Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're at Moscone Center, the rejuvenated Moscone Center, welcoming a first-time guest to theCUBE, Matias Funka, director of offering management hybrid data management from IBM. Matias, thanks for joining us on the program. I'm glad to be here. So talk to us about what you're responsible for products and strategy for hybrid data management. Unpack that for us. Yeah, so my role in the business is to define the strategy for our hybrid data management offerings. So set the priorities and then very much focus on alignment across the different functions we have in the business in support of those priorities and the strategy. So think of marketing, sales, development, offering management all coming together and align themselves in support of those priorities. And then bring new capabilities and offerings to market together. Great, so Matias, we'd love to have you on because in our open this morning we were talking about, all the shows we go to, everybody talks about how important data is. Now of course the database is one of those places that data has always been and now we have things like AI and developers and everything else modernizing how we think about that sort of environment. Seems that's something that's central to what you're doing. Maybe you explain how some of these mega waves are impacting your products and your customers. So obviously, given my role, I believe in the importance of the database. I think it's at the core and the foundation of what we at IBM currently describe as the AI ladder. So anybody who wants to realize business benefits by delivering better insights on data to the business, differentiate themselves as a company to the competition, it all starts with data and the ability to collect data and bring it together and make it accessible for the business. So yeah, the role of the database cannot be underestimated in my opinion. There's so much we talk about this too at every event that we go to on theCUBE, the power of data, data is the new oil, et cetera. We also talk a lot about trust and how trust is essential. There are, what I think stat I saw the other days do is that 80% of the world's data is not searchable. Companies understand that data is valuable. It's liquid gold, for example. But extracting, finding that data, finding the insights rather in that data is hugely challenging. IBM is great at dealing with complexities. Talk to us about what IBM is doing to bring modern technologies like AI to the database, for example, to help customers start extracting quickly the value in these massive pools of data. Right, so first of all, I think we all live, I mean, at least on my side of the business, we sometimes tend to live in our own bubble. We believe that the world already embraced AI and embraced, everybody has embarked on a journey to AI. The reality is that many companies struggle. We did, there is a survey out there. I don't recall exactly the source, but like 49% of all the CIOs of the companies out there, they struggled in executing a strategy towards AI. If you think about Gardner as an analyst, Gardner would say today 60% of the companies have an AI strategy. In three years from now, 90% of all companies have an AI strategy. It's an expression of the importance of the data and an AI strategy for the respective businesses. But many companies are not there yet, right? So it's our job to help them get there. And yes, in the database and data management, the ability to collect data and make it accessible is key for success. When it comes to AI on the data layer, I look at it in two ways. So how do we bring intelligence into the database to make the life of the user, the DBA, the database administrator easier, right? Automate things, reduce the amount of labor, reduce the skills required to operate a database. And the other angle is, how do you help people build intelligent applications with database, right? And simplify the access to the data. Yeah, you bring up some great points there. We love talking about the role of what's happening inside of jobs today.  The whole wave of big data was, I should be able to have almost anybody in the business should be able to access data and be able to leverage it. Help connect the dots with us as we go to this AI world. Where does the DBA sit compared to the rest of the business? How is their world different today than it was just a few years ago? Right, so in order to democratize access to data and make it available, the cloud has promised a lot. We have public cloud, we have private cloud. At the end of the day, the expectation is that you reduce the number of dependencies that the end user who wants to deal with the data has on other or different people in the organization. The DBA plays a core role in making sure that the data is available, especially in traditional on premises environments, but also in the private cloud. When it comes to public cloud, often that role is now delegated to the public cloud provider. You're thinking about public managed database services, so you delegate that role. But still, you know, that job is to make sure that data is available, that queries perform in an efficient way, and you know, so the business can depend on those data sets being available and those queries to run every day, day in and day out. Yeah, absolutely. When we look at a hybrid world, so much of what IT specifically is asked for, they now need to manage a bunch of stuff that's outside of their purview. So I've got the stuff that I own plus everything else, so what does a hybrid data management solution look like for customers? Yeah, it's a huge challenge because think about different heterogeneous repositories, data sets, designing different locations. How do you abstract that to the user or the application that you have in the organization? All right, so data virtualization is a term that comes up quite often in this context, but how do you virtualize all that physical topology? How do you protect the investments that people make as they build, let's say, their solution on a certain data estate in one specific form factor, but then later on the side, we want to move that to a different form factor because of the economics. How do you preserve that investment? And the answer here is often well, you got to make sure that the integration points are consistent, the experience and the way you interact with those data management properties is consistent and unified across that hybrid environment. If you have data sets on premises or in the cloud or in the cloud, you want this all to look and feel the same, essentially. Do you have an example of some customers that you've worked with across the globe that, because you've been with IBM a long time, you said 21 years. Oh, I was hoping you would not say that. I'm sorry.  I'm curious, some of the evolution that you've witnessed, whether it's in the role of the database or the DBA, the administrative themselves, what are some of the trends that you have seen IBM really help to help companies achieve and be really successful across industries in the last 20 years? So I don't recall what happened 20 years ago, but I can give you some recent examples. And there is an insurance company that I've been working with for a while and the example that they always, or that they gave me at the time was, hey, it takes us, when we as a business user, when our business user, a business analyst, they have a new question to answer for the business. It takes them like eight to 10 weeks to actually get access to the data that allows them to answer the question. And by the time the data is available to them, the question has moved on. They have a different question to ask. And the reason it takes eight to 10 weeks is that there's so many different functions involved in the business to find where the data resides in the organization, how to bring it into the environment that these business users have access to. It's tremendous, the challenges that complex organizations face here. So IBM Cloud Private for Data, as an example, is our answer to, in delivering an experience that basically accelerates that whole workflow and skips or avoids dependencies between different persona types that are associated with that workflow. So simplify that journey, make it easy so that the business user feels fully empowered to access the data that they want to without depending on anyone else in the organization. Yeah, Matthias, one of the strengths that IBM has is just a long history of really owning that application and understanding the people that use it and how I get that all the way through the infrastructure, through the data in the piece. What should people be looking for? I know there'll be some announcements that we can't specifically talk about today, but what sort of thing should we be looking for from IBM? So I'm very excited about what's coming up later this week, what we will be talking about. We think it's disrupting 40 years of database technology in the way we ingest or infuse intelligence into our database to make the life of the different users easier. Also the way we bring different workload types together over a single copy of data that deals with all kinds of challenges that you have in complex data architectures, think about data latency, moving data from A to B, which is very costly. So how to avoid that and make it more effective or inefficient for the organization. So Matthias, you said disrupt 40 years of database. I've looked through my career, I've got a couple of years in the industry also. Intelligence and automation, things we've been talking about for a long time. Explain why 2019, we have the tools so that AI can actually offer up something disruptive that isn't just what we've been talking about for decades. Yeah, so the analogy I would use is the car industry. For 100 years we have been using combustion engines, right? And you have brought these engines, or consumed these engines in different form factors like a truck, like a regular car. And you make it available in different consumption models. Think about a taxi or Uber or you buy a car, right? But what happened with the engine is Tesla took that to the next level. They say, no, we go all electric. That's disruptive, right? We bring that back to IT and data management. The cost-based optimizer in a database has been there for 40 years. So the way people compile their queries, execute their query plans on data has been the same for 40 years. On Wednesday we'll be talking about a new method to do that. And it has tremendous gains in terms of performance, in terms of simplicity for the users. So I'm very excited about that. But that's just one aspect of what we're going to talk about on Wednesday. When you talk about disruptions, a word that's used a lot, but 40 years, four decades of, I won't say status quo, but I think you don't understand what I'm talking about. When IBM has a massive install base of big companies like IBM, what are, along the lines of this big disruption, things that we'll learn about in the next couple of days? What are some of the things that excite you about helping some of these massive companies, such as IBM, to actually embrace this disruption, leverage it for competitive advantage and be able to find new revenue streams? So yeah, that's a great question, Lisa, because you can have all kinds of innovative ideas and technologies. What matters is how you productize it, how you bring it, give it into the hands of your clients and how you help them gain value from that, right? So that's my job. That's why I get out of bed every day because I see this as a very exciting journey, a very exciting mission for myself and for our team at IBM. And seeing these clients then benefiting from it by saying, hey, we have reduced so much cost or we have gained new agility in the way we can bring new capabilities to our lines of businesses and become more competitive in the industry is really exciting. Excellent, well, Matias, thanks so much for joining Stu and me on the program this morning. We appreciate your time. Look forward to hearing some of these announcements coming out later this week. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are live, day one of IBM Think 2019. Stick around, our next guest will be joining us shortly.


So, thank you everyone for coming this afternoon. Bala and I are here to talk about our experiences hosting large Cloud Foundry deployments through Bluemix. We've had a great, great fun working with Cloud Foundry in the community over the last few years on the foundation really since the beginning and before the idea. I remember Bala and I were both on early projects that led into what Bluemix became and sitting around and what's our strategy? How are we going to do this? And at the time, we were still feeling that out. And a lot of the sentiment, you heard Sam kick off the day this morning about the power of the community and none of us is as smart as all of us. And we've just seen so much growth through the communities we've worked in, whether it's Eclipse or OpenStack and the idea of Cloud Foundry and folks like Chris Ferris and Bala and Rachel and Angel coming in, starting with Pivotal and helping grow this foundation. It's really, really, really been fun. So today we're going to talk a little bit about what we've been doing, share some of our experiences, share some of what we're hearing from the clients that we work with and that are driving a lot of needs that we think as a community we can work together to address. And we'll kind of end with some of the ideas of areas that we can collaborate on moving forward. We hope that our stories resonate with some of you in the audience. And the best result is that people at the end go, yeah, we're experiencing similar things. Or we have visions for the similar. Or our clients are telling us similar things and we'd like to collaborate together around that as part of the community. So a little bit about our implementation of Cloud Foundry. It is the world's largest public hosted deployment of Cloud Foundry. So we've got in production, we've got two data centers today. One in Dallas and one in London. Huge, huge scale. We are onboarding 8,000 new users a week into this environment. So with that, that's helped driven a lot of the quality and a lot of things into Cloud Foundry today. So we have lots of engineers that have been through the dojo process, that are contributing a lot of code. Actually number two in the community in code contributions. And a lot of that is a direct result of just the scale and what we've been experiencing out there in the field. And we've really got multiple deployment options within Bluemix. So that's the public hosted. We've got a private hosted version that we call Bluemix dedicated. We can install that in any soft layer data center around the globe. So in addition to the big public footprint, we're running Cloud Foundry instances specific for clients that say, yeah, I want to go off-premises. I want a cloud, but I want to private within me. So there's also a whole bunch of operations we have to do around that. And we're going to talk more about what we're hearing and what we're doing around hybrid, borderless clouds. And really clients want to use all of these deployments together. And that's really where we see a lot of opportunity. You hear a lot of talk in the hallways about multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, and that's because that's what the market wants, is what customers want. And it's a great focus area and opportunity for us. So really, we've got a feedback and it's given us some good perspectives in a few different areas. So the first one really around cloud foundry customer requirements. You know, one of the early ones that I was familiar with from probably about a year and a half ago going back was, okay, let's pick the Java runtime space. There's lots of different Java runtimes in the market. Some people want to use Tomcat. Some people want to use WebSphere Liberty. Some people want to use Jboss. So we didn't really have a good way to administer that in the community. So we worked together with the community to bring admin build packs and to bring a better administration model to how we can control different runtimes with build packs. Some things around high availability that we brought into. And there's a long list that we're hearing around opportunities for cloud foundry to keep pushing the bounds on really enterprise and scale. And all that designed around what it takes to build real world solutions. I think that's what we hear a lot. There's kind of this myth that, yeah, platform as a service, that's kind of the future. That's not real world production. And we're working with clients that are living the opposite, that are really embraced platform as a services. I know many people are in this room and see the value that you can get out of it when you start to compose applications from services and APIs and your developers don't have to worry about that underlying platform. But even within that, not everything is going to be born on the cloud. So how you connect that back into the enterprise and really how you even navigate this emerging cloud landscape around things that I can build just with Docker on bare metal. Things that I can build in a platform like Cloud Foundry. And when you really get into the use cases, if you start to complement these technologies together, you get a lot of power. And that's what we're excited to that a lot of the partners and the vendors and people here are people that are involved in all these different communities around cloud. We've got a lot of opportunity in that space. And really around the operations. I talked to the beginning about the scale of what we're doing. It takes a lot to operate that not just from Cloud Foundry, but to the services that we bring into that, services that partners bring into that and really what the end user wants is a consistent cohesive experience around a platform. So when I'm running my Cloud Foundry environment, I'm gonna have services from ten different vendors and things I bring myself and how do I manage and operate that altogether as a cohesive platform. So I'm gonna turn it over to Bala, who is our distinguished chief architect newly named IBM Fellow. We can't embarrass him enough. He was very excited about the blue text on the opening chart. So if you like the shade of blue, please let Bala know. But I'm gonna invite Bala to come up on stage and talk a little bit more architecturally about what we've been dealing with Cloud Foundry. Thank you, Adam. And I'm really proud of that blue.  So, Adam said the context, which is, I mean, when we look at Cloud Foundry, I mean, I think there are certainly certain set of workloads that can be put completely in Cloud Foundry. But in many of our engagements, we've seen that it's actually fit into a brownfield environment. So we've been working with a payment provider. And this is kind of an abstraction of their architecture. What you see in the middle is a bunch of legacy stuff. I mean, these are traditional applications, traditional patterns. Legacy not in the derogatory sense, but legacy in the sense of architectural patterns and what tools and technologies they used in the past. And for the most part, they are systems of record, which is they focus on transactional data and some of the processes around transactional data. But it's also been, at least my observation that in the past, you had just a few tools.  You were forced by the availability of tools into a certain style of architecture. And so you have a whole bunch of legacy code. And many customers, 80% is what stuck in the middle. And when you have a discussion with them around the pragmatics of adopting new technology, especially around things like what's my return on investment, the fringes don't matter as much as sometimes what's happening in the middle. So we have to have a cohesive argument. How do you help change technology in the middle, cloud-enabled existing applications, as well as what are the opportunities that we can bring some of the newer models, like Cloud Foundry, into play? So if you look at the right, typically, systems of engagement, I want to build new portals, whether it's for mobile or for internal use or for customers, etc. I want to build new APIs. I need to build new channels.  So how do you start addressing some of those use cases via technologies like Cloud Foundry? The other area that we've seen quite a bit of interest is around how you integrate with partners. Partners are exposing a lot of APIs these days. So even if you look at a traditional banking industry, looking at providers who assess risk, for example. They tend to be SaaS-based services. How do you integrate with them? Cloud Foundry and the set of integrations around that gives you a really, really good model to achieve that. I got a pose for this picture. So he said he was going to be a heckler, but I didn't realize he actually meant it, but anyway. So given this particular landscape, when we tried to synthesize some of the discussions we've been having with many of our customers, the foundational aspect is a simplified user experience. And Cloud Foundry and the community has been very, very persistent in that in terms of the abstractions and the maintenance of those abstractions. The role of open technology, the role of community cannot be understated in the sense of importance in buying decisions. And some of the very, very core attributes like reliability, scalability, performance, cost, etc. Are fundamental to the adoption of the platform. We've also found, and Adam alluded to that, around the different deployment models. Public is certainly one of them, but being able to deploy in a dedicated environment, especially for security-sensitive applications on the cloud. It's still off-premises, but it is restricted to a particular customer. And the last one is around local, which is on-premise. On-premise is important for a variety of reasons. Certainly, security is one of them. But when you look at the context above, which is the set of very chatty, low-latency dependent applications within a data center, some of which might include things like old backends or legacy code components. How do you create a flexible environment for developers in that context? And one of our customers basically said, I mean, I have two choices. Either I take everything that's on my premises and move it to the cloud, which I cannot because some of the technologies are on hardware that's not available in the cloud, for example. Or I need something on-premises to the core minimal set that'll let me expose those capabilities to the cloud. So there's roles for different deployment models. Getting polarized around, hey, cloud is only public or cloud is only private or on-premise is probably not worth it. I think that you need the flexibility in how you deploy this stuff. The point to the left, to me, is actually very critical on top, which is hybrid application architectures. When you look at Brownfield environments, I mean, we talk about these different abstractions, whether it's containers, whether it's managed containers like Cloud Foundry, whether it's VMs, whether it's patterns of deployment like Tosca and so on and so forth. Each of them has a role in being able to create effective solutions. You cannot polarize people into saying, hey, this is the only abstraction that works. The only place where you should deploy applications is Cloud Foundry, or it's only Docker, or it's only VMs. All of them, depending on the workload, depending on the legacy of the application, depending on some of the technology, has a role. And how do we accommodate different application architectures is a critical element of what we've found when we go out and talk to customers or deploy Cloud Foundry-based applications. DevOps, obviously, is critical. I think this is a platform that enables DevOps in many different ways. More Dev than Ops, but Ops is an important component and that's one area that we need to continue to focus on is given Cloud Foundry, given an ecosystem of services, given how Cloud Foundry-based applications link up to existing application. How do you manage this? How do you guarantee SLAs around it? How do you manage multiple providers in this space? So the notion of Ops and DevOps is also very critical. Integration, it all comes back to the application architecture that you see on the top. If you have existing components, you have new applications, you have to have effective ways to integrate them. From a data perspective, from an API perspective, from a performance perspective, with the assumption that some of those back-end services might not be elastic and scalable and everything that Cloud applications are targeted to be. Portability is going to come up in a big way. A lot of our customers are particular about the notion of lock-in and not being locked into a particular vendor, a particular location, whether it's on-premise or off-premise. So how do you support portability across different environments, across both the platform as well as the services that are available across these platforms? So that's a very critical requirement as well. Security and compliance, who cares? Management and SLA is, sorry. Security and compliance is perhaps the biggest question that we get from our customers. Security from a fabric perspective, the reliance of security on underlying infrastructure, security of applications, services that enable security, whether it's single sign-on, whether it's encryption, whether it is tokenization services, being able to provide that in the right context around a Cloud Foundry ecosystem is becoming much more of an important topic of conversation. And we need to continue from an architectural perspective and from a community perspective that we focus on that. To me, security, to Sam's point earlier this morning, is not a differentiating capability. It is something that should be in the platform, because one insecure implementation can sink this whole momentum. So to me, personally, I think security and compliance are something that we need to work together and kind of raise the tide and the competence of the platform across that particular capability. And as I was mentioning earlier management and SLA is a key. We are just touching the tip of that when we talk about complex systems that connect existing systems, newer APIs, newer systems. The reliance of the system for more production or mission-critical workloads, having the ability to manage it effectively, do incident management, change management, problem management, SLA management, et cetera, is becoming much more critical in many of our conversations with clients. So as part of what we've been doing and I'll move a little bit quicker here, given the premise, we look at Bluemix as a platform and the ecosystem around Cloud Foundry as one of the principles around it is to provide compute flexibility. So in addition to Cloud Foundry capabilities, we are integrating from a DevOps perspective as from a user experience perspective, capabilities around Docker, capabilities on VMs and patterns and so on and so forth. And we find that a necessary component in being able to position Cloud Foundry and its capabilities in the context of enterprise architectures. The second element is services. We, services are independent entities. They need to be accessed from Cloud Foundry applications. They need to be accessed from Docker applications. They need to be accessible across different environments and maybe across different providers as well. So having services as first class citizens is absolutely key. Data of any cloud platform I've seen, the currency that really matters is data. You put data on the cloud, you get a lot of cohesion around that platform in terms of application, in terms of users, so on and so forth. So having an effective strategy around data for our platform, around persistence, around state management, around moving data in and out, around security of the data is a very critical element of our overall strategy in terms of Cloud Foundry. And the last but not the least integration with its API integration, data integration, so on and so forth with existing systems is an integral part of what we should look at from an overall platform perspective. The reason I said this context is there's an element of Cloud Foundry in that. And for Cloud Foundry to be successful in this context, these other factors around it need to come together as well. And in all of our conversations with clients, it is almost always a case where to not have a polarizing discussion. Having to explain PAS a hundred times over as to what exactly it is. And I don't believe that word anymore. It is how do you put the context around it from a perspective of compute flexibility, data integration, security, and services. I found that to be very critical. The other area that is interesting around the spaces, services, how do you build effective services around Cloud Foundry? So Cloud Foundry is a platform to build services. It is a platform that lets you consume services. But to build effective services, services that are, or microservices, that scale, that are measurable, that are monitorable, that can be updated continuously, you need a set of core services. So as part of our approach to this platform, we are building a set of core services around it, we call them Cloud Foundational Services. Everything from container services to monitoring services to logging services. To even configuration management services like Chef and so on and so forth. So that we have an ecosystem of services that support building applications, supporting the life cycle of the applications from creation through management, as well as building services that can scale elastically and support newer implementations of these services in the Cloud Foundry. This could be a day and I have 25 minutes. No, I have less than 25 minutes. You have minus five minutes now. So, in terms of delivery of Blumex, one of the points that we, our biggest investment of time, effort is around managing the platform as a whole. So if you look at it, we break it down into kind of three distinct pieces. There's a platform, Cloud Foundry, the underlying capabilities around it, how you deploy applications, the APIs, and so on and so forth are the core part of our system. But around it, we have to build an ecosystem of services and we have to build an ecosystem of how do you manage Cloud Foundry deployments and the services underneath Cloud Foundry. So you can see that broken into three pieces. There's a platform, Cloud Foundry is a centerpiece. The set of user interfaces and DevOps that need to come together around the platform, so that you can effectively use the platform and optimize the, and we can go into a lot more detail about that. But the general experience of a developer around the platform, a scalable set up around services, so that we can bring in more services, elastic services, connect those services not only from the purpose of consumption and deployment, but around it, life cycle. How do you monitor it? How do you get security logs? So we have a long way to go from that aspect, in terms of a complete life cycle around services. And off to the left, the whole notion of service delivery, from being able to deploy applications, the CI and CD parts of the applications, BSS to meter and price. The various services in a pay as you go model, for example, infrastructure, NOx, and more importantly SOx are something that we spend quite a bit of time on. So how do you harvest logs across all of the Cloud Foundry components, as well as the network components? Being able to monitor various aspects of it, including the ecosystem around Cloud Foundry, which is other services, perhaps even SaaS services. Support, and support is not just a standard support model. It's how do you support the new paradigm of application development? How do you support in using new digital models? All of the automation that is necessary for a very large scale deployment, and obviously compliance and security and managing it and demonstrating it, is something that's very key. Now I think I need to cede the floor to Adam, but let me think it, go ahead. Hey, I'm happy to sit back down and take a nap. Still on East Coast time. So we hit on this a little bit earlier, kind of the different deployment flavors. And we said today, we've got hosted Bluemix, whether that's public cloud, whether that's private cloud, also bringing that into local data center. And I think that's common across, if you look across other Cloud Foundry vendors, there's a need and a use case for shared off-premises, single-tenant off-premises. And no, these workloads need to be in my data center. What we're learning more and more is that it's really even a hybrid between those. So my mobile push notification service, okay, that can be off-premises. There's nothing secretive that I'm gonna send out there. But it needs to pull off of some data source that contains sensitive information about banking accounts, and that's gonna be on-premises. But still in a cloud, I'm okay in moving that out of the data center where it is today, meeting where it is today, but not out of the data center. With that, what's emerging through that is a seamless experience through that. And that's what we're hearing from clients is, I wanna run DevOps across these different zones. I wanna be able to monitor what's going on across these different zones. And by the way, that also includes applications that may end up in a hybrid state. We see a big trend towards large monolithic application today. But I've got microservices, but I can't break it down and re-architect it overnight. What I wanna do is I wanna slowly break that down and maybe at some period, some of those functions are in microservices in the new world. Some are still in the old world. I may have a mix of these different deployment models and how do I bring that experience together? So we're sharing that because as we get to the punchline here and we talk about just some of the opportunities and areas we think we have as a community. It's a lot of this feedback that's really driving us towards the question of, how does Cloud Foundry fit in this world? And what can we do to make Cloud Foundry even better? So some of what we've been doing is really kind of around. It's we've been working on a single operations console, whether that's resource information, whether that is managing deployments, reports logs, user administration, etc. But it's about multiple channels through that. And I think it's not just the deployments before, but it's multi-cloud. So as we have vendors that maybe are users that start to use Cloud Foundry from multiple sources, we're starting to see that. Yeah, I'm gonna use some Bluemix and some Pivotal Cloud Foundry. I'm gonna take some Cloud Foundry from myself and I'm gonna stand it up on Azure and I want that ecosystem to work well together. Isn't that what you guys told me? It's Cloud Foundry, it should all work the same. It's really critical for us to be working together to make sure that that happens. And really around this idea of collaborative operations, which is where you then start to get to. When it's operations, whether that's collaborative between, okay, it's hosted and there's things that the end user and customer needs to see, and then you as the person hosting it. Or as we get into multi-cloud and it's operations across multiple teams, the lines are gonna start to blur. And it's really about one borderless cloud working together. And that's another area we're gonna have to come through. So I'm gonna ask in the last couple of minutes here, I'll let it come back on stage. We'll try not to talk over each other too much.  But I wanted to talk about just some of the opportunities. And we've quickly dove right down into the weeds, but we find that's where you've gotta get to if you wanna take real action. And we really hope that this generates some good conversation in the hallways kind of afterwards for people that wanna help invest in these areas as well from a Cloud Foundry perspective. Yeah, so I mean I think there's just a sample list. I mean there's many, many opportunities. But we kind of, based on the conversation we had, things like security. How do we do things like secure logging? We've seen that as an important element of almost any enterprise deployment where, or even a multi-tenant deployment where logs need to be encrypted and separated and stored. So how do we do secure logging? Services tend to be persistent in terms of how they present their credentials into runtimes. How do you support things like rolling API keys? How do you have, and this is a very interesting case. And we experienced it ourselves, is let's say you have a database, database instance that's exposed into Cloud Foundry, into a particular org for example. And you have four or five privileged users for the production aspect of the database. How do you start providing credentials that separate or modulate what kind of access do you have to that service? Once you can get to the credentials, you can do everything from read the database to destroy the database. Many of our customers, even in a production environment, want to have separate credentials for different levels of access into the underlying services. So that's becoming an interesting element of how do we support services within Blumex. Private DEAs, in many cases for performance reasons or for isolation reasons. They want DEAs that are specific to a particular organization, a particular application for PCI compliance for example. And associated with that, more granular role models. The second broad area is services, how do we blacklist services? In many organizations, even though there's a plethora of services available, they want to restrict which set of services are supported under organizational control. It's great to have a variety of services to start trying out, but in many organizations the support end of it becomes a problematic situation. So they want to be able to provide a blacklist certain sort of set of services that don't have the right security controls or they're not provided appropriately. So that's one important area that we are looking at. And we need to look at it as a community. Microservices enablement and security of those services, ability to move services across different organizations that might have dev and prod, sharing services, or having independent services between CF-based applications and non-CF-based applications are a set of examples of things that as a community we need to get our hands around for adoption. Org-specific build packs, going on to the last column. Org-specific build packs, quarters for various aspects within Blumex or within Cloud Foundry. The ability to deploy apps with context routes more than just the base domains. And the last one is particularly interesting. When you move from the role of an individual developer to managing applications created on Blumex, you get into a whole set of interesting management and operational questions. So the ability, for example, when an application scales up or scales down, might be important to a certain group of management users, say capacity planners within an organization. How do you start generalizing the notion of notifications out beyond the core fabric into the external management systems is one of the areas that we need to look at as a community. So I got the five minute little sheet of paper wave. So let's spend the next couple of minutes on questions. And if you guys refuse to leave this room, that's perfect. I mean, that's fair by me. I don't have a problem with that. We can ignore a sheet of paper. So any questions, any thoughts?  I mean, anyone who does not see that? Contrary and viewpoints are very, very appreciated.  I have a family of four and I get three contrary opinions. So I mean, this is like, well, any question? I think that is something that's a really, really good question. Because I think when you look at a runtime platform, I mean, and this has gone on forever. If you look at Java or you look at J2E or whatever it is, the core platform is just one bit of it. The ecosystem around it, whether it's monitoring tools, whether it's dev tools, whether it is performance management systems, there's a huge ecosystem around it. I think what we need to do as a community is recognize the fact that for a production deployment, you need many of these pieces. How many of these can we look at, build the right interfaces, build the right data models to make the deployment in customer situations very easy? So that's a very, very good point. You need that ecosystem. Our job is to make that ecosystem flourish across multiple vendors and also provide the right interfaces around it to make it easy and not make it a lockdown ecosystem. And that's why we're here today. So for those who didn't hear the question, it was going to lose. Back on the chart where we had the different components, right, of what we're delivering as cloud, there was a big box in there that had Cloud Foundry. There's a lot of other stuff around that. And what we're learning and it's really driven around these areas and the hybrid nature and the multi-cloud nature we're hearing from clients is that they need more than what's in there today. And we're hearing that a lot and we want to collaborate with the community and kind of grow that box and work together so that way Cloud Foundry can just crush out there and be the premier platform that people develop that to. So I think we're out of time. So we'll cut it there, but please come up or ask us questions. Thank you for spending some time with us today. You can find us on Twitter too, our handles there in the corner. That's an easy way to get ahold of us. And we look forward to working together. Thank you. Thank you guys.


Welcome back to our lecture series Math 12-10, Calculus I for student at Southern Utah University. As usual, I'll be your professor today, Dr. Andrew Misseldine. This is the first of actually a three-part lecture, which we're going to introduce the idea of the derivative. Formally speaking, the derivative is the limit of a difference quotient. Now, in this video, the first part, lecture 16, we're going to introduce, well, in this video we'll talk about the tangent line, but in the other videos for this lecture, we'll also talk about the so-called velocity problem. We'll be computing limits of different quotients to see from a geometric or physical point of view why we would care about that. And then in later videos, we'll talk about why these are actually derivatives and therefore why we care about derivatives. Now, to motivate this from a geometric point of view, let's switch over to the graphing calculator. So you see the picture of the unit circle on the screen here graphed using Desmos. Now, for a circle, a so-called tangent line is a line which intersects the circle at a unique point. As you can see illustrated right here, the point in play, the point of intersection between the line and the circle is just a one single point. There's just the one point. We call this a tangent line. All right, this is in contrast to a so-called secant line where a secant line is a line that intersects the circle in two different places, right? So you have one intersection on the top and one intersection here on the right. So a secant line has two points of intersection and a tangent line has a single point of intersection. So in this video, we wanna talk about tangent lines of a curve, that is to say the graph of a function. Intuitively, the tangent line to an arbitrary curve at a point on that curve should touch the curve at just the single point, let's call it P and not at any points nearby as indicated by the curve itself. So let me take a look of what I mean by such a thing. So consider the following curve, right? So this is just a parabola, right? In which case, if we were to talk about a secant line, a secant line of the parabola, it should be a line that essentially hits the curve at two different places. Now I do recognize that with a parabola like this, it could be that curvature of the graph eventually comes down and it could be that this intersects in maybe three or more places. What we mean by a secant line here is that it's intersecting the graph at two points, far away from each other. A tangent line on the other hand is gonna be something that we can see right here that turning off the secant line for a moment. A tangent line ideally should only hit the graph at one point, it's just basically kissing the graph. Again, admittedly the curvature of the graph might cause it to intersect somewhere else, but the idea is locally it's intersecting the graph in only one place right there. So formally stated, what is a tangent line? A tangent line of a graph, which that graph will be given as y equals f of x, the tangent line at a point, we'll call it a comma f of a. So this right here is our point of tangency. So we'll call it P right here, a comma f of a. This is our point of tangency. So our tangent line is gonna touch the function just at this single point P, which a just represents the x-coordinate that we're trying to find the tangent point at. And then f of a because it's a functions graph, the y-coordinate is determined by the function relationship f of a right there. So the tangent line to the graph y equals f of x at the point of tangency a comma f of a is the line through this point whose slope is given as, we'll all lap around the slope in just a second. When it comes to a line, we can always describe a line using the so-called point slope form, point slope form of the line. In which case, this will be given as y minus y1 is equal to m times x minus x1, where in this situation, the coordinates x1, y1, this represents a specific point on the line. As we're trying to construct tangent lines, we will use the point of tangency as these values. So x1 will be a and y1 will be f of a. So we have the point we want for this line. So to finish the equation of line, we need to know the slope. That's the hard part of finding a tangent line. Now, of course, if you have a line in point slope form, it can always be converted to slope intercept form y equals mx plus b. We can find that out later, but we were gonna start with the point slope form. We need to know the slope. And so that's the question at hand right here. How do you find the slope of a tangent line? Well, the slope of the tangent line, which we'll call it m, this is gonna be the limit as b approaches a of f of b minus f of a divided by b minus a. So let's investigate this expression for a moment, okay? So when you look right here, f of b minus f of a over b minus a, this is something we have seen before. This is what we call delta y over delta x with respect to the interval a to b. That is to say, well, I mean, in an expanded form, this is f of b minus f of a over b minus a. This is our so-called average rate of change. Average rate of change. Which the average rate of change, well, I mean, as the name suggests, it tells you on average, how does the function change from x equals a to x equals b? And more important to the question we have about tangent lines right now, the average rate of change measures the so-called slope of the secant line. The line that passes through a comma f of a and the other point b comma f of b. So this blue box right here, now it became a white box, this box is the average rate of change. It's the slope of the secant line that goes through x equals a and x equals b, okay? Now what we are doing in this situation for this slope of the tangent line is we are computing the limit as b approaches a of this slope of a secant line. And we claim that'll be the slope of the tangent line written in a slightly different way. This is equivalent to saying the limit as h approaches zero of f of a plus h minus f of a over h right here. And so the idea here is if h is the difference, right? If h is the difference between b and a, that would imply that b itself is just a plus h. So instead of focusing on two different points, this parameter h is representing the distance between the two points. So you have this fixed point x equals a, the point of tangency, and then you have some variable point, this parameter b that slides. Well, if the distance between the fixed point and the sliding point is h, then you can rewrite in the following way. This is a form we'll use a lot more in the future. In this video, as we're focusing on slopes of tangent lines and secant lines, we'll prefer the more traditional slope formula for this. So to illustrate this point, let's consider the function y equals x squared plus two, which is just the standard parabola that's been shifted to above the x-axis. You can see the x-axis down here. So we just have a good looking parabola right here. And so let's consider finding the tangent line at the point negative one comma three. So in this consideration here, our a value is gonna equal negative one, then f of a, that is f of negative one, is gonna turn out to be three. And you're looking at this point right here on the graph. So if we wanted to find a secant line that goes to that point, well, we'll just find the line. We'll do the algebra for this in just a second. We're gonna take the point negative one comma three, that's our point of tangency, that's our fixed point. And then we can take some other point over here at the moment it's 1.416 and then it's corresponding y-coordinate 4.005, right? You know, we could take any value we want, we could take x equals one, we could take x equals two, which is a little bit off the screen. Again, this point over here on the right, we consider a slider, right? So this b-point can move around. It's the a value that's gonna remain fixed with its corresponding y-coordinate. So as we slide b around, we get all these various different secant lines with all their various slopes. You can see how this changes in real time here on the screen. So as I bring b closer and closer and closer to a, you can see this on the screen. You can start to see that our secant line is approximating a line that's gonna touch it at just one single point, okay? And so we bring it closer and closer and closer. And then at a moment, you notice what just happened, the line disappeared. At the current moment, you'll notice that b is actually equal to negative one. Negative one was our a value, right? So currently b is equal to negative one, a and b are equal to each other. So this is the moment where b is actually touching a and the line disappeared. And I'll show you just a second as we look at the algebraic properties of this thing is that when b touches a, the limit of the secant slope, the limit of the arbitrary change actually becomes the function, well, it becomes the form zero over zero, which is undefined. And so even though we take the form zero over zero, the limit of the secant slope will still be well-defined. I'm just trying to illustrate to you here that as we bring it closer and closer, it starts to approximate something, although we can't allow it to touch because then we'd have to divide by zero and that's not a number, right? And so if we turn off the secant for a moment, what happens when they touch is we actually form the so-called tangent line, this line of the curve that just touched us was one single point. And notice our orange curve, right? When b is far away from a, they don't at all look like each other. But as you bring b closer and closer and closer to the a, you see that these lines become almost identical and they would converge, the secant line converges to the tangent line when b takes the limit towards a right there. So let's consider this exact same problem from a purely algebraic point of view. Let's consider the graph f of x equals x squared plus two, like we saw a moment ago. Let's find the slope and equation of the secant line when x equals, when it goes from one to two, right? So remember, negative one was our fixed value you considered a moment ago. Let's consider some alternative value x equals two, all right? So we first wanna find the slope m. If you're finding the slope of a secant line, this is gonna be the average rate of change delta x over delta y as x ranges from negative one to two, which will have the formula f of two minus f of negative one over two minus negative one for which we're gonna evaluate the function at two. So we get two squared plus two, and then we subtract from that negative one squared plus two. This sits above two minus negative one, which is it's a double negative, you've got two plus one right there. And so we're gonna end up with two squared, which is four, plus two, which is six. You're gonna get negative one squared, which is one, plus two, which is three, and then the denominator turns out, in this case, to be three. So you get six minus three, which is equal to three over three. This is gonna simplify to be one. The slope of the line in this situation is one. So using the point slope form we saw on the previous slide, right? Y minus for y one equals m times x minus x one. Let's use the point of tangency here, x equals negative one, the y corner turned out to be three. We're gonna see here our line looks like y minus three is equal to one times x minus a negative one. Simplifying the right-hand side, you'll notice that times in my one won't do anything. And if you have x minus a negative one, that's gonna be x plus one. So you get three, or y minus three is equal to x plus one. If we add three to both sides of the equation, our equation will then be in slope intercept form. We get y equals x plus four, which is then the equation for the secant line from negative one to two in slope intercept form. Coming back to our picture we saw previously, let's turn off the tangent line. If I slide b over to b two, and I'll zoom out a little bit, you can see that right here. This line, it's y intercept is in fact four. We can see that very clearly. And what about the slope? Notice if I go up one over one, yep, that's another point on the graph. This is the correct function we see right here, the correct secant line. Let's now consider finding the tangent line with its tangent slope as we saw previously. And let's consider the tangent at x equals negative one. So like we saw before, the slope of a tangent line, this is gonna be the limit as b approaches a of this average area change delta y over delta x on the interval a to b are more simply put. We're gonna take the limit as b approaches. In our case our a value is negative one. So we're gonna get the limit as b approaches negative one.  And so what's the limit or what's f of b? Well, because of the function it's x squared plus two, we're gonna get b squared plus two. I don't need to compute f of negative one again. I've already done it twice now graphically and numerically here. We saw that's gonna be three. And the denominator, you're gonna get b plus one. And we're taking the limit as b approaches negative one. Notice what happens if we just plug in b equals negative one right here. If you just plug that in, you're gonna end up with negative one squared plus two minus three over negative one plus one for which when you simplify that you end up with zero over zero which zero zero is not a number but we're taking the limit of this difference quotient right now. And therefore perhaps if we simplify the difference quotient before plugging in negative one we can still compute the limit. The limit still can exist in this setting right here. So let's simplify the numerator a little bit. Take the limit as b approaches negative one here. We're gonna get b squared minus one over b plus one. Now I don't like the b plus one of the denominator because if I plug in negative one for b I'm gonna get a zero again, right? But maybe I could factor the numerator to cancel out the b plus one we saw in the denominator. That's something we've seen many times already. After all b squared minus one is a difference of squares. It'll factor as b minus one and b plus one which sits above the b plus one in which case as we know the factors of b plus one on top and bottom cancel out and then we get the simplified limit, the limit as b approaches negative one of b minus one. And in this situation if we plug in negative one we no longer get that zero over zero form we get negative one minus one which is gonna be a negative two. In which case then if we use that for our point slope form we're gonna get y minus three the y-coordinate of the point of tangency equals the slope which is negative two times x plus one right because we get a minus a negative one right there distribute the negative two throughout you're gonna get negative two x minus two add three to both sides then the slope intercept form of our tangent line will be y equals negative two, negative two x plus one. And so this should be the slope intercept form of our tangent line which coming back to our graph let's turn off the C-can line and turn on the tangent line. So what we can see here is I'll zoom out a little bit our what did we claim was the y intercept it was a plus one right because it's y equals negative two plus one sure enough we can see the y intercept here is gonna be a one right zero comma one what about the slope of this thing? Well now I have two points on the graph if we go down right so we go one, two, three, four down, two over so our slope is gonna look like negative four over two which simplifies to be negative two so in slope intercept form we have a slope of negative two and a y intercept of one this is in fact the correct tangent line this illustrates to us that taking the limit of the C-can slope that is the limit of the average rate of change produces the slope of the tangent line


In veterinary medicine, gene therapy has become increasingly important as it provides a way to develop more specific drugs for different species. This is particularly useful when dealing with allergies or immune responses to foreign proteins. In this study, researchers created species-specific genetically engineered plasmids containing canine vascular endothelial and fibroblast growth factor genes. These plasmids were then injected into animals to treat skin, muscle, and ligament injuries. In vitro studies showed that the plasmids induced angiogenesis in mesenchymal stem cells, while in vivo studies showed that the plasmids stimulated skin regeneration in both rats and dogs without any adverse effects. Overall, the results suggest that gene therapy could provide a promising new treatment option for veterinary medicine. This article was authored by E. U. Zakharova, A. M. Amoletinov, N. M. Alexandrova, and others.


When it comes to fruits and vegetables, it's not only quality and quantity, but also variety. We know, for example, spinach is healthier than lettuce, and a big salad is better than small. But is it better to get the spring greens mescaline mix than even the straight spinach? Is it healthier to eat one apple in one orange than it is to eat three apples or three oranges? An interesting pair of studies was recently released that looked at disease risk and the variety of fruit and vegetable consumption. I think we're used to some of the more generic plant compounds like vitamin C, which is sprinkled throughout the plant kingdom, whereas there are specific phytonutrients produced by specific plants to perform specific functions, both in their organs and ours, and we miss out on them if we're stuck in a fruit and vegetable rut, even if every day we're eating a lot. There are tens of thousands of phytonutrients, but they're not evenly distributed throughout the plant kingdom. Those wonderful glucosinolates I've talked about are found almost exclusively in the cabbage family. You don't get linoids like a lemon in a liminal or a tangerine in apples, for example, comparing apples and oranges is like comparing apples and oranges. In a sense, though, all fruits are just fruits, whereas vegetables can be any other part of the plant. Roots harbor different nutrients than shoots. Carrots are roots, celery and rhubarb are stems, dark green leafies are leaves, peas are pods, and cauliflower is true to its name, a collection of flower buds. All fruits are just fruits, so it may be even more important to get in a variety of vegetables so you can benefit from all parts of the plant. And that's indeed what they've found.


by looking at the data results. So then we'd have to run some statistical analysis on it. So then I would like to tell Excel to count the number of heads, simply count the number of heads. Now, conceptually that we would just take our data set and we'd say this is how many times it came out heads. If you did this and you actually flipped the coin, then you would have to tally out how many times it counts as head. But Excel will do that for us with our random generated tools here so we can play with this stuff a lot more quickly and understand it more conceptually and understand Excel formulas. So this is equals count if. So it's taking this data. We can take either one, but if we take the numerical data, we're gonna say count if there's a one. And if we take the data that's the text data, we can say count if you see a heads, count if you see heads, then pull that. And we came out to 52. And then you can do the same thing for the tails. So I'm gonna say Excel, take this data and count if, if it was this column, you see a two, or count if over here you see a tails. And then if I sum those two up, notice I didn't do exactly 100 flips and I'm kind of happy that I didn't. Oftentimes in statistics people use 100 because if I had 100 and there was 52 heads out of 100, well, that's 52%. But it's useful to do that added step of saying, well, what if it wasn't 100 flips, then you would have to do the math to think about how much it was out of. Meaning if it wasn't out of 152 wouldn't be 52%. If you came out with 52. So if I sum those up, it came out to just 99 flips. So we flipped it 99 times, came out heads 52 times, came out tails 47 times. All right, well, then we can say if I take that 52 divided by 99, that's how I'm gonna get the percent. So I can pull out the trustee calculator, 52 over 99 is gonna give us, if I move the decimal two places over 52.53 about, it's rounding, right? If I multiply times 100 times 100, the percent 52.53 about. And then if I look at the other one, tails is gonna be 47 over 99. If I move the decimal two places over 47.47 about, and that will give us the total percent of 100%. So we don't have to flip it exactly 100 times in order to get a percent, right? Which is often what you see an example problem. So if I do that with a formula, it would just be the 52 over the 99. And this would be the 47 over the 99. This is a common calculation to see, right? You've got the sum and then the total. And then I wanna see, I want to see then the percent of each item compared to the total. So this is like a running percent, which is quite common calculation, very useful to be able to visualize and excel or mathematically, because it's very common and useful. All right, I'm going down here. Now we go down. And so now we could do this many more times in Excel. So now I'm gonna use the same random between function here. And I could test it out and say, let's say we're gonna do a few different tests and we're gonna flip it anytime between two times and 15 times.  In this case, I got two tails. And that might not, obviously if I got two tails, that's gonna be misleading. So I don't have a big enough sample to really tell me anything about the data, right? The more times I flip it intuitively, you would expect that we're likely to get closer to the 50-50, right? But still three times is still, you might get three tails if you flipped it three times, right? This is a test where we flipped it four times. So I'm just using the random generator tool and just in each cell flipping it two times. This one we flipped it three times. In test three, we flipped it four times. At a test four, we flipped it five times and so on and so forth. So you can see as we go through the results, as we flip it more times, you would expect that we would get a result closer to what we know the actual result is in the actual population, just knowing it intuitively or theoretically or logically if it was a fair coin, using our conceptual knowledge would be 50-50, right? The entire pop, if we flipped it infinite amount of times. All right, so then, so if I, so this is another random generator tool and this will keep on populating random generations and so you can test it randomly and I can copy this entire test which will keep randomly generating every time I click on something in this table and I can then paste it down here one, two, three. In other words, pasting the value only and then I can run my statistical testing on it. So in this case, we had the test of two, we came out with two heads and zero tails. So if I was to do my percentage, two out of two is 100% for the heads, zero out of two is zero for the tails so and there's our 100% so that adds up to 100%. So this is kind of misleading, we only flipped it two times and we came out with a result that obviously isn't gonna give us too much information about the entire population if we were to flip it infinite amount of times. So this would not be sufficient to overturn the null assumption that it's fair coin because we don't have enough of a sample to really get an information. In this case, we have three so it happened to come out one heads and two tails for three so one divided by three is 33% about and two divided by three is 67% and in this case, we flipped it four times, it happened to come out two heads, two tails which are four and 50, 50 and this one, it came out five times, we flipped it five times, two heads, three tails and so on and so forth. Now in Excel to get these results, what we did is we used count if again, I said count if these two cells have a one in it and so two of them had a one in it and on the second one, I said count if


Hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us. Another episode of the nonprofit show. Today we have with us, Kevin Yates. And Kevin is the founder of an organization called Meals in the Meantime. So hello to you, Kevin. And you're gonna talk to us about what it's like to be new to nonprofit and some lessons that you personally have learned along the way. So before we dive into this conversation, we wanna remind our viewers and our listeners who we are. So hello to Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And to myself, Jarrett Ransom, nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. And we are honored to have the continued support day in, day out over the last three years, thanks to our amazing sponsors. So I'm gonna give a verbal shout out because they deserve it. So thank you so very much. To Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, fundraising academy at National University, be generous, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader and the nonprofit nerd. These companies have been by our side, right Julia? Like many of them from the very, very beginning. So they allow us to have the conversations like we'll have today with Kevin to talk about nonprofits and the lessons learned. But if you miss any of today's episode or any of our previous 600 plus episodes, you know where to find us. So check us out on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, Vimeo.  So Kevin, we are thrilled to have you with us today. Again, founder and president, meals in the meantime. Welcome to you. Thank you so much. I'm really, really excited to be here today. You know, we're thrilled to talk to somebody in a position like yours, which is really unusual, where we can talk with the founder and they can share with us what it's really like to be involved in this process. And so we're really, I think a lot of people will get information and inspiration about your honest reflections, you know, because it's so easy to have passion and excitement and then the reality hits and it's a hard slog. Before we get going, I wanna mention that you're coming to us from Ireland, right? I am. As we speak, I am in the lovely city of Dublin for the very first time and absolutely loving it. And I'm representing the brand here in Dublin. I love it. Fantastic, yeah. And I love your logo here for those of you watching. I just, that's a really appealing and attractive logo. Tell us a little bit about meals in the meantime, Kevin. Absolutely, absolutely. Again, thank you so much for the opportunity to talk about my experience and to talk about my nonprofit. Meals in the meantime is primarily focused on serving the Chicago Land South Suburban and our mission is filling the food gap with nourishment and dignity. And that's not just the slogan. There is some intention with that idea. And so when we talk about nourishment, we are focused on providing free, fresh, healthy, high quality food. We are also focused on meeting specific and unique needs of those who need help with food. So in other words, there are people who might have dairy allergies. And so we offer plant-based milk as an example. There are people who may not eat, say, things like pork or maybe even beans. And so we offer turkey products. And so when we talk about nourishment, we also are focused on providing fresh fruits and fresh vegetables. And then, again, focusing on nourishment and dignity, I think that one of the things that makes us very unique is how we engage with our pantry visitors. We don't have any preconceived notions or biases against people who need food, right? And so there are many, many reasons for why someone may be experiencing a food deficit or food scarcity. And so our perspective is not having access to food is not a condemnation. We're focused on changing the condition. And so when we have food pantry visitors, we see them, we acknowledge their presence, we say hello, we say good morning, we say we are glad that you're here. And so, again, our mission is filling the food gap with nourishment and dignity. And it's not just a cliche, it's not just a tagline, it's how we operate. And I'm just super excited and so grateful to be able to serve the people who visit us who need help with food. So that's a little bit about who we are at the highest level. I love it, I love it. You know, one of the things that I think Jarrett and I immediately could see, even when we started communicating with you about coming on the show, was that you do have a passion. And that's really important, but I gotta get right into it. How do you start a nonprofit when you don't have a nonprofit background? You have plenty of passion. I do. And some of it comes from personal experience. And just to give you and our audience today perspective, my background in terms of where I have been focused for the past, well, I don't know, 25 years, kind of given my age a little bit the way there. My area of focus expertise and where I have been doing most of my work for the past few years is in training, learning and talent development. I had the inspiration and the idea for meals in the meantime. On March 9th of last year, to be exact. So on March 9th of 2021, I got the idea and the inspiration to help people who need food. And I do believe it was divine inspiration that led me in the direction where we're headed with the nonprofit. On a very personal level, back in 2016, I was rolling right along in life, doing very well in my career and my profession. And the organization where I was working had a restructure, a real work. And as a result, there was redundancy in my role. And I found myself in the situation where I was without a job. I had a wonderful severance package and was able to leave the business with a really solid reputation for the work that I had done. But again, it was a business-based decision and one that I obviously could not take personally. And so fast forward a year later, I didn't have a job. And it was a very different and very uncomfortable place for me because up to that point, I had done very well in my career, was doing quite well financially. And again, just because of circumstances, suddenly found myself in a situation where I did not have a job. And so resources, that money was a little tight. It was a little tricky having to manage that. And so I did have my own personal experience for what it's like when you have a shift in a life condition and a life circumstance and how that kind of changes things for you. And so I do have the perspective for what it's like when you find yourself in a situation that you didn't anticipate. And there are so many who are finding themselves in situation circumstances and conditions where it's difficult just to access food, right? And so for me, food is one of the most basic needs that we have as human beings, right? And so again, on a lot of levels, I have some reference point for that. And so I believe that that's where the passion comes from. So it's not me just doing something that I've heard about. I have a reference point for what it's like when you are at a certain point in life and suddenly you find yourself at a point that you didn't anticipate. And those are points of which resources and access to what you normally have access to shift very suddenly. And so that is why we have the belief that not having access to food is a condition, not a condemnation. There are so many reasons for why people might find themselves in a situation where they are experiencing food insecurity and food scarcity. So again, to go back to your question about the inspiration and the idea, I believe that it was divine, divinely inspired. And it also comes from a very personal place. Thank you for sharing that, Kevin, because I feel nonprofits exist for, there being a problem in the community. And you saw this opportunity slash problem, right? And you brought this to your local community. What are some of the most important things that have come up for you and those lessons that you've learned since starting this organization? Wow, there are so many lessons, but don't know where to start. Again, going back to the idea that nonprofit work is not my background. And so when I entered into nonprofit work, it was every single step of the way was learning. Every single step of the way was growing. I think that maybe one of the biggest lessons that I've learned is that while having the inspiration and the motivation and the desire to help, what sits on the other side of that as it relates to running a nonprofit is the business side. And running and managing and executing and operating a nonprofit is very unique. And so there are dynamics and some uniqueness for running a business that is a nonprofit that isn't parallel to say a nonprofit business. And so I've had to learn about things like nonprofit financial management. I've had to learn about all of the government requirements as it relates to reporting. I've had to learn about partnership management. I've had to learn about promotion. I've had to learn about advertising. I've had to learn about brand management. To your point, thank you so much for your feedback on our logo. That took some time. It took some time to create a logo that I would be proud of and one that accurately reflects what we do. So the other part of nonprofit management as far as I'm concerned is brand management because we have a brand, our brand name is strong and then there's a lot of work that goes into maintaining that brand and promoting that brand. So it's all these nuances and dynamics on the business side that I did not have insight into because of my own background that even one year, almost a year and a half later I am continuing to learn and grow. Yeah. Yeah, and it will continue to shift, right? And I love the financials because so many time I feel that nonprofits have board members that say, oh, we need to have someone in the baking industry. They can be our treasurer. But as you can see, your part-time controller as one of our amazing sponsors they are dedicated to what you just said that nonprofit financial management piece. And that I think has been like the biggest learning curve for a lot. You mentioned brand management. You mentioned so many good lessons learned. I'm sure all of that ties into success. So what has success looked like for you or how do you define success for four meals in the meantime? Yeah, and before I answer that question, I wanna go back to the financial management piece. This is not a plug and we didn't set this up so that your audience knows it. You don't know this, but I brought your part-time controller in about six months ago. I think it is. Ah, yay! Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And it's interesting because I was driving around one day and I never will forget it. I was listening to National Public Radio, NPR, because I love NPR, and heard an advertisement for YPTC, your part-time controller. Yeah, I got it right. I got the acronym right. And I thought to myself, you know, financial management for nonprofits is not an area of expertise. And I'll tell you guys, for me, financial management and fiduciary responsibility is something where I will not compromise. It has to be 100% right. And I say that because we are entrusted by our donors to ensure that we are being responsible with their donations and our financial gifts. And so for me, the idea of bringing in your part-time controller, an organization who has expertise and experience with financial management for nonprofits was the absolute right thing to do. So I just wanted to call that out because it has been a lifesaver. And then there are aspects of financial reporting and management that I just really don't have to worry about. And then the other, the very personal thing I'll share with you is that I am horrible at math, math frightens me. It literally scares me. I love that.  And we're not a big organization, right? We're very small. We're still lean and mean. And so having an organization like YPTC bring in the expertise that we really needed was just really a lifesaver. And so- We certainly couldn't have plugged that or planned that any better, but I'm thrilled to hear that. Absolutely. And that's probably one of your success measures as well, is that oversight of the financial measurement? What else would you say, Kevin, or some of the successes for your organization? Yeah, one of the ways in which we measure success is the amount of food that we give away, right? And actually, if our watchers and our viewers visit our website today, you can take a look at the quantity and the volume of food that we have given away today. What sticks out in my mind immediately is the fact that today, we have given away over 2,000 pounds of free, fresh, healthy vegetables and fruits. That says a lot. So we quantify the amount of food that we give away as one of the biggest indicators of our success. And then certainly another way in which we measure our success are the stories that Pantry visitors are able to share with us about how we're able to help. And particularly when they look at the freshness, right, of the food that's in our bag, they are often caught by surprise. The other thing I'll share with you that is very unique about us, we don't give away canned goods. We don't give away boxes of food that are at expiration or close to expiration. And I just wanna be clear in saying that there's nothing wrong with canned goods, absolutely. And there's nothing wrong with boxes of food that may be very close to expiration because for someone who is experiencing a hunger, they will happily accept a canned good item or maybe a box of food. That's okay, I'm not dismissing that. But our focus is on fresh and healthy. And so as a way to demonstrate that, the food that we give out on our pantry, we actually pick it up from the grocery store the day of the pantry on that morning. So it is literally fresh from the grocery store to our Pantry visitors. And again, we're focused on things like fresh healthy vegetables, fresh healthy fruits, turkey products, almond milk, wheat bread, right? For example, as opposed to white bread, that matters because wheat bread promotes healthy digestion, for example. So those are some of the ways in which we continue to measure our success. You know, Kevin, I'm so interested in what you're saying on so many levels.  Well, not so much education, right? I think that just in terms of our website, right? And our social media, that is where you can really take a look at our approach and our methodology and why we offer what we offer. So maybe not so much a need for education beyond that, but also as we get foot traffic at our pantries when we have opportunity to have those discussions with the visitors who are actually engaging us. I mean, they're educating us, which is so encouraging and exciting because the education that they're giving to us is, we really appreciate the quality of the food and the kind of food because I suspect obviously that those who are visiting our pantry are looking for other pantries as well. And so ours is just one that complements what they need. And so they're saying to us, we are very grateful for what you offer here because it's very different than what other pantries offer. And again, I'm gonna be very clear. The effort to help people who need food is a collective effort, right? So the kinds of food that other pantries are offering is great. We're part of that effort. They're part of that effort. We're all coming together to help people who need food. We're just doing it in a different kind of way. So again, do we need to educate? It's interesting that quite often it's the reverse is true because our pantry visitors are educating us on the uniqueness of what we offer. Does that answer your question? It doesn't make sense. You know, it isn't what I would say to you that this is part of that horrible thing that we call Founder Syndrome. A lot of times founders are not listening to what their constituency base is. They have an idea and they're more forecasting that and pushing that onto the community. And so I would say for you, it bodes very well for your future that you are listening and it sounds to me like, you know, that factors into some of your decision-making. So good job. Good, good job. I mean, Jared, I can see you smiling. I know, that doesn't happen. It doesn't. That doesn't happen. And for you, Kevin, you know, as we started, you know, not, you have the passion probably, you know, tenfold, but maybe not the nonprofit experience looking at the success for this. I love that you're really paying attention to your community and what the community, you know, says and what the community is asking for. That to me is just fantastic. Did you think two, three years ago that you would be a nonprofit founder? You know, this is so far removed from what I saw, from what I thought, for what I envisioned for my life. And I think that that is what gives me such a great deal of excitement, right? Because at this particular point in my life, for where I am in my journey professionally, for where I thought I would be landing in my life, I'm not there, but it's a good thing because this is work that resonates with me very personally, very personally. And certainly in my professional career, I have found joy and fulfillment and excitement, right? But the type of joy and fulfillment and excitement that I get from this work is very different. So no, I had zero idea. I didn't do anything to prepare for this, you know, I did everything that I needed to do to prepare for my vocation and my quote unquote day job. I did everything to prepare for that. I did nothing to prepare for this. I am learning along the way. And I think that that is the joy and excitement as well to be entering into work that is new. Everything is new right now. Everything is new. And to me, that's exciting and it's fresh and it's fun and it's helping people. I mean, it is helping people. That's a fantastic attitude, Kevin. And if you didn't see yourself two, five years ago as the founder, you know, president of Meals in the meantime, let's look ahead, right? Where do you see yourself and where do you see your organization? What is that vision for the next three to five years? I absolutely see myself continuing this work and doing it in such a bigger way, right? And I'll just give you some examples of where I see our growth and where I see us headed. And so right now, we are providing quarterly pantries, right? My vision for 2023 is that we are providing pantries every other month, right? And then my vision for 2024 is that we are doing pantries monthly. And then beyond that, we are doing pantries as much as funding will allow. So that's one example of where I see our future. Another area where I see an opportunity, our future, is building up our infrastructure, right? So here's the example. As I share, on the day of our pantry, we go to the grocery store and we pick up the items. So it's kind of like direct from our pantry visitors to, you know, from the store to the pantry visitors. And we have food transport now via either trucks that we rent or in-kind donations that we receive for trucking services from our partner. Shout out to Alamy Brothers Transportation, who also provides transportation for us. My vision, guys, is that I don't know when, but my vision is that at some point, we have our own truck, right? So that we can rely on our own transportation methodology to pick up food.  The other vision that I have for our future is that, you know, as I shared right now, we pick up food on the day of. My vision is that maybe as soon as next year or the year after, we have our own storage facility for cold goods and for dry goods as well. So for me, the future looks like more pantries. It looks like having our own transportation and having our own facility for where we can store and for where we can keep food. So that's what the immediate future looks like for me. I have to commend you, Kevin, because I've talked to so many founders and they want all of it right now. And what you just expressed was such a sustainable scalability of this is where I see ourself going from quarterly to every other month, from every other month to monthly. That to me speaks volumes with a business plan and what's realistic. Because again, and I'm just as guilty, right? Like we're an instant gratification community, but say we wanna provide this fresh nourishing food every single day, but you're seeing the realistic side of that. And I just, I do, I have to commend you for that because that's really refreshing to hear. Although I'm sure it's not always easy.  There is non-profit envy. That's what I mean by that. You know, I do see other non-profits who are doing amazing work and they're doing great work and they're doing more than we are. But I have to go back to the idea that, you know, they're further along in their nonprofit journey. You know, again, we're still new. We were just founded last year, 2021. You know, again, March 9th, 2021 is when I had the vision. And so I am encouraged and believe that slow and steady went to the race, right? Because what we always want to be focused on is the quality of the food that we provide, how we are providing food. And to do it that way means we just can't do it fast. It means that we have to be very strategic, very intentional and very purposeful. And you can't be strategic, intentional and purposeful fast. That requires time. So I'm totally okay with the journey being what it is, but always staying focused on our mission, right? And again, our mission is filling the food gap with nourishment and dignity. And we're gonna take time to make sure that we stay on that path to do just that. So it's gonna continue to grow. We're gonna continue to do more work and I can be patient. Well, we don't have much time, but I have to ask, I feel like this is the elephant in the room. How has your board supported you with this vision? And also, you know, supporting you since it started, like, do they help, you know, keep everything kind of methodical in timing or talk to us a little bit in this brief amount of time about that board relationship? Yeah, I have an amazing board. And what makes that board amazing is their diversity. And they are very supportive of my vision and the dreams that I have for the work that we're doing. And so, you know, I'm very cognizant and conscious to say to my board, I'm very grateful for your support of me and my vision. But even more than that, I'm grateful for your support of the work that we are doing. And again, it's a diverse board, different backgrounds. We're small, but mighty board. We have just recently increased the number. Well, including myself, we were a board of five. And then we very recently brought on two new board members. And I can share with you that one of the opportunities that I saw for bringing on these two new board members, they are young, they are eager, they are talented, they are bright, they have ideas that just because of by virtue of their age, they have innovation, they have just open minds. And so the entire board works very well together, just in terms of demographics, in terms of background. And I could not have been blessed with a better board, absolutely. Love it. I think this is great.  And again, that's just been really exciting. I think the passion of work is something that helps us get going. But the reality of the journey is what can really be challenging. And so to hear you, as Jarrett mentioned, be so strategic and really thoughtful and thought forward is really great. So I'm excited to see how this journey takes you. I think Jarrett and I are gonna really want to push you to come back on and you know- I'd love to. I'd love to. Thank you for that. And report kind of like what you're seeing and what other lessons that you've learned because I'm sure every day is different. Every day is different, you're absolutely right. And I'm gonna do a shameless plug here, if I may. We are 100% funded by donations and grants. So to our listeners and those of you who are watching today, I wanna invite and encourage you to go to mealsinthemeantime.org and donate as your heart direction to give. It will go to good use. The bulk of our funding is toward food acquisition. So if you go to mealsinthemeantime.org, you can select the donate button right there on the homepage and you can leave your financial bill. I love it. And you know what? I think that that's a hallmark of a strong leader. They're not afraid to ask, so- Absolutely not. And I'll share one more thing. That is something I had to grow into because historically I have not always felt comfortable asking people for money. But the thing is I'm not asking for me. I'm asking on behalf of people who help for food, which food rather, right? So again, I beg and implore you to go to our website and please leave your donation. Oh my gosh, I love it. Hey everybody, this has been a real pleasure. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Been joined today by the nonprofit nurse herself, Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we wanna thank all of our presenting sponsors who are with us day in and day out and have afforded us this great opportunity to talk to this new nonprofit leader, Kevin Yates. We wanna thank Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, be generous. Fundraising Academy at National University, staffing boutique, nonprofit thought leader, and the nonprofit nerd. If you saw this, or if you've been watching this recording, you'll see that Kevin gave the big thumbs up when we announced one of our partnering sponsors, your part-time controller, and I just love that. So thank you for witnessing to us. Hey, as we end every episode, we wanna remind ourselves, our viewers, our listeners, and our guests to stay well so you can do well. Thank you, everybody. We'll see you back here tomorrow.


8 months since the typhoon called Haiyan or Yolanda hit the country and obviously you will notice that there are still a lot of scars from the typhoon because let's remind us that nobody expected such a scale of devastation throughout Samar Island for instance and Samar is just one of the four islands impacted by this super typhoon. Yolanda destroyed or damaged partially more than four million houses or shelters in the country so you can imagine that the scale of the rehabilitation or the rebuilding process is immense. You will still see too many families living in a tent or in very basic shelters. Despite this stress it's amazing to see how the people are doing their best to get back on their feet. Everybody is trying to rebuild a life that is as normal as possible as it used to be prior to Yolanda. One of the stories I keep in mind that strikes me all the time is the community living in Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, Gipollos. When we started to work with this community they told us that what they need now is really to have a sustainable shelter. At the time they were still living in tents and today if you visit Santa Cruz we are just fixing the last shelter and you can see the joy to the families. We have identified so far 4,500 families in eight different municipalities of Samar and together with the Philippine Red Cross we are providing now the kit. We have delivered right now 1,600 kits and we are still looking at being able to complete all those activities by the end of this year.


The top ten dumbest things propagandists ask us to believe.  Here are the top ten dumbest things the propagandists of the US centralized empire try to get us to swallow. One, that the US war machine has been surrounding its top two rivals, China and Russia, with war machinery as an act of defense rather than as an extremely provocative act of aggression. Two, that the war in Ukraine simultaneously A was completely unprovoked and B just coincidentally happens to massively advance US strategic interests and therefore should be funded as much as possible. Three, that okay, all those other wars were based on lies and resulted in disaster, but that couldn't possibly be the case for this current war. Four, that your country's foreign policy is determined by your official elected government, even though the foreign policy remains the same regardless of who is in office. Five, that it is only by pure coincidence that your nation's population remains in a perpetual 50-50 deadlock which prevents anyone's votes from changing the status quo and the status quo just happens to be perpetually frozen along lines that hugely advantage the rich and powerful. Six, that the only reason anyone could possibly be critical of the most dangerous impulses of the world's most powerful and destructive government is if they are a secret agent working for the enemies of that government. Seven, that the Western Empire which spent the last two decades murdering Muslims in the Middle East suddenly cares very deeply about the Muslims in China. Eight, that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom and that the Empire is pouring weapons into Ukraine because it loves Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy. Nine, that foreign propaganda and influence operations are significantly manipulating the way Westerners think and vote but the plutocrats who fully control all the most influential platforms in the Western world are not. Ten, that we need to be worrying about tyrannical enemies in Beijing and Moscow instead of tyrannical enemies a lot closer to home.