 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Edge 2016, brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hoes. Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're back, Michael Goodenoff is here as the chief technologist at TechScape, IBM partner, Michael, good to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. It's great to be here. Thank you very much. What a wonderful group of people that I'm kind of following right now, huh? It's been some great interviews. You know, IBM always brings great guests on to theCUBE and their main stage, it's always thought provoking. It's not just a bunch of talking at their clients and it's good. I mean, they're trying to catalyze discussion and thought and it's... Your last guest, yeah, your last guest was just extraordinary. Well, thank you, really appreciate you coming on. So tell us a little bit about TechScape and your role. So TechScape today is really heavily focused on a Cisco solution, we're in New York City and we're solving a lot of problems within that entire ecosystem of productivity as a whole, to be very honest with you. What's natural within the telecom industry is to shift towards the phone lines and the phone systems that are more advanced. That's a lot of where that initial collaboration kind of begins and then it goes well beyond that. It also brings in an AI layer to add into the total analytics and the assistance to that space. All of the advancements that TechScape has made has really been around top tier providers. I think we see a lot of people that have focused on trying numerous different technologies within their research and development and we've learned I think along the way that it's really imperative to kind of follow the top tier, follow the best practices, the compliance, the APIs and other components. So we've really built ourselves around a real strong foundation of those best practices and governance. Where do you find top tier? I mean, New York financial services you would think is top tier, right? Is that sort of going to school with those guys? Is it the cloud service providers? It is, so I mean I was born from cloud service providers really at the end of the day. IBM was really the birthplace of where I stem from and my focus, however from a New York where there's every business, every line of business within that city, smart buildings, intelligent buildings, building management, building ownership, construction, all new construction, the development they're in, all of these draw in that analytic side of the fence. They all draw in amazing amounts of data and needs for enhanced capabilities around either security or compliance that protects their employees, right? Along the life cycle of that development process. So there's so many innovations that are really hitting us from the city. It's extraordinary, it's everything from managing the buildings appropriately and effectively to being predictive in how to empty an elevator 30 seconds before a brownout because you don't want to have any major issues and people trapped within the building. So yes, really hedge funds are there to the financial side of it. They tend to be very, the financial vertical as a whole. They tend to be very ahead of the game. The financial industry is very much ahead of the game within the analytic side and their adoption has always been on the larger size of that innovation, so. Mike, you know, some people look at the channel and I think it's a bunch of box pushers. I know down, you know, greater New York City area tends to have some of the more advanced people. You've got the clients that need, you know, as many of the solutions you're talking about. You can talk about how the channel's been educating itself on some of these more advanced solutions. Yeah, you know, it's amazing because as a channel, as an organization within that channel, it's about architecting solutions and bringing them together, right? And so when you're a standalone organization, you know your products, you know the research that's been given to you, but if you're not the researcher, you truly don't know and understand the pros and cons to their true painstaking level, right? You haven't contacted the health tests, you haven't sat with the user experience testing, you get the research that comes from that. So I think ultimately, you know, we sit in a space where as channel partners, you can fill me in on exactly where you're at. We can find, we can form a consortium, we can form a group or a partnership where I can rely on some of the intel and development that you're doing and you can rely on that from which I'm doing. We can share products and product stacks. And so it is important to make sure that the connectors we're using help within the migration process, help within the evolution of the life cycle, help within the advancements of AI or the cognitive platform, the adoption of, and the real key is intelligent business processes, right? And that's what leads us into the business intelligence, which leads us into the AI, which leads us into that cognitive side. And so the birth of virtualization, the birth of an advancements within these layers of technology have really given us the ability to manage a micro system, right? A microcosm of technology. And by managing that, we understand capacity planning, we understand the fundamentals that we're going to bring into a larger analytics platform. And so really, our evolution has been throughout the partner side to understand that, to understand your experience, because I'm one-sided. I know my customer and I know their experiences. Yeah. So you set yourself up for your co-founder of something called the Cognitive Consortium. Most people are still kind of getting, you know, wrapping their brains around the whole cognitive term. What caused you to found this and give us a little bit of unpacking of what that group is? IOT is another piece that's an evolution from the cloud, right? Developers getting an ability to develop something for $47 because it's sensors and a simple processor, and actually testing that and developing a platform within the cloud. It's a phenomenal place where we're taking, you know, the average college student is coming out of school now, not to try and become a major place in a corporation. They're not really building, they're building a resume around, I'm going to build a company, a technology firm, a software, an IOT device. I'm going to, because they got the tools. And that's what we've done. We've given them the tools now in an open source, in a community way. And that comes from the open, you know, that open world at the end of the day. But we've given them the ability to find all the information. 20 years ago, we were rolling out the first, I was telling people they had to get off their physical calendar, and they were freaking out, right? Now, and it went from- Have the date timer. Right? And it went from mice, and it went from keyboards to being gyroscopes and GPS systems. The unbelievable productivity in the past 20 years is absolutely amazing and extraordinary. And so with that, there's the birth of the need for solving major problems. Like what's happening in smart buildings. Like what's happening, you know, we're dealing with projects with NASA right now and the International Space Station. We're dealing with projects around agriculture. You know, water conservation, world hunger. They're real problems that can be solved with IOT. They really absolutely can with the tools that we have at our fingertips today. It is an amazing time. The question becomes, how do we truly know that we're successful, right? We haven't had a time in history where we could map our roadmap to success and analyze it and almost be predictive on it. That's the dawn of this era. And that's the extraordinary part of what we're about to be, what we are being birthed into. That the small business gets it all the way up. As long as they get, it builds off of an intelligent business model. They can't be pying in the sky in it. They can't be, you know, they have to come into it understanding what their growth expectations are going to be or their market is, right? Sorry. I love this discussion. You talked about, you know, the box seller and we talk about it all the time as that business is going to go away. And everybody talks about wanting to be a solutions provider, but so often that means, okay, we do a VMware solution or an SAP solution and Oracle solution and that's fine. You're taking solution to a whole new level. We're solving some of the world's hardest problems. Okay, so you might need Oracle or SAP experts. Fine, great. But you also need some creative people. What kind of skill sets comprise, you know, the folks in your organization? You know, it's pretty wonderful, right? We have chief marketing officers. We have astrophysicists. We have astronauts. We have chief technology officers. We have people who are working on, and I want to share the stories, but I just so can't because they're, but working on the most amazing IoT technologies that are solving major problems around the airline industry and the train industry and then not so major issues, you know, issues around how to give advancement to robotics to our students, right? Which is much more giving and much more fundamentally, you know, at the core of what we do. But, you know, we're confronted with a problem from one of our members and they say, hey, this is happening and we bring a round table together to discuss it and to talk about it and talk about what architectures work and how they don't work. What data modeling is good or isn't good. And you find expertise in so many corners and it's a community. And that's the whole key, right? That's the huge call to action for you folks. And it always has been, to be honest with you. My knowledge stems from IBM, which was a community at the time and I was born to the best education in my opinion at the time of the greatest minds ever, right? And so that was the main frame all the way into the virtualization onto the X86 or the SystemX platform, right? So it's just been an amazing experience straight across the board. Talk about the data architecture of these IoT systems. I read a stat, I mentioned it before Stu, that David Floyer, one of our senior analysts, predicted that 90 plus percent of the data that lives out at the windmill is going to stay at the windmill, is going to stay at the devices. And only a small portion is actually going to come back. And I saw that, and I've seen other stats, maybe half, 40%, but he's saying 90, 95%. The vast majority is going to stay where it is. Analytics will get done there. Add some color to that. What do you see in your practical experiences? You know, I think the key is security, right? So the key is where does the device sit and what does it do and what is it capturing? So right now I think what we have is a small problem around being able to secure the transmission of that information back, right? We're starting to see the birth of mobile chipsets that can be put onto these devices at a very inexpensive cost. The Wi-Fi, you know, the layer around security as a whole has been a major issue. If the user's walking through a mall, you can come up with plenty of examples of what might happen when they, you know, go through any type of a wireless system. I think we're now moving into the point where the protocols are matching what we need, not only are the protocols, but the language that's on the other side of it. So we're not just talking about a binary level chip. We're talking about something that has intelligence that's sitting over there, Intel Edison. There are just so many examples, right? Raspberry Pis, there's just so many examples right now. It's ridiculous. The Latte Panda just launching out with the Windows integration layer to it. So this brings a higher ability to process at the end. The question is, do I want to, sending binary data is a wonderful thing, right? I mean, at the main frame, right, at the end of the day that was really one of the most secure ways to deal with it. But today I think we have the ability to deal with that processing at the end. And the question is, can I consolidate that data string? Can I, and it's the cost of moving data that's really the problem in today's world, right? Again, it comes back to the discussion you guys just had a minute ago. In order to truly run a true cognitive platform or a platform that's going to allow me to process hundreds of millions of transactions within seconds, it has to be as close as possible to this CPU, right? So, I don't know, I'd love to believe that. But this is a dumb terminal, like it comes back to the basics of where we've always been with where that binary code lives. So right architectures are going to define it. So it remains to be seen. And then you mentioned connectivity. So everybody talks about instrumenting the devices out there, but there's got to be connectivity or else you're doing truck rolls. Exactly. So what are you seeing in terms of the connectivity infrastructure that is out there? Is that? I see, I see, no, no, it's brilliant. If you really want to know the truth, you know, you're looking at the AT&T's and the Verizon's of the world. They're abandoning that public cloud platform. They're getting away from that commoditized layer. They're staying true to what they are, which is connectivity. They're creating a connector. They're creating that outlet. And that's again, something that's been discussed many times here, right? It's about really creating that connection, that connectivity or that transformation or a translation of data point to point. So it becomes an aggregator, really. It becomes, you know, how are you going to either aggregate or deal with that data where you're going to put the right engine right in and to what point. But, you know, it's really interesting because if you look at the Microsofts of the world, they're creating a partnership now with the telecom partners that are out there in the world and they're trying to expand into that telecom world vastly because again, it comes down to the connectivity in that space. So that whole world is really transforming right now and going through a major transformation. And the truth is, it is going to be the cognitive layer or the analytics later and also that AI layer, right? It's kind of a beautiful thing if you think that all I need to do is train my AI to take some actions, my cognitive platform to take some actions. If a lot of these cloud providers keep within the same actions as we go, that connection, all of those components, they can be driven automatically and predictively plugged before we hit their problems. And that is where I see the vision of our future is being no longer caught in the middle of fire drills. We're going to have time to sit and look at models and incredible models that are going to solve our problems like we've never been able to fathom in the past. And I'm so excited by it because it's the community. Watson's been there, but it's the community that brings it to life. Mike, you're pretty passionate about the technologies you're working on. Before we get to the end, I wonder, can you share a little bit about that you've got some military veteran outreach programs that you're part of? Share it with our audience. Yeah, you know, I think I got a number of different really things that I'm passionate about. You know, the military right now is really a major focus for me. We just did a major piece at the Channel Partner Show out in DC. We brought a number of women veterans to the show and they were able to experience the entire floor. They were able to experience looking at things from a project management perspective, from a technology perspective, looking at things from a logistical perspective, identifying where they might plug in when they get out of the, you know, when they're getting home. We met some really brilliant individuals out there. You know, honestly, some of them just leveled me. You know, their intelligence was just extraordinary. And it really, it speaks volumes to the way the military is kind of integrating technology into their average soldier. And it's a very different thing than when I was in in the early 90s. We didn't have any technology. You know, we used night vision scopes that would literally blind you for about 30 minutes when you took your eye out of them, you know. So it's such a different world. And these folks come back really understanding so much more. It's about plugging into the industry. And so my outreach has always been to getting them involved in learning or understanding how they can plug their skills and expertise into the system. And there's some great success stories, obviously, that have really come from that military background. So yeah, it's a very passionate thing for me. And yeah. I love the story, Mike. I mean, your website is great. If you want ordinary, you're in the wrong place. You hear that a lot, but you guys are really doing some extraordinary things. So congratulations on what you've done with your organization and good luck. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there. But Stu and I will be back. It's a wrap. Day one, this is IBM Edge. This is theCUBE right back.