 From New York, it's theCUBE, covering Blockchain Week. Now, here's John Furrier. Hello everyone, welcome back. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in New York City for Blockchain Week New York, as well as Consensus 2018. You're watching theCUBE. We've got two great guests here. Cube alumni, Al Bergeo's been on many times. Do a hot startup. Digital Bits, he's got a great project. It's really getting a lot of traction. Been there before, fellow entrepreneur. He's got it in big news. And he's with Jamie Leverton, general manager, VP in Canada and APAC for Co-GO, peer one. So the press release, congratulations Al. Thank you, thank you John. Jamie, welcome to New York. Thank you very much. So Al, talk about the deal that you did with these guys, news went out. What's significant about it? Well, I think it's very significant to the blockchain space. In a lot of respects, it's very powerful technology that a lot of people speak of when it comes to distributed ledger technology. But in some respects, with regards to, let's say, certain industries, it's still just starting to work its way into the space. We basically are trying to drive innovation at multiple levels and we can achieve that with the support of great partners like Kojiko Peer One. And all that, Jamie explained what they do, but from a partnership perspective, you can kind of think of what we've created at Digital Bits really is this open source technology that we want many people to consume, not just consumers, but the enterprises, SaaS companies and so forth. So a lot of those companies live in Kojiko data centers. Worldwide. And so they're just a natural partner for us. They are a company we always see in the forefront of innovation and they're doing it with blockchain. So we're really excited to have them as a partner. Jamie, I want you to take a minute to explain what you guys do and how that fits into blockchain. I think it fits in incredibly well. So for those of you not familiar with Kojiko Peer One, we own and operate a global network. So we have our own connectivity, as well as 16 data centers globally. We have our own private cloud. We partner with the hyperscale public clouds. We have managed hosting, collocation. We work with 6,500 enterprise customers around the world who live in our data centers or on our networks. And we really believe that blockchain is the future and there's no better place for it to live than an infrastructure like ours. Cloud computing was always poo pooed. Be all cloud computing. No one will ever give up their data centers and hosting and cloud kind of came together. But that drove a lot of growth. Same things happening now with these networks. You're seeing blockchain needs to run on something. Just like the old argument was cloud's going to kill the server business. Well, servers still need to be bought, right? So blockchain needs to run somewhere on servers. So decentralized servers, but there's some big ones too. Is that how you see it? I mean, that's really kind of what I'm seeing happening out there. That is exactly how we see it. And I feel very blessed for the infrastructure that we've built, the reputation that we have in this industry, which is literally perfectly poised to support web 3.0 and everything that is coming, starting with partnerships like this. Al, I want to get your thoughts about, you know the networking business, you've done a couple startups in the area and you've done all that stuff. You guys just did some news out there where they're spinning up stuff. When we saw what happened with Stellar, okay? Can you explain this nuance point? Because it's kind of an inside baseball kind of geeky thing. But it's really significant for the industry. Well, at the end of the day, you know, everyone's talking about enterprise adoption, enterprise adoption, but as we've just discussed, enterprise today, the hardware is not into possession anymore. And so they don't need to be the only organization to be able to support what the enterprise wants to do, or even the SaaS company. Many, in fact, the majority of SaaS companies don't manage their own hardware either, right? And they're relying on cloud providers to provide that compute storage and so forth. So there needs to be that proficiency and almost think of it like a standard. And not necessarily one, let's say Linux is a standard, Windows is, there's different flavors of Linux, there's database technologies, and so on. But whichever they're choosing to use, it needs to be supported at every layer of that digital supply chain. And we are basically, we see that. And we're working with partners at every level there. The ones that we know, get it. You know, I really understand compute and network. Because it's very important. We're in the hallway here, and we're in the middle of the floor here in Consensus. So we've been hearing a lot of hallway chatter, and I always like to eavesdrop, you know, being the journalist, reporter, you know, guy that I try to be, as you know. But I hear a lot of things. One thing I heard all week, consistently, is that I'm going to spin up some blockchain nodes. So it reminds me of the old days of spinning up clusters, right? Like storage clusters, right? So this notion of spinning up a blockchain cluster, I've heard, or I've heard provisioning clusters, or what does that mean? To spin up a blockchain? And is it that kind of trend that we're seeing? So if it's a primitive blockchain, you know, Bitcoin, for example, it's the grandfather of all, let's say, blockchains that we're familiar with, or this era that's familiar with. It does a few things. Processes, transactions, anybody could spin up one, and what have you. But if you want to take something and make it enterprise grade, there needs to be APIs. And you'd be able to know how to integrate, consume those APIs, and so forth. And so, not every company's going to know how to do this. There's a gap. There's a shortage of blockchain engineers. There's a shortage of engineers, period, that understand this stuff. So it has to be supported. It has to be supported. There needs to be companies that can support the enterprise to consume this. So spinning up is easy for an engineer that's proficient in blockchain to say, yeah, we're spinning up nodes. We're going to take our work really hard, purchase hardware, deploy it, ship it, many, many, many months. Maybe they'll use Amazon if that's well-suited for them, or some other cloud provider, like KojiCore would have you. But the challenge is, what's everyone else going to do, right? If they're not proficient in that technology, they need partners that get it. And that's where Managed Cloud comes in. And that's where we're very focused. What does this mean for digital bits in your project? I mean, I'm just trying to squint through. It's kind of nerdy, geeky stuff, but I like it and it's networking. But now you've got a project called Digital Bits. You've got some horsepower with the KojiCo deal, right? So you can spin up blockchain, I can imagine. What's it mean for the Digital Bits project and the impact of what you're trying to do? So it's an open source project. And from our perspective, we want to see many, many enterprises and many, many SaaS and other organizations use this technology. It's not going to just happen. You don't just build it and they will come. So you need strategic partners that see the value in it, whether directly or through other lines of business that they have. And co-advangelizing this technology and supporting the enterprise and their consumption. And so again, partners like KojiCo really help us create that new standard of technology that they can consume. And it becomes mainstream this way. Jamie, what's your take on this? Obviously you did a deal with these guys. What was the benefit to you doing it? Obviously you had customers moving in the direction of having a decentralized application set of infrastructure to provide power to the next generation. Why this deal? Why these guys? I think when we look at who we partner with and build out our ecosystem, it's really about the relationship with the individuals behind it. We're very much about trust. We've worked with Al before. We believe in his vision. We know that he goes up projects with passion and integrity. And ultimately, the reason we did this with digital bits is because we believe in what Al's doing and his track record. Well, he knows the technology. He's also been a successful entrepreneur. And he understands network, sorry to jump in, but really understanding that the power of the cloud is only as good as the power of the network and the closer you can bring those things together, that's where the magic really happens. And no one understands that better than Al. And when you look to build out blockchain going forward, like, that's what you need. That's the power that you have to be able to harness. And we don't have to educate him. Jamie, you've been doing a lot of innovative things. We were just talking before we came on camera. You got an innovation award last night in Ottawa. You couldn't make it down for the big party we had last night with Jeff Bezos' brother. Jeff Bezos' brother. That was really, really cool. What are you doing innovative that you can share? I mean, I love what you're doing. It's great work. What are some of the innovation things that you're proud of that you take a moment to share? I'm proud with the incubators in Canada. So really working with startups, next generation technology, supporting the people that we think are going to build the future. So that's where we put all of our attention, as opposed to on a traditional large enterprise focus. Our focus is next gen emerging incubators. We've had a lot of success in the gaming industry with artificial intelligence, which is really booming in Canada. Ottawa, Montreal, and Toronto are creating incredible new companies focused on AI. A lot of them are partnered with us in our data centers and using our technology. So really I just see us continuing to push further and further as the industry moves. We want to be there moving with that. Are you going to be on the Canadian boat tonight? I call it the... Yes, I'm going to be on the Canadian boat tonight. The Diorio. That's right. Yes. Hopefully the rain subsides. But yeah, I'll be on the boat. Great. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it, Al. Congratulations on the news. Big news from Digital Bits. Open source project gaining steam, really disrupting the old loyalty platforms as one of its use cases. Check it out at Digital Bits. Any URL you want to share, Al, for the project? DigitalBits.io. You're watching theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host here in New York all week for Blockchain Week. Thanks for watching.