Welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip. The podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia gods Chuck and I'm the SVP of communications here at Worlds labs, helping to grow the Hedera ecosystem. I am delighted to be joined by Steve Todd, who is with hedera, as newest governing council member, Dell technologies. Hi, Steve, how are you? I'm good, Zenobia. Thanks for having me. Good well, I think nobody needs an explanation of who Dell is, but for our community, can you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your role there? So my name's Steve Todd and I'm a fellow at Dell technologies, which is really a path for individual contributors to grow in the company. I work in the Office of the CTO. And our job is to really look at forward looking or emerging technologies in the tech industries on behalf of dell, in our customers, in order to best prepare our customers for what's coming in the tech industry. Great and, you know, Dell is one of the most trusted names. I mean, organizations use you for a wide variety of things. I know, you know, most people the hardware comes to mind. But can you give us an example of the other kinds of technologies that you all bring to the market? Sure well, my background is actually I arrived at Dell through the acquisition of EMC. So, you know, Dell has that trusted brand, well known among consumers. But once the acquisition of EMC, they also brought another trusted brand, which is a lot of our infrastructure that runs in theta centers, in the cloud on the edge, that sort of thing. So not only do we make, you know, the highly visible consumer products, but Dell also manufactures a lot of the infrastructure and data protection plumbing that runs the internet, basically. Yeah, you have your hands sort of across organizations and throughout the enterprise. And so what made you decide, hey, this is the time for us to join the governing council of the blockchain? Well, I think there's two reasons, really, Zenobia. The first one is, as I mentioned, we have a lot of infrastructure products and our customers are increasingly moving from centralizing them in one location to distributing them across multiple locations, whether it's multi-cloud or whether it's edge. So we believe that a distributed ledger will be a critical part of the architecture for edge computing. We need some sort of a trusted multiparty way to communicate business transactions. And so Dell is increasingly exploring distributed ledger technology, and Hedera has that enterprise focus that we really liked. So that's reason number one that we've decided to join. The second reason is that our customers are increasingly interested experimenting with writing applications that run on distributed ledgers. So for us, when we join the council, right, to actually implement a node, right? A Dell server running on the Hedera network will gain valuable experience that we can then turn and share with our customers and help them on their journey to use distributed ledgers. Yeah what better way to really jump in and understand what it takes? I want to go back to edge computing for a bit because I think that means different things. Sometimes to different people. So when, when I see, for example, something in my local store or when I am, I always think of the extreme of the edge, right? Like a server or something on an oil rig out in the ocean. What what kinds of ways are people thinking about edge computing across your customer base and exactly how distributed is that? You know, there's probably seven or eight different verticals, right, at least that are really growing with edge. Transportation is a great vertical retail, as you mentioned, going into a store. Medical is another one. And they all have this characteristic that data is being created far away from a data center and it needs to be processed and handled immediately in a trusted way. And all of the thought leadership, all of the intellectual property, everything that we've built up in the data center. Right somehow all that trust needs to make its way out into those regions or those locations where the data is being manufactured. So we think that there is likely a distributed ledger nearby somewhere that can help with this trusted processing of data. And that's why we think distributed ledgers and edge computing is such a strong match. Absolutely and, you know, you talked about the experience that you will gain from running a node. What other kinds of things are ideas do you have in terms of how you'd like to engage with either other governing council members or you play around with the technology or engage with other applications that are being built on the network? Well, I think the biggest thing. We're excited about in working with all these other council members is that they've already gone through the process of installing an enterprise class, trusted server in their infrastructure and got it running right for a specific use case. And it may or may not be edge. Right so when we come to the council and we begin to collaborate with and work other companies like a Boeing or an IBM or a ServiceNow or Google, will gain this visibility into, well, what kind of applications are they running? Because Wilf will bump into those customers. There probably will be Dell customers trying to solve those exact same problems. So we tap into this rich network of use cases that are already in flight, already have a lot of thought put behind them, and that can Accelerate Solutions for our customers, which is something we're really excited about. Yeah, and I think that's a pretty unique opportunity, right? I mean, being able to share that learning and not only be a part of the Council and running a node like you said, but also understand, gosh, ServiceNow may have applications or concerns that are going to be similar concerns that you're going to see across your customer base. Right and when did you first start? I know Dell has done some other things in terms of decentralization of data. How far along do you think you are on your journey there? Well, I would say that we recognize the intersection between distributed ledgers and edge many, many years ago. And we began to work on technologies to solve problems, and we decided to open source some of those technologies. So, for example, we open source something called Project ovarian, which uses distributed ledgers to track trustworthy data in edge environments. So we believe now we can experiment with Hedera as one of those ledgers that can track the trusted movement and processing of data. And in all those verticals that I just mentioned earlier. Wonderful well, Steve, we are certainly excited to have you on the governing council and to have your participation and your expertise in this area. Anything else that you would like to share with the community or with your other fellow governing council members? Before we wrap up for today? I'd just like to share with the community. We've already got a glimpse of what you're working on. We've already started joining your meetings and meeting all of you and looking forward to further collaboration with Dell. Well, fantastic. We hope to have you back on soon as you continue your journey. And Thank you so much for spending some time with us today. Thanks for having me to novia.
