 from downtown San Francisco. It's theCUBE, covering RSA North America 2018. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the RSA conference in downtown San Francisco. 40,000 plus professionals all about security. And one of the big themes is how do we work together? How do we leverage our collective knowledge, look for patterns to help be better against the bad guys? And one of the really big forces for that is the Cyber Threat Alliance. So we're really excited to have Michael Daniel, the president and CEO of Cyber Threat Alliance. Michael, great to see you. Thanks for having me. So talk about kind of the genesis of this because it's such an important concept that yes, we're competitors on this floor, but if we work together, we can probably save ourselves a lot of work. Absolutely. I mean, part of the idea behind the Cyber Threat Alliance is that no matter how big you are, no matter how broad your coverage as a cybersecurity company, no one individual company ever sees all of the threats, all of the time. And so that in order to better protect their customers and clients, sharing that threat intelligence at speed at scale is a very fundamental part of being a much better cybersecurity company. So how hard of a sell was that a year ago? I think you started it a year ago, announced it. And how has the ecosystem kind of changed over the last year? Well, I would say that it's not like I run into anybody that says, you know, Michael, that's a really stupid idea. We shouldn't do that, right? It's really finding the way for a cybersecurity company to fit it into their business model, to be able to consume the threat intelligence at a speed that matters and really be able to bake it into their products. That's usually the hard part. Conceptually, everybody agrees that this is what we need to do. Right. And then how about just the nitty gritty nuts and bolts of how do you share information? How is it picked up? How's it communicated? What are the protocols? I imagine that's not too simple. That's right. And one of the things that we settled on was we used the sticks format because it's an open format that everybody can translate back and forth. We had to build in a lot of business rules to actually make sure that people were playing fair. You know, for example, we actually require all of our members to share. So you can't just join the alliance and consume information you actually have to give in order to receive. Right. And you've got some really kind of high level lofty goals that you've built us around in terms of doing good for the greater good, kind of beyond the profitability of an individual customer transactions. I wonder if you could speak to a few of those. Well, sure. So part of the idea behind the way that CTA is structured is that we're a 501C6. So we're a nonprofit, right? And the idea is that we function to help raise the level of cybersecurity across the digital ecosystem and actually enable our member companies to compete more effectively because they have better intelligence that their products and services are based on. But we ourselves are not in it to make money. Right, right, right. All right, Michael. Unfortunately, we're up against the times and we're going to have to leave it there. But love the work that you guys are doing and it makes so much sense for people to work together. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. All right, he's Michael from Cyber Threat Alliance. I'm Jeff from theCUBE. You're watching us from the RSA Conference in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.