 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital coverage. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm excited to be talking with one of Dell Technologies customers, EarthCamp, joining me is Bill Sharp, the senior VP of product development and strategy from EarthCamp. Bill, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you so much. So talk to me a little bit about what EarthCamp does. This is a very interesting webcam technology. You guys have tens of thousands of cameras and sensors all over the globe. Give our audience an understanding of what you guys are all about. Sure thing. The world's leading provider of webcam technologies and mentioned content and services where leaders in live streaming, time-lapse imaging, primary focus in the vertical construction. So with a lot of these, the most ambitious largest construction projects around the world, you see these amazing time-lapse movies. We're capturing all of that imagery basically around the clock. These cameras are sending all of that image content to us when we're generating these time-lapse movies from it. You guys are headquartered in New Jersey. I was commenting before we went live about your great background. So you're actually getting to be on site today. Yes. Yes, we're live from our headquarters in Upper Saddle River, New Jersey. Excellent. So in terms of the types of information that you're capturing, so I was looking at the website see from a construction perspective or some of the big projects you guys have done, the Hudson Yards, the Panama Canal expansion, the 9-Eleven Museum, but you talked about one of the biggest focuses that you have is in the construction industry. In terms of what type of data you're capturing from all of these thousands of edge devices, give us a little bit of an insight into how much data you're capturing per day, how it gets from the edge, presumably, back to your core data center for editing. Sure. And it's not just construction. We're also in travel, hospitality, tourism, security, architecture and engineering, basically any industry that need high resolution visualization of their projects or their performance or of their product flow. So it's high resolution documentation is basically our business. There are billions of files in the Isilon system right now. We are ingesting millions of images a month. We are also creating very high resolution panoramic imagery where we're taking hundreds and sometimes multiple hundreds of images, very high resolution images and stitching these together to make panoramas that are up to 30 gigapixel sometimes, typically around one to two gigapixel, but that composite imagery represents millions of images per month coming into the storage system and then being stitched together to those composites. So millions of images coming in every month. You mentioned Isilon. Talk to me a little bit about before you were working with Dell EMC and PowerScale. How are you managing this massive volume of data? Sure. We've used a number of other enterprise storage systems. It was really nothing was as easy to manage as Isilon really is. There was a lot of problems with overhead, the amount of time necessary from a systems administrator resource standpoint to manage that. And it's interesting with the amount of data that we handle, since there's being billions of relatively small files. They're half a megabyte to a couple of megabytes each. It's an interesting data profile which Isilon really is well suited for. So if we think about some of the massive changes that we've all been through in the last, in 2020, what are some of the changes that EarthChem has seen with respect to the needs for organizations? Or you mentioned other industries like travel, hospitality, since none of us can get to these great travel destinations. Have you seen a big drive up in the demand and the need to process data more data faster? Yeah, that's an interesting point with the pandemic. Obviously we had to pivot and move a lot of people to working from home, which we were able to do pretty quickly. But there's also an interesting opportunity that arose from this, where so many of our customers and other people also have to do the same. And there's an increased demand for our technology. So people can remotely collaborate, they can work at a distance, they can stay at home and see what's going on on these project sites. So we really saw kind of an uptick in the need for our products and services. And we've also created some basically virtual travel applications. We have an application on the Amazon Fire TV, which is the number one app in the travel platform. People can kind of virtually travel when they can't really get out there. So it's, we've been doing kind of giving back to people that are having some issues with being able to travel around. We've done the fireworks at the Washington Mall around the Statue of Liberty for the July 4th. And this year we'll be webcasting in New Year's and Times Square for our 25th year actually. So again, helping people travel virtually and maintain connectivity with each other and with their projects. Which is so essential during these times where for the last six, seven months everyone is trying to get a sense of community and most of us just have the internet. So I also think you guys are available on Apple TV. Someone can fire that up later and maybe virtually travel. But tell me a little bit about how working in conjunction with Dell Technologies and PowerScale, how is that an ability to manage this massive volume change that you've experienced this year? Because as you said, it's also about facilitating collaboration which is largely online these days. Yeah, and I mean, the great things of working with Dell has been just our confidence in this infrastructure. Like I said, the other systems we've worked with in the past, we've always found ourselves kind of second guessing. Obviously resolutions are increasing, the camera performance is increasing, the streaming video is, everything is constantly getting bigger and better and faster and more. And we're always innovating. We found ourselves on previous storage platforms having to really kind of go back and look at the second guess where we're at with it. With the Dell infrastructure, it's been fantastic. We don't really have to think about that as much. We just continue innovating. Everything scales as we need it to do. It's much easier to work with. So you've got PowerScale at your core data center in New Jersey, tell me a little bit about how data gets from these tens of thousands of devices at the edge back to your editors for editing and how PowerScale facilitates faster editing, for example. Well, basically you can imagine every one of these cameras and it's not just cameras. We have mobile applications, we have fixed position and robotic cameras. There's all these different data acquisition systems. We're integrating with weather sensors and different types of telemetry. All of that data is coming back to us over the internet. So these are all endpoints in our network. So that's constantly being ingested into our network and saved to Icelon. The big thing that's really been a time saver working with the video editors is instead of having to take that content, move it into an editing environment where we have a whole team of award-winning video editors creating these time lapses, we don't need to keep moving that around. We're working natively on Icelon clusters. They're doing their editing there, subsequent edits. Anytime we have to update or change these movies as a project evolves, that's all can happen right there on that live environment. And the retention is there. If we have to go back later on, all of our customer's data is really kept within that one area that's consolidated and secure. I was looking at the Dell Tech website and there's a case study that you guys did or it came down with Dell Tech saying that the video processing time has been reduced 20%. So that's a pretty significant increase. I can imagine what the volume's changing so much now, but not only is huge to your business, but to the demands that your customers have as well. Depending on where there's demands are coming from. Absolutely, and just being able to do that a lot faster and be more nimble allows us to scale. We've added, actually, again, speaking to this pandemic, we've actually added personnel. We've been hiring people, a lot of those people are working remotely as we've stated before. And it's just with the increase in business, we have to continue to keep building on that. And this storage environment's been great. Tell me about what you guys really kind of think about with respect to power scale in terms of data management, not storage management. And what that difference means to your business? Well, again, I mean, number one was really eliminating the amount of resources, the amount of time we have to spend managing it. We've almost eliminated any downtime of any kind. We have greater storage density. We're able to have better visualization on how our data's being used, how it's being accessed. So as these things are evolving, we really have good visibility on how the storage system is being used in both our production and also in our backup environments. It's really easy for us to make our business decisions as we innovate and change processes, having that continual visibility and really knowing where we stand. And you mentioned hiring folks during the pandemic, which is fantastic, but also being able to do things much in a much more streamlined way with respect to managing all of this data. But I am curious in terms of innovation and new product development, what have you been able to achieve because you've got more resources presumably to focus on being more innovative rather than managing storage? Well, again, we're always really pushing the envelope of what the technology can do. As I mentioned before, we're getting things into 20 and 30 gigapixels. People are talking about megapixel images. We're stitching hundreds of these together. We're just really changing the way imagery is used, both in the time lapse and also just in archival process. A lot of these things we've done with the interior, we have this virtual reality product where you can walk through and see in a 360 bubble. We're taking that imagery and we're combining it with these BIM models. So we're actually taking the 3D models of the construction site and combining it with the imagery. And we can start doing things to visualize progress and different things that are happening on the site. Look for clashes or things that aren't built like they're supposed to be built. Things that maybe aren't done on the proper schedule or things that are maybe ahead of schedule. Doing a lot of things to save people time and money on these construction sites. We've also introduced AI machine learning applications into directly into the workflow in the storage environment. So we're detecting equipment and people and activities in the site. Where a lot of that would have been difficult with our previous infrastructure. It really is seamless in working with ISO on now. I imagine by being able to infuse AI and machine learning you're able to get insights faster to be able to either respond faster to those construction customers, for example, or alert them if perhaps something isn't going according to plan. Yeah, a lot of it's about schedule. It's about saving money, about saving time. And again, with not as many people traveling to these sites, they really just have constant visualization of what's going on day to day. We're detecting things like different types of construction equipment and things that are happening on the site. We're partnering with people that are doing safety analytics and things of that nature. So these are all things that are very important to construction sites. What are some of the things as we are rounding out the calendar year 2020? What are some of the things that you're excited about going forward in 2021 that EarthCam is going to be able to get into and to deliver? Just more and more people really finally seeing the value. I mean, I've been doing this for 20 years and it's amazing how we're constantly seeing new applications and more people understanding how valuable these visual tools are. That's just a fantastic thing for us because we're really trying to create better lives through visual information. We're really helping people with the things they can do with this imagery. That's what we're all about. And that's really exciting to us in a very challenging environment right now is that people are recognizing the need for this technology and really starting to put it on a lot more projects. Well, you can kind of consider an essential service whether or not it's a construction company that needs to manage and oversee their projects, making sure they're on budget, on schedule, as you said, or maybe even just the essentialness of helping folks from any country in the world connect with a favorite travel location or something like that to help from an emotional perspective. I think the essentialness of what you guys are delivering is probably even more impactful now, don't you think? Absolutely. And again, about connecting people when they're at home. And recently, we webcast the president's speech from the Flight 93, 9-11 observation from the memorial. There was something where only the immediate families were allowed to travel there. We webcast that so people could see that around the world. We've documented, again, some of the biggest construction projects out there, the new Radar Stadium was one of the recent ones. It's delivering this kind of flagship content. Wall Street Journalist used some of our content recently to really show the things that have happened during the pandemic and time squares. We have these cameras around the world. So again, it's really bringing awareness to letting people virtually travel and share and really remain connected during this challenging time. And again, we're seeing a real increased demand in the traffic in those areas as well. And I can imagine some of these things that you're doing that you're achieving now are going to become permanent, not necessarily artifacts of COVID-19 as you now have the opportunity to reach so many more people. And probably the opportunity to help industries that might not have seen the value of this type of video to be able to reach consumers that they probably could never reach before. Yeah, I think the whole nature of business and communication and travel and everything is really going to be changed from this point forward. It's really, people are looking at things very, very differently. And again, seeing that the technology really can help with so many different areas that it's going to be a different kind of landscape out there, we feel. And that's really continuing to be seen as on the uptake in our business and how many people are adopting this technology. We're developing a lot more partnerships with other companies, we're expanding into new industries. And again, we're confident that the current platform is going to keep up with us and help us really scale and evolve as these needs are growing. It sounds to me like you have the foundation with Dell Technologies, with PowerScale to be able to facilitate the massive growth that you're seeing and the scale in the future that you've got that foundation, you're ready to go. Yeah, we've been using the system for five years already. We've already added capacity, we can add capacity on the fly. Really haven't hit any limits in what we can do, it's almost infinitely scalable, highly redundant, it gives everyone a real sense of security on our side. And we can just keep innovating, which is what we do without hitting any technological limits with our partnership. Excellent, well Bill, I'm going to let you get back to innovating for EarthCam. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time today. Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure. For Bill Sharp, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's digital coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. Thanks for watching.