ready to get going. Thanks so much to everyone for being here. This is both of our first times at RailsConf and we're super excited to be here as well. It's been a fantastic week, so fantastic that I'm losing my voice and I've gotten a little cold, so please forgive if I have a crackly voice. I'm all hopped up on cold meds, so it should be an entertaining presentation anyway. So my name is Rosie and I'm joining you here from Minneapolis and this lovely lady here is Sonya all the way from Washington DC and today Sonya and I are going to talk about APIs, but we're going to take a slightly different approach to this talk. We both have been through fairly major career pivots in the past three years that have led us to be in front of you here today as Rails developers, so we wanted to take all of our past experiences and use this to kind of frame this conversation in a way that we thought might be relevant and interesting. So my background before I made the transition to Rails development was in architecture, as in bricks and steel architecture, not software architecture, and city planning. Sonya also worked as a writer and graphic designer in a former life. We've both spent a lot of time thinking about the building process and design elements. So to start out this presentation, I'm going to talk a little bit about the importance of patterns in both the built environment and in software that support good design. Then I'll get into the meat of the talk and describe why we think you should consider building the API first. Then Sonya will go over some best practices and I'll bring it home with a bit of conversation about some tools and best practices that you can use to build your API. So as I mentioned, my background before I got the wild hair to become a Rails developer was in architecture and planning. So along the way, learning to program and learning Rails has been a fascinating journey, partially because everywhere I look, I find these parallels between the built environment and the Rails software stack. One of these parallels is the role that patterns play in both of these worlds. Before we dive into the meat of this talk, I wanted to tell a quick story about how I came around to this topic and why we thought it might be relevant to approach this topic from the perspective of design patterns. One of the most influential books in the last half a century in architecture is this book by Christopher Alexander, a pattern language. If you're unfamiliar, a pattern language in a nutshell is a method of describing good design practices. A pattern language should facilitate successfully solving very large complex design problems. These patterns are tools to help abstract the way some of the complexity in our world, so our little brains can wrap around how to approach solutions. Design patterns in the built environment go back hundreds and hundreds of years and are very much so rooted in how we as humans experience our surroundings and relate to each other. And for me, as an architecture student, understanding patterns was a big part of my training. I'm sure you all guessed where this is going. So this book came out in 1977 in response to a few decades of really, really bad architecture that just went in the face of good design patterns that had developed over the ages. They ignored these patterns that support the tried and true way humans want to inhabit cities and essentially ended up creating a lot of buildings that were really awful spaces for humans. So now we fast forward 20 years and these ideas reemerge in the software world and Martin Fowler, for example, is writing about patterns. Not only is he writing about patterns, all of the language that he uses to talk about object-oriented software design comes straight out of the architecture world. On this book's Wikipedia page, they point directly to Christopher Alexander's book as an inspiration for Fowler's work in software. Most people probably take it for granted at this point, but all of the language that we use to talk about software was lifted straight out of the architecture world. And as an extension, I think the way the profession thinks about the organization of things. We like to think that what we're doing is new, but take a couple steps back and the concepts are really the same. I don't know if Fowler and Alexander knew each other, but I think they would have gotten along. And one of the things I like to imagine is them going out on Tuesdays to drink cappuccinos and to have these really intense philosophical conversations about the order of things. Even though at a glance, it seems they come from very different worlds at a conceptual level, I think they would be having the same conversation. So, coming back to Rails, when I started to think about software, I inevitably brought this lens of patterns with me, which meant I was super primed to drink the Rails Kool-Aid. Convention over configuration? Obviously, this was just really smart design. These conventions mapped very cleanly in my brain to patterns and I just got it right away. At first, the process of learning Rails was just a smooth progression of these elegantly designed pieces sort of clicking into place. Then, inevitably, I stumbled into area after area where Rails does not provide conventions or strong opinions on what to do. And I would look to my right, look to my left, talk to developers around me and realize everybody had a different opinion. And honestly, this is when learning Rails got kind of hard. And so this brings us here today. One of these areas that we found without a clear sort of mainstream convention that everyone seems to agree on was APIs. Beyond using JBuilder and the basic happy path Rails application, there wasn't clear guidance how to deal with APIs. And honestly, this really surprised me. Seems to me that maybe many of you, most of the hard problems I deal with today are related to data transfer at my current job. This is what we do. We build applications that manage large amounts of data. This is a really important piece of our applications. And so thinking about this more as developers, as a new developer, I should say, when we have a question, I of course asked the internet. This sent me down a rabbit hole where everyone was suggesting something slightly different and nobody seemed quite satisfied with how they were dealing with this problem. I read about lots of solutions, all having varying degrees of success. It was all interesting and somewhat helpful, but it wasn't the solid answer I was looking for. And honestly, it was really frustrating. I knew this wasn't rocket surgery. And I left me feeling like, okay, Rails, if you're so opinionated, why don't you have an opinion on this? What should I do? And so here we are. And we believe building APIs is one of the critical areas where we should have a shared solution. Because, obviously, this is how our applications talk to each other. This is where my application and your applications cease to be my problem and your problems, and they're now everybody's problem, especially if we have a public API. So for one moment, bring this back to architecture. The evolution of our great cities is really the evolution of shared problems becoming shared solutions and elegant and innovative ways. We tend to think of the development of cities in terms of buildings, but buildings come and go in reality. The interesting story, and here I take off the architecture hat and put on the city planner hat, is really the story of infrastructure. How we came together and agreed how electricity should be delivered, how our sanitation systems should be constructed, and how we wanted to get from point A to point B. So the starting point of this talk is that APIs should act as the infrastructure for our applications. If passing around data is the most important thing your app does, then your APIs should be elevated from something we hobble together to something that we have a solid solution for. And starting with the API and building your client applications around it opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Carried out to the full realization of this concept, your APIs could be the foundation that supports a variety of clients, such as mobile applications or rich JavaScript framework clients. By decoupling your REST API from your client, you can more easily support multiple clients and have a system that is much more flexible, but also organized. If a mobile interface is really important to your application, your REST API can support multiple native mobile apps with minimal duplication across platforms. This is a good thing. You can also use the same API to serve data to a JavaScript framework, again, with very little duplication. Your API should be the common denominator. Without a good standardized server solution, you can't have a standardized way for different clients to talk to the servers. All right, we've discussed some reasons why for this new generation of Rails applications that must embrace a variety of clients, the API should be the foundation and where we think you should consider starting. So, one, your application will be designed to pass around data from the get-go. And reason two, if you need to support multiple clients, you can easily do this with minimal duplication across platforms. And three, if you create the standardized server code first, you'll easily support the creation of standardized client code. Okay, now I'm going to pass it off to Sonya. So, let's discuss some of the API best practices. There are a few that are very important to begin with when you're constructing your API. But before we jump into them, I think it's important to consider this question. Why is a well-designed API so important? Well, in this image, we see falling water. We're going back to architecture just for a moment. This is a cantilever home in Pennsylvania built in 1935 that is among one of the greatest assets to the architect and design thinker, Frank Lloyd Wright. It is built partly over waterfowl, driving its name from its situation and has been conserved as a museum now since 1963. So in other words, this is a huge asset to the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright. A well-designed API can be that of a company's greatest assets. Why? Because users invest their time in obvious and not so obvious ways. In the obvious ways, you're writing to it, buying products that use it. You tell your friends and communities about how great this API is. You start writing blog posts about it. You're creating hype, basically. The less obvious ways is that the users are digging into it and spending a significant amount of time learning how it works and playing around in the code. A poorly designed API can be a huge liability. The same users who would have been promoting it and using it as inspiration for new products are now calling in for support and asking you what to do about the problems that you've created with the API and taking away from your productivity or worst case scenario, they're just taking one look at your API and then running away from it. So the first guideline to follow of the best practices is to design your APIs for experience rather than and readability and not for data alone. In other words, an API should reflect how something is used, not just how it is stored. In fact, I hate to say it, but nobody really cares what your database looks like. People want to know how it operates, how they can use it. The experience should not fill your fellow developer with misery or regret. It should be methodical and consistent, which leads me to the next best practice of consistency. By providing a single API that can serve multiple clients, you get consistent client solutions across platforms. This includes having single endpoints and clean routes throughout your API. It's kind of like a telephone pole with all the cables and wires running through and around it. The pole is built with specific plug-ins for specific wires and purposes, allowing electricity to flow from the power plant to your computer screen or your light bulb, what have you. And similarly, an API call retrieves a particular dataset from your database and expects a consistent return every time. Without this, we get this, the alternative. Something hideous and terrifying. Unfortunately, this slum's infrastructure does not support consistency or sustained development of regulated wiring. It is inefficiency at its finest, where everyone seems to have adopted to each their own mentality. You should never have your API making someone feel like this, so avoid that. Coming from the writing and editing world, documentation is so important, especially having learned how to code later in life. I love a well-documented gem or anything I'm trying to use. I love when I see a lot of documentation and written the right way. So documentation is very important to the widespread use of your API, public or not. It should act as a bonus layer of information, though, like a glimpse into a developer's mind that assumes nothing and notes everything. It should sit on top of an already easy to understand API. And so in other words, don't make the documentation do the dirty work. Your API should already be understandable and you're just providing this layer of documentation on top of it. So if you're the type who just grumbled at my last slide, I know you're out there, let's chat about a service that makes documentation a cinch. One that we found was apiary. It's a structured interactive tool that follows the necessities of documentation using markdown and a template for easy usage. The result is an intuitive document incorporating the basic necessities that all documentation should contain. So here's an example of apiary, what it might look like when you're doing it. But generally speaking, apiary or not, all documentation should include the following. Examples of the full request and expected response, a list of error codes, their significance, what is causing them, a searchable HTML interface, and communication of versioning and deprecation schedules.  So the lifespan of an API is important to consider. It can be difficult to choose how you're going to version or what your strategy will be, but you should approach it as if you have to get the first one, the first version of your API absolutely right. It makes it easier down the road. The most important thing though to remember is that versioning is inevitable and plan for deprecation from version one. I also like to think of APIs as if they were a rescue dog. If anyone knows me from Flattering School, I see a few of you out there. I'm obsessed with rescue animals, so I had to tie this back in for a moment. So this is not a Westminster Killing Club winning dog, but it's more like a little rescue pup. He has limitless potential to be an incredible pet if you let him get there. Just like you want to set your future dogs up for success, you'll want to do the same for your API. For starters, neither this dog or your API require any fancy things. They simply crave repetition and unconditional support in order to be successful. Give them what they need to involve into their new versions, but don't ever forget where they came from. The JSON API is one standard for building APIs in JSON that is supported by the Rails community. So this is Steve Kladnik's quote, by following shared conventions you can increase productivity, take advantage of generalized tooling, and focus on what matters, your application. And we liked the JSON API standards, so I put an example of it here. And like so many of the tools that we've discussed already today, there are more out there and there's a lot of great ones being developed right now. So Rosie's going to share a few more of those with you. So building APIs is a shared problem for most developers. It seems there is now a general shared understanding of what a good API should consist of. A shared solution is the next step, so we can turn these best practices into conventions. For the last couple of months we've been asking every developer we encounter what they use to build APIs. The answers were usually Rails or Sinatra with some combination of tools available on Ruby Toolbox and usually a partially hand rolled solution. We also heard more and more how Rails is being used to create a REST API that talks to a mobile client and there seem to be growing interest in using Rails for JavaScript frameworks. These may not be traditional Rails applications but people still recognize the value of Rails for creating a REST API. After talking to lots of people, it was evident though that an agreed upon solution still wasn't clear and the whole thing just required way too much thinking. There's so many ways to hobble something together but we wanted to know the Rails way. What will be the Rails way to build a solid API? Again, damn it Rails, if you're so opinionated and committed to this idea of conventions tell me what to do. We no longer have to be pioneers venturing out into the unknown. So in the middle of all these conversations we did see a Rails way emerging though it's not baked in yet. Lo and behold there are solutions emerging from the core Rails team that provide an opinion on how to create REST APIs. We've been exploring Rails API in combination with active model serializer for building an API where you only need JSON endpoints. Rails API is Rails, utilizes most of the same generators and conventions and will look very, very familiar. For this new generation of applications where the API is your infrastructure that supports a family of client applications, we think this is what the future might look like. Rails API is really just a miniature Rails stack where they skipped all the stuff that you need if you were creating views. Producing a solution that is lighter and faster than the full Rails app. But it does still come with a full suite of baked-in solutions for many poorly understood problems. And the documentation there's a laundry list of things that are handled in the middle world layer and the action pack layer. This is definitely a win. For example you might understand perfectly how to handroll a solution for IP spoofing attacks or maybe not. But even if you do why spend time doing this, Rails is going to do it for you. Thanks Rails. And again, if there's a solution for something already out there, I'd rather use that than reinvent the wheel. The other tool we're exploring is active model serializers. In short, serializers replace hash-driven development with object-oriented development. For example, with active model serializers when you're using render JSON in your controllers, Rails will search for a serializer before the object and use it if available. It's an elegant solution to creating server-side APIs that doesn't require a view layer. The serializers act a lot like models and can be easily customized. Active model serializers also follows the JSON API standard. So you know you're creating a standardized API that will easily talk to a variety of clients. It really helps to take the guessing out of how your JSON API should be structured. Okay, so it's time to start wrapping things up. A few points to leave everyone with. We find it's increasingly important to design APIs following patterns and conventions that fit into the system as a whole. To do this, we can leverage existing best practices and tools. And by doing so, we'll create APIs that support a more organized structure for our applications. I was inspired by Yehuda Katz's keynote yesterday. I think it's time for us as a community to move API design out of the area of experimentation and into the area of our collective shared solution. We'll all benefit. And again, trivial choices are the enemy. Drink your convention over configuration Kool-Aid, but brush your teeth afterwards. Kool-Aid's not good for you. But anyway, we're often trying to solve the same problem. And when this is the case, we should agree on a strong convention and I'll follow it. We'll all benefit in the end. And third, don't forget about who or what else is going to want to use this API in the future and plan accordingly. This may include native mobile applications or a JavaScript client-side framework or something else that we haven't even imagined yet. By designing our APIs today to be consistent across platforms, we can make changes to our client-side applications in the future much easier. So tomorrow, someone's not trying to use your hand-rolled API that didn't really follow any established design patterns or conventions. And you have to explain that. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. For those of you who aren't from Minneapolis, this is the ugliest building in the Minneapolis skyline. So little context for you. We all drive by and shake our heads like, why? Or worse, your application gets scrapped because it was poorly organized from the get-go and too rigid to update. And last but not least, document all the things. Documentation is the key to your API being used successfully. All right. And we've come to the end. I hope just want to leave you with one thought. I hope when you approach your next project, you'll consider building your API first. All right. Thanks, everybody.


Hello, welcome everyone to the Euforium Talk Show. We have with us today Mr. Birout Shate, co-founder and CEO of Gupture, a unicorn based in Silicon Valley. It is absolutely an honor to have you here, Mr. Shate. Thanks, Kanchin. Thanks for having me here. It must be late evening in San Francisco, right? Yes, but I keep India hour, so my day is just beginning. I have a lot of calls. Okay, so I would like to start this conversation to, you know, by understanding the Gupture journey. I mean, you started this platform nearly two decades ago. So what was in your mind then and how conversational engagement domain has evolved over the last 18, 20 years? Yeah, well, you're right. I think it's about 17 years or so. And I think, you know, in the beginning, I mean, we saw the power of, you know, when we started the mobile revolution was happening. And there were another 1, 2, 3 billion people getting connected for the first time, right? They were not on the internet, but they were getting digitally connected for the first time. And those early feature phones, mobile phones, right, really the lowest common denominator was actually SMS, right? That was the only thing that worked on every mobile device. So I think the key insight at that time was, you know, if you can use SMS as the transport layer to deliver content to millions of people, then, you know, for the first time, you can deliver rich, interesting content to billions of people. That was really the key idea. And then the early version of Gupture actually was a social network. It was a consumer service, right? It was kind of like Twitter, where you could publish and subscribe for messages that became immensely popular actually grew to about 70 million users. But then, you know, we were subsidizing all of that SMS messaging traffic at that time. And it got prohibitively expensive. It was too expensive to subsidize. And then for different reasons, we couldn't monetize it either. So I think at that point, we had to pivot to a different model. And then we switched to the enterprise model and, you know, and then the rest is history. I can go into more details as well. But that's sort of, that's how we got started. It's been a long journey with quite a rollercoaster with lots of ups and downs.  So I would also like to know how Gupture is helping businesses transform, you know, cross industry verticals. Yeah, so I think so, like I said, right, once we pivoted to the enterprise model, we, you know, enterprises like large banks or e-commerce companies or education and travel companies and so on, they have millions of consumers, and they need to communicate and send updates to them, right? So in the beginning, you know, or until recently, a lot of these messages were almost entirely on SMS, right?  All of those messages were all happening on SMS. Now, more recently, as new technology has emerged, you can also send messages through WhatsApp or through Instagram or through these other channels. And when you, when you do that, it's no longer just a one-way notification, but you can also have a two-way, meaning the user can also respond, right, which enables a two-way conversation. So as that is happening, more and more businesses are now using the rich interactive, you know, conversations with consumers to do all kinds of things to do, you know, to do marketing, to do commerce, to do support and so on. So anyway, I think in a nutshell, what Gapshab does is we provide the tools to enterprises to help them engage their customers better through conversations, right? Through conversational messaging, through conversational voice, you know, to do marketing, commerce and support. And I think it's an exciting opportunity. There's a lot of growth in this space. Enterprises are seeing enormous value and returns coming out of this. And, you know, I think it's, you know, because everybody, I mean, you think about it in countries like India or in regions like Latin America and other places, they may not be using the web, they may not download a lot of apps, but they all have WhatsApp, right? They all have messaging, either SMS or WhatsApp. And therefore, it's really is the lowest common denominator in the emerging markets. And I think it's, you know, it's very, very critical. It's almost the primary channel of customer engagement and customer interaction for enterprises. So it's really exciting. And that's, you know, we really provide all the tools to enable all of this. I think Instagram has also, you know, come up in a big way in the last few years. So are you also working with Instagram, you know, platform? Yeah. So I think, you know, one important distinction to make is all of these social media platforms, there's a consumer angle, which is consumers interacting with each other. And then there is the business messaging API, right? So Instagram, which is immensely popular, but recently, just a few months ago, they started enabling businesses to, you know, to automatically communicate with consumers. So now that is also emerging as a new opportunity for businesses to, you know, they can write some software and build these automated chatbots, right? Which means if any user likes an Instagram, an item on the Instagram photo, I mean, they can literally have a little conversation saying, do you have it in this color? Do you have it in the size? And then actually pay for it and buy it right there, right, without having to go to a different website or anything like that. So yeah, I think we are seeing, you know, so WhatsApp business messaging is growing fast. Even Instagram business messaging is also growing. And I think, yeah, in fact, enterprises should be taking advantage of these things to really drive a lot more engagement in commerce. So artificial intelligence has also, you know, it is transforming the digital marketing domain now. So how AI-enabled conversation marketing is helping brands to reach, you know, wider consumer segments? Great question, right? So the moment you can have an enterprise can have a two-way conversation with consumer, you know, consumers can submit any kind of query, right? They might say, okay, can you show me a red shirt? Or do you, you know, can you show me gifts between, you know, you know, 5000 and 10,000 rupees, for example, or, you know, by budget, by size, by color, by shape, and so on, they can select and ask queries like that, right? Now, for a business which may receive millions of queries like that, right, they have to automate it. But automating queries phrased in natural human language can be quite challenging. So that's where AI comes in, right? Within AI, especially technologies like natural language processing or voice technologies as well, they can help an enterprise automatically understand what the user is asking and then look up on the back end and then recommend the right product or the right item and so on. So that's where conversational AI comes in. It enables businesses to build these, you know, very delightful engaging experience so much so that for the consumer, it feels like, oh, I'm just chatting with a human, right? And they may not know or care whether it's a human or a chatbot so long as it works, right? And I think for a, for a business, right, it makes it much more effective, right? Because the alternative is they'll have to have hundreds of customer support agents, right, responding to all these queries. But if they can use AI, then they can automate it, or at least they can automate most of the queries, if not every query, right? And the frequently asked common queries are easier to automate. So they can automate those queries and escalate the more complex one to human agents. But AI is really transforming the conversational industry and businesses are, you know, the tools have gotten very good. I think AI models have gotten very good as well. So what was, you know, just an idea, even a couple of years ago is now the technology is all there, and you can do it in different languages. You can do it, even it can understand accents, you know, for spoken voice sort of understanding. So it's become very, very powerful. I would also like to know the new growth drivers for you and also your, you know, expansion plans. Sure. I think, well, firstly, you know, I think in terms of expansion plans, if you've read recent news stories, I mean, Gapshap acquired about five to six companies just in the last maybe nine months, right? So the first thing for us is to unify all of these products to create a really advanced product. But as it stands right now, Gapshap is really unique. We are the only ones that can offer a comprehensive toolkit for enterprises for all of their customer engagement needs. We can offer messaging tools, voice tools, we can offer chatbot development capability and conversational AI across different languages and so on, right? So we have, through these acquisitions, we've built out probably the most advanced and comprehensive product stack, right? So we continue to invest a lot, right? We've always, you know, all of Gapshap's success has all been built on a foundation of product and engineering, right? We invest a lot in that and now with the very advanced product, we're going to continue scaling, adding more features, more capabilities. We listen to our customers very carefully and do that. So, you know, R&D is sort of one important growth driver for us. And then another one is international expansion, right? A year ago, we were maybe in five countries, but now we are in about 40 plus countries. We have teams and customers in many, many countries around the world and we're seeing a lot of traction in Latin America and Southeast Asia and Middle East and Africa as well. So we're really expanding dramatically on those sides. And maybe the third thing is just, you know, developing sort of a lot of innovative solutions in partnership with our customers, right? So we listen carefully to, you know, to what they need or what they do with the tools that we provide them. And then, you know, if they need anything extra, we'll package it up quickly, we'll create new solutions and launch new products to the market.  So I have not two questions. Are more acquisitions on the card? And also what is happening at the innovation front? Because now you have, you know, so many collaborate on the part that's like one that it asked it, active AI. And I suppose one more, Nolarity, who you acquired this year only. Yes, yeah, all of these companies, right? So Nolarity gave us the voice capability, Wanderer gives us the agent dashboard capability, I think SID and Active AI gave us the conversational AI capabilities, and so on, right? And there's also dot go, which gave us the RCS capability as well. So I think it's been very effective in helping us build out a highly scalable product, right? I think, will there be more acquisitions? You know, it really depends. I mean, I don't think we start with an assumption of wanting to do an acquisition, right? If you find a company that's a good fit, that is complimentary, they have a good team and culture and so on, then, you know, of course, we'll do it. But you know, we're always looking, but there's nothing in the pipeline right now. I think apart from that, you know, we're going to continue in terms of innovation. There's a lot of new things coming up, right? So for example, because we have the messaging and voice capability, right? So we expect what's called voice deflection to messaging, right? Meaning, if the call center is busy, then instead of asking the customer to stay on hold, we can redirect the message, we can redirect the conversation to a messaging experience, right? Saying, hey, sorry, we couldn't pick up your call, but you know, here's a chat pod that can help you accomplish your task, right? So that's just one example. But we are, you know, doing also, we are integrating call centers with voice bots, right? With chat pod experiences, we are creating some very innovative marketing experiences, right? So businesses can engage their customers, activate their customers, you know, send out deals and offers and so on. We are enabling commerce, right? So here's something amazing, right? Most of us know that you can have a digital storefront on a website or a mobile app, okay? But what many businesses may not realize is it's now possible to have a storefront inside WhatsApp itself or Instagram, right? Where you can list your catalog, you can have shopping cart, you can put prices and even payments and so on. So the whole end to end shopping experience is possible, right? Inside that. And maybe the last thing that, you know, in particular, your customers and viewers might be interested in is, you know, using Instagram and channels like that to integrate sort of social media marketing with conversational messaging, right? So for example, when a user complains on Facebook or on Twitter or Instagram saying, hey, you know, I have this problem with this enterprise, well, the enterprise, you know, enterprises can set up a chatbot to instantly look at the complaint, resolve, you know, have a little private conversation with them to resolve the complaint and then convert it into a testimonial, right? So because if you can address these issues instantly and automatically, then it really, you know, help you manage your brand reputation and drive a lot of customer satisfaction. So I think the possibilities are endless. And I think, you know, businesses really have to, no matter what they're trying to do, you know, this is going to become the primary means of digital engagement and digital communication with your customers. Apart from staff and Instagram, do you see any other, you know, communication platform that is coming up in a big way that could be, you know, that could be the workshop in future?  So for example, RCS is another messaging channel that's coming up. There's also Google business messages, GBM, that is emerging as well. I think SMS continues to be, you know, very, very valuable and so on. And then Gupshub itself has launched an innovative channel that we call GIP, right, which is just short for Gupshub IP messaging channel. So, you know, each of these channels, they serve a different purpose, a different use case, you know, they have different features and capabilities, maybe even different price points, right?  And they, they enterprises tend to be kind of channel-agnostic, meaning it doesn't matter what channel it is so long as they can engage with their customer, right? So, so I think, you know, in a way, as you have multiple channels, it makes it, it allows them to do more things and more rich things, you know, experiences, deliver rich experiences to their customers.  You know, I think the biggest difference really is the medium of engagement, right? If you look at US, the Western markets, right, US and maybe Western Europe, it tends to be a very web-centric ecosystem, right? Because every, every business, every brand, they have a website, okay? And, and some of them will have apps, but all the transactions and engagement and commerce and conversations and so on is all focused on the website. So when they use messaging, they will use it just to drive the user to the website where the real commerce happens. But when you look at the emerging markets, you look at India or even Brazil and Indonesia and so on, there, you know, you don't have a web dominant or a web-centric ecosystem, right? Because there are many more users on messaging apps, right? What is it? Maybe 500 million users on messaging apps versus maybe 100 or 150 million on the web that we know it and so on. So messaging is where, you know, you're going to have far more users, far more reach, and, and then within, you know, these enterprises also want to do all that rich interaction within the messaging channel, right? Because you can't, you can't just send a message and send the user back to the website because consumers are not doing that. They're not used to that. On the other hand, if you're inside WhatsApp and you say, oh, here's a catalog, here's an item, here you can, you know, create a shopping card, pay for it, look at deals, interact with different options and so on, and all of that happens right inside the messaging channel, right? Then, then it's just everybody would use it. So I think that's honestly the biggest difference. The medium of engagement in the Western markets is the web, the medium of engagement in the emerging markets is, or is the messaging channel, right? And I think There are different devices. Well, I mean, are we, are we, are we using more mobile phones here and laptops here or in the US also people are using mobile to transit through web? Well, yeah, no, I think, I think emerging markets are much more mobile first, right, or mobile centric. Of course, everybody in the US also has mobile phones and so on, but you know, in the US people also spend a lot of time at their desk in the office or, or at home, right? And people are very familiar and not only that, the habit was formed, right, in the mid 90s when the web came about. So everybody's been using websites. So even when mobile phones came about, people continue to use these websites from the mobile phone. But emerging markets were mobile first, you know, meaning the first digital experience was the mobile phone, which is a smaller screen.  I think in emerging markets, it's really mobile first, messaging first ecosystems and therefore, you know, the impact of web or email or even apps is a lot less than what it'll be for messaging in the emerging markets. So one question at a time when many unicorns are facing downturns, you know, due to a range of reasons, maybe inflation and, you know, fuel, fuel price and also Ukraine, Russia, what, how does Gapsha remain profitable? Oh, I think, well, firstly, you know, we've been profitable for nearly 10 years, okay, through all kinds of ups and downs in the markets, you know, we've maintained, we built a profitable business. And I think we will continue to do that and we'll continue to stay that way, right? So firstly, we just we built that muscle of, you know, running managing a business prudently of being careful with our expenses of focusing on high ROI activities. We invest in areas where we expect, you know, to grow or to drive revenue and so on, right? So we really, we listen carefully to our customers, we don't get carried away with, with recruiting excessively, right? And so on, we'll, we'll, we'll get good talented people and only as much as we need. You know, and not sort of, I think a lot of, a lot of young entrepreneurs, first time entrepreneurs and so on, when they get raise a lot of funding, they assume that, oh, great, you know, we can spend a lot and we can do all of these things. But if you're not careful, you know, then your expenses can get ahead of your, of your projected revenues and so on. And that's when problems can start. So I think really, you know, some of it is just being mature about it, being commonsensical about it, being very thoughtful and deliberate, right? Because, yeah, and, you know, as a, as a business, you kind of have to, you know, you can invest ahead of the market a little bit, but you can't do it too much, right? Sometimes it takes time for the market to, for your customers to learn and adopt and grow your products and so on.   You know, there's no guarantee that once a unicorn, you'll stay forever a unicorn, right? There's no such thing. I think you kind of have to keep growing your business, building it, scaling it up. And so that's how it works. Very important points indeed. And now last question, what would be your, you know, advice to aspiring entrepreneurs? Oh, I think, you know, I have a lot of battle scars and bruises, and therefore a lot of advice, you know, that, and lessons that I've learned. I think there are, I mean, depends, you know, I think there is a startup journey can be a roller coaster, it can be lots of ups and downs. So it's important not to get overly depressed or overly euphoric. I think you want to be stay balanced. I think it's also, you know, be very customer centric, right? Listen carefully to the customer, figure out the product market fit. If they like your product, make sure you understand why, but if they don't like it, even more important to understand why they don't, and then see how you can kind of improve it. I mean, what else, you know, having a good team is super important. I think that makes, you know, if you have a great team that lead to great products, which then lead to good customers and revenues, and so on. So don't compromise on the team that you're building as well. You know, I think it's a risky journey, right? So you need a lot of grit and perseverance and patience, right? So you can't get very impatient. I mean, as we discussed earlier, right? The Gupship journey has been a very long one. And there have been many, many, many difficult years, right? Almost, I don't know, maybe the first 12 to 14 years were very, very challenging. So I mean, just think about it. When entrepreneurs start, they don't think about such long timelines, but sometimes it happens, right? It's not by choice, but, you know, you kind of have to be persistent as well, right? But ultimately, I think, look, the most important advice I can give is, you know, be entrepreneurial, take a chance. You know, I think entrepreneurship is the ultimate sort of prosperity generating machine for society, you know, for the country. And I think even if you fail, you learn so much more.  So there's really no failure, right?  You know, you can go back to the job that you think you would have had very likely, right? So there's not as much risk as you might think. But on the other hand, if it succeeds, right, it'll be a sort of complete game changer. So, you know, I think I would encourage more people to take risks. I mean, it's a great time to be doing entrepreneurship in India where there's a huge need for technology in general. I think the odds are more in your favor. So nicely explained. Thank you, Mr. Sashit. I know for talking with you for him. Thank you very much. Thanks, Kanchit, for having me again. Thank you.


to First Unitarian Society. My name is Kelly Aspruth-Jackson, and I am one of the ministers here. Today I am joined by the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, and Stephen Gregorius. The vision of FUS is growing souls, connecting with one another, and embodying our UU values in our lives, our community, and our world. If you are visiting us today, welcome. We are so glad that you are with us. If you'd like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by the welcome table. It's located in the commons, just through those doors, the tables to your left. We hope that you will be able to stay and join us for coffee hour immediately after the service, also in the commons. For those connecting with us virtually today, we are glad that you are with us as well, and we hope that you will be able to take a moment to watch the announcement slides after today's service to learn about upcoming events and activities. A word about what is going on here, just in front of where I'm standing. Entering the auditorium today, you may have seen the offering of a piece of paper on which you could write down whatever thought, feeling, or experience you wish to let go from the year now past. If you don't have one yet, there is still lots of time to pick one up during or after the service. And for those of you at home with something that you are needing to release, I encourage you to write it down on your own piece of paper. You can dispose of it in your own way. Just please be sure to be careful and make sure that there is a grownup involved if you actually use actual fire. Anytime between now and shortly after the service, you are invited to deposit your piece of paper in the jar provided. I will be taking that jar and this brazier that it's resting on outside to ceremonially burn away all of those things that need letting go of a little while after the service. And now, I invite you to join me in a moment of silence to center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. We bid you welcome on this first Sunday of the new year. Like Janice, we gather with part of us looking backward and part looking forward. We gather on the edge of the new year saddened by our losses, cherishing our joys, aware of our failures, mindful of days gone by. We gather on the cusp of this new year eager to begin anew, hopeful for what lies ahead, promising to make changes anticipating tomorrow's and tomorrow's. We invite you to join our celebration of life knowing that life includes good and bad, endings and beginnings. We bid you welcome. And now I invite you to rise in all the ways that we do and join me in the words of affirmation for the kindling of our chalice. Out of the darkness, light. Out of the light, warmth. Out of the warmth, joy. Out of the joy, togetherness. May this flame hold us for the time we are here with one another. And now let us sing our opening hymn together, number 58. Ring out, wild bells. This story this morning, but first a little question. Has anyone ever seen a lion dance before? It's what the picture is there. It's a practice common in several different parts of China associated with the practice of the martial arts. It's a beautiful, both artistic and athletic presentation in which two people together form the body of a lion. So there's one person at the front sort of responsible for the mask and one person at the back responsible for the tail and they dance and move together to create the motions of a lion. And this story, this story is one of the stories. I wanna stress just one of the stories about where that dance came from. So this is the way that the story goes. That long ago there was a village and in that village every year a monster came to town. It came up out of the sea. It stood up on a dry land and it destroyed everything that it found. Ransacked all the stored food. It damaged all the houses. It ruined all of the crops. And every year the townsfolk, knowing not what else to do would have to just leave town on the first of the year. Early in the morning they would get up, they would leave the town and just let the monster do what it was going to do and then it would go back into the ocean and they'd be safe for another year. So one day, as it was coming up on that new year where the monster was going to appear again, one day an old man came to town, a traveler. And everyone was busy. Everyone was busy getting ready, getting things secured, locking things away, trying to make the best defense of their home that they could and packing up whatever they could carry to get ready to go up into the mountains and hide for the new year's day. So no one greeted the traveler warmly, no one was there to receive him. He walked all the way into town without anyone saying so much as a hello. But finally he did reach one home where an older woman was boarding everything up and getting things ready to head up into the mountains like everybody else. And she said, oh, friend, you don't wanna be here. You see, there is a monster coming tomorrow. We all know this and that's why we're heading up to the mountains.  The old man said, that seems like it's a little bit of a problem. So every year, every year this monster comes to town. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And every year, every year you just leave and let it do whatever it's going to do. Yeah, pretty much it's a monster. It's a very dangerous thing. Well, the old man thought about it and said, all right, I'm going to take care of this problem for you and the rest of the town. All that I ask in return is that you allow me to spend the night in your house because I don't have a place to sleep for tonight. And she said, I don't think that's a very good idea, but he wouldn't be dissuaded. And well, she did want him to at least have a place to sleep for the night. So that night, the old man slept in the old woman's house. And in the morning, everybody, just before the sun was rising, everybody went up into the mountains. But he stayed behind. So then, up out of the sea, came the monster, Nia, the monster that had been terrorizing this village since who knows when. And it stalked into the town. And it prowled down the streets. And it munched and it crunched and it thrashed and it bashed everything that it found. But it was used to the way that the villagers boarded up all their houses, tried to make them as impervious as possible. It was used to that. It was used to the way that the streets were cleared of anything that might be valuable or that they didn't want to see just destroyed whole cloth. But it wasn't used to this one little hut in the town being so beautifully decorated with streamers and lanterns and all sorts of beautiful things. It looked like they were having a party which the monster was not happy about. So it prowled over to this heavily decorated house. And it could hear inside the sounds of laughter and music and all sorts of fine things which the monster was not happy about. And so it prowled up to the door and just as it was about to tear the door off of its hinges, the door flew open and loud bangs of firecrackers going off. Bam, bam, bam, bam. And out of a cloud of smoke came the old man laughing and the monster was afraid. And it ran away back into the sea. And it never was seen in that town again. This is the story, one of the stories at least, of the beginning of the lion dance which is meant to be an impression of the monster neon and of the practices of the traditional Chinese New Year which I wanna remind you is celebrated on a different day than is called for in the calendar that we use here. But it is a story about laughing in the face of old lingering doubts and fears and dangers and regrets and welcoming in the new possibility that you thought, or at least everyone else thought, was never to be seen again.  Well, if I had my microphone on, wouldn't it? Our gifts at this service and all the holiday services this year help provide a great deal of the funding that runs Just Dane's eviction prevention program. Sometimes the difference between a family being out on the street or staying in their home can be just a little help. With your help, Just Dane and Joining Forces for Families are helping people to prevent eviction and homelessness. There are multiple ways that you can share your gifts this morning. There are baskets at the exits to this room in which you can place cash or checks. You'll also see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fusmattison.org, and you can find the text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. So today is a new day and a new year. The poet E.E. Cummings wrote for days like today, this is the son's birthday. This is the birthday of life and of love and wings and of the gay, great, happening, illimitable earth. Days like today are supposed to fill us with a sense of promise and possibility. The newspaper is full of previews and forecasts for the coming year and small talk inevitably drifts to the subject of new year's resolutions. But today or on any other day of the year, it is not always easy to seize that sort of momentum. There are days when I feel, and perhaps you can relate to this, a little bit like Winnie the Pooh. I'm thinking of the time when that silly old bear dropped by the burrow belonging to his friend Rabbit and had a bit too much to eat while there. As he was leaving, he climbed halfway through the hole in the ground that was Rabbit's front door and became stuck. Oh, help, said Pooh. I'd better go back. Oh, bother, said Pooh. I shall have to go on. I can't do either, said Pooh. Oh, help and bother. There are times in life when, like Pooh, we find ourselves in a predicament from which we want to retreat, but cannot, while going forward seems just as impossible. That feeling of stuckness can be an overwhelming force as we find ourselves developing a long and frustrating list of all the things that cannot be fixed or changed or helped. In my household, we once had a theatrical scene that we would point to to describe this feeling. It comes from the producers, the musical, rather than the original Mel Brooks movie. The two main characters, Max and Leo, have devised a scheme to make money by producing a Broadway failure, but their plot unravels when their surefire bomb turns out to be a hit. Max reads glowing reviews with shock and dismay and at the end of each line, a despondent Leo moans, no way out. The argument against that feeling of no way out. Issues from many corners, so I will begin by pointing to one that I believe puts it very well. Thomas Paine, who never actually aligned himself directly with Unitarians or Universalists as a spiritual group, though we might find some common ground with him theologically today, wrote these words as an exhortation to challenge one of the dominant sorts of stuckness in his time and place. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present has not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand and in this point of view, how trifling, how ridiculous do little paltry cavalings, that is objections, appear when weighed against the business of a world? Paine said this as he was calling for independence from Great Britain for the American colonies in 1776 and for the formation of a representative system of government. He was speaking to a moment in time that he considered to be exceptional, a situation not seen since the days of Noah. But that sense of promise and possibility is not something limited to the great crises and turning points of history. Each day that we awake to is new and there is no limit to the number of opportunities that life gives us to begin again. Of course, sometimes we wake up and things really are more different than usual. In the movie, Sleeper, Woody Allen wakes up 200 years in the future to a world run with an iron fist by a frightening and terrible leader.  Or think about this, in the country of Samoa in the Pacific Ocean, a little over a decade ago, the people there went to bed on Thursday night and woke up on Saturday morning. They skipped Friday in order to hop from one side of the international date line to the other, giving up being two hours behind California to be three hours ahead of Australia instead. A day is an unusual cost to pay for a new beginning, but it is hardly the most severe. Thomas Paine invoked the story of Noah in his vision of a new world. In the book of Genesis, only a few chapters after having created the world and the human beings that populate it, the creator becomes dissatisfied with the creation. It says, God saw how great was humankind's wickedness on earth and how every plan devised by human minds was nothing but evil all the time. And God regretted making human beings on earth and God's heart was saddened. So in the story, God decides to give the world a new start, but the cost of this new beginning will be terribly high. A flood will cover the earth and only a very few humans, Noah and his family, and a scant sampling of non-human animals will survive. This story is one of the first and the most influential examples of the idea that in order to make a new start, to begin in a new way to be the people that we want to be or build the world that we dream about, we have to destroy or discard everything that went before in the television show, Mad Men. The advertising executive, Don Draper, visits one of his star employees in the hospital. She has been through a painful ordeal that she is deeply ashamed of. Physically, she is well enough to leave, but she is being held for psychological reasons. Worn out and powerfully stuck. She is unable to face the outside world, the people she knows, or even the prospect of getting out of bed. Don, her boss, and something approaching her friend has already remade his life, already cut away the parts of himself that are inconvenient, that didn't fit with the person he'd decided to be. Seeing his story reflected in the woman in the bed in front of him, he stares her down and tells her to do anything and everything it takes to get up and never look back at this moment. Say whatever. Do whatever. The doctors need to be satisfied. He tells her, get out of here. Move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened. When I feel trapped in the present moment, the lure of blowing up or abandoning the past becomes very attractive. But the past is always part of us. What has gone before shaped who we are, what we are, and where we are in this moment. History, from a painful relationship to a family secret to a civil war cannot simply be forgotten. To pretend otherwise only robs us of a part of ourselves and leaves us unprepared for the inevitable moment when the events of our past will somehow echo into the present. We need to change just like our world and everyone else in it. We all need to turn in our hearts away from selfishness, indifference, and despair and towards the forces that sustain and uphold life. Not just once, but again and again when we are angry, when we are lonely, when we are tired, or stressed, or in pain. We need to begin again, we need that sort of transformation as individuals and as a society and accomplishing it requires us to know and acknowledge our past rather than denying it. To set goals that are clear and to be ready to work hard in pursuit of them. This past Friday marked the 86th anniversary of the start of the Flint sit-down strike. Just before New Year's, 1936, workers at General Motors Plants in Flint, Michigan occupied the facilities and refused to work, to leave, or to let management remove the equipment to a different factory. They did so with the demand that their employer recognized their union, the United Auto Workers, which was then just getting off the ground. For a month and a half, in the Michigan winter, the striking workers lived and slept in those factories, holding off the police and agents of the factory owners. When they finally won recognition, it was a watershed moment for American labor. It showed other workers in other factories and in other professions what could be accomplished through organization and collective bargaining. The victory in Flint was the beginning of a new and different world, one in which labor unions in the United States and many other parts of the world had to be taken more seriously, even by large and powerful corporations. It was a transformative event. As Unitarian Universalists, we share a theological legacy that resists the idea of rare and special moments in time as being the only place to make a new start. Each moment, in our understanding, is a fresh start. In every second, there is an opportunity to turn towards wholeness and begin again in love. So we cannot be satisfied to wait for the right moment or the right visionary leader to come along. Lema Gabaui is a Liberian peace activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work organizing women in her country to demand an end to its 14-year-long civil war. Women are often portrayed as vulnerable victims, particularly in Africa and particularly in times of war. Ms. Gabaui spent years as a refugee, keeping herself and her children alive with no power, no money, and no place of safety or security. Eventually, she began sharing her story with other women and daring to make a collective effort with the 51% of the population normally completely cut out of the peace process. She challenges me and she challenges each of us to make change where we know that it is needed, saying, if you have a situation that seems endless and is a negative situation, don't wait for a Gandhi, don't wait for a King, don't wait for a Mandela. You are your own Mandela.   Rise up and do something to change your situation around. There is a Zen Buddhist saying, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. So too with the new year and a labor strike or just about any other activity that needs to be done or can't be avoided and takes no notice of the coming and going of a holiday. Our faith affirms that the needs of the world are real. Mundane tasks like chopping wood and carrying water aren't separate from the meaning of a spiritual life. They are a part of it. Any work that is necessary to sustain life is holy. So at the start of this year, I wish you a renewed joy and appreciation for the work that you are already doing. May the new year bring you new wood to chop, new water to carry. The poet Philip Appelman wrote a poem for the new year that I believe brings home the importance of the mundane even amidst the promise and upheaval of change. It is entitled to the garbage collectors in Bloomington, Indiana, the first pickup of the new year, the way bed is in winter, like an apron lamp, like furry mittens, like childhood crouching under tables. The ninth day of X-mas, in the morning, black outside our window clattering cans, the whir of a hopper, shouts, a whistle, move on. I see them in my warm imagination, the way I'll see them later in the cold, heaving the huge cans and running, running to the next house on the street. My vestiges of muscle stir uneasily in the percale cocoon. What moves those men out there? What drives them running to the next house and the next halfway back to dream? I speculate, a social wheel? Let's make good ol' Bloomington a cleaner place to live in, right men? Hop, hurrah, healthy competition.  Enlightened self-interest, another can, another dollar. Don't slow down, Mack, I'm putting three kids through Princeton. Or something else, terror? A half hour later, Dawn comes edging over Clark Street, layers of color laid out like a flattened rainbow, red, then yellow, green, and over the black and blue of night still hanging on. Clark Street maples wave their silhouettes against the red and through the twiggy trees, I see a solid chunk of garbage truck and stick figures of men like wind-up toys tossing little cans and running. All day, they'll go like that, till dark again, and all day, people fussing at their desks, at hot stoves, at machines, will jettison tin cans, bare evergreens, damp Kleenex, all things that are Caesars.  After this first run, you too may rest in beds like great warm apron laps and know that people everywhere have faith, putting from them all things of this world, they confidently bide your second coming. Now, I am going to give you a bit of spiritual homework. Consider the new world that you need to live your life towards. It will come from a sense not only of the future that you hope for, but also the past that you have experienced. You may find it is attractive to use responsibilities, all the things you feel you have to do, to explain all the ways in which you cannot change. So start instead with the question of who and what you are ultimately accountable to. Answer that clearly, and it will become apparent that your responsibilities, the ones that really matter, the ones you won't give up, are a source of strength and determination. The commitments that define us can be the catalysts for our own transformation. Rather than a barrier to it. Focus on where your heart is and you will find where your spirit leads.  It is a work that I can tell you is best done in community, where you can find people to share your goals, to support your struggle, and to challenge you when you have lost sight of your own ideals. Our great Unitarian ancestor, William Ellery Channing, exhorted us not to be any more satisfied to remain stuck in the burrow hole of life than Winnie the Pooh was. He said, I call that mind free, which resists the bondage of habit, which does not mechanically repeat itself and copy the past, which does not live on old virtue, which does not enslave itself to precise rules, but forgets what is behind, listens for new and higher munitions of conscience, and rejoices to pour in fresh and higher exertions. In the year now begun, may we pour ourselves forth in the work of beginning the world over again. Here we bring new water from the well so clear for to worship God with this happy new.  We gather, carrying in our hearts the joys and losses of our days. We hold our own pain and celebration and those of ones we love. We share these here, knowing they are held gently in care and in support and in love. We light a candle for Connie Weisner, who suffered a fall recently. We send her our love and care and wish her a swift and full recovery. We light a candle of grief for the 39 people who lost their lives due to the recent winter storm in Buffalo, New York. We share our sorrow both for the loss and for the failure of public leadership, which continues to leave so many so vulnerable to the ongoing global climate crisis, particularly those already living at the margins. We light a candle in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, both in their suffering and in their struggle. Together we yearn for peace for them and for all people and for an end to all wars of conquest anywhere and everywhere on earth. As this is the first day of the new year, many of us come to this hour with thoughts or feelings connected with the year now closing, but do not serve us well and which we would like to release into memories of the past rather than lingering burdens of the present. For anyone and everyone with such a burden to set down, whether you have chosen to write it out on one of the pieces of paper provided or simply to hold it in your mind for this moment, I offer this blessing on all of our behalves. With gratitude for the ceaseless flow of endless time, which has led me to this place and this moment, I renounce whatsoever the past diminishes me or anything else that lives. May the old year pass away into its place of memory. May I welcome the new year, prepared to fully embrace its possibilities. Now, may we rest for a moment together, holding all that lives within our hearts. Blessed be. And amen. Let's rise and body and a rent spirit to sing our closing hymn together. Number 350, the ceaseless flow of endless time. The ceaseless flow of endless time. Is finished, but our work is not yet done. May our spirits be renewed and our purpose resolved as we meet the challenge of the week to come. The chalice flame extinguished until once again ignited by the strength of our communion. Go now in peace. Blessed be. And please be at rest for the postlude.


Welcome to ToffeeTV. It is the Everton News Daily. Rafa Benitez has held his press conference ahead of tomorrow's game and has spoken of those rumours of Rich Arleson going to PSG. He has said, we are not considering selling him. He is our player and we are really pleased and happy with him. Hopefully he can score a lot of goals for us this year. So Rafa Benitez putting those rumours to bed for the time being, let's be honest, for the time being, there's still a little bit of time till Tuesday night, until that window closes. It is rumoured that Everton would want in the region of 120 million euros for the Brazilian, who apparently is PSG's first choice if and when they sell Kenning and Bapay to Real Madrid. There has been a couple of other names mentioned. Harland, as me mentioned today, he may actually cost less than Rich Arleson, but Everton not looking to sell at the moment and certainly not saying they would encourage a bid before a away game with Brighton. So we'll have to see what happens, but let's hope Everton keep that stance because unless it's a very, very silly bid for Rich Arleson, then fans would lose faith, not for the first time in the club if they were to sell one of the fans' favourites and certainly if it happened without bringing in major reinforcements. This is also on the day when Moise Keane is being heavily linked with a move back to Juventus. Obviously Ronaldo has left for Manchester United and Juventus want to bring some players in and they're looking at Moise Keane for a loan deal with an obligation to buy. Everton are not willing to let him go just on loan, they want that obligation to buy and let the player go once and for all. He never really looks happy, does he? So hopefully that happens, but if that happens that would mean Everton need another attack on player before they even consider selling another attack on player. So hopefully Moise Keane does get done and goes to Juventus and I think that would mean everyone would be happy with the situation. Everton though have been linked with an attack on player today, Lewis Diaz, the Colombian winger, right-footed left winger who plays for Porto, 24 year old, 14 goals and 62 league appearances for Porto would cost him the region of £21.5 million and there is the sweetener of Hames possibly going to Porto as well on loan for the season which would obviously effectively finishes Everton career because he's only got one year left. That deal as well could suit all parties if that was to come off as well. We'll have to wait and see but haven't been in talks for the last couple of weeks with Porto over the player and maybe now if Moise Keane goes we'll put them in a position to let Moise Keane go and get the money and use that for a new winger. We'll have to wait and see on that one but wheels are spinning ahead of Tuesday's Transferred Deadland Day. Rafa Benitez has also said just on the game for tomorrow they will have players back. Hopefully that will be Ben Govry coming back to play centre back. He was in the travelling squad for Tuesday's game, a other field but wasn't included in the matchday squad because he wasn't deemed ready enough. So hopefully he's back tomorrow. One player who's not going to be involved is Fabian Delth who has got a shoulder injury. Surprise, surprise. There you go. Make sure you check out the starting eleven show. Make sure you check out our match preview. Our opposition match preview as well as available now on Patreon. You want to check that out. Brighton fan sitting off on the beach living the life we would all love doing the match preview which was amazing. Check that out. Also check out our Ultimate Fan app if you haven't already. Chance to win £8,500. Basically all you do is open packs. Build a fantasy team with six players. The packs available. There's one free every week. There's also a silver tier and a gold tier that you play a subscription fee for every month. You get better players in those packs. You build your teams. You get points for a chance to win £8,500 every single week. The scores are reset every week as well. So it's every week there's a different chance to win money. So make sure you check that out. The link is in the description. If you do pick a team, share it with us on social media as well so we can see what your team is. There you go. Make sure you give this video a like. Subscribe if you haven't already and if you want more great videos. Join us over on Patreon. See you later.


My name is Leon Wong, I'm the Oncology Service Chief, Dr. Dawn Johnson, Dr. Carlos Sandy, Pimson-Wanara, right, I'm Amy, Fafnirath, Desmarla Cork, Golden, Willis, Johnson, Rangana, Fonday, Dr. Kansari, Dr. Timothy Kinn. I've had time to develop long-term friendships with these patients because they have been with me for so long now. I do feel like every day when I've gone home that I've done a good thing and I've really helped somebody.


From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. The one constant that we know for customers is change and how they manage their data, their applications in this ever-changing world is something that is always interesting to dig into and helping me with this conversation. First time guest on the program, Jody Angelo, who is a Distinguished Engineer and National Practice Lead of Availability Solutions with Veritas is here with me. Joe, thanks so much for joining us. Stu, thanks for having me here, this is great. All right, so first, before we get into it, give us a little bit about your background, what you work on, how long you've been with Veritas? Sure, so I've been with Veritas for nine years in various different roles. I was a product manager when I joined the company. Since then, I've joined the field sales technical field sales organization, working as an advocate with some of our more strategic customers, sort of like a liaison back to the product team. Before that, I was a consultant, sort of as a implementing these technologies from Veritas. And of course, there was a customer too, so I always had sort of that round out, that full spectrum of experience with the company. Ooh, love that we can draw on some of your experience as a customer, let's start there if we will. You work with a lot of customers in the space you're working on, the availability solutions, I kind of teed it up with, we know that there's change happening. When I talk about customers and their cloud journey, it is an ever-moving thing, it's not a one-way thing, there's data centers, there's cloud, there's edge, there's all of these environments, and figuring out what application goes where and how that's changing over time is, there's a real challenge for customers these days, is it not? It absolutely is, and really one of the sort of the foundational tenets of the availability solutions at Veritas is that we give customers the ability to sort of decouple their applications from all of that sort of chaos that's in their infrastructure, whether it's in the cloud, whether it's hyper-converged, physical, virtual, different storage technologies, they can run their application, where they need to run it, when they need to run it, and be confident to know that it'll be performant. Yeah, well we know from Veritas' legacy, I remember seeing the billboards and the t-shirts, there's no hardware agenda, so we understand Veritas has always been a software company, and you look at that kind of wave of software-defined storage and the like, help us understand today, here's 2020, we're living in the future, what that means for customers' data, customers' application, what the availability solution and the product lines that you work with mean. Yeah, that's a terrific question. Well what it means is you have a myriad of choices you have to decide on, so it's not just the individual application, but really the composition of those apps and the relationships they have with other applications. You mentioned software-defined storage, I mean we cut our teeth on software-defined storage back when that wasn't even a term, 30 years ago. I like to think that it's almost in our DNA that taking and virtualizing storage is one of the first things we did as a technology. Today we've taken that same sort of approach to commoditizing most of the infrastructure so that it doesn't matter what operating system, it doesn't matter what storage vendor you use, it doesn't matter what cloud provider you use. Our technology gives you the luxury, or I like to say breathing room in many cases, to make those decisions so that they can align with your business outcomes more effectively. All right, so Joe the product we're going to be talking a bit about is InfoScale. InfoScale. For people that aren't familiar, what is InfoScale, how does it fit in this ever-changing landscape? You mentioned cloud and operating systems and hypervisors and everything, so help us tee up where InfoScale fits. Sure thing. So InfoScale is really a moniker if nothing else on top of our storage foundation, Veritas Volume Manager, Veritas File System, Veritas Cluster Server Technologies. And those have been industry staples for decades, right? Being able to address the needs of the most critical applications and some of the most stringent and high demanding workloads be it the top financial institutions, healthcare providers, et cetera. The technology itself really addresses resiliency and availability from sort of three areas. We'd like to think that you can provide the ability to keep your services online with our high availability and disaster recovery solutions. But we also want to make sure that those applications and those data sets that you're using the technology with make sure that they're performing, right? Because an underperforming application is just as detrimental to availability as would be an application that's simply gone offline. And we also want to give you the ability to migrate workloads and move those applications among different technologies. So that's really where the focus of InfoScale is. Okay, so Joe, when you have customers that are trying to figure out, okay, I'm taking an application, do I take that from my data center? Do I move that to the cloud? If I'm building a new application, where do I do that? How does InfoScale fit into that discussion and how is the discussion of InfoScale fit with the infrastructure discussion that they are having? Yeah, absolutely. So inevitably what the choice, a lot of the customers I have conversations with struggle with just, what's the first step to get to the cloud? And many of them are locked into a proprietary solution or some technology that doesn't really have an analog or some sort of equivalency in the cloud. With InfoScale, what we allowed them to do is actually replicate that data anywhere they want to go. Because you said we don't have a hardware agenda, it doesn't matter what the storage underneath the covers may be. So we can go from physical storage on-prem into the public cloud across any variety of different tiers of storage that exist there. And this works at not just from a dataset standpoint, but the applications as well. So if you've got something as critical as a database, a relational database, a Oracle database, a SQL database, whatever it may be, you can very easily replicate those and move those workloads into the public cloud for the purposes of migrations or disaster recovery, with truth be told to the exact same thing. Migration is just a one-way ticket, a DR is a round-trip ticket. But the technology is exactly the same. So that's how you're able to achieve those goals. Okay, we talk about applications. In general, you mentioned some specific, is there a compatibility list or what sorts of classes of applications? How do I know if my application today is something that fits under this? Certainly, so we have a catalog of agents we support, what we call our bundled agents or agent framework, and it's a list of roughly over 500 different infrastructure components, applications and services that we monitor and protect for the purposes of, again, for disaster recovery and migration capabilities.  But we also have the ability to very easily introduce custom applications. So a customer can take and say they may have written something homegrown and it has any number of different components to it. If you can tell me how to start it, how to stop it, how to monitor it, we can put it into InfoScale. Okay. Joe, I think we've paint a pretty good picture of what InfoScale is. Maybe do you have a customer example that might help us understand a little bit about kind of the use cases and commonly why they're using it and how that works? Well, I have a little bit of an anecdote that I like to tell a story about a customer, this is a state agency that was a big InfoScale user. It just happened to be on Windows and we'd gotten through a deployment and everything was looking great and they were able to move all of their applications in this particular, these Windows applications, all, being protected by InfoScale, being replicated and having both high availability as well as disaster recovery and everything was looking great. I finished the project on a Friday afternoon and by Sunday morning I was getting frantic phone calls from the people that I was working with. At the time I was actually a consultant and they're asking me, what happened? What's going on? What's the issue here? I go, I left the customer just fine on Friday, there were no issues at all. And they said, you need to reach out to your team there and see what's going on because we're getting some phone calls that there's some problems. I was like, okay, so I got on the phone and I spoke to my contact there and he said, oh no, nothing's wrong with the environment but we might have some issues with who's going to be maintaining it come Monday morning and I go, why? Well I think half the team, well pretty much all the team's going to be calling in rich Monday morning and I go, what are you talking about? He goes, the entire IT staff at the Mega Millions Jackpot. So, this is the entire staff. This was the DBAs, the network admins, the manager, the manager's manager, all the Mega Millions Jackpot.  He said, we already reached out to support, your guys are on the call, we're confident knowing that Veritas is going to be there to help us through this transitional period because we've got this consistent layer. So I use that example because one, it's a fantastic story but two, it addresses the fact that disasters come in many different flavors and many different, they can produce and manifest in many different ways and your people, that to me, that's always your most critical asset and when those suffer, this technology is there really helped to address them. Well Joe, I like that example rather than I think going forward, rather than saying, well, what happens if one of your critical staff gets it by a bust? What if your entire support team wins the lottery? And it happens and it did happen. I'm here to say, hand to God, God's on the street. All right, what would you say are some of the kind of misconceptions that maybe people don't understand if they haven't looked closely at InfoScape lately? Yeah, great question. So I think some of the misconceptions about it is that it's tied to a very specific sort of heritage, big iron, UNIX only workloads. Admittedly, we cut our teeth in that space, right? Whether it was going back in the days of the original SunOS and some of the big iron systems, we gained a lot of traction, a lot of, we earned our stripes in that space. But in reality, that space has shrunk tremendously over the last 10 or 15 years for a variety of reasons. And I think there's still some misconception that InfoScape or Veritas, volume manager and file system only is relevant in that space and truth be told, nothing could be further from the truth. Because if you go back to what I commented earlier about this idea of commoditizing that infrastructure, we can help customers transition throughout all those different sort of points of inflection. So going from the big iron to go into the more commodity, commoditized, x86 hardware, going from physical to virtual, going from virtual to the cloud, going from virtual to hyper-converged and even back in some cases. We have the capabilities and the wherewithal to be able to help customers through those kinds of transitions. Yeah, I've been in the industry long enough. I remember a lot of those Unix migrations, whether we're going over to Windows, whether we're going over to Linux. What would you say are some of the similarities and some of the differences from what we did in those environments compared to what's often a cloud discussion today? Yeah, so truth be told is that we tend to not reinvent the wheel at Veritas. We look and say, okay, what are some of the really tremendously powerful tools and capabilities that we have? How do we apply those to new platforms? You take the cloud, for example, one of the things that we've always prided ourselves on is giving customers, again, that breathing room to make a decision and say, I'm going to move to a new platform. So I can literally take a workload that was running on Unix and I can move it over to Linux. Well, that same model now can be applied where I can take that legacy workload running in Solaris, I can move that directly into the public cloud. And that's something that turns a lot of heads because I asked a lot of customers, like would it be compelling if I had a means for you to be able to take that legacy Solaris environment or that Unix workload and I can might it directly into, say, EC2 in AWS. And they're all, they're incredulous. They're like, no, this can't happen. There's no way you can do this. And they said, yes, it can because we look at the cloud as another platform and we want to be able to have customers take full advantage of it, exploit it, but at the same time, not be fearful that they won't have a way to move data in and out of it. How is Veritas helping with some of the management pieces when you talk about going through those migrations? It's one thing about what platform I live on but how do I manage that environment? What skillset do I need? How are you working hand in hand with your customers on that? Well, the great thing about it is is that there is a sense of parity between what you do on-prem and what you do in the public cloud when you're using InfoScale. Because again, we consume cloud resources just like they were any other platform. So whether you were going from physical to virtual, virtual to hyperconverge or into the public cloud, the same operations, the same configurations, the same scripts, the same user interface, all the things, all of the machinery and the tooling that's around those applications can be consistent. And in many cases, that is invaluable because a lot of customers, while they want to adopt the public cloud, they don't want to have to redefine their operational paradigm. They want to be able to take those workloads and I want to just be able to scoop them up and say, put me in the public cloud, I don't want to change everything around it because I don't have the bandwidth to do that. To take on a whole new rearchitecture using the cloud, that's basically starting your IT from zero and building only back up. And they don't have the time or the money or the resources to make that happen. So looking for that consistency, looking for that parity between the on-prem and the public cloud. All right, what are some of the features that are most resonating with your customers? Well, I would say first and foremost, the fact that our core technology around volume management helps you to virtualize storage, all of the capabilities you have there, the fact that our file system can transition between different Indians, right? Going from Unix to Linux, going from Solaris to Red Hat and so on. That gives you that flexibility. Our hardware agnostic replication with volume replicator, giving you the ability to not only provide DR over any geographic distance, but also the ability to migrate between those platforms. So being able to take and replicate data that's on a Unix system today into the public cloud running Linux. So that's with volume replicator. We also have capabilities that allow you to utilize local storage in the sense that and treat it like it's shared storage. Some of the challenges with the public cloud are around some of the restrictive storage architectures. So you take an availability zone inside of AWS. All that storage is only available inside of that particular availability zone. If you want to move an application over to the other node, you can't share storage between those availability zones. With InfoScale, you can. And you can basically address some of those gaps or shoot through some of those blind spots.  When you look at the public cloud, there's always new instances, there's new zones. It's a constant reinvention happening in the cloud. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of things were happening. First and foremost, we're in the marketplace. We have CFTs, we've got AMIs for that product so that for InfoScale, so you can spin those up much more quickly. Working to get in the same thing for the Azure marketplace. We integrate with a lot of the automation and orchestration tools that are in the market today, the Ansibles, the Puppets, the Chefs, making sure that what I call the time to value for our technology is as short as possible so that you get out of the business of becoming a Veritas admin, but focusing more on your business and what Veritas can do to help you improve that. Yeah, it's interesting stuff. A lot of automation going on in this space. Very different world for your customers. Is there some that you need to kind of reeducate customers as to what Veritas is doing today versus what they might have done a few years ago? There is, we're not your father's Veritas kind of mentality that we try to promote. And I think you've seen over the last 12 to 18 months that our messaging, our corporate strategy in general has had a tremendous sort of resurgence of InfoScale being a big part of that. Because we recognize that when you talk about Veritas as a whole with our API strategy of availability, protection, and insights, availability of your services and your data are critical to your success as an enterprise, not just from an IT perspective. And it's where InfoScale really plays sort of the critical role in achieving that. Any other, what sort of outcomes do your customers find once they've rolled these solutions out? Well, I think operationally that there is a significant reduction in the overhead needed to make some of them more complex and really challenging operations. Cookie-cutter, I had a customer just last week, this might sound like a little bit of self-promotion, but he said, Storage Foundation is the single greatest software-defined storage technology that's ever been written. And because they are able to achieve a migration on a scale that they never would have been able to achieve without a technology like this.  If the customer is gonna, has said it, we will take them on there. Then where he did it, it was, I took pause, I'm like, wow, I was like, can I quote you on that? And he was just like, yes, you may. I'm like, well, there you go, I just quote her. Excellent. Joe, what other features underneath that are kind of lesser known things from InfoScale, do you wanna make sure customers know about it? Oh yeah, I mean, listen, there are so many incredible capabilities that are included within InfoScale. I would say that most important is that we can do things like transparently tier storage between on-prem and the public cloud, and that can be something as granular as an Oracle database or something as general purpose as just a shared NFS file system. We have intelligent caching mechanisms to accelerate performance of workloads that again, address the issues of performance on-prem as well as the public cloud. We can help you transition your applications. We have a migration wizard framework inside of our dashboard, our InfoScale operations manager that allows you to, on the fly, establish all of the necessary relationships between the different clusters to be able to move applications from Unix to Linux, move it from physical to virtual, to go from a virtual into a hyperconverge. We identify all those pieces and I said in an on-demand fashion build all the components for you. We have a number of different, what's most common to talk about today is ransomware, right? This idea that how do we insulate our data from the threats of ransomware? You can do so many different off-host, snapshot, recovery methodologies within InfoScale, creating an air gap between your data and secondary data sets that you can recover instantly from, but has that enough gap so that something that would corrupt the primary data set would not infiltrate your secondary copies. So I mean, there's just so many cool things that it can do. It's just, the use cases are just pretty innumerable.  You talk about the application portfolios really changing for a lot of customers, proliferation of databases. We talked about virtual and physical and cloud environments ever changing. So when customers think about Veritas, when and how should they be thinking about Veritas? Well, especially from an availability standpoint, it's really about abstracting your applications from the underlying infrastructure, providing a resilient and performant storage layer to achieve really the goals of your business, not just the goals of your IT, because at the end of the day, we wanna make sure that there is a direct line of sight between what you're trying to do as an enterprise, what you're trying to do as a business, be it a financial service institution, healthcare provider doesn't matter what the industry is, and that the investments you make in IT can directly contribute to that. And with Veritas, we really help customers to make that a reality. And we do it tactically with the idea of protecting your applications and ensuring that you have resilient services. And we do it strategically by giving a platform to be able to host any number of different applications across all different operating systems and technologies. Joe D'Angelo, thank you so much for all the updates, really appreciate you. It's doing my pleasure. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all of the interviews we have. Go hit the search. You can find past interviews we've done with Veritas, as well as all the shows that we'll be at 2020 and beyond. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE.


I'm walking these 60 miles in these three days in Debbie's memory and to help those who are being treated who will need treatment for breast cancer. This is my wife, Debbie Zinser. She is diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 35 and died on June 21st, 2012 at 62 years young. Debbie's cancer had been a remission for a number of years. One Saturday the doctor was looking at some tests to see if he was going to perform surgery for what appeared to be a collapsed lobe in her lung. He looked across the counter at us and he said, there's no need for the surgery. You don't have a collapsed lung. You have cancer. It's come back. When Debbie was diagnosed, we had a long talk about the places and things we hadn't done. The best trip we had was that first one after her diagnosis. We spent time in Japan and Malaysia. So we decided, as her health deteriorated, we would still continue to travel just as much as we could. Travel became part of our everyday life as we tried to squeeze in the whole world whatever time she had left. Reverend Carey Smith called me up and I had supported her previously on her walks for Coleman. And she said to me, Joe, you've got to do this walk, now go sign up. And I began signing up and recruiting people to support me to raise the funds to walk in a three day 60 mile Coleman race to the cure. I think there's nothing more rewarding than a cheering section that just erupts when you walk by. To congratulate you, there is ministry from people on sidewalks as they hand you cold water or chewing gum or candy or maybe just a plot. There are men standing next to vans dressed in pink just cheering for their wives and sisters and daughters when they walk by. There's a special ministry, a special camaraderie of being together for a cause. As we follow in the footsteps of these bold and brave survivors toward a world without breast cancer.