 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier on theCUBE, live from Dell Technologies World 2019. This is day one of theCUBE's coverage for three days. Two sets, lots going on. I'm pretty sure I can guarantee you a very energetic conversation that John and I are going to have with the Dell Boomi CTO, Michael Morton. Michael, great to have you on theCUBE. It's great to be here. Nice to meet both of you. So, Michael Dell, the other Michael, talked about, you probably get that a lot right, the other Michael. No, not really. Talked about Boomi as a leader in cloud integration this morning during the keynote. Stu Miniman and I had the chance to talk to your CEO, Chris McNabb. We've came with tons of energy. We want to talk to you about blockchain. Blockchain? What? Yes. Am I surprising you? Yes. What are your perspectives on it? Does it live up to the hype? Wow, that's a really good question. So, you know, it's really funny because I talk to people about blockchain all the time, to be honest with you. And I would say that for as many as people that are excited about the technology and the possibilities, there are equal number of people that are the naysayers, right? The doubters. And a lot of times, the people in those roles are technology people, right? They'll say, we'll just use a database for that. Right? What difference does it make? But they're missing the point. The point is this. So, what's really happening in the industry is collaboration. Blockchain, it is a technology, but the point is it's creating relationships in business that have never been created before. So if you go and look at these consortium and work groups that are spinning up, you see a construction consortium, an energy consortium, healthcare consortium, transportation consortium, supply chain consortium, and you look at the people that belong to those, it is amazing the collaboration between these companies because of blockchain as a concept. So really it is transforming the industry. So my advice is either get on board or you're going to be left behind. All right, so first of all, we're both pro blockchain. Everyone knows theCUBE knows I love blockchain. And I love the idea of token economics. The ICO's initial coin offerings has really poisoned the market, I think in the general market, because people see Bitcoin, Ethereum, all kinds of currencies, a lot of fraud outside the United States, and the government's cracked down on it. We know that story. But the fundamental technology is changes the relationship between people and data and their interactions. And that's what I think I agree with you 100%, but also it's a cultural shift too. You're thinking about new ways to do something. And I always say, I'd love to get your reaction as Michael, because I always say to people, hey, when the internet started the web, it was dial up. It was the slowest piece of you know what you could ever see. But it was the first time we saw web pages we could self-serve ourselves with information. So I think people tend to compare what I could do alternatively with a database to the early stages of we're blockchain. Yeah, there's some latency issues. Are you doing them real time? No problem, don't do blockchain. But if you look at the benefits of what it could provide from supply chain to community, they're there. It's disrupting the business model behind it. And I think that is a part of the clue train that people can jump on and understand that if they just take the leap of faith, kind of like the web, there were people who poo pooed the worldwide web. It's a toy for people, it's nothing. The graphics are horrible, speeds are slow. No one really uses it. You could say the same thing about cloud and IoT, right? Think about three years ago, everybody's IoT drug, right? IoT, IoT, IoT, right? But now I'll make a provocative statement that I now say that I'm comfortable in saying is if it's a business, you are not incorporating device data, either as a producer or a consumer, you're already behind. You're already behind. And so I will probably say the same thing about blockchain in 24 to 36 months. If you are not working on a strategy to have your business be more competitive by incorporating blockchain, you're going to be behind. Talk about where people can get on the clue train here because that's a good point. There's always the early adopters, the people who take the arrows in the back, so to speak, the entrepreneurs, and we've seen some cases of that, but it's maturing fast. Where are the entry points? We say a technologist, a business person. Is there a pattern that you see that might be a good way for someone to jump in? How do they jump in? I mean, it certainly can join a community and get involved, but I mean, in terms of holistically thinking about impact to their business, to their customers, where should they be staring at for blockchain? I always have two answers. I mean, one is my business hat, one's my technical hat. One is join a consortium, join a work group, learn what others are doing, and look at your competition, right? There's a vast amount of data out there, so just go ahead and search on your competition. It's very easy, and I guarantee that, if there's anything that's motivating, it's what your competition is, but the second answer is this, get your hands dirty, learn the technology, right? Don't be a PowerPoint strategy, learn the technology, for sure, so understand what's there. Understand the strengths and the weaknesses of Ethereum. Understand the strengths and weaknesses of hyperledger fabric. Start learning the technology, really get your hands on it, because that's what we had to do in Bumi is, we've been also looking at it for roughly two years, and it was last year that we came out with our support because of working with our customers and partners, that we too had to work on a strategy of where is Bumi positioned, and how does it bring value to the market for our customers, for blockchain? For us, we had to just start doing it, so now in the past year we're doing it, and we too belong to different alliances and participate, and can't go without saying that with Dell Technologies, very much invested in blockchain across the business, especially VMware, we reap the benefits at a much broader scale, so we're just been in a great position of learning and understanding where Bumi fits. Why is, and if you look at your existing customers and I mentioned before, we spoke with Chris McNab about an hour or two ago, I think I saw on Bumi.com, there's over 8,200 customers that you guys have, Rory Reed energetically talking about how much growth you guys have achieved, the number of customers, sheer number of huge that you're adding monthly. Quarterly, when you talk to your existing integration customers, what are those conversations kind of along the lines of John's question, where you're talking to these customers about why integration is so important as it relates to blockchain? Well, first of all, most importantly is, customers need an integration strategy. They just need a strategy on integration, so let's push blockchain aside, right? Like Michael Dell and everybody else says, every business needs to integrate. And let's face it, the majority by far of customers that need an integration strategy are integrating data between legacy on-premise solutions in cloud, right? Once they get established of understanding the processes and the procedures and bringing in a solution like Bumi, it's a natural extension that, boom, you already have blockchain support. You're just extending your integration strategy to now basically onboard. What kind of blockchain features do you have in the product and the roadmap? What's it looking like? Where's the use case for you guys? So I'll tell you what we're seeing. So first of all, our support is Ethereum and hyperledger fabric. It's also fully compatible with a VMware announcer, the beta and blockchain at the end of last year. So we're fully compatible with the VMware blockchain, which is Ethereum based. And for us, most of the conversations that we have now, of course, we all know that there is every industry is dabbling or really trying to be a front runner. But the clear front runner for us is trusted lineage, track and trace. It's really tracking supply chain. That is by far the most predominant scenario that we see our partners and customers we work with seem to be the most interested in. It's interesting, digital is like all supply chain. It's connected. And then connecting the analog is interesting too. Some of the examples we see a lot as, you know, shipping goods, a physical activity, but there's a digital component in it that the ledger for instance plays beautifully for. So it's the confluence of physical world meets digital, where now you have human relationships to a digital connected network. And if everything's connected, everything can be a supply chain at some point, if you're looking at data. Your thoughts on that? It's interesting you bring this up because we've been talking like it's a business automated process, right? You run something and integrates, it pulls data, transforms data. But interestingly enough, the other thing that people tend to think about is they tend to think of blockchain and a silo, right? I'm just installing blockchain and here it's over there humming in the corner waiting to do something, right? But that's not going to be the case. But interestingly enough, people also think that's just integrating applications back and forth. But when you pull up a phone and maybe do a financial transaction, you're really communicating with a smart contract in the back end. You are actually a person communicating or integrating with a smart contract. This is the beauty that people now if they just start thinking about it and they learn is, oh, okay, again, Bumi will help you integrate data back and forth between smart contracts, but it also presents you the user interface for a smart contract. And it removes the middle, intermediaries or middlemen. And so what that means in software is that you're going to go direct software to software for these smart contracts. So that's one. But also it's just in the real world, if you and I are online and we want to do something, we could have a digital smart contract. No lawyers are involved. We can just agree. And then it's immutable. That's right. So that's another benefit. Again, these efficiencies come from things being taken away. That's right. This seems to be a big part of the blockchain. It is, as a matter of fact, geolocation is another example. Whether it be freight or ships or trains, we're already seeing cases where based on geolocation, it's denoting where the goods are based on geolocation. A human is not even involved in all. It's all automated based on proximity. Right, it's all like this ecosystem is becoming just alive in itself and just starting to be self-building. What are you hearing of the integration of blockchain into Bumi's product roadmap? What are you hearing from your customers and your partners? For us, I will tell you that given that we've been working on this, there's no question that the validation and quality of what we have is because of our customers and partners. But, hands down, everybody's still on the journey. Yeah, yeah. Everybody's still, everybody's trying to figure out. Early innings? Very much so. The other thing I need to point out, just to make sure the viewers know this is, Bumi itself is not a blockchain, right? It's not a mechanism by which you install a blockchain node, right? It is the ability to interact with a blockchain that's pre-existing, that's very important because sometimes people will look at us like, oh, is Bumi helping me deploy a blockchain? It's like, no. We're helping you integrate your business with a pre-existing blockchain and there's a big difference there. And that's the partnership of consortiums that you guys are part of. That's the important part of you mentioning, correct, joining a consortium. Not so much, you need to stand up your own blockchain. That's right. Hyperledger, for instance. Right. Patchy, license, no problem. Right. So that's kind of where the integration point is. Okay, what's about speed and performance? Speeds and fees, because again, you know, knowing about the latency issues around how tokens are being written to the blockchain, it's not super fast, innovation's happening. So that's also, I would say, limiting the scope of the early market adopters. But if you're doing just a trivial transaction where latency's not involved, it's a great use case. Where do you see the performance of blockchain? How's that coming along? What's your view on that? What do you see timetable-wise? And just to be able to throw a dart at the board, you know. You said 24. Everybody wants to aspire to be, to overcome the highest volume transactions today, which we know as probably credit card companies, right? Like that's the benchmark. And I will tell you that there is a ton of research going into performance. For example, today, Boomi and VMware work with the University of San Diego Supercomputing Lab. It's commonly known as the short name is Block Lab. So we're actually all working together. I saw that was a recent announcement. It got announced, not too recent, but I think it could have been at the end of last year was the first press that we did. And coming up now in May or June, we will, there'll be another press release of what's going on. From a performance standpoint, again, we are many universities, I mean, as you could imagine, it's a great university project for just that reason. And so we're involved in that together with VMware. So what the developer involvement now, Ethereum attracted a lot of developers and then there was some ease of use issues, performance, natural. Then other languages, other blockchain approaches came out. Where are the developers gravitating towards now? Do you see? Because soliloquism is a unique language for Ethereum, but it's not as easy as JavaScript, for instance. You got a JavaScript guy out there who can sling hyperledger possibly. So you start to see tool chains and how developers orientations or preferences come into play. You do. I mean, whoever heard of Solidity, right? Before Ethereum came on the scene, right? That's a whole different programming language. But the two front runners by far is Ethereum and hyperledger fabric. Hyperledger fabric, I mean, having support for Java Toolkit. So that's going to cater to a much broader audience. So you've seen the evolution of both of these catering to more mainstream languages like Go and Java. It's going to happen. Yeah, it's going to happen. Predictions. Predictions. Yeah. When are we going to see blockchain hit the mainstream? What's the tipping, maybe a better question. Tipping points. What's the catalyst tipping points? What's just your mental model? How do you think about looking at the signals from the marketplace to see a tipping point for mainstream, at least awareness? Based on what we're seeing in the industry today, I believe that enterprise businesses will have to be integrating with blockchains in 12 to 24 months. 24 months is probably the max. But 12 to 24 months, I don't think you're going to have a Fortune 100 company that's not integrating with a blockchain for one reason or another, whether it be currency or trusted lineage. But 24 months. Wow, Michael, boomy, blockchain. I feel like I need to say bazinga. I need another B word. Boom. I promised you boom, boomy, blockchain. I promised you an energetic interview and I think these guys just gave it to you. Thank you so much, Michael, for joining John and me on the program. I'm excited to see what comes up and hopefully see it at Dell Boomi World. Yes, thank you very much for having me. Hello, our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas. Thanks for watching.