Okay, good morning, those of you who are here and also good morning to those who are online. We will begin. So we are going through the last few prophetic books. We have, we are kind of done with the entire whole testament and now we are looking at the minor prophets. So last week we stopped with Amos. So today we will try to cover Obadiah, Jonah and Micah, all right? So we'll begin with the book of Obadiah and before we begin the book of Obadiah, hopefully at least by the end of this week I will put up the final assessment. So again, just like the midterm assessment, this would be 50 multiple choice questions following the very same pattern, all right? So coming to the book of Obadiah, now Obadiah was basically from the Southern Kingdom. He stayed in the, he was born in the Southern Kingdom of Judah and he was not from any prophetic school. He was not the son of a priest or prophet. So he didn't have any high status, but he was an ordinary person chosen by the Lord to prophesy regarding the judgment against Edom, all right? So the book of Obadiah mainly focuses on the judgment which is going to come against the Edomites. Maybe we can look at about three verses which talk about the main crime that God accuses Edom of. So if we could have someone read out for us, Obadiah verses 11 to 13. Obadiah has only one chapter. So it's Obadiah verses 11 to 13 if someone could read out for us. In the day that you stood on the other side in the day that strangers carried captive his forces, when foreigners enter his gate and cast lot for Jerusalem, even you were as one of them. But you should not have gazed on the day of your brother in the day of his captivity, nor should you have rejoiced over the children of Judah in the day of their destruction, nor should you have spoken proudly in the day of distress. You should not have entered the gate of my people in the day of their calamity. Indeed, you should not have gazed on their affliction in the day of their calamity nor need hence on their substance in the day of their calamity. Yeah, so here the main allegation that God is making against these Edomite people is that you were so happy when the people of Judah were invaded when they were attacked. In fact, you tried to help the enemy and the Lord says, because of your attitude, because of the way you chose to take a stand against the people of Judah when they were being attacked, rather than helping them, you are happy that they were being attacked because of this attitude of yours. You will be judged is what God is basically saying in the short book of Obadiah. So now some people, it says in verse 12, is where it says that these Edomites rejoiced over the people of Judah in the day of their destruction. So what is this day of destruction that is being talked about over here? Which day of destruction happened when the Edomites rejoiced to see the people of Judah being invaded. So some people say, obviously this must be the Babylonian invasion. So when the Babylonian invasion took place, the Edomites probably rejoiced and they must have come and carried off the wealth of the people and all of that. But if we look at all of the historical records, we don't see anywhere, even in the secular writings, we don't see anywhere that when Babylon came and attacked Judah, they took the assistance of Edom or that Edom was involved in any way in the invasion. We don't see any such facts being mentioned anywhere. So most probably this day of destruction of Judah, which is being talked about over here, is probably not the Babylonian invasion. It was probably another kind of attack which must have happened at an earlier date. And so some commentaries will say that this is probably referring to the attack against Jerusalem, which was done by the Philistines and the Arabs in the 9th century BC. This is mentioned in 2 Chronicles chapter 21 verses 16 and 17. So in 2 Chronicles 21 16 to 17, it talks about how God allows the Philistines and Arabs to come and attack this city of Jerusalem. And so most probably the Edomites rejoiced at that time and the Edomites actually took advantage of the situation at that time. So maybe we can actually have someone read out for us 2 Chronicles chapter 21 verses 16 to 17 to see which invasion it was during which time the Edomites rejoiced and actually worked against the people of God. 2 Chronicles 21 16 to 17. So over the Lord stood up against Jehoram, the spirit of the Philistines and the Arabians who were near the Ethiopians. And they came up into Judah and invaded it and carried away all the positions that were found at the king's house and also his son and his wife so that there was not a son left to him except Jehoiah, the youngest of his sons. So here in 2 Chronicles 21 16 to 17, we learn that God was very angry with Jehoram and therefore he allowed the Philistines and the Arabs to attack Jerusalem. And in fact they are able to carry away a lot of the wealth and even in fact they're able to take away even his sons and wives as prisoners. So God allows this attack of the Arabs and Philistines to happen because he is angry with Jehoram. Why was God angry with Jehoram? It is because of the evil deed which he does. Now Jehoram was the son of Jehoshaphat. Jehoshaphat is, I mean if you know your Old Testament, Jehoshaphat is one of those examples of faith which is talked about in the Old Testament. Would any of you know who Jehoshaphat is and what great act of faith he did in Old Testament times? Something to do with 2 Chronicles chapter 20 which is regarded as very famous. So you guys really don't know your Old Testament at all. You need to maybe start meditating upon the Old Testament during your personal devotions so that you become more familiar because it says in the New Testament that the reason God put down the entire Old Testament for us is so that we would learn from it and you cannot learn from it if you have not even read it. So in 2 Chronicles chapter 20 we see that Jehoshaphat goes out to fight against the Ammonites and the Moabites not with a bunch of soldiers. The people leading the army is a bunch of singers who are going in front and praising the Lord and the battle is won just through praise and worship. So that is the great famous incident which we read about in the Old Testament regarding Jehoshaphat. A man of faith, a man of might, his son is Jehoram and Jehoshaphat willingly, gladly gives the throne to Jehoram. So after Jehoshaphat's death, it is Jehoram who comes to the throne. Nobody is trying to steal the throne from him. The throne is his but Jehoram thinks in his heart, in his evil heart he thinks, what if one of my brothers tries to take the throne from me? What if there is a threat to my power?  That is his attitude and so God brings judgment upon him. He allows these Philistines and Arabs to attack and they in fact have a great victory. They are able to take away a lot of wealth and at that time when God's judgment is coming upon Jehoram, the Edomites instead of feeling sorry for the people, instead of trying to support them and help them, they rejoice. In fact, they take advantage of the situation. They also come, they also steal some of the wealth. In fact, they try to help the enemy, they try to help the Philistines and Arabs by, okay maybe we'll look at that a little later, other things which they do which makes the Lord very very angry with them. So yes, the Lord judges Jehoram for his evil but the Lord is not pleased with the way the Edomites behave when this judgment is going on, all right, so which is what we see over here. Now Jehoram, he in fact goes on to die a very very horrible death. We will not get into the details of that but if you really want to know how he died, how terribly he died, he died so dishonorably that when people saw God's hand of judgment upon him, they did not have the guts to even give him a royal funeral.  He's not even given a royal funeral because the people can see that God's hand of judgment is upon this evil man. So Jehoram dies in that way. So this book of Obadiah is talking about God's anger and his displeasure at the way these Edomites behaved while God was judging Jerusalem at that point of time. And why is God so upset with Edom for behaving in this way? It's basically because the Edomites and the Israelites are supposed to be brother nations. So God is basically upset because one brother nation did not show kindness to the other brother nation when the attack was going on. Rather than trying to help them, rather than showing kindness and mercy, the Edomites take advantage of their brothers and the Lord is displeased with that. And this is what God says regarding these Edomites. So the structure of this little book in verses one to nine, God talks about how they are so proud. They think that nothing can ever defeat them. Nothing can ever overcome them. Maybe we can look at a couple of verses which describe their great pride. So if someone could read out for us verses three and four, we will look at how proud these Edomite people were. Verses three and four. The pride of your heart has deceived you. You who dwell in the collapse of the rock, whose habitation is high, you who say in your heart, who will bring me down to the ground. Though you ascend as high as the eagle, and though you set your nest among the stars from there, I will bring you down says the Lord. So the Edomites basically stay at a higher level in the mountains. They don't live in the valley. Their Edomite kingdom is in the mountainous regions. So any enemy which wants to attack the Edomites will have to go through the mountain passes, travel upward, climb upward to reach the Edomite cities. So which means long before the enemy actually reaches their gates, the Edomites can see the enemy approaching. So it gives them a great advantage. They can come and attack. They can prepare themselves for the attack which is coming. So you can't have a surprise attack on the Edomites. The Edomites are on top and they can see the enemy coming towards them from below. So this was a great advantage which the Edomites had. And in fact, at certain points where the enemy is trying to pass through a narrow ridges and trying to move upward, they can stand on top and throw large rocks and boulders on them and crush them. So the Edomites had this advantage and so they felt we are living on the heights. Nothing can touch us. And God says even if you were like an eagle, even if you were like the eagles which make their nests on the heights of the mountain cliffs, I will bring you down is what the Lord declares in this book of Judgment. So in verses one to nine, God talks about the pride of these Edomites. And in verses 10 to 14, God describes in what way they behaved against his people. So maybe we can read out verses 13 and 14. Here we know we can look at a little detail about what they did in that day, how the Edomites behaved when the Arabs and Philistines were attacking Jerusalem versus 13 and 14, please. Can I read, sister? Please go ahead. You should not have entered the gate of my people. In the day of their calamity, indeed, you should not have gazed on their affliction. In the day of their calamity, now laid hands on their substance. In the day of their calamity, you should not have stood at the crossroads to cut off those among them who escaped. Nor should you have delivered up those among them who remained in the days of distress. Thank you. So it says over here that these people, the Edomites, marched through the gates when the attack was going on by the Philistines and Arabs. They didn't just march through the gates to help them. They marched through the gates to take advantage of them. It says they gloated over them. They felt so happy. They were rejoicing that their brother nation is suffering. And it says they seized their wealth. So taking advantage of the helpless situation of the people in that day, they began to grab their wealth and steal from different houses. That is what these Edomites did. And then they go a step further, which I think was rather cruel. They wait near the crossroads. So all the people, the Israelites, who were escaping from Jerusalem and trying to run away from the surrounding areas, they are standing over there near the crossroads to capture them and then turn them over to the Arabs and Philistines, which is really very sad.  They have left behind their homes, everything. There's nothing in their hands. They're just refugees running. And here the Edomites are standing near the crossroads to grab hold of them and go and give them over to the enemy. That was the attitude of this brother, this brother nation, and therefore the Lord is highly displeased with them. In fact, Joel also goes on to mention this later. We could have someone read out for us. Joel chapter 3 verse 19. Yeah, Joel 3 19. So Joel also gives a prophecy and he says, one day Edom will be like a desert waste. Why? Because of the violence they have done to the people of Judah because they have shed innocent blood. So you have two, three prophets talking about what Edom has done and how God is going to judge them for their conduct. And then in the last portion of Obadiah verses 15 to 21, God goes on to say, not only am I going to judge Edom, I'm going to judge all the nations who have the same attitude of pride. Just like Edom, people who are thinking, oh, we live in the heights. Nobody can touch us. Nobody can bring us down. The Lord says, in the same way, I'm going to bring down Edom, I'm going to bring down all the nations which think that they are above me, that I know that I cannot touch them. So God speaks judgment against all of the nations in this last portion. And he says he will take action against them. There's something interesting that the Lord says in verse 18, if someone could read out for us, verse 18. The house of Jacob shall be a fire and the house of Joseph a flame, but the house of Esha shall be a struggle. They sell, kindle them and deliver them, and no server shall remain of the house of Esha for the Lord has spoken. So here, the Lord says in that day of judgment, Israel, or here he just uses the word Jacob and Joseph. Jacob and Joseph are basically implying that he's talking about the nation of Israel. He says Jacob and Joseph are going to be like fire. On the other hand, what is Esau going to be like? Or in this case, he's using the term Esau to refer to the Edomites, the descendants of Esau. So he says, what will the nation of Esau be like? They will be like stubble, that's the word for dry hay. If you bring fire near dry hay, what will happen? That very dry hay will immediately catch fire. It will be burnt up, not even a little bit of that hay would be left. So that is the imagery that God is using over here and is saying, you know what, I'm going to make my people like fire and when I bring them near the Edomites, they'll just be wiped out. They will be finished. So that's the judgment that God speaks against the people of Edom. So what actually happens to these Edomites? Later, when you have the Babylonians coming and attacking Jerusalem and taking away all the people of Judah as slaves, at that time, around that time in the 6th century BC, you also have them attacking Edom. So Edom is also attacked. In the same way, the people of Judah are taken away as slaves to Babylon. What is done to these people who are living in Edom, in the mountainous regions, they are taken as exiles and they are in fact relocated in southern Judah near the Mount Hermon. If you remember, we talked about this in our previous classes, the policy which they had, the Babylonian policy, they're going to take the people from their land and then put them as exiles in some other place so that people will lose their national identity and they'll all start thinking of themselves as Babylonian citizens. So that's the idea. So the people of Judah are taken away to Babylon. On the other hand, the people of Edom once they are defeated, they are brought and they are placed over here in southern Judah near Mount Hermon. So the Edomites who used to consider themselves an independent nation are now reduced to living in the place which they had looked down upon and now they are living as exiles literally over there near Mount Hermon in Judah territory which they had looked down upon once upon a time. And so as the generations go by at the time of the Maccabeans, one small time in Israelite history when the Israelites are able to regain the throne for a short temporary period of time. So during that time, the Maccabean king, an Israelite king named Hirkenus, when he comes to the throne, he forcibly makes all these Edomite people who are living around Mount Hermon, he forcibly makes them convert to Judaism. So they're not really true followers of Yahweh but under force they are forcibly converted to Judaism and basically it's from that lineage that you have Herod coming out so later on when you have the Romans coming and taking over this entire region, they appoint Herod as the king in this region to govern Israel and the people of Jewish people are not very happy to have Herod because Herod's background is Edom. His background is not Israelite background, he's an Edomite.  If you remember when we were covering the Book of Ezra, the people were a little sad when the foundation of the temple was laid because the old people among them still remembered the glory of Solomon's temple and how grand that used to look compared to that the second temple which they have now rebuilt, doesn't look very impressive and so they are very sad about that and so Herod, he says, I'm going to build a grand temple for you. So of course the main temple complex, the main temple as such is left alone because that is the holy place in the most holy place but all around it he builds these large marble buildings and he makes it so beautiful and it was considered like one of the wonders of the ancient world and of course in 7080 the Romans of course destroy all of that and today all we have is that platform which has left this huge platform on which you have a mosque resting right now. So all of this happens.  That is what happens to them because of the judgment which God brings upon these people. Now even as we are looking at the Edomites, maybe we should look a little bit at Esau as well because after all the Edomites come from Esau. Now we know there was a lot of rivalry between Jacob and Esau in the book of Genesis and if you look at that story and if you were to simply ask someone who doesn't really know the Bible stories much and you were to ask them in this entire story who is the villain, Jacob or Esau. I'm pretty sure someone would, I mean anyone who would straightforwardly say the villain is definitely Jacob.  Esau is the innocent party, he's the one who's been exploited. So Jacob was this really unpleasant evil person. It's one thing to steal the birthright from your brother but to go and deceive your own father who can't see. I mean you know old Jacob is now too old to be able to see properly and he's sitting over there aged. I mean would we do that to our aged parents? You know a person who can't even see properly and he trusts his children and this Jacob goes to him and says oh I'm Esau. I mean a very crooked person and God judges him nicely later on. When he goes and starts living with Laban, Laban gives him full treatment, the kind of treatment that he gave Esau, he gets triple that from Laban. You know God really knows how to make people reap what they sow. So Jacob is living over there with Laban and Laban is fully exploiting him. Yeah I know Jacob exploited his brother Esau a little bit but now Laban is fully exploiting Jacob and now he knows what it feels like to be exploited and now Jacob can't bear it anymore and he wants to come back to his home land. But if he comes back Esau is going to be waiting for him and what had Esau decided in his heart? He decided I don't want to hurt my parents but once they are dead I'm going to kill this Jacob for what he has done to me. So Jacob is scared to come back but he can't continue living over there because Laban has become a full torturer. He can't handle that.  So with that assurance he comes back and the way Esau behaves it's marvelous, it's amazing. You know a man who had been ill treated so much by Jacob, what does he do? You know in Genesis I think that was chapter 32 or chapter 33, I can't remember when that encounter happens between Jacob and Esau. You know Jacob is standing over there really scared, he's bowing down seven times to the ground trying to hope that you know maybe Esau will not hurt him and what does Esau do? He literally comes running to Jacob, hugs him, kisses him. He does not hold any grudgeness heart anymore. So Esau is actually you know portrayed in the Bible as a good person, as somebody who had learnt forgiveness, who showed kindness to someone who had ill treated him and we know we see more details of this later. I mean if you were to go into chapters 33, chapter 36 we get to know that Esau even though he had purchased some land in Seir, he continues to hold territory even over here in Canaan and so for a little while in fact it looks like Jacob and Esau stay together, you know they coexist together for a little while until of course in Genesis 36, you know Esau says we have both become such large families and our property is now so large we can't stay together anymore so I'll give up my you know my property over here and I'll move permanently to Seir. So he goes away. But the thing is you see Esau sets a good example for his children about how they should treat their cousins. Esau wanted friendly relations to continue between the Edomites and the Israelites. However the people of the descendants of Esau do not follow this practice. They choose to start behaving like enemies towards Israel that was never Esau's intention. Esau wanted to continue maintaining friendly relations but his sons and his grandsons and their descendants choose to take a very anti-Israel you know policy. So this is probably because Esau had one main failing which is pointed out in Hebrews 12. So Esau was a good man, he understood forgiveness, he showed kindness, they even stayed together probably for one or two years but when it came to spiritual matters Esau had absolutely no interest in spiritual matters you know I mean he gives away his birthright for a bowl of soup. For him spiritual things don't matter at all. In fact when he's getting ready to get married whom does he marry? He does not marry someone who is a follower of Yahweh.  So when it came to spiritual matters he was simply not interested in spiritual matters. So no wonder his sons and his grandsons and his you know descendants became so hostile towards the Israelites because they had no godliness inside them. So look at the lesson that we can carry away from this. Esau was a good man, a man that you can praise, a man that you can appreciate but when it comes to spiritual things he had no interest. Of what use was all his niceness and kindness when he lacked the spiritual principles which could have kept him in a relationship with Yahweh. So you see we know people like this right all around us and in our neighborhood. Good people you can't say anything bad about them but when it comes to spiritual matters they have no interest in the living god even when we share the gospel with them they're like oh you know all the requirements of Jesus are too high it's difficult. So they just reject Jesus and down the line it actually harms them you know. So we need to think about this it's good to be good but goodness alone is not enough. The godliness which only Yahweh can put inside a person when you have a personal relationship with him that is what makes a difference. So Jacob in spite of all his rottenness God brings him down to his knees to a position where he finally starts relying upon Yahweh and then God is able to bring a change in his life. So look at that there was one man Esau who was good but he had no interest in spiritual things and his you know future was just hell.  So in the end it's the spiritual matters which really you know make a difference where we end up how our descendants will be what our own future will be like in the end it's the spiritual things which matter just being a good kind person is not really going to cut you know it's just not going to make much of a difference. So we see this about Esau and his descendants so even though he was a good person because he could not you know did not have a walk with Yahweh and because he did not teach that walk with Yahweh to his descendants they turn into enemies of the nation of Israel and God speaks judgment against them. So the book of Obadiah is basically the judgment which God speaks against the Edomites. So even after so many generations I'm sure these two nations don't even look at each other as brother nations anymore there's so much enmity between them but in the eyes of God he still thinks of them as brothers and he says how could one brother nation behave like that against another brother nation. So in God's eyes relationships are very important you know we don't think about these things too seriously we think okay I know we're both attending the same church that man and I but you know he's somebody he has his own life I'm I have my own life but in God's eyes you and he are brothers so in case you do not have a right heart attitude towards that other person in the church in God's eyes that is serious in our eyes we may think of what is there I have my life that man has his life and he's treating me badly so I hate him we can't go around hating people like that from the family of God because in God's eyes he sees us as his family and we are brothers and sisters whether we like it or not so when when we have you know brothers and sisters who are very unpleasant not very nice to get along with we have an obligation to continue showing love and forgiveness towards them because in God's eyes these things are serious relationships are important to him so imagine after so many generations he's looking at Edom and is thinking look how this brother has behaved towards his you know other brother nation so the way God looks at us it's very different and we need to have that perspective and we need to correct ourselves if we have wrong attitudes and be more serious about how we treat our brothers and sisters in the Lord okay so that's one lesson that actually comes out from this entire story when we look at the background now after the book of Obadiah you would basically have which book now you mean after looking at the Old Testament you should be able to say it by heart you know in Sunday school they teach you the order of the books Genesis comes first and then you have Exodus and you have Leviticus you should be able to you know know which book comes after which kind of helps because then you can turn in your Bible smoke quickly and find the particular book you know that we are referring to so when I was in Sunday school and I was trying to learn the order of the Old Testament books one one thing which helped me was that it was easy to remember the major prophetic books you know that's basically because you know you have Isaiah Jeremiah and then you have you know LED you know lamentations Ezekiel and Daniel and then after that what to do you have Hosea so Hosea fine I told myself I'll remember that after that it was very easy because you know you have J, A, O and Jonah so in India I would tell myself J, O, Jonah you know God says to God no go over there so I just kind of remember it that way so we have just now talked about Obadiah so after Obadiah you would supposed to have Jonah after that would be Micah but you know let's just change the order a little bit so we'll look at Micah first and then after that we will cover Jonah all right so let's quickly get into the book of Micah you know I mean I generally don't say anything but really thank you for all of you who you know who keep responding here online you guys are great if I could you know if you guys could be here in the class it would have been really nice but thank you so much for always responding and putting your replies in the chat it's encouraging because it tells me that behind all those rectangular squares the real people sitting over there and actually attending the lecture and listening so thanks a lot for that so coming to this book of Micah now Micah was also from the southern kingdom he was from a place called Moreshet and he is asked to prophesy against both the northern and southern kingdoms and in fact he does his work of prophesying just about 10 20 years before the northern israel falls so you know his ministries around the last few years of the northern kingdom and this is what he says about his ministry Micah chapter three verse eight if someone could read out Micah three eight but truly I am full of power by the spirit of the Lord and of justice and my particular to check off his transaction and to Israel his sin yeah you know here Micah is speaking about himself and he says truly he says I'm filled with power with the spirit of the Lord and with justice and might to declare to Jacob his transformation to Israel his sin he's saying that his ministry is being done full with filled with power and filled with the spirit of the Lord I was just looking at that wording last night and I was thinking wow if my ministry could be like that filled with the power of the Lord filled with the spirit of the Lord if you have these you know your ministry will always stay on the right track because it's the Holy Spirit who will be guiding you and taking you in the right direction you will never go off track you know you'll never do a whole bunch of things which were not meant to be done by the Lord and you will not waste your resources you will not end up you know hurting people and all of that so Micah is a prophet who can confidently say that he is walking in God because of which he's filled with the Lord's power and he's moving in the spirit of the Lord and he has the same heart as God regarding justice and because of that he is full of might and he says you know even though the judge the words of prophecy that I'm bringing to you people are painful I am going to do it because I'm strong God has made me strong enough to speak out these words so you know I'm in our current environment where there's a lot of hostility towards us believers and you know here in our nation where we are criticized and condemned if we talk about our faith and we try to share about our faith with other people we need this if we are filled with power if we have the spirit of the Lord working in us then no matter what the opposition is we will be able to share the gospel you know in a way which will touch and impact people's hearts so we need this kind of a ministry we need to be like Micah so Micah basically is talking to both the northern and southern kingdoms and so he says very shortly you know Assyria is going to come and it's going to you know take over northern Israel he also talks about Babylon he prophesies that Babylon also will one day come and conquer Jerusalem which would happen around another 140 years later so you know so he talks about both of these judgments so if you were to think about the structure of the book of Micah the first three chapters are talking about judgment against these two northern and southern kingdoms chapters four and five is where he promises you know God promises restoration to the people in the future and in chapters six and seven God says to them even now if you repent I can you know turn away the judgment so in verses in chapters six and seven God asks the people to repent so that he doesn't even have to bring the judgment upon them please if you could mute mute yourself child okay so yeah Micah chapter one verses three to four is where God speaks about the judgment which is coming upon these two nations if we can have someone read out for us Micah one verses three and four Micah one three and four for behold the Lord is coming out of his place he will come down and trade on the higher place of the earth the mountains will melt under him and the valleys will split like wax before the fire like waters pour down a steep place he's using poetic language over here and he says you know God is going to come down from his dwelling place and when he comes down the mountain will you know split apart the valley no the valleys will split apart the mountain will melt he says it will be like fire and all of that it almost sounds like the description of Mount Sinai you know when God came down upon that mountain to make a covenant with his people so at that time in Exodus he comes down to make a covenant with the people but here Micah is saying God is going to come down in the same way and when he comes down this time it's not to make a covenant it's basically to punish you for not keeping that covenant for not observing that covenant so is what he says over here Micah is basically famous for this one verse I mean I mean more than any of the other verses this is the one verse which is popular from the book of Micah if we can have someone read out for us Micah chapter five verse two Micah five two but you Bethlehem Abraham though you are little among the thousand of Judah yet out of new shell come forth to me the one to be ruler in Israel who's going for a form of old from everlasting exactly here in Micah chapter five Micah is giving a word of prophecy and he is saying that from one of the clans of Judah you know though you are small among the clans of Judah out of you Bethlehem Ephrata will come the ruler this is not going to be just a human ruler why is this not just a normal human ruler because his origins will be from of old this is not going to be a baby which has just been born at that time and is beginning to start its lifetime this is going to be someone whose origins were already from of old from everlasting so it's talking about a eternal ruler who is going to come from Bethlehem Ephrata and so whenever each time Jesus you know talked about him as I am in the New Testament he was talking about himself as the eternal Messiah the Pharisees understood what he was saying but they were not willing to accept that he is the one whom they are waiting for they always knew that the Messiah when it comes will be eternal not just a human king is going to be someone whose origins are from old from everlasting they always knew that when the Messiah comes he'll be somebody divine but each time Jesus said I am that divine one they hated it they did not want to accept him so you know in the time of Herod when those wise men have come to honor this Messiah who has been born and they are searching for him Herod hears about it and he says all these people are talking about a king where is this king from and at that time the chief priests and the scribes yeah they know they know their Old Testament by heart right I mean they sit every day by hearting the Old Testament they don't practice it but they by heart it so they know their Old Testament quite well and so they very gladly tell Herod this is what it says in Micah 5 2 you know and they explain and they say that he's actually going to be from Bethlehem Ephrata so that way they all knew who was born in Bethlehem that it was Jesus who was born over there and yet they refused to accept him as Messiah simply because he was telling them that they need to change their ways and they did not want to change their ways they were quite happy in their sinfulness so Micah 5 2 is famous because it tells the exact place from which this eternal Messiah is going to come another nice thing that we see about the book of Micah Micah actually helps Jeremiah in a way now if you remember you know Jeremiah had undergone a lot of suffering because you know he was speaking in the last days before the destruction of Jerusalem and everyone hated him and on multiple occasions they tried to kill him so in Jeremiah chapter 26 you have one such incident being mentioned where you have all these you know people who are very upset with him because he's saying that Jerusalem will definitely fall they are very upset and so they decide to kill him this would be in Jeremiah 26 verses 8 and 9 so they say why do you prophesy in the Lord's name that the house will be like Shiloh and the city will be desolate and deserted and so they say that they are going to kill him okay in verse 10 it says this man should not be okay they say they're going to kill him and then some officials in verse 10 they come and they say this man should not be sentenced to death because once upon a time Micah also gave a prophecy and when he prophesied King Hezekiah did not say I'm going to kill you rather King Hezekiah got down on his knees and he repented so when Micah's negative prophecy was received by Hezekiah in such a humble manner why are you people getting ready to kill Jeremiah because he's giving a negative prophecy and so they quote from Micah chapter 3 verse 12 now it's 10 50 so we'll go for a break but you know we'll just kind of look at a few details after we come back from a break thank you


Hey everyone. This is Ryan Patterson with Peerless Network. Welcome to the first of the series of webinars we're going to be doing in 2020. We first going to go through a little bit about the Peerless Overview and I'll go through the agenda here with you right now. First, I'm going to go through some introductions. My name, like I said, I'm Ryan Patterson, the Vice President of Channel Sales with Peerless. Also on the call, we have Jim Brewer, who's our Senior Vice President of Emerging Business. We're going to be going through a little bit. First, I'm going to start. I'm going to go through a little bit of the company overview, get into a little bit of our pricing products and support. Then I'm going to hand it off to Jim to go through the portal demo. He's going to hand it back to me and I'm going to go through a little bit about why Peerless and talk a little bit about our promotions. Then all that should be done in about 30 minutes. Thanks again for your time. Got a lot of information that we're going to be throwing at you today. As always, contact your channel managers or myself for any additional questions. We'll get right into the overview of Peerless. Peerless is based in Chicago. We're a nationwide provider of voice services. Today, we're about a $150 million company and we've got about 160 employees. We started back in 2008 as a carrier's carrier, providing voice services. They're basically under the line provider for a lot of the UCAS providers out there, a lot of the CLX. You may not have heard of Peerless. We've been in the enterprise space for about the last five years or so and that's definitely our fastest growing segment. We really differentiate ourselves with our size. We're not a huge company. We're not a small company. We're perfect size out there and with that, we can offer outstanding support for our agents and our customers. We're also a very innovative company. As you know, in technology, the industry is ever-changing and Peerless is very nimble and innovative and can constantly move with the changes in the industry. As I said, we have a nationwide voice network in over 200 ladders around the country and we service over 93% of the US population on-net to the Peerless network. What do all these numbers mean? Simply, it means that Peerless is one of the few providers out there in the industry that can offer end-to-end voice services. From the call setup to the call termination, Peerless is 100% accountable to our customers and to our agents for those calls. We're not handing it off to a lot of other different networks. We're servicing that from end to end and that's a huge differentiator for us. We're very proud of that. As you see on there, we'll also expand it into the UK as well as into Canada. A few other numbers for you. What we've achieved in the last 12 years, like I said, we're servicing on-net over 93% of the population, over 4,000 interconnections, almost 15 million numbers on system. All of that is we're offering five-nine reliability on our entire network. We're running with our wholesale enterprise almost 10 billion minutes on our network on a monthly basis. I mentioned we're the underlying provider for a lot of the UCAS companies out there, a lot of the CLEX, and you see that right here, some of the big names of the services that we're delivering. Next, I'll get into a little bit about our products and services.  What we're focused on is being the number one voice provider in the industry, and you see that from our products set here. As you know, one of our products that we've been offering since the start of Peerless is Enterprise SIP Trunking, UCAS Services, Long Distance, Toll Free. The Platform Services is something that Jim's going to be picking up here in a minute, but the Peerless portal really wraps around our entire product set and enables customers and agents to do, enables, gives quite a bit of control to our customers and our agents, and I won't try to steal too much of Jim's thunder there, but a lot of numbers, SMS and MMS messaging, 911, CNAM, directory listings, et cetera. Get a little bit deeper into our SIP Trunking offering. You know, over our nationwide network, it's a very comprehensive product that we're bringing to the table. We can deliver SIP Trunks on a three-year term for as low as under $5 a month. A very popular product these days is our IPPRI, and as a lot of companies are trying to get out of the copper business, our IPPRI is all SIP and certainly is a very popular product for us. All of these IP or SIP products are delivered with our fail-safe routing. You can also load balance and, most importantly, use our Peerless portal to be able to deliver these services almost instantly. To your locations or to your customers as well. It's a little bit about our SIP offering. Give you a little bit of information on our UCADS offering as well. It's a Peerless proprietary platform. We try to keep it as simple as possible, and all of our complete extension basically enables or offers all of the features that Peerless offers, including call recording, call forwarding. Our mobile and our desktop app are also included, and we also do a great job of monitoring the location for quality of service up and down and upgrading and things like that as well. Like I said, we're going to be throwing a lot of information at you today. If there's further questions, this is just the first of many webinars we're going to be doing as well as you have access to your channel managers and support team to be able to help you with further information. Speaking of the Peerless account team, we've got an outstanding support system here. Our philosophy is we want to make it as easy as possible to do business with Peerless, and that's through a couple things. One is through the account management team. It's a single point of contact for your customers that you bring in, as well as the channel team helps with pre-sales. We have sales engineering. It helps with more technical sides of things, and then a full escalation list. We provide to every one of our customers that goes all the way up to the CEO of Peerless. Now, I'm going to be handing it off to Jim Brewer to go through a little bit about the Peerless portal. All right. Well, hello, everyone. Hopefully you're seeing my screen here. What I'm going to do is take you through the portal. I'm logged in as an agent. What we're looking at here is all the capabilities that you as an agent would have within our portal to propose services to customers, to onboard customers, and to manage the service of your customers. I'll just take you through a general navigation of the portal. We're seeing the home page here. We'll promote various things to you. The upper right hand corner is the account menus, where basically you have control over various kind of high level account features like your contact information. You can add additional users so that other folks in your organization can access the portal. You can open support tickets with Peerless if you have questions. We have API keys here available for your developers. If you have your own internal portal that you might want to integrate through API with our portal, your developers can gain access to all that through this menu here. Then on the left is really the heart of all the services and all the features of the portal. We have a dashboard which just shows some kind of high level stats about your customers and the revenue that they're bringing. Then we have an agents menu here. This will show you any subagents that you might have. If you're a master agent with subagents, you can see those here. You can add other subagents to the program through this invite agent button. Next is customers. Here's where you can see all of the customers that you have or are in the process of onboarding. You can see their status. These couple demo ones we have here are active. To onboard a new customer, it's as simple as sending them an invitation. You click the invite customer button. You fill out some basic contact information for your customer. They'll get an email. That email will allow them to establish their credentials to access the portal themselves and prompt them to fill out a credit app that's reviewed by the Peerless Finance team. As your customer is going through that onboarding process, you're going to receive continuous email updates so that you know when your customer has filled out the credit app, you'll know when they're approved and when they're starting to use service. Beyond filling out their contact information, you're allowed to specify different pricing plans that your customer can be on. We currently offer service on a month-to-month basis or a little bit lower price on a 12-month term, further lower price on a 24-month term, and then lastly a 36-month term. You can see all of the pricing here so you know what price your customer will be on. Then as soon as you hit the invite button, they get that email that I referenced. They'll be locked into the 36-month term plan and they'll fill out their credit app and they'll be off and running. Once they're fully registered, have been through the credit app process, they can log in to the portal and start buying service themselves or you can start ordering service on their behalf and I'll show you how to do that as well. Probably before you actually win a customer's business, you have to propose services to them. We have a great tool here to help make that easy for you which is our proposal generator. On the left here you see the proposals menu and I'll walk you through how this works really quick. You can give the proposal a title, you can customize your own greeting by typing in some free text here, your contact info, auto populates, but you can update that here as well. Then you choose which plan that you want to propose for your customer. Say you want to offer them the most aggressive rates on the 36-month term plan here, you can select that and then you start adding services to the plan. If we're talking about a UCAS offering with a Cloud PBX, you can add maybe 10 complete extensions, two essential extensions and you'll see in the upper right hand corner here that there's an ongoing tally of all the services you're proposing so you can see what the monthly costs that you're proposing are going to be. If you want to add phones to the proposal for the Cloud PBX, you can just go to add equipment here and then you can choose. I'm going to maybe put 12 Polycom BVX 250s in here and you'll see that all of our phones are available for lease or for purchase and we have the latest lineup of Polycom phones, the latest lineup of Yealink phones and we have conference phones and the like. Maybe we'll propose 12 VVX 250s on a lease and you'll see that now added to the proposal. The same goes for SIP Trunks and we'll talk a lot more about these services in a minute, but you can propose SIP Trunks. There's a PRI trunk that Ryan mentioned here. It's a really great price so maybe they need one of those. We can add those to the proposal as well. We have toll-free numbers so you can see the charges for the numbers and the service itself and once you're done adding things to the proposal you just hit the generate proposal button and then in a few seconds here you'll have a PDF document that will open up and I'll show you what the proposal looks like. Let's give this a second to download. There we go. So now we have a proposal and this proposal includes a whole bunch of information that hopefully your customers will find valuable. So you can see the name that we gave it, the customizable greeting here. Then they get a lot of information about peerless, who peerless is if they're not familiar, our products and services, some of the capabilities that they'll have themselves in the portal once they register and then they see what you propose. So you can see the complete extension for our UCAS offering and all the various features of that, the essentials extension, the CPE that we added to the proposal, the PRI that we added to the proposal. So they'll see all their monthly costs and all the information there and then there's a schedule of pricing so they'll see not only the services that you proposed but the prices for all of our other services should they choose to buy any of those in the future. They see a lot of information about our support process, how it works, how to contact us and then they have a complete escalation list here. So peerless is all about customer support so the customer is not just blindly opening a trouble ticket but they can also get in touch with people all the way up to our CEO and his cell phone number. So the customer has a lot of great information here in the proposal and then hopefully that proposal helps you win the business. You onboard the customer like I showed you previously by sending them the invitation and then you'll see their status in the table. They'll fill out the credit app as I mentioned and then they can start ordering services. So once the customer loads here I'll show you a little bit about how service is managed and ordered through the portal and I guess one thing to mention at the outset here is that everything in the portal is instant in real time so these are not orders that you're submitting that are being fulfilled by peerless folks you know one or two or three days later it's it's all instantaneous. So in order to manage the services you go to the top menu here you select a customer I selected one of our demo customers that belongs to this demo agent and then it's broken out by these menus at the top so we have cloud PBX and some of the attributes there will walk through trunking, phone numbers, call records, and account related information. So let me start with cloud PBX. The first thing for cloud PBX is our CPE shop so customers can buy CPE from peerless or lease CPE from peerless and that CPE comes preconfigured comes labeled and they'll be able to simply plug and play with all the devices that they purchase from peerless but we also support a BYOD program so you can use or the customer can use any device they might have and I'll show you a little bit about that in a minute. So here's our shop we saw this earlier when we were looking at the proposal generator but you can see the latest lineup of Polycom phones, Yalink phones, conference phones from both vendors, we have cordless phones and we have a whole bunch of accessories whether it's a door buzzer or a paging system or an ATA for a legacy fax machine down to power supplies and wall mount brackets pretty much anything the customer could want is available for purchase or lease from peerless. Extensions are obviously the heart of a cloud PBX service and those are all manageable here so if you navigate to this page you'll see all of the extensions that the customer currently has and of course the ability to add new ones so it's loading the list of extensions here and here we can see them all the extension number who the user is where they're located customers can have multiple locations around the country and to add a new one it's as simple as using this wizard so everything in the peerless portal is ordered through a wizard where we just prompt you for the minimal amount of information needed to make the service work and the first step here is to choose the plan you can see the various features of the different plans you enter extension information you can assign a DID specify a location specify the user's email so the users of this extension have their own view of the portal where they can do things like manage their call forwarding download their voicemails and change their voicemail settings and things like that you can choose a device that you want to provision it to configure some voicemail settings and then the last tab here is the checkout and as I mentioned earlier everything's you know instant gratification here so as soon as you hit this add extension it's available for use so that's a little bit about extensions devices is where you can see the devices that are currently in use by the cloud pvx and we have the concept of inventory devices so if you have a phone sitting on a shelf that you might want to use in the future you can keep track of those in here and to add a device it's as simple as going up here and this is where you can start using by od devices that you might have from or the customer might have from a prior implementation or they bought them on ebay or something like that you can use those here so you just enter basic information mac address is obviously important for any voice over ip service so we prompt you for that you can provision it directly to an extension if you want or you can just leave it an inventory choose the time zone that affects the the clock display on the phone and then you'll see there's a drop down for make and model so if the phone that the by od device that you're adding here is any one of our makes and models in this list and it's it's broad because it covers the entire series of phones right if you find it in this list we'll support zero touch provisioning for this by od phone which is nice so even though you're not buying the phone from peerless you can still make a plug and play by using our zero touch provisioning capabilities here but lastly if you have a device that's not on our list we still allow you to use that by simply choosing the generic sip device and as long as it's a sip capable device you'll you'll be able to use it with the service it'll just need to be manually provisioned is all next is our trunks so we have sip trunks we have pure i trunks all of this again uh provisionable through the portal in real time a customer as we'll see here can have an unlimited number of sip trunks so if there's a if there are a large multi location enterprise that might have a an ip pbx in in each location they can manage all of those sip trunks for all those pbx's through a single account with peerless so here you can see we have three different sip trunks you can see their status because everything is real time you can see active calls you can even click on the active calls and if there were any it would show you who's calling who and and all that good info and to add another one it's simple as filling out another wizard where we we prompt you for all kinds of information and give you all kinds of control and if you ever have a question about what some of these drop downs might mean we've got tool tips on everything so you can click on these tool tips and get a whole bunch more information that should answer your questions but if not of course as rye mentioned we have a whole support team uh that can help you through this so i won't go through the the whole wizard here but again you can order sip trunks and manage them uh and provision them in real time same with phone numbers so if you want to get d i d's from peerless you have you can see the d i d's you currently have and where they're pointed to get new ones as simple as using this add d i d wizard where we ask you to you know specify the sip trunk or the the cloud pbx and then you can just start searching for phone numbers by by area you can narrow it down to different area codes down here and then just kind of work through a shopping cart process choose your features and of course i'm going through this really quickly here for you today just to give you a high level overview but we're happy to spend more time going through this in much greater detail with you if you so desire and just like everything else when you add d i d's you hit the place order button and they're instantly available for use wherever you designated them to go and then lastly before i turn it over to ryan i'll just point out some of the documentation we have down here in the left i've got lots of frequently asked questions that hopefully you'll find useful here we've got documentation on the cloud pbx and some of the calling features and this is available to the end user in their portal as well so they can see how to use their their cloud pbx service and then lastly our our sip trunk config guides and phone config guides so we we provide really good step-by-step instructions for how to configure the customer cpe to be used with the peerless service so if we just glance at one of these real quick here's a config guide for 3cx if you have a 3cx pbx and we include screenshots and step-by-step guides of how to configure this within the peerless portal and then later on how to configure it within the 3cx platform itself and the same goes for all of these other different types of platforms and we continuously add more you'll know down here that we are certified with a via ip office so we have their config guide available same for skype for business and then lastly the phone configs on the left here as i mentioned anything they buy from peerless comes preconfigured but if they wanted to manually reprovision one or something for some reason we have the documentation here so at bottom line we provide a lot of info in the portal a lot of control in the portal everything is real time and as you want to follow up in a deep dive on any of this reach out to the the account team and we can definitely spend more time together and with that i will hand it off to ryan for his closing remarks all right so just want to wrap things up again we're throwing a lot of information at you guys today so if you need further demos we'd like to schedule demos for your customer have your channel manager come out to see you and etc etc please contact us and i'll finish with the with the channel information here on the last slide but just a little bit about why peerless you saw it one big thing is the peerless portal we want to make it as easy as possible to do business with with peerless and one of the ways to do that is by utilizing the peerless portal certainly you know agents are very interested in delivering a quality service to the customer but as well as getting services quickly and getting paid quickly and there are speed to turn up and our speed to revenue is simply unmatched by our competition when you can turn up something real time for a customer or in minutes you're not only going to make a happy customer but you're going to get paid very quickly as well so peerless portal certainly is a why peerless we're very experienced like i said we don't want to be everything to everyone we just want to be the number one voice provider in the industry and we've been doing it for 12 years and we're going to continue to deliver quality service like i mentioned also our size and flexibility we're not too big not too small we're perfect size to deliver a good quality service and reliability to our customers and speaking of reliability we've been delivering it for 12 years for a lot of you know the large ucaz and and clex out there and we're now we're delivering it directly to our agents and our customers with our quality five nine reliability and our unmatched support through our account management team second to the last slide here is just a little highlight of our q1 promotion right now for q1 2020 we're offering a five times mrc on our sip and our ucaz products we're delivering that in a gift cap gift card format once the once the account is turned up and active you can get in whatever increments you would like five times mrc in the from the on that gift card so very aggressive promotion of course it needs to be new customers and on a three-year term there's a little bit about a little bit of our information our channel our email address is channel at peerlessnetwork.com and there's my direct contact information certainly if you need anything thank you so much for your time we appreciate it and i look forward to doing this with business with you have a great day


So Kieran, I've heard from a lot of people that there was this turning point in maybe sort of perhaps even the 1970s when around the time when Israel was founded that Ireland was actually kind of quite supportive as a whole of Israel. Were you around back then or have you heard that story as well? And can you tell me exactly when that turning point occurred in public sentiment? I was around then. I'm old enough to have vague memories of the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and I mean I don't remember the exact conversations amongst parents and family but I think I get a general sense that there was a kind of a nervousness about you know will Israel survive or will Israel be overrun because obviously for the first few days Israel was caught completely unawares and the Egyptians were making major advances across the Sinai Peninsula. So I do remember those conversations. I think the Lebanon, the situation in Lebanon might have started being a turning point. Just one politician called Lenin. Oh my god I can't give his Russian name now. He was Minister for Defence Brian Lenin. We're Brian Lenin. You know I'm talking about Brian Lenin senior and not not Brian Lenin junior. Brian Lenin senior was Minister for Defence back in the late 70s early 80s in the Irish Army where the Irish Army was in sort of Lebanon acting as a peacekeeping force, a unifil and he mentioned that as being a point when he started to kind of move away from being pro-Israel and more pro-Palestinian and it was around that time that a lot of Irish soldiers were being shot by South Lebanon Army and some of our proxies that were released ostensibly backed by Israel. So and Tinky went there a few times and felt that he wasn't impressed by the behavior of the Israeli Army. So that might be the turning point but it was also the IRA. The IRA had had close ties with the PLO and they would have started to agitate for Palestinianism and Palestinian nationalism. I mean the Northern Ireland issue definitely has had its effects. It's kind of a chicken and egg situation in Northern Ireland. I'm not sure whether the United Kingdom community was pro-Israel so the IRA and the Nationalist decided to be pro-Palestinian or whether the IRA decided to be pro-Palestinian and then the Protestant Union, the Israeli community decided to be pro-Israel but that has had its effects as well. That would have changed some minds to be more anti-Israel.


So let's look at yet another problem. I have this 3 by 3 matrix, and you'll see it's a very special type of matrix. If you remember matrix algebra you'll see on the diagonal we have all 2s and everything 0 under that. Okay, you'll remember those matrices. Anyway, let's look at a minus lambda i. That is going to be 2 minus lambda 1, 6. And we're going to have a 0 of 2 minus lambda 5 and a 0 is 0 and 2 minus lambda. That's a matrix and we've got to get the determinant of that, but we're going to be clever about it. We're going to get it along either column 1 or row 3 because we have 2 zeros in there. Remember it will be positive, negative, positive, negative, positive. So it's going to be that one. So the determinant is going to be 2 minus lambda. And we're going to multiply that, so we take it along this row, close that off. So it's going to be this minus 0, which is now going to be 2 minus lambda squared. And that's going to equal 0. And then, behold, what do I have here? It's 2 minus lambda cubed equals 0. This is my m, so this is multiplicity 3. So I now have an x sub 1, x sub 2, x sub 3. But I first need to find out for this eigenvalue of mine now, my eigenvalue being... Now, just have a look at this. Now, you've just got to be careful with this negative here. It says 2 minus lambda, in other words, lambda equals 2, not negative 2. So lambda sub 1 equals 2. So with this I need to find out how many eigenvectors I can get from that. So if I have a minus 2i times k is going to equal 0. There's the short way of doing it. There's the long way of doing it. Let's do the longer way. Maybe you can also do the augmented matrix. So I'm going to have 0, 1, 6, 0, 0, 5, 0, 0, 0, 0. And I've got to multiply that by k sub 1, k sub 2, k sub 3. And then just got to equal the 0 column matrix. So what are we left with? We are left with k sub 2 plus 6 times k sub 3 there. And then we're left with 5 times k sub 3 there. And we're just left with 0 there. So those two have got to equal each other. We can clearly see that k sub 3 at least. So if we just look at k, k sub 3 has got to be 0 there. And if I let that 0, that means k sub 2 has also got to be 0. But that leaves me in case of 1 to be anything at once because I've got to multiply it by 0 anyway. We're not going to choose 0 because then we have that 0 eigenvector, which means nothing, so the next thing we'll put in is a 1. So I can put in a 2 there. A 3 doesn't matter, but that would just be constant multiples of this eigenvector. So what I can see here is that I can only get 1 eigenvector for this eigenvalue. And if I do that, remember now I've got to go move on to say that a minus 2i times p has got to be equal to k. That would be my next step. Remember if I could get more than one eigenvector, I could have just gotten, I just could have used all of them, but I can only get a single eigenvector. Case of 1 can be anything because it's multiplied by 0. But that will just be constant multiples of this, so that won't help me. So let's do this one now. And now it's going to equal 1, 0, 0.   Is that and p sub 3 is going to equal that and lastly 0 equals 0. So p sub 3, if I just look at p, p sub 3 is just 0. p sub 3 equals to 0. And if p sub 3 is 0, that means p sub 2 must be 1. I'm left with p sub 1 being anything I want. I'm always going to start with 0. I didn't want to start with 0 there, otherwise it's all the same. But yeah I can start with 0 because I'm still left with this. The next one I have to do is multiplicity 3. So I'll have to go to q and that is going to equal p. So let's do that one. Now this is going to equal 0, 1, 0. And again, so it's q, so it's 1, q sub 2, and q sub 3. And so again q sub 2 plus 6 times q sub 3. There I'll just have 5 times, I hope I put the 5 in before, and 0. So now I see q sub 3, q sub 3, 5 times q sub 3 equals 1. So q sub 3 is going to be equal to 1 over 5. And if that's 1 over 5, so that becomes 6 over 5, so that means q sub 2 is negative 6 over 5. And again q sub 1 can be anything, but I'm going to start with 0. So there we go, I have all of these now. And now I've just got to remember how to construct my general solution set. My general solution set. So let's look at that. For x sub 1, I'm just going to have k, what was my k, remember it was at 0, 1, 0, 0. So that's just going to be k, so that's 1, 0, 0, e to the power, what was my, it was 2t, 2t. x sub 2 was going to be k, that's 1, 0, 0, t e to the power 2t plus p was 0, 1, 0, e to the power 2t. And x sub 3 was going to be 1, 0, 0, t squared over 2 e to the power 2t plus p was 0, 1, 0, t e to the power 2t and q was 0, negative 6 over 5, 1 over 5 e to the power 2t. So there we go. Because I could only get one eigenvector for my eigenvalue, that's what I have there. And then for the general solution set, it will be x equals c sub 1, x sub 1 plus c sub 2, x sub 2 plus c sub 3, x sub 3, x sub 1, x sub 2 and x sub 3 are not constant multiples of each other. In other words, they each get their own, so that's going to be c sub 1 times that plus c sub 2 times that whole one plus c sub 3 plus that, c sub 3 times that whole one. Okay, so this would be the general solution. That's quite easy to do.


Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org, and this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of IBM IOD. theCUBE is our live social media studio. We go out to all the events, we extract the signal from the noise, and we bring you the smartest people that we can find. We try to get in practitioners, people who work with practitioners, experts, domain experts, bloggers, pundits, and of course we try to bring our own analysts and journalists as well. Go to Wikibon.org for the research, go to SiliconANGLE.com for all the news of the day. Check out SiliconANGLE.tv, check out Kristen Folletti's news desk in the process of launching our 24-7 network. We got a lot going on. You got questions, hopefully we got answers.  This is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host. I'm Jeff Kelly, else from Wikibon.org. We're here with Paul Zacopoulos, Director of Client Technical Professionals in the Information Management Group at IBM. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So tell the audience a little bit about your role and then let's just dig right in and talk about what you're seeing on the ground there in terms of big data practitioners. Yeah, you bet. I'll tell you, it's 20 years at IBM, so which I think is rare for a guy of my age, I guess. You started at 15? I did, I felt that way, but so I spent 10 years in development and then moved out to the field. Started in database technology, pretty deep in there, written a number of books and then moved into the big data world exclusively about a year and a half ago, two years ago, really saw that growing market momentum and really chatter about big data and probably a lack of understanding what big data was. And so now I run our organization at Technical Professionals, there are about 800 of us worldwide, a responsibility for those folks and we help implement our solutions and help teach our customers about how to get flat in the time and analytics of our solutions. So you said you've written a number of books. Yeah. On which topics? Take us through some of them. I'll take you through the whole biography. There are not many books. Bibliography, but so... What are some of your favorites? DB2 for dummies, DB2 certification for dummies, wrote a book on governance on SGML, on the new book here at the conference, Harness the Power of Big Data, and last year it was really understanding big data. It was the book I wrote. So what do you make of Oracle's, Larry Ellison saying that Oracle is the first multi-tenant database? Did you agree with that? I think if you look at Oracle 12C, so I used to lead the competitive team, so I know Oracle pretty well. I think anytime Larry says anything, there's a grain of salt to it. I think 12C, I'd say the C stands for catch-up. If I looked at the multi-tenancy and I look at separation of concerns, separation of duties and those kinds of things, they've been in DB2 for a long, long time. It's a lot of catch-up there. There are a couple of nice things in the pluggable architecture that I'm looking into, but by and large, I don't think there's a lot there. It's more catch-up. I'm biased, but that's what I'll tell you. Okay, so we had to get that in. All right, so tell us what's going on with customers. What are they talking to you about? Where are we at? Take us through that a little bit more. Yeah, in the context of big data? Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah, so look, what can I tell you? Big data is the hot, hot word, right? So I was looking around LinkedIn the other day, like a 60% increase in big data termed skill for a profile, so unfortunately what that means is it's becoming so ubiquitous that it's going to kind of dilute or fragment what the understanding is. So one of the things I'm finding customers doing is putting their arms around what big data is.  It's like the worst term ever, but apparently the industry has gotten around it because it implies that all data is big, right? And big data is so much more than volumes of data. We look at things like its veracity, its trustworthiness, so to speak, its variety, the speed at which it arrives at my organization. So that's the first thing I start with clients is let's level set on what big data is and I take them through that. And then I have to tackle the client who's looking at big data as the science project because that is a road to failure. I'm going to tell you that right now folks, right? Have to attach it to a business need. So we see this struggling on what is the business case for big data, where we see this science project coming up. We want to change those kinds of things, obviously. But that's the struggle. Give me the business case, give me the payoff and how's it going to be different than what I'm doing today? Those are the key things. So I'm inferring from your comments that a lot of people say, okay, we got to do something with a dupe. So let's go out and try it. And you're saying that's not the place to start. Yeah, well, you know, it could be the place to start. So the first thing I'll say is the biggest myth is that big data is Hadoop, right? So Hadoop is part of the big data ecosystem, right? And so we're going to look at different types of technologies that are purpose built or suited for different things. Hadoop is an at rest engine, the same way on the Tesla or a Teradata or an Exadata would be an at rest engine. I think big data requires in motion as well. So you look at our infocere streams, look at TwitterStorm for example. So we have to have that discussion. But speaking on Hadoop, a lot of people are jumping on that. How do we get going on that? That's some good purpose built things that can solve some problems if that's your issue to start with. I want to analyze raw data. I have a number of data that has a very short shelf life. So when I bring data into my warehouse, right? It's expensive no matter what the target is. I'll propose to you that we have the lowest cost per terabyte platform around for what you get out of it, but I still have to enrich the data, cleanse the data, document the data, right? Understand it's lineage, that's expensive, right? So if I'm in a discovery phase, that's great to go into Hadoop and try to discover those kinds of things. So there's some use cases to get started there or I want to analyze data that has a very short shelf life, but I could have other big data problems. And I think I've finished your question with the most common big data problem I see is clients to me, they're guilty of not knowing what they could already know. They actually already have big data assets. They don't know they exist.  You download Google desktop, right? Why? Because I find files all the time, I didn't know I had. And so you can imagine working at a large organization, even at IBM, I can't find stuff to save my life. We have some of this information. So we've gone from finding a needle in a haystack to finding a needle in a stack of needles. And that's a big data effort and that has nothing to do with Hadoop. And so the big data story depends on what your pain point is. So where would you say we are in the maturity model of big data adoption? Are we still in the kick in the tires phase? Talk about where we're at specifically. So IBM just released a study. We did it in joint with Oxford University on big data. We talked to a number of leading companies and professionals around the world to figure out where they were. I think you're looking at around 50% are in the education and planning stage. We're in the very low double digits, maybe 16 to 22% are actually doing something with it. And some of the problem there is around the consumability. So we're not all Facebooks and LinkedIn's and Yahoo's. We don't have thousands of developers who are Java, Java and their DNA and programming. We have a lot of existing investment in SQL skills and those kinds of things. And they're struggling with how do I get here and how do I get the skill? So what we have to do is bring consumability to it. And that's what's stopping that adoption from the learning phase to the execution phase. So I think one of the things of the platform I'd like to talk about is how do we flatten the timed analytics curve? And you do that with various features in the platform. And so in the big data platform, that's what we do. For example, we've put a declarative language around text analytics. So listen, here's a dupe. You go downloaded, you get it from Cloudera, you can get it from us, non forked version of the dupe. And then I say, go build some text extraction. You're going to do some social sentiment analysis. So where do you go from there, right? In our platform, how we're trying to address that is to say, we understand that SQL democratized relational database. So now I could write this declarative language. I didn't have to know the underpinnings. There was an optimizer which said, go get it from this table or perform these algebraic expressions, gave it back to you. Then we gave it a tool set, whether it's Excel or whether it's a tool builder like Cognos, a SQL builder. Now everyone can write SQL for good or bad. For text extraction, now we've generated in our platform, AQL, annotated query language. Looks like SQL, has a built-in optimizer that understands that the CPU is critical in that kind of work and has an integrated development environment. So, consumability. Paul, our customers looking at their big data investments. Who's their data investments on a portfolio basis? In other words, you've got the traditional data warehouse space, the BI piece, which in many respects failed to live up to its promise of a 360 degree view and predictive analytics. In a lot of ways, the Enron debacle sort of helped boost that business a lot with the reporting and the compliance and that was a real win in the sales. But there's a lot of spending that went on there and then you've got this sort of new stuff, a lot of it's experimental, but clearly people are adding some business value. Our people and our customers and how are they managing that portfolio between the new and the old? Yeah, some are struggling, right? Some, I mean we're not asking clients and no one should be asking clients to give up their SQL investment and their warehouse investment because it's very purpose built for specific tasks and it does those tasks very well. Pre your comment on the Enron debacle, right? We had to have this trusted reporting data source. If you look at some of the NoSQL databases, right? We'll kind of lack in consistency, right? We'll trade acid properties of a database for the base properties of NoSQL. We'll worry about consistency later. So I'll answer your question with an analogy and then you'll see kind of in that area we kind of go forward with both, right? Because don't you find it interesting that for NoSQL the biggest movements in NoSQL is bringing the SQL API to the NoSQL database world, right? It's hot right now. I'm hearing a lot about that this week. Absolutely, absolutely. So here's the analogy I like to tell clients. Think of gold mining for it, okay? Or gold mining. So I think back to the gold rush a hundred whatever years ago and you had this gold miner and he would pan for gold and he could spot a big chunk of gold, right? And that was visible to the naked eye. So that data had value to the naked eye and while we didn't go and extract massive amounts of earth it would spike a gold rush and an investment of towns around where gold was fine and we'd go and find that. If I look at gold mining today we have this new capital equipment and it's capable of moving millions of tons of dirt, low value per byte data in spotting near invisible strands of gold. So as it turns out, gold needs to be more than 30 parts per million or to be visible to naked eye. So most gold today that's mine is invisible. Well, guess what? The dupe is to find these near invisible strands of gold, extract that in a cost efficient way and then build that into our processes perhaps into the warehouse or to side by side processes. And I'll finish the analogy with this. I was watching the documentary on gold mining the other day and our company's under some heat because they're not reconstituting the land that they've dug up and put into park lands and they say we're working on a chemical wash. In five years of time we'll be able to find finer granularities of gold and I thought, this is perfect. You think about Hadoop as a low cost platform to store corpus of data of which I'd like to discover. I bet you just like in analytics three years from today assures you'll find more gold, you'll find more data, you'll find more insights, more signals in the noise. And so I think that's an analogy I'd use to answer that. I want to carry that and that for through a little further and get your take on this. So one of the things that people often say about the gold rush is the guys who made the real money in the gold rush with the guys who, you know the railroads that got the people there, the guys who applied the picks and the accident and all the infrastructure around that. But there's a premise in big data that says and Peter Goldmarker from common is the first I ever heard say this. He said that big data practitioners are actually going to create more value and extract more value than the big data suppliers. Do you buy that? And are you actually seeing that in the customer base? Yeah, you know, I think the practitioner is where we execute. So I think what the practitioner needs is this consumable platform that allows them to execute. So I view it as a partnership. And I think during the ecosystem or the ebbs and flows of the partnership there times where the practitioner is going to carry us forward, right? So today to get started, it's, you know the data scientist is the hottest topic going. You know, you look at the starting wages for some of these kids coming out of university and it's awesome, right? And it's around math and Java, right? And so they're getting stuff started but then was we kind of democratized access to big data then it will be the us as a provisioners that help you why? Because I'll take your common class folks or the average type of worker, knowledge worker we have and we'll boost their big data IQ. And then the data scientist will come up and there'll be some new technology and someone else is going to push that. So it's going to be a partnership and that's how I see it going forward. So you talk a little bit in your book about end to end. What does that mean? And you know, why is that important to a customer? Yeah, so, you know one of the books I wrote was around governance and we talk about information lifecycle management and probably one thing I'm a little worried when I see and obviously I'm not going to say the customers here on age is people doing a do but I'm like, doesn't that data have to be protected in the database? So if I store it in our DMS you have to protect it but for some reason you think because it's in HDFS it no longer needs to be protected. So when I talk about information lifecycle management I want to talk about how does the data arrive at more organization? First am I taking the opportunity to apply analytics at the moment it arrives at the organization? Because the opportunity costs and it's a term I use in the book return on data. Your return on data starts to dilute the moment it hits your enterprise. What you're going to get out of it, right? What I could do with that data. So as I look at lifecycle management I'd like to plan that says the data's entered the organization. I apply some analytics perhaps as it makes its way to rest I attach to it governance policies. Is it immutable? Can I store it? Should I get rid of it? Should I enrich it? And deciding not to care about it is a governance policy. I need to make a decision and then as it sits there you know to me is Hadoop not the new tape. So if it sits in my Nutiza database and I want to apply that into an at rest engine low cost maybe I need a policy to move it there. So cradle to grave that's what we talk about in lifecycle management. So I want to ask a question about something you just mentioned. So you know Hadoop is the new tape. You know certainly in the Hadoop open source Hadoop community and a lot of the players we're going to see tomorrow and a Thursday at Strata would take issue with that. And I think we're seeing players like Hadapt for instance build out kind of on their vision of a unified platform based on a Hadoop foundation that includes both SQL and no SQL type functionality. And I guess the knock on the more traditional or the approach we're seeing now often is HDFS a lot of connectors between databases. Is that a long term strategy? Is that a long term effective way to go about big data and what about these new vendors like Hadapt and others who had this vision of a unified platform really built on Hadoop at the foundation? So I mean you guys ask good tough insightful questions, right? So I like it. You ask the same question my customers ask me. If I look at Hadapt I'm not sure how unified the engine is as opposed to it's unified on the API level or at the top and underneath the covers it's kind of separate, right? They have some Postgres in there they have some Hadoop in there. Here's the notion that I go after when I talk like that. At IBM we believe in purpose built optimized engines, right? So I won't take shots at our competitors. I don't think one size fits all when we look at the kind of workloads that we have. So I think IBM does a terrific job at that. Where I think the economies of scale come from that you're referring to is what is the portability of the development and the power user skill because developers outnumber DBAs anywhere from six to 10 to a factor of one. So if I have a transportable API or programming method across the engines then you've got pretty much the Hadapt model but for us I mean we're bringing enterprise class proven solutions. So if I look at the IBM big data platform I'll give you a couple examples. If I sit in Hadoop and Big Insights and by the way I could slub Cloudera as the Hadoop engine in there I can use the IBM technology to extract text extract to build a text extraction dictionary. Once I've identified that text extraction so this kind of harvested artifact I can move that in motion at the drop of a dime. There's nothing left to do. I just move it over. Why? It's a transportable skill. It's a transportable artifact. If I build a map reduce job in Hadoop but maybe I've got some structured data that I want to keep into the warehouse I can take most map reduce jobs and run it in database in the teaser which supports in database map reduce processing. And so now you see instead of making people run to the engine I want people that are great at what they do text extraction, map reduce programming, machine learning and I want them to be able to walk across the portfolio and use the engine that's best suited for the task at hand. The final example I think we've been doing this a long time. If I go and program to DB2 for Z and I want to take that application and move it across the DB2 Linux News Windows family the SQL API is 98% portable. And so we took that concept when we introduced our Oracle compatibility layer so we natively not emulated we natively support PL SQL and DB2 because we saw a lot of clients choosing Oracle not because they thought it was a better choice but because they had a skill set in PL SQL. Take your smartest people touch them with the business problems but let them go across the technology that helps implement it. I want to follow up on something that you said and I wonder if customers are asking you this when you talk about purpose built optimization. So a lot of the industry discourse Paul has been around hey we've got these silos and application with purpose built infrastructure we have to break those silos down and the cloud is all about a general purpose infrastructure on which you can run any application across the portfolio. And then you see what you guys are doing certainly Oracle Exadata you see in many others building these purpose built appliances help me rationalize the dissonance there where we're talking the general purpose sort of a flexible infrastructure versus that very focused block of infrastructure. So I think there's not as much dissonance as maybe you're suggesting and I think that IBM has got that flexible in it. So if you look at our pure systems architecture we start with ironically pure flex right which is about that exact elastic compute model to apply whatever applications I want in there be it ERP, be it application server or database provisioning. As we go into maybe what I'll call tier one like for example in transactions I need a tier one database that has higher characteristics of availability higher characteristics of scalability without changing the application we have these other systems so in that case we have a pure data system for transactions. It's kind of you can think about that as an on premise cloud model it has the characteristics the elasticity of cloud, the provisioning of cloud the monitoring of cloud can add in capacity, take capacity I can take it in and out by hour if I want in seamlessly. So we have that concept and so I think those cloud characteristics find their way into our usage patterns I think the cloud's terrific I'm all over the cloud, love the cloud do I think every enterprise is running to run their entire transaction system on a cloud? Absolutely not there's security concerns in there I think first step cloud without question is around development and I think Hadoop is boosting the cloud because I'm able I think I get about a hundred node Hadoop cluster for 34 bucks an hour I can do a lot of work with that but that option depends on the data I'm crunching that data needs to be protected I can't just send it out there I have some provisioning rules around that and so I think we've got some of those cloud concepts in there and they'll come together as we move forward So you can accommodate what you said was with pure, with expert integrated systems you can accommodate that use case that I was talking about the cloud applications across the portfolio and you can pick the horse for the course in the transactional model Do you see in the client base role your own as essentially a dead model? Yeah, I hear a lot about that and so as I was just talking to a customer today that loves a certain storage vendor and then they, but they love the appliance form factor here's the bottom line if I look at percentage of IT budgets and spending and if I forecast that in the 2015 I'd say that you're looking at maybe only 20% is on new server storage spending I'd say about 25% is on heating and cooling associated with storage of which has double digit compound on your growth rates so we got to do something about that and we're investing in that What's the rest? People, labor Okay, so I'm going to ask a question to the audience here, okay? And I'm going to go on record and say this isn't happening for me at IBM I can't speak for others How many people have experienced double digit income raises year over year for the last four or five years, right? I mean they just haven't and this isn't a world of brick outsourcing Brazil, Russia, India I can outsource cheaper labor than ever before yet the cost of managing these systems as a personnel perspective as a percentage IT budget is going up that answers the question we got to get to the appliance because the business can't afford to invest in us three cats up here So another way to say that is if you're going to roll your own you better have a damn good business case to do so I'd say so Or live on the West Coast I can't That's fantastic All right Paul, great perspectives I really appreciate the candid answers and the insights that you're bringing from your customers Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE Yeah, it's been a pleasure All right good, well keep it right there folks we'll be right back with our next guest live from IBM IOD This is theCUBE


Hello, fellow lovely fragrance lovers. So I finally got my hands on Midnight Fantasy. I had to go pick up a prescription from Boots Fantasy and they had this on sale for 10 pounds. So I picked it up. I liked the fantasy the original pink one so just going to unbox this and try it and give you my first impressions of Midnight Fantasy. I have to say the box is really nice. I quite like the colors. So just based on the colors alone I'm expecting this to be a deep sensual fragrance whereas the pink one was very bubblegum poppy. This is so adorable. So adorable. Look at that. Let's just get some light. Oh I love this so so so adorable. Okay let's try this. I have never seen anything cuter honestly. I think that this is so adorable and these speak to my inner child so much. These cute little things that are the sort of things that I would have loved to have as a kid. You know just like they have. So this is supposed to have plum, sour cherry and raspberry as the topnotes. So I'm kind of getting the dark vibe that they have going here because they've got some dark fruits and then we have orchid, iris and freesia. It'll be interesting and the base notes of vanilla amber and musk. I think it's very hard to go wrong with those three base notes. So let's try some of this.  Oh okay. The atomizer this is hard to control. Something so small this is quite hard to control but what have we got? You know the super sweet tropical juice? The one that would come in a carton and it would have pictures of like you know tropical fruit. That's what I'm getting. Like I could drink this. Also a reminder of shampoos. You know the tropical thingy shampoos. It's definitely deeper than the bubblegum pop of the original fantasy I think. But it's not unpleasant. Perhaps I was expecting a little bit too much of it but I probably should have managed my expectations a little bit. But yeah very tropically. Very very tropically. I can't say I'm getting the plum in it and I think it's because the very first fragrance that I ever tried that had like a strong plum nest to it was Marc Jacobs Decadence and that had a very strong plum scent for me especially when I had it on my skin. And to date I haven't really found a fragrance that has the plum nest but I have a plum tree so perhaps it smells differently. But yeah it's lovely. I think it's an inoffensive fragrance. I think it doesn't smell particularly unique in the sense that I don't feel like all my days I've never smelled anything like this before. As far as the celebrity perfumes I think the one that I smelled that was unlike any of the other celebrity perfumes was a stash SJP which yeah that that's completely completely different. And I think if I didn't know that there's such a thing as celebrity perfumes and I was just being made to smell the celebrity perfumes I think that most of them came from one company but then the stash I would think that that was a completely different company because it smells so different. But this is it's lovely. I can see myself wearing this during the day. I don't think I would reach for it if I've got if I want to feel special. If I want to feel you know like really really special. If I really want to feel myself I think that this would be a good daily fragrance for the days that I'm at home. I'm cleaning. I'm running errands and I'm doing stuff and I'm not particularly I just want to smell lovely but I'm not particularly bothered about smelling and feeling amazing. But I love the bottle though. I absolutely love the bottle and I'm probably going to collect most of the Britney Spears fantasy lines simply because of the bottles and my kids love the bottle as well. So yeah that's that. Okay so that's my first impressions of midnight fantasy. I picked it up for 10 pounds from boots which I think I probably paid too much for it but never mind it was there. I was waiting in line and I picked it up and I was able to fulfill the fantasy of trying midnight fantasy. See what I did there. That was a pun. So please do subscribe.  Lots of unboxings, lots of discussions about perfumes, lots of talking about scents and fragrances and comparing to how a plum in fragrances smells different to plums in real life and things like that because that's that's what's been fascinating me quite a lot about this whole perfume journey. Thank you so much for watching. I'll do next time guys. Bye.