Welcome back to HP Discover. We're in Las Vegas for HP's big customer event. All the top executives are here. All the customers are here. A lot of technical folks are here. Just a really, really good show. This is Silicon Angles, the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the silver from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm Joe with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org. Bethany Mayer is here, a multi-time Cube guest. She's the senior vice president general manager of the networking business for HP. Bethany, welcome back. Thank you. I'm excited to be back. Yeah, thank you again for taking your time. So we heard this morning big honking switches, and you guys are powering this convention center. So you got good props from Donna Telly. So give us the update on the business. Sure. So the business has continued to go very well. We just passed now our 14th consecutive quarter of growth for HP Networking. We continue to take share again this quarter from our competitors. And we, as you might have heard, we're shipping now a whole new lineup of data center products as well. And our SDN offering portfolio continues to get bigger. So we really have some great opportunities coming up. And frankly, lots of good customer discussions here around our products and around what we can do for them.  Early on in the Cube, you've started to talk about that really before the industry really hopped on board, certainly before the NYSERA acquisition. A lot of the discussion in the industry has been kind of geeky about overlays and protocols. We were talking the other day about we're not hearing enough about management. What's HP doing in that space? Well, so there are all the geek-speak stuff that's really fun, and I like it too. We can geek out if you want. We can geek out. I like geeking out. I'm a girl geek. But anyways, so there's that. But also there's really what it does from a benefits perspective for the business, because honestly, the network has been such a stumbling block for businesses trying to do things differently, whether it's acquire a company, whether it's add new applications, whether it's go to the cloud, whether it's have a big data application, whatever those things are, the long pull in every project tent has been the network. How to provision it to map to whatever is new is needed. And of course, that just isn't going to work going forward. And so really what SDN does is it makes the network responsive to the business in the time frame that the business needs it to be. And that's the difference. It also automates a lot of what was, frankly, true, just nuts and bolts and bites, kind of manual entry. That just goes away. And so these are huge changes. And sadly, they're huge changes because the network hasn't been any different for 30 years. But they're huge changes that need to happen anyways and that are happening as a result of SDN. So the conversations are always talking about ports, this, that, the other thing. And networking has always been back and stacked. But one thing that's coming clear, not only in our conversation earlier, but in the industry is the notion of fabric. Right. So here we talked with Broadcom. And people talk about the internet of things. The fabric conversation is really becoming more and more relevant. That kind of speaks to kind of the underlying, you know, geeking out on the SDN. So, you know, that is a top comment. What conversations are you guys having around fabric?  Yes. How does that relate to what's going on in the main trend? You've got cloud, you've got mobile, you've got social. Internet of things. Right. SDN brought on this whole software trend. Right. You guys were first to ship on theCUBE. You mentioned you guys were two years ago. You were the first to ship OpenFlow. So we're going to keep, get the props out there so people can remember. Yeah, that's true. We were here. But what is the fabric conversation that you're having internally at HP and with customers? Well, so again, so I think the fabric, it's interesting because the fabric discussion of old was about boxes. It wasn't even a fabric. It was, OK, how many boxes do you need to put together? And then they call that a fabric, right? When reality, what you're talking about is really, sorry, but that's true. That's always true. OK. So, yeah, so there you go. So we're cut off. But really what you need is you do need this connective tissue that goes between server storage seamlessly and that can deploy applications in a very, very quick, efficient manner, right? And that connective tissue can be anywhere. It can be in a server. It can be in a storage device. It can be software-based.  And so I think that that's a paradigm that's changing as a result of, frankly, more intelligent thinking about what is a fabric and then how to deploy that fabric in a logical manner, given the amount of integration you can do in a company like HP. Are the customers savvy about that?  Or do they say, give me a fabric? Are they, what are you? Well, they ask you what your fabric is, right? What exactly is your fabric strategy? And the discussion that we have is really around virtualization of the fabric. I mean, our fabric capability is a virtualized fabric, right? So intelligent, resilient framework that really provides fabric for the data center. Fabric for styles of IT. Exactly, right, and got a new suit. It's a good fabric and you make a nice, new suit in your video, that's great. We like sports analogies and you like designers. We just gave you some great sound bites for your next keynote. Right, but it's important to know, it's a different discussion. It's about, it's also about, so our fabric strategy is a software fabric strategy. It is not the port density fabric strategy. We have very strong port density, that's not the issue. Yeah, the value creation for you guys is software. So you can ride the, quote, Moore's Law or whatever the law of IT becomes on performance on hardware. Whether it's a moonshot like thing or something new integrated, but right now the performance of the hardware is getting better, cores, multiple cores. But on the software, you have to then integrate across. So okay, let's take that to the next level. So internet of things is a hot conversation right now. And a real conversation, we were talking about how to connect the edge of the network. Mobile device is the first generation of internet of things, maybe it's Google Glass and Fitbit or other things. So that has to land on a fabric. There's small pieces of data. Are you guys involved in anything with that kind of approach and technology? Yeah, so we have a really, really nice BYOD solution. And by the way, it's SDN enabled. So basically we have a BYOD solution that provides self-service onboarding that provides tracking of devices and fingerprinting of the devices. It provides access control of where people can go in the network. It also, from an SDN perspective, we use our security application, SDN security application, which is Sentinel to basically enable security all the way down to the switch port itself so that if a device comes in with malware on it or it's been to a bad website, instead of it having the traffic having to go through an IPS box sitting somewhere in the network, it actually is blocked right at the switching port. And that is actually a software strategy. So it's a software platform. Much more granularity. And it does what we've been trying to do with security and networking for years, which is dissolve a function like security into the switching plane versus basically taking all these boxes again back to our boxes talk and having all these boxes in the network to try to support that. And virtualize that. It was different than the concept of the compute. Virtualization was all about consolidation and getting more out of this underutilized resource. And networking's different, the ports aren't underutilized. Well, so in a way it is kind of underutilized in the sense that if you have, as a good example, let's talk about link, okay? Link is an application that generally is pretty hard on a network because you've got these people who want to run video simultaneously or they want to share a desktop and it requires a lot of bandwidth. And it also, you know, it's all over the place, right? And so the issue with link is what you do from a networking perspective is you generally have to over provision the network because you don't want to make sure everybody gets a good user experience, right? Right, so with SDN, that all goes away. Because, and as we've done with our SDN controller, we wrote an application with Microsoft Link to basically integrate link into the controller so that the network dynamically brings up a session for two link users who want it in a session, brings up the link in the session, provides it with the priority, quality of service, and all of the issues, all of the things that the session needs to be successful and have a good end user experience. And then when it's done, it dynamically tears it down. So you don't have to over provision the network.  So you free up those resources. Right. It does it for you. And so that is an application that you can create with SDN that's very different than the way most folks think. But- Does that handle encrypted data too? Yeah, oh yes, it handles encrypted data. But to your point about virtualizing the network and having it be better utilized, you've now better utilized a network without adding more bandwidth to it, right? To solve the problem, that's the idea. Well, to your other point about the labor content involved in configuring networks, now you start to address that challenge. I tell you, and this has been interesting, this whole SDN, you know, paradigm shift, I would say in five years, this discussion about, well, we need to use a CLI, oh my God, we got to go do all the Perl scripts, that's just going to be noise. That is not going to be a discussion we'll be having at all. This is going to change that completely. Because that doesn't scale. Well, SDN is- It just never will. I mean, SDN's been a double edged sword, right? I remember we were kind of dismissing it early on when we were first talking about it a couple of years ago, but it's created awareness to the mindset of shift. So it's going to change and get better dynamic policy enforcement, encryption, et cetera, you mentioned. So I got to ask you about security, because that's one of the pillars of Meg's vision, big data mobile, cloud and security. That's pretty much it. You play in that. So what are you guys doing on security? What's the new, any new information, any new announcements? Well, so we don't have any new announcements, but what I would tell you is that we work very, very closely with the security business unit with our Gillens team. And the idea there is to utilize our controller as a platform for a lot of different security applications, I guess I would call them, to be able to provide those to the network, across the entire thing, across the network. So instead of it being, as I said, a hardware box, like an IPS box, it's going to be more of a software platform. And that's, I don't know that anybody else right now is doing anything like that. I mean, frankly, I know that Cisco is not, because they can't. Well, to our, you mentioned. Broadcom mentioned they're doing multiple cores, they're doing inline, 100 gig, 100 gig E. Right, and of course we use Broadcom in our chipsets, in our switches, but the fact that you can, you know, actually dissolve security into the fabric itself, without a bunch of boxes, that's a different way of doing it. Well, you mentioned art, and he's got one of the best wraps I've ever heard on security, he's got a good vision for it, very practical as well.  His stat was fascinating. He said, on average, when the bad guy gets in, it takes 416 days for the customer to realize that they're in. So he said HP is essentially shifting its focus and helping clients shift the investment to find out when they've gotten in, use the analytics accordingly, really try to understand the anatomy of that hack in a much, much better way. Well, and remember, because a lot of attacks really are low-lying, right? They hang out for a while, and then they pop up when desired, right, by the perpetrator, and so that has to be, again, back to the fabric itself has to be secure. It has to sense these things. It has to be able to sense that there's a DOS attack that's occurring, or that there's malware that's beginning to propagate across the network, and you can't do that by just constantly having sniffers. You've got to have a fabric that is secure in and of itself, and you do have to have wonderful analytics that can compile that information and go, we've seen that pattern before, we know what that means, and then dynamically modify the network configuration to stop it, right? That's the concept. That's the must-have solution. That, to me, is the direction because we were just talking earlier with the customer, they've had malware and it's got an update from McAfee, and it was in there for three months. It's like the fingerprint just didn't connect. It's like, whoa. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Huge issue, so we're running out of time, Pethy, but I want to ask you one question. We just had Sarguilay on, he's got this pan-HP view with cloud. You were kind of looking up, you have a pan-HP view from the network side, so you have to play in a lot of different worlds within the company security. So what is your landscape? How do you look at the trends of software-defined, fill-in-the-blank, storage, servers, networking? Got moonshot, very disruptive. You've got fabrics on your end. You're kind of a little bit of security. Got multiple, great hardware, good software. You're kind of the mayor of networking in every solution, right? And my name is Mayor. Yeah. Yeah, you got to check in with all these different groups and put all those solutions in there. So what's your view about the world that we're living in right now? So I think it really is all about the application. Whether the application is a business application or whether it's going to the cloud, the network has to have the tools and be responsive to those. And it can't be done in a manual fashion anymore. It's got to stop. And the only way to really enable new applications to happen quickly, enable the cloud to actually allow people to use the cloud and for people to create private clouds is to change the paradigm of that network. And that's really what we're trying to do with our software-defined networking is to make sure that when an application is deployed, when an individual comes on the network, when there's bad things happening, the network dynamically knows itself, it can sense it and modify its behavior to match that requirement. So that's the idea behind it. Whether it's load balancing for the cloud, whether it's security for BYOD, BYOD, or whether it's a link session, whatever it is, got to be able to support that. There's a lot of diversity at the edge of the network. It's almost like access methods from the old days, right? You get different access points. You need to be secure. So that's the world we're living in. That's the way you see it. Wow, and so what's your key milestones for the next 12 months, what's your goals for the group? Well, for the next 12 months, I mean, the first thing is we've got to ship our SDN controller, so that's happening. Just want to make sure that happens. And then I think after that, it's working with partners to create new applications to offer our customers. And we've already met with several partners here at the show to do exactly that. And there's some really creative things that can be done now with our APIs that could be, I mean, there's some things that you're going to see that you would never have thought about using SDN for. I predict that there will be an explosion of these applications. So let's talk about with the OpenStack, because that's been some hot, hotbed SDN. OpenStack HP is really deep in. We support it. You guys have made some good calls with OpenStack. It's now the ecosystem of choice, even though it might be still in its formative years or months of developing. But you guys are there. What's, how does that play into your roadmap? I mean, actually, it's pretty important. Right, so OpenStack is one of the orchestration capabilities that our SDN controller supports. So if you're a cloud provider and you're developing using OpenStack to create your cloud and you want to have the network controlled through the OpenStack platform, you can do that using our product and with its OpenStack APIs. So that's completely available. And that's our focus has been on OpenStack for the cloud, cloud orchestration, and our SDN applications using the APIs for other purposes. So you're talking about, you're comment early about the things that we're going to be doing with APIs that caught my attention. So you're talking about potentially accessing granular services through those APIs, turning the network into an API.  That really has, you see it in other technologies, you see it in storage, why not the network? Why not the network? So that's the goal, that's the goal. And I think you'll see a lot of them. I heard it here in theCUBE. Bethany Mayer, Senior Vice President General Manager of the networking group within HP, talking about fabrics for styles of IT, no more manual policy enforcement, all dynamic, a future of a intelligent edge with security, HP networking is powering it all. And thanks for coming on theCUBE again. Great to have you. This is theCUBE. We'll be back with more interviews after this short break. We're going to have Roger Levy come on, Craig Nunez, George Kedif is coming on. He's heading up to software group. He'll be on at four o'clock. It'll be his first time on theCUBE. So if you're watching, stay on until four through four o'clock and here's those great interviews. We'll be right back after this short break.


there. Are you able to see? Yeah. Okay. Martin Weinstein. Yeah. Martin, I need to update these videos. Great. Okay. Yeah. So I'll go ahead and kick off. I think everybody who's attending. Yeah. So for those who, this is the first call, I want to quickly note that we follow the hyperledger antitrust policy and also the hyperledger code of conduct. So if this is your first call, please review those. Usually it's customary when I open up these calls to see if there are any participants that are here for the first time to please raise your hand and introduce yourself. I'd love to hear a little bit about how you found out about us and where your subject matter expertise is, what your interest is. Is there anybody on the call for the first time? Sounds like no. Okay. All right. So I'll run through just a couple quick announcements. We have actually been invited Bert, Bertrand Rue and I have been invited to participate in the IWA interwork alliance working group that's focused on developing a carbon emissions token system standards for carbon emissions tokenization. So that's pretty exciting. And it's definitely relevant to the work that we're doing. We're also in the process of, for those of you who are on the presentation two weeks ago from Guardian and the HR Foundation, we're looking into exploring how to integrate the Guardian into the climate accounting solution that we've developed for tracking emissions across scope three. And we'll be having a conversation this week about that. So that's a potentially really useful tool that could help us kind of move forward with some of the development that we've done. Are there any other announcements before I introduce Alexi and hand it over? Did you put links to those things in the chat? I did not. The links to the interwork alliance. I'm happy to do that. I'm really excited to have Alexi here today. He is the co-founder and CEO of evercity.io. I have had the opportunity to see one of his presentations before. It's a critical piece of infrastructure and I think just a really interesting application around Web 3 and open source for green finance democratization. And with that, Alexi, I'll just hand over the floor to you and allow you to share your screen one moment. Yeah, sure. Thanks a lot, Sherrod. You see, for this conversation, I would prefer maybe to have a more lively discussion and stuff around the slides and stuff because I think it's very important for us to understand where this whole revised space is coming from, what is important what we should consider while building the applications and stuff. So how many of you guys are builders, people who are actually building the stuff? Maybe how can we understand that? Maybe you can raise hands or give me some kind of another sign because I really want to better understand the audience and how to frame the discussion today. Yeah, maybe raise hands. Yeah. Okay, we have one builder. Great. Ken Bush. Ken Bush is a builder too. Okay, so we have two builders. That's amazing. Nice. Three builders. Elizabeth is also building some. Four builders. Okay. The hands are coming. Nice. Okay, then thanks for raising your hands, guys. Nice meeting you. So then who has some kind of sustainability background? Can you also share and raise your hands then? Anyone who was involved in sustainability before? Okay. Even sustainability projects that take place or is a domain sustainability? It could be both, you know, but mainly domain sustainability and stuff like that. So I want to understand who is coming from this direction here. What environmental sustainability? Okay, that's amazing. So we have one really cool expert who has both backgrounds and that's pretty rare. So congrats on that, Elizabeth. And what have you been doing before in sustainability? Elizabeth, I think that question was for you. Oh, you're on mute, Elizabeth. Oh, building? So I'm building a lifetime comprehensive environmental impact calculator that connects to a carbon token market and carbon, I have a whole carbon standard, carbon token standard that I sent out to Vera and ICBCM back in September, October of last year. So I'm trying to build a transfer energy. Thanks, Elizabeth. But my question was referring to your previous sustainability background. So can you share a little bit? Oh, that's environmentally sustainability. So I'm a certified forest steward. I developed a forest. I actually developed a plan to restore acreage of native forest and was actually on the land doing native forest studies in restoration for about 10 years. Okay, that's amazing. Amazing background and a very interesting story.  And then we can discuss more on the topic of today's meeting. So I started my career in actually commodity trading in Geneva in Switzerland. And that was very interesting because it showed how goods are moving, you know, how a financial system works, but never brought any impact. And on the contrary, right? I couldn't really understand why we need to trade all those oil commodities and sometimes really trading like thin air and making money, which didn't bring like any impact and didn't make any sense to me. But and that was like 15 years ago. But thanks to that company, I came across CO2 trading and European CO2 trading market. And it was a very interesting presentation about hedging strategies on European CO2 trading market, which was a 100 page presentation made by one of the traders. And that really opened up like a very interesting market for me. And I realized that it's something more than just, you know, some derivatives and some trading.  And it really amazed me how important it is and how, you know, how actually not enough our actions are and war at this point. So I quit this company and started my own organization, which was a carbon fund. And this carbon fund developed climate projects, nature based, but also looked at technology based solutions and projects. And so we started working with big multinational corporations like Alcoa, Union Lever, and PepsiCo and Bloomberg and many others, helping them to actually understand their sustainability risks, their emission reductions potential. And maybe you know that saying that reduce what you can and offset what you can. So that's what we were helping them with back then. It was more than 12 years ago already. So it was pretty, you know, pretty early also for carbon markets. And clients had all sorts of motivations to buy carbon offsets, not only kind of, you know, what we see now, but a lot of marketing, a lot of GR, a lot of other things that actually drives the demand back then. And then we started to get global, we started to participate in the UN climate conference format in some of the other UN associations and initiatives like UN Global Compact. It's an organization which unites a lot of businesses on the agenda of sustainable development. And by the way, Science Based Targets and this kind of thing. So actually UN Global Compact is one of the global organizations that actually promoted, you know, Science Based Targets and carbon offsetting and stuff like that. And also some of the others organizations. So we went to this global level.  And we thought everyone really wants to save the world. But we realized maybe it's not the case for everyone. So as I mentioned, there were all sorts of other motivations of buyers of carbon credits and stuff like that. And also there were and still there are many inefficiencies which I will cover in a few minutes. So after that, after Paris climate conference, which was like the really historical one because the Paris Agreement was adopted. And you may know right what the Paris Agreement is, it limits the global warming or at least tries to and provides new mechanisms for carbon financing. And this was largely based on the Kyoto Protocol, as you know.  And that really worked out. So now Paris Agreement is another iteration of those systems of those markets. And so the voluntary carbon market actually, I would say was a spin off or is a spin off of Kyoto Protocol because everything that we're using right now on the voluntary carbon market, those methodologies that we're now trying to digitize all of the processes and stuff, they all actually come from basic Kyoto Protocol mechanisms and ideas. So I just recently was in Denver at a carbon, like, sorry, a climate forum for ReFi startups. And some of the startups approached me asking to validate their digital methodologies and stuff, their ideas. So what I recommended them to do is to look at CDM, which is Clean Development Mechanism under Kyoto Protocol, which actually rolls out all of the key parts that should be included in any methodologies, whether it's a digitized one or it's analog one. But it's one of the key sources of this knowledge that is used widely on the voluntary market by Vera, by Gold Standard, by many, many others. So if you're trying to build something and you're new to climate finance and stuff, so my first message to you today would be to stand on the shoulders of giants rather than trying to create everything from scratch. So there were a lot of smart people who dedicated their lives to this industry, to this knowledge. And it all started, of course, not in the 90s, when Kyoto Protocol was actually introduced, but it actually started earlier, you know, in the 70s, I guess, and it all comes, is connected with the Austrian Economic School and Ronald Koos and the concept of including transactional costs into the pricing of goods and services. So that was one of these basic ideas that actually is, you know, developing more and more. And we're now seeing not only carbon but biodiversity attempts to include biodiversity into economic relations of economic agents. So just look into that, look at what have been developed by previous generations and people who really, you know, dedicated their lives to that and try to innovate based on that and not to create something really, really new unattached from the reality because, you know, even those artists like Malevich, for example, who actually introduced this black square, he actually learned how to paint and he was, you know, well educated in painting, so he could paint you everything, literally. And then he painted the black square. So it's kind of the case for Rify and if we want to build something meaningful and something that people will use as an open source around the globe, then it should be aligned with core values, principles and processes that were developed back then. So that's a very important thing. But to go back to my story, we started after Paris Climate Conference, we started to look at innovations and invested in some of the companies. Some of it was hardware, some of it was software and one of the companies actually made a breakthrough. The company was called Dao IPCI and IPCI stands for Integrated Platform for Climate Initiatives. And the team behind that and the concept behind that was really visionary because this Dao was established actually in 2016 and it actually facilitated the world's first carbon credit transaction in 2017 and I think March 2017. So that was officially acknowledged by the World Bank people, by the UN, the company and myself. We were invited to several events around the globe. So one of them was actually Innovate for Climate in Barcelona, which was the leading carbon innovation conference and still is, but because of COVID, they've hosted two conferences online. So I guess it was not that viral, but actually that was the main innovation carbon conference. And we met with all of the market players, we met with the heads of standards, David Antonioli from Vira, we met with gold standard people, we met with all the exchanges and project developers. So the discussion started actually in 2017 and if someone is saying that REFI was born like one or two years ago, it might be true in terms of the massive movement, but the first REFI project started to pop up even earlier, so 2016, even 15. And that was a major breakthrough, but that was another learning that no one really was waiting for us. And the market was pretty oligopolistic by its nature. So the main players and they're still there, controlled the largest shares of the market. And if you learn the economic theory that you know that oligopoly and monopoly are not the most effective systems of distribution of resources, so that's same case for carbon and other markets. And people back then were really afraid of blockchain, they were afraid of ICO waves, they were afraid of new technologies, and of course, they were afraid of being phased out of the market. And the message that we brought to them, you know, we had the wrong messaging because we came there, we were surrounded by all of these people and we said, now guys, blockchain is going to disrupt you all and we will not need you, so sorry, we don't need auditors, we have digital MRV, we don't need project developers, we have digital methodologies, we don't need, you know, literally anyone just project owner, owner of the land and the end user. So all of you guys, we don't need you. And that was a very bad messaging, you know, and it turned out to be actually a mistake. So that's another learning that I want to communicate, you know, from my experience, that even now we don't have to you know, phase out everyone and disrupt and just exclude everyone. Because if you start building REFI projects and you start, you will start having your first clients or partners, you know, somewhere in Africa or, you know, in other parts of the world, you will understand how important it is to have the domain expertise, the industry expertise, the methodology, wise expertise to be on the ground, you know, to talk to these people and etc, etc. It doesn't really work in a fully automated manner and no one has really proved the opposite, you know, right now. Everything that we learned right now from talking to more projects and stuff, successful players, either they had the expertise before, or they were not afraid to have partners to get their feet on the ground, you know, and talk to, to everyone with whom they're trying to make business, it's like in any other industry. So, you know, REFI or, you know, climate finance is not any different from any other industry. So you either have to come from the industry or you need to have, you know, your experts ready there, and be based on the principles that were developed before in a way, but in a way, disrupt, but not saying that we don't need everyone because, you know, from what we see now, we still need all of the players that are currently there, but we can make their life easier. And open source is something that can really play a big role here, a huge role. So I want to make a short pause here. And maybe you have some other opinions and statements or questions regarding like my experience and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a question. You talked about the messaging that didn't work. I'm curious to hear, and you spoke to it to make the life easier, but what really helped move the needle to kind of achieve buy-in, achieve poop of concept, achieve, you know, early adoption among these, you know, vested, you know, stakeholders that have just been around? Well, you know, Sherwood, that's a very interesting question. And I think in 2017, we just faced this problem that many venture investors are aware of when you're introducing some innovation earlier than it could be adopted by the market, you know. So I think the positioning was wrong. I think people were afraid of blockchain because the ICO thing was really, you know, very viral and loud and stuff. And also, you know, the market was not really moving because carbon markets, guys, I'm not sure how long are you following them? But for more than 10 years, the market was really stable. And it was like, you know, 300 million and 500 million and 400 million and six. So it was growing or not growing. It was like really flat. And it somehow climbed up to a billion. And then, like, we had this twofold growth in the recent years. So I guess this is one of the factors. But, you know, in 2017, I met a guy there in the Innovate for Climate, the core carbon person related to innovations. And what he said to me is like, this thing will come in five years. Because of the reasons I mentioned, also regulation, you know, and the maturity of technology as well. Because back then, technology was not that user friendly. If you remember, you know, MetaMask didn't have the app. And the overall interface was really kind of not that good as now, you know, and that was the case with everything, you know, every part of the blockchain infrastructure. It was like, you know, people are still talking about interfaces and user experience even now, right? But back then, five years ago, it was very basic, very, you know, very generic. So people really need this experience. And I think this is one of the feedback that I also got because just sharing my experience, we had a demo in 2017 for a very big player in the carbon market and we totally failed because of the interfaces.  So our developers, they thought it's genius. It's like a breakthrough, and it was. But in terms of user experience, it was nothing. And people just didn't understand what is that, what, you know, how to use it, why, why is it needed to be introduced, you know. So that's another learning that I had, you know, that user experience, user interface is key. And I just returned from Japan, where the customer is not only right, he is God. So I think this is what we need to adopt in the blockchain industry that the customer is God. And we really need to make things really simple, really native, you know, for more people to use it and more companies to use it. So also that was a major fail that, you know, taught me a lot. And now in every city, we're making a very big accent on user interfaces as well. And also for open source, you know, because open source, usually it's something on the GitHub, and it's great if it has documentation. But usually, you know, even documentation is not that good, or it's done for developers. And it doesn't really help others to use the open source code. So on that side, we also need to improve, you know, and have well documented stuff. And ideally, something that Guardian is doing, you know, why I like what they're doing is that they're trying to implement a low code or no code approach to that. And that's what the DAO IPCI project had actually introduced one of these ideas that we had in this DAO IPCI project is that, you know, all of the, you know, everyone should have an opportunity to easily launch and instantly launch their environmental programs and apps on this DAO. And that was the basic concept that we had. And from the very beginning, the concept that the company was open source, so everything was open source. And we really had hard times with some shareholders that were lawyers to explain them that, guys, we're not registering IP, we're doing everything open source. And that's how things sometimes work. And we, you know, show the example of Red Hat and stuff like that. But no one really could understand that. But now the understanding is there. So there are more and more open source projects. And that's what we really need. While doing our open source, we have to think about the user who is God, not only friend or, you know, contributor or someone else, he is actually God because he will need to use it. And that's a very important thing if we want to build open source. So if you have any other quick questions, and I'll jump to the next part of the story and some next outcomes that I want to highlight from my journey in this. Okay, so I assume there are no more questions. So then I can tell you the last part of my story. So, you know, we realize that blockchain and open source is really an enabler for climate finance based on this experience that we had with the first transaction. And we started to participate in the UN protests every year. So we went to the UN climate conference. I missed only one in Morocco. And then I visited all of them. And that was really mind opening experience. Because when we started building open source in this company, I thought, okay, open source, but I didn't really realize why are we doing this open source and who might need it, you know, except for developers, maybe they can do a fork, do something else, blah, blah, blah. So it was very abstract to me because I'm not a developer. And when I started to present these things at the climate conference, and first we started like with a booth about blockchain and stuff like that. Come to us, we have blockchain and cookies and stuff. Yeah, but you know, I'm giving out swag. And that was pretty weird because at the climate conference, there was no other, you know, blockchain company back then in 2017. And people were really interested. So we started to make workshops. We started to make like, you know, press conferences and stuff with some other friends from the climate chain coalition. And this is an organization we established in 2017, which kind of unites more than 400 members from 60 countries around the globe. And tries to somehow, you know, promote blockchain for climate. And I think we've succeeded. And it was officially supported by the UN. But right now the UN person, Masamba, he kind of resigned from the climate chain coalition because they started something bigger in the UN, which is the UN Global Digital Innovation Hub. And I encourage you guys all to collaborate with both the CCC, the climate chain coalition. And if you're lucky, also try to collaborate with the UN Global Digital Innovation Hub. And I know that Martin Weinstein is one of the key people there. So that's a very good entry point to this initiative. So we started to go to co-op. We started to talk to people and we started to make a lot of presentations. So a lot of people came to these presentations. And then I realized why is it important to make open source? Because like once we had a really big room for 500 people, and it was like, not all crowded, but there were a lot of people. And when we stopped, you know, highlighting our use cases and stuff. So we went down to the people and they actually surrounded us. I think it was 2018 or 2019. And these were people from various African countries from South America. And they all surrounded us.  And what I learned is that people in these countries, they don't really want the ready solutions that you come, you know, from the global north and supply them something that they need to pay for and just use and pay for high fees and stuff like that. That's what has been happening for a lot of time, you know, and that's what is still happening. Because if you come to co-op, you will see a lot of arguments between people from global north and global south. And what these people are desperately craving for is what it's a quote, you know, they said, we need knowledge and we need technology. We have smart people in Africa, you know, we have smart people in Asia and in South America. We have developers, we have like, you know, energy opportunity to actually build stuff. But what we lack is knowledge and technology. So this is what actually open source can deliver, you know, knowledge and technology. And then you will gain like, you know, thousands and thousands of followers, contributors and stuff like that. If you treat them equally, and if you will be patient to, you know, kind of produce the knowledge and get and also, you know, supply the technology. So people here, they go first and you have to know whom are you building for and ideally, you know, meet these people. So I encourage you to, you know, go to these countries, go to the climate conference or some other formats where you can meet a lot of people from indigenous communities, from, you know, various other industries, project developers, landowners, and talk to them and try to understand their main desires there. And when you understand them, when you look into their eyes, you know, it will be clear for you what you need to do in terms of your, you know, open source applications and how you need to treat them. I can give you an example. I know I have a friend, a French guy, he lived in Africa, in Central Africa for many years, you know. And he also went into their blockchain rabbit hole and stuff. But what he started doing, you know, he started creating like his community with the people he knew there in Central Africa. And, you know, engaging very actively with this community, asking what they need and stuff like that. And now even without blockchain, he created like a huge Discord community where people started to be like very active participants and they don't get any tokens, they don't get any rewards. But they like the way he, you know, treats them as, you know, equal people and just sharing the knowledge and, you know, showing them the benefits and stuff. And of course, there are some rewards because there is a mechanism related to data.  So he actually created the decentralized data marketplace without blockchain. Just, you know, with the proper kind of attitude, the proper kind of software that these people can use and big part of it is an open source as well. So that's really important to know what the people want and need to talk to them and make this really accessible knowledge and technology. So there are lots of, you know, companies that I know from the core blockchain space, they organize a lot of schools, a lot of hackathons. And that's an opportunity. That's what, for example, African countries really, really need, you know, and not only learn how to code, but learned how to collaborate and co-create together in a very user friendly manner. So that's exactly what is needed. And ending on my story, so based on those many, many conversations with people from around the globe, many insights, we started EverCity two years ago in order to solve the entry barrier problems, the knowledge barrier and the cost barrier that prevent more companies to enter the green finance space to start, you know, raising using green bonds or start issuing carbon credits. So education and making things really simple play a very big role in our company, as well as the open source component. And we have a sustainable finance protocol that we started to create on Polkadot. And now we're continuing on Hidera, so adding Hidera capabilities. And our idea is simple, we want to create a protocol that actually helps to roll out, you know, any apps related to issuance of various green finance instruments. So green bonds, sustainability linked bonds, and also various carbon instruments, we're adding those things to our protocol, where we are collaborating with the guys who want to use them. So for example, we have never worked on the green sukuk side, you know, sukuk is who knows what is green sukuk, by the way, who can tell me. Kind of Islamic law. Right. So that's an Islamic kind of law. Yeah. It has very specific Islamic rules in it, but it's an Islamic debt instrument, actually. So we never expected, but one of the, you know, people just, one guy just contacted me and regarding the protocol and started to build a green sukuk based on what we have built, you know, before and stuff like that. So yeah, that's pretty much about me. And I tried to tell the story with some of the outcomes that I got from, you know, my experience, some failures, some insights from talking to real people. So I hope this can be useful for you, building your own open source software technology. So do you have any questions guys or things that you want to discuss? I have a quick question. This is related to sustainably linked loans and bonds or blended finance. From some of the research that I've done, I've seen that typically the deal sizes, my understanding are like upwards of like $80 million for a typical deal size. Obviously a lot of development projects are much, much smaller in nature. Does every city have a way of kind of fragmenting larger loans into many different loans and being able to serve the ability to kind of scale that large monetary amount to larger numbers of projects that don't need so much, but could definitely use the preferred interest rate. You know, Sherwood, that's a great question. And that's one of the trends that we can cover next, how we can use blockchain technology and also open source. So that's really important. And the situation is that most green finance vehicles like bonds and even loans, they're right now used by really big guys, really big banks, really big corporations. And when these instruments are discussed at the climate conference, there's a lot of skepticism from developing countries that, hey, guys, you just invented something for yourself and now you're playing with it, but we don't actually get any benefit. Or when we actually receive something, the financial conditions are not favorable at all. And that's something that we cannot actually use. So these were the problems. And these problems can really be solved by blockchain. And fractionalization is one thing. And also securitization. So when you actually combine smaller loans, like hundred small loans, and then there is a bank who is issuing a green bond to refinance those smaller loans, that's also a very interesting use case. That's that many in the financial industry are talking about and thinking about. So this is truly one of the opportunities to connect smaller scale projects and huge banks. So if you want to do that, that's one of the directions that you might take. And more importantly, these big banks, big investors, they want to invest, they want to deploy capital. But because of those restrictions, they cannot actually deploy it and they cannot find enough projects. So they desperately need the toolkit that will enable them to work with smaller projects, package them into bigger investment vehicles, do everything in a proper green way. That's very important to work with institutionals. So you have to adhere to those green finance standards, whatever they are. And also it's important for them to accumulate data sources. So everyone is talking about we need the granular data. If we are investing or refinancing those packages with hundred or thousand smaller loans and companies, we need to understand what happens in each of them, right? And get the data almost online in a really timely manner. So that is very important. And that's one way of doing this. But another way of doing this is through new types of mechanisms and new types of investment vehicles. So a lot will come from the DeFi market, actually. And when we look at Klimadal, of course, they might have done a lot of things wrong. And now they're kind of paying for it. So that's what they have to face. But what they did actually, their main innovation is that they breached DeFi mechanisms and green finance markets. And this is, I think, is going to be a trend. Because all of these banks, all of these financial institutions, they're really slow. And adoption really takes a lot of time. So it moves somehow, but it's still not there. And when we talk with these banks and financial institutions, they always value two things, risk and innovation content. And usually, the risk part actually kills most of the innovation content because they want to do just smaller steps, small innovations that will lead to a bigger innovation. And this is not like a disruption. This does not really solve the key problems. It can solve the problem, but we need to get there. But if you heard just yesterday, a new IPCC report was released stating, it's not new. Everyone in Klimadal know that we're kind of doomed already. We're not meeting the Paris Agreement target. So we need to do whatever we can right now to increase climate financing. And that's where actually open source and Web3 can help. Because I think the most exciting trend will be what Klimadal did, but for other instruments as well and for other markets, just combining DeFi mechanisms and DeFi economy and finance with labeled and high-quality green finance. So if we will be able to channel people's kind of greediness in a good way, like high risk profile of crypto investors and stuff like that, if we somehow can connect it with green finance, and not only carbon, but also other credits. And if we make sure that those assets are really making the real life impact with all the methodologies we have with DMRV, with other players verifying this sometimes on the ground and we still need that, then we're going to succeed. And this has a tremendous opportunity for scaling. Because if it could be replicated by other people, users around the globe, if it can bring liquidity to the core protocols that could make this happen, this would be a major victory. And I think the trend that we will be seeing more and more ReFi stuff until the moment where actually DeFi becomes ReFi. And we actually need that. And if we look at ReFi as a new type of financial industry, then we can look, if we want to predict the trends, we can look at traditional financial industry, which is becoming greener and greener. And at some point we'll have to green their whole portfolios. And there are many bank asset managers who have committed to that. So I think DeFi and blockchain will also, at some point we'll realize that it's important because we cannot live as our physical bodies on chain. And we have to take care about what's going on around us. So that's one of the forecasts. And I think that's the most exciting and important thing. But I want to warn you not to go too much into DeFi space because it can be considered a scam. It can actually spoil the whole thing. And that you don't have to do. And that's why all of the statements that I did, it's important to know whom are you doing this for, standing on the shoulders of giants, respecting what has been done, but doing some really cool innovation. And the most disruptive innovation I think will come from intersection of the green part and the DeFi part and also mechanisms and technologies that can be used and replicated in developing countries. And they're opening up right now to that. I think it's the most exciting times right now to innovate because at COP in Egypt, I talked to many African countries and what they actually need, again, they want to start green finance in their countries, raise green finance, but they need technology. And open source is a good way to enter those markets because, again, many people think that if they use your preparatory tech, they will lose their independence. And there will be a vendor law, which is in most cases in a right. In terms of open source, everyone can have win-win situation. And that goes very much in line with the core sustainable development goal values. And the last thing I want to mention is that if you truly build stuff open source, then UN doors will be always open to you. And that's very important because it's where you can meet your fellow builders, fellow users, advocates, governments, literally anyone. And it's really good. So I encourage you to work more with UN agencies. But for that, a big part of your work has to be open source and true open source. When you said, I mean, I've seen your website about the global standards. So for the carbon credit, for example, so are you following a specific like where our gold is? Or there is a separate global standard from United UNC? Could you rephrase the question, please? I didn't case the last one. So you mentioned about the global standards in your website and your talk too. So which global standards are you following? Global standards or UN bodies with whom we are partnering? Is that the specific ones you're following? Yeah. So it depends on the case, you know, indeed, in ESG, in the green finance, there are lots of standards. But if we have a closer look, we'll see that they're leading standards. There's like a high quality cohort of standards. There's like a medium, you know, the most popular standards and stuff like that. So when we're talking about green debt, we're looking mainly at international capital markets association standards, ICMA, and they have a lot of stuff for bonds for loans and stuff like that. We also look at the climate bond standard, which is the most sophisticated green bond standard. And they're pretty open to innovations as well. When we look at, you know, green screening and understanding whether assets are green or not, we'll look at the UTexonomy standard. And there will be more and more regional taxonomies, which actually can tell you what is green and what is not. And when we look at carbon, you know, we also look at the common standards that are there. And we're just trying to make things a little bit kind of better and more efficient. And the last, you know, last product that we presented at COP, were carbon forwards. And in the carbon forwards, we looked at most of the standards and we tried to make this product standard agnostic, not to actually be kind of tied up to one standard, but rather kind of, we looked at most of the standards. And we tried to compare them and see what is similar in all of those standards to actually somehow help to standard ties. So when I was telling to this refined newcomer guys to look at CDM, it's actually something that, you know, we did and we looked at most of the standards and we tried to understand what similar similarities do they have. So in our work, we do a lot of generalization. And this is what I think we need for open source stuff as well, to be really universal. So we don't have to only look at one standard. We have to look at the principles that those standards were using to build themselves and make credible. And when we do that, we will see that most of these standards, they are universal. So that's, I think key when creating open source stuff as well. And that's what I mean when I say that we need to stand on the shoulders of giants. So respect those principles and build on top of them, make them sharper, make them even more efficient. This is what it is. And regarding impact, we also use a couple of impact indicators and also, of course, SDGs. Because SDGs, they are the main global framework for many things. I think SDGs have a lot of potential. I mean sustainable development goals. And you probably may know that they also have targets. So you might also look at targets as well. And for each goal. And what makes SDGs so unique is that every country around the world has agreed on them. And SDGs, along with the Paris Agreement, those are two global frameworks that people around the world share. And they share them without exception. So this makes it a very universal, very useful framework to follow. But the difficulties start to come up when you look deeper into each target and indicators and stuff like that. One quick question. You mentioned this idea of the need for a securitization of smaller impact project sustainability projects. Is there any, to your knowledge, is there anybody making headway in this particular space that we could look at? Is there any, are there any successful models out there or anything off the top of your head? I know I'm kind of putting you on the spot. So, which exactly, so, you know, can you? Yeah, so for example, if you are looking at technology to lower the methane emissions from a oil and gas field, right, and say, you know, that technology is, you know, cost a million dollars, you know, so you want to, you know, develop a way to kind of securitize 90 oil fields to make it interesting to, you know, blended finance, you know, vehicle or sustainable link, the loner bond. Is there anybody or any solutions out there that you've seen that have addressed that sort of issue? And I think there's also like, you know, palm oil, palm oil, but there's a lot of different smaller projects that could be grouped together and secured. Is there any organization or any technology that's making headway in that particular space? Yeah, so first of all, these kind of groupings, they exist even in the carbon world without blockchain. And even in CDM, there were like, you know, aggregated projects and stuff. So again, you know, we can look at this. But if you want to look more at innovations that come from the, you know, climate finance space, I advise you to look at the cases in the climate finance lab. They are really innovative. They don't have specifically like blockchain focus, actually. But they are really cool think tank where you can actually learn a lot about this kind of innovations and what's going on. And I can remember there were some similar projects to what you mentioned, actually. Okay, great. But, you know, what I want to say is that many banks really want to do that, but they don't have too many examples, successful examples. So I think it's a trend that will, you know, will be possible also because of digital technologies and not necessary blockchain. And if you look at the climate finance, you know, use cases that they support, you can find some really interesting things there. Great. Okay. And it's basically because a democratized digital bank would be one that makes investments where the people who are investing into that bank tell them to. And so there wouldn't be any runaway fossil fuel investments, for example. And so I put in the chat questions about, you know, helping to find these banks so that we can invest in them so that we can see if they're democratic and what are some of the problems that could happen, like with digital banks. Yeah, so yeah, so I guess there are there are some of these banks, but also there are old school banks and we need to do something with them, right? So we always shared the approach that we should actually work with these guys, but just like tell them what needs to be done, you know, highlighting the benefits. That's what that's what I was doing during my whole life, you know, I was always telling them, you know, hey, guys, you know, this is how we can do it. This is very exciting. This is very innovative. This is good for your marketing. It's good for impact. And depending on what they were interested in most, I was like highlighting this kind of thing. So I believe that we need not only to work with green banks, but also we need to transform, you know, the legacy banks into green banks, and they're doing actually a lot, but we need to help them somehow. And that's why I think, you know, what Hyperledger is doing is a super important work. And, you know, I support this approach very, very much. But also we need to leave as an example, right? Because when Klimodal and some other folks, you know, they did some remarkable things and achievements, then the legacy players, they started to move, you know, and started to think, okay, we can do it. You know, that's something that is important. But going back to your question, so you want me to address this complaint from Africa, the digital banks can freeze your funds, right? That's the first question. Yeah. So what can I say, you know, we've seen that banks are freezing funds and not only digital ones, right? Centralized banks are freezing a lot of funds as well. And we know a lot of recent cases, right? No need to tell you, I can just show you my cup. So, you know, this is actually one of the benefits of decentralization. And if we can truly make, you know, decentralized protocols for the value exchange, like Bitcoin, right, we will never, Bitcoin can never freeze your funds, right? So that's pretty cool. And I guess the answer would be, again, open source, decentralization, building new types of financial, you know, mechanisms that would be actually connected to the real world by the real impact that they're making. And that's, you know, goes back to the trend that highlighted the something that we need to do. So I guess if you talk to these guys again, you can, you know, give them example of Silicon Valley Bank, and then an example of Bitcoin, that no one can really freeze your Bitcoin, you know, funds and stuff. So that's, that's, I think, a good argument. But in general, none of the banks can guarantee that they will not freeze your funds, because there is another saying, when you're sending your money to the bank, it's not your money anymore, it's the money owned by the bank. And the bank is actually using this money, you know, as they want. So they can lose it, and they can be subject to any kind of issues by the government, any regulation and stuff. And it's there, there is no safe heavens now. That's the reason for my second question. Because you should be able to just go ahead and click on, you know, open an app and click on, you know, I want to find a greener bank than the one that I'm invested in that just decided to go for fossil fuel investments. So I would like that app to say, okay, well, I found a green bank that will do the swap that you're trying to do. So I'm, I'm offering my bank a swap, you know, I'll take your bad, your bad notes on housing, I'll take your housing problems away, you give them the mortgage back to them, and then I'll give you my carbon credit. It's a three-way swap, a Byzantine swap. And I'm wondering, you know, how do I find a bank willing to do that? There's got to be an app out there for that, because this is a tool of democracy that you find that you find the government, you find the bank, you find whatever it is that you need, because it's going to listen to you and, and do the swap that you need. But why do you even need a bank in this system? Because, because I had never found, I have searched and never found anyone who has housing nearby willing to swap it for carbon credit directly. They want dollar bills. Okay. But you think that the bank will help you to find this kind of? It would be any bank that is interested in my carbon credit to decrease, that they would be able to decrease their carbon footprint. And in exchange, they would swap the housing, the mortgage, they've got people who are, you know, bailing on their mortgages and defaulting, and they want to get rid of that bad paper. Well, that's interesting. I know a couple of green banks in the US, actually. So I can maybe send to you. This year, if you click on the first link, there's, they scroll way down, they've got a link to a list of green banks. And it might be on there. And there's also a link to another link to more green banks. So the thing is, is that there's, there's got to be an app that tells me which of these is open to the, this Byzantine swap. Yeah, I think we loved it. We love to hear. If you do hear that, I think it'd be really interesting to hear about. You can find that. If anyone's doing that already, that would be my goal, finding somebody who's already done it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, again, building, building on the shoulders, not reinventing the wheel. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, that's very interesting. You know, on that, on that point, I was listening to that, you know, when it comes to carbon footprints, people love their gigantic home. So in this case, would that swap require the home to be only a so many square feet? Right. And so that they would have to avoid the carbon tax on the square footage of their home. And I would be looking for an empty lot so I could build a tiny home on their 200 square feet. Yeah, I don't know. People on the phone, if you ever, when that subject is broached about carbon footprints, nobody wants to talk about the size of their home. It seems to be a a red flag. Nobody will discuss it. They'll buy this EV that's powered by renewables and they'll put up a 10,000 square foot home as if they have no carbon footprint. And I just curious, has anybody also seen that dichotomy where people will not discuss carbon footprints with these massive homes? Absolutely. And then they condemn the homeless who have a zero carbon footprint. I mean, even some of the advocates that are, you know, media types, we won't name any names, but we know about who are advocates for carbon reduction have massive homes or they have two or three homes. And it just seems one of those areas that may never get addressed properly is the massive carbon footprint on these, these mansions, but people who are out there advocating, we get we have to lower carbon footprints have these massive homes with two or two or three. I always find that interesting. There's never a discussion on that point. This is the first time I've seen something around that around that topic at all. That's a big integration into the Tarpini missions network that Cytan's been working on because they're already, they already have square footage building set up in there. Interesting. That's open source. Well, great. Well, Alec, I want to be cognizant of your time. You've you've been so generous with it. And this has been very engaging. And definitely a kind of diversion from what we normally see where it's just a presentation. I've really enjoyed how you've kind of engaged with us and shown or shared really interesting history and just all around really interesting perspective on something that's very near and dear to us. So I want to thank you for your time and thank everybody else who brought somebody really great questions. This has been a really fascinating past hour. So thank you everyone very much. Yeah, thank you so much. I hope that was, you know, kind of maybe useful for you. I tried to make it really more engaging and entertaining and just tell you everything I learned about open source and how to build it for climate and environmental use cases. So I hope this was useful. And if you want to dive in some more details, you can always contact me and we can have like a in depth session on everything that was mentioned. Would love to. Yeah, that sounds fantastic. I've got to do some some thinking and some unpacking and probably watch this again, but I really enjoyed it and have been touched soon. Thanks a lot. Have a nice day. Thank you. Enjoy to be here today. Thank you. Thanks for the great questions. Thanks everyone. Thank you.


Meanwhile, against the allegation of the PDP, Senate caucus that President Buhari is not in charge of the nation's security. The APC caucus of the Senate says he is in full control of the present administration, addressing newsmen after the caucus meeting on Wednesday. Senate Majority Leader Abdullah Yahya noted that the caucus is worried, saying their position had gone too far in their criticism playing with the lives of Nigerians. Abdullah Yahya maintained that President Buhari, service chiefs and heads of other security agencies are meeting on the matter of security challenges, with a plea that Nigerians should be patient, accusing past administrations of its failure to invest in the security of the country. We take exception to the unfortunate charge that our presidents have not been seen. This is polls and cheap politics. Mr. President and the service chiefs are meticulously busy every day and every night in deliberations and actions, with a view to addressing the security challenges across the entire country. Similarly, Mr. President had always made statements to Nigerians on all major security incidences and assuring Nigerians and indeed the international community that is on top of the game and that he will continue to do his best in making sure that security challenges are tackled head on. We want to assure Nigerians that Mr. President is in charge of the government and is discharging his duties conscientiously and patriotically. It is a well-known fact that the federal government and the PDP refused to invest in the security infrastructure of the country while Mr. President and that APCE-led government had massively invested in this regard more than any other past government including the military and we are confident that the nation will surmount its current security challenges.


Hi, this is your host up in Bhartiya and welcome to a special Let's talk show for a lot of content today. We have with us once again kid marker chief growth officer at number nine Get is great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me swap. No Yeah, so we had a very you folks had great as a little content We recorded some interviews there as well talk a bit about any, you know, first of all, I would love to just hear You know, what was the experience this year?  This is what we're expecting. You're like, hey, we are not expecting that kind of what it is And we're kind of not only surprised but in a positive way. Sure. Yeah I mean, there were lots of lots of great surprises at slowconf this year This is our third year running the event and you know, we started right in the middle of COVID and We try to do something different from a virtual event perspective Which I think kind of surprised people one is like we kind of throughout the agenda There's no schedule really we have this daily stand up that I host but it's a very short time but the rest of it's all done virtually and Asynchronously so people submit their videos and we can watch them and discuss them async But one of the things we did this year that was different and a huge hit is we ran slowconf local events all over the world and we had 10 different cities including New York Chennai Sydney, Australia London Dublin Tokyo you know this just all over the place and Those in-person events got really really rave reviews. So at those they have local speakers They had food and drinks. They got to watch a few videos the pre-recorded We got really positive feedback about the local events and people want us to do more of that And I think it was a very unique way for us to you know Not bring everybody from all over the world to one city But really to meet people where they were and I think that was a cool change this year We had some great speakers from end practitioners. So companies like capital one The New York Times Ford Motor Company people who are adopting SLOs Themselves and can share that story not you know, not necessarily vendors pitching their their technology But really kind of the end user practitioners. We also saw I'd say an increase in the executive audience this year We saw I think it was over 160 people joined that had VP or higher titles Which I think is it also really nice turnout for an event with about 2,000 people that showed up for the event overall So yeah, so I think for this year My big takeaway is the shift from, you know, should I do SLOs to how do I do SLOs and hearing from real practitioners that have seen the business benefits of SLOs in their organization. I think that's really the key thing. Did you folks make any in hospital during this, you know Event week. Yeah, we use the slow-comf week as our time to kind of dump a bunch of announcements So I'll just give you the highlights real quick. So we started the week with Reviews from a couple of different annuals reports. So the state of SLOs 2023 came out and we had you know that that we reviewed with Brian Singer last week at slow-comf and then We also had Paul Machawati from the enterprise strategy group who talked about his new report Which is all about the business-impacted service level objectives. You can find both those on our website at number 9.com We also announced a bunch of product enhancements, which are mostly focused I think, you know in the spirit of reliability engineering focused on the reliability and quality of noble mind itself So we built a query checker. We built a Metrics health notifier and basically a bunch of tools that make it so you're resilient to upstream data issues When you're building SLOs, you're highly dependent on the data and you may have heard this term garbage in garbage out So we're trying to help people figure out, you know, what garbage is coming into the SLOs They can improve upstream monitoring and that kind of stuff We also announced that we're now available on Google cloud platform in addition to AWS So now we're giving customers choice of where to deploy noble mind itself across the clouds But wait, there's more we also announced a new Network what we're calling the noble mind delivery network and we announced this with services companies that want to bring open source Methodologies for SLOs so including open SLO the slow development lifecycle or slow DLC R9 y dev which is a reliability kind of Architecture framework that Google created, but we're working with companies like cognizant and Coravan's and the scepter and Teleon and these other kind of very focused Professional services groups they are working with us now as part of this delivery network We have a set of services including cloud migrations SLO bootcamps even AI policy Workshops we have a bunch of different reliability oriented Services that people can find that we can connect you with partners and and service providers through this and 90 n So that's noble mind comm slash and 90 n the noble mind delivery network and the final and I think the most fun Announcement is I got to work on a little project called slow GPT slow GPT.ai, which is a Basically a way for you to quickly build SLOs using generative AI and it uses Google's new vertex Palm to the preview of palm to which just came out at Google I o what two weeks ago And we showed that off last week and the cool thing here is one of the challenges like I was talking about your garbage in garbage out problem People have to connect to their data sources to get SLOs You want to go get you know an SLI you got to use you know data dog or New Relic or Prometheus or whatever upstream tools Connecting to that finding the data getting the query and then pulling it into an SLO platform is a lot of work Well slow GPT makes it so you can use the universal API which is a screenshot. So all you do is you take a screenshot of your Metrics and we have some examples on the website. So you don't need to necessarily even You know if you just want to try it out, you can do without any setup But it analyzes the data pulls out the the SLI data gives you an interactive SLI It lets you set different targets let you set different thresholds and you can see a burn down but what's really cool using the LLM the large language model AI capability is you can actually ask it questions about The SLO and so you might ask silly questions like, you know, write a song or write a poem about my SLO Which is kind of fun and it'll tell you if you know something something funny But you can also use it to generate open SLO YAML for examples You can you can ask it for that so you're gonna fit that into your Your developer workflow for SLOs and we actually showed a demo of that a slope on the last day Peter Patak who is the developer who built slow GPT along with me You know we worked on it together But what's really cool is he showed how you can fit that into an actual workflow of you know You have your metric and data dog you take a screenshot you put it in a slow GPT it generates the YAML Then you can go into noble mind connected to the data source for real with a real query Add it to your good ops workflow and apply it using the slow cuddle command line Anyway, so that's I mean as a whole rundown of stuff that happened this week from a news perspective But you know everything from AI to to delivery network to new capabilities to industry research All of that kind of encapsulated in the the slow comp week Can you talk a bit about what you also mentioned a slow report? So talk about you know if there was any anything that you know Stood out or it was some major you know kind of point or highlight sure. Yeah, so this the state of SLOs Survey 2023 it is the second year that we've run this and what's what's really interesting about it What it indicates to me My biggest thing I mean we could dig into the data and I definitely encourage people to go deeper to watch Brian's overview of it from slow comp day one daily stand-up last week But the one that surprised me the most is we asked the question new question this year Did you increase your focus and reliability due to the pandemic and 80% of the respondents said yes And so this to me, you know something we kind of felt but having that validation that the pandemic actually increased people's focus On software reliability, I mean that really rung true The other interesting thing is we saw some of the data Being very consistent with the previous year and when I talked to the research team that did it You know, I was like a little bit depressed at first because like oh, so nothing changed They said no no this is actually a good thing because now it validates our sample Because you know if we see the same percentage answers year-over-year with the different people answering the questions It kind of validates that you know the the people were talking to a really talk straight thing So we're seeing in that and I don't you know I don't have all the headline numbers on the top of my head But you know definitely seeing the impact of of SLOs on the business Seeing people who are you know using SLOs and that trend is continuing to increase again The big surprise to me was like okay They really are focused on this as a result of the the pandemic and what we've seen come out of that You're also talking about you turned up on There were a lot of you know folks executives that you know You're like kind of surprised to hear and you also talk about that there are a lot of users You know not just vendor switching their products and solutions, but I'm curious when All these you know, especially you mentioned some names as well And of course we talked about state of SLO, but where when it comes to SLO How much awareness did you see was already there in terms of that that you're like Hey We have actually moved that face as we have this discussion earlier also that the awareness face is gone No, it's more about you know actually helping them, you know with their SLO strategies there are we yeah Yeah, so so the interesting thing, you know I've been in this slow game the SLO game for you know a few years now And I you know Google did a great job of advocating for service level objectives as part of the SRE Methodology, but I think it was kind of seen as one part of something you know of this this larger change And you had a kind of question Okay, do I want to do SRE or not and what we we tried to do was to break out the really great parts about service level objectives And and I think you know Steve McGee from Google did a nice talk about this at slow comp actually But he kind of talked about how Google's true innovation on SLOs, which have been around for a long time I mean SLA's and SLOs have been around for a long time as long as there's been service their true innovation was how to apply SLOs to distributed systems and The SLO methodology that you see is really about distributed systems What we see is SLOs can be used in a variety of use cases And so we've taken actually what Google was popularizing and we've brought together practitioners that are finding all sorts of creative uses for SLOs That are not just about distributed systems are also about you know, how we measure You know our inventories for our supply chain or how you know client software works or even how monolithic software works You can measure it through this concept of services as companies are adopting the service Abstraction and we see services everywhere software as a service platform as a service infrastructure as a service Microservices, right? This is where the way people are thinking about the interactions of software now It only makes sense that you're going to find the reliability targets performance targets You know the shape of that service in a way that can be consumed by other people so so to your question You know we when we started this it was trying to get people excited by SLOs now What we're seeing is well first of all is called SLO comp for a reason like people self-selected They kind of already know what SLOs are before they join I don't think many people join the conference not knowing what is and that's that's sort of by design We want to have people who are all part of this but it definitely has gone from you know What is an SLO? What are the basics? What is an error budget? You know these kind of very basic concepts that are important and counterintuitive, but they're their basic concepts So now how do I convince my boss? How do I show the business value? How do I? Decide whether to do DIY or open source or a vendor solution How do I roll this out across my organization? And actually it was interesting as in the exit survey. We did a post-event Exit survey like we always do we asked people what is the next step on your SLO journey? And we wanted to understand that and we had a very small percent into like 1% who said I'm not sure I need SLOs we had a you know I think about a quarter of them saying they want to they want to do their You know first SLO we want to create our first SLO, but the vast majority like 70% something like that Said they were either Automating SLOs air budget slows this code They want to do something like that or they were trying to scale SLOs across their organization So I that to me is a very strong signal that people are ready to take this to the next level It's not the getting certainly sure there's people you know Quarter of the people are in the getting started camp, but the vast majority are now saying okay I've taken it I've gotten started but now I need to scale it now I need to automate it now. I need to really get the to get the value out of it So as a law is now in production and day two phase or day three day four phase at 100% Yeah, it we're we're definitely past the toy phase and I would be honest like I've got customers like you know Ticketmaster and Cisco and service now and others That and pro core, you know, they're all really Taking SLOs as you know using noble mind is as like a production You know, it's how they're getting alerts It's how they're silencing lures if you look at that report from enterprise strategy group They talk about how out systems reduce their learning by 92 percent noisy alerts reduced by 92 percent And I just think about like the impact for engineering teams and it's funny I you know, I talked to engineering teams all the time that you know we have monitoring over here and we have a learning over there and We can't figure out how to get it to tell us with high signal and high quality What's going on and I think if there's just one thing you can solve from us You know from SLOs if you can get the pager to go off when it's supposed to and not go off when it's not if you can get that Solved that's a very clear business value because you know, I don't know not waking people up at three in the morning Sure, you're not paying them at three in the morning in theory. I mean we all you know most engineers are salaried Okay, but the fatigue and the hazard pay and you know the impact on attention That has a real Impact and that means, you know, I don't I don't like to talk about the cost savings part because I think that's less interesting The more interesting thing is how are you gonna have time to learn how to do AI and Move to cloud and cut costs and and and deliver new capabilities for customers if your team is chasing the pager Like how is an organization? Are you gonna do that? I don't know I how do you become competent at data science and AI if your team is answering the pager from noisy alerts? It just doesn't seem like a strategically smart move. So that's that's my I mean That's my simplest pitch for why SLOs will look Outsiders reduce their page in my night They're false alarms by 92% if you can get to your organization, you could free up resources to work on AI and cool stuff Okay, that's the simplest way I can explain the value of SLOs. Yeah, these events also help us, you know Kind of you know shaping the future. So what was some key takeaways where you're like? Hey, this is where users are or the ecosystem is and that's where we should move forward Which means, you know, what does it mean for noble line and yeah, yeah, it's a really great question So one of the one of the talks we did last week day two daily stand up if people want to go watch it We'd Alex now to who's our CTO at noble nine and he actually we had Michael Hausenblass who wrote is writing a fantastic new book called Cloud observability in action. I definitely recommend checking that book out It has a whole chapter in SLOs and so we spoke with him we saw Alex now at our CTO and Alex's talk was what's the future of open SLO and This is getting to exactly your question like we have this open standard It's been adopted by you know dozens of organizations multiple organizations have adopted it as a standard like, you know Sumo logic and others and What he talked about is this idea of prefabricated SLOs that the future is going to be all about having out of the box solutions That are open source. They're publicly available and its developers sharing with developers How their infrastructure is expected to work and and as a test study of this what Alex built is something called EKG EKG I think maybe you and I even spoke about it before but it's the essential Kubernetes gauges And it's a way to have out-of-the-box SLOs for EK Eks from Amazon or Kubernetes generally and it's an example of a prefabricated SLO where you can now Not just go and like define all the criteria You can actually look to the community wisdom you can go to a central GitHub repo Find SLOs code imported into your environment whatever solution you're using that's open to SLO compatible And you can now have SLOs that give you clear reliability targets performance targets with zero work And this to me is one of the exciting things so as we're you know We're investing in the AI space and the generative AI because who you know, you can't not do that So far all the AI work we've done we've decided to make it free Most of what we're using upstream is in preview like palm to and things like that So we're not willing to charge for that work yet But the analysis tools and the prefabs and things like this We're trying to put this into the open source to improve productivity We want the engineers to focus on running reliable services not on all the plumbing to measure and manage The metrics pipelines for the reliable services You want them to focus on cool and new stuff and that's to me This is really you know directionally what we're trying to do We're trying to make it so that less configuration less setup less guesswork And more productivity and directionally that's where we're going and you can see that for the from these examples prefabs and open examples and Generative AI can all support this mission and then you know the debugging tools like the query checker the metrics health notifier These other reliability resilience improvements. We've made this means that you can trust the system and make it better And to your point, this is the day to plus type of world This is not a oh experimental put in my dev environment This is like you know changing lives in how you manage production How you do software releases how you do auto-scaling how you do rollback how you do incident management All this is affected and so that's where we're really I would say Investing the most of our our mind share and energy right now is on that topic We've built a core platform. That's great. Now the answer is, you know You know, what do we do to make it so that it's just mind-blowingly easy and to give people that instant business value of Making their engineers more productive so they can go focus on shipping new capabilities. Yeah, okay Thank you so much for taking time out today and of course give us an update about slow con and of course I would love to chat with you again soon. Thank you. Thanks so much for being a media sponsor for slow cough this year We really appreciate it. Great talking


Yeah, this is Brett with Summit Auto in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and use Jeep and Jeep Cherokee headquarters. Today we are checking out this 2020 brand new Cherokee Latitude Plus. This vehicle has the 3.2 liter V6 Pentastar motor which pumps out 271 horsepower, 27 miles per gallon on the highway, 19 city for an average of 22. This is a four wheel drive vehicle in diamond black pearl coat. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p, 60 frames per second, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer tablet or smartphone device, turn them on right now because it is like you're right here looking at the Jeep with me. And definitely your best way to check out the vehicle before seeing it in person. Always like the Cherokees, I've owned three of them myself. Really nice vehicles, ride great, and the V6 in them is a really nice combo with the 9-speed. Get a lot of power, good torque, and they move them nicely. 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You can see 27 Highway 19 City for an average of $22, and your crash test rating is very good. Four-star overall, four-star, and five-star front, and side crashes, five-star and four-star rollover. Very safe vehicles. Like I said, I've had three of them, and definitely always felt safe in them. Has the capitalist fuel fill. This is new for the new body style, which came out last year, and that's a really nice feature. I've never used it. I highly recommend it. This one does have blind spot and cross-path detection. That's where you get your backup sensors right there in the rear bumper. That's what those little dots are. Being the V6, you get the dual rear exhaust with the chrome tips. You get the chrome-trimmed 4x4 Jeep logo and latitude logo there as well, and the LED tail lamps. Back storage area is ample. Good amount of storage, and those seats fold down for even more storage.  The manual raised gate, you do get LED license plate lights. Going down the rest of the side of the vehicle, you can see that it does have the keyless entering-go system. You get your heated mirrors and blind spot indicators in the mirrors.  They call this premium vinyl. It feels more like a leather than a vinyl, and the cloth mesh seating has the blue stitching, power driver seat, lumbar, all-weather floor mats, part of that cold weather group, auto headlamps, tilt, and telescopic steering wheel, power windows, power locks, power mirrors, the chrome-trimmed door handles. You also have your audio controls on the back of the steering wheel. As we hop inside, you can see that this one has the digital spinometer, and you get a mileage and miles to empty display up there as well. You can change that to compass and temp as well. Has the heated leather-wrapped steering wheel, cruise controls on the right, Bluetooth and information center controls on the left. 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This is a push-button start. And this one has the remote start system part of that cold weather group. Stability control is right here. You also have your start-stop capabilities, nine-speed automatic transmission, your select terrain Active Drive 1 system with auto snow, sport, sand, and mud, and an Augs and USB jack. You have your electronic parking brake right there, nine-speed automatic transmission. You got your map lights up here, and you do get lights in the back for your rear passengers. We're going to take a quick look at the back seats. Really like the redesign on the Cherokees. It's a good look. I think the new front end really helps in the sales and everything. Latch child safety system for a child car seats. All-weather floor mats back here, side curtain airbags, very safe vehicles. You get two USBs and two USB C's back here for plug-ins. And then these seats do fold down for extra storage. You got your tether anchors back there. And these seats do fold back up. It does have cup holders in the center here for your rear passengers.  Four-wheel disc brakes on these vehicles. And really a good-looking vehicle. We're going to do one more walk around here. I'd personally like to thank you for checking out the video today, and hopefully from this HD video you have been able to tell just how good-looking the Cherokee is for 2020. A little bit about the Latitude Plus package. To see more pictures of this Jeep or one of our other 450 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, Wranglers, half-tons, three-quarter-tons, one-tons, Cherokees, Grand Cherokees, you name it, we got it. Go to our website, www.SummitAuto.com. Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at SummitAuto.com. And if you'd like to check out more HD videos, you can go to youtube.com. Last Summit Auto remember to like, subscribe, and share on this video and all the videos that you see there. In fact, in a second you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more new inventory videos like this one on your right. If you have not been to our website on the bottom, link to this vehicle on our website. Click those, check us out. And we're super excited to be offering the 2020 Jeep Cherokee, especially the Latitude Plus with the V6 and four-wheel drive. Thanks again.


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