There's Jeff. Jeff, you just have to unmute. Jeff Munger, you need to unmute if you want to talk. Hey, Jeff Munger, you're still muted. Hey, Jeff Munger, are you ready to roll? Bill Kehoe? President and counter for. Would you want to start the meeting or if I don't know what happened to Jeff Munger? So he looked like he was unmuted. He was muted. Yeah, I can't see him now. Can you see him, Nick? Jeff Munger? I think he's off now. Do you want to wait a minute for him? Just about. Okay. Happy week after your birthday. Yeah, I know it's quite a day, believe me. Whoa. We can talk. Okay, but I can't see anybody. I don't know why. Take your right on the right of this video. We have the mute button is a video button. The Regular Airport Commission meeting for Wednesday, October 21st at 4.08 p.m. The second item is the agenda. Do I have a motion to accept or adopt the agenda? She might. I've moved to accept the, I moved to accept the agenda with a proposed amendment, which after a second I will present that. Do I have a second? Second. Or in favor. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's right. You need to make your amendment. Yeah, I would amend. I assume the commissioner's got an email from Mr. Tim George with a proposed amendment and I would therefore move to amend the agenda to include that change. I'll second that. Any discussion? Excuse me. That's fine. Any discussion? Hearing none. All in favor. Aye. Public forum. Is there anybody, can you see anybody or is anybody on the line? Hearing none. We'll move to the consent agenda. Mr. Chair, Jeff. There are two people in the attendee. I'm sorry. One is the town meeting is on and then we have city councilor Karen Paul on as well. All right. Well, I didn't know that. So and Karen does have her hand up. Hannah, can you It's okay. You've unmuted me. I'm just here to listen and just happy to be here to listen to your meeting. That's all. Thank you. Thank you all. Happy to have you. Oh, Bill, you're the best. Thank you. And who else was there, Nick? Just channel 17 is on as well. Okay. All right. So moving, moving ahead to item number four, the consent agenda. We have already had the amendment to approve Tim's change to the minutes of our last meeting. Oh, yeah, I didn't do that right, but no, I didn't think so, but so you're the you're the guru on the Mr. Chairman. I would propose that the minutes be amended as recommended by Commissioner George and to think this is the appropriate place to put it, not where I put it before. So after this is approved, I'll make another motion. All right. Do I have a second? I'll second. All in favor. I don't want to get too technical, Mr. Chairman, but technically my incorrect motion would the order would be to reconsider that and delete that amendment. That's the way to officially to do it. But I would propose that the chair use some prerogative and delete my amendment in the incorrect amendment. So I would recommend that happen. So do we vote on that bill or it's just me? All right, let's go. I hate to do this. It's my mistake. No question about it. Let's go back and reconsider the item that I incorrectly amended because I'm so we need to vote on the reconsideration. So if we could have that. So in other words, we have to go back to item number two, the agenda. Yes, we have to reconsider Bill Keough's amendment. Correct. Do I have a second? I'll second. Thank you, Helen. Get it on. All in favor. I would move to delete the amendment as proposed in this item and refer to item number four. Yep. All right. So we just have to vote on that, correct? That's all. Yep. Okay. All in favor. Sorry, guys. That's all right, Bill. Item number 4.02, implements. Thank you for including that. I knew it was bad, but I didn't think it was this bad. Is this the consent agenda? Yes. Okay. Well, I move we approve the consent agenda as presented. And I'll second that because it's just the minutes, correct? Just the consent agenda, which is really the implements report. That's your only end of moment. The consent agenda had the minutes and the implements. Helen, you're right. Oh, okay. So do I have a second? I heard. Check it. Any discussion? Well, I actually, I'm interested in just to hear from, you know, Jean and Nick or whoever, just, just to, you know, obviously we can see the employment numbers, but if you could just talk us through that and sort of is this totally in alignment with what the rest of the country is seeing? So I don't know if we should discuss that now or I'm fine approving the consent agenda and then discussing it, but either way I'm just sort of interested to hear. I'm going to discuss it now. Okay. That's actually when I know it sounds bad, but it's actually better than worse, you know, that it's been in the past. So it's actually, you know, we've come up to around 3000 a week and sometimes it's close to 4000, which is really nice. But yeah, your instincts are dead on. It's not great, but it's better than it's been. Good news is I heard something today that the TSA for the day I think has hit a million or something. So that's a good thing, you know, that it means that traffic is building. Certainly people are trying different things to be successful, you know, and building confidence. You know, the BTV was one of three airports that had the COVID testing. And now there's 13 and many, many more. And the more that we do things like that, the better off, I think you're going to see these numbers go. So I'm confident that we will have worse days. I'm very confident we're going to have better days. And people have to feel comfortable with what they're doing. And certainly the airlines are doing everything they can to help people feel comfortable. And flying certainly is safe.   But it's, I guess you'd have to quarantine then, I guess for two weeks. So that wouldn't make any sense. But anyhow, things are, that's roughly what they are. And actually, I feel really good about our numbers. I'd like to see around 5000 a week. And if we had that, that would be a good number for the airport. Gene, do you think, that's Jeff, do you think that given the explosion of COVID cases nationwide that we could actually see a little bit of an increase or should we be prepared for another dip? You should anticipate another dip. Our numbers as far as COVID cases are equivalent to what they were in July. And, you know, in the United States, so even though it looks very red, it's equivalent to that. I do think it's going to get worse. And, you know, they're highly recommending that people don't cross the lines for the holidays. So that could certainly hurt our numbers. But I do know a lot of people with testing will feel more comfortable, you know, traveling. You know, it goes back down to the honor system, you know, that we have here in this state. Many of the other states don't seem to care as much as Vermont does. And, you know, the results are pretty evident. So I think the answer to your question, Jeff, is that we will we're going to see some better days and we're going to see some much worse. I think I think you're going to we're going to get potentially down to 13, 1400 in some weeks prior pre-Christmas is what I'm thinking. Yeah. Well, I know, you know, I just got through with my quarantine and went and had a test, which was negative. But just because I went to Massachusetts for a weekend. I will say one more thing on the testing. I'm sorry, Bill. I know you're going to slap me here in the as far as the not going off topic, but it has to do with employment. It's the we did, as you know, we opened COVID testing here last week. And since then, we've got two people that had tested positive that would not have otherwise been, you know, tested, you know, so they came in just to do the test and they were positive. So then they go to the next test. So, you know, when at the press conference, I talked about if we just get one person that doesn't spread it to 100, you know, it has been successful. So we did better than that. We have two and it's been less than a week. Oh, go ahead. I just have a question going back to when this first started. And I think, and I may have just misunderstood, but at some point, I think you said that the airport needed to have a minimum of 19 flights a day in order to meet some FAA standard. Now, is that sort of by the wayside now and they use a different management tool? Nick, do you want to address that? I'm not sure about the 19 flights a day. That doesn't spark anything. That's what I remember hearing. Okay. Okay. I mean, there's a couple of things that we're working on as far as employment scope. Going back to kind of the positivity of it, we are one of the lucky airports that we have not gotten full service terminated from. There's a couple of New England airports that that airlines are fully exiting the market from them. So we're lucky in that case. So that that's a positive case for for our future in in payment and claimant growth. The schedule looks very consistent to what it has been over the last couple months, which is consistent with what Gene was saying with with implements being around that 3000 per week mark, which is equivalent to that 12,000 that you see on the monthly side. And then the things that going back to your question, Helen, the things that we are making sure that we're following for the FAA, not regulatory side, but financial side is when our implements go down, our PFC collection, of course, is very much reduced as well as our AIP entitlement fund calculations. So we're following that very, very closely because we don't want this year to be the calculation. And going back to what Jeff was saying in the beginning, it's 100% consistent nationwide. So we're not, you know, a segregated case here where we're with every other airport in the country fighting for that calculation, moving forward into into the future so that we do get the three and a half million or so entitlement funds in the future. That's the only thing I can associate with with the employment numbers. Nick, I'm with Helen. I do remember the 19 flight number, but I didn't think it was daily. I thought it was a week in order to qualify for some FAA funding. I did mention that and I will try to quantify that. I mentioned that a few meetings ago and I am having not quite under, I mean, I did say it and I'm not quite sure how if it was weekly or daily, but I thought it was daily. But I will try to, by our next meeting, have a better understanding of that for you. And I think it had something to do with our relationship with the airlines and what they had promised for service or something like that or an agreement to serve the airport. So I'll try to dig into that and get you a better answer, Helen, and Jeff. Okay. Well, if it's not an important number, you know, don't waste your time. I just was wondering how it all fit in. The good news is, is that we've maintained our relationships with the airlines.  And we've been very lucky, you know, we call them weekly and talk to them. And because of that, we really haven't suffered and we continue to still be able to get to where you want to get. So I'm going to continue to do that. And there are several flights, you know, a day that leave here. And I hope I have not been notified that that won't happen. I know that Frontier will be servicing, you know, Florida, other airlines like American have kind of shied away from those destinations. And they have other destinations. So I think each airline is taking their niche in the market right now to maximize their aircraft. Okay, thank you. Can I just change the subject briefly? Well, it's sort of, anyway, I heard on national news that they showed a dummy sitting in an airline seat. And we were talking about how more you're safe, you're just a bit a step ahead of being safe in a grocery store as you are in an aircraft because of the aircraft filters and the change of air. Of course, the other situation was that the middle seat be empty. So a lot of people are looking to go to Florida and they're waiting for news like that, which would certainly increase in payments. But again, that was only a study. And I'm sure there'll be a lot more follow up in the next six months or so. Sure. Thank you. That was a bill, the one that you're referring to. That's a study that United Airlines did. And they're actually including the middle seat. Yeah, I saw the same thing. Yeah.    You know, so I mean, whatever your comfort level is, but I would say that you're very safe in an aircraft. The problem is, where are you going to go? Everything else is red, you know, so you're leaving green and going to wear. So, you know, if you do go to Florida, you know, Shelby and I or Nick were having a fantasy about taking an aircraft down and, you know, and going down and staying at my house, but we wouldn't be able to go out. So I think you're going to see a lot more of that. And if you do look at our numbers, you will see that the general aviation, we have exactly the number of plane and playments that we did last year with general aviation. There's a lot of jets flying in and out of here. We're really lucky that a lot of other airports are not, don't see that kind of activity. We actually are very, very busy and I would say, I mean, I think you must see them flying over your place. It's very active here. So it's just a different type of business. Thank you. Any other discussion on playments? All right. All in favor of accepting and placing on file the employment say aye. Aye. Aye. I guess we're up to Marie for the financial picture. Hello, everyone. I'm happy to provide an update on our financial position. You have, in this month's package, I have put together the profit and loss for the month ending of August 2020, including the debt service coverage for August. Those things are, it's a little, given the uncertainty of the revenues, it's easier to wait until I'm getting all the information from all of our customers and vendors in terms of putting together an accurate picture. So you have a few things like the cash position and the counts receivable that are going to be through the end of September, because those are factual and known. As I'll go through the highlights, the CARES Act money is the same as I reported last month. We will be putting together a reimbursement monthly. The FAA does close down, they close down for about three plus weeks at the end of their federal fiscal year, which is September 30th. They close early. And then they, I have yet to hear that they've reopened, but we'll be putting together a CARES Act reimbursement for September through them. And we will also be the AIPs that we've been spending some money on our bigger projects will be going in for reimbursements on them as soon as they open up, which should be any day. The debt coverage score, which includes the CARES Act money that we got for July and August, we were at 1.48, which is a pretty comfortable number. Certainly, if we can target in that area or even a little bit less in that somewhere between as long as we're above 1.25, we are meeting our debt coverage for the bond covenants. The revenues that we had for, well, I put July here, but I think I meant August. Revenues for August for $1,550,000 before adding the CARES Act grant monies, which we've added about a million dollars for July and August. So our total revenues that we've collected through August, that was just a typo in the month, are $2.3 million lower than we took in a year ago. And I just wanted to give you an idea. The primary driver that you're going to see is just lower parking garage revenues, $841,000 lower. That's a lot of money that we're just, we're not going to be able to recoup. We just don't have the traffic coming in and out of the garage. Our rental car concessions, which is the really, that's their busiest time of year is the summer and the fall. And those were also quite, we took, we'll see quite a bit of lower for July and August was almost $600,000 lower. And our CFCs, which are component, that is a daily charge of $4 for every day that the car gets rented. That was also as reflected lower about $300,000 lower. Landing fees are lower because the commercial flights that are flying, we have less flights. So we have less planes, the commercial ones landing. And so that's why we see lower. And the expenses here to date were $1.8, almost $1.9 million. We are trending right now a little bit lower than we did in the prior year. We're trying really hard to look at everything that we're spending and spend on what is necessary, spend on what is safety involved. We certainly have a lot of obligation to keep things running and running well here at the airport. And those things don't go away, but wherever we can manage those expenses and manage them a little better, we're trying very hard to look at everything we're doing for obvious reasons. The AIP, that is our grant receivable, was a net of about a million dollars owed to us. You're going to see on that AIP receivable report. I'm showing what the year is. We are going to owe the FAA. We're going to owe them $2.1 million. We're, and they owe us money on the other active grant projects. For the properties, the seven properties that we maintained and kept and pulled out of the grant are, we call them the Kirby Cottages. Those are those seven properties on Lily Lane. And we're just, we're going to be getting a bill from the FAA. We took them out of the grant. We will pay them back the grant. We also sold the properties in August. So you're seeing sort of the net of that activity on that statement. And as soon as we get a bill from the FAA, we'll be able to consolidate that and remove that. And just the last item on there is we had, as of September 30th, we had $15 million in our main airport account. And this is running higher than you would have seen in past years because we did, we did draw down the revenue anticipation money of 11.1, but we still have adequate revenues in our, in our account. And so that is a good thing for now. So I will take any questions that you might have on any of this or anything financial. I have a question about pulling in the, the, or drawing down the 11 million dollars. And is that, it's an, in anticipation that we will need it in the very near future? Or is it just easier to draw it down and then, and just have it there? I'm, I'm just wondering what the cost is to have that sitting in an account and not needed. That's a great question, Helen. And we drew down, we, we were able to work with downtown and they were able to secure with, with Key Bank an 11.1 million dollar revenue anticipation note that closed in June of this past year. But one of the requirements was that we draw all of that money down at once is, which is different than the line of credit, which you would maybe draw down as you need it. The cost to us, the interest cost was, is 1.85%, which is a very, it's a very low cost of borrowing and certainly one that lets me sleep a little better at night, knowing that should we need this money? I mean, when we went to get this money, we did some forecast, we knew we had some things in that were coming up. We also did not have the cares act grant money secured yet when we went for all the approvals and going ahead to try to move forward with this. So that was part of the, and getting the amount of money and just making sure that we had money available should that come to be and should we need it. So so far as of yet, we have not actually needed to draw down. I should say we haven't fallen below that 11.1, but we might. So we have it. We are, we are safeguarding the assets at the airport. We won't be a financial draw on the city who pays all of our bills and our checks and our payroll. We won't be drawing on them and then the negative in our own bank account, if I'm just one follow-up. So shoot, what was I going to ask? That's age kicking in here. Shoot, I can't remember. I'll remember it. The reason we, and I'll just remind you all the reason we took this out was to have a comfort level. It's hard to get money when you need it if you don't have any. And so we hedged and we, it's kind of an insurance policy making sure we do make it through the year and we don't need to put strain on the city. We want to be self-sufficient as we can be. Certainly the city gives us the ability to do what we do, but you know that was a planned exercise what Maria is speaking about.  You know, we got a letter from Moody's this week and we did not get downgraded. You know, so or, and it wasn't a grading opportunity, but they didn't, they spoke well of us and a lot of the airport's financial planning. So I feel really good because not every airport is in the condition that we're in right now and we're going to be careful, you know, about moving forward and making the right moves. But what Maria is speaking about is merely an insurance policy. So make sure that we make it through the other end. Will the CARES money be available to pay back the cost of that borrowing? We will not be, the CARES Act money is being used for our operational expenses. And if I needed to use it on the interest, I certainly could. I would not use it on repaying the balance, but we have, we have sufficient. I just meant interest. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's a cost of COVID in a way. Yeah. When we draw down for reimbursements, we, we literally attached, we upload invoices or the cost of the payroll, the salaries that we're paying things like that. It's actually very literal expenses that we're applying for reimbursement on. Great. Thank you. Marie, this is Jeff. Is there a deadline that we have to use this CARES money by or obligated? Within four years. Oh, great. That was going to be my question is, is, was the CARES money targeted for a certain amount of time? I get that we have it for four years, but was it meant to cover revenue shortfalls for a year or a certain number of months or is that not clear? We are planning on using that within this calendar year. And we anticipate getting another one as well. We're hoping and we will tap into that as well. What we're trying to do is spread out what we have and not burn any one area. And yeah, so that's kind of what's happening right now. Maria is watching Cache Daily and reporting to Nick Hain Shelby. And so that is what is happening. And she's doing a good job balancing the beam here. But we, we don't want to burn up all of it. We want to use it in the way that is intended to be used. And then we will do the same. And again, we've hedged on what we've used to make sure that we can slowly make it through what we think is going to be a very challenging winter. Yeah. Can you talk at all about other sort of expense reductions that I assume there's some sort of natural expense reductions that just occur given that dramatic drop off in flights? Of course, it doesn't correspond one to one, but anything you want to just share with us about that, Jane or Maria? Maria and Nick went into the, you know, when we did our budget, they sliced it pretty hard. But it's certainly worse than what we could have even anticipated. So we're probably going to need to depend on that carers money.  But as far as cost reductions, we're just, the parking garage was a big one. And Maria, you want to, what else do you have out there, a list of things that we did? So give you, we slashed every expense that we, that was reasonable for us to slash. We didn't slash things like de-icing or, you know, there were things we didn't touch. But we slashed everything out. So we really said the obvious, travel and training, other things that might not be so obvious, but make sense right now. We're not doing the amount of marketing that we were doing. We really, we scaled it way back when we have a marketing contract for five years, but we said, we can spend up to the amount if we wish. But we told the firm, we're going to slash this right back. And so we're spending a fraction of what we were spending on something like marketing. We've also cut back on some projects that we had thought like some of the repairs, bigger repairs in the garage, we've been done a lot of work over the years in terms of doing, catching up on some of the deferred maintenance. And now we're really in the preventative maintenance phase for many of our items. And so again, we said, well, we don't need to do that today. We'll see how things go. And we're just going to push that off and see how the year goes. So those sorts, there's all sorts of expenses like that, that we really just sort of stop and think and what can we do without where can we save? I know the team, Larry and the team are really looking to, we have some monitoring that we do with our stormwater and our UIC. We just refit it. Those bids are being evaluated now. We're looking for places to save money where we can and do things always looking to be smarter. So that's what we're doing. Anything on the personnel side, like security or temp staff that, any reductions there or until positions? Sorry, I didn't take that one. Go ahead, Shelby. My crew is largely customer service. We don't have any vacancies. There is one position that's posted right now that's an operations position, which is essential. From the ambassador perspective, over time has been dramatically cut, but no one has lost any hours. They have not been reduced. So they're still at a whole paycheck, just not as much over time opportunities. Shelby, Nick's job, we haven't filled. So between Nick and Kelly's and Rick Brown's job, we've kind of stretched those out and we're trying to see, we actually are carrying a pretty intense load on the staff here. Everybody's working very hard and we have more projects, but we're trying to just take advantage of not rehiring Nick's position right away. I've not posted it. So next time you see Nick, say thank you for doing two jobs and also thank Larry and Shelby. They've really stepped up to taking on a lot of those extra duties. So that right there is one savings and when we can, we just stretch it out a little bit. Jeff, to get some savings. Okay, thank you. I got a question about the deferred maintenance, like in the garage or whatever. If we defer things till the following year, is it not going to cost more to fix it? It actually isn't, Jeff. We had really done a significant amount of work in the garage ahead of time and a lot of those, the work that we did were the cracks that in the garage. We did a three thorough cleanings and there was a lot of salt and residue that was helping corrode the garage. So we've done intense cleanings and we're now able with tools that we have to keep the garage cleaner and we've also cut it off so that the public can't use the whole garage. So it saves us a fair amount of time, but just getting the chemicals out of the garage is a pretty big deal. And so we've been, we did our crack sealing and then we've got the chemicals out. So that's a pretty big deal. So will those cleanings take place during the winter? No, they happen in the early spring and late fall and we use a fire hose and I think we took out 43, 40 gallon containers of dirt and chemical from the garage. Because they're just going to get more chemicals over the winter, right? Yeah, but this had built up over the years and we have a new vacuum that we pick up a lot of that and I guess we're just taking better care. We realize that a garage is like a person and it needs to be maintained regularly and it has, so Shelby and her team and the maintenance folks have been working on that garage and I think if you've been in it, you've probably observed that it's fairly clean. Okay. Any other questions about our financial situation? We accept the financial report and place it on file. All in favor? All right. All right. Item 5.02, Larry construction update. Great pictures, by the way. Yes. Okay, I'll keep sending some along as we move forward. All right, so I'll just go through this quickly. Item number one, the air cure apron rehabilitation. Phase six is near completion for the winter so everybody will be jet blue will be back in its normal place and taxiway alpha will be able to reopen. We did receive 2.5, hey guys, we did receive 2.5 million of a grant of an application we did for 9 million for the entire phase seven. We didn't anticipate getting the entire grant but you know we're ready if they had money available but we're moving forward that portion and we'll start construction in the spring on the first phase of phase seven. A quick turnaround facility is complete. We're just doing some punch list items on the project and that place is looking great as soon as it starts being operated again. Taxiway Gulf phase two, we will be completed in the next two weeks you know hoping for you know dry and warmer weather because obviously pavement going down this time of year is tough but with good weather the next two weeks that project for the winter taxiway Gulf will open for the winter so we'll have a full parallel taxiway. Airport master plan update as everybody knows over the last couple weeks we had final public hearings and public meetings they went very well and we are finalizing our airport layout plan and CIP short medium and long-term initiatives in the CIP which we've already met with the FAA on and we're nearing completion of that. Nick I don't know if you want to add any more to that. No I think we heard a lot of great comments and feedback over the three meetings that we had last week we had a regional advisory committee, a technical advisory committee and then a public hearing all last week so we heard great feedback we're adjusting a couple of things that we got mostly from the technical folks that has to do with our geometry and some of the taxiway systems out on the airfield but it's been a 18 plus month project that's been really we're really fortunate to go through one of these because a lot of things have been updated to include some of the things that we've gone through over the past through months with COVID-19 hitting us and spark some different conversations that we've never had before of course but I think our next step is to finalize some of the chapters they are extensive we'll get those to you via our website btvmasterplan.com which you can log on now and and view all those videos and some of the draft chapters over the next couple of weeks and then we'll be producing a full master plan set both with the maps as well as the documentation around it and a couple of hard copies as well if you would like or just let us know but we're in the final final steps to the to the master plan right um the hotel um the South Burlington DRB closed the hearing on September 15th and uh the decision has been issued um and um that project will move forward to determine it on um you know the the need and and and when that the contractor can um feasibly feasibly build it and um Valley West Apron we didn't receive our final bill or our retained request until just recently from finishing on the spring that's being processed we've already spoke about the parking garage putting off some of those repairs that we had planned until next year or so the terminal integration project the consolidation of the TSA we received three proposals last week we received them in two parts altogether which was a technical proposal and a price proposal we opened the technical proposals a team a group here at the airport is reviewing the technical proposals those technical proposal results will be reported on Friday in the the formal price proposal opening date this is a process we have to follow from the FAA so um Friday we will have pricing on the terminal integration project for the construction of that project um new security system um we are meeting actually tomorrow for a pre-construction meeting with the the contractor and the FAA and every and operations to get that project going over the next several weeks um South Apron already reported to that and under item one that's phase seven which we received the grant for we all start that in the spring um Chamberlain school everybody understands we received the grant for that um we had um have completed the review of the engineering fees and went through the independent fee estimating process and record of negotiation and we settled on a price to finish the engineering and get that project out to bid so we meet the deadlines of the grant and hopefully construction next summer for Chamberlain school um noise monitoring equipment um we are preparing the RFP right now for the installation or for the supply and installation of those monitors um that's that's moving forward right now um miscellaneous um I think uh pretty much all this right reported before with exception to as Marie mentioned um I went out for uh competitive proposals for the next three to five years for stormwater and UIC permit management that's sampling analysis and evaluation of outfalls around the airport by an independent firm I received um six proposals um and um the pricing looks very favorable very competitive um so we should see some good savings in that um the only other thing I wanted to mention was um over the last couple of months we we signed a long term lease agreement with a national weather service at the airport which included about a half a million dollars worth of improvements to their space so we're going through the design and the procurement process for hiring somebody to do that work um the engineering department is very busy any questions thank you but we accept the report and place it on file do I have a second second all in favor hi all right um we now have tellin if you have uh south burlington seat update okay the only thing um I have to update is that our meeting monday we did um have as an item but not for a huge discussion the uh noise compatibility plan and we were all asked to um review it and it send in our comments to Paul Conner and Kevin Dorn um and I sent in two um one was you know my understanding was that there might very well be some good um collaborative work with uh vermont gas systems and energy or efficiency vermont um and it isn't um mentioned in the plan and I don't know whether that's by design because the f a a it's not their money it would be some some additional money but the sense is that if you're going to you know go be going through all those houses and putting in windows and whatever it is you're doing it might be a perfect time to link up the owners um with opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of their home and use other money um to support that their own and maybe some grant money um and the second thing what was it um oh I I was a little could maybe confused or concerned with how the um process for kind of identifying the first homes that would be worked on I mean I understand you're going to do pilot which makes total sense and then you have to kind of check everything out to find out if it's a new build and it doesn't meet you know the standards are high enough in the new build that there's nothing the f a a will pay for but I just wanted to um suggest that we look carefully at you know those homes that have been dealing with the noise for the longest and are the oldest um housing stock as maybe being um earlier on the list of homes to be attended to and that's just you know the there's some language about how you you know really look at the three big communities Winooski South Burlington and Burlington and I just I understand wanting to make it fair but I also I just think there was another component that wasn't necessarily reflected in the report so so I don't know who else is going to send in comments but that's all thank you Helen if it's all right I can I can comment on a couple of those it's okay with me ask Jeff well it's fine so the the pilot program uh you're right is is um a strategic path to make sure that uh specifically houses within contour areas are identified based on what type of build they are year bill etc so that we can confirm eligibility along that entire contour line so we're looking at about 10 houses for that particular pilot program and then for the uh your your other question comment uh there thank you first of all for for getting I haven't seen it yet um from South Burlington I'm sure they're compiling which is great um so when we look at uh the bigger years which we're shooting for approximately 50 houses per year after this pilot program year we want to identify specific areas as as we outlined in the implementation plan based on the total essentially the total number of houses in each community and essentially a ratio within each community so if there's more houses in Winooski in that particular year more of that 50 house or the ratio 50 houses would go more towards Winooski versus South Burlington and then exactly what you said um although it's not identified exactly in those words if if you're closer to the airport with those ratios in mind uh you're you're most likely going to be contacted first theoretically those are the houses that have experienced those noise levels for a longer period of time uh so so the the we're hoping to and the FAA wants us to make sure that we're looking at the closest contour lines first again keeping in mind those ratios uh where where um the allocations would be different and then of course uh not everybody is going to be eligible as we continue to do the acoustical testing which that pilot program is going to help us out uh and identify those houses early on we still need to do the acoustical testing and testing throughout the the process we're going to identify houses that are not eligible and or what they could be eligible for um meaning one of the other programs that that are identified um uh i'd also want to just mention uh that we just received an updated noise compatibility program um uh record of approval uh you what you saw prior to that was a couple of weeks maybe a month um uh that Richard Doucette had recently approved about a month ago one of the things that we've been working on is specifically the sales assistance and purchase assurance some of the language in his record of approval mentioned that the the city or the airport sponsor needed to um those programs except for the insulation portion of it this updated record of approval removed the entirety of that language and and identifies that there's there's could be many funding opportunities including the FAA helping us for example purchase a house and helping with that funding the homeowner moves sound insulating insulating which again the FAA would help fund and then reselling the house prior the the old record of approval did not identify that funding opportunity for us now it is identified which is which is fantastic i'll make sure you get a copy of that as well great thank you gene looks like uh you're ready to tell us about the uh your director's report and it says the rapid testing facility which you've already spoken about a bit um so go ahead so we're real excited about that um you know the garner uh partnership is uh we believe it's a win-win for the community win-win for the airport and certainly the flying public um you know i think there's a lot of uh you know uh tension a lot of anxiety and uh this uh help us people uh feel more comfortable uh with you know what they may have run into it's just there's no rhyme or reason to it so uh we're hoping it will be successful so far it's been extremely successful uh we have used it at the airport personally um i was the you know the test dummy on the day of the uh the press press conference and which was nice and then uh we had part of my report will be telling you that we had the FAA come and they announced friday they were doing an inspection and uh it's interesting everybody wants to come to vermont because we're green but we don't want them because they're red and so we have this conversation and um so what we did is uh nick longo put together a program over the weekend um which is really challenging to have a discussion like this with the FAA um but uh i talked to gaela trell who's uh in charge of new england and let her know that we had some concerns and so we had our team tested and her team tested and uh so we felt like we were starting the inspection in a good and fair way plus we asked people to wear masks and all protective uh get up such as gloves and things so uh the inspection i'm not sure it just ended so i'm not sure how we did but i'm anticipating we did very well uh the team works really hard and we've had a very good year uh you know working painting um you know keeping surfaces clean uh i did a review with nick uh ladder portal last week and things looked really good out there so i'm optimistic uh that we did well we always learned something from these inspections and uh nick does a really good job um and his team you know communicating with the FAA we have had our uh fair share of uh you know activity here as i said with uh all the beta and uh you know being as busy as we've been there's you know been some interesting things that have happened and again nick has handled them and his team in the very best way uh but they do involve a lot of paperwork and uh so uh we will as soon as we get that report we'll give it to you all and i'm anticipating that something will receive in the next week or so um larry talked a lot about taxiway g the parallel taxiway i'm really excited about that that's going to be opening this year i'm thinking of doing a press release out there um i really believe you know it's been years in coming and to be able to go to one end of the airport to the other is going to be even if it's a blizzard i would like to have a press conference out there because it's a pretty big deal for efficiencies and uh it's a big development for the airport so um stay tuned for that if you're up to it um we also at the very end of the runway we have what we have for years have called the pit um we a few years ago we asked dirt to be stop leaving the airport and to go into our pit so we could make it something we're just finishing the elevations and things down there so we have about 34 acres um of good buildable area down there now and uh in the next two weeks it'll be the uh it'll be finished up and so it'll be something when you look at it it won't look like a rock quarry other than it'll actually look like a pasture so we're pretty excited about that and we used our own resources um you know to uh and I would say our deal making to keep our dirt here and use it for the benefit of the airport um we also have been working on some space downstairs we'll be moving the Burlington PD downstairs um and upstairs where their office is now is where the weather folks during our negotiation they asked for more space so they took the old police space and we've renovated the new uh police area and that was done by staff internally and they've done a really nice job uh making that a better and probably safer place for the police and it gives them a better location I think in the airport one there we've had more problems uh you know down by the rental car area um we so I'm excited about the weather contract we've been about two years in negotiating that uh Nick and Larry worked really hard and Shelby and Andrew uh getting us where we needed to be on that we came really close to losing it they were going to go down to the social security building and then a couple other spots in south Burlington um and then they ended up realizing they wanted to be here but uh there were other folks negotiating that were manipulating the process so we did win that battle and they'll be staying here for some time and we're excited about that um I don't know if any of you have been by the airport recently but the beta building is just outstanding there are about I think they put about five million dollars into it so far and it looks great outside it looks great inside it's just absolutely stunning to have that infrastructure here at this airport um and you know brought up to date but not at the cost to the airport and at the same time to have a partner as great as beta building electric aircraft I mean that's really really we feel so fortunate and they're doing a really uh you know they're hiring more people they're fixing up their real estate they have been terribly busy over the last few weeks meeting some of their thresholds and it's pretty exciting um we uh apron worked around the airport as Larry said is coming to a close and JetBlue will be going back in that again is another project we're just about you know at least around the terminal we're just about complete if you remember we were doing about six to eight hundred patches a year and now we have brand new concrete out there and again thanks to the airport team for working hard getting those grants and convincing that this was a good investment and they certainly have invested Burlington Vermont so we're pretty excited about that um today Nick Longo and yesterday did winter training with his team that's a pretty significant investment of time and effort and it's something that they do pre every snowstorm but uh you know we kind of are getting ready for that we believe it's within days we'll have the first opportunity to use some of our new equipment but we want to make sure that everybody was in sync Nick did a really good job um the VGS that Nick and Helen alluded to uh there will be a press conference we hope next week and to talk about the uh the relationship uh Helen I'm sure you will be invited as well as Mayor lot and um I know they're working on that um again I want to thank Nick Longo uh for uh working so hard uh to come up with a that solution as you all know we were stumbling you know you got 90 percent of the way there but we didn't have the 10 percent and certainly the airport doesn't have it so Nick really worked hard and with some community partners to secure this investment and bring people to the table uh that this would be a win-win for our community so I'm very very excited for next week for the details of this to be announced next week that will happen so we're pretty excited about that I talked to you about FAA we continue on the TIP project which is the terminal integration project as you know we secured ten million dollars for that and uh we have had conversations over the last couple of months um to get additional dollars and we're asking you know for another ten we're probably not going to get that we've been told but we will get I'm hoping um we'll get a chunk of that we've again Larry and Nick Shelby have worked really hard to talk to the FAA and convince them you know that this was a good thing for the for them to continue investing in they were pretty satisfied at the 10 million but we showed them you know that the rest of it is very needed to finish that project um we also have a new uh bit of history at the airport there's the Ethan Allen host cart that for years was at the Ethan Allen club and was housed there but it was one of the first uh firefighting apparatuses that we had in Burlington and that is now housed at the Burlington International Airport up on the second floor in the mezzanine and that came in today so we're pretty excited about that um another uh element is when you're out looking at the runway and you see any of our vehicles there's now LCD uh lighting uh LCD LED LED LED LED lighting which uh really really really bright and what it does it's something that Dave Carmen uh one of Nick's team members uh recommended last spring and we pulled it together and those are being installed this week so when there is a storm and you look at the LED um uh lighting out there it's uh blue and green um it's very bright it'll be easy for the tower on cloudy snowy days uh for them to see who's out there and what numbers are out there so that's a new safety feature at the airport here and we're real excited to see it working uh this winter um that is it good i just might add um i have flown out of btv twice in the last two months and i can attest to the cleanliness and um care that you have given to really make the place clean and comfortable and um feeling very secure about that um i i we did experience not being able to get a um an uber we could have it went from 15 dollars to know that isn't available and it kept jumping and at 65 i kind of said no we're not going to uh rent and get an uber for 65 so we went over and took a taxi but um that's kind of one of those uh fallout things i guess um you know at 11 o'clock at night there just isn't that much traffic if that ever happens again please let us know get the number of the uber or the taxi um that would be good to know that that's what's happening and who's doing it and i'll do it for 50 and i also used the um i got my covid test at the airport thank you so i have i'm gonna connect with them about one thing i think they should be aware of but because it's new and but anyway it was great and if you want to share with me i would love to help you out in anything that you need to do that we need to do to provide the best possible service over there it's a you know it's a daily learning opportunity you know for everybody but uh we want to be the best we can be and give the best service jean i have a question about that rapid testing facility um how many does it is it do passengers know that it's there and how they do and and if so what's the cost i'm i'm guessing it's not free no it varies and uh some people have insurance um and helen how much did you pay do you mind saying or no it was 175 dollars um but i apparently can um go to medicare and see how much of that they will reimburse i don't know how much they will i haven't gotten my receipt yet um but the i don't know jeff i don't i didn't get involved in their pricing and how people will know i actually had a meeting with them today is they will um all the screens at the airport will be populated and i asked them for 16 two by three signs for the the jet bridges and for you know the common areas just so that people would know they're there otherwise they probably would not know unless you looked at my facebook page but um you know uh or the airports but we will have it on our splash page we've been waiting for them to give us the approved package and we haven't received that yet okay um any other questions for gene now we have commissioner items anybody have any items they'd like to bring up i i've got a couple go bill okay uh there was a council work session on the public right to know it was very enlightening of course it applies to both our airport staff as well as the commission perhaps it's time for us to get a refresher course in the public right to know law what the airport does what the commission does or does not do affects a lot of people in the area i think we can do a better job if we're more familiar with this law they deal with many important items like agendas meeting minutes ejection session and what constitutes an emergency meeting that's one item second item uh we had a i think nick referred to a consultants report a week ago and uh i was the only commissioner there no other commissioners were were present nick is there going to be another presentation of that that had to do with the master plan the facilities short term development that was important information and i was the only commissioner there is there another way that the commission can be can be informed if they're not so because we get a vote on that i assume yeah so all of that included the recorded presentation the zoom presentation is on our website at btv masterplan.com so you can view the the video as it occurred last week all three meetings the the regional the technical advisory committees as well as the public meeting that was our final public hearing for the master plan and the we're collecting comments and we'll continue to collect comments especially from municipalities on adjusting some of the items in the master plan but that essentially was the the wrap up to the to the uh or the conclusion to the master plan process well can can you send that uh uh link to the to the commission i think absolutely it's it's important that we all look at that and understand that too bad we didn't have the input as to some of the questions but that's the way it is so you can do that all right if you would i'd appreciate that and i'm sorry i was going to ask nick how long is the uh comment period we didn't set a time frame uh we still have quite a bit of work to finish up our internal documents as well um so we worked with the regionals and and the users of the airport so we have we have uh well over a month before we we can collect some some items and and incorporate them into that documentation um obviously we don't want to extend it too too long okay and finally uh i would suggest that the staff work more closely with us on information uh commissioner tim george has requested that the commission get a heads up on news releases before it gets to the public yes i know there are other elements involved the commission ought to be uh recognized as a member of the team we ought to be informed as about some f-35 issues when that's appropriate and i'm wondering about who calls the airport with noise complaints and where they live i think south burlington might be interested in that information and certainly i would i'd like to see us get a monthly report on who complains about uh noise and where they live we used to get a monthly report on airfares but that went by the board but this report on noise complaints of you would be i think valuable to us in the long run but that's all i have for now go at me if you want no bill i don't think so um before we adjourn i think the next meeting would be the 18th of november that's the third wednesday jeff anybody any comments on what i said no i didn't hear anybody jump in there bill that oh no i would love to have the noise complaints and i think that's that's good um i think whatever information um press releases and so forth is important and um i had one more question i've forgotten and wanted to know how many pounds of potatoes were harvested from the um four forty four hundred four hundred oh wow thank you very much i don't know if everyone's aware but the garden was supporting um the food shelves in the area one of which was the south burlington food shelf and i thank you thank you for calling us yeah i'm sorry go ahead jeff uh wondering if um people that looked at their calendars yet about the 18th the november 17th the next meeting no 18th okay i think it's the 18th is a wednesday okay i'm around so we'll set it for now and if it needs to change i'm sure hannah will okay hear it out for us over your journey you'll have a second thanks everybody thank you all thank you appreciate your time yep sorry about question we got 99 people in the chat did we get bombed or whatever they call it


Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in our Palo Alto Studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great conversation here with entrepreneur, founder and CEO of Articulate. CUBE alumni was just on theCUBE at our SuperCloud 4 event talking about the cloud and AI with Intel. Now he's the founder and CEO of Articulate, a hot new company that was launched formerly from Intel, an intellectual property assigned to a startup and funded by Intel and digital bridge, Arun Sabrinian, who's here. Arun, great to have you coming on theCUBE and congratulations on your new venture. John, thank you so much for having me here again. It's nice to be interested as a founder, entrepreneur, founder, because just recently you were at Intel as a big company guy. Formerly Amazon Web Services. And again, you're on theCUBE with SuperCloud. You kind of knew this was happening and kind of smiling all the time. I knew something was up with you. Thanks for coming on. No, thank you. Thanks for having me. And it's been quite an exciting time. We launched on January 3rd officially and it's been quite an interesting reception both right after the launch and see years as well. You know, it's really an exciting time Arun. You had one of the most prolific comments that Dave and I have been repeating from SuperCloud about thought experiment. If, you know, if AGI was here, it would know we know it, therefore it's not here. It's really an exciting time for businesses and entrepreneurs with this AI wave coming because it really is impacting up and down the stack. SuperCloud, you got super chips. The middleware is changing. You see AI Ops, I just see the conversation recently with a VC former executive around how AI Ops is going to change, how software gets built and how infrastructure is going to be run. And with the skills gaps, we're going to see a lot more self-driving infrastructure if you will with AI. And then the paradigms are shifting. You're starting to see things flip. You need infrastructure to run the apps. Now apps is the data, data needs it. So you're seeing a new paradigm, not just on the trends, but in the architecture. And I think the enterprise specifically is most disrupted. This is what you guys are doing. Explain, articulate, premise. Describe the transaction. Intel has this IP that you started. Take us through the story. Absolutely. So we started this, not necessarily trying to go build a platform, right? So we started this because, even inside Intel, to go help solve customer's problems, right? And the problem that we're trying to solve was how do you get JNAI into enterprises safely and at scale? And enable enterprises to move really, really quickly so they can build applications fast, right? So that is really the problem we're trying to solve. Now, when we got into it, it was pretty obvious that you not only have to go enable them to say, build a large model or deploy one model at a time, you actually have to help them go from the bottom most layer of the stack, which is the infrastructure layer, move up to the data layer that takes care of all of the different data elements that are required for your JNAI engine, and then get to the model layer that we think about, it's not just a model, it's a collection of models. And not only our premise, our whole thesis that we've now validated multiple times over is, model is a means to an end. You need to have multiple models working together. We actually call that model mesh. That's our most proprietary technology that we've launched with. And then it is really around giving customers ready to use application level APIs. What I mean by that is, if you ask a question, say, take a simple question, like say, you want to be able to search for something. Now, just that search alone, you go into it, has to hit like 15 different APIs, come or collect all of that, and then give application developers something for them to use. Think of all of the different complexities that has to go through all these four layers, vertically optimize it, that's really what we did. So you're an enterprise software company. Okay, so I'll get to the business model in a second, but you're targeting the AI market application builders who have a lot of data sitting around. They want to essentially get up and running your shortcut, a fast path to getting applications running with data. So data is the source, you build the software, training, fine tuning, inference, all built into the platform. It's a platform. And I deploy it on premise. So my developers can code with the data. Is that right? So that's absolutely right. The only additional make to that is on premise for us is both on-prem, like so an actual on-prem data center, or the cloud, right? So, but even in the cloud, we run entirely inside the customer security perimeter, right? So what I mean by that is, say if you're running on Amazon, we deploy into your VPC, right? Which is slightly different from most other players because we are both a SaaS provider, you talked about the business models, we'll get into it. We are a SaaS-based business model, but then we are kind of an on-prem deployment model. That's one side of the story. The other side is when we say we deploy, we actually enable our customers to deploy. We are not hands-on keyboard deploying into your environments because that also can get intrusive with respect to security, right? So, and we had to do take this hard step upfront because that's where we started with, right? Most of the customers we're dealing with are Fortune 1000 companies. Okay, so tell me the market opportunity. What market are you targeting? So I'll give you a layer of the landscape, right? So I mentioned this briefly the last time I was here in Cuba as well. Think of the biggest and best models that are out there. Any model that's out there that you want to name has been trained on the open public dataset that's out there, less than 5% of the world's data. The 95% of the world's data that is dark, that's our opportunity. And not only that the data is dark, it's going to continue to stay dark. No enterprise is going to go put that out there for somebody else to build models with. But not only that, think of the last decade where the amount of money that's been spent in data and AI transformation activities, depending on which ever report you believe, whether it's McKinsey or BCG or Bain or anybody else's reporter IDC, it's a universal consensus that between 8 to 11% of those projects have actually gotten to the outcome they promised initially. Flip side of that is 90% haven't gotten to production. Finally, we have a piece of technology that can actually get maybe 50, 60, 70% of those projects to production. That's the opportunity that we are going after. And it's also not something where you go and hire an army of data scientists, an army of, say, consultants, and then wait for three years before you get an outcome. What's the alternative? Okay, I'm an enterprise server. I think there's a lot more opportunity. I think the beachhead is enterprises who want to get into AI business. So their alternative is to build code from scratch. Build code from scratch, or imagine going after 100 or 500 different options trying to figure out which pieces actually fit together, trying to understand which models are good. Somebody tells you you need a large model. Somebody tells you you need a small model. But then today the conversation is predominantly around models because they are the coolest thing. But the problem is there may be 10, 20, 30% of the solution. 70% of the solution is actually going and figuring out how do you close the last mile into the delivery gap, which nobody tells you. And then you get into it and realize that you have two years and millions of dollars spent before you can get your first outcome. So we're going into the dark data you mentioned, the enterprise. They have enterprise out there that has all this data. It's a vendor, they have their own proprietary, not proprietary, it's their data. They speak vendor. That's their company language. Then you got, you have information that's their information. Then you got information that people know about in the market, customers, third party, and then you got analysts. How do you guys train that data? What's the, are you training it on? Think of. Are they training it themselves on their own data or do they have to mesh with other data sets across train? Very good question. So let me like talk in three buckets, right? So think of it as the open world data set that's already out on the internet. That is the world knowledge data. So in one way, shape, or form, you need some way to get that information. Most of those models out there, either you get a proprietary model or you get a model of your own. You can have that. And the reason why some companies are proprietary, you mean like open AI? Like open AI or any of the other companies that are out there. The large language, the big ones. The big ones. Or you can do open source models and then fine tune it for yourself, right? So that's your own model. The reason I say large companies will need something like that is the regulatory landscape that's evolving. You need to have more and more control over what you put into your own environments, what you can actually deliver to your customers. That's one bucket. The second bucket that's only now basically nascently evolving is what I call domain specific models. So the model that understands that particular domain, right? So it might still be from open information or nearly open. So we have the cube model. We know we speak cube. B2B tech, jargon, Kubernetes. So that's the domain model for cube. Yes, right? So like for example, everything related to infrastructure, everything related to cloud, that would be the cube specific model. And then, but that's also cube industry specific model. Then you get into actual cube model, which is your own proprietary data, your interviews, your backend conversations, the team that actually puts the show together. That information also needs to get codified into a model for you to then go and say, look, I will be able to go deliver. We could use this. We would be a customer. Absolutely. So I think you have a lot of markouts. I think there's going to be a surprise. It'd be interesting as we progress through the journey, what emerges as opportunistic white space that you didn't see. Someone becomes a data aggregator overnight, uses your software to kind of create a new in fact that I'm smiling because that's kind of already starting to happen. So we were in stealth for a long time, partly because we were also very careful about saying, look, we need to be able to deploy this in production, have customers ready to be able to talk about it before we can actually go, say launch that this is actually real. We've done that in multiple verticals, right? So you can see that on our website as well. But really one of the largest financial services firms, not only took our platform and deployed internally, they actually went to production with their applications over the holidays, right? That's something really fast. Very fast, right? So one of the biggest advantages is we say, we don't do POCs, we do only production pilots. The difference is scale, right? The reason for that is it's super easy for anybody today to go do a demo with a few hundred documents or a few thousand documents. Anybody can go do that. But jumping from that to say tens of thousands of documents or hundreds of thousands of documents or millions of documents, completely different ballgame. Our production pilot starts from there, right? So I'll give you some simple metrics, right? Take the latest demos that anybody shows in their own say conferences, cloud conferences. They're dealing with millions of tokens, right? That's the demos that are being shown. Our production pilots at a bare minimum are 10 to 20 billion tokens. That's the production pilot and that's deployed in six to eight weeks. Do you have headroom? You've got scale headroom, no problem on the future, future-proofing thing. Yes. Well, so we think that it's just getting, yeah, so for enterprises to get in, the reason why you need to go to that kind of scale is any enterprise of reasonable size would have these kinds of volumes before they can start giving meaningful answers, right? So that's the main important thing. All right, so let's get into the business side of things just to get on the record here. So Intel had the IP, you were incubating it, you're doing all this cool stuff. You realize, hey, we can build software to help accelerate people's journey. Pat loves it. They're all looking at this, hey, there's an opportunity. So you guys, spin-outs of weird work has got all kinds of corporate, Intel's big conglomerate is what's Intel's relationship. So just to get it right, let me get the facts right and you tell me if it's right or not. You have intellectual property that was assigned to a new company that you're the founder and CEO of because you incubated it. Intel signs the intellectual property so they let it go and they get equity for that and they give cash investment. So let me take me through the transaction real quick. So first of all, the premise of the transaction, right? Let me just give you a little bit of the premise because so the field is moving so fast and also the need from enterprises is massive, right? So everybody wants to go get this done because they're seeing that as a core differentiation. However, we also have to meet customers where they are and this is a software play first and foremost. Now it will have a massive pull-through effect for all hardware manufacturers including Intel but we have to be cognizant that customers will have to be the ones making the choice. Of course we are optimized on Intel, we'll continue to stay optimized on Intel but we are also hardware agnostic and we're cloud agnostic. That's one of the selling points. So that's the premise of the story. Now if that is true and we're also going and deploying to customers already upfront, we're already optimizing across the board for customers, right? Now, the IP that the software was built in Intel but then Intel being an investor, transition the IPO to the new company, the new company is completely independent, we in some ways have to own our own destiny moving forward. Exactly, welcome to the party. So Intel doesn't really have, it's not Intel companies, it's completely independent. It's a completely independent. Digital bridge is another company that put money in so you have another investor. That's right. You're a director, it's a startup, you've got funding. Yes, we actually have several investors that we've named publicly, some investors we've not named publicly. So for example, FinVC, FinCapital, or GS Holdings or Communitas Capital, lots of the investors came together and it's a completely independent company, it's unlike a venture backed company. The Cube capital never got a phone call. Next time, keep us in mind. Great to have you on SuperCloud and again, this is exciting news. So I want to get back into the business model. Business transaction, it makes total sense. Congratulations, you're an entrepreneur. Welcome to the, you're out in the wild. Get a friend for yourself. You got a friend here in the Cube, we'd like you to be doing. How do you make money? What's the business model? What you're thinking around? How are you going to deploy this? Consumption, how it's deployed? How customers engage with the software? How, what's your charge for it? Take us through the economics. Absolutely, right? So this is, from the business standpoint, it's a SaaS business model. And what I mean by that is it's really a subscription based business model. And we offer what we call two different bundles, so the first bundle is what we would call Express Bundle, which really gets people quickly started and then go off on scale. And this also aligns with our overall philosophy that look, if somebody tells you that the only way for you to get into JNAI with transformation is you have to build your model, I think you'll have to rethink who you're getting your advice from because there's three steps. You think that's bad advice, getting something, build your own model. What does that mean? What does that even mean? Yeah, so build your own model, I would say is the third step in a very long three step journey. And the reason for that is, first and foremost, you have a lot of data. Can you first figure out what you can do with the data if you had a JNAI engine with you? So there is probably about 70% of your use cases that doesn't even require a fine tuning or a full blown pre-training yet. You can tackle a significant amount of use cases there, right there. Now, most other of your competitors would also be able to do that. They have their own data, they can go do that with any number of different off the shelf components to go do it. The next step is okay. There are some use cases I cannot solve just by using my data with an existing set of models. That's when I go start fine tuning for specific tasks. I'll get to maybe the next 20% of use cases. The last 10% of truly differentiated use cases are the ones where you need to pre-train. Now, you cannot jump to that step directly. You need to be methodical about how you go there. And the other piece is you need to be able to get business value as you are moving there. It's not a, and by the way, moving from the first step to the third step, every time you probably jump order of magnitude in terms of how much investment you need to make. So you need, if you're getting 10x in return, you need to know what you're going and applying it for. Yeah, and so let's get into some of the tech and the secret sauce. I think you're the good transition point there. It's not trivial. I mean, it's kind of trivial but not trivial to actually make something work on a model basis. You got to take a lot of steps. There's a lot of things to do. It's like a sausage factory came to get ugly. It gets dirty. So I guess the question I have is, is that what are people doing now? Cause I see that same thing. And you mentioned model meshing. One of the things that CUBE research put out was the power law of how you see specialty models coming out. My thesis I've been putting out there for over a year now is that model integration will be a big part of, okay, model mashups, I call it. Maybe the old web 2.0 mashups. I see models integrating with each other. Is that what you mean by mesh as a neural network mesh? Or I mean, explain the mesh. Absolutely, right? So it's a model mesh itself as one word is our trademark, but really what we mean by model mesh is it's a collection of models. Some of them are LLMs, some of them are not LLMs. And then there is a decision layer on top of it that decides what to do based on the inputs that are coming in and also based on the reactions from the customers, right? So it's that dynamic system that has to decide what to do. And the reason you need that is, the same person even asking the same question out of the same data set, the same corpus, might want different answers at different points in time because their context has changed. And assuming that one large mega model would somehow be able to answer all these questions is, in my opinion, a pipe dream, right? So you need to be able to collect different pieces. The other one is any vertical that you go into, if you're solving the hardest problems, not the simple problems that everybody seems to be tackling, but the hardest problems, you also cannot ignore that particular domain. So I'll give you a specific example, right? So take financial services, for example, and you're trying to go do, say, even actuarial models. You need an LLM or a set of LLMs to go understand unstructured information coming in, combine that with structured data, but then you also have to make sure that the existing models that are validated, verified over decades, don't get forgotten. Now, if we try to go build yet another model for it, first of all, it's never going to catch up with existing models. Second, it's a waste of time. Why can't we merge the two worlds together? Then you actually increase your confidence, increase your pace, and can get the advantages without losing the accuracy. Does that solve the hallucination problem? Or makes it more higher quality? It definitely makes it more higher quality, but the hallucination problem is acute when you try to do everything with a model. When you start putting guardrails with multiple models, when you start putting guardrails with checks and balances, the problem kind of automatically goes away because you're grounding it with data, and then whatever output comes out, you're again grounding it with the existing models. Okay, so let's take, what's a secret saw? So if I understand this correctly, I have data, I got cube data, I got all this data. I drop it into articulate platform, and then I can start building apps. Yes. How does that work? Take us through the secret saw. That's the secret saw of that software. And then how does that deploy? How do I get apps out quick? What do I do? Is it a language, is it a framework? So the beauty of this one is the language and the framework is all as standard as it gets. So whatever application programming language you're using, you continue to use that.  Most of those APIs are as standard as it gets, right? So it's a standard REST call or a standard GraphQL call, and you're just basically building your application on top of it. We take care of actually deploying the product into your environment. We also give you tools to make sure that the data pipelines that are needed to come into the platform is all clean. However, I also want to be clean that every enterprise we go into also have their own data platforms. We are not here to replace your data platforms. It's purely connection. Like a Databricks, Data Lake, or Snowflake, or whatever. Any of those things. So the connections would automatically be made so there is no. It's just a data pipeline. It's a data pipeline with as minimal replication of data. And I want to be careful there, because if you have a large amount of data sitting in a relational database, there's no reason for you to replicate it. The only thing that'll come into an articulate platform is the metadata around what data you have, right? And that's something else that you asked about white space that's already evolving. That's where it's also evolving. I'll come to that in a bit. But in terms of what customers have to do, it's about connecting the data in through our APIs so that the right amount of information comes in. But the connections back to your original data streams are intact, so we don't replicate anything, right? And then everything you need for your application is automatically pre-configured and then delivered for you.   That's the premium bundle where you can, we use the premium bundle to build our Express Bundle. How much are they paying for this? What's the price? Our promise to our customers, and we've stood true today, and we think that we can actually do that over the long term, is today we are three to five times cheaper than any platform out there that if you have to go do it yourself. And this is the total cost, not just the software cost, but the software cost plus the people cost that you need to deploy the systems in place. Now, the three to five X Delta is something that we have not just saying it for the sake of saying it. We've done this multiple times, where we've told our customers. What are the competitors that are out there doing an Accenture and some of the consultants, or is it more? So not really. So this one comparison is with OpenAI, with, say, with Google Vertex, or with Jumpstart, Anthropic, Bedrock, like any one of those players. If you have to go do the same application, to build an application in production, you're an alternative to Bedrock then. Absolutely. So I would say Bedrock is more of an ingredient, to be honest, because that's the model layer, the piece in the model layer. So who's cooking the meal here? The developer, right? So if that's an ingredient, I'm thinking about it on premise. You have to actually go do all the work, right? So you have to do the work on the infrastructure layer. You have to go do the work on the data layer. You also have to do the work on the API layer. All that is what we are taking away. To borrow Amazon's own terms, we take away the undifferentiated heavy lifting. And you compete with Bedrock and make it easier. I mean, look, I believe in, you know, we've said- It's also a partnership, right? So for example, we don't have a problem partnering with Bedrock, where the model deployed in Bedrock actually gets deployed into it. That's not the problem there. Well, the problem that we're seeing in the market is production workloads aren't yet in the cloud. They're still figuring out what do I got here. Some of the alpha developers are going fast and they're getting in there. We're seeing that. But to your point about this inflection point, we've been saying it in SuperCloud. I keep saying it again from the shout, shouting from the highest mountain I could find, that this is like the web. I mean, this is so early. And that what's coming is more innovation. There's white spaces developing. You've introduced a new paradigm. To me, it reminds me of not to date myself, but it sounds like the old developer kits.   It's got middleware. It's got hardware. This sounds like it's a development kit for data and AI. Is that so? So think of it as close. So you're very close.  It's great for somebody making choices for themselves to learn, but imagine an enterprise where they have to go to a production workload in eight weeks or 10 weeks and imaginable for them to go do that. That's really what we're abstracting, right? Yeah, and the thing also that's coming out of all of our conversations, certainly it's been great on theCUBE to kind of horizontally get the conversation space around AI nailed down as the data is the new mode. Data is the competitive advantage. Data is where the value is. And back to your point about dark data, implying that enterprise have all this data. It's not yet indexed. And not necessarily they want to be indexed. You know, I see people saying, I want my own model. And okay, now I want to maybe put a wall around that or firewall it or do something, bad word, but protect it. And then integrate it into other data to see how you can actually build applications faster. And not only that, the notion of having just one model to make sure that everything you do in your enterprise is actually replicable is also a little funny, right? You need to be able to expand beyond the notion of just one model. It's like magic and chemistry. It's like the mad scientist dropping stuff into the mix.  You know, waving your hand and magic's happening. So that speaks to that integration, you blend data. This is not, I mean, common. I mean, data alchemy has been around in some use cases, but with neural networks and now data is not available. That's not a conventional wisdom in the data management world. Not really. And also what we call data is data in the traditional sense and also institutional knowledge. Right, in a lot of sense, the institutional knowledge is not really captured properly. And think of this as a level playing field where you can capture unstructured institutional knowledge. Somebody's offhand comments come into the place, but then you can actually set, okay, this is coming in from a 30 year veteran. Pay more attention to that. And all of the structured information coming together, you can mix it together into your own unique company platform. It's interesting. Arcubee, I can actually go in and find out who's smarter.  And I've seen a lot. I mean, going back multiple generations of collection points, but I got to ask you architecturally, we're covering things from KubeCon, which is cloud native, Amazon re-invent, all the cloud players, now AI and big data, since a dupe and, you know, the cubes 13 years, we've seen everything. This is about like, okay, the architecture is impacted now. And everyone out that I talked to is like, we got to re-architect our enterprise to support cloud distributed edge because the data equation is changing, compute and now the infrastructure is changing. And yet there's not enough platform engineers out there. One, that's just on the infrastructure side. So there's a whole opportunity there. And then on the LLM side, this does not enough coders that can, can sling APIs and do rag, retrieval augmentation generation, as well as actually figure out what to train. What do I deal with data? Data engineering is emerging as a huge issue.  So I would say in one sense, the architecture is emerging, but not necessarily completely changing. And the other sense, we finally have a glue, think of it that way, that can actually connect the different disparate architectures that have evolved. So we've gone from the edge to the cloud, to data lakes, to data warehouses, to lake houses. And what I call, if you start putting data without thinking about what you're doing in lake, data lakes or lake houses, you end up with data swamps. We actually have an opportunity to take advantage of all of that because finally you have a layer that understands unstructured data and structured data equally well. And the notion of, I mentioned this in the CES talk before, there is some amount of fear saying, oh, this is going to replace developers and all that, but to your point, It's enabling developers. It's enabling developers and imagine the number of new developers we need to get all these applications deployed. I think your point about the data swamp has been around, that's been a cliche for years, about going back to the Hadoop spark transition, obviously data bridges using that lake house and data swamp example. But think about the concepts. I've been using chatGPT to clean up a bunch of old email lists. Go out and take in to all the G-Mails and proton email and just, it just doesn't like that. I think that the swamp goes away with AI because you say, hey, go clean the swamp. Yeah, and you can clean it when you need it. It's not something that you pre-clean and then somebody else does it. Everybody can do it themselves. That's on one side of the story. And to your other question of emerging architectures, so you're going to see an explosion of applications developed from folks who may not necessarily be traditionally called application developers. That's really the white place we are seeing emerging because one of the applications you've already deployed with a security company is they have gobs and gobs of structured information about everybody's security profiles. But then when somebody asks a very natural languagey question of, hey, how many of my instances are open to the internet? Trying to find the exact information in the right table is the connection that LLM actually enabled to do. And our platform is going and doing them where you can improve the number of relevant responses by not just 5%, 10%, but by an order of magnitude. I mean, your point, everything's being smarter. Does this software work with this cluster? Yes or no? I mean, this stuff's going to be figured out on the fly. I mean, smart data, everything's getting smarter and productive if the data is smart. If you've got clean data or using the data, what's your take on this whole smarter intelligence? What's the change that's going on? So in fact, we are trying to get that into a lot of the enterprises as well. The notion of I need to have perfectly clean data before I can go do something is slowly going away. You of course need high quality data, but that doesn't mean that you need highly structured quality data. If you feed it bad information, don't get me wrong. It's going to get chunked out. But if you have information that is highly unstructured, you can use an LLM to actually get your answers much, much faster. Just like the classic learning machine concepts back in the day. If you have enough core data that seeds out the concept, you can figure out and infer and train out the bad data. Yes, so we are seeing two things emerge. So there was a study that just got concluded by BCG and Wharton and a few other teams as well, where if you give this piece of technology to experts, like real experts, they actually go much, much faster. You give it to folks who are in the middle of the pack. So they're not experts yet, but they're also not newbies. They also do really well because they have discerning capability. You have to be really careful how you give it to people who are really new to the field. Because what happens is they get an over-reliance on these tools before they develop a discerning capability for themselves. And that can get very dangerous, because then you don't know whether the thing is giving you good answers or bad answers. You don't know if it's grounded or not. There, the experiment that was conducted was even if you simply ask the question, have you thought about the answers that came back? Yes or no in every answer that they're submitting back? Changes the mindset completely. OK, the question that's burning for me is, can I get my hands on the software? Absolutely. So the- How much is it going to cost me? Are you going to break the bank? Is it in the queue before it? Absolutely. Or small? Yeah, yeah, so absolutely. So the affordability- That's not for the rich. This is a democratized platform for us really in the early days for us. We are more interested in getting into specific verticals and showing a big difference rather than actually making a massive profit in the beginning. And the reason we are doing that also is we are truly wanting to solve the toughest problems in every industry. And the reason for that also is that's what is the most sustaining. If I go after a customer success use case, which is very useful, there are 100 players doing that and they'll probably do it better. We don't need another Grammarly. We don't need another word processing. Yeah, they do it well. What they do is- Yeah, they got that nailed. They got that nailed. We can have that. But the harder problems are what needs to get solved right now and that's really what our course is. I think the domain-specific data that drives real unique questions that could have reasoning answers to them that uses retrieval and data effectively is going to, where the value is going to shift, that's in the specialty models. That will be part of the training apparatus and the meshing and the interaction. Interactions, right?  We have a small startup, but it's a very successful security startup. As a use case as a customer, we also have a large government as a customer already using it. So it's as diverse as it gets and it's really around us going into fields that we think the problems are hard enough to solve. We tend to run into tough problems. Arun, great to see you and it's exciting to see. When I saw the announcement, I saw you on there. I was like, wow, okay. Now I know why we were so exciting to have you on theCUBE on SuperCloud and it's a great opportunity. I think you're going to see some things emerge. I think it's going to be a real accelerant for people to get up and running. Again, in all these inflection points, the simple equation is reducing the steps it takes to do something, make it as simple, fast, and easy to use and intuitive. You do that as a winning formula. And make it affordable. Affordable, yeah, that's independent of product. You do those, that's a utility. We're in a market of scale and speed. Sounds like a great product. Just final note here. Put a plug into what you're working on. What's your plans for the next year? Obviously you get the funding, independent company, so you don't have the real purse strings of Intel, but they're not going to let you go under, but you're not like an Intel company.  What are your goals? What are you looking to hire? What's your objectives? Absolutely, right? Our objective really is to go after specific verticals and make a big impact in each of those verticals. And the verticals I'm talking about really are also all on our website, but really we're going after, of course, a government is a large space. Financial services is a large space. Aerospace is another large space. We're getting into telecommunications and of course, semiconductor because of where we come from. And in each of these places, it's really around showing that it can be done. The toughest problems can be solved in a meaningful way and in a way where the customers can get business outcomes quickly. That's really what I would consider success. Scale is something we will continue to scale. And as an early stage startup, we'll continue to double or triple. That's just in the DNA of that. And of course, Intel, a motivated third party, you get more workloads in AI, workloads in cloud, more chips to make it go faster and scale up with the performance. In fact, that's one of the biggest pitch we actually have already started getting customers to start using massive amounts of accelerators that they would have never used before because we put them in production. It's not just about a research team going and doing an experiment. It's in production, very different class of use cases. The app development market and AI is going to surge of the big topic up and down the stacks from super chips to super apps, got super cloud, super on-premise, super exciting. Arun, great to see you. And thanks for coming in again. Congratulations on the entrepreneurial venture. Welcome to Out in the Wild. No cover here, we will execute. Absolutely, John. Thank you so much for having me and you've always been a pleasure to talk to you. This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you. Yeah, great, great, super important. This AI trend is continuing to innovate and create an opportunity for entrepreneurs and businesses to create an environment where more intelligence and productivity will help humans in society. And this is the good side of AI, we're going to let it run. Of course, in theCUBE, we're always interested. Thanks for watching and we'll talk to you soon.


Hello, friends. I am Sanjay Gupta. I welcome you on Sanjay Gupta Tech School. In this video, I'm going to demonstrate how you can show all related records of parent on child itself. So we are going to use a feature that is known as single related list to perform this operation. So let me explain this scenario more clearly. So I'm opening account record and with account you can see various contact records are associated. So on parent, we have related list so that we can see the related contacts or related records. Now, if I open any contact, so let's say I'm opening demo contact. So on contact in details, we can see account related information like account name with which it is associated. But we are not able to see other contact records which are associated with this parent. So now we have one feature that is known as single related list that we can use to see the siblings. Like if this is the account and it is having five contacts. So all those contacts are siblings and this is one of that context. So if we want to display this sibling context on this page itself related to this account. So we can do that with the help of single related list. So you need to edit the page. So just after the implementation, you will have better understanding what I'm trying to explain. So here you can see related list single option is available. So I'm dragging and dropping it here. Here it is. So at right inside you can see you need to select the parent record with which associated records you can display and associated records we want to display as context. So I'm clicking on save and you can also click on activation so that you can choose or default app default or app record type and profile. So as per your requirement, you can choose these options as well. So it is saved clicking on back. So now on contact you can see the sibling contacts which are associated with a particular account. So account is Burlington Textiles Corp of America. So here you can see total five contacts are available. Now I'm moving to contact scrolling down. So here you can see context for parent account. So five contacts are available here and we are on contact. So these are all siblings, right, related to a particular parent. So if you click here, so you can see all those contacts. So this way on child, you can see all the related records to a parent record. So with the help of this related list single option, you can do this. So I hope you understood what I demonstrated you. So earlier what we used to do, we used to have related list on parent record only. But now that parent record related list we can have on child itself so that we can see what all related records like contacts on parent associated. So this is a good feature that you can use. So I hope you understood how we can implement this in Salesforce Lightning. So if you want to watch more Salesforce administration or other topics related videos so you can go to description of this video and you can. You can have the links of various playlist so you can follow them as well. Thank you for watching this video.