>> Live from Los Angeles, it's theCube
covering Open Source Summit North America 2017
brought to you by the Linux Foundation and Red Hat.
>> Hey welcome back everyone,
live here at 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 Dickenson who is the program director
of the blockchain platform at IBM
and Shaun Frankson, who's the co-founder and
TED speaker at a company called The Plastic Bank
doing some truly amazing things with technology
for the betterment of society and communities.
We'll get this out in a second.
Guys, welcome to theCUBE.
>> Thanks for having us.
>> So two important things honestly.
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.
That's a big number.
You guys went all in on Linux, good bet,
Linux was successful,
it's now the standard so congratulations.
Now you have the same thing going on with Blockchain.
IBM's got the big bet,
the company's best brains at work working on blockchain,
kind of reminds me of the Linux move back in the day.
Pretty impressive.
>> Yeah I mean, there's a lot going on with Blockchain
and one of the reasons we're here is
that this is a developer event.
We really want to help accelerate technology adoption
and with our platform we launched two weeks ago,
we have a whole suite of capabilities 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 also love the Smarter Planet and I think Shaun,
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.
What's some tech behind it.
Take a minute to talk about your work.
>> At The Plastic Bank we make plastic waste a currency
so in developing countries it can be too valuable
to enter the ocean.
So the mission to use technology to stop ocean plastic.
So we create a recycling ecosystems all around the world
where people can go out, recycle the plastic
that's abundant in the environment,
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 to sort it, recycle,
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 that 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 just want to drill down
because this highlights 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 think of any problem.
Recycling plastic, which is not that hard to do,
you go to the placement.
How do you get it institutionalized?
Is the collective intelligence problem.
So you got a clever idea to do this
but you also have to support it.
There's a lot of cost involved
so how did you pull this together?
What were some of the nuance to keep the incentives,
to keep the motivation, to create the payouts.
We all recycle our cans for five cents at some points
in our lives, I remember when I was in college
it helped me a lot.
But it's a whole other scale here.
Take a minute to talk about the technology.
>> For sure. So we're starting in developing countries
that essentially have almost no existing waste management
systems 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,
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 not really not looking of how do we go back
to you know, what's been done in the past,
it's how do we 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,
but most of the world does not qualify for a bank account.
They don't have the identity,
they don't have the credit history,
so it's simple concept of how do you save 200 dollars
to send your kid to school.
You essentially hide it under a mattress
and hope that nothing happens in between.
But when you can safely have a digital wallet,
it's just instant savings.
>> Mobile phone penetration is pretty high in these areas,
so they might have mobility
but no actual institutional credit bank account,
am I getting that right?
>> Oh exactly.
It's amazing when we think there's countries
with no power but who have phones.
So that means the education of the mobile payments
is still there, it's not a foreign concept,
but now you can earn the tokens which can then
even be converted into mobile payment.
Again where recycling is the equal opportunity.
>> So are you using the blockchain component, IBM blockchain,
or are you guys using a derivatives, what's the tech?
>> So we use IBM blockchain, Hyperledger Fabric and LinuxOne
and you know 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.
>> You mentioned LinuxOne and I believe there's some
announcements week around how to secure containers
even more and we've been trying LinuxOne,
Linux on the mainframe for quite a few years.
Give us the update on what's new.
>> One of the new things that we're announcing
at this year's show is Emperor II.
It's a new Linux platform and it's the technology
that's underpinning The Plastic Bank's blockchain.
The other thing that we're announcing is
the beta for Secure Services Containers.
Around the globe we have a lot of cases where
data is stolen and blockchain's 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 Service Containers
that kind of wraps around the application
and protects it from malware,
protects it from insiders, can't see it,
insider credentials get compromised,
goes into the main ways, data gets stolen.
You have to do 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,
and 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 a technology that we put
in place to accelerate and help people.
>> Security is a huge issue, I mean the ICO marker
for instance, remind me of the old stagecoach robberies,
right. You literally do like a multimillion dollar ICO,
completely a secured, when you're getting 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
is still an open book?
I mean you can have secure transactions
on the blockchain but you still got your wallets out there,
so you got to have a wallet strategy.
>> Most of the Secure Container technology
can be used for any Linux application that you run
when it's out of beta.
Right now it's in beta.
So we're looking for users that want to have
a very secure application environment,
running on Linux and sign then up for our beta.
>> Shaun can you tell us, what led you to this solution?
I'm sure security has got to be high on your list,
the kind of financial transactions that are involved in it,
but I have to say a young small company,
mainframe is not the initial thing that we think of.
>> Again, the only way to solve the global problems
is really go on such a scale that
we can have hundreds of millions of pounds provided
to the world's largest companies.
Which just means 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 you know we're delivering a promise of social good,
environmental justice, that if we get
an irrefutable trust that it's just the right system,
and to me, blockchain's a trust stamp,
IBM's a trust stamp, LinuxOne 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 now of course, the supply chain is a channel
that you're dealing with that blockchain is a good fit for.
A lot of these early use cases, their 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 blockchain for our audience and our world,
so it's interesting, a lot of the blockchain,
certainly people see the hype and the scams out there
and the ICO stuff, which is natural, they're early market,
the underbelly kind of 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 CTOs, really strong technical people,
and A plus entrepreneurs, they're salivating
at the blockchain opportunity because they're
the canaries in the coal mines in my opinion
on disruption opportunities. You 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, and another
and 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 Behlendorf on yesterday,
he runs the SmartLedger project for the group
and we talked about decentralizations versus distributive,
we all know what distributive computing is,
we've seen that.
But now with decentralizations,
he had a good quote, he said,
minimum viable decentralization and 'cause if people think
that you have to have a completely decentralized environment
which I thought was a really good observation.
>> I agree, I heard him say that and it reminded me
of one of the steps we see in blockchain progression
is we 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 Bank's approach
is that they try to get it working right somewhere first
and then scale from there.
And then 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 that we've designed
into our blockchain platform, is the ability
to 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, lets say you have a new version of
Hyperledger Fabric, you want to take down your
blockchain that's operating while you install
the new version, but we've made sure that
you can do that in a smooth way that keeps on running.
>> You know Alan, that is a super smart observation.
I hundred percent agree with you.
I've always said this, and Stu and I and Dave,
we talked about this. Blockchain is a community win.
The community could win this together as
the community participants increase in that
kind of philosophy, the value increases.
If it's a winner take all, it doesn't work, clearly.
So what do you guys with the ecosystem?
That's a good question.
Are you guys investing in the ecosystem?
Can you give some examples.
Obviously you're supporting great projects.
>> We've built a lot of technology but one of the things
that is unique about IBM's approach to blockchain
is the governance tools that we've created
to help manage the ecosystem.
We're the only blockchain partner out there right now
that has these kind of ecosystem partner tools
that 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 a few more members
after your blockchain is running?
That's a technology problem,
but it's also a business problem.
And will your blockchain keep running?
>> Well we'll keep in touch,
we definitely 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 on the enterprise
it's a lot of activity coming
and I think Accenture is going to do very well.
Shaun, get back to you for a second.
Want to ask you a quick question.
On a personal note,
what has been a learning from your process?
You're doing, what seems to be probably
an exciting and intoxicating job
where you're making social good happen, using some tech.
I mean, it's a cool project.
Assuming there's been some bumps along the road
like any other entrepreneurial venture.
What are some of the learnings you've taken away
from where you are today,
where you've come from and what you achieved?
What are some personal learnings?
>> I think really the two biggest things is one,
especially coming from just a entrepreneurial nature,
it's not what you know, it's what you can figure out.
There's always a how.
And for us, when 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.
Mentally just becoming the person capable
of achieving what you are trying to achieve
as compared to getting caught up on all the things
you don't know, I mean the more you know,
the more you know how much you don't know
and it's really just getting inspired by the fact
that whatever the next answer, whatever the next hiccup,
whatever the next how, we'll figure it out.
I might now 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 it's a journey and process
and an inspiring journey to be on.
>> You got to dream the future to create it.
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 and have to figure it out,
that's a great mindset. Versus nervousness and insecurity.
Good job, well done.
Well congratulations on your success
and thanks for coming on theCUBE,
we really appreciate it.
Alan, we look forward to chatting with you in the future
and talking blockchain.
IBM here on theCUBE with the great projects they're doing
on blockchain and also they had an announcement
a couple weeks ago around some really cutting edge value
around food distribution and value chain so again,
Smarter Planet, I know you guys do a lot of investments
early on but congratulations, and continued success Shaun.
Live coverage here from the Open Source Summit
in Los Angeles, California.
It's theCube, I'm John Furrier, Stu Minniman,
be right back with more after this short break.