 Live from Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering I.O. Brought to you by I.O. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burns. Hey, welcome back, everyone. We are here live at the Rosewood Hotel in Silicon Valley at the heart of Venture Capital Land on Sand Hill Road, the famous Rosewood Hotel. This is theCUBE for a special presentation of I.O. Conversations with the I.O. Data Center's industry event here around Thought Leads around Data Center as a service, as a platform, and of course we're here with the founder of I.O. Data Center, George Lessman. Good to see you, welcome to theCUBE and your event. Thank you for having me again. This is good to see you. Great event. I mean, I think what you're doing here with this event is very Mark Benioff-like sense that he throws a big event dream force where obviously they have stuff to sell and they have a great community. This world of co-locations is a similar community, but you guys bring that thought leadership like what Salesforce does in this event and it's not just an I.O. Data Center, it's an industry event where there's a lot of thought leadership. What was the motivation behind that? Why are you taking that different approach? Yeah, it was important to us that the data center itself, the physical data center, space, power and cooling that the internet runs in and the cloud runs in and Salesforce runs in and every other piece of technology that we use today is really a world that's not well understood or really well engaged, I think. Minimized. Yeah, yeah, minimize it. People just call it the cloud and it's like they don't realize that there's hundreds of megawatts of infrastructure described in megawatts, right? Aircraft carrier is six megawatts or 10 megawatts of total power that powers a U.S. aircraft carrier. We have data centers with hundreds of megawatts of capacity that are delivering all these services that are so critical to us. So bringing that to the forefront and having the conversation around that, I think the other thing is that because it's been such a foundational component of the IT stack or of the cloud, it's not the innovation hasn't been there like it's been in the rest of the stack and so it's really important to me and what my brother and I have done over the years of the founding a number of businesses that we founded, two of them directly in the data center space, three of them, bringing that to the forefront. We need to innovate at the data center level. It's an imperative. One of the things that John and I were talking about is that if we've heard what we do this from a research and SiliconANGLE standpoint but we heard it over and over again that the tasks remain important. How you institutionalize the work is where the innovation can happen. So it's crucially important that people realize that there's still work that must be done that we associate with data center but there's a lot of new options for how you think about institutionalizing that co-location, cloud, on premise, et cetera. I agree with that, but it's even worse that I mean it were better than that, I guess it'd have been when I think about it. The physical data center has been the manifestation of construction projects. Literally people buy land, they call it real estate, they put a building on it, they hire construction contractors and engineers to build this facility. It's then as operationalized as a custom piece of infrastructure that's been built by a construction company. And then the technology show up and put the technology inside the box. And what we've seen is leadership at the hyperscale level of the Googles and Amazons and Microsofts and Facebooks and others who have integrated the data center into their core operating assets as a part of what they do. We've endeavored to bring that to the rest of the world, right? So every other enterprise and every other consumer of data center to give them the ability to access that same type of capability. So interesting, our view is not just the way that, not that there's different ways of deploying and utilizing data center, that the data center itself had to change. And so the sister company to IO Baselayer, which my brother now runs, was we built a hardware and software platform at the physical data center layer that is new, different, it's innovative. I love talking with you because you're a pioneer and entrepreneurs all sometimes are early, right? So, we've been talking for a few years now. A couple of things that you've been doing right on this new trajectory that everyone's kind of waking up to, if you will, is the notion of software, right? The software aspect, as well as you have unique IP around how you do the data centers, the modules and data, but bringing them together. How is that going? And what have you realized now that you're in a few years into this new model? What are some of the results? What are some of the things that you're seeing? You're right, I mean, it's good to be early, but not too early, in some instances. You know, we were, I think, It's hot right now, certainly popping now. Yeah, we were first to the, I guess first to the party, as it were, and now everyone else is showing up, which is, you know, it's a good place to be. You know, you go through some tortured years of like why are people not getting this yet and why are they not adopting that scale, right? And then I guess that's also our expectations for the scale. We have, you know, six massive data centers, global versus deployed. We've got, you know, 650 customers utilizing the infrastructure in one way, shape or form on an enterprise scale. I mean, Goldman Sachs is our largest customer globally, you know, very large global commitment with us on the platform. So I mean, the adoption is there. It's been with the companies that are most innovative and the most engaged in understanding how to manage these resources in a more effective way. And the software is the key element of it. The secret sauce of our platform is our ability to integrate all of the data center infrastructure into a single software defined API that then it can be exposed to the consumer of our services and the consumer of base layer products to be able to more in a, I guess, a more concentrated way run their infrastructure where it should be running at a given time with visibility into the space, power, cooling, network access layer of the stack, which most people don't pay any attention to. But it's 30 to 40% of the operating costs of a data center is the physical data center itself, but between energy, people and infrastructure. So software is a key enabler. Anything else that you guys are focused in on as an asset? Well, data. It's not just the software-enabled data collection. So by having software layered across this really untouched layer of infrastructure, we now are collecting massive amounts of telemetry and how it's operating when it's operating, be able to do what we call fingerprinting. So we can actually look at that and say, this is what a normal state of operations looks like at any given time and then be able to identify when it's not operating in a normal situation without having to touch the IT or the application directly. So I'll give you an example of that as, you know those NetAppMo and some of those other things you can put in your house and they have CO2 sensors on them and you have one of them in my bedroom. Well, I can tell during the day when my significant other decides to take a nap, because she closes the door to the bedroom and then takes a nap and the CO2 levels go up in the room because the room seal, well, that's a fingerprint that I'm able to see through the data I've collected that when those CO2 levels go up, that means someone's respirating in the room, right? Similarly, we can do that in the data center with the data we collect today. We can see how the applications are running inside of the customer's IT stack based on the thermodynamic properties that come in. So basically heat and energy consumption. And when those things change, we now have a methodology to feed that data back to the customer so that they can take action depending on what the particular use case is. So in the few minutes we have left, take a minute to explain the current value proposition that you're offering customers. Obviously there's a lot going on the industry with open compute now getting some sea legs and really getting traction. Open source in general is dominating, but yet the challenges still remain. What is the core value proposition of IO? The core value proposition is we operate six scale data centers across the globe today. So Singapore, London, and then four in North America, East, West, and Central United States. Inside those data centers, we provision deploy our technology platform that's built and developed with the base layer team. That platform gives customers and then the network layer that we've layered on top of it, it gives an enterprise looking to take advantage of the cloud. It's the on ramp to the cloud for them. So jumping for a large bank to go straight to the public cloud is just not a rational outcome for them. We run too much legacy infrastructure, too many regulatory constraints, data sovereignty, federal regulation, financial regulations, et cetera. We give them an on ramp to where they can support their legacy infrastructure in a smarter and more sound way than they've ever been able to do before on a global scale and then interconnect directly in a private and trusted environment to the public cloud providers, then other private cloud providers and SaaS providers in this trusted environment. And they can buy much smaller slices, they can buy much smarter. And then the real value proposition comes is once they're on this platform, we give them the ability to move between services and between regions of both horizontally and vertically in the stack without having to renegotiate their contract. So it gives them eminent flexibility as cloud becomes reality to be able to express that and how they're spending their money. And they move to the operating model, which is what they want. Yeah, it all goes to all from capital to operating and then they can even go from half capital, half operating to all operating. It gives them complete flexibility and optionality. Well, we really appreciate the support bringing theCUBE to your event. We're excited to cover it. Some amazing interviews here to wrap it up. Tell us what's next for you guys. What can customers and the industry expect to hear from in the IO conversation? By the way, the hashtag is IO Conversations. Great hashtag. As you guys continue the momentum and continue the conversation, what are they gonna expect to hear from you guys? As long as I'm still running the business, which I expect to be for a long time, we're gonna keep innovating. No matter how much the industry loves to stay the way they are, we're gonna continue to innovate and drive the, push the ball down the field as it were in the days that are later. And as the conversation today we've had, we see from self-driving cars to autonomous supply chains to drones delivering our Amazon packages, there isn't a single part of our life that isn't gonna live in a data center in five to 10, 15, 20 years, if it doesn't already today. And those data centers are going to have to be built and delivered and managed differently to be able to support that growth. And that's what we're about. That's the trend that everyone wants. Really appreciate it. Thanks for the support. Congratulations on a great event. We are at the Rosewood IO data centers, breaking it down for the future of how to operate in the cloud and have all the benefits of on-premise and the data center of the future. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.