Thank you all. It's has been a really really rich two days of this conference I'm sure some people have had to rush off to trains and planes and and buses Or maybe bicycles but we are really happy to have just a short session now to reflect a moment on some of the conversations we've had over the last couple days, but also we we must absolutely do another round of gratitude Expressions of gratitude. So first of all Thank you all for being here for making all the effort to come here to participate to present To moderate. Thank you moderators. That was a really tough job to keep people within time and most of you did a really excellent job Thank you all for For your contributions. Thank you again to our steering committee and to the Queen's College to our funders KR Foundation and to the SIDA for supporting this and making it possible for us all to be here We also want to make a special thanks to the conference organizing team Zack and Austin. I don't know where Austin is. Oh, there you are You guys made things flow so smoothly in lecture room B and Shulman Thank you so much and for all the work And with a smile on your faces nonetheless, it's been really fantastic Thank you Lindsay for all your efforts to prepare many many documents and communications and anticipation of the conference and for today and the work that will come So all of us can can enjoy the sessions that we happen to miss because we were in the other ones And is in us here. Oh, there you are. So Big big big. Thank you and a round of applause for Ines, please this conference This this conference would not have been possible without the absolute Genius of Ines and making things happen and happen so smoothly. So thank you so so much Ines It's really nice. Yes. We're so grateful. Thank you Good that's really good to hear I'm gonna pass the microphone on to Mikael who will explain our last exercise Thank you, thank you It's it's really easy with a crowd like you.  So first here's a survey We really appreciate if you give us feedback on the conference so we can improve or take it for future conference So, please take a moment. We'll also simply by email if your camera doesn't work with this Also, there's been lots of requests to share the presentations and it's here There's been lots of requests to share presentations and to share the email addresses of participants So the way we're gonna proceed is we're gonna say we're gonna share the presentations But it will give everyone an opportunity to say please don't share mine So expect an email saying if you don't want to share, let me know and then we'll just make it available Only to the participants and then we will not share the email addresses But we'll make a LinkedIn group where we'll invite everyone so whoever wants to join can join and contact with the others So that's how we're gonna proceed and now for the last activity of the day and of the conference We're gonna do the hot mic exercise where we're gonna take some Highlights or takeaways or things you learn from the public So we're gonna pass the mic around you can throw it But please don't throw it like this just throw it softly like this So no one gets injured and we're gonna pass and we're gonna ask each one of some of you not every one because too much But like ten of you to say one sentence Something that you learn or a highlight from the conference for you. So this will sound like hello I am your name and then something I learned is and it ends with a period or with a When you have to breathe, okay, and then you pass it to the next person And this way we're gonna get some of the key takeaways that you and hear from you And with this we'll close this this session. I think so I'm gonna pass it volunteer And a suggestion when you pass it to someone else try to pass it to someone you have not You don't know or you have not had a conversation with during the conference If that make clear Just so we extend the circles. All right here you got it Thank you so much to everyone who who put this together. This was uh by far one of my favorite conferences Not not exactly something I learned, but it was really nice just to see everyone That I've Was seeing their research but never actually met and it was just really nice to connect with individuals on that basis So thank you so much for being here today. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much It was just really nice to connect with individuals on that basis. So thanks Someone catch I'm chris, uh, I'm from culture and stand and echo what's just been said about the conference Uh, there's too many things there are too many things in my brain But just really connected with the mapping of feminist Resistance and that I heard about yesterday and yeah, it was really beautiful Hello, um, I'm claire omanic with oil change international. Um I am very jet lagged at the moment so Learned how much I need sleep but I think I've been thinking a lot. I guess about like still how to bridge some of the Really cool modeling and like technical details things with like the bigger high level conversations that have also been had about justice and colonization and like I don't know how how we can bring the conversations more together in times and Sometimes I feel like they're Happening but also in parallel. So Yes, that is my reflection and I will How's it to you? Thank you Um, hi, I'm Igor from perspectives climate research Um, actually I'm coming out of a three months sabbatical and yesterday was my first working day So it was an amazing way to get back into uh into the climate policy Um, uh, you know work and get inspiration and meet so many So many people working on well, not only on fossil fuel supply policies, but other issues as well related to climate change and um That's really something that you know Motivates me a lot. Uh, so thanks a lot to to everyone. Thanks a lot to to you guys for organizing this And I'll bust it back over there Okay, um, gosh, I did not really want this thing here, but uh So I'm Kevin Koenig work with Amazon watch First time at the conference and um, it's been so inspiring. I feel like I've I've met so many people whose papers and analysis have read And it's just across the board. It's so useful so much of our campaign work engagement with governments with companies I for now feel like I actually have some Tools and vocabulary to better engage with them. Um, so really inspiring I will say to you my experience across the board has been You know when we're all we're looking at the agenda and you see the panels and you're like, oh There's three, you know, there's three or four sessions Or panelists one this doesn't really apply to me and you sit through it And you're like that's always the one that I walked away with and you're like wow I don't work on coal But what I learned about how the transitions embedded in the analysis is really super and applicable for what we're doing So thank you Okay No one's looking at me Um Hi, uh, Johnny west of carbon tracker. I'm just the um, extraordinary amount of Uh Work that is already there and in place and can be drawn on Which um, I I guess perhaps I should have known but didn't you know Um, but it's just very clear From the panels here. I mean I've got a list of like 20 things to follow up on Who's going to take it? Oh god I can I cannot believe I caught that I'm Natalie from ISD. Um, uh, yeah, I just really want to echo what Johnny said We you know, I I feel like we we have so many of the tools and the approaches the strategies the policies um What I would be quite interested in is I think echoing what claire said I'm thinking more about how this area of work intersects with sort of broader Economic policies and kind of transformative economic policies thinking about sort of Ownership who owns the economy like that kind of stuff more in general is I think a link that would be interesting to explore in future I'll pass to someone who I have not spoken to before Can I get some indication Hello everyone, uh, tim donagy with greenpeace, um Echoing on everyone else has said a really fantastic conference. Thanks to the organizers Um, I feel like I have a head full of things. I don't know about but probably need to figure out In particular critical minerals international finance Um, and probably most importantly, how do we build power? Political power to actually enact this transition and make it just and fair for everybody Hello everyone, my name is himana warners from the ford foundation Um, thank you for all the organizers. This has been a wonderful conference. I did learn a lot Um, first time I was at this conference. So it was just very overwhelming and um I think what I what I learned or maybe what I would like to see more of Um is a lot more of the connections across Scales from academics and activists and people from local communities From the global south and in the global north. I heard a couple of times people saying that we needed to have more of those connections And I think there are academics and research institutions in the global south That I think making those connections across Scales, but also across movements would be really would be really wonderful I did see some of that here as well, but we love to see more of that So, um, I'll pass it on to I'm gonna watch out Sorry Right. Thank you for to the organizers for all the work done Uh, something I'm happy about this conference is seeing how indigenous perspective were in Tira part In any of the panels I'll join, uh, this this was all always highlighted And also seeing how indigenous were nor were an active part of of of the discussions that made me really happy coming from a country That's very rich in a lot of good terms and I'll pass it to No one looking at me. I know this strategy already Hi, I'm feeling city sir For me, I haven't been to many conferences and the Handful one two conferences have been to have been very different from this one So I've just been extremely, uh, delighted with the breadth of Of, uh, people invited from different areas activism, um Research policy, and I think that's really the way to go and I feel very inspired by the Passionate speeches that have been given in in in some of the panels Um Yeah, thanks a lot Hmm You'll take it Anyone wants to say anything any inspiration? No, okay. Well, thank you everyone very much. This is this has been fantastic. Um So I guess with this we are done for this session So we're gonna adjourn until the next time we stay posted We'll give details when we know ourselves what the next conference is going to be When um, so in the meantime, thank you all for coming. Thank you so much and uh until the next one. So we are done. Thank you


Hello traders at CMC Markets! Welcome to a new update from RRG Research for Monday, the 23rd of May and I'm recording it on Friday the 20th just before the market opens. My name is Julius de Campanar and I'm presenting to you from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I'm running RRG Research together with my friend and colleague Trevor Neal in the UK. Anyway let's kick off with a quick overview of what happened last week and what we can expect for the coming week. If we kick off with the view of world stock market indexes in the Chess, we're looking at the weekly RRG at the moment and be careful this is a relative picture so it shows you a relative strength of those markets, not necessarily price trends because I think we all know what happened last week. Quick look at it, what we can see is that the UK is actually doing really well, Australia is holding up well, the Japanese Nikkei index is coming in quickly pouring into the leading quadrant and we'll see some strength from the European market stocks index led by the German index and the French CAC index. Where's the weakness? The weakness is very, very clearly in the US. If you look at the US indexes then we've got the NASDAQ which is in the lagging quadrant and it hooked back down, powering further into the lagging quadrant. We have the S&P 500 index which is turning around and moving into weakening and heading towards the lagging quadrant and we now have the Dow Jones Industrial Index that is very early stages of rolling over so my view is that the US markets are the weakest, if you look at this universe that is. If we bring that to a daily RRG then we see a little bit more of a pronounced picture and here you definitely see the weakness of the US. Here's the NASDAQ, here's the S&P 500, here's the Dow Jones Industrial. These are the three indexes that are very clearly, oops that's not bad, very clearly rotating towards the lagging quadrant that's indicating that they're losing relative strength versus the rest of the world. All the greens here are the Asian markets and the European markets and you see a little bit more erratic movement that's because of the volatile swings that we had over the last week but I think the general picture here is very clear that the US is on the performing the world so that is a market where you would be looking for short positions and you can offset that with longs probably in Europe maybe in Asia. Now last week I showed you a trick where we instead of using in this case the MCI world as a benchmark for the RRG chart where we use a 0% performance which makes the RRG chart looking at absolute price and that is probably what's better in your mind. Here you see what's happening in the world right now. All these markets, all these international stock market indexes are on the left hand side of the graph which means that they are in downtrends versus the benchmark and the benchmark here is a 0% line which is a straight line. Basically we're looking at absolute price performance and then you can see that all these markets are now in downtrends when measured in price. Obviously if you're a trader in the trade CFDs you can benefit from both long and short side that's where these RRGs based on relatives come in to help you make choices and probably find some interesting pair trades. If I quickly take a look at the S&P 500 is obviously arguably the most important index in the world and we see that that topping formation has completed and we're resting at a support area around 3900. I made that a very thin line because I don't think it's a very major area of support. I think the more meaningful support levels are coming in around 3500 maybe as low as 3300. If we look at the daily version of the S&P then you can see that we had that break which was obviously the first signal and then we got a few days of a very strong rally where 4100 was going to be just above 4100 was going to be a resistance area. Old support becomes resistance but we didn't even get there. The peak came in at 4090 just below 4100 and we're now already pushing against that lower boundary. If that lower boundary that's the crucial part of 4 or 4. I think today which is Friday and I don't have that data yet but today and the coming week when you're listening to this if we break below 3800, 6000, 3800 let's round it off 3850 then we'll probably see an acceleration lower to the levels that I just mentioned but we've got to pay attention to a little bit of a positive divergence that's building up here in the RSI index, the Rathostract index and that's a positive sign that is usually a sign of a pause and a decline maybe a little rally. That could bring us back to that 4100 area possibly a little higher but if you look at the big picture of the S&P 500 I think that we can safely conclude that we're in a downtrend lower highs lower lows on a weekly basis that ain't gonna change anytime soon I'm afraid and that means that whatever we see on the daily charts should be judged as temporary rallies within the framework of a longer term downtrend on the weekly chart. I quickly want to take a look at the German market we haven't talked about the German market in our updates and obviously that's a very important and a big market in Europe. If you look at the RRG these are the stocks that are currently in the RRG momentum plus basket that's the pretty much the only basket that is showing on the performance all over a 30-day period right now but there are some things that we can learn from it especially the fact that there are a few stocks that are moving in a top right direction and that's RWE and also here you see Bayer and you see Wacker these are stocks that are moving in a top right direction that's pretty good and then we've got the stuff that's moving to the lower left which is better avoided. I've done a little bit of homework and I selected two stocks to inspect on an individual chart and the first one is obviously RWE because I think it's doing really well and then also Befeza BFSA is the ticker symbol and that's that's pointing to the north eastern direction which in generally is good but it's on the left hand side of the graph which means that it's in a relative downtrend and very often especially when they have a low reading compared to the other elements on the chart there is a pretty high risk that this is rolling over and these are the rallies within a downtrend and I think that Befeza is one of those stocks making it a good candidate to look at for a weaker performance while RWE is a candidate that is moving nicely into the leading quadrant so if we start with RWE and you look at the price chart you can immediately see why it is moving into the leading quadrant. It's already in an uptrend for quite a while and now we've just broken above that horizontal resistance area and it looks as if we're holding up quite well there and that makes RWE a very interesting stock potentially going to higher levels in the coming week. Now the other side of the coin is Befeza because here you say this is a weekly chart because I thought the daily was a little bit too condensed and here you can very nicely see the break from that broad range. This is a more than 10 euro range which is now broken to the downside and very often you can project the level of the height of that range to the below the lower boundary of that range. That brings us to an area around 45-46 maybe even lower but I think that 45-46 could be a good target area because that's a nice area of support which is formed by peaks that were set in 2018. So a major break for Befeza while RWE is breaking higher to German stocks looking to to be set for a nice move higher. Thank you for watching I hope you enjoyed the show and I'm looking forward to see you again next week same time same place.


When I was a senior in high school, I was told four-year college is the way to go. You have to. You want to get a good job You want to have a good life. It's what you got to do So that's what I did Off to a four-year university. I went and I hated it Absolutely couldn't stand it. I was not happy there. I wasn't doing what I wanted I mean, I was double majoring in psychology and political science for heaven's sakes So thanks to a very persistent mother telling me what I already knew like normal I knew I had to go back to school. I went back to the university to try and Reenroll myself. I took a year off. I'm better. I'm I'm good. I'll make it work So many hoops to jump through so many challenges It didn't make it seem worth it in the end So like any other you know frustrated teenager, what do I do? Call mom She works at Southwest Tech and she was able to just be like hey come check it out and I thought a Technical college. What am I gonna do there? I? Walked through those doors, and I instantly knew I was home The staff and faculty there are fantastic, and they're always there to bend over backwards to help you out and make you successful And I can't express how amazing that was so graphic of what design decided to be the program I went into and I instantly fell in love from day one the hands-on activity is fantastic every day our instructors are amazing


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I was asked to give a general input about economic aspects of digitalization, and I thought there would be... Well, I think there is no sense in talking about digital capitalism right now without talking about the current crisis. The crisis of public health, first and foremost, but for many people right now, and definitely in the years to come, an economic crisis of dramatic proportion. It is a crisis of globalized just-in-time capitalism with supply chains disrupted, and companies, governments, and citizens suddenly realizing the fragility of global production networks and the impact of this on health and social stability, as well as the systematic relevance of social infrastructure on the one hand, and digital services such as cloud computing, video communication, and of course, online shopping on the other hand. We are dealing with a project to build a privatized, or to put it more precisely, proprietary markets. The preliminary stage of such privately owned markets are the platform companies of the commercial internet, which have in many cases established themselves as commercial monopolies for certain services such as taxi rides, Uber, music and video streaming, Spotify Netflix, or food delivery. These private markets, however, are embedded in the socio-technical ecosystems of a small number of companies, among which the most important ones are Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, at least for the global west. The other platforms circulate like satellites around these platform planets. By binding our attention, the planets, or you could call them meta-platforms as well, are more and more in control of what we perceive at all. They control a large chunk of our attention, as can be seen, for example, in ever-growing screen time during the current corona crisis. This position of power is a goldmine, because in increasingly competitive consumer markets only those who can create attention for their products are actually able to sell them. Control of users' attention actually means control of consumption time, or to put it more abstract, control user attention means control the demand side of a market. Surveillance capitalist advertising is thus one way of capitalizing on consumer attention, or on the control of demand. It is of course just one such way, which is why the privatized markets theory emphasizes a variety of mechanisms of capitalizing on the market-like function of meta-platforms. Most of these mechanisms are based on different types of fees, which the meta-platforms charge for their function as markets, including, of course, revenues from advertising, but also more direct fees for market participation, like, say, the 30% of revenue, of revenues Google's and Apple's app stores charge for transactions between, say, a German gamer and a game-developing company in the Philippines. The pointed thesis about digital capitalism then is that the leading companies of the commercial internet, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, do not really operate in markets whose pricing mechanisms they might, for example, distort. They are these markets. They are these markets in the sense that for the economic space of the commercial internet, they are the ones connecting almost all the supply, apps, other software, content of all sorts, e-commerce products, to almost all the demand, everybody having a digital device. By constantly expanding their product and service portfolios and controlling the distribution channels for the products of an ever-increasing number of external providers, these private markets are permanently expanding their offerings. On the demand side of the market, i.e. with consumers, they rely on different login strategies. On the one hand, their own systems are continuously optimized for maximum convenience in order to reduce the need to switch to another system. On the other hand, they often make it difficult for consumers to use certain services outside their own ecosystems. Login effects can be observed empirically, for example, in retention rates of around 90% for both mobile operating systems, iOS and Android. It doesn't really matter then for the power of these companies that there are two of them theoretically competing for users when 90% of the users never leave their provider. The power of market ownership materializes in four distinguishable forms of control. Information control through surveillance is only the first step, which incidentally is by no means only aimed at consumers, but also and particularly at producers. Through information control, platform companies not only want to tell us what to buy, so to speak, they also and maybe more importantly want to tell producers what to make and how to make it. Uber drivers, booksellers on Amazon, app producers all over the world are told exactly how to deliver their services by the market owners. The rules and conditions of how to behave on a privatized market are made by those same companies, the market owners, leaving little choice to producers on how to deliver their services. Why does this even work, one might ask? Well, it works because information control enables three further forms of control which are essential to privatized markets and which enforce the power of platforms over producers. So information control is the first type of control. The second one is control of access. Platforms rule over who can participate in a market. Amazon, for example, regularly blocks third-party vendors from its platform, sometimes for very good reasons like fake medical equipment, sometimes for reasons that are not so well understandable. The third one is control of prices. How much someone can charge for a product depends on the market environment which is controlled by the meta-platforms. Platform operators have, for example, the opportunity to strategically expand their own offerings in order to lower prices for consumers and thus increase sales accordingly and accordingly their revenues. Fourth, they cannot, they can to a large extent control the performance of producers operating in their market-like structure. Just as publishers how Amazon or Facebook have changed the rules of books or online publishing, or check out the talk from Rasmus Kleis Nielsen in this talk series. A little footnote on that matter. Which angle on questions of power and inequality does this process imply? Let me just stress one very basic aspect. Imagine an economy run through the organizing principle of proprietary markets like the ones we were talking about. In other words, imagine a world which is like the Internet. In such an economy, a relevant amount of revenues, educated guess, 30%, might be extracted by market-like platforms. Where are they extracted from? Well, if you take the commercial Internet, the answer in most cases is they are extracted from producers, not from consumers. Consumers get highly subsidized products as is well-known in order to keep them attached to the platforms. But producers have to play by the rules of market-owning companies which includes their fees, say again 30% of revenue. These 30% are then missing on the producer or supply side of these markets. But this is exactly where in this whole equation or this whole framework labor is located. People are not only consumers. Most of them have to work to make a living and they usually do so in producing some sort of thing or service. When 30% of their revenue is missing, this is at least as a principle, 30% missing from wages of these workers. This is how this whole thing is a source of social inequality. Footnote end. Now how might we sum up all this in an analytical way? Well, asking about the analytical meaning of the formation of proprietary markets, one is not referred to something completely new, but rather to something quite ancient in the capitalist economy. Proprietary markets correspond to the return of an idea which shaped the early capitalist pre-liberal epoch in Europe, mercantilism. Unlike in liberalism and also unlike in neoliberalism, the basis of mercantilism at the time was an understanding of world trade as a zero sum game. This was particularly evident in the importance of an active trade balance which was the central goal of the mercantilist state. From this perspective, prosperity could only be achieved by cheating other parties. Positive trade balances were regularly squeezed off the opposing parties by brute force, for example, with the help of state guaranteed and protected trade monopolies such as the British East India Company. Those were the market owners of the 17th century. Digital capitalism's leading companies are the market owners of today. This time, however, we are dealing with privatized mercantilism. The big difference between the emerging system of proprietary markets and classical mercantilism lies in the respective role of the state. It was the state which promoted traditional trade monopolies because it profited from their businesses. The proprietary markets of the commercial internet, however, on the other hand are privatized sector companies that in recent years have been criticized for various anti-state practices, tax avoidance, for example, or the promotion of fragmentation of the political public sphere. The state, in other words, could be described as the big loser of this development, especially since more and more of its infrastructure relies on services delivered by digital capitalism's leading companies. So, getting back to the start again, will the crisis to come be any different for digital capitalism than the crisis that preceded it? When sticking to questions about the state, we might be able to get the clearest picture of how it might differ, however gradually. Of course, the immediate effects of the current crisis on technology are on the business side of things, probably reproducing a situation similar to the post.com and post-2008 situation. During the first weeks of the lockdown when consumer markets collapsed, Amazon became more popular and powerful than ever. This, of course, might mean more than a possible upward bump in revenues. It might drastically change the image of Amazon, creating something like a patriotic tech image, very different to what we discussed as Techlash in recent years. Another aspect is the window of opportunity for deep-pocketed technology companies when it comes to acquisitions. When financial markets will dry up or collapse in the course of the economic crisis to come, these companies might be even more capable of buying any potentially competitive startup on the market. Again, this is not only a possibility for expanding their market function for more and more services and, of course, a huge blow to competition. It is also a hard punch for any political strategy to strengthen something like a third way through digital capitalism by publicly funding innovation or startups. How could one build European tech champions when acquiring them becomes even easier than in recent years? This power shift between the state and big technology companies is probably most obvious in the process of immediate crisis management itself. When states technically try to ramp up their data management skills in order to allocate resources, bats, ventilators, labour, etc., Palantir, AWS and others were right on the spot. When the idea of managing the pandemic through contact tracing apps gained popularity, Google and Apple rose to the occasion by delivering infrastructure which seems to be without an alternative. When fake news about the virus had to be stopped, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok provided both possibilities to regulate the spread of false information through AI and advertising opportunities, for example, for the WHO. When states invested in the development of vaccines or drugs biotech companies such as Verily, Part of Alphabet or Virbiotechnology funded by Notorious Softbank were ready to offer their services and thus entered the promising health sector. Are these only spotlights or are these signs of a particular development? If the later is true, we might be observing in real-time right now not only how the corona crisis is further strengthening the power of privatised markets, just like the dot-com boss bust and the crisis of 2008 and 2009 did. We might actually be seeing a rapid acceleration of the state's deepening structural dependency on leading digital corporations, signs not only of big tax power over the economy or digital capitalism, but indeed over the digital society and its state. Thank you.


Hey, welcome back everyone to SuperCloud 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, we're here all day talking about the future of cloud, where it's all going, making it super, multi-clouds around the corner and public cloud is winning. Got the private cloud on premise and edge. Got a great guest here, Baskar Gorty, CEO of Platform 9, just on the panel on Kubernetes and Enable or Blocker. Welcome back, great to have you on. Good to see you again. So Kubernetes is a Blocker enabled, with a question mark I put on that panel, was really to discuss the role of Kubernetes. Now, great conversation, operations has impacted, but the thing about what you guys are doing at Platform 9 is your role there as CEO and the company's position, kind of like the world spun into the direction of Platform 9 while you're at the helm. Right, absolutely. In fact, things are moving very well and since they came to us, it was an insight to call ourselves the platform company eight years ago, right? So absolutely, whether you are doing it in public clouds or private clouds, you know, the application world is moving very fast in trying to become digital and cloud native. There are many options for you to run the infrastructure. The biggest blocking factor now is having a unified platform and that's what we've come into. Baskar, we were talking before we came on stage here about your background and we were going to talk about the glory days in 2000, 2001, when the first ASPs, the application service providers came out, kind of a SAS vibe, but that was kind of all kind of cloud-like. It wasn't. And web services started then too, so you saw that whole growth. Now fast forward, 20 years later, 22 years later, where we are now. When you look back then to here and all the different cycles. In fact, as we were talking offline, I was in one of those ASPs in the year 2000 where it was a novel concept of saying we are providing a software and a capability as a service, right? You sign up and start using it. I think a lot has changed since then. The tooling, the tools, the technology has really skyrocketed. The app development environment has really taken off exceptionally well. There are many, many choices of infrastructure now, right? So I think things are in a way the same, but also extremely different. But more importantly, now for any company, regardless of size, to be a digital native, to become a digital company is extremely mission critical. It's no longer a nice to have. Everybody's in the journey somewhere. Everyone is going digital transformation here, even on a so-called downturn, recession that's upcoming, deflation's here. It's interesting. This is the first downturn in the history of the world where the hyperscale clouds have been pumping on all cylinders as an economic input. If you look at the tech trends, GDP's down, but not tech, because the pandemic showed everyone digital transformation is here and more spend and more growth is coming, even in tech. So this is a unique factor, which proves that that digital transformation is happening and every company will need a super cloud. Everyone, every company, regardless of size, regardless of location, has to become modernized infrastructure. And modernizing infrastructure is not just some new servers and new application tools. It's your approach, how you're serving your customers, how you're bringing agility in your organization. I think that is becoming a necessity for every enterprise to survive. I want to get your thoughts on super cloud because one of the things Dave Vellante and I want to do with super cloud and calling it that I personally, and I know Dave as well, he can speak for himself, we didn't like multi-cloud. I mean, not because Amazon said, don't call things multi-cloud. It just didn't feel right. I mean, everyone has multiple clouds by default. If you're running productivity software, you have Azure and Office 365, but it wasn't truly distributed. It wasn't truly decentralized. It wasn't truly cloud enabled. It felt like they're not ready for a market yet, yet public clouds booming on premise, private cloud and edge is much more dynamic, more real. Yeah, I think the reason why we think super cloud is a better term than multi-cloud. Multi-cloud are more than one cloud, but they're disconnected. You have a productivity cloud. You have a sales force cloud. You may have, everyone has an internal cloud, right? But they're not connected. So you can say, okay, it's more than one cloud. So it's multi-cloud. But super cloud is where you are actually trying to look at this holistically, whether it is on-prem, whether it is public, whether it's at the edge, it's a store, at the branch. You are looking at this as one unit. And that's where we see the term super cloud is more applicable. Because what are the qualities that you require if you're in a super cloud, right? You need choice of infrastructure. But at the same time, you need a single pane or a single platform for you to build your innovations on, regardless of which cloud you're doing it on, right? So I think super cloud is actually a more tightly integrated, orchestrated management philosophy, we think. So let's get into some of the super cloud-type trends that we've been reporting on. Again, the purpose of this event is to get the conversations flowing with the influencers like yourselves who are running companies and building products on the builders. Amazon and Azure are doing extremely well. Google's coming up in third. Cloud works in public cloud. We see the use cases, on-premises use cases. Kubernetes has been an interesting phenomenon because it's become from the developer side a little bit. But a lot of ops people love Kubernetes. It's really more of an ops thing. You mentioned OpenStack earlier. Kubernetes kind of came out of that OpenStack. We need an orchestration. And then containers had a good shot with Docker. They repivoted the company. Now they're all in an open source. So you've got containers booming. And Kubernetes has a new layer there. What's the take on that? What does that really mean? Is that a new de facto enabler? It is here. It's for here for sure. Every enterprise somewhere else in the journey is going on. And most companies are 70 plus percent of them have one, two, three container-based, Kubernetes-based applications now being rolled out. So it's very much here. It is in production at scale by many customers. And the beauty of it is, yes, open source, but the biggest gating factor is the skill set. And that's where we have a phenomenal engineering team. So it's one thing to buy a tool.  We provide a software platform for cloud acceleration as a service. And it can run anywhere. It can run in public, private. We have customers who do it in truly multi-cloud environments. It runs on the edge. It runs in stores, there are thousands of stores in the retailer. So we provide that. And also, for specific segments where data sovereignty and data residency are key regulatory reasons, we also run on-prem as an air gap version. Can you give an example on how you guys are deploying your platform to enable a super cloud experience for your customer? Right, so I'll give you two different examples. One is a very large networking company, public networking company. They have hundreds of products, hundreds of R&D teams that are building different, different products. And if you look at a few years back, each one was doing it on a different platform, but they really needed to bring the agility. And they worked with us now over three years where we are their build test dev platform where all their products are built on, right? And it has dramatically increased their agility to release new products. Number two, it actually is a light-sourced operation. In fact, the customer says, like a Maytag service person, because we provide it as a service and it barely takes one or two people to maintain it for them. So it's kind of like an SRE vibe, one person managing a large- 4,000 engineers building infrastructure. And their tools, whatever they want to do. They're using whatever app development tools they use, but they use our platform as a service. And what benefits are they seeing? Are they seeing speed? Speed, definitely. Definitely they're speeding speed. Uniformity, because now they're building able to build. So their customers who are using product A and product B are seeing a similar set of tools that are being used. So a big problem that's coming out of this super cloud event that we're seeing, and we've heard it all year, ops and security teams, because they're kind of two part of one team, but ops and security specifically, need to catch up speed-wise. Are you delivering that value to ops and security? Right, so we work with ops and security teams and infrastructure teams, and we layer on top of that. We're like a platform team. If you think about it, depending on where you have data centers, where you have infrastructure, you'll have multiple teams, okay? But you need a unified platform. Who's your buyer? Our buyer is usually the product divisions of companies that are looking at, or the CTO would be a buyer for us functionally, CIO definitely. So it's somewhere in the DevOps to infrastructure, but the ideal one we are beginning to see now, many large corporations are really looking at it as a platform, and saying we have a platform group on which any app can be developed, and it is run on any infrastructure. So the platform engineering teams. So you were in just two sides of that coin. You've got the dev side, and the infrastructure side. Another customer, I'll give you an example, which I would say is kind of the edge of the store. So they have thousands of stores. Retail. Retail, food retailer, right? They have thousands of stores that are on the globe, 50,000, 60,000, and they really want to enhance the customer experience that happens when you either order the product or go into the store and pick up your product or buy, or browse, or sit there. They have applications that were written in the 90s, and then they have very modern AIML applications today. They want something that will not have to send an IT person to install a rack in the store, or they can't move everything to the cloud, because the store operations have to be local. The menu changes based on- It's a classic edge. It's a classic edge, right? They can't send IT people to go install racks or servers. Then they can't sell software people to go install the software. And any change you want to do that, you know, truck rolls. So they've been working with us where all they do is they ship, depending on the size of the store, one or two or three little servers with instructions that- You see little servers, like, how big? One, like a- Pigeon box. Pigeon box, yeah. Pigeon box, right. And all the person in the store has to do, like what you and I do at home and we get a router, is connect the power, connect the internet, and turn the switch on. And from there, we pick it up. Yeah. We provide the operating system, everything, and then the applications are put on it. And so that dramatically brings the velocity for them. They manage thousands of them. Two plug and play. Two plug and play. Thousands of stores. They manage it centrally. We do it for them, right? So that's another example where on the edge, then we have some customers who have both a large private presence and one of the public clouds, okay? But they want to have the same platform layer of orchestration and management that they can use regardless of the location. So you guys got some success, congratulations. Got some traction there, that's awesome. The question I want to ask you is that come up is, what is truly cloud-native? Because there's lift and shift of the cloud. That's not cloud-native. Then there's cloud-native. Cloud-native seems to be the driver for the super cloud. How do you talk to customers? How do you explain when someone says, what's cloud-native, what isn't cloud-native? Right, look, I think, first of all, the best place to look at what is the definition and what are the attributes and characteristics of what is truly a cloud-native is CNCF Foundation. And I think it's very well documented, very well- Two con, of course, the droid's coming up. So it's already there, right? So we follow that very closely, right? I think just lifting and shifting your 20-year-old application onto a data center somewhere is not cloud-native, okay? You can't port to cloud-native. You have to rewrite and redevelop your application and business logic using modern tools, hopefully more open source, and I think that's what cloud-native is. And we are seeing a lot of our customers in that journey. Now, everybody wants to be cloud-native, but it's not that easy, okay? Because I think it's, first of all, skill set is very important, uniformity of tools that there's so many tools. There are thousands and thousands of tools. You could spend your time figuring out which tool to use, okay? So I think the complexity is there, but the business benefits of agility and uniformity and customer experience are truly being done. I'll give you an example. I don't know how cloud-native they are, right? And they're not a customer of ours. But you order pizzas, you do, right? If you just watch the pizza industry, how Domino's actually increased their share and mind share and wallet share was not because they were making better pizzas or not. I don't know anything about that, but the whole experience of how you order, how you watch, what's happening, how it's delivered, they were the pioneer in it. To me, those are the kinds of customer experiences that cloud-native can provide. Being agility and having that flow through the application changes what the expectations are for the customer. The customer's expectations change, right? Once you get used to a better customer experience, you will not, that's got to wrap it up. I want to just get your perspective. Again, one of the benefits of chatting with you here and having you a part of the SuperCloud 22 is you've seen many cycles. You have a lot of insights. I want to ask you, given your career, where you've been and what you've done and now the CEO of Platform 9, how would you compare what's happening now with other inflection points in the industry?  What's going on right now? Put it into context. This moment in time around SuperCloud. Sure, I think, as you said, a lot of battle scars being an ASP, being in a real-time software company, being in large enterprise software houses and a transformation. I've been on the app side. I did the infrastructure and then tried to build our own platforms. I've gone through all of this myself with a lot of lessons learned in there. I think this is an event which is happening now for companies to become cloud-native and digitalized. If I were to look back and look at some parallels of the tsunami that's going on, is a couple of parallels come to me. One is, think of it, which was forced on us like Y2K, everybody around the world had to have a plan, a strategy, and an execution for Y2K. I would say the next big thing was e-commerce. I think e-commerce has been pervasive, right, across all industries. And disruptive. And disruptive, extremely disruptive. If you did not adapt and adapt and accelerate your e-commerce initiative, you were, it was an existence question. I think we are at that pivotal moment now. In companies trying to become digital and cloud-native, that is what I see happening. I think that e-commerce is interesting, and I think just to riff with you on that is that it's disrupting and refactoring the business models. I think that is something that's coming out of this, is that it's not just completely changing the game, it's just changing how you operate. How you think and how you operate. See, if you think about the early days of e-commerce, just putting up a shopping cart didn't make you an e-commerce or an e-retailer or an e-customer, right? So I think it's the same thing now, is I think this is a fundamental shift on how you're thinking about your business. How are you going to operate? How are you going to service your customers? I think it requires that just lift and shift is not going to work. That's great. Thank you for coming on, spending the time to come in and share with our community and being part of SuperCloud 22. We really appreciate it. We're going to keep this open. We're going to keep this conversation going even after the event to open up and look at the structural changes happening now and continue to look at it in the open, in the community, and we're going to keep this going for a long, long time as we get answers to the problems that customers are looking for with Cloud Cloud Computing. I'm John Furrier with SuperCloud 22 in theCUBE. Thanks for watching.


As the nation's unemployment rate continues to experience an unending rise, Nigerians are calling on government at all levels to create an enabling environment to improve micro, small and medium enterprise in the country. The belief that the government's role is poverty part of sustaining the policies to support the growth as well as sustainability of businesses aimed at the current economic realities. This call is a follow-up on the 2023 United Nations Day set aside annually to mark the MSMEs across the globe. The government cannot, I repeat, does not have the capacity to create job opportunity for its people. What the government can do is come up with policies that can help to drive the spirit of entrepreneurship. I can tell you that for some years now we have experienced one, the closure of businesses that belong to young entrepreneurs. As a result of high costs of running the company, let's look at the dollar for instance. Some of these young businesses could not survive anymore because the dollar was just too high. If we are to talk of subsidy, subsidy, subsidy, what they should do is subsidize the dollar for young entrepreneurs to try. Instead, they are busy subsidizing the same dollar for people who are already jived in their industry at the expense of the young ones that are just coming up. It is the middle class that drives the economy of any nation. See, coming up with a policy is very easy. Implementing it is the issues. We've had recently with the three Buhari administration that they were going to give money to farmers so that they can farm. People took their money and just ate the money and the farmer did not get the money. I hope their plans will not also reflect promises that have not been fulfilled. The new development of the government over the small scale business and I think it's a work on development and it will also help to eradicate poverty and the unemployment in the society. I want to use this medium to talk to our youth, to enable them to embrace the work on development. I think it will go a long way. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.