 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NAB 2017, brought to you by HGST. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at the NAB 2017 conference, a national association of broadcasters. Great event, over 100,000 people. Wow, amazing. I'm Lisa Martin. Very excited to introduce you to our next guest, Dave Plack, the CEO of SquareBox Systems. Hi Dave, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Great to have you here. Now you are a veteran of NAB. Yeah, right so. Yeah, this year's event, really this overarching theme of the MET effect, convergence of media, entertainment technology that used to be distinct. With that theme and all the buzz that's going on here, what are some of your observations on day, this isn't day one for you, but day one for most of us? Well, I think the show is far busier than I've seen in recent years, and so we've been overwhelmed on our booth this morning. And I think really folks being able to manage extremely complex storage landscapes has been a real theme for us in the discussion so far this morning. In addition, folks are so much moving towards the cloud that people have been talking about it for years, but suddenly it seems like there's been a step change. People want to do it right now. And so we're really noticing that in the discussion so far at least this morning, yeah. Do you think that's because cloud technology has matured so much as have cloud users? Yeah, I think exactly. I think exactly both. So the technology is starting to mature and the bandwidth is really getting there so folks can use this stuff more effectively. And people are getting more used to it in their day to day lives. So everyone's phone backs up to the cloud and everyone just gets used to it just being always on and always working. And so I think a lot of the confidence that people need to have when you're shooting content that's valuable and you need to have deadlines you're going to meet, then people are getting used to the fact that the cloud can be as reliable and even more reliable than a lot of the traditional storage and production approaches. And one of the themes along those lines that we've heard today on the program is speed and agility are absolutely key. We're hearing that studio will shoot something, a particular scene, and then think, you know what, that would have been great in virtual reality and do the entire thing again. And then that compounds costs and storage challenges but needing things really quickly. Another thing that we're hearing is, well, all of us are content creators, right? We all have tablets and mobile devices. We're not only consuming it in these ways, we're creating it in these ways. And so it really becomes a challenge for whether it's broadcasters or film studios or even on the sports and entertainment side of containing and kind of corralling this. Tell us a little bit about squat box systems. Who are, what are you delivering by way of media asset management and who are some of your key constituents, key sectors that you work with? Yeah, yeah, so our core product, Cat DV, is all about helping people to find and reuse their content, saving time, saving money, saving stress, and a whole pile of kind of workflow orchestration, workflow automation. And so being able to find and reuse content is clearly really important when content is exploding in the way it has and the ways that people consume content are exploding. And so almost everybody has a potential need for a system like Cat DV with this explosion of content. If you can't find your content, you just don't have it. It's just taking up space and money on some storage somewhere. And so the main sectors in which we work are, I guess we started our focus on broadcast, production, post, but now everybody has media. And so we have a pile of customers, basketball, football, baseball, soccer, in the sports market, education, many universities use Cat DV, non-profits, lots of houses of worship use Cat DV, lots of corporates use Cat DV, training videos, outreach, marketing, social media, you know, a lot of agencies advertising use Cat DV. So, and there's a few really interesting kind of use cases, things like JPL, the history of space sites in Cat DV, you want to find out about the Mars Rover or about all the space probe stuff, looking Cat DV. So I think, so sports is a really interesting one. We have a load of maybe 10 NFL teams and they have some really interesting workflows around asset management. So in fact, I was challenged some folks from the Kansas City Chiefs a few weeks ago. And what their workflows done is really turned on their head the way that they make programming and content. And so if you imagine they go away to an away game, then what they'll do is they'll shoot their content and on the plane on the way home, they'll log that content, they'll plug the camera cards into laptops and they'll log that content, not just for tonight's show, which is clearly important because tonight's coming soon, but to become part of the history of that sports team, to become part of the historic record. And so then, let's imagine in a year's time, we've got an athlete that's retiring or that's got an award or something, they can go into our system and they can say, well, hey Cat DV, find me the five star clips for this athlete in this season wearing this number. Cat DV will come back with a long list of content, be able to preview it, whether it's on active storage on the cloud storage or wherever it is in this kind of complex landscape. And then Cat DV will be able to preview that media, put it into a rough cut, and then within a few minutes, you've got a rough cut for a pretty quality piece of programming that can then be made very cost effectively. So for them, it's really turned on the head, the kind of psychology of program making and the psychology of logging. It really has become such a valuable thing that it's just part of their DNA then when they're making their content for their fans. Another thing that speaking of fans that really interested me and piqued my interest when I was reading that Kansas City Chief's case study on your website is what they're doing working with SquareBox to really diversify and improve the fan experience. Because from a fan's perspective, they're able now to slice and dice different parts of the game and deliver it in multiple platforms. Tell us a little bit more about how you help sports teams, for example, really diversify engaging with their fans, which presumably to them is going to drive up revenue. Right, exactly. And I think that kind of talks to how many kind of end points there are where people can consume this content. Clearly folks, I think I heard that there are, it's getting on for that there are more mobile phones and there are TVs in the US now. So I always consume my content on mobile devices now. We have a TV, we watch films on it, but that's about it. And so I think so being able to have content and then repurpose it extremely quickly for different workflows. Okay, being able to broadcast to the satellite channel for the KCC, that's great. But being able to take segments that are athlete profiles for websites, for Twitter, for social media, man. Just being able to get that stuff out really quickly in an automated fashion. So if you get people in the way, mistakes are made and things are slow. So if you can just tick a few boxes and rely on content getting to the right place at the right time, then that is crucial. And so automation, big thing for us as Cat DV, that is a real key thing when trying to, so trying to manage this stuff cost effectively because while there's an explosion in demand, there isn't an explosion in budget. So how do people cope when there's all this demand for high quality content, but there isn't more money to pay for it to be? So walk us through that journey. If you're talking to a Kansas City Chiefs or another sporting organization, help us understand how do you help them understand where to start to your point, budgets are constrained, but the opportunity there for them to really gain much more from their existing digital assets is huge. What is that journey that you helped them go on? It's a really good question. And actually it's kind of what motivates me to be in the industry at all because we make asset management products, we think they're great. But asset management doesn't exist in isolation. There's cameras and networking and storage and archiving and distribution. And so the first conversation that we have when engaging with any customer, sports included, is what's your problem? What are you trying to achieve? And we end up having really interesting conversations about folks' businesses. How is it that they're trying to get work done? What's the content creation process like? So how do you shoot? What do you shoot on? And so we have to almost follow the life of a file through from whether it's being created as a piece of FX or whether it's some content that's being shot on a camera. Well, how does that get from where it's being made to the consumer? And then how does it get reused so it becomes an asset rather than a liability? Meanwhile, making sure that it's safe, it can't get lost, it can't get stolen and all that kind of stuff. So we end up almost doing business consulting about the creative process of making content. And that is really fascinating. And it's only when we have a really good view of that workflow can we recommend, well, how's the best way to use our stuff and how's the best way for that to work with storage? And you brought up something about safety and security. Cyber security is a huge issue. Completely, yeah. And we see it in all that, we talked to a lot of different industries here on theCUBE and in some industries we had Ted Harrington on the program a little bit ago who's a security expert and said in some industries it's sort of nice to have. And more in media and entertainment it's really starting to become part of the culture. Is that something that you're experiencing? Over and much so. Absolutely. So, and then there's always this balance, right? So everybody wants their content everywhere and we find off and the execs say, oh, I don't want to log in, I just want you to send me the video. It's like, well, we can do that and we send you the video and it's enormously simple, but it's not secure. And so what we try and do is have a balance. So we have simple tools that are secure and we have many government agencies and military agencies that use our software. So we love working with those guys. They help us to improve our product and to harden it because there are so many well-publicized cases of content being stolen. So we try to get a good balance between hyper secure and locked down and very usable and we work with customers to kind of choose how far down that path they want to get. And there are some simple things you can do too. If you're sharing content over the internet then putting nice watermarks on stuff, whether they be visible watermarks or invisible ones that are kind of burnt in, then that can really stop people misusing content or stop people making mistakes about where content is going to be broadcast because it's really clear. You're not going to put stuff up if it's got a big label over it. So yeah. You mentioned working with different types of customers, broadcasts, sports, houses of worship. From a collaboration perspective, talk to us about how Squarebuck facilitates collaboration. Yeah. Absolutely. So there are kind of three core things that Cat Divi does. Automate, collaborate, and organize, right? So for this show, one of our biggest announcements is Cat Divi Social. And so what Cat Divi Social lets you do is to have a conversation, real time, a bit like a Skype or a Slack conversation, either between a couple of people or a group about a collaborative event. So we're making some content. You know, I need this sound file right now. So being able to have that real time collaborative conversation is a new feature in Cat Divi. We're previewing it at the show and I have to say it's getting a huge amount of interest. It's great. Fantastic. Well Dave, thank you so much for being on the program. We wish you nothing but continued success at Squarebox. Thank you very much. And we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, live from Las Vegas at NAB 2017. I'm Lisa Martin, stick around, we'll be right back.