 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019, brought to you by VMware. Everyone, welcome to this special CUBE conversation here in San Francisco for VMware's radio event. Their top engineers are here for once a year, get together, showing the best stuff, roadmap. To get two great guests here, we've got Mike DiPatrillo who's the senior director of Blockchain for VMware, we're going to hear where their journey is, where they've come and gone to today where they are up to. And for team, Gluckman engineering leader, Blockchain engineering, both with VMware. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. Appreciate spending the time. My favorite topic, Blockchain. Our favorite topic too. Thanks for joining me. So, Mike, let's start with you. Take us through where you guys are now because we talked about a year ago, just getting the, putting the team together. You were here last year at Radio, kind of getting some core momentum. Where have you guys come from and where are you now? Yeah, it's been quite a journey. You know, over the past five years, we've been doing a lot of research that research culminated in an open source project called Project Concord that we announced last year. Then we wrapped some commercial offerings around it around really the operational side. How do you operate a Blockchain at scale in an enterprise setting? We introduced that as VMware Blockchain. So very descriptive on the naming. And it really focuses on three core things. Enterprise grade, decentralized trust, not distributed trust, but really decentralized trust. So being able to deploy it across multiple different cloud environments as well as on-prem, it concentrates on robust day-to-operations. How do you operate it at scale in an enterprise setting? How do you deal with stuff like GDPR, the right to be forgotten, you know, data sovereignty issues, things like that, which is much different than other Blockchains. And then the third thing is really being developer friendly. Last year, we were fully Ethereum compatible. We had the Ethereum language sitting on top of our Blockchain. Since then, we've added support for DAML from Digital Assets, so another language. And we're adding more and more languages so that developers can develop in the frameworks that they're used to on the best scalable, you know, enterprise support. So bringing some DevOps mojo concepts to Blockchain. Absolutely, absolutely. All right, so what the demo you guys did, you did on stage, I want to get to that because that's a real use case. So again, R&D, conceptual, years of research, starting to put it together, making some progress on developer. So the solutions that you guys presented, we're real, take us through that. So the Ocean Plastics demo that we talked about at radio basically solves this problem or just the plastics polluting our oceans today. So if you look at the numbers, they're staggering. And the BPA that you actually consume in fish, it's pretty scary. The other thing is it's been predicted that we'll have more plastic in our oceans than fish by 2050. And one of the things Dell is trying to do is clean up the environment and they're building these reusable trays over packaging material for their Dell laptops. And so this use case was providing them that functionality. And if you look at Dell, they have a massive supply chain. They've got hundreds and thousands of vendors that they use disparate systems that don't actually talk to each other. They've got complicated workflows. There's also a lot of corruption in their supply chain. And one of the things that can really solve a lot of those problems is VMware Blockchain. And they have an instance running on our service which runs on VMC on AWS. And I walked through the demo of just going through an aggregator to getting to a manufacturer and then assembling these laptops with the trays and shipping them off to a consumer. So this was something that we covered at Dell Technology World. I just want to point out for the folks watching, Dell's taking recycled material from the ocean, plastic, using it as materials into their laptops as a part of sustainability. It's a great business outcome for Dell. The supply chain piece is interesting. So you guys are using blockchain to track the acquisition of the plastic out of the ocean to manufacturing end to end. Yes, end to end, yes. Using VMware Blockchain. Yes. So who coded this up? It was actually Dell. Dell developers coded it up. So they coded it up. They took two weeks to code it. We had absolutely no support issues that came our way. Which really talks about the ease of use of our platform and just the applications that run on. How does someone get involved real quick? What's the plug for how someone joins the VMware Blockchain initiative? Yes, VMware Blockchain is a managed service offering from us. So it's a licensed product. If they're interested, they can go to vmware.com slash blockchain. Or email us at blockchain-info at vmware.com. Get it signed up on the beta. We have an active beta. We have lots of enterprise customers all around the planet using it today at scale. Is it a free service or is there a licensed, paid license? There will be a paid license for it. You know, we're in beta right now. So beta's free, right? Okay, that's what I want to get to. But we're going to get you in the end, no. So it is a licensed. It is a managed service. Yeah, it's a managed service offering. And that's, you know, the beauty of it is that you don't have to worry about updating it, you know, keeping the nodes live, anything like that. We don't see the transactional data. We don't manage the nodes or anything like that. But we deploy them, keep them updated, keep them refreshed. You know, one of the benefits Ray Farrell's on, just talking about the IP revolution, how IP changed the world with the internet than the web. That blockchain has that same kind of inflection point impact. You mentioned GDPR. That implies changing the values on the blockchain. Well, one of the advantages is immutable. How do you handle that? Because if it's already immutable and encrypted, how does GDPR work? Or does GDP care if it's encrypted? No one can see it then. Yeah, well, you know, blockchain's not about encrypting the data, right? There are some blockchains that do encrypt the data. People get confused with that because they associated the cryptography with it, which links the blocks together. But the data down there is still visible, right? We're working on privacy solutions to make privacy per transaction. We're working on GDPR issues right now, because that is an issue. When you get into a regulated environment, which there isn't really a non-regulated environment these days, you have to worry about these things. You know, blockchain gives you immutability, and that gives you the trust, but really blockchain is about trust. It's about this decentralized trust. And when you think about it in that context, you say, well, if I trust that I want to be able to delete that data, and we reach consensus on it, and we still maintain the order, right? The proper order of the bits, which is really what blockchain is doing, is giving you trust on that ordered bits. And I agree, as a consensus, to delete one of those pieces out of the ordered bit, and we can still maintain trust of the ordered bits, then that's fine. Now I can't get into details on it because it's engineering secret sauce. Oh, God, yeah, I was just going to go over that. So one of the things I want to ask you guys as engineers, because I think this is one of the things that I see is that blockchain is attractive. There's a lot of unknowns coming down the bike, but we do know one thing. It's a distributed, decentralized kind of concept, and people like it. I see a new generation of attracted to blockchain, new generation of entrepreneurs, a new generation of young people, engineers, who see use cases that others from old school industry might not. So you start to see, I don't want to say it's not hipster or cutting edge, it's just that it's attracting this kind of new generation developer or engineer. Why do you think that's the case? Why? And is that right assumption to look at? Because when I asked is blockchain certainly state of the art? Yeah, it's not as fast as a database if I wanted to do something technically. That's like saying the internet dial up was bad, right? But what ended up happening after? So a lot of people are making these arguments, but I see it definitely resonating with young people. Yes. You look at Facebook, we're trying to look at blockchain and move in their entire broken system to blockchain and try to fix that. So you can see all these indicators. What's your thoughts? I think part of it, and I definitely saw this, last Friday and Saturday I was at E3L up in New York City. And it was very much that hipster crowd. And it was really attached to the cryptocurrency phase. Cryptocurrency allowed individuals to make investments, the kind of millennials to make investments. They didn't have to go to an E trade or they didn't have to go to some broker. It wasn't caught up in anything. They could make these bets. And now they can build applications that are directly attached to that currency. They can make up their own currency. They can make up their own value system. You've done some of that with theCUBE, right? We've launched an application that provides value around the content and tokenizes that value. And now I can transfer that value. So it opens up the transfer of that value, the trust of that value. And I think we're in a generation of trust and transparency. That's what's powering the world right now is about trust and transparency. And that's what blockchain gives you. It gives you trust in the system that no one person or no one government owns. And I think we'll really like that value. But one thing important is, I mean, we just have to demystify this, right? We just have to say this is not about cryptocurrency. That's one thing. And what VMware is doing is enterprise blockchain. And Mike, you've talked about this. You always say, blockchain's not going to save the world or it's not going to get rid of poverty. But there's four use cases that we've drilled down to in the supply chain realm and there's the financial services. And so those are some of the things we're tackling. And I think it's important to like talk about that. And there's these hipsters, every time we go and talk at anything regarding blockchain, we know a big chunk of people are there for cryptocurrency. And apparently at Consensus in New York, they reduce their audience from, I can't remember the numbers, they went up. 9,000 to 2,000. 2,000. They kicked out all the cryptocurrency people. And so it's important to make that distinction. Well, I think the crypto winter probably hurt them more than kicking up because last year there was a lot of hype there. But I think the bubble was already burst around February last year. But this brings up to a good point. This is something that we've been kind of covering on SiliconANGLE and the Cube is there's infrastructure dynamic, the engineering goodness. And I think that certainly is intoxicating to think about blockchain as an impact, engineering-wise. The token conversation brings up utility of the decentralized crypto currency, the ICOs and initial coin offerings, the fraud part or regulated part has caused a lot of problems. So to me, the way I tell people is, look at the ICO kind of scams and fraud kind of put a shadow on token economics and blockchain as a technology. So supply chain, no doubt, is great blockchain. That's where you guys are focused. That's where the enterprise won. We start getting into tokens. Tokens is a form of measurement. And that's where I think the regulators to your point earlier has caused a lot of problems. So the SEC says if you've got a utility token and you're selling it, it's not an utility token. So that's stalled a lot of, I would call those app developers. Yeah, but the app developers are still out there, right? And what's nice is these app developers that are on the side building these unique little applications, they still end up working for these larger companies and driving interesting solutions through like we're doing with supply chain, like we're doing financial services, like what we're doing in telco and media. You look at the people that we're dealing with in these companies, they came from building those applications. Heck, some of our own product managers came from building unique things, mining rigs and mining companies. So they still have that background. They still have that entrepreneurial asset and that's what's changing these companies. They're driving change to these companies saying, hey look, we can use blockchain for this really unique thing that opens up a brand new business line for this large corporation. You know, I showed you our tech preview. We did a tech preview of VMworld last year with our blockchain community with a cube coin token, kind of a total experimental thing. And it was interesting timing because I think you hit the nail on the head. We as entrepreneurial developers had this great application we want to do for the cube community, but we were stalled by the crypto winter and we were app developers. So there's many use cases of scenarios like that that's kind of people are kind of halfway between A to B. What's your advice to us or folks like us who are out there who want to get the projects back on track? What should we and applications do? Should they refocus on the infrastructure piece? What's your advice for the marketplace? It's so early. It's so early to actually really comment on that. I mean, I would say just keep at it because you never know. I feel like we're so early in the game that though we can't solve world hunger, there's so many use cases and applications that come out of it and we just have to keep going. And I think the developer community is what's going to make this successful and even emerging standards. I think that's one thing is standards across these blockchains. Like we don't have that right now and that's something we really need to do. And I just feel like we need to- Well, we program in Ethereum so the question is, is that a bad choice? There's a lot of cognitive dissonance around. Do I have the right tool? That's what I was just going to bring up is that you brought up a point of you're an app developer and you become stalled in your project and we see that exact same thing happening in the enterprise. We go into account after account where they've chosen some blockchain solution that's out there and they become what I call stalled pioneer. They've gone through, they've developed that application but they either hit a scalability issue and then throughput or the number of nodes. They hit an operations thing. Operations comes in and says, whoa, how are you going to do an audit on that thing? What about data sovereignty? What about GDPR? What about this? What about that? How am I actually going to operate it inside of my environment? What's the security side? So it's really around scalability. It's around operations. It's around security. Those are the three things we hit on over and over and over again will be stalled pioneers. So those are the accounts that we go into and rescue them essentially, right? We say we can provide you the scale. We can provide you the throughput. We can provide you the operations. For 20 years, VMware has been taking large complex distributed systems and making you operate them at scale in an enterprise setting where the experts at it. So we're doing that with blockchain now and allowing your blockchain projects to succeed. And redoing that. Stalled pioneers, good term. Yep. Okay, so, Radia, what's the feedback here? Obviously, you got the demo. What's been some of the peer review? Give us the 411 on peer review here. People liking what's going on? I think the demo really talked to people. It was relatable, right? It was a social good demo. I think it really impacted them. But some of the cool stuff we're doing is also like in the financial services side. We've got more interesting stuff on the supply chain. So the feedback's been great. A lot of focus is on VMware blockchain, which is also cool. We didn't quite have that last year at Radio. We had everyone running off in different directions. So now it's VMware blockchain. And what Mike talked about as stalled pioneers is we're seeing scalability throughput. Our numbers, and we talked about it at VMworld Barcelona. Our numbers are looking really great. And we're optimizing, pushing our platform so we could get to perhaps the PayPal numbers, right? And someday visa. Yeah, you got to have high availability. You guys know scale. Yeah. You happy where you are right now? Oh, very happy where we are right now. I mean, we've got great customers, great feedback, great solution that's solving real world problems. Engineers like doing two things. Shipping code and solving stuff that's going to help the world. At least here at VMware, that's our culture, right? And we're able to do that. Day in and day out. And VMware blockchain is a cornerstone to that. And that's what makes people happy. Mike Patino, we'll be following your journey. Great to check in. Great to hear the progress. Congratulations on the great demo. Real use cases in supply chain. We'll be following you guys and keep in touch. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Absolutely. Thank you for the time. John Furrier here with Lisa Martin here in San Francisco for theCUBE coverage of Radio. The top engineering event where they all come together internally with the VMware. One of a few press outlets here at theCUBE bringing exclusive coverage. Thanks for watching.