(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. It's the CUBE's live coverage from Monaco for the Monaco Crypto Summit. I'm John Furrier, host of the CUBE. We're getting all the action here as the world goes decentralization as assets from the physical world connect with virtual to hybrid steady state. But Mattia Baldassarre's here, founder and CEO of Epico Play. Welcome to the CUBE! >> Thank you, John >> So I love to have you on. I love the Italian accent. Get a little European going here. We're from Silicon valley, where you're in Italy. Great to have you on. So Epico Play, what is it? >> So Epico Play is an innovative startup with the aim to digitalize the sport industry, to support clubs, federation leagues, to move into the digital era. Right? So we build up a technology. It is, actually two heads. One is a kind of white label technology for, you know, small, bigger club and then a B2C platform api-play.com where you actually can open up your own engaging channel straight away and allow clubs to have a digital infrastructure, to engage directly with their community, to monetize it and to make together some let's say two way engagement experience. Because we are used today, to just, you know a communication usually by this brand that has one way. So I tell you something, here is something, you know we create something together between the brand that is a club and the community itself. So it's kind of our ability to lump these experiences. >> Yeah. So I saw something on YouTube a day and a half ago. Roma soccer team introduced a new player and the fans were going crazy. They had a little light show. He comes out with the Big Digital Bits logo on this jersey. I forgot who the player was. You know, it was a young player. >> Dybala. Paulo Dybala. >> Yes. And the fans packed the place. And I know he's got the sponsorship with Digital Bits. So Digital Bits is sponsoring that club, but then the underlying technology. Are you over the top? Are you building apps on top of digital bits? >> Yes. I mean, that's also one of the, you know touching point of our partnership. Digital Bits today we announce our partnership with them, with Digital Bits Foundation. They're going to become, you know, our blockchain partner. They will support us on offering the token service to clubs. And for sure, we are going to, we are aiming to create our own token for Epico Play Platform which will always be the substances of the Digital Bits blockchain. And a second step will be for sure optimizing the relationship of Digital Bits, you know, also around the world. >> Yeah. >> But on ourself already has, you know a big pipeline of clubs onboarding. And I was telling before in the in the Summit is not just, we don't want just the top clubs. Right? That's easy. They have money. We want to help, you know, smaller club to go into this new era. Otherwise they're going to lose a lot of audience. They're going to lose a lot of revenue. >> It's interesting Mattia. I was telling earlier guests we had on about the meta version, sports. Sports clubs have been savvy around data for a decade, over a decade, all the big clubs that have TV contracts, certainly. They know how to manage, use technology to manage the team. They have technology to manage the stadiums and they have technology to manage the fan experience which was normally ticketing and, you know, I got a beer, I go to my seat, get stuff delivered, get a shirt, you know spot pricing, being smart. >> Sure. >> So with data. So, okay. That's good. That's a nice foundation. Now with the digital side of things and NFTs you've got assets and you've got a whole other level of interaction on the assets, the player, the brand the fan who can be a player and a fan. And so like now the multiple dimensions of new use cases. >> Completely. It is I believe it is, is like the game A New Hero, you know? So the touching point are much more our, let's say the Gen-Z, you know, the teenager, like they need more, much more input during the week. You know, for our, for my generation going to the stadium was the most exciting thing. So we were waiting for Sunday to go to the stadium, right? Now, the kids, they have so much information that if you don't engage them through this kind of fun engagement during the week, they will play PlayStation, you know or play whatever gaming on Sunday instead of watching the live match. >> But so to get that example let's stay with that for a second. You use your personal experience. Because I felt the same way for sports. If they could reach you during the week you'd be engaging with them. >> Exactly. You collect more data. >> You were ready. >> Exactly, you collect more data and mostly you have a higher quality of the data itself because you see how they behave. You see what they like, not just on the offline pitch. Right? But you can track everything here. So it's a, I think the big step that we bringing also into, into sports >> You know, I did a talk over 15 years ago at MIT and I said, web one was about information. Web two is about connections. And web three is about relationships. Okay, not just who you, you know connected to with devices, relationships. And guess what? Community, NFTs, self-expression, engagement, and the engagement patterns are changing as well. You're talking about things that aren't around right now. >> Yeah, exactly. >> This is new, new benefits. >> It's a new benefit, completely >> New benefits of everybody >> Completely for everybody. And especially, you know, actions that clubs need to do if they want to evolve, you know, that's I think really crucial for them. >> Great. You're building on Digital Bits. Where are you with the company? Talk about the origination story. How did it get started? Did you wake up one day and the apple fell on your head and you said, well, what happened? What's going on? >> So the story is this one, I worked in media, into sport media industry with a big group in London for a long time. And then I was also the CEO of a sport, OTT broadcaster. It is international, but I was taking care of Italy. While I was getting along with clubs, federation leagues, I said, there is a missing here. Right? They still not consider this as a main aspect. They always scared of investment or investing money in this. Right? So that's why we say, okay, you know what when I quit my job, we say, okay, I want, I'm going to... >> You just quit your job. Say I'm going to quit. >> Okay, no, I finished the season. Then I say, okay, done. Now I'm, I'm already thinking about what's going on. And then I open Epico Play. We also, with these mission say, okay there is an opportunity. There is a need in the market. And again, John, I'm not talking about just the top three teams of each league. I'm talking about all the teams. >> All the teams. >> All the teams, professional clubs, being basketball and volleyball. You know, all the sports need these changes. >> Yeah, some are bigger than others, but it's the power law. They all have communities. >> But if you aggregate all the small and medium teams, you know, right, You reach 1.5 billion fans. Right. So huge amount of data. And again, with our technology, we are able to give this environment without an investment from the club. So they are more open. They feel more like comfortable. And we are going to make money together with that. >> And they contribute the assets. So they're partner. >> Yeah. We are completely partner. So we build ecosystem, we then, for them and we make money together. >> It's a joint venture kind of, not formally but it's a win-win. >> It's a win. >> Not a lot of money out of pocket. They put a little bit probably to integrate in, but not big numbers. >> Not a lot of impact on the cash flow because in their mind is still for sure. The pitch, not the field is the most important thing. >> Yes. >> So that's why, okay, then we will help them. Okay. Don't worry. >> It's all upside for them. Do they have a rev share on things too? >> Yes. Exactly. >> So they do a business deal on their side? >> Yes >> So they're happy. They have the option for the future and... >> We build up everything for the future. Then we keep starting and keep monetizing together. So into different ways. >> So can you get some good tickets when the CUBE is in town? >> Whenever you want John. (laughs) >> Of course. What's next for you? Take us through your fundraising. You're building your team. Take a minute to put a plug in for your company. >> We actually, at the end, like seen around 1.2 million. Between, you know, an investment group that we're working with. This other venue, you know, one big TECHO company and some angel, strategic angel investor. Now we are also closing another bridge round to go then in 2023 to make a big round, you know, and scale internationally. So already, now we are approaching five to seven countries new countries, especially, you know, also going to South America where there is a massive adoption of this kind of opportunity, especially in terms of data. Then straight after we're going to, you know, make this fundraising and expand our business. Be really aggressive. As I told you before on the fact that, okay you know what we do the investment. Just let's build us your ecosystem together. >> Yes. >> And then we see, you know can be a different element between eventually other competitors will come out after. >> Okay. Great venture. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for coming on the CUBE. We'll see you at the yacht club later today. >> Thank you so much. >> The big gala event. Stay right there. We're wrapping it up here. I'm John for you here live in Monaco with the CUBE, Monaco Crypto Summit. All the next generation, new wave of businesses being refactored with new technologies, bring in value. That's what decentralization is, web three all coming together. Of course the Cube's covering it like a blanket. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back in more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>from around the >>globe. It's the >>cube with coverage of Kublai >>Khan and Cloud Native Con Europe 2021 >>virtual brought to >>you by red hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. Hello, welcome back to the cubes coverage of coupon 21 Cloud Native Con 21 Virtual, I'm John Ferrier Host of the Cube. We're here with a great gas to break down one of the hottest trends going on in the industry and certainly around cloud native as this new modern architecture is evolving so fast. Richard Hartman, director of community at Griffon, a lab's involved with Prometheus as well um, expert and fun to have on and also is going to share a lot here. Richard, thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you >>know, we were chatting before we came on camera about the human's ability to to handle all this new shift uh and the and the future of observe ability is what everyone has been talking about. But you know, some say the reserve abilities, just network management was just different, you know, scale Okay, I can buy that, but it's got a lot more than that. It involves data involves a new architecture, new levels of scale that cloud native has brought to the table that everyone is agreeing on. It scales their new capabilities, thus setting up new architectures, new expectations and new experiences are all happening. Take us through the future of observe ability. >>Mhm. Yes, so um 11 of the things which many people find when they onboard themselves onto the cloud native space is um you can scale along different and new axis, which you couldn't scale along before, uh which is great. Of course, it enables growth, it enables different operating models, it enables you to choose different or more modern engineering trade offs, like the underlying problems are still the same, but you just slice and dice your problems and compartmentalize your services differently. But the problem is um it becomes more spread out and the more classic tooling tends to be built for those more classic um setups and architectures as your architecture becomes more malleable and as you can can choose and pick how to grow it along with which access a lot more directly and you have to um that limits the ability of the humans actually operating that system to understand what is truly going on. Um Obviously everyone is is fully fully all in on A. I. M. L. And all those things. But one of the dirty secrets is you will keep needing domain specific experts who know what they're doing and what that thing should look like, what should be working hard to be working. But enable those people to actually to actually understand the current state of the system and compare this to the desired state of the system. Is highly nontrivial in particular, once you have not machine lifetimes of month or years which he had before, which came down to two sometimes hours and when you go to Microsoft to surveillance and such sometimes even into sub seconds. So a lot of this is about enabling this, this this higher volume of data, this higher scale of data, this higher cardinality of what what you actually attach as metadata on your data and then still be able to carry all this and makes sense of it at scale and at speed because if you just toss it into a data lake and do better analysis like half a day later no one cares about it anymore. It needs to be life it needs or at least the largest part of it needs to be life. You need to be able to alert right now if something is imminently customer facing. >>Well, that's awesome. I love totally agree this new observe ability horizontally scalable, more surface area, more axes, as you point out, changes the data equation on the automation plays a big role in mention machine learning and ai great, great grounds for that. I gotta ask you just well before we move on to the next topic around this is that the most people that come from the old world with the tooling and come from that old school vendor mentality or old soup architecture, old school architecture tend to kind of throw stones at the future and say, well the economics are all wrong and the performance metrics. So I want to ask you so I assume that we believe we do believe because assume that's going to happen. What is the economic picture? What's the impact that people are missing? When you look at the benefits of what this system is going to enable the impact? Specifically whether it's economics, productivity, efficient code, what are some of the things that maybe the VCS or other people in the naysayers side? Old school will, will throw stones at what's the, what's the big upside here? >>Mhm. So this will not be true for everyone and there will still be certain situations where it makes sense to choose different sets of of trade offs, but most everyone will be moving into the cloud for for convenience and speed reasons. And I'm deliberately not saying cost reasons. Um the reason being um usually or in the past you had simply different standard service delineations and all of the proserve, the consulting your hiring pool was all aligned with this old type of service delineation, which used to be a physical machine or a service or maybe even a service and you had a hot standby or something. If we, if we got like really a hugely respect from the same things still need to operate under laying what you do. But as we grow as an industry, more of more of this is commoditized and same as we commoditize service and storage network. We commoditized actually running off that machine and with service and such go even further. Um so it's not so much about about this fundamentally changing how it's built. It's just that a larger or a previously thing which was part of your value at and of what you did in your core is now just off the shelf infrastructure which you just by as much as you need again at certain scales and for certain specific use cases, this will not be true for the foreseeable future, but most everyone um will be moving there simply because where they actually add value and the people they can hire for and who are interested in that type of problem. I just mean that it's a lot more more sensical to to choose this different delineation but it's not cheaper >>and the commoditization and disintermediation is definitely happening, totally agree. And the complexity that's gonna be abstracted away with software is novell and it's also systematic. There's just it's new and there's some systems involved, so great insight there. I totally agree with you. The disruption is happening majority of almost all areas, so in all verticals and all industries, so so great point. I think this is where I think everyone's so excited and some people are paranoid actually frankly, but we cover that in depth on the Cuban other segments. But great point. We'll get back to what you're where you're spending your time right now. Um You're spending a lot of time on open metrics. What is that enabling take us through that? >>So um the super quick history of Prometheus, of course, we need that for open metrics. Promises was actually created in 2012. Um and the wire format which he used to in the exposition format, which he used to transport metrics into Prometheus is stable since 2014. Um But there is a large problem here. Um It carries the promise his name and a lot of competing projects and a lot of competing vendors of course there are vendors which compete with just the project. Um It's simply refused to to to take anything in which carried the promise his name. Of course, this doesn't align with their food um strategy, which they ran back then. So um together with scenes, the f we decided to just have a new different name for just that wire format for the underlying data model for everything which you need to make one complete exposition or a bunch of expositions towards towards permissions. So that's it at the corn, that's been ongoing since 2000 and 15 16 something. Um But there's also changes on the one hand, there is a super careful, a super super careful um Clean up and backwards compatible cleanup of a few things which the permit this exposition former serious here for didn't get right. But also we enable two features within this and as permitted chose open metrics as its official format. We also uplift committees and varying both heads. Obviously it's easier to get the synchronization. Um Ex employers stand out which is a completely new, at least outside of certain large search companies google. Um Who who used who use ex employers to do something different with with their traces. Um it was in 2017 when they told me that for them searching for traces didn't scale by labels. Uh and at that point I wanted to have both. I wanted to have traces and logs also with the same label set as permitting system. But when they tell you searching doesn't scale like they tell you you better listen. So uh the thing is this you have your index where you store all your data or your where you have the reference to enter your database and you have these label sets and they are super efficient and and quite powerful when compared to more traditional systems but they still carry a cost and that cost becomes non trivial at scale. So instead of storing the same labels for your metrics and your logs and your traces, the idea is to just store an I. D. For your trace which is super lightweight and it's literally just one idea. So your index is super tiny. Um And then you touch this information to your logs to your metrics and in the meantime also two year to year logs. Um So you know already that trace has certain properties because historically you have this needle estate problem. You have endless amounts of traces and you need to figure out what are the useful are they are the judicial and interesting aero state highlight and see some error occurring whatever if that information is already attached to your other signals. That's a lot easier. Of course. You see you're highlighting see bucket and you see a trace ID which is for that high latency bucket. So going into that trace, I already know it is a highlight and see trace for for a service which has a high latency, it has visited that labor. It was running this in that context, blah blah blah blah blah. Same for logs. There is an error. There is an exception, maybe a security breach, what have you and I can jump directly into a trace and I have all this mental context and the most expensive part is the humans. So enabling that human to not need to break mental uh train of thought to just jump directly from all the established state which they already have here in debugging just right into the trace, went back and just see why that thing behave that way. It's super powerful and it's also a lot cheaper to store this on the back and a four year traces which in our case internally we just run at 100% something. We do not throw data way, which means you don't have the super interesting thing. And by the way the trace just doesn't exist for us a good job. And that's the one thing to to from day one this intent to to marry those three pillars more closely. The other thing is by having a true lingua franca. It gave that concept of of of promises compatibility on the wire, its own name and it's its own distinct concept. And that is something which a lot of people simply attached to. So just by having that name, allow the completely different conversation over the last half decade or so and to close >>them close it >>up and to close that point because I come from the network, from the networking space and, and basically I T f r f C s are the currency within the networking space and how you force your vendors to support something, which is why I brought open metrics into the I. D. F. To to give it an official stamp of approval in Rfc number which is currently hopefully successful. Um So all of a sudden you can slip this into your tender and just tell your vendor, ex wife said okay, you need to support this. But I've seen all of a sudden by contract they're bound to to support communities native. So >>I support that Rfc yet or no, is that still coming? >>I, so at the last uh TF meeting, which was virtual, obviously I presented everything to the L. A W G. Um there was very good feedback. Um they want to adopt it as an informational uh I. D. Reason being it is most or it is a documentation of an already widely existed standard. So it gets different bits and pieces in the heather. Um Currently I'm waiting for a few rounds of feedback on specific wording how to make it more clear and such. Um looking >>good. It's looking good. >>Oh yes while presenting it. They actually told me that I have a conference with promises and performance. Well >>that's how you get things done in the old school internet. That's the way it was talking to Vince serving all of my friends and that generation we grew up, I mean I was telling a story on the clubhouse, just random that I grew up in the era. We used to pirate software used to deal software back in the old days. Pre open source. This is how things get done. So I gotta ask you the impact question. The, the deal with open metrics potentially could disrupt all those startups. So what, how does this impact all these stars because everyone is jockeying for land grabbing the observe ability space? Is that just because it's just too many people competing for one spot or do they all have differentiation? What happens to all those observe ability startups that got minted and funded? >>So I have, I think we have to split this into two answers, the first one open metrics and also Prometheus we're trying really hard to standardize what we're doing and to make this reusable as much as we possibly can um simply because premises itself does not have any any profit motivation or anything, it is just a project run by people. Um so we gain by, by users using our stuff and working in the way, which we think is a good way to operate. So anyone who just supports all those open standards, just on boards themselves onto a huge ecosystem of already installed base. And we're talking millions and millions and millions of installations, we don't have hard numbers, but the millions and millions I am certain of and thats installations, not users, so that's several orders of magnitude more. Um, so that that actually enables an ecosystem within which to move as to the second question. It is a super hot topic. So obviously that we see money starts coming in from all right. Um, I don't think that everyone will survive, but that is just how it usually is. There is a lot of of not very differentiated offerings, be the software, be they as a service, be their distributions? Well, you don't really see much much value and not not a lot of, not a lot of much anything in ways of innovation. So this is more about about making it easier to run or or taking that pain away, which obviously makes you open to attack by by all the hyper scale. Of course, they can just do this at a higher scale than you. Um, so unless you actually really in a way in that space and actually shape and lead in that space, at least to some extent, it will probably be relatively hard. That being said. >>Yeah, when you ride, when you ride the big waves like this, I mean, you you got to be on the right side of this. Uh, Pat Gelsinger's when he was that VM Where now is that intel told me on the cube one time. If you're not, you don't get it right on these waves, your driftwood, Right? So, so, you know, and we've seen this movie before, when you start to see the standards bodies like the I E T. F. Start to look at standards. You start to think there's a broader market opportunities, a need for some standards, which is good. It enables more value, right value creation, whether it's out in the open or if it's innovative from a commercialization standpoint, you know, these are good things and then you have everyone who's jockeying around from the land grab incomes, a standard momentum, you gotta be on the right side of these things. We know what we know it's gonna look like. If you're not on the right side of the standard, then your proprietary, >>precisely. >>And so that's the endgame. Okay, well, I really appreciate the impact. Final question. Um, as the world evolved post Covid as cloud Native goes mainstream, the enterprises in the cloud scale are demanding more things. Enterprises are are, you know, they want more stuff than just straight up in the cloud startups, for instance. So you start to see, you know, faster, more agility obviously, uh, with deploying modern apps, when you start getting into enterprise grade scale, you gotta start thinking, you know, this is an engineering and computer science discipline. Coming together, you've got to look at the architecture. What's your future vision of how the next gen programmable infrastructure looks like? >>You mean, as in actually manage those services or limited to observe ability to >>observe ability, role, observe ability. Just you're in the urine. The survivability speaks to the operating system of what's going on, distributed computing you're looking at, you gotta have a good observe ability if you want to deploy services. So, you know, as it evolves and this is not a fringe thing anymore. This is real deal. This observe abilities a key linchpin in the architecture. >>So, um, maybe to approach us from two sides. One of the things which, which, I mean I come from very much non cloud native background. One of the things which tends to be overlooked in cloud native is that not everything is green field. Matter of fact, legacy is the code word for makes actual money. Um, so a lot of brownfield installations, which still make money, which we keep making money and all of those existence, they will not go away anytime soon. And as soon as you go to actually industry trying to uplift themselves to industry that foreign, all those passwords you get a lot more complexity in, in just the availability of systems than just the cloud native scheme. So being able to to actually put all of those data types together and not just have you. Okay, nice. I have my micro service events fully instrumented and if anything happens on the layer below, I'm simply unable to make any any effort on debugging um things like for example, Prometheus course they are so widely adopted enable you to literally, and I did this myself um from the Diesel Genset of your data center over the network down to down to the office. If if someone is in there, if if if your station and your pager is is uh stepped in such to the database to the extra service which is facing your end customers, all of those use the same labels that use the same metadata to actually talk about this. So all of a sudden I can really drill down into my data, not only from you. Okay. I have my microservices, my database. Big deal. No, I can actually go down as deep in my infrastructure as my infrastructure is. And this is especially important for anyone who's from the more traditional enterprise because most of them will for the foreseeable future have tons and tons and tons of those installations and the ability to just marry all this data together no matter where it's coming from. Of course you have this lingual franklin, you have these widely adopted open standards. I think that is one of the main drivers in >>jail. I think you just nailed the hybrid and surprised use case, you know, operation at scale and integrating the systems. So great job Richard, thank you so much for coming on. Richard Hartman, Director of community Griffon A labs. I'm talking, observe ability here on the cube. I'm john for your host covering cube con 21 cognitive content. One virtual. Thanks for watching. Mhm Yeah. Mhm.

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent, 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and, their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas, for AWS, Amazon Web Services, re:Invent, 2018. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, our sixth year covering this event. We've been to all the re:Invents, except for the original one, watched the progress of cloud computing. And it's a lot of new things happening, more compute, more power. We're here with our special guest, RaeJeanne Skillern, who's also known as RJ inside Intel. Vice-President of Data Center Group and the General Manager of the Cloud Service Provider Platform Group at Intel. Good to see you again. >> Nice to see you again. >> The headline on silkenangle dot com right now, "In a blockbuster move, "Amazon jumps into data center with both feet". Which really validates kind of some of the commentary we've been seeing in the queue for many, many years. And our analysts and you guys are involved in the Data Center. Data Center's still going to be a big part of computing. It's not going away. That's your business. >> Yes. >> And the cloud service provider, which is also growing. So, take a minute. >> It is growing, I've been personally covering the public cloud at Intel for a decade. And, when I started I'm not sure I had any concept how big this was going to be. And the one thing that I'm positive about, is we're just still at the beginning. Because every use case you see, all the development, all the IOT, all the business transformation, we're just starting, right. This is a good place to be, but there's more coming. And, if I look at just 2018, I'm a little competitive at work, but we were to proud to announce earlier this year, the end of the summer, that the cloud is now 43% of the Data Center Group's revenue. So, coming from when I started, 10% or something like that little, now to be the number one contributor. And, we, in the first half of the year, had a 43% a year revenue growth. This industry is booming. And I wish I could say it was my hard doing, but I mean, if you come to an event like this, you know why it's growing. >> And the cham is increasing in the total market availability with the cloud, is requiring more and more horsepower. >> Yes. >> You've got IOT Edge, you've got the Data Center, you got the cloud, and software is being written, specifically to take advantage of something. So, huge market opportunity, still. >> Yes. >> What are some of the innovations? Take us through a little bit of your mindset on how you guys are attacking this growth, surface area of the market, starting to see specialized things, general purpose, compute is not going away, storage, networking, still very important. You've got FTGAs out there. I mean, amazing amount of opportunities, with innovations. >> You know, you hit so much of it, and I really agree with some of the comments you made. It started off for us, with silicon technology. But, what a lot of people don't know is, we have core computes, network, storage, FPGAs, purpose built accelerators, and we can create custom aesics for any one of our customers. We also have a unique ability to not only just customize, uniquely, but you talked about the many different use cases from Edge to Data Center, it's because every workload demands a different set of technology capability. If you want true optimization at the TCO, per TCO level. And so that's why it's so important for us to work with customers like Amazon, not just to customize one SKU, but many SKUs. We are, and I was surprised at this number, out of our latest Xeon processor, the Intel Xeon scalable processors, there's actually 54 instances, on just that one CPU generation alone, and 51 of those, are from a custom CPU, that were tailored for unique workloads and instance types. So, that's part of it, but you also talked about the software. And, that's another thing, I think people think Intel's the hardware company. OK, we make hardware, we're a huge software company, thousands of engineers. And, what I love about my job, is I built a team and call them the Cloud Ninjas, but they're software and hardware engineers, that go onsite with customers. They, whether it's performance tuning and optimization, or we are co-creating cloud services. New cloud services, with our customers, that innovation, up and down the stack, that's where real innovation can happen. Two heads together, not just one. (laughs) >> So the cloud is now the number one consumer of your technologies. >> Yes. >> There are a lot of misconceptions early on about the cloud. Everybody thought, okay, the cloud is going to be just one big cloud. It's actually quite diverse. It's global in scale, it's a services business, which has always been sort of fragmented and global, despite Amazon's dominance in infrastructure service. The Data Center itself, the players are kind of consolidating, which is kind of interesting. So, how has cloud affected the way in which you guys look at the market, go to market, everybody else thought everything was going to be standard off the shelf components, in the early days of cloud. >> No. >> Now you're driving towards customization. >> No. >> So what's happening there, what are the big ideas. >> I think we've learned a lot along the way, you're right. One of the things, I mean, these cloud service providers are pushing me off the road map. They want more than we can deliver, so that's where we bring so much at hand to do about it. But, I'd say while a lot of big players are getting bigger, the market is still really in a healthy way diversified. The Super Seven, as we call them, the world's largest, they're growing fast, about 35% around the world. The next wave around the world are growing almost as fast, about 25, 27%. Consumer SAS, has been, Twitters, and Facebooks, and Ubers, right, has been a large part of the cloud. It's now 50/50 with business. And they're both growing at the same categories going forwards, so you're going to see the diversity. Not just big players, but also small. Not just consumers, but business services. And then that's spanning a lot of global growth, and a lot of, if you see the wall of logos in any Amazon presentation, it's because they have partners all over the world. >> RaeJeanne, I want to get your perspective. I talked about this a couple years ago on theCUBE, about the power law of distribution of cloud providers, the top of the head is the big guys, then kind of narrows down. But then I was predicting a cloud service provider market was going to expand and I want to get your thoughts cause that's kind of happening now, you're kind of saying. But I want to get specific on this. You got core cloud, Amazon's of the world. Then you've got hybrid cloud, kind of Data Center. Then you've got the business cloud, business SAS. >> Business SAS. >> Sales force, Twitter, you mentioned those guys. >> Uh huh. >> They run clouds. Enterprises are now going to be cloudified, with commonality. >> Multi-cloud road. >> This is changing the nature of the business. Do you see it that way, talk about this business cloud, it's not competing with core cloud, it's just an expansionary. >> It's so interesting because there is certainly some competition or cannibalization within the cloud. But what I tend to see is, whichever part of this, because you'll hear a Business SAS company, some of it's running in the cloud, some of it's running on their own premises. They're doing that for a reason and both are growing. And then you talk about infrastructure service, but what really happens, especially we another rise moves their business into the cloud, there is just some part of it, just moved A to B, but what we're finding is about 30% of it is TAM expansive, because there are things when you move to an Amazon, or you move to another cloud service provider, take a mature SAS provider, they're just things that they can do that you never would have been able to do in your own IT shop. So, that's driving TAM expansion on top of it. That's also creating a lot of new market entry points, for new businesses to come in and innovate around. Security offerings, verticalized offerings, geo-based specialized offerings. So, yes, there's some friendly competition, but even when I ask somebody who would say, they might be the little challenger to a big infrastructure service player, they say but you know what, we actually get so much business by working with them too, it's hard for me to say, are they competition or a partner, right. That's the industry we live in. >> Co-creation, you mentioned that earlier, a big part of it. >> And the other big TAM expander is you've got the data, you've got AI, machine learning. >> Yes. >> You've got the cloud for scale and then you've got Edge. >> Yeah. >> These are not, it's not a zero sum game, where you're moving stuff from the Data Center into the cloud, these are all incremental. >> New. All new. >> So what are you seeing there? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about the Edge. For me, it kind of feels like that next, uncharted frontier, everybody's investing, everybody's doing amazing things. We're getting the 5G out, we're getting better technologies, we're learning how to store data, and move it faster, quicker, and cheaper. We're getting set up, but the use cases are just yet to be really fully defined. And I'll be honest, when I look at my market modeling, over the next five to 10 years, I always put a little disclaimer, this does not comprehend what's going to happen when billions of devices come online, when we activate. So I think when people say, it's a cloud, it's been going so fast it's going to just slow down. Why? Because innovation's not stopping. >> I think you hit the nail on a point we try to clarify on theCUBE here, is that a lot of people are misunderstanding what a cloud is, and about cloud service providers. As it grows, it's a rising tide floats all boats, so everyone tries to squint through, they're winning and a market share there. It's a different game changing, so that's a great point. I want to, as we get ready to end this segment here, give you a chance to talk about the relationship with Intel. You guys, again, cloud service provider is growing. Big part of your business. But you guys have been working with Amazon, for a long time, talk about the relationship between Intel and AWS. >> Yeah it is, it's a privilege, to be able to. The folks at a company like Amazon, and specifically the ones at Amazon I work with, they have the ability, obviously, to track some of the most amazing talent in the industry. And these people move fast. And, they have a lot of choice. You can either be there with them, ahead of them, and do the customization and differentiate them, and give them what they need. Or, they're going to leave you in the dust. So, I'd like to say we have a great partnership, because they've given us the honor over 12 years. We have so many, from the Data Center, to the Edge, the car, the racer car, deep lines. So many things we're doing together, Stage Maker, Machine and Deep Learning. But it's a, if we slow down, even for a bit, we're going to get left behind. So my job is to just keep running and trying to get ahead of them. And every time I think I get there, they come and poof. But, we're working together. It's a great, challenging partnership. But one that I can guarantee there's better innovation, from Intel, coming out of it, because of getting the opportunity to work with Amazon. >> And you guys are contributing to them too. It's a good win, win scenario. >> I believe so. They've said some really nice things about us, so, about our processing technologies. Our products, seven generations of our products, we're in every availability zone, every instance frame. We've got a great position. >> Well, congratulations on the business performance, I love the Cloud Service Provider expansion, love the Data Center focus, that's really relevant. And acknowledging by Amazon, that's good news to see. And, just stuff. Thank you guys for your partnership with theCUBE. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Here at theCUBE, Intel Cube. Intel is a big sponsor of theCUBE, we really appreciate that. I'm John with Dave Vallante. Stay with us for more AWS coverage re:Invent, our sixth year in a row, covering all the action. All the value being created. Stay tuned for more after this short break. (techno music)

from Tavern on the Green in Central Park New York it's the to covering Veritas vision solution day brought to you by Veritas welcome back to New York City everybody we're in the heart of Central Park at the Tavern on the Green beautiful location here a lot of customers coming in to see and hear veritas solution days we talked to Scott general earlier about sort of why these solution days very intimate customer events around the world David Moyes is here he's the vice president of software to find storage and appliances at Veritas David thanks for coming on oh thanks for having me you're very welcome so wait appliances you guys were software company what what's going on we are we are a software company and we have been a software company for a very long time and we will continue to be a software company for a very long time but what we find is that you know customers oftentimes they want to deploy software but then they find that there's a lot of additional challenges that come with that there's the maintenance of the actual server infrastructure there's patching of the operating system there's vulnerabilities that show up those additional operational costs sometimes outweigh the benefits of just buying a purpose-built appliance and those purpose-built appliances can sometimes you know how workflows built-in to them that just make them so easy to use that you know one person could potentially operate petabytes of an appliance versus a whole army of people trying to maintain hundreds or thousands of individual servers so you put out a stat this morning which I wasn't aware of you guys have more than half the market I think it was an IDC stat maybe was Gartner more than half the market for integrated the purpose-built backup appliances is that right that's right so for backup appliances purpose-built back of appliances that actually hosts the backup software we have more than 50% market share people have that much trust in the appliances that we build and find that simplicity so compelling that they want to buy it and that form factor from us you know about a decade ago I wrote a piece in the early days of wiki bond talking about services oriented storage and and when we think about software-defined storage what you described today was actually sets of granular services that I can invoke when I need them or not if I don't need them very cloud like I mean I could replace the s in Software Defined with s and services and that's your kind of philosophy and approach isn't it it is in fact what we find is that people want data services on top of that data when you're reporting enterprise data and you protecting exabyte so that apprise data the way the Veritas does having it just sit there and do nothing is is kind of wasteful to a large extent unless you're just waiting for a disaster to occur or data corruption or something like that if we can support to think about what are the governance capabilities lineage audit all of the different things that we could potentially build as services that are then can be downloaded onto that purpose-built backup appliance those all become added value to the customer but you you did what you described was not just another you're not just dropping in another stovepipe appliance you talked about having visibility across the entire portfolio you really stress that a lot you said several times you can't get this from any other backup vendor or any other vendor really talk about that a little bit well what's interesting is that look from the moment that data is actually born from a primary application and then it's protected its protected into a backup solution and then it's probably put into some sort of a storage solution either maybe at a duplication storage solution then it's moved to an even cheaper tier and eventually off to the cloud or somewhere else each of those are disparate if we can actually build a connector framework that can actually extract that information and bring it all together so that we can start to make assertions about hey how did this data flow how did it originate what kind of information do I have do I even need it anymore after seven years should I purge it or should I delete it is it even a risk to my organization to keep it you can only do that when you can make those associations across the lifecycle of that data and so we tracked the data through its entire lifecycle and that's only through the integration of all that product portfolio and that's something that you're not going to see with the small point solutions that are being built by startups and it's even very rare to see in some of the larger companies that build these solutions you know dude I'm glad you mentioned that about getting rid of data because so often today in the in the news media and you here in vendor presentations people talk about keeping data forever yeah that's that's dangerous in a lot of case a lot of general councils out there don't want to keep data forever there's data that you want to delete if in fact you can because of the compliance risks that it brings to your company you don't want to keep working process or some rogue email that floats around the organization get rid of that keep what you have to and get rid of the rest right and then the problem is if you don't know what you have and also you don't know how many places that that data is propagated how can you possibly delete it all we've helped customers in some cases that I'm not going to mention who they are but we've helped them delete up to 50 percent of their data after it's aged out and I've talked to banks before and I've asked them like hey after seven years what do you do with your data they say well we just keep it because we don't know what it was originated for we don't even know what's in it and therefore it's too risky for us to go and delete but at the same time to your point it may be even too risky to keep in some cases especially a liability to keep that deal and what's the what's the technology enable are there is that your catalog you're sort of copy data management self so it's a combination of things the catalog is what helps us understand what we have and where it is and how it's actually moved through that lifecycle and then we have a component called the Veritas information classifier and that component allows us to crack open the data and actually determine what's inside whether it's personally identifiable information social security numbers there's a number of different patterns we can look for actually document types and we can actually tag that data and say hey this data has information that's pertains to a specific individuals so for example if I'm following gdpr rules I can now find out all the data where it's propagated specific to an individual who said now I want all my stuff deleted and that's a very powerful technique so such as the data it's the metadata associated with that taste well that's a that I think it's a unique capability in terms of being integrated into a solution and so that's that's cool I also want to talk about Acme financial services yeah is artificial company or a real company but but an anonymized company that you talked about moving to your system your appliance based system they were able to reduce TCO by 40% shave two thirds of their hardware infrastructure away come back to that is I have sort of a tongue-in-cheek there get rid of tape at least we're possible no new tape I think is what you that's right and then save 20 million dollars a year in reduced downside downtime costs so my tongue and cheek is who everybody remembers the the no hardware agenda of signs you know bhai live in Massachusetts that we used to see those right next to the EMC facilities and you're only a hardware agenda it seems with your appliance is to get rid of hardware is exactly right look we we are actually putting out technology that allows you to take ten heads or ten servers and consolidate it down to two or three to make the total cost of ownership for your product less because at the end of day it's in our benefit right we're a software vendor we want to maintain ourselves as a software vendor we want to take Hardware out of the equation to the extent that's possible but we don't want to do it at the expense of simplicity and so striking that balance is what's most important yeah and and you also have talked about a little you showed a little leg if you will on a road map that's right I'm one of the things that struck me and it's sort of there today but but even more in the future is the ability to scale compute and storage independently and more granular chunks explain what that is and why that's important to customers well you know if you think about it the way that these integrated backup appliances work even back up people just dismiss backup appliances they just grow and grow and grow to a certain capacity they scale up and scale up and at some point the performance just starts to tank and taper off so what if you could actually grow them almost in a node-based architecture think about its compute and storage that you grow together and as you add more compute you add more storage and so that means that I can do more micro services or I can provide better deduplication but my deduplication doesn't slow down when I go from two petabyte to four petabyte because my compute has actually grown in lockstep with my storage you made a big deal about eliminating tape where possible and you also and I want to push it this a little bit talked about the economics of solution relative to tape I was somewhat surprised because the conventional wisdom would say tape is you know pennies on the dollar come here to to disc based solutions how is it that you're able to make that claim well there's a couple of different things that come to play number one is that again through the cloud catalyst capability of net backup we can actually keep data deduplicated before we send it to our disk based solution which means that it stays in some cases 50 to one deduplicated and you're not necessarily gonna get that capability on tape you'd have to rehydrate don't have to rehydrate so if you talk about about pennies well multiply that by 50 because if your data duplicates that much that's the kind of thing you're talking about the second part is the operational cost of actually maintaining tape now if I'm keeping data for seven years thirty years the lifetime of a patient that tape infrastructure age is out and I'm doing tape migrations all the time those are not cheap and sometimes though tape infrastructures not even available anymore the other compatibility is not there that's right the other thing is well the other thing is is the network costs right if you're going to be pushing stuff over the network absolutely your network and your and you pushing bigger things over the network you have more network infrastructure just for the purposes of moving data from one here tier to another tier it's wasteful David talked about the Flex appliance what I took away from that is it sort of allows for services oriented deployment fast migration it allows you to sort of test out new services to see whether or not you like it what what is that what does the customer have to do to exploit that capability today the customer would buy our high-end backup appliance which is the 53:40 they would buy the Flex software which is a software package that allows them to basically augment that's appliance so that it can actually maintain that catalog and then quickly deploy them those services as I showed in the demo in three minutes or less we can deploy a service on from the service catalog in the future you should expect that we should we will begin to build that into all of our appliances that's just the way of doing things it becomes a service-oriented architecture and that catalog is just going to be a natural way of us operating ok I want to also ask you about another capability that you discussed which was your ability to look across the portfolio and identify predictive failures yeah everybody talks about machine intelligence being used you know in that use case IOT you hear about that along what are you guys doing what's unique well you know in some cases what we're doing is not completely unique I mean there are some companies that have done this pretty well they've done it for their own point solutions I think where it gets interesting is when you say look we're not just building a point solution we have a number of different products again for the entire lifecycle of data from the moment it's born and if I can integrate all of the telemetry that I get from those different products I can now start to get predictive about things that might have happened not just at one stage within one product but might happen down the road when I go to move it into my long-term retention as my long-term retention ready for it is it going to impact the performance of my long-term retention solution and so therefore should I think about scaling on my long-term retention solution independent of you know so or ahead of the actual growth of my purpose-built Beco appliance right so it's that portfolio view that makes it so powerful right it's okay two things actually the portfolio view and also the full lifecycle view as well that's right something you've been hitting on not just a point product all right David I know you Jam it a lot of a lot of customer conversations here in New York so I gotta let you go but thanks so much for stopping by the cube appreciate my pleasure I really appreciate your time thank you welcome all right keep it right there everybody you're watching the cube live from Veritas solution days in New York City right in the heart of Central Park we'll be right at right back after this short break [Music]

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to day three of Dell Technologies World, the inaugural Dell Technologies World. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our kickoff of day three, we got a little analyst roundtable, Keith Townsend is with me, Stu Miniman, Peter Burris, the co-host, tri-hosts, quad-hosts of this show, long-time Dell EMC watchers and guys, let's unpack what's going on here. We're a couple years in now, the merger between Dell and EMC. I've said all along this was inevitable because of the pressures of cloud. It's very clear that Michael Dell is taking control of this company, it's the Dell brand, Dell Technologies, Dell Technologies World, EMC is sort of fading into the past, we'll talk about that Stu, we'll talk about the culture and the implications there, but I want to start with you Keith, let's talk about the customer perspective. What are you hearing from customers? What are the challenges that they're facing? Some of the concerns they may have with Dell and some of the positives? >> So one of the challenges, customers were worried that Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, would just be another HPE too big to solve their challenges, just how do you find solutions in the company with such a large portfolio? In reality, customers are pleasantly surprised that Dell Technologies has been able to surface up solutions, and not just focus on solutions, and also partner with their existing ecosystem of vendors, which is a surprise. One of the things I challenged Michael on as a customer, was hey you know what, this deal with Nutanix, this deal with XE, what are you leaning with from a hyperconverged solution perspective? Dell has been able to walk that line extremely well, We had a Datrium customer on day one, couldn't be happier with the relationship, then we talked to a couple of folks from the product team, 62% of the client meetings this week has been about VxRail, VxRack. Talked to another Fortune 500 customer that's all in on VxRail VxRack, not just for standard workloads, for SAP HANA which is not even certified for VxRail VxRack, so customers really happy with the overall ability of Dell to bring solutions to the table. I've seen, though we still have some time to tell if they'll be able to keep that momentum as they grow, as they continue to partner, and if they can continue to find solutions to challenges. >> Keith, if I can actually just follow up on one thing there, it's very clear that Dell will streamline the portfolio. Had Michael Dell, Jeff Clark, people from the marketing organization said absolutely, and we're telegraphing to customers as soon as we've sorted everything out we're gonna communicate it. Is there any concern from the customers? Michael said, we won't leave any customer behind, but absolutely the past of what EMC had with so many storage products they couldn't figure it out, there will be a lot less of them by the time we get to next year. >> So I think one of the things that you hit on when you talk about culture, I think customers still are very happy with the EMC brand, I think Dell did a really great job of not just getting rid of the EMC brand, customers still very much trust EMC. EMC had an extremely capable support organization, there's question about whether that support, that white glove support that we've gotten in the past from EMC will exist going forward. You know, Dell got rid of EMC cold, they brought Scale IO to a hardware-only solution versus the open ecosystem, so there's questions around where the cost-cutting will impact customer operations and support, but overall customers are happy with the progression. >> Peter Burris, one of the questions that Stu asked both Michael Dell and Clark yesterday is look you've got some of your bigger hardware competitors like IBM, like HP and HPE running away from head-to-head and I think Jeff Clark said "well I don't know how you can do end-to-end without both heads." So from your standpoint, from a customer perspective, is there an advantage to that head-to-head? We certainly heard it over the years, we used to hear it from HP a lot, we used to hear it from IBM a lot, they've retreated from that, Dell's sort of banging that end-to-end drum, does it matter from a customer perspective? >> Well of course, but it matters not just for what the customer wants but also the applications required. So, look, the biggest challenge, the most obvious, best end-to-end solution, if you take a very narrow view, it's gonna be AWS, Azure, some of these others. But the question is, is all of your data going to be in that public cloud? So the fundamental engineering challenge that every enterprise is gonna have is where am I gonna put my data? Some of the data is naturally gonna go to the public cloud, some of the data is not. What Dell needs to do over the course of the next couple of years is pick up on that as aggressively as they possibly can, try to not just convince people, but to show them that their organization of their digital business increasingly is going to be defined in terms of where their data assets are located, the practical realities of what that means, and therefore what types of fundamental support are they going to have to bring to bear on it? Keith, you said something interesting about HPE. The reason why Dell was not HPE, a little bit less so on IBM, is that Dell, Dell EMC have over the past 10, 15 years have made good bets, HP did not make good bets. You want to understand the history of HP over the last 10 years and why they're not the same, it's because HP gyrated all over the place to try to buy companies that were kind of at that moment a good price, let's just go for scale as best as we can, and Dell hasn't done that. Well Michael and his team have stayed relatively close to a simple vision of what types of engagement model they want, they've delivered on that vision, and they've got the assets that they can put into play now, but they just have to convince the enterprise that the play is where do you put your data, because you're gonna put your processing close to your data, and you're not gonna put it all in one place, right customer? And that's not going to be an easy, that's going to be a very challenging set of conversations over the next few years. We think how it's gonna play out is that Dell EMC is gonna be just fine because the enterprises are not gonna want to give all of their data up, and they can't give all their data up, so we'll see what happens. >> Well Stu let's talk about that, I mean Dell's cloud strategy is pretty clear, they want to be an arms dealer to the cloud. HPE, that's really their only choice, obviously IBM owns a cloud so it's a little different there, Oracle owns its own cloud, and they have software, that's a whole different ballgame. Dell clearly is comfortable being a high-volume, lower margin supplier, throwing off cashflow, throwing off profits. What's your take on the lack of a public cloud and are there issues there? >> Yeah, well you know Peter talked a little bit end-to-end and you see what Azure and AWS are doing. One of the surprising things for me is to see pieces of the public cloud and how the Dell Technologies portfolio are fitting into it. So being we're a native US, we absolutely understood. There's actually an isilon with Google cloud, a solution that I had an interesting discussion with Manuvir Das on day one here, really explained that you know scale out architecture, really get into the cloud. IBM cloud, there's a booth for them, they're here on the expo floor, so we've seen that maturation as hybrid cloud is not that transferring state that people thought but as that pits out we know data and applications are going to live lots of places and a company like Dell needs to be able to live in many of those environments. Edge of course, IOT, a hot issue that they're talking about, but they have portfolio products that will live in many of those places, so good maturation, public cloud is not enemy number one but of course they are a little bit more toward the private cloud, they highlight a bunch that if you go all in your prices are gonna be bad, we're gonna pull it back, Keith mentioned the EMC code team kind of got killed. A bunch of them are actually over at VMware now with an enhanced team, so it's still, we're not at the steady state of where the shift from my data center to public cloud is but it is definitely matured and nuanced and Dell has a lot of good partnerships that are growing. >> Well and selling servers to tier one cloud guys is not a great business, HP exited the business, Dell's in the business but it can't be a high market, it's not a great business I mean we know that. But, you know, nonetheless there's a lot of non-tier one clouds up there. You had a point to make, Pete? >> Yeah really quickly, the thing I was gonna say is, and we've talked about this in the past, and if we think about two things about Dell's portfolio, first off if we look back at what happened with the minicomputer business, and everybody says "oh the microprocessor killed it" well that probably contributed, but what really killed the minicomputer business was TCPIP and CISCO, that's what killed the minicomputer business because before a Dell or a Deck executive or a DG executive would walk into a shop with stuff all over the shop floor and the customer would say "I want to integrate this, you know, bridge it" and CISCO said, flatten the whole thing, bring TCPIP, and all those minicomputer companies went away. There is a gem in this portfolio which is NSX, and the degree to which Vmware, NSX can in fact become that technology for flattening the cloud network, cause that, to me, that's what the next big play in this industry is gonna be. AWS is gonna have its approach, Azure is gonna have its approach, you're gonna have bunch of on-premise stuff, the question is are you gonna be able to flatten those networks and really achieve that end-to-end? And if there's one good option on the table right now in the industry, it's VMware NSX for doing that. The second thing that I would say is, and I had a couple conversations with some folks about this this morning, we're talking about end-to-end, we're talking about greater conversions, hyperconversions, etc, yet Dell is still organized by server, storage, network, and it's going to be interesting to see how that evolves over the course of the next few years as customers increasingly do want a leverage that's end-to-end, diminish the distinctions and take advantage of convergence and whether or not we see Dell have a series of inter-nexian warfares about where that ends up. Because we know Dell does not wanna be RCA, right? >> Well that's really interesting because some of near-term moves that they've made are basically to take some of that converged stuff and put it in- >> That's right. So I love that now the TCPIP and NSX completely agree with you, the one thing that Dell is definitely missing from a customer perspective is the control plane glue they want to lead with the VMware story, you know any workload any cloud, I'm not gonna take my VMware approach to Google, I'm not gonna take that to Azure. So this any workload, any cloud thing, I'm not buying. I don't think customers are buying that. HPE is leading I think with a pretty good message on offering cloud services. It's a really, really difficult problem. >> The Oncenter story, you're talking about. >> The Onecenter story. It's a very difficult problem, enterprise customers want a single solution to consume all files, they want that TCPIP set of protocols, standards- >> They want the cloud to be flat. >> They want the cloud to be flat. NSX flattens it from a networking perspective but from a controlled plane API perspective the industry is a long way before that and I don't think Dell even has any plans for it. >> So, Stu, you know well when people were talking about you know, Michael's gonna sell VMware, you were very vocal about it, "no he's not, only an idiot would think that, I mean there's no way that's gonna happen." I mean, what a gem, in the portfolio, talk about end-to-end. The other thing I wanted to bring up is if you look at Dell's business, about half is the client business, it's doing better than expected so it's throwing off more cash than expected, especially with the storage business being soft, Dell's been pretty transparent about that, well I guess it has to be, but nonetheless there's upside there, but VMware is about 10% of the revenues, it throws off half of the operating cash, so why would you get rid of that, right? It's such a strategic asset 500,000 customers, a key part of the end-to-end, and it just makes this such a more interesting business. >> Yeah I mean Dave, I know you love teasing apart this complex, the tracking stock, all the things there, one of the interesting nuggets out of the Michael Dell interview was oh he said "the tax changes really had no impact, you know that's not it." You know, people really misunderstand, they understand these finances, it's not that they're hurting for cash, they can't make cash positions. >> So with my senses it's probably a slight negative but with the tax legislation, you're right, it's basically a net neutral for these guys. It's way overblown. >> Yeah, but you know, what's changed, we knew, when Dell went private, there were a bunch of changes in-company, I knew a lot of people that left the company for different things. The EMC acquisition, it's been a lot of change in the last 18 to 24 months, it'll still be rolling out there, you know, I live right in the heart of the old EMC country and there's some changes there, who's running it, you see a lot of former Dell executives, legacy Dell executives, there's still some strong people from the EMC side but Jeff Clark, very strong engineering culture, actually the more I've gotten to know him the more he reminds me of what EMC was 10 or 15 years ago in a good way, sharp, technical, getting on it. So I think the EMC brand, by the time we come here next year will be gone, but it doesn't mean the EMC people or products like the powermac are gonna be going anywhere. >> Well let me push at that a little bit, cause one of the things that Jeff Clark is doing is he's simplifying the portfolio, and Joe did the opposite, he complexified the portfolio because he said overlaps are better than gaps. And Jeff Clark's taking a different approach, is there a concern for customers? Wow, I might be left behind. They've got to be a little bit careful with that message, don't they? >> Yeah, but I mean we've touched on it a little bit, Dave, there's still some of the core product, you know powermac comes out there, this is the legacy of b macs, still supports the mainframe, you know, there's a business for this, and they're not gonna leave their customers behind. But what we said, Dave, when they put this portfolio together they need to turn the crank a little bit to get the operating margins where they need to be, not be overlapping so much with marketing and some of these other places. So, they're going to be very smart in how they do this, they say they're going to overcommunicate to not only their customers but their partner. I've talked to a bunch of (inaudible) partners, pretty happy. You know, there were a little bit of bumps over the last 18 to 24 months as to "oh wait I had this account rep and now they brought in this overlay and then they flopped who owned it." So it's been interesting to watch some of those and- >> Well look. >> It's a people business, and some of that changed- >> At the end of the day, Dell's portfolio can all be placed in service to the customer with relevance and competency today. That's a much better problem to have than a company that has either been building a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter or has bought a bunch of stuff that's not gonna matter. It means if they can sustain a degree of focus that allows them to pay down their debt and do the financial engineering and Tom Sweet's a stud, the CFO's a stud, it means that they can listen to customers and continue to service what the customer needs because their portfolio is easily applied to customer problems unlike a lot of other companies. That's a pretty decent position. They can pursue all of these things because the portfolio is relevant. Now, are there gonna be some challenges? Well, one of the reasons why EMC complexified the portfolio was because they had salespeople who were deeply engaged in their accounts and they used that as an advantage, and so the salespeople said "I need something" and so Dell EMC, like CISCO did for years, went off, or EMC, went off and found it. Dell still has a different channel organization and a different channel approach, much more partnership-oriented, if there's tension in the model, I don't know what you think about this, Keith If there's tension in the model it's we're going through a major transformation in the industry right now. How close do you have to be to the customer, is this going to be a partner-led transformation or are you gonna want your people handling the transformation? EMC's approach was your people led the complex portfolio. Dell's approach, simplify the portfolio, are you making the relationships more complex as a result? >> That's a great point, we touched on this with Marius, because essentially, in Marius' organization you have an overlay EMC salesforce which is used to belly-to-belly, and he said "look we're working it out" and it requires great leadership. >> It's gotta be somewhere, is it gonna be in the portfolio or the engagement model? >> And from the engagement model, just look at the Dell Technologies family themselves. When I was a EMC VMware customer, I didn't have combined meetings with EMC and VMware, two belly-to-belly relationships. When that Dell EMC merger took place, Dell came in and flexed the muscle, you know desktops, laptops, end-to-end vision, VMware became, you know, you could sense the tension in the room. I just talked to another big Dell EMC VMware customer and they'll say you know what at VMworld, Dell Technologies World, the messaging here has been incredible. You get in the real world, you talk to your Dell Technologies or Dell EMC rep, one set of products, you talk to the VMware rep, a completely different set of products. >> And then you talk to partners, and what are they saying? So where's the complexity gonna be? EMC said the complexity's gonna be in the portfolio, the engagement model is gonna be simple. Dell's saying the portfolio is gonna be more simple, but what's gonna happen to the engagement model? Because customers, this transformation stuff we're talking about is hard. >> Let's break down, we've got a couple minutes left, let's break down the competitive landscape, the horses in the track as we like to say. We obviously got AWS, you know the megatrend factor sucking up a lot of demand. Everybody says that people are coming back on prem, more people are going to the cloud. 49% growth. So that's clear, but you got traditional server competitors which really is I guess HPE and Lenovo, right? We're gonna focus on the enterprise stuff because that's kind of our wheelhouse. You've got the storage guys, you know that app seems to be back, Pure is continuing to do its thing, small in the grand scheme of 80 billion dollars. >> Their best friend will be Nutanix. >> Right, yeah right, and you got that funky relationship, you got an interesting CISCO relationship going on, so how do you describe the competitive landscape? Start with you, Stu. >> Yeah, it's a little bit complicated. Listen to what Peter was saying there, EMC was pretty cut and dry, you know. Storage, that's where we're gonna live, and everything else, we're gonna partner, even all the server companies that need to sell storage, they have great partnerships with IBM and HP and everything like that with the first one you had to partner with EMC because they were dominant in that space. Dell at the core of it, server company still so it was interesting, one of the interviews I did, it was, you know, VxRail, if you're not in hyperconverted space, if you don't own the server, you're not in the right thing. And I'm like, we got Datrium and Nutanix and all these other partners that are here in the ecosystem that are living on top of the Dell platform, so there's a little bit of that give and take, it's more coopatition than I used to see, you used to go to Dell World, they'd have that rack of OEMs with all those different vessels out there, so you know, where does Dell want to go? How do they maximize, you know, the investment that they made in the biggest merger in tech history? So it's still playing out, I hear relatively good things from the partners, and the customers at least aren't getting stuck in the middle. You know, with CISCO sometimes it was really a punch in the face and if we're not 100% on board we're not gonna let you have it and then the channel would just sort it out themselves. >> I mean AWS and the cloud, it is what it is. The VMware partnership, you know good move, gives them some near-term maybe even mid-term runway, we'll see what happens long-term. In the server business it's HBE, right? Is the main competitor. What do you guys think? >> We got IBM. >> Yeah, IBM for sure, yeah. >> The powermacs that just got announced, when that comes out the second half of this year, that goes right after CISCO UCS. Not a lot of talk about CISCO, the VxBlock business is a three to four billion dollar business between the Dell family and the CISCO family and this is gonna put them at loggerheads really soon. >> Yeah I talked to customers, they love the Dell EMC certainly, powermacs has been one of the top conversations, they can't wait to connect their powermacs to their HPE blades, that's gonna be awesome. Which is good. The other piece of that is the NetApp story. NetApp did a great job of talking about data fabric and being a data copy, I don't know if they're there yet, did a great job talking about it. Dell EMC- >> Good investments, they hired great people, so they're on that path. >> Two men in my peer community, a man and woman said NetApp's cloud story is legit, they're good. >> They're a software company. >> They're a software company. Dell EMC's cloud story, specifically around storage, you know, the isilon announcement was a partnership but you know I think customers are really looking at that again, that API is about the data and how do I move my data on-prem, off-prem, I don't know if Dell EMC has their story yet and they have the product portfolio to back it. >> So, here's what I'd say Dave. At the end of the day, there's a whole bunch of transformations and I'll try to be as succinct as I can. First off, data has to be acknowledged as an asset. Number one. That's a transition in itself. Number two. Investment in technology has to be regarded as an investment in improving the value of that data asset which means that ultimately the money in this industry is gonna follow the value of the data, that's the simplest most straightforward way of thinking about this. So, when we think about, for example, the server business, we're saying "you're not gonna put all your data up in a public cloud because the data's not gonna allow you to do that." Well, what's the difference between saying you're not going to put all your data in a public cloud and saying oh you're going to move all of your data to some server somewhere? There's, yeah it's a little bit more approximate, but it's still not, you're gonna move your data closer to more intelligent storage, more intelligent networks, and they'll go find the compute that they need. And that's not how Dell is set up today. That's just not how they're set up today. So if we think about five to ten years, we're talking about a whole bunch of processing power being moved closer and closer and closer to the data in the form of, you know, routines that are being run right there at the storage machine. We're talking about much more programmable control planes, data-driven data-first control planes, that are being in the network and defined by what the network can do, and the compute is increasingly gonna be regarded as important, not unimportant, but it's gonna be an increasingly distributed world where you can't have your cake and eat it too, you can't say don't go up to the public cloud but go up to our big honking server. There's something that doesn't quite watch there. >> Well, great analysis Peter, and to your point organizational structures really matter and I think today Dell's organization is really optimized for the continued integration, streamlining that piece, getting that right, making sure the processes are there, and then we'll see how it goes over time. Alright, thanks you guys. That was awesome. Good kickoff for day three. Okay, this is day three, you're watching theCUBE, keep it right there we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break.

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

>> Announcer: Live from San Jose, it's theCUBE, presenting Big Data Silicon Valley, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partner. (upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back to The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with George Gilbert. We are live at our event, Big Data SV, in downtown San Jose down the street from the Strata Data Conference. We're joined by a new guest to theCUBE, Sastry Malladi, the CTO Of FogHorn. Sastry, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, thank you, Lisa. >> So FogHorn, cool name, what do you guys do, who are you? Tell us all that good stuff. >> Sure. We are a startup based in Silicon Valley right here in Mountain View. We started about three years ago, three plus years ago. We provide edge computing intelligence software for edge computing or fog computing. That's how our company name got started is FogHorn. For our particularly, for our IoT industrial sector. All of the industrial guys, whether it's transportation, manufacturing, oil and gas, smart cities, smart buildings, any of those different sectors, they use our software to predict failure conditions in real time, or do condition monitoring, or predictive maintenance, any of those use cases and successfully save a lot of money. Obviously in the process, you know, we get paid for what we do. >> So Sastry... GE populized this concept of IIoT and the analytics and, sort of the new business outcomes you could build on it, like Power by the Hour instead of selling a jet engine. >> Sastry: That's right. But there's... Actually we keep on, and David Floor did some pioneering research on how we're going to have to do a lot of analytics on the edge for latency and bandwidth. What's the FogHorn secret sauce that others would have difficulty with on the edge analytics? >> Okay, that's a great question. Before I directly answer the question, if you don't mind, I'll actually even describe why that's even important to do that, right? So a lot of these industrial customers, if you look at, because we work with a lot of them, the amount of data that's produced from all of these different machines is terabytes to petabytes of data, it's real. And it's not just the traditional digital sensors but there are video, audio, acoustic sensors out there. The amount of data is humongous, right? It's not even practical to send all of that to a Cloud environment and do data processing, for many reasons. One is obviously the connectivity, bandwidth issues, and all of that. But the two most important things are cyber security. None of these customers actually want to connect these highly expensive machines to the internet. That's one. The second is the lack of real-time decision making. What they want to know, when there is a problem, they want to know before it's too late. We want to notify them it is a problem that is occurring so that have a chance to go fix it and optimize their asset that is in question. Now, existing solutions do not work in this constrained environment. That's why FogHorn had to invent that solution. >> And tell us, actually, just to be specific, how constrained an environment you can operate in. >> We can run in about less than 100 to 150 megabytes of memory, single-core to dual-core of CPU, whether it's an ARM processor, an x86 Intel-based processor, almost literally no storage because we're a real-time processing engine. Optionally, you could have some storage if you wanted to store some of the results locally there but that's the kind of environment we're talking about. Now, when I say 100 megabytes of memory, it's like a quarter of Raspberry Pi, right? And even in that environment we have customers that run dozens of machinery models, right? And we're not talking -- >> George: Like an ensemble. >> Like an anomaly detection, a regression, a random forest, or a clustering, or a gamut, some of those. Now, if we get into more deep learning models, like image processing and neural net and all of that, you obviously need a little bit more memory. But what we have shown, we could still run, one of our largest smart city buildings customer, elevator company, runs in a raspberry Pi on millions of elevators, right? Dozens of machinery algorithms on top of that, right? So that's the kind of size we're talking about. >> Let me just follow up with one question on the other thing you said, with, besides we have to do the low-latency locally. You said a lot of customers don't want to connect these brown field, I guess, operations technology machines to the internet, and physically, I mean there was physical separation for security. So it's like security, Bill Joy used to say "Security by obscurity." Here it's security by -- >> Physical separation, absolutely. Tell me about it. I was actually coming from, if you don't mind, last week I was in Saudi Arabia. One of the oil and gas plants where we deployed our software, you have to go to five levels of security even to get to there, It's a multibillion dollar plant and refining the gas and all of that. Completely offline, no connectivity to the internet, and we installed, in their existing small box, our software, connected to their live video cameras that are actually measuring the stuff, doing the processing and detecting the specific conditions that we're looking for. >> That's my question, which was if they want to be monitoring. So there's like one low level, really low hardware low level, the sensor feeds. But you could actually have a richer feed, which is video and audio, but how much of that, then, are you doing the, sort of, inferencing locally? Or even retraining, and I assume that since it's not the OT device, and it's something that's looking at it, you might be more able to send it back up the Cloud if you needed to do retraining? >> That's exactly right. So the way the model works is particularly for image processing because you need, it's a more complex process to train than create a model. You could create a model offline, like in a GPU box, an FPGA box and whatnot. Import and bring the model back into this small little device that's running in the plant, and now the live video data is coming in, the model is inferencing the specific thing. Now there are two ways to update and revise the model: incremental revision of the model, you could do that if you want, or you can send the results to a central location. Not internet, they do have local, in this example for example a PIDB, an OSS PIDB, or some other local service out there, where you have an opportunity to gather the results from each of these different locations and then consolidate and retrain the model, put the model back again. >> Okay, the one part that I didn't follow completely is... If the model is running ultimately on the device, again and perhaps not even on a CPU, but a programmable logic controller. >> It could, even though a programmable controller also typically have some shape of CPU there as well. These days, most of the PLCs, programmable controllers, have either an RM-based processor or an x86-based processor. We can run either one of those too. >> So, okay, assume you've got the model deployed down there, for the, you know, local inferencing. Now, some retraining is going to go on in the Cloud, where you have, you're pulling in the richer perspective from many different devices. How does that model get back out to the device if it doesn't have the connectivity between the device and the Cloud? >> Right, so if there's strictly no connectivity, so what happens is once the model is regenerated or retrained, they put a model in a USB stick, it's a low attack. USB stick, bring it to the PLC device and upload the model. >> George: Oh, so this is sort of how we destroyed the Iranian centrifuges. >> That's exactly right, exactly right. But you know, some other environments, even though it's not connectivity to the Cloud environment, per se, but the devices have the ability to connect to the Cloud. Optionally, they say, "Look, I'm the device "that's coming up, do you have an upgraded model for me?" Then it can pull the model. So in some of the environments it's super strict where there are absolutely no way to connect this device, you put it in a USB stick and bring the model back here. Other environments, device can query the Cloud but Cloud cannot connect to the device. This is a very popular model these days because, in other words imagine this, an elevator sitting in a building, somebody from the Cloud cannot reach the elevator, but an elevator can reach the Cloud when it wants to. >> George: Sort of like a jet engine, you don't want the Cloud to reach the jet engine. >> That's exactly right. The jet engine can reach the Cloud it if wants to, when it wants to, but the Cloud cannot reach the jet engine. That's how we can pull the model. >> So Sastry, as a CTO you meet with customers often. You mentioned you were in Saudi Arabia last week. I'd love to understand how you're leveraging and gaging with customers to really help drive the development of FogHorn, in terms of being differentiated in the market. What are those, kind of bi-directional, symbiotic customer relationships like? And how are they helping FogHorn? >> Right, that's actually a great question. We learn a lot from customers because we started a long time ago. We did an initial version of the product. As we begin to talk to the customers, particularly that's part of my job, where I go talk to many of these customers, they give us feedback. Well, my problem is really that I can't even do, I can't even give you connectivity to the Cloud, to upgrade the model. I can't even give you sample data. How do you do that modeling, right? And sometimes they say, "You know what, "We are not technical people, help us express the problem, "the outcome, give me tools "that help me express that outcome." So we created a bunch of what we call OT tools, operational technology tools. How we distinguish ourselves in this process, from the traditional Cloud-based vendor, the traditional data science and data analytics companies, is that they think in terms of computer scientists, computer programmers, and expressions. We think in terms of industrial operators, what can they express, what do they know? They don't really necessarily care about, when you tell them, "I've got an anomaly detection "data science machine algorithm", they're going to look at you like, "What are you talking about? "I don't understand what you're talking about", right? You need to tell them, "Look, this machine is failing." What are the conditions in which the machine is failing? How do you express that? And then we translate that requirement, or that into the underlying models, underlying Vel expressions, Vel or CPU expression language. So we learned a ton from user interface, capabilities, latency issues, connectivity issues, different protocols, a number of things that we learn from customers. >> So I'm curious with... More of the big data vendors are recognizing data in motion and data coming from devices. And some, like Hortonworks DataFlow NiFi has a MiNiFi component written in C plus plus, really low resource footprint. But I assume that that's really just a transport. It's almost like a collector and that it doesn't have the analytics built in -- >> That's exactly right, NiFi has the transport, it has the real-time transport capability for sure. What it does not have is this notion of that CEP concept. How do you combine all of the streams, everything is a time series data for us, right, from the devices. Whether it's coming from a device or whether it's coming from another static source out there. How do you express a pattern, a recognition pattern definition, across these streams? That's where our CPU comes in the picture. A lot of these seemingly similar software capabilities that people talk about, don't quite exactly have, either the streaming capability, or the CPU capability, or the real-time, or the low footprint. What we have is a combination of all of that. >> And you talked about how everything's time series to you. Is there a need to have, sort of an equivalent time series database up in some central location? So that when you subset, when you determine what relevant subset of data to move up to the Cloud, or you know, on-prem central location, does it need to be the same database? >> No, it doesn't need to be the same database. It's optional. In fact, we do ship a local time series database at the edge itself. If you have a little bit of a local storage, you can down sample, take the results, and store it locally, and many customers actually do that. Some others, because they have their existing environment, they have some Cloud storage, whether it's Microsoft, it doesn't matter what they use, we have connectors from our software to send these results into their existing environments. >> So, you had also said something interesting about your, sort of, tool set, as being optimized for operations technology. So this is really important because back when we had the Net-Heads and the Bell-Heads, you know it was a cultural clash and they had different technologies. >> Sastry: They sure did, yeah. >> Tell us more about how selling to operations, not just selling, but supporting operations technology is different from IT technology and where does that boundary live? >> Right, so typical IT environment, right, you start with the boss who is the decision maker, you work with them and they approve the project and you go and execute that. In an industrial, in an OT environment, it doesn't quite work like that. Even if the boss says, "Go ahead and go do this project", if the operator on the floor doesn't understand what you're talking about, because that person is in charge of operating that machine, it doesn't quite work like that. So you need to work bottom up as well, to convincing them that you are indeed actually solving their pain point. So the way we start, where rather than trying to tell them what capabilities we have as a product, or what we're trying to do, the first thing we ask is what is their pain point? "What's your problem? What is the problem "you're trying to solve?" Some customers say, "Well I've got yield, a lot of scrap. "Help me reduce my scrap. "Help me to operate my equipment better. "Help me predict these failure conditions "before it's too late." That's how the problem starts. Then we start inquiring them, "Okay, what kind of data "do you have, what kind of sensors do you have? "Typically, do you have information about under what circumstances you have seen failures "versus not seeing failures out there?" So in the process of inauguration we begin to understand how they might actually use our software and then we tell them, "Well, here, use your software, "our software, to predict that." And, sorry, I want 30 more seconds on that. The other thing is that, typically in an IT environment, because I came from that too, I've been in this position for 30 plus years, IT, UT and all of that, where we don't right away talk about CEP, or expressions, or analytics, and we don't talk about that. We talk about, look, you have these bunch of sensors, we have OT tools here, drag and drop your sensors, express the outcome that you're trying to look for, what is the outcome you're trying to look for, and then we drive behind the scenes what it means. Is it analytics, is it machine learning, is it something else, and what is it? So that's kind of how we approach the problem. Of course, if, sometimes you do surprisingly occasionally run into very technical people. From those people we can right away talk about, "Hey, you need these analytics, you need to use machinery, "you need to use expressions" and all of that. That's kind of how we operate. >> One thing, you know, that's becoming clearer is I think this widespread recognition that's data intensive and low latency work to be done near the edge. But what goes on in the Cloud is actually closer to simulation and high-performance compute, if you want to optimize a model. So not just train it, but maybe have something that's prescriptive that says, you know, here's the actionable information. As more of your data is video and audio, how do you turn that into something where you can simulate a model, that tells you the optimal answer? >> Right, so this is actually a good question. From our experience, there are models that require a lot of data, for example, video and audio. There are some other models that do not require a lot of data for training. I'll give you an example of what customer use cases that we have. There's one customer in a manufacturing domain, where they've been seeing a lot of finished goods failures, there's a lot of scrap and the problem then was, "Hey, predict the failures, "reduce my scrap, save the money", right? Because they've been seeing a lot of failures every single day, we did not need a lot of data to train and create a model to that. So, in fact, we just needed one hour's worth of data. We created a model, put the thing, we have reduced, completely eliminated their scrap. There are other kinds of models, other kinds of models of video, where we can't do that in the edge, so we're required for example, some video files or simulated audio files, take it to an offline model, create the model, and see whether it's accurately predicting based on the real-time video coming in or not. So it's a mix of what we're seeing between those two. >> Well Sastry, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing what it is that you guys at FogHorn are doing, what you're hearing from customers, how you're working together with them to solve some of these pretty significant challenges. >> Absolutely, it's been a pleasure. Hopefully this was helpful, and yeah. >> Definitely, very educational. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with George Gilbert. We are live at our event, Big Data SV in downtown San Jose. Come stop by Forager Tasting Room, hang out with us, learn as much as we are about all the layers of big data digital transformation and the opportunities. Stick around, we will be back after a short break. (upbeat electronic music)