Okay. Yeah, so I'm just reading from Psalm 118 and a few verses Verse 1 says, oh, give thanks to the Lord for he is good and his mercy endures forever And give thanks. He is good. His mercy endures forever Then just going down to Verses 8 and 9 it is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in princes, right? And then it goes on So verse 1 Really very very encouraging because it says give thanks to the Lord Two qualities about God about about God himself Now which is listed here for he is good. No, that's that's very encouraging. It's not a mixture of good and bad It's not a mixture of holiness and, you know, unrighteousness, but he is good right and everything that we can think of God being good the attribute of The he's a very personification of it, and he is good and And then the second attribute there is his mercy endures forever You know when he extends his mercy, it's he doesn't run run out of it He doesn't he's not in short supply of this mercy. It's mercy endures or goes on forever And verse 8, you know because of these attributes, you know, the psalmist is able to declare it is better to trust in the Lord Than to put confidence in man, right? That doesn't mean that we he should not trust people at all, you know The Lord Jesus he trusted the disciples even after they You know, they one denied him One betrayed him and he gave the great commission, you know to the disciples he Trusted in them and he put his confidence in them but the thing is this that if we are going to have our Confidence in man and if it's going to exceed and you know, if it's going to be more than our confidence in God Right, then it is not the right thing So it says here it is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man it's better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in Princess and simply because that the Lord is Good and his mercy endures forever, right? So today You know as we begin, let's just pray and and let's This is real in our hearts, you know, wherever we need to trust him wholeheartedly trust him completely and trust him and his word, right? Let's pray Father, we thank you Lord your words very your word is very clear that Lord that you are good and Lord your mercy endures or goes on extends forever Lord Father, we thank you that we have you as our God. We thank you that we can completely Lord rely on you wholeheartedly follow you God and Master, we thank you that you will not do us any wrong. We thank you that your mercy endures forever We thank you that you lavish your grace upon us Lord and it is it is Purely because of this Lord that we can put our trust in you Lord as compared to our confidence in man and put our trust in you as Compared to Lord even rulers or God people who wield influence and power or master Lord We can we can put our trust in you completely Lord even compared to that Father God because you are over and above all that You are our sovereign God and yes master and even today Lord We pray that even if we are facing any situations where Lord We are they're torn between one and the other or father God where I pray that wholeheartedly that we will come and Lord Trust in you Father God that we will Lord put our confidence in you master Wholeheartedly or father God we we pray God that we will even as we do that that we will experience God In our lives We will experience the truth of your word of who you are Lord of who and how you describe yourself to be master Yes, Lord and there is no one like you Father God There is no other God there is no one like you and we we put our trust in you master We thank you. We give you all the praise and all the glory at this time Jesus master's name. We pray amen. Amen Okay, so we've been progressing Going through Our course and we've come to the last chapter Which is chapter six and it's on stewardship right stewardship and also some practical things to do practical steps to undertake for our You know with regard to finances regarding finances and also when we you know when it comes to these things again You know when it comes to practically, what can we do with money? It's good to have a biblical base. It's good to consider the scriptures so that we can be sure You know, is it worldly or is it you know, is it something that is out of fear? It is something that is you know, am I doing the right thing so we can do it with all confidence Yes, you know, there is a scriptural backing to it So my heart needs to be in the right condition right posture and I can do it, right?  Okay, so So it's it's good that we study them and it's good that we apply them You know more than just be curious about it It's good that we apply it in our lives and and enjoy the fruit of it, right? Okay, so so first of all Let me just share the notes and Okay, so We're on page 18 and we're looking at you know, just going through that list of 15 things Practical things that we can consider So first of which is stewardship, right? Biblical stewardship. So this is something for us to know and understand. We know who a steward is a steward is another name for a manager one who is an overseer and one who To whom is entrusted the responsibility of looking after maybe it's a it's a it could be you know certain Certain function it could be Finances it could be certain responsibility. So a steward, right? So when it comes to the word of God, you know We can define biblical stewardship in this way that it's the use of God given resources for accomplishing for carrying out God God's objectives, right? God objectives or God's objectives like it's it's the usage It's the usage of God given resources. Okay, so so it is it is not a one-time thing We know it's it's because it involves spending decision so Resources when we say resources it involves money it won't involves time it involves our ability and everything so Everything comes under that the bracket that category of resources But primarily of course, we are talking about finances, right? So we see that First of all, you know when it comes to stewardship, we understand that everything belongs to God You know, this is something that we saw earlier on in the course that That everything belongs to him, right? We see in Let me just check that was here some 24 and worse one Just put it here for us in the chat Sam 24 and worse one. It says that the earth is the Lord's and all its fullness and the world and those who dwell there and so We see that he is really the owner. He's the one who possesses everything, you know every wealth and In another place where God declares the gold is mine the silver is mine the cattle on a thousand hills Everything belongs to him. Okay, so so we come with an understanding that okay God everything belongs to you and even when you know through my profession or ministry or business You know when when I went when when I handle the wealth that comes in as a result of Yeah, of the you know the success of the work that I do or in return for the work that I do the wealth that I You know the money that I hold in my hand. I know that it is it is something that belongs to you and You've you know you because of your favorite race I'm able to you know have this and because of your provision, right? This is the way in which you provide for my needs either my need and collectively for us as a family You've made it possible like for us to do this. So First and foremost is to have that understanding, right? That everything belongs to him. So then it's important for us to have that understanding Because what of what follows next? Okay? because we see in the word of God that a Steward is One who is faithful Okay faithful in what is entrusted to him or her right one who is Okay faithful to everything that has been entrusted so without faithfulness there is no stewardship Okay, so if I I just put the verse in the chat again one Corinthians 4 verses 1 and 2 give a pulse right and he says Let a man so consider us as servants of Christ and Stewards of the mysteries of God Okay, so the revelation knowledge and understanding and the you know the hidden mysteries that were revealed and so he's saying you Consider us as servants and stewards of the mysteries of God First to moreover, it is required in stewards that one be found faithful. So faithfulness You know integrity is a very important aspect of stewardship. So Well, whatever the Lord puts or brings our way puts it in our hands, you know So when when I go back to him and I ask him God, what do I do with it, right? So faithfulness is important because and the Lord entrusts and the Lord says okay, this is what you do Then am I being faithful? Am I being faithful and stewarding it? Well, you know We see other aspects of stewardship a steward always, you know, if it's interesting when we study, you know a steward increases Steward not only takes care protects but also increases we see in the parable that the Lord Jesus, you know spoke taught He required the stewards to whom he had given to to actually multiply what he had interested them So a good steward is faithful a good steward protects what has been interested a good steward also enhances or Increases what has been entrusted into his or her hand, right? So so that is something that we see so When it comes to stewardship, we we we can consider all this in that first of all, it has been given to me so, you know, I need to be faithful and And and the thing is that Since it has been in a sense that I'm seen as a steward by God You know, I I need to be faithful. I need to protect not just protect but also Increase what has been entrusted to me Okay So what can I do to do that and and the Lord will lead the Lord will guide Another scripture that's that's helpful for us is in Luke chapter 16 Versus 10 onwards. So it's 10 to 13 Okay, let me just share that entire verse Um Section portion of scripture. So it says he who is faithful in what is least is faithful also in much And he who is unjust in what is least is unjust also in much Therefore, if you've not been faithful in the unrighteous mammon Who will commit to you the true to your trust the true riches? Okay, that's versus 10 and 11. So the thing is this, you know, when it comes to faithfulness It's not about the amount or it's not about the quantity It's not about that quantum of what we have or what has been put in our hands, you know, many times We think, you know, hey, this is just a small amount or this is just a small thing So it really doesn't matter, you know, how I spend it or how I use it or if I'm being careful with it You know, it's just a small amount. Oh, I know this person gave it to me and it's just a matter of 100 rupees So it's fine. You know, that person won't ask It's okay But actually the thing is it doesn't matter. You know, the quantity doesn't matter But it's really a heart behind it. How you treat what has been given to you And so while we are waiting for that big thing to come and then we'll be found faith We want to be faithful. You know, how are we in the small things? I'm with scriptures very clear. He was faithful in the least, you know, is faithful also in much The opposite is true. He was going to be unfaithful in the in the small things is going to be unfaithful in the bigger things as well right, he's just going to Apply the same principle there or you know, whatever his heart is it's not been dealt with It's going to be the same way. So so that is the thing, you know And and the Lord asked the question verse 12 We see that and if you have not been faithful and what is another man's who will give to you? What is your own? Okay, so We started by saying, okay, everything belongs to God, right? So it belongs to him and And maybe the Lord, you know entrusts us with great responsibilities and great stewardship So are we faithful in it because if we are not faithful in what is small if we are not faithful in what is another person's Then how can we be faithful in what is what is big and how can we be faithful in what is really our own, right? So that's an important thing to consider when it comes to stewardship Okay, biblical stewardship, right? Okay That's let's move on to the next thing which is financial planning. Okay, so when it comes to You know closely flowing out of stewardship is financial planning.  Is it okay? Is it scriptural? You know, we saw earlier that Well, it is okay to plan But it's not okay to worry it's not okay to, you know, have worry as a source and and then You know, do the other actions because the the Lord Jesus very clear clearly says in Matthew 6, you know Don't worry and it's linked to needs legitimate needs, right? Do not worry about what you will eat What you will drink do not worry about the food that I mean the clothes that you will put on, right? So these are legitimate needs, but Lord is Against us worrying because that means that we are not actually putting our faith in him We're not trusting in him, right? So So it's not about the Lord is not against us planning For the future now that is not lack of faith worry is lack of faith if we use our God-given creativity if we use our God-given You know skills and abilities and talents and if we include God in the planning process There's nothing wrong in planning for the future fact Proverbs is full of You know such wisdom About planning about working and and so on Okay, but the but the scripture also warns us about being selfish scripture also warns us about Putting our trust in the wealth and riches. So these are this is the other side of it, right? So so we don't have to you know, totally do away with financial planning You don't have to totally, you know do away with okay, you know Allocation of resources. Yeah, so one way of looking at it financial planning is it's Allocating, okay. This is how much I'm getting every month. Okay, so to What expense can I allocate it? You know, I remember when we initially you know initial days of marriage? Of course many years ago, so The salary that we used to get was it was a very limited amount and Very small even those days considered Considering the expenses in a in a city like Bangalore So it was a small amount and I was working, you know in a in a Organization and as a salesperson and so You know, we would set aside the amount for tight and and I was the only person working at that time And so what we used to do is, you know, we used to have these envelopes envelopes, you know four or five of those and then as soon as the salary comes, you know, we'll draw the whole thing and then put it in non-velopes and And then, you know, salary This I'm sorry house rent would be this much You know to pay for the electricity bill would be this much and you know, not many things I don't think anything was paid online at that time So we used to I used to do that You know the draw the money and then put it in these envelopes and then so these were separate expenses right rent bills to be paid Electricity bill, maybe the for the, you know groceries. This is what we are going to pay. So like that, right? So similarly, you know, when we look at our monthly expenses, if there are different It comes under different heads or maybe we I'm sure some of us would have would be very very meticulous In this aspect, maybe you're very well planned and if not, you know, we can you know, you can be okay Let's say, you know, for example, if your income No, you're the total income is let's say 45,000 per month You know, I'm just just a figure that is put there. It could be anything. It could be 10,000 It could be whatever four lakhs So a percentage of that. Okay. It goes to the tight 10% and then there is some amount which goes for taxes Now this table that you see here It's not a perfect table because if you add up these percentages goes beyond 100 So I just marked out that miscellaneous, which is, you know, the 105th percentage. So I just put that down but if you look at You know, these are major expenses, right? They could be something for housing place of stay It could be rent. It could be, you know, maybe an EMI towards a housing loan, maybe or it could be you know, so housing and There could be another Expense which is for food. So accommodation food Transport, right? Which you put as auto, you know, it could be short for automobile. So it could be transport. It could be Your commute from work, whatever you're using, whatever you're spending on it It's just a rough example. It need not be 12%. So so you see that most of it, you know, if you look at these three heads that would form You know, almost 60% of it Okay, so what the experts say is that, you know, what we have at hand after our tithes and taxes Okay What we have at hand That it should not go beyond this major expense should not go beyond 70% Okay, now We're not going into how that 70% has arrived at but it's a healthy thing. It's a safe thing to keep it Less than 70%. Okay, so here we see 60% allotted to that There could be other heads like insurance, maybe debt meaning, you know, there is a loan that is a repayment of it something for recreation You know, taking the family out maybe, you know, to an entertainment park or or maybe To a restaurant or something. So these are, you know Legitimate expenses, you know, there could be clothing, maybe some medical Maybe there's some school or childcare and some investments. Okay, so this is a you can go through this table and See and and you can actually write down your own table of a list of expenses Right and it's good to do that So, you know monthly what is the expense? Yeah, so so the so the thing is this Normally we We may not we may or may not, you know, look into this or take Be mindful of this but it's good to list down. Okay.  So it's good to, you know, list that down. Okay And see, okay, can I budget for this? Okay, so it's good to track Maybe for a month or two and see, okay, this is how much I normally spend and And you know, it will help and help us to analyze help us to see, okay, you know Where where can I, you know, where can I increase? Where should I increase really? You know my spending where should I increase and where should I cut down? Right, so I feel that something is a wasteful expense. I'm spending so much on let's say recreation, you know in the name of recreation eating out, you know It's let's say, you know, I can in sort of four times in a month Bring it down to once a month or maybe twice a month So decisions like that. So it's not hard and fast, but you know as a family, you know You can collectively make a decision or maybe as an individual you can collectively make when you can You know analyze and make and make a decision. So it's up to you It's up to you Okay, so this is something, you know, which is useful to do to budget and to plan and it will help you You know when you in you when you allocate and say, okay, this is how much I'm getting This is how much I need to spend and into 12 will give you the expense for the entire year And of course, it's not going to remain the same, right your your income would go up The place where you are right now, you know in terms of finances in terms of what how much you're, you know Getting will not be the same, right and and definitely in God Even as you walk with God, you know, God will Enable you to prosper. He will give you the wisdom. He will give you the opportunities. He will give us the You know, he'll give us a grace and the opportunities and and bring us to a place where there is Increase, right? So we don't have to fear that, right? This will be the place. It's going to go down No, no God will take us to a place of increase. So that's for sure. No, that's his heart Okay, so here are some a basic guidelines for Financial success. Okay, so if we were to look at some these are very basic things and we know this is, you know It's just practical wisdom. The first thing would be spend less than you earn Okay it's you know anybody can You know resonate with that spend less than you earn. So the question is Just one second, please Okay, so this is what We see in Proverbs 1311 that weight wealth gained by dishonesty will be diminished But he who gathers by labor will increase. Okay, so there is You know the wealth that you get either by dishonesty or by labor but When it comes to dishonesty That wealth is Is useless. It's not a blessing. It will diminish But when it comes to, you know, honest labor, you know, there is increase. Okay, so So that's something so so having established. Yes There is some earnings in labor So now The thing is challenges to spend less than what we actually earn Spend less than what we earn. So so the question is, okay, how can I how can I spend more? You know than what I earn this is not money that I have in my hands. How can I spend more? The answer is that Well, when we don't have we tend to borrow Right, we tend to ask people or maybe we tend to ask or use You know credit cards right when we don't have money in our hand, we tend to use these and Maybe there's an overdraft in a bank. We can use that and then all these ways by which we We use we spend more than what we actually Earn and we get into a cycle of debt. Okay, so The thing is this that we need to be able to spend or live within our means, you know, we might say You know, that's very extremely difficult the way I'm living right now the way things are right now, you know, yes You understand, you know, there could be you know, there could be challenges That could be things that we are facing maybe because of previous debt, right? but the thing is to come to a place of paying off that debt or you know recovering from that debt Okay, so there are experts who can help us We're not going into that in in in this course, but with regard to You know repaying of debt and with regard to Managing our finances and then how to repay that debt, you know So many so many ways when you when we consider that okay These are our assets Right when we what do we say as asset, you know, it could be Maybe land that you own house that you own a vehicle that you own or maybe jewelry that you have or Equipment that you have right so there are assets that we have Which could be You know, which could be used against a repaying of that debt you know because A debt can really hold us back Right because whatever we earn it goes into repaying of the debt Okay, and and the quality of life diminishes, right? So, uh, so first thing spend less than you earn avoid the use of debt okay And there's and there's a good reason why the there's wisdom in that because um the scripture talks about how The borrower is a slave to the lender Okay, uh, because I think that's what probes 22 7 is let's look at that verse probes 22 and verse 7 Okay, uh, the rich rules over the poor And the borrower is servant to the lender okay, so that's that's the thing because you know It can be a very embarrassing thing when when you know people who to whom we owe money Come and ask and sometimes harris And say, okay, this is You need to pay back, right? So avoid the use of debt now Now debt in a small in in small Ways, you know, if it's manageable, it is good, you know, like sometimes there could be You know loan that has been that has been taken maybe to buy a land buy a vehicle buy You know something and you take it with the With the full knowledge that it is within your means Like, you know, if you look at the table that we looked at earlier Um, you see this here There is a column for debt It's put as five percent, which is very less and You know, maybe it could be more in some cases Where, you know, there is a repayment of debt Maybe a loan maybe something that we have, you know, bought maybe even a credit card debt That you're paying off so It's best to avoid it Right or clear it And sometimes, you know, you you use your card Maybe to buy something that is online But make sure that doesn't go into a debt The other thing that we see is to To build liquidity. So what does it mean to build liquidity? Okay, so That means that you Build the means by which you can actually, you know, you can pay off Or you build Cash reserves as it is called, right? Okay, let's look at this verse Proverb 6628 or You know, it talks about Some very strong exaltation, right? Proverb 66 Go to the Antius Lugger. Consider ways. Consider her ways and be wise which having no captain overseer or ruler Provides her supplies in the summer and gathers her food in the harvest Okay, so what is and do provides her supplies in the summer and gathers her food in the harvest? So so there is So when we look at when we say liquidity, which means that there is some amount of saving Which you can easily access Right, which which is not locked away In terms of, you know, sometimes saving can be in the form of You know in the form of jewelry, it can be in the form of land Right now that cannot be, you know, automatically used when there is a need Right or immediately used when there is a need when there is a urgent need for Cash to be used for money to be used to be spent, you know, if it's in the form of Jewels if it's in the form of Land or even housing that cannot be used It'll take some time to sell off To convert it and to use it. So when we say liquidity, it's it's something that You know, it's hard cash that you can use Right, so it's good to build liquidity, which means that you can invest you can save And you can use, right? Okay set long-term goals Set long-term financial goals saying that okay, we will First of all, it's I just want to say that it's it's not wrong It's not wrong to have long-term. It's not it's not wrong to have financial goals It's not wrong to have long-term financial goals.  God, you are first and foremost, Lord everything that I have or everything in this world belongs to you Okay, so that's that we are not you know compromising on that, right? And we are also saying that that God You know, you have the right of way You have the right of way you are sovereign and I must you are and I'm going to be faithful and obedient You have the right of way, right? So we are looking at that we are we are saying, you know, we are we come to that place of understanding And we also know that God is our provider that he is he takes pleasure in the success and the prosperity of his servants, right? He is he's not He's not, you know, holding back. He's generous. He's a provider And he's a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. So Well, so that's the thing and our heart is not On the money, you know, but in using the money well that God gives into our hands So so when it comes to that, okay, so how can I use it? Well, you know, do I have some long-term financial goals? It means that, you know, even planning on You know saving Investing Planning on providing for some very legitimate needs. Okay, maybe let's let's say Okay, and today I'm living in a in a house. That's, you know, we have let's say paying rent Is there some way by which You know, we can purchase or buy a house later. Can I work towards that financially?  I I live within this Right, nothing wrong. Absolutely nothing wrong Uh, the problem is if we start looking down on others Okay, who have more than four four pairs of clothes Right now that's that's not our place Right to look down on others who have who have wealth Or to look down on others who do not have, you know, who make a decision saying this is how I want to live Right, this is how I want to live my life and Uh, this is this is as simple as it can get. I want to live it. Fine. No problem at all. Right. Okay, so Set long-term goals. Uh, there's nothing wrong and believe that God owns it all. Okay Um Okay, when it comes to goals, okay, I think we looked at that. We said, you know When you plan financially we we can have goals we can have goals in life and and actually to have a goal You know, if you look at it, it's a it's really a statement of faith Right, you're saying that God in in four years or five years. I want to work towards this I want to put away a certain amount of money and I want to be able to, you know Maybe buy this so that I can give it to this person or buy this so I can, you know, give it to this ministry And there are people who do that, right? We want to use We want to, you know, set aside this amount so that we can, you know, help Reach the kingdom, right? I mean reach Reach the world or with God's God with the gospel of God expand the kingdom. So there are people who do that So, uh, which is amazing, right? That's how that's that's their financial goal And if it's, you know, something that's for the household, you know, for the family For the children, right? There is absolutely nothing wrong. Okay, so um Let me just share this verse, uh, the scripture with you Um, where it's the Lord Jesus, uh, when he's talking about, um He's talking about counting the cost really, you know, counting the cost About following him Okay, um, making a decision to follow him.    So in line with that He shares, um, this very important truth Okay, so let me just share that verse here Okay, which is uh look chapter 14 And uh versus 28 to 30 Look chapter 14 28 to 30 So let's read that for which of you intending to build a tower Does not sit down first and count the cost Whether he has enough to finish it Lest after he had laid the foundation and is not able to finish All who see it begin to mock him saying this man began to build and was not able to finish So he's really talking about counting the cost. So So several things we can learn that okay, so planning To build something planning something for the future Right, this is something in the future, you know Um, it's it's not yet there in existence It's something in the future So working towards that planning Towards that which involves a cost financially is not wrong Right, it's absolutely. In fact, the Lord is saying you you better do it Right, you better count the cost You you better plan ahead and do it You know, uh, lest The project gets abandoned halfway or maybe, you know, you're nearing the end. You're not able to finish So, you know, you're laying the foundation you started the work and etc. And you're not able to finish so you count the cost So, um, so so we see that No, it's it's okay to have goals to work towards goals Um, so something important about goals is that you know, it is a something about the future. It is a statement of faith But, um, we need to measure it in terms of amount and time Okay, very important to consider these two amount and time so What is it Like what is the amount? What is it that you're working for? Clearly define it right and the time The time that is going to take Right, is it months? It is years The time that is going to take so Um, so it's good to do that right okay so Following on the those lines is to understand that You know, like I said earlier Like there are people who want to live a very very simple right lifestyle and Well, they they don't want much And this is how they decided is this is maybe they they have the means But they decided this is how they will live Okay, so they will invest In other things they will invest invest in people invest in You know, maybe ministries giveaway and so on No, so the in scripture, you know, we're not Told, you know, this is how you need to live You know, this is how You need to be But it is just that we can decide Okay, we can decide because you know, we we know that it's when we say, okay, he's a rich person Or a wealthy person or a poor person It's a very relative term right it's very in the sense it's you know Maybe in a in a certain place considering You know the way things are financially in that particular place maybe having a you know, um Let's say a vehicle like a two wheeler like maybe like a bicycle. It's considered a big thing right and The people around will consider that person to be wealthy Okay, why because this person has this right, but Maybe in another place You know, that may not be the case It could be common to have a bicycle a two wheeler Right, so it's really a relative thing when you say this person is wealthy and this person is poor and so on so Okay, so so a lifestyle okay Now the bible does not say, okay, this is how this is how you need to live and It just you know, the bible just declares that yes our Faith should not be in the material things Right, our faith our reliance should be should not be in the riches that our heart should be for god But our faith should be in god So which is very very clear in first Timothy chapter 6 and verse 17 It talks about you know For chapter 6 talks about godliness with contentment is great gain and then on to verse 17 Which okay, let's just read that. I think it's been a while since we read that verse um, we Read it at the beginning of the course right first Timothy chapter 6 and And verse 17, okay Okay So what does it say it says, um Command those who are rich in this present age not to be haughty Not to trust in uncertain riches, but in the living god who gives us richly all things to enjoy Right, so that verse talks about where our heart needs to be, you know, what we should put our where we should put our trust in and God when we look at god himself who richly provides right? He is generous who richly gives he's a giver All things for us to enjoy So so that's the that's the you know, the big picture So when it comes to a lifestyle also that um, we need to understand that just by having things or more of it Or putting our trust in it, you know, that's not going to result in contentment, you know, we're not going to be content We're not going to be satisfied With with all that right, so we need to understand that So we can decide okay, this is how we are going to live, you know, we can decide, okay Let there be no lack Right, let our needs be met And let us have more and enough and more so that our needs are met and We can meet the needs of others as well. We can be a blessing, you know to those who are connected to us We can be a source of blessing Okay If we have about two more minutes and then let's let's look at borrowing and debt and And then we'll close okay, so so borrowing and debt okay, so when it comes to borrowing when it comes to lending Uh, you know is borrowing a sin? Well, it is not Right, you can when there is you know, when there's uh, when there's a need you can but then always understand that Borrowing places you at a disadvantage.  You take a loan From a bank you have to repay that loan Right, so when you you know every month it's going to some amount of money has to be repaid A specific amount of money and it's going to be repaid for x amount of time meaning it could be like Depending on how the how big the loan was Maybe it's a student loan. Maybe it's a house loan, you know, whatever housing loan vehicle loan You know, it's fine. It's not sin.  Maybe maybe it's maybe it's five years, 10 years, whatever Understand that so in during those five years your spending is going to be limited Right, so that is the thing that is there it will be restrictive But I know with that understanding you go in for borrowing. Okay Okay Now when it comes to borrowing it can be it can result in conflict within the family, you know, if there is no understanding right if the husband borrows and the wife is not kept in the dark meaning the wife is unaware of it and you know, it results in unnecessary conflict between the husband and the wife so um One has to have proper understanding. It has to be transparent between the husband and the wife um, you know, sometimes the husband would have borrowed And maybe the husband passes away and the entire You know, the weight of paying back Is on the family, you know, we've seen Such scenarios as well. So Well, the family has to know, you know, it's a substantial, you know, sometimes The men don't talk about it to the rest of the family family is completely in the dark and then it comes as a surprise When the person is not there and the family has to bear the brunt of You know paying back and it's a heavy burden on the entire family the spouse the the children um, so We need to understand that also You know, sometimes people Just borrow and borrow and borrow and spend spend and spend Because there's a deeper issue, you know, it's a deeper spiritual issue. Maybe there are some addictions There are some things which are related to that Because of which they do it, right? So we need to, you know, look at borrowing, you know, rather seriously and and Look to repaying debts Okay, which are there loans and coming out of it as soon as possible or managing it or doing it in the right way Then it's manageable. Okay, so we'll stop here and the next class we'll look at The rest of it and also I I've also I just pulled out some questions Which in earlier classes, you know, they were asked to just have a some of the so we'll we'll time permits we'll Discuss those questions also Right. Okay Fine. Thank you so much We'll see you soon. Bye. Bye. God bless


It's The Cube, here is your host, Jeff Frick. Hi, Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We're on the ground in San Jose, California at Zebra Technologies, a really interesting company with a great history, but also doing a lot of new innovative things and we're really excited to be down here. We're joining this segment by Jill Stelfox, the VP of Location Services, right? Yep. Excellent, welcome. Yeah, thanks for having me. So, we went to a little show, Location and Context World in the City, a couple of weeks ago, and you were speaking, and I was fascinated by your keynote, for a whole lot of reasons, so let's just jump into it. You talked about what you guys are doing in professional football, so give people a little overview. So, Zebra Technologies is the solution for next generation statistics for the NFL, and what that means is we do player tracking. We track speed, distance of NFL players in every game. Yeah, so you talk about tracking and statistics, but it's a whole different thing than your traditional kind of fantasy statistics. You're not talking about yards and distance, well, you are, but you're talking about real time, real motion, where these guys are on the field, how fast they're going, where they're going. Exactly. So, we put these little tags in the shoulder pads of football players, and they blink at 20 times a second, and so we're tracking their left-right shoulder movements and how they get down the field very, very fast. All of that information is collected on a server in the stadium and delivered to broadcasters in less than half a second. So before you and I see it on television and can argue about it on our couch, the whole story is documented. So the example you gave in the keynote, which again, I don't know if people are quite getting what we're talking about, but if it's Sherman and Crabtree, right, and they're running down the field, before they show the replay, you guys can actually calculate the speed off the line, the closing distance, how far they went, their acceleration, their miles per hour, all that distance, and then provided back to the viewer in the way of a graphic before they can go to the next play. Yeah, and what's really kind of interesting is that we can tell as the game unfolds if Crabtree's ability to hold that speed over time is the same or does it go up or down as the game progresses. And so it's really, it's really very interesting and really fun to see those interactions. And they're just beginning to show it on television and sort of us as fans get to see it real time. So from the application space, right, there's a lot of different applications there. There's the application for the entertainment, right, for we can see people I know. They did a lot of that in the World Cup soccer, they would tell. How far does the guy run when he gets substituted out. And then there's also the coaching applications to know whether Crabtree's been working out enough and he's got the ability to hold that acceleration throughout the distance of the game. How are people starting to use this data in ways that, God, there must be a ton of applications. Yeah, so we work with the Saints, the New Orleans Saints in practice, and with Sean Payton. And you know some of the things that they're really interested in are how do we keep these, you know, important assets for us, these players, healthy. And one of the ways is how often you work out and at what speeds. And so it's really important to track all that. So a very simple statistic that we're able to give the Saints is how long do you spend running at maximum speed in practice. And you shouldn't, in a lot of cases, you should save that for game day, right? And so it's without actually monitoring something like speed, how would you know? And by eyesight it's hard to tell. Can you pull in other data like bio data from other types of sensors and pull that into the mix as well? Yeah, so we thought, in our traditional business, we actually pull in lots of sensor information into our system. And so we brought that same kind of philosophy to sports and really what we do is we take heart rate monitors, temperature sensors, all that kind of stuff in practice. We collect it on the tag and we deliver it to our system in real time. And then back to you, if you were Sean Payton on the side, and you could see, oh, look, the heart rate of somebody is really high, Drew Brees, for example. The interesting thing about a heart rate being high, and I think we as people can sort of think about this, if our heart rate's high, it's hard to think. Because we're focused on, oh my gosh, it's hard to breathe and what's going on and I'm getting exerted. And you don't think. In football, you actually have to think, especially in the quarterback position, to be able to make the play, right? And so knowing heart, lung capacity, things like that, it's really critical for practice. So that's half of the story. The other part of the story that I think is fascinating, and you just touched on it, is the history of this company, right? Zebra Technologies, I've never heard of them. You look it up on the internet, founded in 1969, right? 1969 became Z, it was the data specific corp or something like that, which turned out to be pretty interesting. It became Zebra in 1982, went public in 1991, and you're an RFID barcode company that has been a billion, what, like 1.1 or 1.2 trailing revenue, public company. So it's really cool that you're using this old technology to really go after a brand new application and new business. Yeah, it's actually really exciting. So I think two big things for Zebra. One is that we acquired the Enterprise Solutions Group of Motorola a few months back. And now we're a three and a half billion dollar organization. And we really consider ourselves to be in what we call the enterprise asset intelligent business.  And so the ability to kind of collect data is what we're about, whether it's traditional barcodes, which have been around for lots of years, or active RFID, which is what we use. Right, right. And talk a little bit about some of the technologies that have enabled you to take it to the next level. I know at the show we were at, they talked about low power Bluetooth, that all these sensors all over the place are basically like GPS for inside, or GPS in a mall, or GPS in a stadium, that you're able to leverage to really kind of bring what you had in the show floor and manufacturing now into some of these other cool applications. Yeah, I think a combination of things have come together to enable something like this. Because the goal is to take data off a player in 120 milliseconds, add character to it, you know, what play is it, what down marker is it a pass, and then put it out on broadcasts for fans in less than half a second. So everything has to move very quickly. And so what's changed is databases are better. Computer software is better. The compute power on hardware is better. And in our case, we work with, you know, because we manufacture enterprise intelligence devices, right, we've got Bluetooth sensors, we've got active RFID. We've got passive RFID. You can bring all those collection mechanisms together and you can collect so much information now on these players. It's amazing, actually. Collect it and process it and display it back, right? Exactly. So the classic case of, you know, taking data, you know, converting it to information and then actually providing the insight. Exactly. I mean, it's really one of the things I would say that our team is most proud of is on Thursday nights when they're during Thursday night football, you see it every week now. There's some amazing statistic, you know, in the, there was a Thursday night Houston game where JJ Watt, who is an amazing, yeah, athlete, but defensive lineman and should not be running super fast. That guy intercepted the ball. Long run, right? Right. And he ran so fast. And that was, by the way, only the second time in the history of football that speed was shown on television, the speed that the player was running. We did it once before then in a game prior where we also showed a defensive interception. And so those were the first two times that even speed was ever shown. And I think what's fascinating about that is you look at how we watched football games 15 years ago and there was no score. There was no down marker, down and distance marker on the television and you had no idea where you were in the game. And now we've got that, but we're going to the next level of information that we can provide. So one last topic before we go. You're obviously a woman. You're super passionate sports fans. We won't talk about Sherman anymore because I don't want you to square on camera. Surrounded by football things, shoulder pads. Talk a little bit about being a woman in technology and sports. So you're kind of crossing two pretty predominantly male dominated industries. Yeah. How's that going? How did you get here? What tips and advice would you give to young girls, young women that would like to pursue this type of career?  And I also think it's a big advantage, especially in a man's world. So what's funny is when I go into sporting environments now, they'll say, Oh, I know you. You're the woman in sports. And it's good to be known for something.  So that's good. And in terms of, I think, what you can do on your journey, it's really one of the things I say often to girls is you actually can push yourself harder than you think.  Just keep moving and keep moving forward. Everybody's going to tell you no, or maybe it's not possible. But it totally is if you just keep pushing. When somebody says no to me, what I honestly hear in my head is not no. I hear not yet. And not yet means keep trying. So it's not about the no. It's about keep pushing. Good advice. Just like Hank Stram and one of the great NFL films I was sharing with Greg Super Bowl Four, just keep matriculating the ball down the field. Exactly. And you'll get there. You'll get there. Well, Jill, thanks very much for taking some time out of your day. We're really excited to be here. Again, Jeff Frick on the ground, San Jose, California. You're watching The Cube. I'm with Joe Stealth-Exford. Super Technologies. Thanks. Thanks.


From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This CUBE conversation, I'm really excited, Craig Hibbert is here. He's the vice president of Infinidat, and he focuses on strategic accounts. He's been in the storage business for a long time. He's got great perspectives. Craig, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Good to see you, Dave. Good to be back. So there's a saying, don't fight fashion. You guys fight fashion all the time. You got these patents, you got this thing called NeuroCache. Your founder and chairman, Moshe, has always been cutting against the grain and doing things his own way. But I'd love for you to talk about some of those things, the patents that you have, the architecture, the NeuroCache, fill us in on all that. Sure. So when we go in, we talk to customers and we say we have 138 patents. A lot of them say, well, that's great, but how does that relate to me? A lot of these are andor gates and certain things. They don't know how it fits into the day-to-day life. So I think this is a good opportunity to talk about several of those that do. And so obviously the NeuroCache is something that is dynamic instead of having a key and a hash, which all the other vendors have, just our position in that table allows us to determine all the values and things we need from it. But it also monitors, this is an astounding statement, but from the moment that array is powered on, every I.O. that flows through it, we track data for the life of the array. And for some of these customers, it's five and six years. So are those blocks of data, are they random? Are they sequential? Are they hot? Are they cold? When was the last time it was accessed? And this is key information because we bring intelligence to the lower level block layer where everybody else is just dumb. They just ship things, things come into a queue and they move and they have no idea what they are. We do. And the value around that is that we can then predict when workloads are aging out. Today you have manual people writing things in things like Easy Tier or Fast or competing products or Tiered Storage Manager or all these things that manage all of these profiles of the human intervention. We do it dynamically and that feeds information back into the array and helps it determine which virtual array group it should reside on and where on the dispendials based upon the age of the application, how it's trending. These are very powerful things in a day where we need imminent information sent into a consumer and store, right? It's all of this dynamic processing and the ability to bring that in. So that's one of the things we do. Another one is that's the catalyst for our fast rebuilds. We can rebuild two failed full 12 terabyte drives in under 18 minutes. If those drives are half full, then it's nine minutes. And this is by understanding where all the data is and sharing the rebuild process from the drives. That's another one of our patterns. Perhaps one of the most challenging that we have is that storage vendors tend to do error correction at the fiber channel layer. Once that data enters into the storage array, there is no mechanism to check the integrity of that data. And a couple of vendors have an option to do this, but they can only do it for the first write. And they also recommend you turn that feature off because it slows down the box. So where infinite is unique, and I think this is for me one of the most important patterns that we have, is that every time we write a 64K slice in the system, we assign some metadata to that. And obviously it has a CRC checksum, but more importantly, it has the locality of reference. So if we subsequently go back and do a reread and the CRC matches, but the location has changed, we know that corruption has happened. Something's a bit flipped on, right? All of these things that constitute sound data corruption. That's not just the impressive part. What we do at that point is we dynamically deduce that the data's been corrupt and using the parity in the core. We're a RAID 6, like a dual parity configuration. We rebuild that data on the fly without the application or the end user knowing that there was a problem and that way served back the data that was actually written. We guarantee that. We're the only RAID that does that today that is massive for our customers.  Because eventually, you know, it's getting there. It's like a month. With us, it's the same. So if you look at our 3TB drives, it was 18 minutes. The 4TB drives, 18 minutes. The 6, 18 minutes, 8, 12. We'll be good all the way up to 28TB drives of the configuration we have.  We were early on in the flash storage trend and we saw the prices coming down. We felt like high speed spinning disks where their days were numbered and we were correct in that prediction. But then, you know, disk drives have kept that distance. You guys have a skewed going all flash because of the economics. But help us understand this because you've got this mechanical device and yet you guys are able to claim performance that's equal to or oftentimes much, much better than a lot of your all flash competitors. And I want to understand that a little bit. It suggests to me that there's so much other overhead going on and other bottlenecks in the system that you guys are dealing with both architecturally and through your intelligence software. Can you talk about that a little bit? Absolutely, absolutely. The software is the key, right? We are a software company and we have some phenomenal guys that do the software piece. So as far as the performance goes, the back end spinning disks are really obfuscated by two layers of virtualization. And we ensure that because we have massive amounts of DRAM that all of that data flows into DRAM. It will sit in DRAM for an astonishing five minutes. I say astonishing because most of our vendors try to evict cash straight away so they've got room for the next one. And that does not facilitate a mechanism by which you can inspect those dumb pieces of data. And if you get enough dumb data, you can start to make it intelligent, right? You can go get discarded data from cell phone towers and find out where people go to work and what time they work. And because of that, what demographic are they in? And now you're predicting the election based upon discarded cell phone tower data. So if you can take dumb data and put patterns around it and make it sequential, which we do, we write out in a log-structured right. So we're really, really fast at the front end and some customers say, well, how do you manage that on the back end? Here's something that our designers and architects did very, very well. The speed of DDR3 is about 15 gig per second, which is what's in DRAM right now. We have 480 spindles on the back end. If you say each one of them can do 100 meg per second, which they can do more than that, they can do about 200. That gives us a 48 gigabyte, sorry, per second, backplane destageability, which is three times faster than the DRAM. So when you look at it, the box has been designed all the way so there is no bottleneck flowing through the DRAM. Anything that's still been accessed that comes out of that five minute window once it's destaged to all the spindles, incidentally in a log-structured right. So right now it have 480 spindles all the time. And then you've got the random still on the SSD, which will help to keep that response time around about two milliseconds. And just one last point on that. I have a customer that has 1.2 petabytes written on a 1.38 petabyte box of still achieving a two millisecond response time. And that's unheard of, because most block arrays, as you fill them up to 60, 70% that the performance starts going in the tank. So I got to go down memory lane here. So the most successful storage array in the history of the industry, my opinion, probably fact, was Symmetrix. And when Moshe designed that, he eschewed RAID 5. Everybody was on the crazy about RAID 5, they said, no, no, no, we'll just mirror it. And that's going to give us the performance that we need. And he would write to DRAM. And then, of course, you'd think that the D-stage bandwidth was the bottleneck. But because they had such a back high, a large number of back end spindles, the bandwidth coming out of that DRAM was enormous. You just described something actually quite similar. So I was going to ask you, isn't the D-stage bandwidth the bottleneck? And you're saying no, because your D-stage bandwidth is actually higher than the DRAM. Yep, it is. So with the Symmetrix and typical platforms, you would have a certain amount of disk in a disk group, and you would assign FAs and fiber channel ports to that. And there'd be certain segments in cash that were dedicated to those disks. We have done away with that. We have so many, well, we have two layers of the virtualization at the front, as we talked about. But because nothing is a bottleneck, and because we've optimized each component, the DRAM, and I talked about the SSDs, we don't write heavily over those. We write in a sequential pattern to the SSDs so that the wear rate is elongated. And so because of that, and we have all of the virtualized RAID groups configured in cash. So what happens is as we get to that five minute window we're about to D-stage, all of the RAID groups, the algorithms are telling the cash how to lay out the virtual RAID structure based on how busy other RAID groups are at the time. So if you were to pause it and ask us where it's going, we can tell you it's the machine learners, the artificial intelligence that's saying this RAID group just took a D-stage or there's a lot of data in the cash that's heading for these, based upon the prediction of the hot, the cold that I talked about a few months ago. And so it will make a determination to use a different virtual ratio. And that's all done in memory as opposed to relying on the disk. So we don't have the concept of spared disk, we have the concept of spare capacity, it's all shared. And because it's all shared, it's this very powerful pool that just doesn't get bogged down and continues to operate all the way up to the full capacity. So I'm struggling with this, there is no bottleneck. There's always a bottleneck in the system. So where is the bottleneck? The bottleneck for us is when the array's full. So if you overwrite the maximum bandwidth and that historically, in 2016, 2017 was roughly 12 gig per second, we up that in the fall of 2018 to around about 15 and we're about to make the announcement that we've made tectonic increases in that where we'll now have right bandwidth approaching 16 gig per second and also read bandwidth about 25 gig per second. That 16 is going to move up to 20. Remember what I said, we released a number and we gradually grow into it and maximize and tweak that software. When you think that most all flash arrays can do maybe one and a half gig per second sustained writes, that gives us a massive leg up over our competition. And instead of buying an all flash array for this and another mid tier array for this and call service for this, you can just buy one platform that services it all, all the protocols and they're all accessed the same way. So you write an API one way. Mark Shuttle was just a big fan of this about writing code obviously with Spinnaker and some of those other things that he's been involved in. We do the same thing. So our API is the same for the block as it is for the NAS, as it is for the iSCSI. So it's very consistent. You write it once and you can adapt multiple products. I want to pick your brain about customers for a bit. Everybody talks about digital transformation and it's this big buzzword, but when you talk to customers they're all going through some kind of digital transformation or they want to get digital right. Let's put it that way. They don't want to get disrupted. They see Amazon buying grocers and Apple getting into financial services and content and it's all about the data. So there's a real disruption scenario going on for every business. And the innovation engine seems to be data. Okay, but data just sitting there and a data swamp is no good. So you got to apply machine intelligence to that data and you got to have scale. So you guys make a big deal about petabyte scale. What are your customers telling you about the importance of that and how does it fit into that innovation sandwich that I just laid out? Sure, no, that's a great question. So we have some very big customers. We don't have 70 petabytes of production. Seven? With a 70, yep. We have a couple of those, both financial institutions, very, very good at what they do. We worked with them previously with another product that really kind of introduced another one of Moshe's products that was XIV that introduced the concept of self-healing and no tuning and things like that. We haven't even talked about that, that there's no tuning knobs on the Infinidat. Probably should mention that. But our customers have said to us, we couldn't scale. We had a couple hundred terabyte boxes before that we're okay. You've brought, you've raised the game by bringing a much higher level of availability and much higher capacity. We can take one of our, but I'm in this process right now, the customer, we can take one of our boxes and collapse three VMAX 20 or VMAX 40s on it. We have in numerous occasions gone into establishments that have 11, 12, 23 inch cabinets, two and a half thousand spindles of the old DMC VMAX station, we've replaced it with one 19 inch rack of arts, right? That's a phenomenal state when you think about it. And that was paid for, you think some of these VMAX 40s have up to 192 ports on them, fiber channel ports, we have 24. So the fiber channel port reduction, the power heating and cooling over an entire row down to one eight kilowatt consumption. By the way, our power is the same, whether it's three, four terabyte, six, eight, 12, they all use the same power plant. So as we increase the geometry capacity of the drives, we decrease the cost per usable. Well, we're actually far more efficient than an old flash array. We're the most environmentally friendly, hybrid spinning disk planet on the array. So I asked you about cloud, so. Discourage on the planet, that would be so. So when cloud first sort of came into vision, financial services guys were like, no, cloud is a bad word. They're definitely leaning into that, adopting it more. But still, there's a lot of workloads that they're going to leave on-prem. They want to bring that cloud experience to the data. What are you hearing from the financial services customers in particular? And I single them out because they're very advanced, they're very demanding, and they get a lot of dough. And so what do you see in terms of them building cloud, hybrid cloud, and what it means for them, and specifically the storage industry? Yeah, so I'm actually surprised that they've adopted it as much as they have to be honest with you. And I think the economics are driving that. But having said that, whenever they want to get the data back, or they want to bring it back on-prem for various reasons, that's when they're running into problems, right? It's like, how do I get my own data back? Well, you've got to open up the chat book and write big checks. So I think Infinidad has a nice strategy there where we have the same capabilities that you have on-prem, you have in the cloud. And don't forget, nobody else has that. One of the incumbrances to people moving to the cloud has been that it lacks the enterprise functionality that people are used to in the data center. But because our cost point is so affordable, we become not only very attractable for on-prem, but for cloud solutions as well. And of course, we have our own Nutritz cloud offering which allows people to use it as DR or replications and so however you want to do it where you can use the same APIs and code that you run your data center and extrapolate that out to the cloud, obviously, which is very helpful. And so we have the ability, if you take a snapshot on Amazon, it may take four hours and it's been copied over to an S3 device. That's the only way they can make it affordable to do it. And then if you need that data back, it's not imminent. You've got to rehydrate from S3 and then copy it back over your snapshot. With Infinidat, it's instantaneous. We do not stop IO when we do snapshots, another one of the patterns. We use a time-synchronous mechanism. Every IO that arrives has a timestamp. And when we take a snapshot, we just do a point in time and any timestamp that's greater than that instantiation point is for the volume and previous is for the snapshot. We can do that in the cloud. We can instantly recover hundreds of terabytes worth of databases and make them instantly available. So our story, again, with the innovation, our innovation wasn't just for on-prem, it was to be facilitated anywhere you are. And that same price point carries forward from here into the cloud. When Amazon and Microsoft wake up and realize that we have this phenomenal story here, I think they'll be buying from us in leaps and bounds, it's the only way to make the cloud affordable for storage vendors. So the interesting thing is you talk about bringing data back, bringing workloads back. And there are tool chains that are now on-prem. The Kubernetes is a great example that are cloud-like. And so when you bring data back, you want to have that cloud experience. So automated operations plays into that. You know, automation used to be something that people are afraid of. They want to do manual tiering. Remember, they wanted their own knobs to turn. Those days are gone because people want to drive digital transformations. They don't want to spend time doing all this heavy lifting. Can you talk about that a little bit and where you guys fit? Yeah, I mean, you know, I say to my customers too, not to knock our competition, but you can't have a service processor as the intercommunication point between what the customer wants and it deciding when it's going to talk to the array and configure. It's going to be instantaneous. And so all we have, we don't have any Java. We don't have any Flash. We don't have any host. We don't have massive servers around the data center, collect information. We just have an HTML5 interface. And so our time to deployment is very, very quick. When we land on the customer's dock, the box goes in, we hook up the power, we put the drives in. I hate to use the word VToc because it brings back bad memories for a lot of customers. Volume table with context for those who are, you know. Now we're going back in time, right? Knowing that main here. And so we're very dynamic, both in how we forward face the customers, but also on the backend for ourselves. We eat our own dog food in the sense that we are, we have an automation team. We've automated our migration from non-infinite platforms to us. That uses some level of artificial intelligence. We've also built a lot of parameters around things like going with service now because you can do with our API what other people take, you know, page in page of code. I'll give you an example. One of our customers said, I need OCI, the NetApp management product. And we called NetApp and they said, hey, listen, you know, it usually takes six months to get an appointment and then it takes at least six months to do the code. And we said, no, no, no, we're not like any other storage around it. We don't have all these silly RAID groups and spare disk capacity. You know, there's three commands we can show in the API and we show them and they're like, wow, can you send us an array? We said, no, we can do something better. We were designed SDS, right? When infinite out was coded, there was no hardware. And the reason we did that is because software developers will always code to the level of resilience of the hardware. So if you take away that hardware, the software developers have to code to make something to withstand any type of hardware that comes in. And at the end of the coding process, that's when we started bringing in the hardware pieces. So we were written SDS, we can send vendors and customers an OVA, a virtual appliance of our box. They were able to do it in a week. They told the customer, we have to go through full QA, no reason why it wouldn't work. And they did it for us and got it on. It was a massive customer of theirs and ours. That's a powerful story. The time to deployment for your home grown apps as well as things like ServiceNow and OCI, incredible infinite out. Three API calls, we were done. So you guys had a little shadow partnership with that app in the field. We did, yeah, I mean it was great. They had a massive license with this particular customer. They wanted our storage on the platform and we worked very, very quickly with them. They were very accommodating. We'd love to get our storage qualified behind their heads right now for another customer as well. So yeah, there's definitely some synergy there. People realize what we have, a Splunk's massive for us. What we're able to do with Splunk in one box, people, the competitors can't do in a row. So it's very compelling what we actually bring in, how we do it. And that API level is incredibly powerful and we're utilizing that ourselves. I would like to see some integration with Canonical. Mark Schull and his guys have done a great job with SDS Plays. We'd like to bring that here, do Spinnaker, do Galactic Fog, do some of those things as well that we're working on with the automation team. We just added another employee, another FTE to the automation team and infinite out. So we do these and we engage with customers and we help you get out of that trench that is antiquity and move forward into the vision of how you do one thing well and it permeates the cloud on-prem, off-prem, hybrid. All those kind of things. Well, that API philosophy that you have and that infrastructure as code model that you just described allows you to build out your ecosystem in a really fast style way. So Greg, thanks so much for coming on and doing that double click with us. Really appreciate it. I'd love to have you back. Great, thanks a lot Dave. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you for watching. You're watching theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.


And so that's what we've found. At the moment, with our active plugins, we probably have a pipeline of about 100 hours of stuff that we want to do and that we've scheduled in. And so we have to pick and choose what's the most important stuff. So we've got, you know, someone comes along and they say, well, you know, I think it would be great if you have this feature or I insist that you have this feature, otherwise I want to refund. It might be anywhere from one to 30 hours to make those changes and we typically would spend, you know, 20 to 50 hours making a plugin from scratch for a typical one. So there's quite a lot of time involved. Maybe it costs me more because I'm not a developer and so I need to pay someone else to do it well. A second thing, listen for me, is definitely customer service. So when you start scaling it, there's going to be a lot of people who, we've got 1,500 clients using your plugins. There's going to be a lot of people who have problems and a lot of those things are not going to be your fault but you still need to deal with them. There's a lot of people who have 50 plugins installed on their website and when they install your one, it breaks the whole website but it's kind of like the straw that breaks the camel's back. You know, it's not your fault, it's not your fault typically but you will be blamed often but also because you might have a wide number of users with different versions of WordPress and all this kind of stuff, there's going to be a larger chance of something going wrong. So people are really keen to get priority service every time. They are the most important person when they email or call you because their website's gone down and they assume that you will stop everything in order to help them. So you need to sort of manage those expectations quite well. Plug-in maintenance is also part of that is that when someone says, I think it would be really great if you did this, you've got to prioritize and think about what you should be doing but make sure that it's better over time every time because if it's not better three months later than it was then they can just go somewhere else and get it from someone else who's got better stuff. The next point is about Git. It's a technical thing. I think the point with this is that there's always going to be something that's going to totally crush your soul when you're making these things, whatever it is.  And it manages the versions of the software and all that kind of thing. And I don't care about Git. I'm not interested in it as a non-developer. I just want to get our new versions of our plugins out there but some of our partners required that you submit it through Git and no one in our team seemed to be any good at this Git thing and so what happened was that we'd have a new version of our plugins and then it would be two weeks before we got it into the system because it was just such a hard thing. I don't know why. Now it's really easy but at the time it was super complicated and we were getting a lot of pressure about why haven't you... You haven't done this properly and it should have been really simple but it wasn't. So there was a time when one of our plugins was going to be removed because we just weren't keeping up with the customer service. We weren't following these lessons. This was a while ago and there was a chance that one of our plugins would be removed from the marketplace because the customer service as well as there was new versions of WooCommerce and it just wasn't keeping up. So it was a real risk for us and gave us some real inspiration to up the quality of what we were doing, up our game, up our customer service and it was a really good lesson. So what is it that makes a successful plugin business? I think one of the cornerstones has to be recurring revenue. If you are selling something for $25 which you only get once from that customer, it's not a viable business proposition unless you're selling thousands upon thousands of these things every month. So for us, especially with the WooCommerce side of things, recurring revenue is what we send to our business around for the plugin development but what that means as well is that you can focus on improving the plugin for the existing users, improving their renewal rates as well which I think is really important and your business starts to focus around that and you get paid every month which is fantastic and you get paid more every month if you do it right. I've already talked about customer service but I do think it's really critical because you have so many potential customers and they will just go somewhere else and especially if they haven't paid very much and they're not too price sensitive, they'll just buy it somewhere else and they'll ask for a refund straight away. So it might be that they buy it at 10 o'clock this morning and then they don't hear from you about their problem installing it and they want a refund by 3. So, you know, again you have to manage the expectations but you have to expect that. Quality again is really important. There are a wide range of quality in plugins as you may be aware and so we have a team that they just do the plugins. They don't really do anything else and that means for us that they're really focused on that. They're not making websites and plugins. I think there's a conflict there and so if it isn't great it's not going to work across different versions of WordPress or WooCommerce or whatever system you're using. It's going to be less reliable and then when you get to scale it's going to have more problems. With WooCommerce we actually stop supporting the previous versions quite quickly because otherwise it just becomes, you're spending 20 hours making your new version compatible with something from five years ago. I've got something here about the $10,000 versus the $500 plugin so really what that's about is that there's a big opportunity here for customized solutions so most of our business is actually from customizing our existing plugins or custom building plugins for our clients. A lot of the time people say, well your plugin doesn't do this thing and I would expect it to do that and therefore you need to add it otherwise I want to refund. Other people will say, especially in the commercial space, they'll say, I want your plugin to do this and I expect it and how much is it going to cost me and so we do a lot of that and that comes from building up a reputation over the long term. For the $500 plugin we actually have like a plugin that we sell which is $500 and it's actually really popular. It's popular because it's a high value plugin and we spend a lot of time on it. For example, that $500 you go, whoa I can get a plugin for $20. That $500 plugin last year we would have, in November, December, we would have spent $5,000 improving it so you get an idea of what we're putting into it but then we get the returns at the end of the day and so I think that for a business where you are selling plugins, that plugin is really a stepping stone to doing other work in the space. I said here the big win. I think that by, and I've talked about this already, is incremental improvement of your plugin over time, adding new features and functionality will definitely increase the value of the plugin over time because if you're not changing it it's just not going to be competitive and therefore you increase your renewal rates as well. People want to continue buying it because they have a new version of WordPress and it doesn't work. It's been a year they want to invest in it again. I think it's important to be aware of some of the complexities involved when you are dealing with a wide range of customers for us. We do deal a lot in the financial space so we have a number of plugins which are connecting to payment systems. We do have to have some risk management and there we are insured for financial software development in the financial space. So we're covered there but I think you need to seek professional advice about that because the chances might be slim of someone coming to you but if someone's really angry then it could be a risk. We might have fallen off the planet here. Just with me. I think this thing might have died. Thankfully we have the right arrow. So for business owners what is your experience with plugins? Did you buy a $35 plugin and it saved your bacon and made things so much better for your website? Did you install a brand new plugin and your website went blank and was like that for four days while you tried to find a web developer to fix it up for you? Or did you get your web designer to make a plugin for you who was very enthusiastic about it but they did a terrible job and it didn't work properly? I think that whatever your situation is something to learn about plugins as a business owner my first advice would be definitely using your web designer to make a plugin might be the worst thing that you can do. I have a certain respect to find it because we were those guys making plugins to start with and we weren't very good at it for the first couple of years so having someone who's skilled at plugin development is really important and I think you need to ask those people that you are getting those services from. What are their credentials in making plugins? Do they actively make plugins? Have they ever made a plugin? What's their experience with those things? I think that that's really important because especially if you are getting something customized you need to make sure it's going to be reliable and work and that person's going to be around to upgrade and improve it over time. In terms of what makes a good WordPress plugin I think it goes back to a lot of the things that I talked about before it's got to be really good quality for a start it's got to be made by someone who knows what they're doing it's got to be considering a bit of a range of versions of WordPress or whatever software you're using for WooCommerce we do have to make it quite reliable because we're an official WooCommerce partner we need to make sure that it's at a certain standard otherwise we get in trouble or we could get in trouble and so I think that as a business owner how can you tell well again I think you need to sort of suss out who the person you're buying it from is and sometimes at the end of the day you just have to buy it and test it out but test it out on a development site don't test it out on your live website because there might be a 3% chance that it breaks your site but if you don't want a chance at breaking your site and you want your site your life to be serious free then get a developer to actually test it first and with a lot of our clients not for our plugins but for other ones that we use with our clients we actually might try a couple of different ones so even if they're like three or four hundred dollars each we might say hey let's try it depends on the client of course but we might try a couple of different ones just to see exactly they say that it does this but how good is it really and does it do the job specifically that the client wants to do and what's the quality of the code too because we don't want to build it for the customer but definitely we want to look at the quality in fact we had a customer who had like an advanced MYOB enterprise integration that they wanted to do with their WooCommerce store and in that situation we actually they had from the vendor received a plugin so it was already available the client was so concerned about it because it wasn't very good that we actually rebuilt it from scratch for them and also custom built it for exactly what they wanted so they're like we don't care that it's free we want something that is going to be sustainable and reliable so in terms of setting expectations what do you get for your money for buying a $35 plugin you may get $35 of value people so you know and especially if it's a smaller developer that it may not be spending much time upgrading it so keep that in mind and also if you have 100 plugins on your WordPress website the chances of something happening are quite high something bad quite high it's like if you have a room full of 100 people people are going to disagree on stuff right so it's like 100 WordPress plugins there's going to be problems and I think you just need to be aware of that and certainly professional advice can help with that some people ask why is it so expensive to have one system talk to another when I want to make something integrate with a plugin and definitely a big part of that is about the fact that these guys made this software another group of people made this other software how easy they are to talk to each other might be quite complicated but it's really about time to connect them and so you might be paying an hourly rate for someone to do that so it does add up so opportunities for growth I think for us personally as a company definitely these are our plugins on Woo we do a lot of stuff with these other areas too these are the brands and even with our existing plugins there's a huge opportunity for growth for us so I think whatever you're doing, whatever stage you're at there's always opportunity for growth if you are a developer and definitely for businesses because WooPress and WooCommerce are so popular and they have such a massive following there's always going to be someone who is in some way interested in making the plugin that you want so it's worthwhile spending the time to research options out there and you know like if you're thinking I can't really find what I'm looking for get some advice on it or just keep googling and hopefully find something that's good so that's it so thanks very much everyone all right time for questions please raise your hand I'll get you on the mic so it's all recorded so any questions? Hi Chris Chris Mundi here thanks for the great talk a couple questions and thoughts and ideas I thought maybe with your scope if you put a scope statement up and what your actual plugin does then people you can always refer that to them so you don't have any arguments to understand that's the scope of what it does so that might be something you might want to think about the other thing too is I used to work for a company and what they used to do was they used to charge organizations for their customized work but then they would advertise what they actually did and then if they had buying from other people then they worked out a percentage of a refund over time so it might be something to consider as well yeah look I think the scoping part is really important we are always always making our plugins more clear because you can't be clear enough with people there's always expectations about what it should do and you're always going to fail in some respect with that with making custom plugins for clients yes there's always going to be demand from someone else and so it's good to have an agreement with that customer I mean we would normally say have some sort of agreement or we'll just do it for them and if someone else asks about the same thing then we might go back to that client and say hey someone else is interested could we give you a bit of a refund so that always can be quite popular I love questions so nice talk today how do you manage licensing when good question so with WooCommerce marketplace it's all managed and they contact the customer about renewals all that kind of thing and we see what the renewal percentages are and actually the WooCommerce is covered under the GPL so with our own plugins though we work it a little bit differently we normally have like a 12 month license of validity people can use it after that as much as they like but typically people come back for a license renewal because we have a new version after 12 months which you know works with the new version of whatever it is and so that's normally how we do that you were talking about customer support a little while ago this is coming from a different point of view but still kind of related because I do write some plugins I bought a WooCommerce plugin for delivery of product I forget what it was called the plugin terms and conditions said if you add content to your website the plugin will disable so let's not go down the side of that too much but at the end of the day I spoke to the owner of the business and he said it left him vulnerable for probably about $5,000 a day worth of shipping expenses it's a pretty serious matter and it literally disabled without notification or anything at any time of the day it felt like WordPress was going to update a plugin was going to update you added content or whatever so I had an all out row with the developers over it they were nasty and aggressive the question would be from your perspective as a developer there's an unintentional issue with the plugin what do you think would be a reasonable turnaround time to resolve given something like that that it is a potentially fairly serious issue for a customer yeah I think that that's a good question the range of potential problems that you have with over 1500 active customers is massive so the unique situations with those people is massive every single person has a different collection of other plugins on their side and those all interact with each other either in a negative or positive way so it's really from the customer service perspective it's about setting the expectations with the customer because we will have terms which say we don't do this and we don't do that but then also there's the realistic side that someone's going to say well why does it just doesn't seem make sense that this doesn't work or whatever you might have someone who comes and says well I've got this plugin and your plugin doesn't work with it so I need my site's not working because of this and I need this done by 6pm and for us we're going to say okay well it's 3pm and we've scoped to work it's going to take us about 20 hours to make those our plugin compatible with the other plugin so we're not going to do that in the next 3 hours but you know it's about having an honest conversation it's about communication it's really important to have that back and forth and say look you know here's the situation we have this plugin it does certain things but it doesn't do everything for everyone and you know at the outskirts you're going to have people who are really disappointed about that and might be quite angry but also we're running a for profit business so we need to decide and prioritize there'll be other people who say well this massive really important plugin doesn't work with your really popular plugin so that doesn't make sense and we might be like well that doesn't make sense so let's enable it and then you open up a whole new opportunity but I'm not a developer so what I find is that it's good to have sometimes non-developers who are skilled in the plugins to be liaising with the clients rather than necessarily having developers having that conversation Just further on the customer service as well there are people who like to vent after sort of their experience of not getting what they want and they sort of vent in the form of a review like a negative review even though it's an unjustified one that's just their way of letting the world know and just vent how do you deal with those situations? I think most of that stuff for us is internal so we'll have someone complain directly to us rather than put it as a review and so I find that that's a really valuable opportunity for us to make amends but it's about how we react to that and how we liais with them so they'll say, oh my God you're so useless and you can't even do anything and I emailed you yesterday and I expected this yesterday and there's all these problems with your plugin and so on and so by managing that we've got quite a lot of experience managing people's problems so I think that that's really important is that experience and so you do have to build that up it doesn't come straight away but it's really between 20 plugins and the point at which they start interfering with each other is there a sort of linear relationship or is it basically, you know if you've got 10 you're okay, if you've got 20 you know it's more difficult if you get 50 it's impossible? If we make a website for a customer we will have as little plugins as possible because I suppose it's it's more that every single new plugin exponentially increases the chances of there being a problem and you may have 100 plugins and you're fine and you're like hey I don't have any problems with my plugins why did your 101 101 first one mark up my website and so yeah I think it's ideally we wouldn't have more than five on any of our client sites Any other questions? Do you communicate your roadmap to the public or to your customers? I think it's a good question we're not particularly proactive with that kind of thing at this point I think that if people were asking for it then maybe most of the time it's more it doesn't work with a new version of Word or WordPress I think it's a really valuable point and I'm going to take that idea and run with it, thanks