 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Samsung Developer Conference here in San Francisco at Moscone West. John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, co-host of theCUBE. I'm here with Vargarious Naran, who's the co-founder of Before Alpha, an old friend of mine who introduced me to podcasting back in 2004, right when the MP3 was put into the RSS feed. Early days of blogging, early days of social, you're one of the most prolific social engineers I know. You've been there from day one. Great to see you. Yeah, you too, man. Yeah, it's been a long time. What a wave it's been. I know. Web 2.0, you are at the front end of creating with the- Fortunately, they didn't make a 3.0. Thank God, because Web 2.0 bursted. But those were the days, I mean, just think back, okay, Web 1.0 post bubble burst. Web 2.0, you were part of a crew of folks. We were all a small community at the time. Really kind of rubbing nickels together, trying to make things happen. Back then, tech crunch was formed, pod tech was formed, you had your venture going on. And we all were, before social media existed, we were doing stuff. Skullable was brought down from Microsoft with the mic startup, pod tech. But we were all kind of trying to figure out this new infrastructure. It ended a bubbling burst a little bit, but it ended up turning out to be true, that social infrastructure was created. Facebooks, we saw, pre-Facebook was obviously MySpace, but the social graph, okay, that extended out from RSS with enabled blogging, creates some great innovations. We're seeing the value, interest graphs develop. And a term that I coined called the value graph is now extending on top of the interest graph, something that we call in the queue, which is a new form of collaboration is happening. You're riding this new wave, you got your new firm, you're leading companies through transformation. What's your take of the Samsung's of the world? Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google. You got a lot of these old tech guards trying to be consumer companies and infrastructure companies. B to B means B to C, but B to B is boring to boring. We don't want B to B anymore. We want the new, everything to everything. Exciting to exciting. I think you nailed a lot of the points, I think, that are really interesting because innovation is really about blending cultural change, a technological change together, right? And forming new things, and it usually is a succession of small iterations and some moon shots, right? And I think what Samsung's doing that's really interesting is they bring all that stuff online in real time. We don't wait 10 years to hear about what the next innovation is. It's popping out before you even warm up your other phone, right? I think in the States we're almost a little bit at a disadvantage in seeing the breadth of Samsung because their footprint is actually significantly bigger. It's not nearly as adopted here, but I think as the theme today was the intelligence of things really, I think it's very powerful. And they're on the stage with Google. You see the relationship with Google shining forward. Actually a lot of big applause there. Google lost the Android, not Apple, no iOS. But this speaks to the consumer company of Samsung hardware. And even in their IoT, they're under the hood, geeky stuff, they put in extra security modules in there for device security because now the hardware stacks are emerging with software stacks. So this is the challenge because you know how hard it is to do database work. But you got a lot of unstructured data. Data is now a real-time dynamic. Self-driving cars, you can't have latency less than nanoseconds. That's right. And so databases just don't operate that way. So a new architecture is being developed. What's your vision and thoughts of how companies are reimagining it? What are you seeing out there? I know it's early innings, but what are your thoughts? Well I think, you know, we went through this software as a service generation, right? Where sort of software was at the center, right? Social was at the edge. Now the human is moving to the center. And I would say with that, they're clutching to their devices, right? And so there is a piece of hardware that every person basically that's invoked. And I think hardware is now becoming as extensible as software, ultimately. And I think it is also being deconstructed, right? I think a lot of like that web 2.0 sort of aura was really the deconstruction or the breakdown of sort of large monolithic services down into smaller, discrete services that are addressable and serviceable. We're seeing that happen now on the hardware side as well. You know, things is really just micro devices, you know, that embody all the pieces. If you look at the trend lines right now, we're kind of going back, but connecting the dots forward, there's a massive tsunami going on in open source development. Linux Foundation, we're just down in LA talking about a exponential growth in new software shift and a new class of developers coming in. Containerization in Kubernetes points to microservices, whole nother level of developer goodness at the top of the stack, freeing up the infrastructure configuration for the cloud or DevOps, as we call it. This is the phenomenon. This is the big way. This isn't about developers being the guys right and pushing out code. This is front lines stuff. And certainly AR shows and devices from Samsung show. When I think the interesting thing is that with these hardware building blocks too though, it's allowing software developers to articulate hardware without actually learning the hardware bits and pieces, right? So I think it's like much like the abstraction, like you didn't have to know how bytecode was generated now, you know, to work on the web, but you sort of don't have to necessarily know how hardware is put together to be able to actually command an army of hardware pieces. How familiar with Samsung's cloud and data strategy? One of the things I see missing in the keynotes today and clearly missing in the show, so this is kind of a critical analysis of Samsung is, they don't, I don't see a lot of the cloud. They see smart cloud, Samsung cloud sprinkled around. I don't see a lot of cloud specifics and they're not being specific around how the data is being used. I'm like Ali Baba there in China last week, data, data, data, refueling data, data acquisition, data usage, using data as a development tool. I'm not seeing that here. Am I missing it? Are they showing it? I think it's some of the, you know, pavilions around there, there are deeper dives in that, but I might argue that this is almost an intentional thing. Right? Like in some ways, because we're consumerizing more and more of these pieces, you know, AI scares the crap out of a lot of people, right? Like, and so do I really want to go deeper? You mean in a creepy way or just like surveillance? I think always, right? Like, you know, like people are, you know, much like with personalization, you want it all the way until it's too good, right? And, you know, I think this is a challenge. Like what else do they know about it? Yeah, exactly, right? And so, you know, how much of the weeds are necessary? I think like at a developer-centric event like this, yes, like there definitely should be deeper dives, but likely not on that. So from a messaging standpoint, probably best not to put data out there. I think it'll consume, yeah. All this stuff, this is Blendo, right? Like it all becomes consumer now, right? Like so the more you put out there, the more you sort of alienate potentially adoption. So one of the things that we see obviously with theCUBE covers hundreds of events in the enterprise and emerging tech area, but as we get more to the consumers with Samsung, Alibaba, Amazon and so on, the consumerization trends definitely here. That changes how businesses do business. IT information technology or called IT departments are no longer a department. It's now a fabric of how companies work because you have on-premise hardware, you buy your servers, but now you're operating at a cloud model. You're using public cloud with it, Microsoft, Amazon, Alibaba, Samsung, whatever. Do people care if it works? So this new phenomenon is shaping how companies are architecting their innovation strategies. You guys are doing a lot of this that year before Alpha Venture. What are you guys doing? Is it early days and you just basically like crawl, walk, run stage? Give us an update on the customer. We will get innovation from like four points of view, right? As I mentioned earlier, that technological versus cultural. And really, it goes back to the hardest startups, right? It's like when large companies see startups, they're like, we love what these guys are doing. And the real question they should ask is, why do these guys exist, right? And usually it's like either one thing, right? Like our norms or our beliefs have changed on the cultural side, or there's a new model of efficacy or efficiency that's possible inside of your business. And so we will get a perspective change, like am I in the right business, right? Is Samsung in the hardware business or are they in the intelligence business, right? Like sort of a question they're positing now, right? What's the persona then if we're in the intelligence business? Because suddenly it's not just people who buy hardware bits and pieces. All the people who consume intelligence. What are the processes we use to build that stuff? How do we surface it? And then of course, what are the products, right? What are the things that land in people's hands? Yeah, and I think one of the things I would add to that is that the element of how they use compute power. So if you look at Internet of Things, which is a message here, it's not too sexy, mainstream doesn't get IoT, but AI can surface itself. Driving cars essentially in machine learning meets IoT, which you could call AI. People can grok that and understand self-driving car, but you know, airplane connected to the internet machines on a factory line, that brings up the role of the data. So the compute power is critical. You don't want to move data around the network. So, you know, it's interesting how companies will buy their compute. Do they rent it? Do they send it around like a virtual machine? So these are like legacy infrastructure things that are really high impact to architecture. Yeah. Well, and also, you know, even if you think about like fractional compute, right? And the whole time share model like for compute is also another area that, you know, you have to really readjust and reconfigure the way your entire system works to be able to take advantage of it. Yeah. And one of the things we've seen is like companies like Intel are transformed from being a chip company or a supplier of equipment to basically a compute company. Yeah. We're seeing things that. And that's that perspective change, right? Well, yeah. I mean, you got to look at computers now with cloud unlimited potential resource. You can spin up the Zillion virtual machines on the cloud to do a edge analysis, whether it's a car or something else. That's the luxury we didn't have back in the days when you were doing your first venture, did we? Yeah, no. No, the whole new world. Final thoughts, what are you working on now that's the coolest thing that you're doing? Give an update on what's happening for you in the next year or so. Cool thing. You know, I think we, the most exciting work is when we're working with companies who sort of understand that either the future is upon them or that they need to get ahead of it, right? And so like I'd say when we're working with customers that do that perspective change, it's like really reinventing their universe. I think that's really, really powerful. It's better, you know, when it's proactive as opposed to like, great, someone just sat on our head. But you know, sometimes you get there how you get there. So we're doing a lot of work. I think looking at like the technology of the future, but more importantly, how will it impact consumers today? You know, and really the evolution of your own customer base. Co-founder of Before Alpha, he's the lead Alpha Gregorius. Great to have you on theCUBE. Final thought, you've seen many waves. You've worked as a CTO. You worked on startups. You worked with database. You worked with social technology. Now you're working kind of helping customers put together the future. What's the big learnings that you've seen over the past 10 years that you're putting into place now from a practical perspective to bring to your customers? Yeah, you know, I think everyone asks me like, what's the secret to innovation? Right, it's the number one question I probably get. I have a list, but the one thing I put at the top of the list is permission, right? Which is that organizations tend to fail at this because people don't feel like they have permission to do it. They don't have permission to fail. They don't have permission to not work on something else that's taking up 50% of their calendar, right? And I think, you know, like you see it Samsung as an innovative culture, right? Like for other brands, companies, corporations would be successful if they don't enable, give that permission to their employees, they're never going to fail. Yeah, certainly with cloud, you can try something new and iterate. We've seen the lean startup culture kind of growing and artistry kind of coming in mainstream. Thoughts on artistry and art and technology coming together. I think it was a natural peanut butter and jelly kind of moment from the beginning, right? You talk to any engineer, any developer, they view what they do as art, right? And the expression of that, it takes any number of forms. And the great news is in the front lines is they get more consumer tech like Samsung and Apple. You've seen guys out in the front lines really adding value, changing the scope of what's possible. With this creator movement, right? Like that we're having here, it's a big theme at this event as well. Creator movement, building good apps, great technology. Just a cube, creating great content here on the ground on the edge of the network here at the Samsung Developer Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more after this short break.