Welcome back to the breakfast in plus TV Africa's time for what the process always would take you through the pages of a national dailies and the Essences of detail with what's making the rounds in different parts of the country I like to set up with the punch newspaper this morning. We do have a guest who would join in no time Open up on Kottariya. He's a public affairs analyst. It's good to have you join us this morning open up on Kottariya It's my pleasure messy. I'm the good morning. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much Let's take a look at the page or the front page to be precise and the focus will be on the top caption on the front page Of the punch newspaper this morning. You have World Bank projects for trillion narrow 2022 fuel subsidy Asparts predicts more loans Underneath Nigeria could spend 360 billion Naira monthly on subsidy says World Bank and Federal government will borrow multi-finance the rising fuel subsidy payment These are some statement or the statement quoted or credited to as part and in piece it releases additional 381.8 million liters of fuel and cues lesson Vice President Yamio Sibon draw others in charge during my United Kingdom checkup That's what the president is good at to say you remember that at some point in our country I mean there's been a back-and-forth Whether if the president should be absent and who he should transfer powers to Of course it should be the vice president But usually there's always a clause of the president would not exceed the two weeks and that's you're there But right now the president is saying that the vice president and others will be in charge and is absent The question that a lot of Nigerians are asking is is there you know this letter that has communicated This particular instruction or is it just a verbal statement that's been put out We find that more as we talk with our analysts this morning implement 2009 agreement Fund or short vacities says ASU ASU is asking the government to implement the 2009 agreement Fund or short the vacities that's what ASU is saying APC chairman meet today on certainty surrounds zonal congresses And court workers threaten first strike over judicial autonomy Nineteen doctors to appear before the MDCN for misconduct That's also on the punch and just before we move away Arrested Randy husband six forgiveness for ripping in law for three years really sad And BRT abduction victims 70 72 year old mother six governments help and suspects arrested And the LEA seizes 294,440 trauma door tablets Others arrested in 41 41 in nationwide raids Legos driver crushes four siblings others as you have the youth protest Fail politicians plotting come back to destroy choir That's what you find on Okay, so that's what you find on the punch newspaper this morning Away from the punch would take a look at the nation newspaper APC zoning panel summits report amid disagreement Leader split over key national working committee position Buhari we will overcome crisis I mean just as everyone is waiting for the convention to happen Looking at the 26 we're hoping that the APC will not have another shift Or shouldn't 2023 PDP balls over primaries delegate list 1.5 million flea Ukraine to escape Russians bombing And that's what you find and 1076 Nigerians are back home You still have orders that are stranded And we're hoping that the government would intensify effort to evacuate this young Nigerians You be a poster 153 billion Naira for your profits And that's what also on the punch this morning just a bigger part of the nation And just before we move away you have the CBN's Naira dollar policy Not working says presidential advisor Accept my leadership or quit Or basically tells it do people a do PDP leadership That's on the punch donation The nation newspaper to be very precise None away from the nation and the punch Let's check out the Guardian this morning On the front page of the Guardian you have the new national carrier Midtake of the second quarter as bead opens this week Quite interesting No request for AOC ATL yet You have the NCAA insisting That's underneath the board caption On non gunmen comb unnumbered communities for weapons and others PDP ABC trade tackles over more destructive party to Nigerians WHO releases first malaria vaccine And a recommendation guideline Really interesting I mean if we are being plagued with malaria Especially if you look at Nigeria We would be thinking at this point in time Which probably would have come out with a vaccine That can actually solve the problem No matter why you weren't against political conspiracy on fuels Cursity that's it And you be opposed 153 billion profits And gross balance sheet by 2% If I'm not mistaken Well that's it this morning on the Guardian newspaper That's as much we can take on our national dailies We do have a guest joining the conversation And Okunabe on Kotaria Who's a public affairs analyst And we will have you join us this morning And we really appreciate your time on the breakfast Good morning Good morning Okunabe So let's start off with the punch newspaper And on the punch you look at the World Bank projection For trillionaire 2022 fuel subsidy That's what the World Bank is projecting for Nigeria Sorry I didn't get that to be It proved Can you please take that again I said it proved so I didn't get that So I would like to share your thoughts On the projection of World Bank Saying that Nigeria might be spending Or we'll spend a 4 trillionaire For 2022 in terms of fuel subsidy Now on SBAT are saying that We might just be at the error of borrowing more funds Well that is World Bank projection I am not In any position to contradict it Because I am not an economist That is number one And I have not done any research on that I believe that is the function of the research That World Bank has done And you said analysts are also saying The point is analysts are also saying We are going to borrow more To fund this fuel land Oil subsidy we talked about I am not surprised when it comes to borrowing For more Because this is a government That has this penchant for borrowing So it's religious in borrowing Rather than looking in wars to direct funds And they borrow The president probably not for any Sinister motive But it's lieutenant Definitely for Sinister motive Because that's how they make a lot of money So we are going to borrow Rather than turn around the refineries Rather than put The turn around maintenance in the refineries And also to ascertain Why the refineries are not working That's why the billions When invested in turn around maintenance The government is not interested It's a completely listless When it comes to turning around the refineries There is no sincerity of hope They just believe Because we have the cabal A microscopic view That benefits tremendously From the issue of Important refining these products outside Can you imagine you take our products out It is unheard of, ridiculous Refine them over there And import them and pay At the same time you are You claim to be turning around the refineries You are spending more money on importation How do you reconcile this madness So this is the government That has the penchant Religious, it enjoys Borrowing money And it will continue to borrow On the issue of the World Bank production It must have been based on the analysis That was an implant on analysis of the World Bank They must have done their own investigations I would have gladly come up with that So I was able to say That the federal government will not borrow No, no, we need to talk of borrowing Even if it means to borrow to import sand This federal government will borrow to import sand Even if it means to borrow To import water This government will borrow to import water So when it comes to borrowing That is very flagrable No doubt about that That cannot be contradicted But now the reasonableness in the borrowing Is what Nigerians are questioning So when they say The analysts are saying The federal government will leave Borrow extra miles for them for later It's not as if they are commanding the government They are not being sardonic They are not being... They are mocking the government Mocking the system That we live in a country Where food is It's not no longer a virtue It is profligacy That is not a virtue And that is what the government wants There is nothing much to share about Because whether it is like this or not The government will... Even if it means borrowing To buy nettles Injection nettles The government will borrow to buy nettles So let's... Let's just stay with this I understand the fact that you say That you are not an economist But looking at the amount of money is involved If this is anything to go by I mean we have not had The figures being put out by the Nigerian government Talking about how much we Probably would be spending for subsidy And if World Bank is saying We are looking at 4 trillion Naira 360 billion Naira annually That's monthly I beg your pardon That's what you are saying Maybe... Don't you think that we should have A turn around Maybe we should Reconceive that the issue of A few subsidies If we are going to be spending 360 billion Naira Mercy Mercy I don't know if you will make Change that to the government The questions you just asked now I addressed all Obviously I said the government I spent so much With the turnaround maintenance Of our refineries And not so much Put into the system And nothing has come out I mentioned that I said and that is because The whole process is being Steamed by a microscopic cube That are fraudulent And they enjoy The fruits of this corruption That is why Then again I went as I also said That we are spending so much On turnaround maintenance Why the federal government Is simultaneously boring money Or the same purpose And I said the government Have the penchant And that is the result Of people enjoying The fruits of this crime They are beneficiary Of the fruits of this crime And I don't know Whether you like it or not Try to take any effort To turn around So the turnaround maintenance Is also another way Of satisfying conics That is to sincerity of people I said all this So then I told you that It will be difficult to stop Especially under this administration That has that love Religious boring So what else do you want to say To the government In boring and important work To have the refineries there Who are strongly good And importantly refined product Is that not madness? So I've particularly addressed All the questions That is madness And it is simply because In microscopy You are benefiting tremendously From this problem And the court The government Before it came into office Said there was nothing like substance And vilified On the issue of substance Now it came into office And said it must continue With the substance It has this schizophrenic personality On the issue of substance In another place You said it cannot continue Initially it said no substance Later I said it has to continue Now later you are telling Nigeria That you cannot continue with the substance Because it's having a toll On the initial penalty What do you want me to say? I just told you again I said you need to be boring To import water The government will bore it to import sand It is boring to import sand The government will bore it to import sand It is boring Not the boring is not planned It's not promised unnecessary It is just promised On what line Ecosensitivity Based on To feather our land Sand the pockets of sand in corn That's the point the government will bore it And that is why the refineries Will never ever ever They properly maintain Otherwise you've been in government You promise To seed in your Swearing it That If you do not take your mother Six months, eight months Or they are about to turn around Your final You are now in the twilight Of the administration Where you bore it To import What are the explanations you Other than And if you talk of their mouth Yes Their mouth Must be used and attracted For the boring And the potential to continue Because it is a problem And men To feather Online the pockets Of sand Ecosensitivity So the boring Will come And the potential Will come All right Open up on Qatari Let's also Look at another caption So you're staying with the punch This morning Asso is saying to the government Adher to the Agreement of 2009 Or short the universities Or fund them Or you just move away This seems to be very, very A drastic statement If you ask me Well, as you Tondri I am Yes As A drastic As you might see I also don't have confidence In asking As you Like NLC Of course It's a part of NLC You know Most times They come out Clamor Shout But tension And when they get Their tension And some of them Are giving envelopes Envelopes Of course You know Signifies Private I give them money They go back and keep quiet And when they're just Then their pockets are exhausted They make another noise Because I know I have always said Even on this station That look We all know This is a government That cannot be trusted It's a government That is devoid of revenue It's a government That speaks From both sides of the map Not for its government's people If the government You well don't strike in this time The first time You had an agreement With the government The government reneged You did it a second time You reached an accommodation With the government The government reneged There was a bridge On the path of the government The fourth time The fourth time As you You also have a government We agree We need an overhaul of the Academic service Especially with the special It's not just the special Even with the The primary schools And primary schools Because I can tell this My story Into a national school And the government will approve Into a primary school And the government will approve How ridiculous it is Now you reached an agreement And this is the government That has reneged How many times By the time the government Reneges Two to three times You no longer Go back to work Until The times are met You don't go back to work You don't do that So there is going to be Once and for all I listened to the liberal minister On a sister challenge Was just blabbing gibberish Talking about food mountains That is a medical doctor Who is well educated A former government Saying as such When you reached the agreement You did not know That there were certain hiccups There are certain hiccups Until you decided So you went into an agreement Without preparation In other words I've been issued Because of the disease It was just to ensure That the actual members Go back to work That was the whole effort And now you want to renege the shit Meanwhile You are spending X amount Why would you give Is it a hundred million dollars To Afghanistan Or what this country That depends on just Is it a hundred million dollars To your last name For what When were your institutions Here are dying Starving of course They are giving a hundred million dollars To your country What kind of Horalist system do we have Insensitive system do we have But I don't blame the government They are known for that I blame Asu You don't go back to the classroom Until the demands are met So it's going to be a worse And for our situation Not when they give me a bribe To give me money When you go broke You go inside the game They bribe you When they go broke So the Asu members I call you for off If they are not for off They should not go back to the classroom Let us address this issue Once and for all It's as simple as that Parents are suffering You're a triple-legit parent Who are suffering to train these children You go back to school You pay Now if all you have cost You spend eight years in university You students pay rent Every year it has to do the land The landline is even happy They pay rent every year But don't go out on campus You don't let them know When you're going to graduate Most of these parents Don't leave me out Now, okay, you can imagine We are Probably you are going to graduate in 2019 And because of the Asu strategy Of graduating in 2022 or 2023 Your father dies in 2020 Back for the strike You would have graduated Before the death of your father Now your father dies Because of the death of your father There's nobody to train you To drop out of school In your final year A lot of things A lot of things happen As a result of respect Lots of tribulations Lots of suffering These things are not considered Let it be once and for all You see that the federal government Is addressing it Or Asu should go on strike Even if it's for two years That has to go on strike If they go on strike for two years Students will not go back To renew their rents Because they will not even know when You renew your rents Three months after Asu has gone on strike They'll go on strike for eight months The rent will expire They're going back to renewing again Open up Are you saying that It is the corruption of Asu That has made the agreement From 2009 The government not, you know Implementing the agreement Are you saying that corruption From Asu members could be Responsible for the delay Of the implementation On the hand of the government That is my submission One that could vocally That is my submission That is my submission Actually a simple question I came up with an analysis The last Actually Asu, yes she's smiling Actually a simple question Now If I come to you every day To say Asu give me ten naira I'll pay you tomorrow You give to me It took me one year To pay that ten naira Or to even give you five naira Half of it I come again Asu give me twenty naira You give it to me You took me another Twenty years to come To pay you another To pay you got two naira Out of the twenty naira Ever come the third time You give it to me If you keep giving to me It's because you're using that As a substitute to collect money Openable once money Give me They give to you You're benefiting from it Otherwise you will not give to me Because I no longer have credibility I want to deal with them Without credibility Because if you continue There's definitely There's something you're benefiting from it You're benefiting from it Otherwise you will not And that is the issue Between Asu and me For me I don't know They are corrupt Actually they are corrupt That's the phenomenon As corrupt as they are It's not more corrupt When they are broke They're going to strike When they are broke They're going to strike For what? Go and strike Once I'm gone I will know that you're going to strike Okay Because don't go and strike again That's simple as that Let's just look at this one quickly Before we move away from The Punch newspaper this morning It talks about the vice president And others being in charge When Mr. President will be absent For his medical checkup And you know that Sometime during this administration This has actually cost A lot of, you know, conversation There was a certain time Where the president was away And people queried Why he did not transfer power According to the Constitution But the issue of, you know, the time If you exceeded a particular time limit Which he never, according to You know, the president He had a time that He would stay within the two weeks But now the president is leaving And he's saying The vice president would be in charge And others Excuse me, excuse me Excuse me, Nigeria This shouldn't be an issue It should not be a user item at all It is a user item because It is novel In Nigeria Normally if the president is traveling And is going to have seen The Constitutional provisions Is expected by law To transmit A letter to the National Assembly To that address Well, we've seen situations Since situations where the president Travelled For months Without transmitting a letter To that address And there was this control To say as to who was in charge As at that time It could well be described As a period of interregnum Because there was no gift In fact from it Because there was no transmission Procedural obligations were breached Otherwise it ought not to be news If you are traveling As simple as that You transmit And it's automatic Because the constitutional provisions It's automatic That the vice president Asked me instead So he takes orders And we saw that When the first letter was transmitted Excuse me Acting president then did When again was appointed As a substitute to John CDN And so on We saw the strategy too Which Nigeria has commanded That was when He had done himself To the heart of Nigeria Because it was somewhere You know Because if you are just a vice president And you're the acting president There are constitutional limits To certain things you do And that is why the law Requires that They are not with that transmission Of letter It's ordinary Not to be news It's simple Hey, my friend Besides this He's going to act in my stead But just because of Some very funny Litten hands around the president Oh, if you do this Oh, he's going to do that Oh, don't do this You're going to give me too much power And so he's so ridiculous I would tell you The kind of characters We have in office But I can't even have An attorney general of the tradition A minister was just He should advise the president You can't travel for so few months Without transmitting These are the constitutional provisions Please sir, do this He will not He will not And it's so funny That the president will travel And you have an acting president And the acting president presides it Over the Executive Consummit Who will still be sitting in his own chair Rather than sitting in the chair of the president What do we take away? That is our The kind of destructive mentality Actually Watch abroad Just a second Watch When the American president Is addressing the nation Or a group To have just one lecture There Now, you see Of the United States Of America You see there Or United States Or whatever That same lecture Without their removing Not seeing Is viewed By whoever is with us If it's not of that Of that But we are so power drunk Here That even when a governor is to speak Oh no, the governor's like That is a special Don't transmit the letter No It will give him so much power To do what you want But They didn't want an agent To imagine the CDL It was the vice president who was Acting there That ensured who was running that People didn't like it And we are so high-willed So these are the issues What's the thing to cut off minds And it's so sad that Mr. President Is our president Let me not say such a thing Alright Basically somebody come to you To say they want to Slice the ear of your son Will you allow it Or your daughter will you allow it Will you allow it Because that is what you do As old as it is The former head of As old as it is Why would you submit yourself to All kinds of stupid advices That is what it is But age Age doesn't necessarily mean anything We already know that age is just a number Age is not the exact thing I said the former You are indirectly Bustering my ass off You are indirectly supporting me No, I'm not supporting you I'm just only saying that If you were making I said former military head of state Who is the man that was the governor At my time The former minister of Petrion Impressive credential Former head of state He should have overcome Some of this effectiveness But I think that Open up on Kotaria For those who always make an excuse For all of this You can't compare Maybe that's where the problem lies Maybe the problem lies in the fact That we're having a former military Head of state And coupled with personality And what a view With having to be in a democratic dispensary It's not the same thing The experiences are different And age also As we always say Age is just a number I will not disagree with you My dear message I will not disagree Open up on Kotaria We need to move away from that headline So we can check out more There will say you have an ambition So the minister will not suggest Let's leave that alone Let's open up on Kotaria We need to move away now Let's move away from the punch Let's take a quick look At the Guardian newspaper this morning I'd like to share your thoughts on this one The fact that the new National Carrier May take off in the second quarter That's of 2022 The beat opens this week And this might just be Another good news for Nigerians In the midst of all of the confusion And the hardship that's ongoing Oh God What is that What is that This I'm going to call Help me now Help me now I have no idea what you're thinking at the time Aviation whatever Has doubted it Because certain things are not being done So it has doubted it The minister said Before they leave the box Later he said June next year Now they are saying Second quarter What are we going to believe So the situation is like this Sit down look If it keeps on fighting But you'll be very much surprised That they are trying to expedite action on this Of the money they are going to make for this Then when it gets close to the second quarter They come up with another excuse It will not take off Right there You can go to bank with this It will not take off Because the man had said Before the new office that's the minister Then later he said June next year So what has changed What has changed How is it to make money So if we get this It can be done If we get this It can be done I'm not saying they will not commission They might commission after all We believe in the country where generator was used To commission to buy If you didn't have the president Left Generator went off and out And the president called the governor Only you should know Who is fond of saying this kind of thing The president at that time He said holy It happened Generator was used to commission to buy So anything can happen They can throw in an aircraft Because money must change hands They need the cash If they don't start now The president might say well let my successor continue I'm not interested in that So how can then we are stupid No we must tell him that if we do this Then we can start We must be need money The ones who called are renewed They tell you oh the partners are brought That came up with this excuse Oh there are some legal problems Oh there are this It will not become It's not even a problem It's not even a problem So it will not become The man who has the right now is in health The country can burn He's not praying to get out He's tired That's his problem That's the truth We really didn't say When I did it officially or not He didn't say that the ambassador will continue To accompany All right let's also Let's also look at another one Because We're almost out of time now And I'd like to share your thoughts on this one Because following the constitutional review That's ongoing of the 1999 Constitution Certain recommendations that were put out 68 of them and one of them is the judicial autonomy I mean for the Autonomy for the judiciary Now you have the court workers Threatening that's under the Edges of the judicial Staff union of Nigeria Threatening to embark on an industrial Industrial action Indefinite industrial action Following the failure Of some states in Nigeria To implement Or pass you know the law at the state level Granting financial Autonomy to the judiciary Now these was also You know some of the things that some political Pundit actually thought about The fact that yes it's good but what would happen At the state level Now we're looking at 36 states Out of 36 states we have just 8 states And these workers are saying we're going To embark on an indefinite Industrial action You know what that means for us You understand that the court Is A hope for a common man And now if you have the court Because if you have this part of workers Going and strike it means that to some extent It would actually hamper on Judicial proceedings And what have you and that would Not really be good for us as a country But what are your thoughts on this 36 states You just have only 8 states Granting judicial autonomy If the court Go and strike it could be a constitutional Plan Because Nigerians would take the most Of the Nigerians Nobody's going to witness When it's rights and in charge Of nobody Nobody with that position Never the less You know Our government has something From narcissistic personality They have this Bigurals Capricious Out of control Drive And they want to be in charge Of going to judiciary And the legislation I'll tell you That I am 100% in support If I'm going juicy called Of that strike I was upset And it was on this station On the super station I pleaded with you to not call The government Most Like now the supreme court Some said It was a win-win situation Because the governor said They must be refunded If at all the judiciary To get the capital From the federal government And since the court said no That the supreme court said no And I also am disappointed That the supreme court said no That which the government also They did not lose Because they actually Won because if you are going to grant The autonomy then we need the key Because of the condition In other words, they don't want you To grant the autonomy While the supreme court Is simply relying on the constitution They say no We are not going to refund the money However, the government should ensure If the government We are actually doing what The constitution said they should do They don't have been discused They don't have any implication To respect it Even if it was so stealthy That is what you call Traditional activity And that is the whole issue Because what the supreme court says Is the law that is the law That is why you have them there Now I Quickly I talk of legalism Legalism is about the letter But the law, if it goes beyond the letter You look at the letter and the spirit The interest If you talk of autonomy Today, most judges Even the CJs Go cap in hand You see a governor Telling an ugly to call a CJ To his office An ugly How did he even solve it The governor He works for one or two hours To see the governor Tell me why justice Will not become Thank you so much Direct funding I want you to go and try And if you don't go and try Or if it is not, let your cost Shut down And you know the elections We are going to have the election We will take a break We will take a break Thank you so much We have to let you go at this point in time We do appreciate your thoughts It is always a delight to listen to you Share your thoughts on these issues We look forward to talking extensively On some of them, thank you so much Have a great day Okonobon Kotariya Is a public affairs analyst Good to have him share his thoughts once again We look forward to having more of him On the show this morning On the press And when we return It will be time for us to be looking at our first major conversation The issue of evacuation Of Nigerian students and all that is happening With Nigerians outside The war torn zone If you would like to see But just before we take that break We would like to let you know what happened today In history, been the seventh day In the month of March Please stay with us


The best content marketing strategy is that it should not look like marketing. It should look as an integral piece of the content and it should be a meaningful story or a meaningful proposition to the consumer to which the consumer is attracted naturally versus even the consumer realizing that there is marketing. In fact, marketing is best when it's like water, when it's not present or perceived by the consumer, in fact not even water like air. And I think if content marketing can achieve that, whether it's an informative video or an entertaining video, it can actually achieve that larger purpose to the consumer that it fulfills the real need of either being entertained or informed. And the product is weaved in extremely colorlessly into the whole story. I think that forms the best marketing strategy. You know, marketing has two aspects, right? What you spend on the creative and what you spend on the media. In fact, even in traditional marketing, you spend on the creative and you spend on the media. If the creative, and if you see the investment proportions, probably 10% is invested in the creative and 90% is invested in the media. Now, if the creative itself, the film or the content that's generated, even if it's a direct ad film, if it is superlative or if it's really, really good, then the effectiveness it delivers on the same media plan is massive. Similarly, in content marketing, if the content itself has turned out to be really good and appealing to the consumer, then it will find its own media and your consumer will turn out to be your media, which we now call virality in lingo and in jargon. But the whole thing is how do you leverage on the same media? How do you maximize on the same media? The multiplier effect is what a good content piece can give you. And I think with content marketing, you have a greater opportunity, a greater leverage because the piece can be a little longer. You're not restricted to your 30-second creative. And if you're able to get a great story going over there or a great piece of content which is meaningful and therefore the consumer itself becomes your media, it can definitely save you on budgets or the effectiveness of your campaign. So therefore the ROI. Digital as a platform has really, really evolved in the last five years. In fact, it's just in the last 18 months where it's become or tending to become mass. Content marketing before that was largely, you know, restricted to the television or the radio medium. And digital never, while people did experiment, it was really not giving us the same reach. I think now you can actually segmentize your audiences and therefore have probably 30 different ways, the same campaign ends, depending on whom you're targeting. So I would say digital as it becomes more and more mass will provide a wider platform to innovate and story tell for the advertisers. So I think even today the traditional media is too, too way too big, you know, for the digital media to affect it in a big way. Yeah, but the advantages of digital media in terms of targeting or, you know, innovation are way more. I think traditional media in a lot of cases is catching up and coming up with a lot of innovative ad formats. But I think still digital cannot, you know, match the reach and the noticability that traditional can give you. And when I say traditional, it's not only television, right? See the way print has innovated. In fact, there's a resurgence of print in the last five years. The way outdoors has, you know, been impactful. In fact, a lot of digital media is actually using outdoors to make an impact because beyond a point there is also a blind spot in digital. So while it is forcing the traditional media to be innovative, I think traditional still has a great place of its own.


From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. And when we kicked off this program, Cloud Native Insights, we wanted to talk about the innovation and agility that's happening, not just cloud as a location. We're going to drill down a little bit into, of course, one of the very important pieces of a company. And that's their websites and their applications that lived in that environment. And of course, that's gone through a lot of changes over the years, any of us that have been in tech for a couple of decades have watched from the early days to, of course, today's multimedia, globally distributed environment. And everyone during the global pandemic, of course, has been stressing and straining their use of the internet. So really excited to welcome to the program the two co-founders of Netlify. I have Matt Billman, who is the CEO and his co-founder, Chris Bach, who is the president. Both of Netlify, really the company behind Jamstack, which we're going to explain and talk about a bit. Matt and Chris, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. All right, so let's start with just some of the basics. I expect that some of our audience is not familiar with Jamstack. You do a quick Google search and it's JavaScript, it's APIs, it's Markup, and you say, okay, I understand what a plunge of that means. But if you could give us kind of a counter-contrast to what web development was before and how Jamstack's really helping to revolutionize what's happening in the space. Yeah, so for many years we built websites and web applications with an application-based architecture where every website or every application would be this monolithic application with typically like a load balance or a set of web servers, application servers and a database and every request to a page would go through this whole stack, it would pass through the application layer, talk to the database, fetch template, merge data and template, build HTML on the fly and send it back to the user. And basically what we saw happening and what's been happening with the Jamstack is this decoupling of the actual front-end presentation layer of the websites and web applications and then the back-end layer. And the advantages there is that if you can really like pre-build the front-end application layer, you can take the actual HTML or an application shell and distribute it across a globally distributed network, you can get it into the hands of the user's browser very quickly. And then the back-end, what we've seen happening there is that it's split up to all these different APIs and services, you no longer have your one monolithic back-end, you have all these different services where some are your own, but a lot of them are other people's services like Stripe or Twilio or Algolia or Contentful. So we've seen this shift to this architecture where you can say that in a way the stack has moved up a little from the old tooling where something like the LAMP stack would be common, really naming like the programming language, the specific web server, the Linux server, the operating system and so on, right? And then up to a level where it's really about getting an application into the browser, using JavaScript as the runtime and talking to all these, to this whole new economy of APIs and services. Yeah, Chris, I wonder if you could bring us inside your customers and the companies that you talk to. I think about for the longest time it was, maybe I just outsourced my web development, but website is one of those key components that I share my value, I share what's going on, I want to be able to change it pretty often and there's so much more that I can do today than I could have done 10 years ago. We've watched that march. So help us understand what skill sets do people need to have? What type of companies are using Jamstack and bring in if you can, Netlify, how is this a business and not just an open source standards movement that's helping to revolutionize what's happening? Absolutely, I mean, first of all, people using this and companies using this is extremely wide, right? It's very horizontal. This is anyone with a digital property basically, right? But I think what we've seen all the time is that we have a lot more challenge that we used to have, right? So we started off just maybe having the one dot com, right? With limited functionality. And today you have a multiple channels, right? You have landing pages, you have domains, you have lots of activities online. You have mobile apps and commerce is often a big part of it. And I would say especially in the last few months, there's a lot of people that had the digital convergence points as one of many and now it's the only ones, right? So I think it's becoming extremely important. I also think that when you look at your web infrastructure in general, it has been very complex, right? And you need a lot of different people, right? And you need to maintain staging environments, production lines, development environments. You need to have a wide set of skills to maintain these things, right? And if a web developer wanted to do a lot of things, right? They have to go and tap DevOps and so on on the shoulder, right? And I think what the jam stick is about is saying, hey, you can get so much further as a web developer. Now, if you take the modern built tools, you can take the git workflows and you wrap around the browser that has become a full-fledged operating system and the AI economy as Matt was just talking about, you have these workflows or you potentially have these workflows where you can get so much further, right? And that's very much Netlify's mission. So Netlify saw this opportunity of decoupling the front end for the back end and the building from the hosting of creating an approach to making websites that would be many times faster because you have multiple points of origin and you don't feel very risk. It's many times safer. There's not that huge surface area of attack. It's much more scalable and so on. It was sort of a win-win-win, but the problem was that there was no viable workflow. If you take a traditional CDN and you put it in, it doesn't matter really if it's one or the other. As good as they got services, they're all meant to sit in front of an origin, right? They're meant to buffer some. And if you have the jam stick, there is no origin in that way, right? The network in itself has to be an origin. So it has to be architected quite differently. And then there's a lot of things around CDCI and how you serverless and so on that all had to be sort of re-imagined. And Netlify is that blue layer. It is that platform that takes you from local development all the way out to edge nodes. And what allows you to mix and match any tool. So it's not program-independent. So you can say, well, we use a built tool and that's PHP or Ruby or the JavaScript or React or Next or whatever it might be, right? And we use these APIs for this server, for this property. Over here we have a commerce site. Over here we have a .com that needs a huge enterprise CMS with tons of stakeholders. But the thing is that all of those now become something that plugs into your website rather than have to drive the website itself. And that sort of frees up the silos. So when we see people using Netlify, we have companies using Netlify. Big fitness company, for example, that home fitness company that uses us for developer documentation for all their marketing sites but also for that .com. But even if you go to the equipment that people have at home and you log in, that's actually using some very nifty identity and remote-based access control for Netlify and when you, if you watch the video there, it's also going through a Netlify player, right? We have fast food change that has that .com and their marketing sites, but also the kiosks down in the store, like the menus, the screens there, rather than being an old Windows NC server running some .net application in a dusty corner. Why not have it like that? And so both the category but also Netlify sort of brings in a solution and because it's decoupled from all those architectural choices, that means that you can now use the solution in a much, much wider setting. And we were sort of first to market during this. The Git serverless approach where you just push your serverless functions to Git, that's a Netlify first feature. The poor previews were invented by us and so on. So the Jamstack is an extremely wide, fundamental architectural approach that matches basically anyone that wants to build web properties. Netlify is this agnostic, wide platform that just makes it possible. Yeah, Chris, actually, I saw the Peloton use case up on the website and you're right, a very different experience rather than I bring my device, is it sync? Does it work with it? It really integrates those solutions. And you just brought up serverless, which is actually how I got connected to talk in Netlify. So Matt, sorry, I think you wanted to jump in there but was wondering if you could help us. I look at serverless and what the promise of serverless of course is that I don't need to think about that underlying infrastructure. I just like developers build our applications. Feels like that's really the same mission that you have and the serverless is a piece of your story. So maybe explain and tease that out a little for us. Absolutely, right? I think it ties in, right? Like the, basically what we saw just from an architectural perspective, right? Was this approach of really decoupling of decoupling front end and back end and so on, right? And working in a new way that gave a lot of benefits to the end users and performance and security and so on, right? But on the other hand, early on what we saw was that to adopt that approach, like developers had to deal with a lot of different moving pieces, like CI, CD, CDNs, what to do about like the API endpoints that didn't need to be dynamic and so on, right? And as Netlify, what we saw was that we could give like one end to end workflow for all of this and make it extremely easy for developers to work with this deck. And serverless plays a really important piece there, right? Because when Amazon pioneered AWS Lambda and took it to the world, right? Like I think the promise also for like the front end web developers of being able to simply write code and then not have to worry at all about like, where is it actually running? How are we scaling it? How are we operating it and so on, right? Like that's a really powerful promise, right? But at the same time in the same way, what we saw early on was that for a front end team to actually adopt serverless functions as part of the Jamstack, it introduced another level of complexity of now having to like manage your serverless functions independent from your front end, figuring out like API gateway endpoints for every one of them. And how about like deployment pipeline for your functions layer versus deployment pipelines for the actual front end layer that's supposed to talk to those front ends? How about staging environments versus production environments? How do you manage all that, right? So we saw that there was this inherent like incredible potential, but also a lot of complexity, right? And as Netlify, we saw that if we could give front end developers again, like a web developers in general an end to end workflow where they can work both with the front end framework, write the code that will get deployed into the browser, but also just have a folder where they can write their serverless functions and then know that Netlify will take care of all of the wiring, right? Of when you open a pull request and get with a new function will give you a URL on our globally distributed CDN where you can view both the whole front end but also the function and sidesteps sort of all of the complexities of linking together API gateways to functions of managing CIC pipelines and test environments and so on. And in the end, like the serverless functions starts becoming a really important part of this jam stack approach, right? Because you have this world where you have a front end that's often talking to many different APIs and services where again, some are your own and some are other people's services, but really often you need some place to glue those together or to build your own custom API endpoint that talks to a couple of them and it has access to server side secrets and so on, right? And this idea of not having to suddenly operate and manage a whole set of servers and infrastructure just for that part of it but simply just writing the code and then knowing that you don't have to worry about the operations or scalability or anything around that code. That's a really powerful paradigm. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the real challenges with cloud is you talk about the paradox of choice. There's so many ways to do things not necessarily simple, you know, anybody, you know, I was a blogger for many years and it was like, well, I'll just use the self hosted WordPress because I don't want to have to worry about that piece of it. You know, Matt, I've watched it. You did a presentation talking about if I wanted to do WordPress hosted in AWS, that absolutely is not simple. I even heard a podcast from one of your board members Tim Preston Werner talking about, you know, we need to be more opinionated. We need to be able to give more guidance to developers. Maybe Chris, if you could, you know, how are we, you know, when the proliferation of choice, you know, keeps increasing, you know, making sure that people can, how do I make that decision tree and how do we try to keep it simple? Absolutely. I mean, and I actually think that that's a super relevant question because you have a lot of choice as a web developer today. Frontend developers used to cut up Photoshop files and turn them into HTML, right? Now that you advanced markup and they have all these frameworks and flavors of JavaScript to choose between and there's these powerful build tools and, you know, all those workflows and the browser can do everything you can imagine, right? And so yeah, there is a lot of choice out there, right? And I think, and for Net Define, what's extremely important is that we are opinionated in the right places. And so when it comes to, for example, frontend tooling and build tools and these things that web developers are often sort of faced with having to choose between, our role is to make it as simple as possible as to use any of them, but also give you the opportunity of saying, well, this new paradigm allows you to actually mix and match, right? It allows you to use this tool for this property and this tool for this property and it gives you a ton of flexibility, but still, you know, come under one roof of a platform like Net Define. And I think that is very powerful. And so we also don't want to choose for you. We want to inform your choices and we want to make it as easy as possible to go and say, hey, these are my needs. What should I be going, what direction should I be going? And of course, we work with enterprise clients on migration services and so on, right? And where we help them a lot with that. But if we lock down on a single flavor or a single build tool, or a single frontend framework, then we also limit the application of what we bring to market and we want to remain a little more open-ended there. But I think there is a lot of complexity. A platform like Netlify is all about simplification. So all that wiring that Matt just mentioned, that at least goes, right? You don't spend hours configuring bondage caching and trying to find those edge cases, it just works. And that's a huge game changer for a lot of people, right? But there's definitely parts of the ecosystem that has a lot of choice and we do our best to inform. And I think on the hand-holding part, adjacent to that is the story of, well, do we then stop using content management systems? Like is this a whole new? Is it out with the old and in with the new? And I would say, you still have a lot of those needs, right? You still have non-technical people, for example, that needs to be able to opt and create and maintain content and so on, right? And create content. And so you very often will need an e-commerce solution or content management system and so on. But what we're seeing there is that we're speaking basically with every single major CMS out there that are saying, we're working on a headless system or we already have our headless version or we've just gone full headless. That means that we've worked decoupled so we don't no longer need to build the site which is provide like an independent source of content. And then it plugs into a platform like Netlify. So that can bring a lot of simplicity. So now you just have to maintain your content but you don't have to worry about all the different environments and what is up to date and how does my infrastructure look like? You press a button and it commits to get you get a deploy preview and it looks the same everywhere. I'm curious, what impact the current global pandemic has had on Netlify and your customers? I saw you've got a COVID tracking project that you've done but also now just there's different considerations when I think about what services I need to access from the web and what kind of connectivity the ultimate end user would have. So what learnings have you had? What's involved there? And I mean, obviously we, it depends a lot on as Chris mentioned, right? Like the GenStack is adopted horizontally across all kinds of areas and businesses and so on, right? So we've of course seen businesses in sectors that are having hard time. And on the other hand, we've seen businesses in sectors that are exploding, right? Like we did immediately when the lockdown started happening and the pandemic started happening, we set aside like a free plan for projects working in the space of tackling the information sharing around COVID and finding solutions and so on. And that was really interesting to see. You mentioned the COVID tracking project, right? Which was a project like built in a short time by a small group of distributors that incredibly talented front-end developers and scientists and so on, right? And I think it was interesting to see like how the GenStack and our tooling and so on also really made it possible for them to build as a small distributed team this set of data information and tooling to a global audience, right? Seeing huge traffic peaks at time and just knowing that the architecture and our infrastructure could handle it for them. All right. Chris, I've got one a little bit off to the side here when I look at what Netlify is doing you talk about having an open and independent web and while we are fully supportive of that we're a little concerned sometimes if you look at what's happening across the globe there's a lot of discussions will the internet actually fragment will certain countries fall off certain environments any concerns there? What do you look at? What are you hearing from your customers when you talk about that mission? It is, I mean it's one of the big challenges of our time, right? I mean, I think we all maybe took for given the internet as the standard it became, right? The way that you can publish without permission is pretty magnificent, right? And it would be indescribably painful for civilization if we lost that, right? And I think fragmentation is something that we all have to sort of worry around from the way we see it is that the web, the traditional monolithic approach, right? To where led to a web that wasn't secure enough and wasn't scalable enough and wasn't performing enough and that's for example, what opened the door for for mobile applications, right? Where it just didn't make sense to pull in the UI every time you turn the page so we ended up with a form that said we pre-built the application, we downloaded and then you speak to servers for anything then it's real time updating, right? And that makes perfect sense. That's basically the same architecture that we are bringing to the web at very large scale. But of course the problem is that now that gatekeeper's there, right? That people you have to ask for permission to publish and so on and there are other attempts to say, hey, we need a performant web and there's a very big players out there that say, let's come over and just, you know do we even need to call it the internet? Can we just call it our company? Website, I'm not gonna name any names here, right? But leading down is what we call wall gardens that are great for absolutely no one except for the company, right? And what we believe is that if you have a web that is secure and is scalable and is performing enough to justify at least the architecture maintaining, right? And not having to run into any wall gardens and still say, no, you don't need to use a handful of commercial platforms if you wanna be heard rather than have your own web properties and your own custom domains, right? I think that's the part of the open independent Bible web that we're fighting for, right? Basically one that adopts and keeps adopting an architecture that is something that levels the playing field. And then I would also say for Netlify, I mean, a few years before we started like try configuring your own CDN, right? And like that was reserved for the very, very large tech players, now you can come in, you can literally click a button on Netlify and get custom domain and ACTS and a post-process site that's globally distributed and automatically integrated into Git, right? And that's on the premium point, you know? And so as a startup, you can level set together with everyone else and be available widely across the world without performance issues immediately. And so in that way, I'm also seeing that's a democratization of performance, right? That means that that's great. And for places where you see developing economies where you often have brownouts, where you often can't depend on having rival service in this locally and so on, right? This idea of having decoupled that and having something that's just automatically, you know what, don't even worry about it because it's already ready to go in all these pockets all around the world. That's a huge game changer. That's actually, we see a lot of adoption of the Jamstack and Netlify in those places as well, right? Because that's just such a promise to the architecture. So I hear what you're saying and I'm also very concerned about a fragmented web for political reasons as well, right? Across the globe, right? And from our angle, the way we fight for it is to make sure that it retains using an architecture that makes it accessible for you. Yeah, I heard many years ago a friend of mine said, if you're a technologist, it means that in general you are a technology optimist, which I definitely try to be. So I love Chris how you've just brought in some of the potential and opportunity.  It's going to completely change the world. Anything that you're seeing on your side as to real opportunities that we will see, just a step function in what your companies using Jamstack that partnering with Netlify and your ecosystem. What are some of the early things that you see that are exciting you down the line for this? Part of it is simply like the whole ecosystem around the Jamstack growing up and the tooling, the APIs, the frameworks available around it and the level of innovation that's triggered and especially how it's triggering like, especially how we are seeing the potential for small distributed teams to work together and build things with a global impact in a short time. I remember a couple of years ago, we did a hackathon with Together Free Code Camp and of course like since it was with Free Code Camp it was mostly like teams were mostly fairly new to programming and so on, right? And it was pretty amazing to see what over a weekend like with this architecture and with this tooling, right? With the vendors that were present there and helping out and so on, what these small teams could actually get done in a weekend, right? Like I remember the winning team had an app where the whole room would like see an image on the main stage screen and then on their phone try to place that image on the map and you would real time see like how people ranked, how close they got and get a winner and so on, right? And that was all just from combining like APIs and tooling like Hasura, like Netlify, like HonorDB, like Google Maps and so on, right? And I think in some way we shouldn't forget like just how much this kind of ecosystem of readily available APIs and services around this running stack is allowing people to build things that like years ago would have taken like a very big team like probably like a year to build, right? Like and suddenly you can have a relatively small group of relatively new programmers build something really impressive, right? So I think that's a trend we'll see continue accelerating, right? And Chris, personally involved in advising and helping out a lot of like these new startups in the space that are trying to bring new tooling to the world that makes more and more of these things possible and accessible. Well, Chris and Matt, I really appreciate you both joining such an exciting space. Talk about the cloud agility and innovation, such a robust ecosystem. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having us. And I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for joining and look forward to hearing more about your Cube Insight.


Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Roberto Calandrini, head of architecture and digital and AI services from SNAM. He's remote, remoting in from Milan, Italy. Roberto, great to see you. Thanks for joining us on theCUBE. Great to see you too, John. Thanks for having me here. Love the virtual events. We can bring people in from all around the world. I love the virtual. I mean, it's one of the trade-offs of not being in person as we can still get you in. Thanks for coming on. Before we get started, I want to dig into the digital architecture of what you guys are doing. It's very compelling in a hybrid cloud. It's got all the things going on, which I like. But before we start, can you provide a short overview of SNAM? Who are your customers? What is your company's focus? And what's your role there? Sure. So, SNAM is one of the worst leading energy infrastructure operators. And we basically beat the energy infrastructures and offer integrated services. Our mission is to guide the evolution of the energy sector and lead the energy transition to a low-carbon future. And as you can see in our last investment plan, we declared our net zero carbon objective to bridge by 2040. This is why we basically are investing a lot in technology, in renovating our technology stack in order to provide our business line with the most innovative sustainable energy network, thanks to which we are already guaranteeing stable supplies to Europe of natural gas. Love your title. Love the fact you got the AI piece in there. What about specifically is your role? What do you oversee? I'm responsible for architecture, digital and artificial intelligence services. That basically means that I'm with my team and my extended team of the digital technology department are designing the entire technology stack for SNAM. And I'm specifically focusing more on developing intelligent and usable services for our business lines. Awesome. You guys over there, it's NAM have transformed a lot. The stack, that's cool when we get into that. You redesign your applications map, right? So it's really edge to cloud now, edge up to the cloud. What were the business drivers and the objectives to reach that goal? I mean, cause that's really a great use case. I mean, you got the edge to deal with intelligent, you got industrial, what were the business drivers and objectives? Yeah, yeah, our main business drivers has always been to increase the effectiveness of our processes and business lines. So to bear support the decision of our internal line of business. And we soon discovered that we needed more data in order to do that. And we structure a very extensive IoT program. But those data provide information about the internal states of our assets because they're coming from the census. And we thought, what about the environment in which our assets are located? So following up on that, we integrated data coming from remote sensing technologies. So think about drones and satellites, major data. And we soon discovered that we needed to renew and extend our technology stack from edge to cloud, as you said, and to be the scalable data platform in order to process these new level of data. This way, we think we will be able to enter the new volume of data that we predicted will be 100 times what we currently manage. And efficiently use AI and machine learning to derive insight from these new scale and complexity. So we're talking about big data. Robert, I got to ask you, could you take a minute to describe your transformation journey you guys went through and how Red Hat helped you guys execute the digital transformation? Yeah, we basically started working in 2018 with Red Hat to set up our cloud readiness map. We basically needed to decide what to scale, what to list and shift, what to refactor in order to move our application to a modern architectural stack. And Red Hat helped us with this. We use OpenShift for our container orchestration platform. And from this, we're developing our new application map. Then in 2019, we decided to accelerate the moving of our application workload. We started moving 10 to 20% of our workloads on OpenShift. And since then, most of our new software project is now a club native and developed on OpenShift. We're still in the process of leveraging modern architecture. So microservices based and using our container orchestration platform and other software as a service platform in order to complete the modernization of our application map. And we're targeting 2023, 2024 to complete the entire process. But as you know, it's a never changing landscape. So you basically never complete such a task in some way. Do you see Red Hat technology helping SNAM in its ecosystem for energy efficiency and aiming for low carbon emissions? Well, I think that OpenShift provides us with the right level of flexibility and agility to move at the speed of our new businesses. That's one way to look at the quest. And the other one, I think it would be in terms of energy efficiency and the carbon footprint that our application workloads generate. And I think that in that respect, it could happen on the meter long-term probably. So it will, in proportion to the workloads, we will be able to re-factor as purely reactive so as non-blocking apps. Disparably, in fact, for the same business service could improve the effective resource consumption. So indirectly saving energy and CO2. You know, I love this conversation. I know you're in Italy and wish we could be in person but I'm glad to get you on because you guys are kind of an example of the main theme at the conference this year which is an edge, you know, intelligent edge and IoT. But you know, IoT has been around for a while and we've talked about it before but now with the cloud and connecting to the cloud, that's a huge topic here at Red Hat Summit 2021.  And what's interesting is Kubernetes and containerized orchestration, all help operators, operations people. So you have this OT, IT integration where the operational technology, old school technology, people and the stack and the people and the disciplines are meeting the old IT and creating a new thing. So I have to ask you, what are these, what's that world like? What are some of the use cases that you're working on and you're planning to deploy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. It's exactly like that. It's known as a long OT history as you said. So right now we have a complex brownfield situation for our edges and gateways on the field. There are various technical components that we signs on the field. You must consider that the Italian network, the Italian transportation network has more than 33,000 kilometers of pipeline and differently sized plans across the country. So we have several, already several use cases currently running on our data centers that could benefit we think from distributed processing at the edge. Think about, for example, physical security. So just to give you an example, privacy preserving, local video processing for anomaly detection done at the edge is much more effective in our opinion for hierarchical processing for a data intensive task that involves field data so that you can process the data coming from the field at different level and take to the central data center only what's needed. And we're also working on the usual problem there is with a with a with OT with a with operation of technology that is standardization. So we have many heterogeneous components and communication protocol there. And, you know, without a proper IT stack gathering and normalizing the data for a higher level processing could become cumbersome. So security is also a relevant topic because it is usually a preserve at the physical and natural layer. And we think that we can introduce with IoT three main improvements about this. We're expanding the level of cyber stack to the full technology stack bringing modern internet security standard to the edge. We're pushing containerization to the edge being able to orchestrate our workloads from data centers to the cloud. And we think that this will provide us with a high level of flexibility and a better exploitation of the geographical distribution of our data. And last but not least, we're standardizing our gateways and edges. And this will help us streamline the messy data transfer conversion and normalization of the data we will receive from the field. Awesome, I got to ask first of all, great job on the edge. I think that's a great vision of the building in security. It's important. Having that edge intelligence is really well done. Congratulations, love the vision. I got to ask you, what's your future plans for SNAM's technology journey as a whole? What's your vision? What's your next step? So what we would like to focus on in the coming years is how to best leverage the hybrid cloud environment we currently set up. So right now we have an hybrid cloud environment with a data center and one cloud tenant and having our workloads running on OpenShift would make easier for us to leverage the offering of different cloud providers and of course to best exploit what we currently have on our tenants. Second one is find the best way to leverage IoT. So as I said before, our focus in the coming years would be to complete our IoT foundation, rolling out our edges, our gateways and put our new unified opposition system to work. And this will provide the computational backbone of our intelligent gas network. And finally, and this is a less objective that is will be built on top of the other two. We must find different ways and exploit different ways to leverage data and artificial intelligence. So we need to exploit our data in order to generate insight for our business lines. And due to the scale of our new data streams, artificial intelligence machine learning, we think will be ubiquitous in our applications. Right now we're already using it, but not at the scale that the new data streams will need. And most of the algorithms are working on data that are from legacy system and SCADA system. So they are specifically created for each project. We are about to begin an exciting data journey where everything will reside on a unified data platform and our data scientists, our data analysts in the business lines will be able to derive value from them. Awesome. You know, you guys are great customer use case that love the real operational impact. I talk with a lot of other practitioners and end user enterprises and I get the same question and I go to the statement. They say, obviously security needs to be built in, but the challenges and where they want to, what they want to do, and I want to get your thoughts on this if you don't mind commenting, they all say, I want to run cloud native applications, cloud native applications from my data center to the cloud and then out to the edge and with a, as a distributed platform, one operation set, whether it's OT, IT, I want to make that, that's my end game in the short term. I want to get there fast. So I got to ask you, for those people that want that, is OpenShift a good solution for that in your opinion? We, we of course think it is. It is part of our IoT foundation is not the only technology component, but is one of the most relevant and it is absolutely happiness in enabling the possibility of orchestrating workloads from the cloud to the edge. And we will be able to give you more information about that as soon as we will release the first distributed workloads within 2021. So I'd be happy to answer any any questions from our peers or other colleagues from other industries. You guys have thousands and thousands of sites. This is classic industrial edge implementation, honestly monitoring, just monitoring the pipes.  I mean, this is like just a physical thing. So now as you have technology, you guys have to monitor and get that early detection of any gas leaks. This is critical to your business. How is that changing? How is that environment changing with technology? Is it more automated? What's your vision? How are you guys looking at that? Well, we surely are trying to move along to two main drivers. The first is unification and standardization of how we monitor all these distributed technology stock. This is very important because even for the simplest use case, you're now dealing with distributed application. And this is a entirely different game to what we are used to basically. And the other relevant thing is how can we get the best from the machines we put on the field? So in other terms, how can we standardize how we connect to the machines we have on the field and how much intelligence we need to put there and how to test it? And in order to do that, we're thinking about building a digital twin of our assets that will enable us to be able to test end-to-end before getting to the real thing on fields. How will it work? What are the security vulnerability, potential security vulnerability and other aspects of the technology infrastructure and the data infrastructure? And we think this is very important because in some way, in order to provide the acceleration and the scale that we are going to provide to our company, we need to be sure well in advance that what we designed will work in practice without getting to the field. We would like to get into the field where everything is already tested. Robert Till, great to have you on theCUBE. Great to see you. Thanks for coming in from Milan, Italy. CUBE Virtual is one of the benefits and hope to see you in person soon at the next event. But great use case, love your environment, love how you're looking at that platform as a distributed platform and bringing that OT, IT together, data center to the cloud to the edge. That's a really relevant use case and architecture. So congratulations. Thank you very much John and I hope to see you very soon. Bye. When I'm in Italy, we're going to come by and do a site visit and see each other. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. Absolutely. CUBE Coverage for Red Hat Summit 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.


Hi, I'm Claire Keen, the Extension Specialist and Cropping Systems here at the Williston Research Extension Center, located in Williston, North Dakota. And thank you for taking the time today to watch the Carrington Organic Field Day. I'm very happy to be here. Steve invited me to talk about oats. So that's what this presentation is about. And not the crop. When I say oats, I'm referring to OATS, which is the Organic Agronomy Training Service. And this is a group I've been involved with since it started back in 2018. And so what is oats? Oats again, it's the Organic Agronomy Training Service, and it's a collaborative nonprofit group made up of members with extension industry and also some agricultural nonprofits. And we're focused on building the skill and knowledge base of agricultural technical service providers. So folks like extension agents, certified crop advisors, private agronomists, government agency staff like NRCS and SCD, folks that advise farmers in increasing their knowledge on organic agriculture, the requirements to transition and get certified, and also best management practices for managing organic crops. And what we are responding to is the need for these trained organic service providers. Because currently, many farmers do rely on folks like certified crop advisors, seeds bin, chemical dealers, co-op personnel, for recommendations on input crop rotations. And they really indicated that without that same level of service available, they'd be very hesitant to try organic agriculture because we really don't have, number one, many acres of organic managed ag in the United States. And there really isn't a strong advisory network for farmers seeking to transition to organic like there is in the conventional space. And recognizing that OATS has set out to train the extension agents, the agronomists, the certified crop advisors in the basics of organic agriculture so that they can be a resource for their clients who are interested in transitioning. This need has really grown because the demand for organic food in the United States has also grown. Over the past 20 years, there's been a very steady increase in consumers spending on and demand for organic products. But the number of certified organic acres in the United States really has not kept pace. We're still only at about one, maybe getting close to 2% of organic acres in the US, whereas we're now consuming 5% to 5.5% of our food as organic. And so unfortunately, a lot of that shortfall in organic grains in particular has been made up through imports. And just recently, there's been a really big outcry for the need to increase domestic organic grain production. Not only to meet this organic demand within the US for US consumers, but also to give farmers the opportunity to take advantage of the price premiums that exist for organic grain crops. So again, OATS is trying to train the advisor network in the organic certification, regulation, production aspects so that then they can be a resource for farmers looking to transition their operations and become certified organic farmers. 2019 was the pilot year for OATS. We actually hosted the very first OATS training here in North Dakota. It happened in Bismarck in March of 2019 and was a two-day intensive workshop with a variety of speakers that included extension, scientists, researchers, farmers, and some industry reps, and also some small group work and a lot of discussion to help folks start transition their thinking to the organic mindset of thinking about cooperations and multi-year scales since inputs typically aren't as readily available or can't really be used in the same way as in conventional agriculture. And the training went really well. We had about 35 participants and then other groups held those trainings in other parts of the country later in the year. So there was one in Wisconsin and also in Indiana. And in 2020, we did have plans to expand OATS, offer trainings again in those states and then also another one in perhaps Montana and maybe Pennsylvania to expand our reach to Rocky Mountain in the Mid-Atlantic. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has put those plans very much on hold. And so right now the OATS National Steering Committee is discussing potentially putting together podcasts that would be available for folks to listen to both to talk about the reasons of why to transition to organic consumer benefits, but also to generate interest in future OATS programming. And so looking ahead to 2021, we are also in the beginning stages of putting together a curriculum that would be hybrid online and in-person. So doing a lot of that, say the PowerPoint part, a lot of that in-classroom type of work would be a flipped classroom model where you'd go online, watch modules, have a small group online discussion, and then the opportunity to be in-person once or twice as a follow-up later in the year. So again, that's still very tentative and we don't have a solid plan for that, but we're trying to be responsive to the COVID-19 situation and have both material available for folks to learn from, but also in-person opportunities since we find those really valuable. And so I'll wrap it up. And if you do have any questions about OATS or organic certification, you're welcome to contact me. Again, my name's Claire Keen and my email is C-L-A-I-R-dot-K-E-E-N-E at N-D-S-U-dot-E-D-U. And then for more information about OATS and to look for those forthcoming podcasts, please visit the OATS website, which is at organicagronomy.com. So thank you very much and I hope you enjoy the presentation.