[Music] hello everyone welcome back to the live coverage here in monaco for the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier host of thecube uh we have a great great guest lineup here already in nine interviews small gathering of the influencers and the people making it happen powered by digital bits sponsored by digital bits presented by digital bits of course a lot happening around decentralization web 3 the metaverse we've got a a powerhouse influencer on the qb ryan gills the founder of openmeta been in the issue for a while ryan great to see you thanks for coming on great to be here thank you you know one of the things that we were observing earlier conversations is you have young and old coming together the best and brightest right now in the front line it's been there for a couple years you know get some hype cycles going on but that's normal in these early growth markets but still true north star is in play that is democratize remove the intermediaries create immutable power to the people the same kind of theme has been drum beating on now come the metaverse wave which is the nfts now the meta verses you know at the beginning of this next wave yeah this is where we're at right now what are you working on tell us what's what's open meta working on yeah i mean so there is a reason for all of this right i think we go through all these different cycles and there's an economic incentive engine and it's designed in because people really like making money but there's a deeper reason for it all and the words the buzzwords the terms they change based off of different cycles this one is a metaverse i just saw it a little early you know so i recognized the importance of an open metaverse probably in 2017 and really decided to dedicate 10 years to that um so we're very early into that decade and we're starting to see more of a movement building and uh you know i've catalyzed a lot of that from from the beginning and making sure that while everything moves to a closed corporate side of things there's also an equal bottom-up approach which i think is just more important and more interesting well first of all i want to give you a lot of props for seeing it early and recognizing the impact and potential collateral damage of not not having open and i was joking earlier about the facebook little snafu with the the exercise app and ftc getting involved and you know i kind of common new york times guy comment online like hey i remember aol wanted to monopolize dial up internet and look the open web obviously changed all that they went to sign an extinction not the same comparable here but you know everyone wants to have their own little walled guard and they feel comfortable first-party data the data business so balancing the benefit of data and all the ip that could come into whether it's a visualization or platform it has to be open without open then you're going to have fragmentation you're going to have all kinds of perverse incentives how does the metaverse continue with such big players like meta themselves x that new name for facebook you know big bully tons of cash you know looking to you know get their sins forgiven um so to speak i mean you got google probably will come in apple's right around the corner amazon you get the whales out there how do is it proprietary is walled garden the new proprietary how do you view all that because it's it's still early and so there's a lot of change can happen well it's an interesting story that's really playing out in three acts right we had the first act which was really truly open right there was this idea that the internet is for the end user this is all just networking and then web 2 came and we got a lot of really great business models from it and it got closed up you know and now as we enter this sort of third act we have the opportunity to learn from both of those right and so i think web 3 needs to go back to the values of web one with the lessons in hindsight of web 2. and all of the winners from web 2 are clearly going to want to keep winning in web 3. so you can probably guess every single company and corporation on earth will move into this i think most governments will move into it as well and um but they're not the ones that are leading it the ones that are leading it are are just it's a culture of people it's a movement that's building and accumulating over time you know it's weird it's uh the whole web 2 thing is the history is interesting because you know when i started my podcasting company in 2004 there's only like three of us you know the dave weiner me evan williams and jack dorsey and we thought and the blogging just was getting going and the dream was democratization at the time mainstream media was the enemy and then now blogs are media so and then all sudden it like maybe it was the 2008 area with the that recession it stopped and then like facebook came in obviously twitter was formed from the death of odio podcasting company so the moment in time in history was a glimmic glimmer of hope well we went under my company went under we all went under but then that ended and then you had the era of twitter facebook linkedin reddit was still around so it kind of stopped where did it where did it pick up was it the ethereum bitcoin and ethereum brought that back where'd the open come back well it's a generational thing if you if you go back to like you know apple as a startup they were trying to take down ibm right it was always there's always the bigger thing that was that we we're trying to sort of unbundle or unpackage because they have too much power they have too much influence and now you know facebook and apple and these big tech companies they are that on on the planet and they're doing it bigger than it's ever been done but when they were startups they existed to try to take that from a bigger company so i think you know it's not an it's not a fact that like facebook or zuckerberg is is the villain here it's just the fact that we're reaching peak centralization anything past this point it becomes more and more unhealthy right and an open metaverse is just a way to build a solution instead of more of a problem and i think if we do just allow corporations to build and own them on the metaverse these problems will get bigger and larger more significant they will touch more people on earth and we know what that looks like so why not try something different so what's the playbook what's the current architecture of the open meta verse that you see and how do people get involved is there protocols to be developed is there new things that are needed how does the architecture layout take us through that your mindset vision on that and then how can people get involved yeah so the the entity structure of what i do is a company called crucible out of the uk um but i i found out very quickly that just a purely for-profit closed company a commercial company won't achieve this objective there's limitations to that so i run a dao as well out of switzerland it's called open meta we actually we named it this six months before facebook changed their name and so this is just the track we're on right and what we develop is a protocol uh we believe that the internet built by game developers is how you define the metaverse and that protocol is in the dao it is in the dow it's that's crucial crucible protocol open meta okay you can think of crucible as labs okay no we're building we're building everything so incubator kind of r d kind of thing exactly yeah and i'm making the choice to develop things and open them up create public goods out of them harness things that are more of a bottom-up approach you know and what we're developing is the emergence protocol which is basically defining the interface between the wallets and the game engines right so you have unity and unreal which all the game developers are sort of building with and we have built software that drops into those game engines to map ownership between the wallet and the experience in the game so integration layer basically between the wallet kind of how stripe is viewed from a software developer's campaign exactly but done on open rails and being done for a skill set of world building that is coming and game developers are the best suited for this world building and i like to own what i built yeah i don't like other people to own what i build and i think there's an entire generation that's that's really how do you feel about the owning and sharing component is that where you see the scale coming into play here i can own it and scale it through the relationship of the open rails yeah i mean i think the truth is that the open metaverse will be a smaller network than even one corporate virtual world for a while because these companies have billions of people right yeah every room you've ever been in on earth people are using two or three of facebook's products right they just have that adoption but they don't have trust they don't have passion they don't have the movement that you see in web3 they don't have the talent the level of creative talent those people care about owning what they create on the on what can someone get involved with question is that developer is that a sponsor what do people do to get involved with do you and your team and to make it bigger i mean it shouldn't be too small so if this tracks you can assume it gets bigger if you care about an open metaverse you have a seat at the table if you become a member of the dao you have a voice at the table you can make decisions with us we are building developing technology that can be used openly so if you're a game developer and you use unity or unreal we will open the beta this month later and then we move directly into what's called a game jam so a global hackathon for game developers where we just go through a giant exploration of what is possible i mean you think about gaming i always said the early adopters of all technology and the old web one was porn and that was because they were they were agnostic of vendor pitches or whatever is it made money they've worked we don't tell them we've always been first we don't tolerate vaporware gaming is now the new area where it is so the audience doesn't want vapor they want it to work they want technology to be solid they want community so it's now the new arbiter so gaming is the pretext to metaverse clearly gaming is swallowing all of media and probably most of the world and this game mechanics under the hood and all kinds of underlying stuff now how does that shape the developer community so like take the classic software developer may not be a game developer how do they translate over you seeing crossover from the software developers that are out there to be game developers what's your take on that it's an interesting question because i come to a lot of these events and the entire web 3 movement is web developers it's in the name yeah right and we have a whole wave of exploration and nfts being sold of people who really love games they're they're players they're gamers and they're fans of games but they are not in the skill set of game development this is a whole discipline yeah it's a whole expertise right you have to understand ik retargeting rigging bone meshes and mapping of all of that stuff and environment building and rendering and all these things it's it's a stacked skill set and we haven't gone through any exploration yet with them that is the next cycle that we're going to and that's what i've spent the last three or four years preparing for yeah and getting the low code is going to be good i was saying earlier to the young gun we had on his name was um oscar belly he's argo versus he's 25 years old he's like he made a quote i'm too old to get into esports like 22 old 25 come on i'd love to be in esports i was commenting that there could be someone sitting next to us in the metaverse here on tv on our digital tv program in the future that's going to be possible the first party citizenship between physical experience absolutely and meta versus these cameras all are a layer in which you can blend the two yeah so that that's that's going to be coming sooner and it's really more of the innovation around these engines to make it look real and have someone actually moving their body not like a stick figure yes or a lego block this is where most people have overlooked because what you have is you have two worlds you have web 3 web developers who see this opportunity and are really going for it and then you have game developers who are resistant to it for the most part they have not acclimated to this but the game developers are more of the keys to it because they understand how to build worlds yeah they do they understand how to build they know what success looks like they know what success looks like if you if you talk about the metaverse with anyone the most you'll hear is ready player one yeah maybe snow crash but those things feel like games yeah right so the metaverse and gaming are so why are game developers um like holding back is because they're like ah it's too not ready yet i'm two more elite or is it more this is you know this is an episode on its own yeah um i'm actually a part of a documentary if you go to youtube and you say why gamers hate nfts there's a two-part documentary about an hour long that robin schmidt from the defiant did and it's really a very good deep dive into this but i think we're just in a moment in time right now if you remember henry ford when he he produced the car everybody wanted faster horses yeah they didn't understand the cultural shift that was happening they just wanted an incremental improvement right and you can't say that right now because it sounds arrogant but i do believe that this is a moment in time and i think once we get through this cultural shift it will be much more clear why it's important it's not pure speculation yeah it's not clout it's not purely money there's something happening that's important for humanity yeah and if we don't do it openly it will be more of a problem yeah i totally agree with you on that silent impact is number one and people some people just don't see it because it's around the corner visionaries do like yourselves we do my objective over the next say three to six months is to identify which game developers see the value in web 3 and are leaning into it because we've built technology that solves interoperability between engines mapping ownership from wallets all the sort of blueprints that are needed in order for a game developer to build this way we've developed that we just need to identify where are they right because the loudest voices are the ones that are pushing back against this yeah and if you're not on twitter you don't see how many people really see this opportunity and i talked to epic and unity and nvidia and they all agree that this is where the future is going but the one question mark is who wants it where are they you know it's interesting i talked to lauren besel earlier she's from the music background we were talking about open source and how music i found that is not open it's proprietary i was talking about when i was in college i used to deal software you'd be like what do you mean deal well at t source code was proprietary and that started the linux movement in the 80s that became a systems revolution and then open source then just started to accelerate now people like it's free software is like not a big deal everyone knows it's what it was never proprietary but we were fighting the big proprietary code bases you mentioned that earlier is there a proprietary thing for music well not really because it's licensed rights right so in the metaverse who's the proprietary is it the walled garden is the is it is it the gamers so is it the consoles is it the investment that these gaming companies have in the software itself so i find that that open source vibe is very much circulating around your world actually open maps in the word open but open source software has a trajectory you know foundations contributors community building same kind of mindset music not so much because no one's it's not direct comparable but i think here it's interesting the gaming culture could be that that proprietary ibm the the state the playstation the xbox you know if you dive into the modding community right the modding community has sort of been this like gray area of of gaming and they will modify games that already exist but they do it with the values of open source they do it with composability and there's been a few breakthroughs counter-strike is a mod right some of the largest games of all time came from mods of other games look at quake had a comeback i played first multiplayer doom when it came out in the 90s and that was all mod based exactly yeah quake and quake was better but you know i remember the first time on a 1.5 cable mode and playing with my friends remember vividly now the graphics weren't that good but that was mod it's mod so then you go i mean and then you go into these other subcultures like dungeons and dragons which was considered to be such a nerdy thing but it's just a deeply human thing it's a narrative building collective experience like these are all the bottom-up type approaches modding uh world building so you're going to connect so i'm just kind of thinking out loud here you're going to connect the open concept of source with open meta bring game developers and software drills together create a fabric of a baseline somewhat somewhat collected platform tooling and components and let it just sell form see what happens better self form that's your imposing composability is much faster yeah than a closed system and you got what are your current building blocks you have now you have the wallet and you have so we built an sdk on both unity and unreal okay as a part of a system that is a protocol that plugs into those two engines and we have an inventory service we have an avatar system we basically kind of leaned into this idea of a persona being the next step after a pfp so so folks that are out there girls and boys who are sitting there playing games they could build their own game on this thing absolutely this is the opportunity for them entrepreneurs to circumvent the system and go directly with open meta and build their own open environment like i said before i i like to own the things i built i've had that entrepreneurial lesson but i don't think in the future you should be so okay with other companies or other intermediaries owning you and what you build i think i mean opportunity to build value yeah and i think i think your point the mod culture is not so much going to be the answer it's what that was like the the the the dynamic of modding yes is developing yes and then therefore you get the benefit of sovereign identity yeah you get the benefit of unbanking that's not the way we market this but those are benefits that come along with it and it allows you to live a different life and may the better product win yeah i mean that's what you're enabling yeah ryan thanks so much for coming on real final question what's going on here why are we here in monaco what's going on this is the inaugural event presented by digital bits why are we here monaco crypto summit i'm here uh some friends of mine brittany kaiser and and lauren bissell invited me here yeah i've known al for for a number of years and i'm just here to support awesome congratulations and uh we'll keep in touch we'll follow up on the open meta great story we love it thanks for coming on okay cube coverage continues here live in monaco i'm john furrier and all the action here on the monaco crypto summit love the dame come back next year it'll be great back with more coverage to wrap up here on the ground then the yacht club event we're going to go right there as well that's in a few hours so we're going to be right back [Music] you

>> Live from San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering DataWorks Summit 2018, brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks here in San Jose, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, James Kobielus. We have with us Eric Herzog. He is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Global Channels at the IBM Storage Division. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE once again, Eric. >> Well, thank you. We always love to be on theCUBE and talk to all of theCUBE analysts about various topics, data, storage, multi-cloud, all the works. >> And before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about how you might be the biggest CUBE alum in the sense of you've been on theCUBE more times than anyone else. >> I know I'm in the top five, but I may be number one, I have to check with Dave Vellante and crew and see. >> Exactly and often wearing a Hawaiian shirt. >> Yes. >> Yes, I was on theCUBE last week from CISCO Live. I was not wearing a Hawaiian shirt. And Stu and John gave me a hard time about why was not I wearing a Hawaiian shirt? So I make sure I showed up to the DataWorks show- >> Stu, Dave, get a load. >> You're in California with a tan, so it fits, it's good. >> So we were talking a little bit before the cameras were rolling and you were saying one of the points that is sort of central to your professional life is it's not just about the storage, it's about the data. So riff on that a little bit. >> Sure, so at IBM we believe everything is data driven and in fact we would argue that data is more valuable than oil or diamonds or plutonium or platinum or silver to anything else. It is the most viable asset, whether you be a global Fortune 500, whether you be a midsize company or whether you be Herzogs Bar and Grill. So data is what you use with your suppliers, with your customers, with your partners. Literally everything around your company is really built around the data so most effectively managing it and make sure, A, it's always performant because when it's not performant they go away. As you probably know, Google did a survey that one, two, after one, two they go off your website, they click somewhere else so has to be performant. Obviously in today's 365, 7 by 24 company it needs to always be resilient and reliable and it always needs to be available, otherwise if the storage goes down, guess what? Your AI doesn't work, your Cloud doesn't work, whatever workload, if you're more traditional, your Oracle, Sequel, you know SAP, none of those workloads work if you don't have a solid storage foundation underneath your data driven enterprise. >> So with that ethos in mind, talk about the products that you are launching, that you newly launched and also your product roadmap going forward. >> Sure, so for us everything really is that storage is this critical foundation for the data driven, multi Cloud enterprise. And as I've said before on theCube, all of our storage software's now Cloud-ified so if you need to automatically tier out to IBM Cloud or Amazon or Azure, we automatically will move the data placement around from one premise out to a Cloud and for certain customers who may be multi Cloud, in this case using multiple private Cloud providers, which happens due to either legal reasons or procurement reasons or geographic reasons for the larger enterprises, we can handle that as well. That's part of it, second thing is we just announced earlier today an artificial intelligence, an AI reference architecture, that incorporates a full stack from the very bottom, both servers and storage, all the way up through the top layer, then the applications on top, so we just launched that today. >> AI for storage management or AI for run a range of applications? >> Regular AI, artificial intelligence from an application perspective. So we announced that reference architecture today. Basically think of the reference architecture as your recipe, your blueprint, of how to put it all together. Some of the components are from IBM, such as Spectrum Scale and Spectrum Computing from my division, our servers from our Cloud division. Some are opensource, Tensor, Caffe, things like that. Basic gives you what the stack needs to be, and what you need to do in various AI workloads, applications and use cases. >> I believe you have distributed deep learning as an IBM capability, that's part of that stack, is that correct? >> That is part of the stack, it's like in the middle of the stack. >> Is it, correct me if I'm wrong, that's containerization of AI functionality? >> Right. >> For distributed deployment? >> Right. >> In an orchestrated Kubernetes fabric, is that correct? >> Yeah, so when you look at it from an IBM perspective, while we clearly support the virtualized world, the VM wares, the hyper V's, the KVMs and the OVMs, and we will continue to do that, we're also heavily invested in the container environment. For example, one of our other divisions, the IBM Cloud Private division, has announced a solution that's all about private Clouds, you can either get it hosted at IBM or literally buy our stack- >> Rob Thomas in fact demoed it this morning, here. >> Right, exactly. And you could create- >> At DataWorks. >> Private Cloud initiative, and there are companies that, whether it be for security purposes or whether it be for legal reasons or other reasons, don't want to use public Cloud providers, be it IBM, Amazon, Azure, Google or any of the big public Cloud providers, they want a private Cloud and IBM either A, will host it or B, with IBM Cloud Private. All of that infrastructure is built around a containerized environment. We support the older world, the virtualized world, and the newer world, the container world. In fact, our storage, allows you to have persistent storage in a container's environment, Dockers and Kubernetes, and that works on all of our block storage and that's a freebie, by the way, we don't charge for that. >> You've worked in the data storage industry for a long time, can you talk a little bit about how the marketing message has changed and evolved since you first began in this industry and in terms of what customers want to hear and what assuages their fears? >> Sure, so nobody cares about speeds and feeds, okay? Except me, because I've been doing storage for 32 years. >> And him, he might care. (laughs) >> But when you look at it, the decision makers today, the CIOs, in 32 years, including seven start ups, IBM and EMC, I've never, ever, ever, met a CIO who used to be a storage guy, ever. So, they don't care. They know that they need storage and the other infrastructure, including servers and networking, but think about it, when the app is slow, who do they blame? Usually they blame the storage guy first, secondarily they blame the server guy, thirdly they blame the networking guy. They never look to see that their code stack is improperly done. Really what you have to do is talk applications, workloads and use cases which is what the AI reference architecture does. What my team does in non AI workloads, it's all about, again, data driven, multi Cloud infrastructure. They want to know how you're going to make a new workload fast AI. How you're going to make their Cloud resilient whether it's private or hybrid. In fact, IBM storage sells a ton of technology to large public Cloud providers that do not have the initials IBM. We sell gobs of storage to other public Cloud providers, both big, medium and small. It's really all about the applications, workloads and use cases, and that's what gets people excited. You basically need a position, just like I talked about with the AI foundations, storage is the critical foundation. We happen to be, knocking on wood, let's hope there's no earthquake, since I've lived here my whole life, and I've been in earthquakes, I was in the '89 quake. Literally fell down a bunch of stairs in the '89 quake. If there's an earthquake as great as IBM storage is, or any other storage or servers, it's crushed. Boom, you're done! Okay, well you need to make sure that your infrastructure, really your data, is covered by the right infrastructure and that it's always resilient, it's always performing and is always available. And that's what IBM drives is about, that's the message, not about how many gigabytes per second in bandwidth or what's the- Not that we can't spew that stuff when we talk to the right person but in general people don't care about it. What they want to know is, "Oh that SAP workload took 30 hours and now it takes 30 minutes?" We have public references that will say that. "Oh, you mean I can use eight to ten times less storage for the same money?" Yes, and we have public references that will say that. So that's what it's really about, so storage is really more from really a speeds and feeds Nuremberger sort of thing, and now all the Nurembergers are doing AI and Caffe and TensorFlow and all of that, they're all hackers, right? It used to be storage guys who used to do that and to a lesser extent server guys and definitely networking guys. That's all shifted to the software side so you got to talk the languages. What can we do with Hortonworks? By the way we were named in Q1 of 2018 as the Hortonworks infrastructure partner of the year. We work with Hortonworks all time, at all levels, whether it be with our channel partners, whether it be with our direct end users, however the customer wants to consume, we work with Hortonworks very closely and other providers as well in that big data analytics and the AI infrastructure world, that's what we do. >> So the containerizations side of the IBM AI stack, then the containerization capabilities in Hortonworks Data Platform 3.0, can you give us a sense for how you plan to, or do you plan at IBM, to work with Hortonworks to bring these capabilities, your reference architecture, into more, or bring their environment for that matter, into more of an alignment with what you're offering? >> So we haven't an exact decision of how we're going to do it, but we interface with Hortonworks on a continual basis. >> Yeah. >> We're working to figure out what's the right solution, whether that be an integrated solution of some type, whether that be something that we do through an adjunct to our reference architecture or some reference architecture that they have but we always make sure, again, we are their partner of the year for infrastructure named in Q1, and that's because we work very tightly with Hortonworks and make sure that what we do ties out with them, hits the right applications, workloads and use cases, the big data world, the analytic world and the AI world so that we're tied off, you know, together to make sure that we deliver the right solutions to the end user because that's what matters most is what gets the end users fired up, not what gets Hortonworks or IBM fired up, it's what gets the end users fired up. >> When you're trying to get into the head space of the CIO, and get your message out there, I mean what is it, what would you say is it that keeps them up at night? What are their biggest pain points and then how do you come in and solve them? >> I'd say the number one pain point for most CIOs is application delivery, okay? Whether that be to the line of business, put it this way, let's take an old workload, okay? Let's take that SAP example, that CIO was under pressure because they were trying, in this case it was a giant retailer who was shipping stuff every night, all over the world. Well guess what? The green undershirts in the wrong size, went to Paducah, Kentucky and then one of the other stores, in Singapore, which needed those green shirts, they ended up with shoes and the reason is, they couldn't run that SAP workload in a couple hours. Now they run it in 30 minutes. It used to take 30 hours. So since they're shipping every night, you're basically missing a cycle, essentially and you're not delivering the right thing from a retail infrastructure perspective to each of their nodes, if you will, to their retail locations. So they care about what do they need to do to deliver to the business the right applications, workloads and use cases on the right timeframe and they can't go down, people get fired for that at the CIO level, right? If something goes down, the CIO is gone and obviously for certain companies that are more in the modern mode, okay? People who are delivering stuff and their primary transactional vehicle is the internet, not retail, not through partners, not through people like IBM, but their primary transactional vehicle is a website, if that website is not resilient, performant and always reliable, then guess what? They are shut down and they're not selling anything to anybody, which is to true if you're Nordstroms, right? Someone can always go into the store and buy something, right, and figure it out? Almost all old retailers have not only a connection to core but they literally have a server and storage in every retail location so if the core goes down, guess what, they can transact. In the era of the internet, you don't do that anymore. Right? If you're shipping only on the internet, you're shipping on the internet so whether it be a new workload, okay? An old workload if you're doing the whole IOT thing. For example, I know a company that I was working with, it's a giant, private mining company. They have those giant, like three story dump trucks you see on the Discovery Channel. Those things cost them a hundred million dollars, so they have five thousand sensors on every dump truck. It's a fricking dump truck but guess what, they got five thousand sensors on there so they can monitor and make sure they take proactive action because if that goes down, whether these be diamond mines or these be Uranium mines or whatever it is, it costs them hundreds of millions of dollars to have a thing go down. That's, if you will, trying to take it out of the traditional, high tech area, which we all talk about, whether it be Apple or Google, or IBM, okay great, now let's put it to some other workload. In this case, this is the use of IOT, in a big data analytics environment with AI based infrastructure, to manage dump trucks. >> I think you're talking about what's called, "digital twins" in a networked environment for materials management, supply chain management and so forth. Are those requirements growing in terms of industrial IOT requirements of that sort and how does that effect the amount of data that needs to be stored, the sophistication of the AI and the stream competing that needs to be provisioned? Can you talk to that? >> The amount of data is growing exponentially. It's growing at yottabytes and zettabytes a year now, not at just exabytes anymore. In fact, everybody on their iPhone or their laptop, I've got a 10GB phone, okay? My laptop, which happens to be a Power Book, is two terabytes of flash, on a laptop. So just imagine how much data's being generated if you're doing in a giant factory, whether you be in the warehouse space, whether you be in healthcare, whether you be in government, whether you be in the financial sector and now all those additional regulations, such as GDPR in Europe and other regulations across the world about what you have to do with your healthcare data, what you have to do with your finance data, the amount of data being stored. And then on top of it, quite honestly, from an AI big data analytics perspective, the more data you have, the more valuable it is, the more you can mine it or the more oil, it's as if the world was just oil, forget the pollution side, let's assume oil didn't cause pollution. Okay, great, then guess what? You would be using oil everywhere and you wouldn't be using solar, you'd be using oil and by the way you need more and more and more, and how much oil you have and how you control that would be the power. That right now is the power of data and if anything it's getting more and more and more. So again, you always have to be able to be resilient with that data, you always have to interact with things, like we do with Hortonworks or other application workloads. Our AI reference architecture is another perfect example of the things you need to do to provide, you know, at the base infrastructure, the right foundation. If you have the wrong foundation to a building, it falls over. Whether it be your house, a hotel, this convention center, if it had the wrong foundation, it falls over. >> Actually to follow the oil analogy just a little bit further, the more of this data you have, the more PII there is and it usually, and the more the workloads need to scale up, especially for things like data masking. >> Right. >> When you have compliance requirements like GDPR, so you want to process the data but you need to mask it first, therefore you need clusters that conceivably are optimized for high volume, highly scalable masking in real time, to drive the downstream app, to feed the downstream applications and to feed the data scientist, you know, data lakes, whatever, and so forth and so on? >> That's why you need things like Incredible Compute which IBM offers with the Power Platform. And why you need storage that, again, can scale up. >> Yeah. >> Can get as big as you need it to be, for example in our reference architecture, we use both what we call Spectrum Scale, which is a big data analytics workload performance engine, it has multiple threaded, multi tasking. In fact one of the largest banks in the world, if you happen to bank with them, your credit card fraud is being done on our stuff, okay? But at the same time we have what's called IBM Cloud Object Storage which is an object store, you want to take every one of those searches for fraud and when they find out that no one stole my MasterCard or the Visa, you still want to put it in there because then you mine it later and see patterns of how people are trying to steal stuff because it's all being done digitally anyway. You want to be able to do that. So you A, want to handle it very quickly and resiliently but then you want to be able to mine it later, as you said, mining the data. >> Or do high value anomaly detection in the moment to be able to tag the more anomalous data that you can then sift through later or maybe in the moment for realtime litigation. >> Well that's highly compute intensive, it's AI intensive and it's highly storage intensive on a performance side and then what happens is you store it all for, lets say, further analysis so you can tell people, "When you get your Am Ex card, do this and they won't steal it." Well the only way to do that, is you use AI on this ocean of data, where you're analyzing all this fraud that has happened, to look at patterns and then you tell me, as a consumer, what to do. Whether it be in the financial business, in this case the credit card business, healthcare, government, manufacturing. One of our resellers actually developed an AI based tool that can scan boxes and cans for faults on an assembly line and actually have sold it to a beer company and to a soda company that instead of people looking at the cans, like you see on the Food Channel, to pull it off, guess what? It's all automatically done. There's no people pulling the can off, "Oh, that can is damaged" and they're looking at it and by the way, sometimes they slip through. Now, using cameras and this AI based infrastructure from IBM, with our storage underneath the hood, they're able to do this. >> Great. Well Eric thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It's always been a lot of fun talking to you. >> Great, well thank you very much. We love being on theCUBE and appreciate it and hope everyone enjoys the DataWorks conference. >> We will have more from DataWorks just after this. (techno beat music)

>> Let me check. (uptempo orchestral music) (uptempo techno music) >> Live, from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we are live here with theCUBE in San Francisco, Moscone West, for Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, with John Troyer co-host, analyst this week. the TechReckoning co-founder. Our next two guests are Ashesh Badani, vice president and general manager of OpenShift Platform and Alex Polvi, CEO of CoreOS, interview of the week because CoreOS now part of Red Hat. Congratulations, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> You're welcome. >> So obviously this is for us, we've been covering both of you guys pretty heavily and we've been commenting very positively around the acquisition of CoreOS. Two great companies that know open-source, pure open-source. You guys got the business model nailed down, these guys got great tech. You bring it together. So the first question is how's everyone doing? How's everyone feeling? And where's the overlap, if any and where's the fix? Explain the true fit of CoreOS. >> I'm going to start Alex, you want to jump in after. We're very excited right, so when we first had interactions with CoreOS, we knew this is going to be a great fit. The conversation we had earlier, both companies delivers in open-source, delivers in the mission center to take us forward regard to Kubernetes, as the container orchestration engine, and then being able to build out value for our customers around it. I think from our perspective, the work that both CoreOS did in advancing the community forward but also the work they've done around automation or their upgrades, management metering, charge back and so on. Being able to bring all those qualities into Red Hat is incredible. So I think the fits been good. It's been three months, I'll let Alex comment some more on that but we've been doing a lot of work from integration perspective around engineering, around product management. At Red Hat Summit this week, we reveal details around some of the converged road maps, which I can talk about some more as well. So we're feeling pretty good about it. >> Alex, your reaction. >> Yes, it's been three months. If you've studied CoreOS at all, you know everything that we do really centers around this concept of automated operations. And so by being part of Red Hat, we're starting to bring that to market in a much bigger and faster way of really accelerating it. The way the acquisition are really successful is either mutually beneficial to both companies and they accelerate the adoption of technology and that's definitely happening. We had the announcement yesterday with Red Hat CoreOS around the Linux distribution. Last week, we did the operator framework. It was very central to the work that we've been doing as part of CoreOS, and then as companies in a lot of ways is being part of Red Hat for three months now. This is what our company would have looked like if we ever just another 10 years along or whatever very similar, we're like a mini Red Hat, and now we're leaped ahead in a big way. >> And you guys done a good work. We've documented on theCUBE many times, and we were in Copenhagen last week. Now covering the operating framework but I want to get your reaction. You guys did a lot of great work on the tech side obviously, you can go into more detail but we've always been saying on theCUBE. If you try to force monetization in these emerging markets, you're optimizing behavior. And this was something that's gone on, we've seen containers. It's been well documented obviously what's happened. It's certainly a beautiful thing. Got Kubernetes now on top working together with that. If as an entrepreneur out there that are building companies. If you try to force the monetization too early, you really thinking differently. You guys stay true to it. Now we've got a good home with Red Hat. Talk about that dynamic because that was something that I know you guys faced at CoreOS and you've managed through it. Tempted probably many times to do something. Talk about the mission that you had, staying true to that and just that dynamic. It's challenging. >> Yeah, as we set out to build a company in general, there are really three operating principles. There is build a great technology to solve our mission which is to secure the internet through automated operations, build a great place to spend their days which is really about the people and the culture and so on. Why are we doing this, and the third was to make it sustainable and by that I mean to build their own money fountains, building out of the middle of our campus. And so by joining Red Hat it's we have a money fountain sitting there. (laughing) It's spewing off a ton of cash flow every single quarter that allows us to continue to do those first two things in perpetuity, and that third one is something every company needs in order to continue to execute towards the mission. And the thing that's so awesome about working with Red Hat is we're very much aligned and compatible. Red Hat's mission isn't exactly the same thing we are working but it's definitely compatible. It's like Apache and GPL are compatible. It's like that type of compatible. >> You both believe in open-source in a big way. Talk about the Red Hat perspectives. Now you got like a kid in a candy store. Openshift made a big bed with Kubernetes. You see now, you have the CoreOS, how has it changed in Red Hat internally? Things moving around actually accelerates the game a bit for you guys, and you're seeing new life being pumped into OpenStack. You're seeing clear line of sight with Kubernetes on the app side. We were just at KubeCon. A lot of people are pretty excited. There's clear lines of sight on what's defacto. What people are going to build around, and also differentiate. >> Right, so I'll start off by saying I really hope our CEO, Jim Whitehurst doesn't see this interview but if it goes off in terms of money factor. I'm currently make budget request. I think I know what's going on. >> Balance sheet, cashless now. It's in the public filings. If I see a fountain of money spewing off the thing, >> The ability to reinvest. >> This is a really good fit. (laughing) The way to say this, they have a great business model. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Some of us will make money, some of us will spend the money. Some of us will spend the money, it will work out well. (laughing) >> It's a great win. It's a great win. It obviously accelerates the plans. The commercialization is already there with Red Hat. This is just a good thing for everybody but the impact of you guys accelerating, just seeing OpenShift. You can boil it down to the impact of Red Hat. What is the impact? >> So in all seriousness, I think the focus for us really has been about there is so much complimentary work that's been going on with the CoreOS team that we're bringing into OpenShift, and to Red Hat in general that accelerates everything that you're seeing. You saw some amazing announcements happen this week with regard to our partnership with Microsoft and getting OpenShift out and Azure, and joint support offering. The work we're doing with IBM to get IBM middleware as well as IBM Cloud Private support integrated with OpenShift. The work that Alex referred to around automation, being able to bring that to our customers. We see all the excitement around that front as well so we want to take all Techtonic work that has been going on at CoreOS, then move that to OpenShift. Carry forward the community that CoreOS built around Container Linux, and actually inject a lot those ideas into that Linux, our flagship technology. Bring that passion and energy to bear as well, and then carry forward a lot of the other projects that they have. For example, the Quake Container Registry, that's extremely popular. Carry that forward, support our customers to use that both stand alone integrated with the OpenShift platform. Other projects like FCB that Alex has been talking about which is the underpinnings of Kubernetes plus running worldwide. So all of those things, we can bring forward, and then all the advancements that were made in place by CoreOS as they're working towards their money fountain, just plug that right into it. >> And just as a point of reference, Brendan Burns flew in yesterday. Microsoft Build is going up so he left their own conference to come down here. >> As did Scar Guthrie, right? >> That's a great testament. This is the testament. They're coming down, really laying down support. This is a real big deal. This is not a fake deal, it's real. >> And so I want to talk a little bit about specifics of the timeline, the road maps. Sometimes with these mergers or acquisitions, it's well the technology will be incorporated at some point, and then it goes away to die and you never see it again. And then the people all leave, and then you ask what was going on. But here, you actually have, I was great. You were talking to me. You have some specific timelines and we'll start to see some of the Techtonics Stack in OpenShift fairly soon. >> Yes, absolutely so the acquisition was announced three months ago and we said at that time that by Red Hat Summit, we'll lay out for you a road map and so we're now starting to do that. We put out release of some materials around some details with regard to how that's coming out. We have detailed sessions going on at Red Hat Summit around the integration plans between Red Hat, OpenShift and CoreOS with a few specific areas with regard to OpenShift. You'll start seeing the earliest versions if you will of the work that's being done. This summer, we'll deliver the full road map to you there by the end of this calendar year. With regard to, for example pieces like the Quake Container Registry that's being made available and being sold now as we speak. Customers can go get that, and we want to make sure no customer is left behind. Right, that's a principle we put out. And with regard to supporting any existing customers on Techtonic or the Container Linux space, we're doing that as we're working to integrate them into the Red Hat portfolio. Can you talk a little bit about the decision for Red Hat's atomic coast and Container Linux? Now re-named again, CoreOS. That was one of the seminal inventions that you all made as you started the company. I think it had some brilliant ideas again about security and the operational aspects but can you talk about some of those technologies and the decisions made there? >> Yeah, like I said, the acquisition of CoreOS Red Hat was about saying look what can we take that CoreOS has been doing to accelerate both work and community but also what could be doing to deliver this technology to customers. So the goal was we'll take all the atomic and the word that's been going on there have that be superseded by the work that's coming out of CoreOS Container Linux carry the community forward. Release a version of that called Red Hat CoreOS and in its initial form make that actually an underlying environment to run OpenShift in. Okay so for customers who want the automation that Alex talked about earlier. They made that available both at the underlying platform. Make it available in OpenShift platform itself via the work that's come from Techtonic, and then ultimately, Alex will talk about this some more through operators. So trusted operations from ISP or third party software that would run on the platform. All right so now if you will, we'll have full stack automation all the way through. OpenShift also support Red Hat Linux, a traditional environment for the thousands of customers that we have globally. Over a period of time, you should expect to see much of the work that's going on Red Hat CoreOS find its way into it as well. So I think this just benefits all around for us both in the near term as well as long. >> And Red Hat Container certification, where does that fit into all this? >> Yeah, a great question, so what we announced maybe was, actually was two years ago was a Container certification program. Last year, we spent some time talking about the health of those containers, and being able to provide that to customers. And this year, we're talking about trusted operations around those containers. That carries forward, we've got hundreds of ISPs that have built certified containers around it, and now with the operator framework, we've had, I think it's four ISPs demonstrating previews of their operators working with our platform as well as 60 more that are committed to building ISP operators that will be certified again. >> So people are certified in general, pretty much. I think we're very excited. The fact that we went to KubeCon last week, announced that the operating framework have been based on the ideas that the CoreOS team has been working on for at least two years. Making that available to the community and then saying for the ISPs that want a path to market. Going back to the money fountain again for the ISP that want to pass through market which is pretty much all of them. We also have the ability to do that so give them an opportunity to make sure that as wide as possible some adoption of the software at the same time help with commercialization. >> Can you guys share your definition of operator because I saw the announcement but we we're on a broader definition when we see the DevOps movement going the next level. It's all about automation and security, you mentioned that admin roles are being automated in a way to see more of an operator function within enterprise and emerging service providers. So the role operator now takes on two meanings. It's a software developer. It also is a network operator, it's also a service, so what is that, how do you guys view that role because if this continues, you're going to have automation. More administrator is going to be self healing, all this stuff is going to go on. Potentially operations is now the developers and IT all blurring together. How do you guys define the word operator in the future state? >> Well I know the scenario of great interest to you. >> So operator is the term for the piece of software that implements the automated operations. And so automated operations, what is that? Well that's what sets apart, the way I think about it is what sets apart a cloud provider verses a hosting provider. It's a set of software that really runs the thing for you and so if we're going to get into specific Kubernetes lingo, it would be an application specific controller. That's a piece of software that's implements the automated operations. And automated operation is a software that gives you that simplicity of cloud. It's at the core of a database as a service. It's both hosting but also automated operations. Those two things together make up a cloud service and that software piece is what we're decoupling from the hosting providers for the first time and allowing any open-source project or ISP brings the simplicity of cloud but in any environment. And that's what the operator is a piece of software that actually goes and implements that. >> So a microservices framework, this fits in pretty nicely. How do you see obviously? >> Microservices, there's all these terms. Microservice is more of an architecture than anything but it's saying look, there's these basic things that every operations team has to go and do. You have to go and install something, you have to upgrade it, you have to back it up, when it crashes in the middle of the night, get it going again. A lot of these things, the best practices for how you do them are all common. There's no ingenuity in it. And for those things, we can now because of Kubernetes write software that just automates it, and this was not possible five years ago. You couldn't write those software. There were things like configuration management systems and stuff like that that would allow companies to build their own custom versions of this. But to build a generic piece of software that knows how to run application like Prometheus or a database or so on. It wasn't possible to write that and that's what the first four or five years of CoreOS was is making it possible, that's why you saw all these mat and new open-source projects being built. But once it was possible it was like let's start leveraging that. You saw the first operator come out about a year ago, and I think it was our ATD operator was the first one, and we started talking about this as a concept. And now we're releasing operator framework which is from all the learnings of building the first couple. We now made a generic, so anybody can go and do it, and as part of Red Hat, we're now bringing it to the whole ISP ecosystem. So the whole plan to make automated operations ubiquitous is still well underway. >> I'd love to extend that conversation though to the operator, the person. >> Right. I think you and your team brought the perspective of the operational excellence right to the table. A lot of cloud has been driven by the role of developer and DevOps but I've always felt like well wait a minute operators the people who use to be known as IT insisted they had a lot to bring to the table too about security and about keeping things running, and about compliance and about all that good stuff. So can you talk a little bit as you see the community emerging, and as you see all these folks here. How do you talk to people who want to understand what their role is going to be with all this automation in keeping the clouds running? >> Computers use to be people too. (laughing) But we're not going to completely automate away everything because there's still parts of this wildly complex system that justifies whole conferences of thousands of people that require a whole lot of human ingenuity. What we're doing is saying let's not like do the part that is the fire drill in the middle of the might that keeps you from making forward progress. The typical role of an operations person today is just fighting fires of mundane things that don't actually add a lot of value to the business. In fact, this guy is difficult because you only get brought up when things are on fire. You never get an praise when things are going well. And so what we want to do is help the operations folks put out those fires like the security updates. Let's just roll those out automatically. The way you do those across all organizations does not need to be special and unique but they're really critical to do right. >> Well it's just automate that stuff away and let the operations team focus on moving the business forward. The parts that require the human spirit to actually go and do, and if we get to a point where a CEO of a company is like, wow, I can not come up with a new vision for this imitative 'cause my operations team are just so fast at influencing them. Then we have to start worrying about operations people's job but I don't see that happening for a very long time. >> And no one is going to be sitting around twiddling their thumbs either. >> Let me just extend that point a little bit. The whole point of operators is to encapsulate human knowledge that ISPs have and bring that in the platform and automate it. So the challenge that we've had is an operations person is required to know a lot about a lot. So the question then really is how can we at least take some of what's already known by people and be able to replicate that and that allows for every one to move forward. I think that's just forward-- >> Well, there's a bigger picture beyond that, so I agree but there is also scale. With cloud, you have scale issues. So with scale automation is a beautiful thing 'cause the fire has also grown exponentially too so you can't be operating like this. Scale matters, super. >> The reason that this stuff was invented at Google initially was not because of Google's high career per second. Is that they were, to build the application they're building required so many servers that you couldn't hire enough operations people without writing software to automate it. So they were forced to custom design the system because they had so many servers to run to build the software that they wanted to build. And other companies are just now getting to that point because every company is going through a digital transformation. They have to have thousands of servers just to run their applications. There's no way you're just going to hire the operations staff to go and do it all by hand. You have to write software to turn the operations people into mech warriors of running servers. You need to wrap them in automation in order to scale that. >> At KubeCon, she made a comment that all those operations folks at Google are software developers. >> Brand engineers. >> Brand engineering, so they're not Ops guys just pushing buttons and provisioning gear and what not. They're actually writing code. You bring up the Google piece, the other piece that we heard at KubeCon. We hear this consistently that this is now a new way to do software development. So when a former Googler went to work for another company, left Google. She went in and she said, "Oh my God, you guys don't do. "You don't use board?" To her, she's like how do you write software? So she was like young and went out in the real world and was like wait a minute, you don't do this? So this is a new model in software development at scale with these new capabilities. >> I think so and I think what's really important is the work we're doing with regards to an ecosystem perspective to help folks. So one of the top things I hear from customers all the time is this sounds fantastic. Everyone's talking about DevOps or microservices or wanting to run Kubernetes at scale. Do I have the skills? Can I keep up with the change that's in place and how do I continue going forward around that? So we announced at Red Hat Summit Managed offerings from let's say Atos and DXC where you've got goals to integrate us helping folks, or companies like Extension T systems. The CEO came and spoke today about the work we're doing with them to help connected cars, and those applications be rolled out quick and fast. I think it's going to take a village to get us to where we want to because the rate of change is so fast around all of these areas and it's not slowing down that we'll have to ensure there's more automation and then there's more enablement that's going on for our customers. >> So some clarity, can you guys comment on your reaction to obviously we've seen OpenStack has done over the years and now with well Containers, now Kubernetes. You seeing at least two ecosystems clearly identified. Application developers, cloud native and then I would call under the hood infrastructure, you got OpenStack. Almost it clarifies where people can actually focus on real problems that the Kubernetes needs. So how has the Container, maturation of Containers with Kubernetes clarified the role of the community? If this continues with automation, you can almost argue that the clarity happens everywhere. Can you comment on how you see that happening? Is it happening or is it just observation that's misguided? >> I think we're getting better with regard to fit for a purpose or fit for use case. All right, so if you start thinking about the earliest days of OpenStack. OpenStack is going to be AWS in a box, and then you realize well that's not a practical way of thinking about what a community can do a build at scale. And so when you start thinking about a Word appropriate use case for this. Now you start betting if you will, a set of scales, you set expectations around how to make that successful. I think we'll go through the same if we haven't already or even going through it with regard to Kubernetes. So not every company in the world can run Managed World call. DYI Kubernetes, don't many companies will start with that. And so the question is how do we get to the point where there's balance around it and then be able to take advantage of the work? For example, companies like Red Hat work for us was doing to help accelerate that path 'cause to the point Alex was trying to make is the value for them being able to keep up with the core release of Kubernetes? And every time a bug shows up to go off and be able to fix and patch it, and watch that or is the value building the next set of applications set on top of platforms. >> That's great, well congratulations guys. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate the insight. Congratulations on the three months into Red Hat. Good fit, and enjoy the rest of the show. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks. >> Live from Red Hat Summit, it's theCUBE's coverage here of Red Hat and all the innovation going on out in the open. We're here in the middle of, we open the floor with Moscone West with live coverage. Stay with us for more after this short break. (uptempo techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Pentaho World 2017. Brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. (upbeat techno music) (coughs) >> Welcome to Day Two of theCUBE's live coverage of Pentaho World, brought to you by Hitachi Vantara. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Dave Vellante. We're joined by Robert Walsh. He is the Technical Director Enterprise Business Intelligence at ZeniMax. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you, good morning. >> Good to see ya. >> I should say congratulations is in order (laughs) because you're company, ZeniMax, has been awarded the Pentaho Excellence Award for the Big Data category. I want to talk about the award, but first tell us a little bit about ZeniMax. >> Sure, so the company itself, so most people know us by the games versus the company corporate name. We make a lot of games. We're the third biggest company for gaming in America. And we make a lot of games such as Quake, Fallout, Skyrim, Doom. We have game launching this week called Wolfenstein. And so, most people know us by the games versus the corporate entity which is ZeniMax Media. >> Okay, okay. And as you said, you're the third largest gaming company in the country. So, tell us what you do there. >> So, myself and my team, we are primarily responsible for the ingestion and the evaluation of all the data from the organization. That includes really two main buckets. So, very simplistically we have the business world. So, the traditional money, users, then the graphics, people, sales. And on the other side we have the game. That's where a lot of people see the fun in what we do, such as what people are doing in the game, where in the game they're doing it, and why they're doing it. So, get a lot of data on gameplay behavior based on our playerbase. And we try and fuse those two together for the single viewer or customer. >> And that data comes from is it the console? Does it come from the ... What's the data flow? >> Yeah, so we actually support many different platforms. So, we have games on the console. So, Microsoft, Sony, PlayStation, Xbox, as well as the PC platform. Mac's for example, Android, and iOS. We support all platforms. So, the big challenge that we have is trying to unify that ingestion of data across all these different platforms in a unified way to facilitate downstream the reporting that we do as a company. >> Okay, so who ... When it says you're playing the game on a Microsoft console, whose data is that? Is it the user's data? Is it Microsoft's data? Is it ZeniMax's data? >> I see. So, many games that we actually release have a service act component. Most of our games are actually an online world. So, if you disconnect today people are still playing in that world. It never ends. So, in that situation, we have all the servers that people connect to from their desktop, from their console. Not all but most data we generate for the game comes from the servers that people connect to. We own those. >> Dave: Oh, okay. >> Which simplifies greatly getting that data from the people. >> Dave: So, it's your data? >> Exactly. >> What is the data telling you these days? >> Oh, wow, depends on the game. I think people realize what people do in games, what games have become. So, we have one game right now called Elder Scrolls Online, and this year we released the ability to buy in-game homes. And you can buy furniture for your in-game homes. So, you can furnish them. People can come and visit. And you can buy items, and weapons, and pets, and skins. And what's really interesting is part of the reason why we exist is to look at patterns and trends based on people interact with that environment. So for example, we'll see America playerbase buy very different items compared to say the European playerbase, based on social differences. And so, that helps immensely for the people who continuously develop the game to add items and features that people want to see and want to leverage. >> That is fascinating that Americans and Europeans are buying different furniture for their online homes. So, just give us some examples of the difference that you're seeing between these two groups. >> So, it's not just the homes, it applies to everything that they purchase as well. It's quite interesting. So, when it comes to the Americans versus Europeans for example what we find is that Europeans prefer much more cosmetic, passive experiences. Whereas the Americans are much things that stand out, things that are ... I'm trying to avoid stereotypes right now. >> Right exactly. >> It is what it is. >> Americans like ostentatious stuff. >> Robert: Exactly. >> We get it. >> Europeans are a bit more passive in that regard. And so, we do see that. >> Rebecca: Understated maybe. >> Thank you, that's a much better way of putting it. But games often have to be tweaked based on the environment. A different way of looking at it is a lot of companies in career in Asia all of these games in the West and they will have to tweak the game completely before it releases in these environments. Because players will behave differently and expect different things. And these games have become global. We have people playing all over the world all at the same time. So, how do you facilitate it? How do you support these different users with different needs in this one environment? Again, that's why BI has grown substantially in the gaming industry in the past five, ten years. >> Can you talk about the evolution of how you've been able to interact and essentially affect the user behavior or response to that behavior. You mentioned BI. So, you know, go back ten years it was very reactive. Not a lot of real time stuff going on. Are you now in the position to effect the behavior in real time, in a positive way? >> We're very close to that. We're not quite there yet. So yes, that's a very good point. So, five, ten years ago most games were traditional boxes. You makes a game, you get a box, Walmart or Gamestop, and then you're finished. The relationship with the customer ends. Now, we have this concept that's used often is games as a service. We provide an online environment, a service around a game, and people will play those games for weeks, months, if not years. And so, the shift as well as from a BI tech standpoint is one item where we've been able to streamline the ingest process. So, we're not real time but we can be hourly. Which is pretty responsive. But also, the fact that these games have become these online environments has enabled us to get this information. Five years ago, when the game was in a box, on the shelf, there was no connective tissue between us and them to interact and facilitate. With the games now being online, we can leverage BI. We can be more real time. We can respond quicker. But it's also due to the fact that now games themselves have changed to facilitate that interaction. >> Can you, Robert, paint a picture of the data pipeline? We started there with sort of the different devices. And you're bringing those in as sort of a blender. But take us through the data pipeline and how you're ultimately embedding or operationalizing those analytics. >> Sure. So, the game theater, the game and the business information, game theater is most likely 90, 95% of our total data footprint. We generate a lot more game information than we do business information. It's just due to how much we can track. We can do so. And so, a lot of these games will generate various game events, game logs that we can ingest into a single data lake. And we can use Amazon S3 for that. But it's not just a game theater. So, we have databases for financial information, account users, and so we will ingest the game events as well as the databases into one single location. At that point, however, it's still very raw. It's still very basic. We enable the analysts to actually interact with that. And they can go in there and get their feet wet but it's still very raw. The next step is really taking that raw information that is disjointed and separated, and unifying that into a single model that they can use in a much more performant way. In that first step, the analysts have the burden of a lot of the ETL work, to manipulate the data, to transform it, to make it useful. Which they can do. They should be doing the analysis, not the ingesting the data. And so, the progression from there into our warehouse is the next step of that pipeline. And so in there, we create these models and structures. And they're often born out of what the analysts are seeing and using in that initial data lake stage. So, they're repeating analysis, if they're doing this on a regular basis, the company wants something that's automated and auditable and productionized, then that's a great use case for promotion into our warehouse. You've got this initial staging layer. We have a warehouse where it's structured information. And we allow the analysts into both of those environments. So, they can pick their poison in respects. Structured data over here, raw and vast over here based on their use case. >> And what are the roles ... Just one more follow up, >> Yeah. >> if I may? Who are the people that are actually doing this work? Building the models, cleaning the data, and shoring data. You've got data scientists. You've got quality engineers. You got data engineers. You got application developers. Can you describe the collaboration between those roles? >> Sure. Yeah, so we as a BI organization we have two main groups. We have our engineering team. That's the one I drive. Then we have reporting, and that's a team. Now, we are really one single unit. We work as a team but we separate those two functions. And so, in my organization we have two main groups. We have our big data team which is doing that initial ingestion. Now, we ingest billions of troves of data a day. Terabytes a data a day. And so, we have a team just dedicated to ingestion, standardization, and exposing that first stage. Then we have our second team who are the warehouse engineers, who are actually here today somewhere. And they're the ones who are doing the modeling, the structuring. I mean the data modeling, making the data usable and promoting that into the warehouse. On the reporting team, basically we are there to support them. We provide these tool sets to engage and let them do their work. And so, in that team they have a very split of people do a lot of report development, visualization, data science. A lot of the individuals there will do all those three, two of the three, one of the three. But they do also have segmentation across your day to day reporting which has to function as well as the more deep analysis for data science or predictive analysis. >> And that data warehouse is on-prem? Is it in the cloud? >> Good question. Everything that I talked about is all in the cloud. About a year and a half, two years ago, we made the leap into the cloud. We drunk the Kool-Aid. As of Q2 next year at the very latest, we'll be 100% cloud. >> And the database infrastructure is Amazon? >> Correct. We use Amazon for all the BI platforms. >> Redshift or is it... >> Robert: Yes. >> Yeah, okay. >> That's where actually I want to go because you were talking about the architecture. So, I know you've mentioned Amazon Redshift. Cloudera is another one of your solutions provider. And of course, we're here in Pentaho World, Pentaho. You've described Pentaho as the glue. Can you expand on that a little bit? >> Absolutely. So, I've been talking about these two environments, these two worlds data lake to data warehouse. They're both are different in how they're developed, but it's really a single pipeline, as you said. And so, how do we get data from this raw form into this modeled structure? And that's where Pentaho comes into play. That's the glue. If the glue between these two environments, while they're conceptually very different they provide a singular purpose. But we need a way to unify that pipeline. And so, Pentaho we use very heavily to take this raw information, to transform it, ingest it, and model it into Redshift. And we can automate, we can schedule, we can provide error handling. And so it gives us the framework. And it's self-documenting to be able to track and understand from A to B, from raw to structured how we do that. And again, Pentaho is allowing us to make that transition. >> Pentaho 8.0 just came out yesterday. >> Hmm, it did? >> What are you most excited about there? Do you see any changes? We keep hearing a lot about the ability to scale with Pentaho World. >> Exactly. So, there's three things that really appeal to me actually on 8.0. So, things that we're missing that they've actually filled in with this release. So firstly, we on the streaming component from earlier the real time piece we were missing, we're looking at using Kafka and queuing for a lot of our ingestion purposes. And Pentaho in releasing this new version the mechanism to connect to that environment. That was good timing. We need that. Also too, get into more critical detail, the logs that we ingest, the data that we handle we use Avro and Parquet. When we can. We use JSON, Avro, and Parquet. Pentaho can handle JSON today. Avro, Parquet are coming in 8.0. And then lastly, to your point you made as well is where they're going with their system, they want to go into streaming, into all this information. It's very large and it has to go big. And so, they're adding, again, the ability to add worker nodes and scale horizontally their environment. And that's really a requirement before these other things can come into play. So, those are the things we're looking for. Our data lake can scale on demand. Our Redshift environment can scale on demand. Pentaho has not been able to but with this release they should be able to. And that was something that we've been hoping for for quite some time. >> I wonder if I can get your opinion on something. A little futures-oriented. You have a choice as an organization. You could just take roll your own opensource, best of breed opensource tools, and slog through that. And if you're an internet giant or a huge bank, you can do that. >> Robert: Right. >> You can take tooling like Pentaho which is end to end data pipeline, and this dramatically simplifies things. A lot of the cloud guys, Amazon, Microsoft, I guess to a certain extent Google, they're sort of picking off pieces of the value chain. And they're trying to come up with as a service fully-integrated pipeline. Maybe not best of breed but convenient. How do you see that shaking out generally? And then specifically, is that a challenge for Pentaho from your standpoint? >> So, you're right. That why they're trying to fill these gaps in their environment. To what Pentaho does and what they're offering, there's no comparison right now. They're not there yet. They're a long way away. >> Dave: You're saying the cloud guys are not there. >> No way. >> Pentaho is just so much more functional. >> Robert: They're not close. >> Okay. >> So, that's the first step. However, though what I've been finding in the cloud, there's lots of benefits from the ease of deployment, the scaling. You use a lot of dev ops support, DBA support. But the tools that they offer right now feel pretty bare bones. They're very generic. They have a place but they're not designed for singular purpose. Redshift is the only real piece of the pipeline that is a true Amazon product, but that came from a company called Power Excel ten years ago. They licensed that from a separate company. >> Dave: What a deal that was for Amazon! (Rebecca and Dave laugh) >> Exactly. And so, we like it because of the functionality Power Excel put in many year ago. Now, they've developed upon that. And it made it easier to deploy. But that's the core reason behind it. Now, we use for our big data environment, we use Data Breaks. Data Breaks is a cloud solution. They deploy into Amazon. And so, what I've been finding more and more is companies that are specialized in application or function who have their product support cloud deployment, is to me where it's a sweet middle ground. So, Pentaho is also talking about next year looking at Amazon deployment solutioning for their tool set. So, to me it's not really about going all Amazon. Oh, let's use all Amazon products. They're cheap and cheerful. We can make it work. We can hire ten engineers and hack out a solution. I think what's more applicable is people like Pentaho, whatever people in the industry who have the expertise and are specialized in that function who can allow their products to be deployed in that environment and leverage the Amazon advantages, the Elastic Compute, storage model, the deployment methodology. That is where I see the sweet spot. So, if Pentaho can get to that point, for me that's much more appealing than looking at Amazon trying to build out some things to replace Pentaho x years down the line. >> So, their challenge, if I can summarize, they've got to stay functionally ahead. Which they're way ahead now. They got to maintain that lead. They have to curate best of breed like Spark, for example, from Databricks. >> Right. >> Whatever's next and curate that in a way that is easy to integrate. And then look at the cloud's infrastructure. >> Right. Over the years, these companies that have been looking at ways to deploy into a data center easily and efficiently. Now, the cloud is the next option. How do they support and implement into the cloud in a way where we can leverage their tool set but in a way where we can leverage the cloud ecosystem. And that's the gap. And I think that's what we look for in companies today. And Pentaho is moving towards that. >> And so, that's a lot of good advice for Pentaho? >> I think so. I hope so. Yeah. If they do that, we'll be happy. So, we'll definitely take that. >> Is it Pen-ta-ho or Pent-a-ho? >> You've been saying Pent-a-ho with your British accent! But it is Pen-ta-ho. (laughter) Thank you. >> Dave: Cheap and cheerful, I love it. >> Rebecca: I know -- >> Bless your cotton socks! >> Yes. >> I've had it-- >> Dave: Cord and Bennett. >> Rebecca: Man, okay. Well, thank you so much, Robert. It's been a lot of fun talking to you. >> You're very welcome. >> We will have more from Pen-ta-ho World (laughter) brought to you by Hitachi Vantara just after this. (upbeat techno music)