 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering InterConnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. Okay, welcome back everyone. Live in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bayworth, the IBM InterConnect 2017. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of three days of wall-to-wall. Day three, winding down here at the event. Great show about cloud, data, and blockchain. Our next guest is Marie Wieck, who's the general manager of the blockchain group with an IBM, and Greg Wolfond, who's the chairman and CEO of Secure Key Technologies. Announce a partnership with IBM, a lot of great success of blockchain. It's now a business unit in IBM. Marie, great to see you. Congratulations on the new role. Absolutely, we're really excited. We've seen so much momentum in blockchain that we really are investing heavily, created a new division, part of our industry platforms team, and we're off to the races. So six weeks in the role now. Six weeks, I guess the business model is keep running hard, because you guys have made great success. We had Ramesh, one of your workers in your division on earlier. He came from the labs, or the research team, and now he's in solutions. The traction has been pretty amazing. So take us through from a business standpoint, obviously you're now got the P&L output running, you're going engaging customers and use cases. Where did this progress come from? Was it just the internal coalesce of IBMers and customers coming together? Give us why this is at its point today. I mean, I think the most important point about blockchain is that it really is a network effect. The whole idea of a shared distributed ledger where everybody has visibility to the appropriate parts of data that they want gives you some really interesting new business models. But you can't have a network effect. You can't have a community and an ecosystem if you don't have a common set of standards and a way to drive interoperability. So just 15 months ago, we launched with 30 other people the Hyperledger project in the Linux Foundation. It's been the fastest growing open source project since the Linux Foundation started. So really impressive momentum. And if you think back just a year at Interconnect last year in February, we had this little demo of trading marbles. This year, fast forward a year, we have a new division, we have 400 clients that we're working with on real production level use cases. We have eight networks in production. We've got now version one of the standard, which really brings a lot of the enterprise requirements. And we're seeing all kinds of new use cases. Supply chain, healthcare, government, financial services, all where we're really talking about being real now and trusted for business. And I would add that Ginny Rametti on stage, hammering home the focus. Exactly. Like big time. At a Watson-esque level. Absolutely. That must be mobilizing the IBMers, obviously a new division. What's the buzz internally, right? People want to come work for you in your division now. It's like, I mean, what's happening? I do get an awful lot of emails from a lot of people who are very interested, but I always know when there's real momentum, when there are people who are doing it, that we didn't tell to do it. So we're starting with a pretty small team internally. My group itself, DirectLine, is about 200 people. There's about 600 people in the extended team across the different functions across IBM. But when I do a search on our internal directory and search for blockchain, there's over 1,000 people who have that name already in their title or in their description because they're working on it and they see the power of it. Innovative people get intoxicated by blockchain because they can just see the disruption elements. Greg, I want to ask you because you're actually doing it, not only intoxicating to kind of grok what blockchain can be, is some real use cases right now really jamming hard on blockchain with the ledger? Can you just share quickly how that's playing out and in context to IBM and in the marketplace? Yeah, so we're, SecureQ is a digital ID company. So we started in Canada years ago doing this login service for government. You show up, you want to see your taxes, your unemployment, your pension, any of 80 different departments. We made it easy for citizens to go there. You can redirect into a federated login with your TD login or your Royal Bank login. We have millions of Canadians who use that and we had hundreds of thousands a month but it's really a login service and it saved the federal government, I think, $800 million to get that done but we wanted to move to the next step which is sharing identities, so digital identity and how do I share my attributes from TD Bank or Royal Bank or my data from Equifax or Trans-Engine in a trusted way with parties I want to and not share it in other ways and we couldn't do that without Hyperledger. So we can talk a little bit about why we went to it but we have a network in Canada we tested already phase one we're launching later this year with Royal Bank, TD Bank, Bank of Montreal, Scotia where a citizen can show up at a telco to create a new account is it okay to share my name and address and my credit score, yes, done. Counts open in seconds. FinTrack changed the rules in Canada so you can open a bank account. Can I show up at a bank and share my attributes from the province and from a credit agency and create my bank account in seconds and we've all had this problem, right? We don't talk to my wife. We live it every day, I mean identity theft like I think front and center in mainstream life everyone's have either someone close to them or themselves get the phone call. The credit score is dropping or hey, someone's had my identity for a couple of weeks this is brutal even the credit cards are getting. It's funny when I started this business two of my friends had their identity taken over and someone put mortgages on their homes and I said there had to be a better way to do it. But if you, with blockchain if we can take data from different sources that the bank knows it's me and I can log in right now that I possess this phone that the province knows it's me and I can turn on the camera and check it's me we can raise the ID validation score for everyone in the whole industry from healthcare to government to banking and we not only raise the ID validation we also raise the off score because I'm not just logging in with my bank I must have this phone with this imminent and if it's canceled it's not me and normally people would put that through brokers in the middle but NIST in the US said we don't want brokers in the middle they could peak they could see your data I have single points of failure if this is identity for health et cetera it goes down I have honey pots of data people are collecting all of my stuff in one place it's encrypted but the bad guys going to get that right they could go after the person and say I need the keys I have a member of your family I mean we're living in a world in the cloud we know Marine knows there's no perimeter anymore and the security experts that are state of the art right now are saying even say in the Cuban day one here it's data is the new perimeter so there it is right this is fundamental what you're saying this is the new perimeter the data and you distribute it so no broker right means less of a threat matrix for people to hack right no you don't need a trusted third party to arbitrate there shouldn't be you shouldn't have to get other credentials and things to go right if I can log in at my bank right now and prove I've got the mobile device can I release data from different sources can I you know 10% of Americans move every year if I show up in an apartment can I share that I'm Greg and my bank says I'm me that I have this device from my mobile company can I share a background check to say that it's me we're going to do that in about eight seconds as compared to the landlord having to go and pay a real estate agent one month's rent to vet you and then when you do that imagine the power now right would you like to sign up for internet share your data yes click would you like content insurance click totally taking friction out for consumers but making sure that the parties who provide that data whether it's my bank whether it's my government they can't track me I don't want my government or my bank knowing if I go to mental health or if I go to a cancer clinic really important they don't know yeah healthcare I mean I know it's like in Canada but certainly in the United States you can't get information about yourself and and it's a perfect connection to blockchain because the whole notion of blockchain in our mind is about a trusted network and how do you get trust if you don't know who the people are who are participating so we signed an agreement with the Food and Drug Administration in the United States to focus on leveraging blockchain for exchange of information around patients privately and securely for clinical drug trials you know it's just one example of now you bring that trust element that's built on a blockchain already as a new interoperable component of these new supply chain networks whether it's around around supply chain and global sourcing whether it's the provenance of food or diamonds there's some really interesting aspects that you can now add on top and we're now even connecting you mentioned cognitive you know now apply Watson on top of that how do you increase the trust level in our new version one delivery of hyper ledger on the IBM cloud we actually provide a trust score for the network scale of one to a hundred you know what if Watson could actually look at your use case and hear the recommendations and suggestions for how to improve the trust level improving it means getting more members so it's more distributed and there's more sharing of information but they're not going to want to share that information if there isn't a trust model so give us a glimpse as to sort of your business you got 200 people but you've got thousands of people within IBM that you can tap in addition to the huge portfolio of things like cognitive so you get this the startup right inside of IBM so what do you do are you building out and you said it's inside the industry platforms team so what is that and what are you actually building out so we're we are building we're taking and contributing we're investing really in the Hyperledger project ourselves we are one of now 122 members of the open source and open community project and we're actually developing and contributing content there big committer and we provide a support model for anybody who wants to use just Hyperledger but we take Hyperledger back and now we're delivering it as a secure platform on our high security network that is production grade enterprise strong would be Ginny's word for that right and delivering that on our cloud or letting you take a container and put it on your own enterprise if you really want your own private cloud but we're also building industry solutions on top of that so we announced a partnership with Maresk for global shipping on global trade digitization to provide greater visibility but on that deal just to interrupt that Ramesh was pointing out that wasn't a solution specifically for them that was an industry scope solution so it's really a partnership so in this case again it's that network effect it's that ecosystem it's not Maresk the customer it's Maresk and IBM the partners who are now bringing forward as the anchor tenants in this new network the rest of our ecosystems and we were interested because we have a big supply chain business for all our hardware as well and you're selling a SaaS product is that right so it's a subscription based model and then services on top of that and services both to develop new blockchain applications we've had a number of our clients here from the 20,000 and interconnect that have come up with new ideas we're going to help them build that in a services kind of model but many of these are going to be essentially SaaS networks where either they're going to pay a membership fee or they're going to pay per transaction a percentage of the price or they're going to participate in the savings because this is actually going to streamline the opportunity in the case of Secure Key the model we see customers willing to buy the validation of an identity for an individual if they're participating in a critical transaction a bank would certainly be willing to pay to increase the confidence that Greg is Greg if he was applying for a mortgage online and the consumption is through the IBM cloud correct and that's yeah so there's a toolkit where big believers in open source it's open at the ends really easy using things like BlueMix to connect to the endpoints and for us it's just a magnificent coming together because things like the high security network to turn banks on quickly where they trust it and they can put their data in a secure and trusted way make this all go faster but that's the only place in the world I can get this correct? it is certainly the only place that you can get that level of security in a blockchain from a competitive standpoint somebody else has to build this out and create as a competitive product as IBM has and run it on somebody else's cloud for them to compete correct? that is correct the strategy is not to spam the world's clouds it's to say hey we've got this solution here's how you get it here's how you consume it and we really firmly believe that if this isn't an interoperable set of standards there will be other networks there will be other participants we want them all to be interoperable we want a global identity standard for interlocking networks because that is actually the tide that raises all boats so if they want to take hyper ledger and put it on their own private cloud or somebody else's cloud we support that thoroughly we think that the most enterprise grade cloud though is what I'm saying you just got thousands of people doing it and you say go for it exactly bring it on baby well I mean first of all you had me at blockchain in the interview so I love blockchain and I think it's very intoxicating from a disruption standpoint any entrepreneur, any innovator just this is a bulldozer on existing business models and business, how people do things so I'm sure the organic growth that you guys see is proving it internal, IBM and external how do people get involved what's your plans on building the ecosystem out because you got a tiger by the tail here as the GM of this division now you got to run hard you got to embrace people you got events what's your plan and how do I get involved if I'm someone watching and we want to get involved so great simple ways to get involved you know the developers we want them to be involved directly through the cloud and through developer works you get free access you can get started quickly in three clicks you can have a four-peer hyper ledger network up and running on Bluemix and you can start your own services and create if you are a customer what we're really suggesting is come and bring us your use case bring the participants in your network as well come into one of our IBM garages and we'll work that out for you and I think it's important that we think blockchain has a huge potential or I wouldn't be in this new role but we also think it's not for everything you know it's not the panacea for every business problem we want to make sure that people are using it in the right way for areas where it really makes the most impact and then we'll help you implement that and develop it and then we really see the whole ecosystem around our partners you know you're going to onboard people into a blockchain network you're going to have to integrate with your back ends you're going to extend your mobile devices to provide these new services through apps so our GSI community is really helping with the integration and the onboarding our ISVs are developing new services that run on those blockchain networks and we just launched our new IBM cloud for financial services has a blockchain zone for all those fintech startups to get access and reuse components so that we can accelerate the effect alright well congratulations we're grateful to see you in the new role congratulations thank you super excited for you and looking forward to getting the update soon at our new studio we'll try to rope you into our new Palo Alto studio Greg great to hear your success this is the Nirvana I mean secure ID is like the big I mean easily not like with some either token or you know engineered identity system and this is a home run it's privacy and it's as we talked about before the broadcast Facebook would you trust Facebook to go see your medical records would you unlock your title using Facebook you want things that are private where people aren't tracking you and are more secure than that so this is really Don Tapscott called Facebook data fracker they're like we provide all our data for Facebook they've gotten billionaires on it thanks so much for spending the time blockchain revolution here inside the cube bringing you really trusted content here on the cube distributed around the world I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante thanks for watching more great footage coverage coming up here stay with us