 Live from Los Angeles, it's theCUBE, covering Open Source Summit, North America 2017, brought to you by the Linux Foundation and RedHash. Hey, welcome back, everyone. Live here in Los Angeles, California, it's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of the Open Source Summit in North America. I'm John Furrier, your host with my co-host, Stu Miniman with Wikibon, and our next two guests, Alan Dickinson, who's the program director of the Blockchain Platform at IBM, and Sean Frankson, who's the co-founder, Ted Speaker of a company called The Plastic Bank, doing some really amazing things with technology for the betterment of society and communities. We'll get into that in a second. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. So two important things, obviously, IBM, well known in the history books that's being written, real proponent of Linux. They were one of the early guys in during that movement with a billion dollars in cash. This is a big number. You guys went all in on Linux, good bet. Linux was successful, it's now the standard. So congratulations. Now are you the same thing going on with Blockchain? IBM's got the big bet. Company Best Brains are working on Blockchain. Kind of reminds me of the Linux move back in the day. Pretty impressive. Yeah, I mean, congratulations. There's a lot going on with Blockchain, and one of the reasons we're here, this is a developer event. We really want to help accelerate technology adoption. And so with our platform we launched two weeks ago, we have a whole suite of capability that developers can use that's complimentary, that's free, and they can use that to go and try Blockchain with a hyperledger composer. And they can experiment and work on Blockchain projects. You know, I love the IBM marketing department. They always have the best commercials. To me, I've always loved the smarter planet. And I think, Sean, I would like to give you a chance to talk about your amazing project you have going on. Take a minute to explain. You're up on stage here at the event. Pretty compelling, great social good, real value. There's some tech behind it. Take a minute to talk about your work. Sure, so at the plastic bank, we make plastic waste a currency. So in developing countries, it can be too valuable to enter the ocean. So it's a mission to use technology to stop ocean plastic. So we create recycling ecosystems all around the world where people can go out, recycle the plastic that's abundant in the environments. They can earn enough value to provide for their families, send their kids to school. And we have this entire ecosystem where we gather the plastic. We have these incentive programs that's sorted, recycled. Then we actually sell it back to some of the world's largest corporations who can use that recycled social plastic in their products instead of using new plastic, which means every single product tells a story of stopping ocean plastic, reducing global poverty. And this really allows just a responsible consumer to make a choice that's helping to stop ocean plastic in the end. Well, great story. I want to just drill down because this highlights a couple of big trends we've seen in the internet business as it got into big data. And certainly you guys know a lot about that at IBM. The collective intelligence idea of having these self-forming communities, you've taken a problem recycling plastic, it's not that hard to do, you go to the place. But how do you get it institutionalized is a collective intelligence problem. So you get a clever idea to do this, but you also have to support it. There's a lot of costs involved. So how did you pull this together? What was some of the nuances because to keep the incentives, to keep the motivation, to create the payouts, we've all recycled our cans for five cents at some point in our lives. Apparently when I was in college, that helped me a lot, but it's a whole nother scale here. Take a minute and talk about the technology. For sure, so we're starting in developing countries essentially have almost no existing waste management system. So we're really starting from the ground and looking at the way of how do we remove the dangers of the cash-based systems and instead have an asset-backed token that we can safely distribute and create new abilities. So really we're dealing with the unbankable who can now for the first time save and earn through recycling. So it's really not looking of how do we go back to what's been done in the past. It's how do we just take an area and start with the best technology that exists to safely bring in these new systems. When you say unbankable, what does that mean? I mean, sadly, most of the world doesn't qualify for a bank account. They don't have the identity, they don't have the credit history. So a simple concept of how do you save $200 to send your kid to school, you essentially hide it under a mattress and hope that nothing happens in between. But when we can safely have a digital wallet, it's just instant sales. And mobile phone penetration is pretty high in these areas. So they might have mobility, but no actual institutional credit bank account. Is that, am I getting that right? Oh, exactly. And the mobile, it's amazing when we think there's countries where people have no power, but you have phones. But so even at least the education of a mobile payment is still there. It's not a foreign concept, but now you can earn the tokens, which can then even be converted to a mobile payment. Again, where recycling is the equal opportunity. So are you using the blockchain, IBM blockchain, or are you guys doing a derivative of that? What's the... So we use IBM blockchain on hyperledger fabric and Linux one, and it's a system designed to scale around the world without any interruptions and just, it's a go big, go at home and do it right. Cool. Alan, he mentioned Linux one. I believe there's some announcements this week around helping to secure containers even more. And we've been tracking Linux one and Linux on the mainframe for quite a few years, but give us the update on what's new. Yeah, one of the new things is we're announcing at the show is Emperor 2. It's a new Linux platform, and it's the technology that's underpinning the plastic banks blockchain. The other thing that we're announcing is the beta for secure services containers. You know, around the globe, we have a lot of cases where data is stolen and the blockchain is another type of data. We don't want it to get stolen even though there's a lot of encryption in blockchain. We still don't want the data stolen and people trying to get at it. So we have this idea of secure services containers that kind of wraps around the application and protects it from malware. It protects it from insiders. Can't see it. Insider credentials get compromised. Those are the main ways data gets stolen. They can't get to it that way. Even if IBM gets a court order for us to reveal your blockchain data, we can't do it. It's protected and encrypted in this area, only you have the encryption keys. So the beta for that is something we also announced today. And then two weeks ago, we announced the blockchain platform. It's kind of the technology that we put in place to accelerate and help people. Securities are a huge issue. I mean, the ICO market, for instance, reminds me of the old stagecoach robberies, right? You can literally do like a multi-million dollar ICO, completely insecure transactions, but you got your wallet getting snatched. You're getting hijacked. Is that something that is related to that or is that just a point of the security still an open book? I mean, you can have secure transactions on the blockchain, but you still got your wallets out there. So you have a wallet strategy. How do you- This secure container technology can be used for any Linux application that you run when it's out of beta right now, and this is beta. So we're looking for users that want to have a very secure application environment running on Linux and send them up for our beta. Sean, can you tell us what led you to this solution? I'm sure security has got to be high on your list, kind of the financial transactions you're involved in, but I have to say, kind of a young, small company, mainframe is not the initial thing that we think of. You know what, again, we think of, the only way to solve the global problems is to really go on such a scale that we can have hundreds of millions of pounds provide to the world's largest companies, which just mean it's got to be large scale, no interruptions, and for us, trust is the biggest thing. Investor trust, client trust, and just even everyone's trust that, not only the financial side, but we're delivering a promise of social good, environmental justice, that if we can have irrefutable trust that it's just the right system, and to me, blockchain's a trust stamp, IBM's a trust stamp, Linux one is a trust stamp, that just, it's the right way to do it on a global scale, and for us, it was global, was the only way to go. And of course, the supply chain is a challenge you're dealing with, that blockchain is a good fit for. A lot of these early use cases are supply chain like, well, you got to keep track of a lot of moving parts. And who's contributing to what? You can have a digital token that represents the physical asset, and you can kind of track it through that way, and blockchain can keep the information safe and documented so that you don't lose track of the value. Well, we're super excited, as you know, we're looking at a blockchain for our audience and our world, so, you know, it's interesting, a lot of the blockchain, certainly, people see the high end scams out there in the ICO stuff, which is natural in the early markets, early underbelly, that it shows itself. We've seen that movie before, but here's the thing that I've never seen in my career, ever, very often, when you have alpha geeks getting super excited, we're talking about CTOs, really strong technical people, and A plus entrepreneurs, they're salivating at the blockchain opportunity because they're the canary in the coal mines, in my opinion, on disruption opportunities. You're seeing use cases where I can solve that problem. People with passion are going after these new opportunities that were ungettable before, because you'd have to roll out this complex software product. All these costs to get started, same pattern. We're seeing a lot of technology people get excited about it, but they understand the technology relatively quickly, and they can get it. What seems to be slowing down a lot of blockchain adoption is more the linkages with other organizations, because when you're exchanging value, you're passing it between one organization and another in a value chain, and getting that value chain where you can articulate who it is, and codifying the ways that you work with the people in the value chain and create a smart contract around that, that's what we see slowing down the progress of blockchain. We had Brian Bellin and Dwarf on yesterday. He runs the smart ledger project for the group, and now we're talking about decentralizations versus distributed computing. We all know what distributed computing is. We've seen that, but now with decentralization, he had a good quote. He said, minimum viable decentralization. Because if people think you have to have a completely decentralized environment, which I thought was a really good observation. No, I agree, I heard them say that, and it reminded me of one of the steps we see in blockchain progression is you have to get a minimum viable ecosystem together. We see people sometimes biting off too big of a problem, and one thing I like about the plastic banks approach is they're trying to get it working right somewhere first, and then scale from there. And the same thing with blockchain, you have to get your ecosystem defined, you have to get that working, and then expand from there. And that's one of the things we've designed into our blockchain platform is the ability to kind of govern a group of folks that are trying to exchange value, and then also how to operate a blockchain once it's exchanging value with a group of folks. Things like, let's say you have a new version of hyperledger fabric. Do you want to take down your blockchain that's operating while you install the new version? Well, we've made sure that you can do that in a smooth way, keeps on running. You know, Alan, that is a super smart observation. I 100% agree with you. I've always said this, and Stu and I and Dave have talked about this. Blockchain is a community win. The community wins together. As the community participants increase in that kind of philosophy, the value increases. If it's a win or take all, it doesn't work. Clearly. So, what are you guys doing with the ecosystem? That's a good question. Are you guys investing in the ecosystem? Can you give some examples? Yeah, I mean. It's supporting great projects. We've built a lot of technology, but one of the things that we are, it's unique about IBM's approach to blockchain is the governance tools that we've created to help manage the ecosystem. I mean, we're the only blockchain partner out there right now that has kind of these ecosystem tools. They can kind of speed the creation of bringing multi-parties together and helping them think through how they should govern the creation and then also the operation of the blockchain. What if you want to add three more members after your blockchain is running? That's a technology problem, but it's also a business problem. And you want to do that with your blockchain keep running. Well, we'll keep in touch. We'll roughly want to do a lot more coverage on what you guys are doing. I think it's instrumental. We're doing a lot of coverage as well on the ICO side, tracking that business side of it. But down in the enterprise, a lot of activity coming in my opinion, I think the Anderson, I was going to say Anderson Consulting. I'm dating myself. Accenture is going to do very well. Sean, get back to you for a second. I want to ask you a question. On a personal note, what has been a learning from your process? You're doing, I mean, what seems to be probably an exciting intoxicating job where you're making social good happen, using some tech. I mean, it's a cool project. I'm assuming there's been some bumps along the road in any entrepreneurial venture. What are some of the learnings you've taken away from where you are today, where you've come from, and where you've achieved it? What are some of your personal learnings? Yeah, I think really the two biggest things is one, especially coming from just an entrepreneurial nature. It's not what you know. It's what you can figure out. There's always a how. And for us, one, it was when you come up with such a giant idea, and you just know where it's going and where it can go past there. You know, mentally, just becoming the person capable of achieving what you're trying to achieve as compared to getting caught up on all the things you don't know. I mean, you know, the more you know, the more you know how much you don't know. And it's really just getting inspired by the fact whatever the next answer, whatever the next hiccup, whatever the next how, we'll figure it out. I might not know the answer, but I'm committed to figuring it out and committed to becoming the person capable of figuring it out. And you know, that's a journey and a process and an inspiring journey to be. You got to dream the future to create it. And what you're saying is it's a growth mindset. I love that growth mindset. Say, hey, we're going to go after it. We're going to see some things. I have to figure it out. That's great mindset. Yeah, exactly. Versus nervous, assistant security. Good job, well done. Well, congratulations on your success. And thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. Alan, we'll look forward to chatting with you future and talking blockchain IBM here on theCUBE with their great projects at doing blockchain. Also, they had an announcement a couple of weeks ago around some really cutting edge value around food distribution and value chain. So again, smarter plan. I know you guys do a lot of investments early on, but congratulations and continue success, Sean. Live coverage here from the open source summit in Los Angeles, California. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Be right back with more after this short break.