sending it to is not a terrorist, "is not on a some sort of sanctions list," great, now the bank has to actually go settle and it settles through another network, so the novelty is why can't the messages and the data and the value itself, the digital asset, why can't they exist and move together at the same time? That's what we've really built. But as we've built and deployed that and are getting banks and non-bank financial institutions to sign up for it because the cost of moving money goes way, way, way down and the user experience goes way, way, way up because instead of taking two or three days and you don't know how much it's going to cost until it gets there, it takes 10 or 15 seconds and you know before you even press send how much it's going to cost to get there. It all boils down to this notion of digital assets, that's what it all comes down to, is the way to settle value with finality in real time is for one party to exchange a digital asset with another party. Today, initially, the only form of negotiable digital assets are cryptocurrencies which has banks a little scared, but as we start talking through what we've learned in the enterprise blockchain space, we realized that we can tokenize all sorts of other asset classes, commodities, securities, and even fiat currencies where central banks or commercial banks can issue a token that represents a claim on deposits held at some financial institution and that's, that's a-- >> So you see tokenization as a big deal. >> It's a huge deal. I mean it's everything, I think it's-- >> It's the economic value of the ... >> I think it's the tipping point for blockchain. The irony is it goes back to bitcoin kind of started this all. You know we said "Well we like the idea of the technology "underneath bitcoin, but we want to focus on blockchain," I mean forget for a second blockchain is actually terminology that's invented by the bitcoin primer that was published nine years ago by Satoshi, so yeah it's their, whoever they are, it's their terminology, and it's kind of coming back full circle where you're seeing the convergence of all of these cool optimization capabilities, you know, immutability and workflow optimization, supply chain management-- >> And there's a lot of work to be done on performance and whatnot, but the concept of decentralized immutability data is fine, store the data. Now there's, it's got to get fixed, but I think that what that enables and I think you agree that tokenization's critical. So for a company that wants to token their business or raise money via tokens or get involved in this new economic value creation, innovation trend, how do they do it? And by the way are there tools available? You mentioned banking, and the banking business got to where it was because you had to build the picks and shovels to make it happen, you had to do a swift and you had to have this stuff go on. Now developers don't necessarily have the tools, so there's a picks and shovel market and there's also the real innovation. >> Yeah and that's I think the value contribution that IBM brings. I mean we bring 107 years of credibility in developing and operating mission critical, transactional, and financial systems, and I could do just an ad for a second, that's what the IBM blockchain platform is all about and as the industry evolves, as our platform offering evolves, what we want to be able to bring to small business, medium sized businesses, large businesses is the ability to develop solutions using our toolkit. >> So Jesse I want you to put your financial hat on and at the same time put your payments hat on and your token economics hat on, three hats. Hey I want to tokenize my business, I really want to get in. So we have an innovative team, we're seeing new business model formulas and logic that we want to disrupt, what do I do? I got an existing, growing business that I know has assets and I'm not a startup, but I'm not trying to pivot like Kodak, so I'm not dying, throwing the hail Mary, or I'm not a startup and got to build a whole product. I'm a real business, I'm growing, and I see tokenization as a way for me to be successful. What do I do? What's your advice? >> Well I think you look at it from all potential angles. If you look at any business, they're always looking to improve the bottom line by shrinking costs, right? They're also looking to improve the bottom line by increasing the top side, increasing revenue, and I think as a mid-sized business or a growing business, you have the opportunity to use tokenization, to use blockchain and digital currencies to do both of those things. You have the ability to accelerate the adoption of whatever your good or service or product is by if it's tokenizable, and most things are whether it's a utility, access to some service you provide, or whether it's an asset, some widget that you sell, you enable primary and secondary markets by creating a digital asset that can be bought by anybody anywhere around the world. I mean that's one way to do it and so I think getting people to realize the potential there-- >> You got programs, they call up IBM or get some developers, make it happen. Okay so killer apps money, that's going to be a 30 plus year trend and certainly this highlights that, but the other thing that's happened, it's coming out of either, in the open source community as well as cloud, the notion of marketplaces and communities so marketplaces and communities become a very important role in the token economics piece. What's your thoughts and opinion on that narrative? >> Well again for me, it goes back, I always go back to digital assets. We in the U.S. and around the world, when we start talking about financial instruments, we classify assets differently, but when it comes to an ecosystem and a community that becomes inherently peer to peer and inherently democratic, it's about an asset class agnostic distributed exchange where I can sell you my security token in exchange for your fiat token, or I can sell you my commodity token or utility token for the same. I think the ecosystem gets built automatically by way of new assets coming to a common network or interoperable set of networks, and that's what's missing today by the way, same in capital markets, right? The holy grail in the capital market space today is how do I shrink the time between trade and settlement? There's this whole t plus three and we're spending billions of dollars to go to t plus two, we gain a day, so the trade day and the settlement date are two days apart. I mean you just think about kind of the absurdity of that. If you just say well if the security that you're buying is a digital asset, and the money that you're buying it with is a digital asset, and they both exist on either the same network or an interoperable network, the transfer of ownership and the transfer of value happen together as two operations or a single operation in one atomic transaction, you've solved the problem. >> Speed of light can make it happen. >> Right, delivery versus payment, that's what the capital markets industry is trying to optimize for, right? Because it improves the balance sheet of all sorts of finance-- >> You had a phrase you mentioned before we came on camera, something about money, the future of money. What was that phrase? >> Programmable money? >> Programmable money. >> Yeah, right, right. >> I want you to take a minute to explain. Love this concept, Miko Matsumura, thought leader friend of ours, has a vision called open source money which is more of an open source, this hey money's flowing, it's open, it's out there, but you have a different perspective which I like too which is programmable money. What does that mean? Describe the concept and take a minute to unpack that. >> The concept of programmable money comes out of a paper that I jointly authored with Jed McCaleb who is the founder of Stellar and was the co-founder of Ripple and is a really smart guy so I feel like I have a small brain when I'm around him but we really wrote it in the context of central banking and the ultimate issuer of an asset because central banks are the issuers of currencies. Right now the primary dealers, if you will, for currencies are commercial banks and so that whole commercial, central, fractional reserve banking model has been replicated from the western world to everywhere else in the world and you can't get access to central bank money as they say. But if the central banks were to issue digital currencies which is essentially a token of fiat currency, so you own the token, you own a claim of fiat deposits held on the balance sheet of the central bank, now you have the ability to move that around. You can actually program the movement of money because it's a digital thing, it's a digital asset that's as good as cash and if you are working with a central bank who's issuing it, not only is it electronic money, it's actually legal tender because if the central bank issues it, it becomes legal tender which means everybody who accepts it has to accept that form of payment. That's pretty profound if we can get to that point and we're working with-- >> And software's a big driver in that because you need software to manage digital assets. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> The software's driving it. Bill Tai is an investor, I interviewed him, and he had an interesting topic and I made a highlight of it. He said after World War II, we talked about the oil situation when the dala was pegged to OPEC, that was essentially tokenizing oil. Then okay that's good, so that was their ICO. >> Right, right, yeah, essentially. >> That's what you're saying, you can actually put fiat to the digital token and take advantage of the efficiencies of digital. >> Right, yeah, okay-- >> Taking down all the structural inefficiencies that were built prior to digital. Is that ... >> It is. You fast forward a little bit and think where that takes us. It's no secret that the U.S. dollar is the trade currency of the world, and I want to be careful what I say because, you know, I'm an American patriot here but there are other large G20 nations who wouldn't mind dethroning the U.S. dollar as the trade currency of the world and so as you see central banks starting to get involved in the issuance of digital currency, you create a situation where all of a sudden well maybe oil could be traded heresy in other currencies besides the U.S. dollar which is all it's traded in today. Goes back to your ecosystem question. >> This is a great point. We could riff on this stuff, let's riff on this. The UK just signed a deal with Coinbase, this is a major signal. >> Sign, yeah. >> You got a legitimate country saying we're going to give a license to Coinbase, now they have Brexit to deal with so they're looking at it as an opportunity. Outside of the UK coming in and doing that deal with Coinbase, it's on the web, look up Coinbase in the UK, you'll see the deal. You have other companies trying to jockey for who's going to be the Wall Street for crypto? Meaning I want to convert crypto to fiat, where do I go? Do I go to Estonia? Do I go to Dubai? Bahrain? Armenia? China? There is no place yet. Your thoughts, what's going to happen? What shoe will drop first? Is there a domino effect? >> Yeah, well there's a couple things as it relates to the UK and kind of the extension to Coinbase of access to the national payment system which is really what enables them to then convert fiat to crypto and back. That's pretty interesting. Going back to the programmable money thing, though. If you have a central bank issued token, you've essentially extended the real time gross settlement system which has been only accessible by commercial banks to anybody that holds that token, right? It's a trend, I think the UK sees it coming, I think the Federal Reserve sees it coming. It's going to happen. >> Is it winner take all or winner take most? >> I think it creates a much more purely efficient market. It's a democratic system so I don't think there is going to be a new Wall Street, I think it's going to be-- >> John: Decentralized. >> Exactly, I mean that's the beauty of it. It's scary though for establishments like Wall Street to look at this and it-- >> I mean are the banks scared? You're dealing with the banks right now. >> Yes, they're scared. I mean I've actually read a recent article that Bank of America, the headline was "Bank of America's afraid of digital currency." You've seen Jamie Dimon who came out with a kind of a hard stance against bitcoin and has since kind of backed away from that. >> Of course you probably bought in when it dropped and now it's back up again. >> Well I think part of the bank was actually facilitating their clients and trading bitcoin so that might've been it. There's a natural reaction to it, especially if you're part of the mainstream establishment. >> There's no proof of that, I'm just saying we're posting on Reddit and whatnot. >> No we're just joking around. Jamie's a, he's a good guy, right? >> Can I get your thoughts on digital nations? We've been talking about this. Just a few years ago, smart cities, IoT was kind of the narrative, oh be a smart city, control the traffic lights, and instrument the physical goods and services. Now with crypto and blockchain front and center conversation is digital nations with sovereignty around their cash. This is kind of your point earlier. How are you seeing that? What's your view? Are you seeing that trend? Are there dots connecting for you? Because again, people are jockeying for a position on the global digital backbone to be a major part of the money flow, the fiat conversion, what is the goods and services? Who's going to clear the values? All digital, it's a perfect storm. >> Well I think there's always going to be the need for trusted entities to be the issuers of these assets because it all comes down to trust at the end of the day. The thing with bitcoin is that it's purely autonomous and people are a little bit skeptical of it because they're like, "Well who's controlling "the monetary policy?" and the answer is the market, you know, the users of the network are controlling it and that's why you see such volatility, right? Because the traders love it, they can go in and trade the up trends and the down trends. As long as there's volatility, traders are making money. I think there is still going to be a place for central authorities to add value, but that's going to be the pressure, is for them to prove that they're adding value not, you know, bureaucracy masquerading as process. >> I was reading an article that Telegram, which is doing a huge ICO, just got shut down by the Russian government, they went to turn over their keys, their private keys of their users. Say goodbye to the-- >> Jesse: I didn't read that, that's crazy. >> It's really crazy, so that's going to put a damper on their ICO but regulatory and then government issues around countries becomes a big deal. In your experience as Wells Fargo, at a bank, looking forward in the new digital world, is it one of those situations where path of least resistance, the countries that go more friendly get around that in a sovereignty where you domicile, where you start your company, where you do your banking. I mean I could start a company in Gibraltar and bank in Switzerland. >> Well transparency is part of the benefit or the downside of this, right? I think there may be advantages that pop up but I think they will equalize over time. I've been around the world now for IBM talking to 20 plus central banks, and I had a really interesting conversation with one of them recently in Asia. We're in the room with deputy director level people who are responsible for things like the NA money laundering policy and the economics and monetary policy and things like that and one person said, "You know, we're really torn "between two equally unacceptable decisions. "One is to ignore cryptocurrencies altogether, "and the other end of the spectrum is "to make them illegal, to ban them." I thought it was poignant that they see those as unacceptable, they have to do something in the middle. >> Do they weigh or ban? I mean look, the banning's happening. >> But okay so you saw that Trump used the executive order to prevent Americans from using or trading in the Venezuelan crypto that was issued on Ethereum, right? I saw that Venezuelan thing as a publicity stunt more than anything, an active of global defiance. So there's precedent now for, and the Russia thing with Telegram-- >> The United States of America has to step up its game because look at it, we have a lot of, I mean I remember back in the crypto days when I was just getting into the business, late 80s, early 90s, you couldn't even do it in the U.S., you go to Canada, that's why Canada's got a lot of innovation up there. We're risking our country, and I had one guy tell me in Puerto Rico, he's from South Africa, and he shouldn't be throwing any stones either but his point was, he says, "America's becoming Europe. "There's a shrinking middle class "while other emerging markets have a growing middle class," so the global impact of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and these applications are significant and have to be factored into policy decision making for governments. The U.S. can't just think about itself anymore in a vacuum. >> Right, not anymore. >> Because there's implications otherwise the U.S. will turn into Europe, regulated, all these rules, byzantine stuff. It's a real problem. Your thoughts on that. >> It is. It's cliche, but we live and work in a global economy. The flow of information globally in real time has been around now for a while and it's about time it came to money. The internet of money is a term I've heard. It's just, it's unavoidable. >> Jesse Lund here inside The Cube. Great guest, great conversation. >> Yeah, thanks. >> How do people get ahold of you on IBM's, you mentioned you got some great stuff going on, you've written a paper, you've got a lot of content, where does someone go to discover some of the stuff that you're working on they could get involved with you guys? >> Yeah well I mean the best place to go is IBM.com/blockchain, that'll tell you a lot about what we're doing and the different industry-- >> And the programmable money paper you wrote, is that there? >> It's out there as well, there's a link to that. >> On IBM.com? >> You can get me directly on LinkedIn, I try to be pretty responsive with that because I really enjoy the dialogue. This is a revolution of the peoples, man, it's all over the world, so it's great, it's great to be a part of it. >> And people tokenizing their business, there's real opportunities to change the game to bring consensus, data driven, new kind of supply chain whatever to the markets you're in, great opp-, and you need banking. >> Yeah of course. >> You need to have money. Money, marketplaces, and communities, that's my mantra. >> I subscribe to it. >> Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Jesse Lund. I'm John Furrier here at IBM Think 2018. Cube coverage continues after this short break. (upbeat music)