This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Steve Mueller, Chief Technology Officer, Hypersive. Considered one of the world’s leading experts in remote technologies, Steve has spent the past 25 years providing his technical expertise to more than 300 of the largest enterprises across 5 continents. In this episode, he provides views on what edge computing is today, the state of remote desktop virtualization, and how security is being implemented in current and next generation technologies and infrastructures.
This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Steve Mueller, Chief Technology Officer, Hypersive. Considered one of the world’s leading experts in remote technologies, Steve has spent the past 25 years providing his technical expertise to more than 300 of the largest enterprises across 5 continents. He spent his early years building core devops and virtualization principles to achieve automation and scale, has worked for VMware and AWS addressing customer needs, and is now CTO of a startup focused on next-generation edge, end-user compute, and device virtualization.
In this episode, Steve evaluates what the edge is today and how it has changed overtime. He talks about cloud computing and working in a remote desktop world. Steve addresses the future of physical security and technology, and why he is so excited about what’s in store for the use of video. He also explains how his company Hypersive provides a platform for building management and security through ready-to-run cloud services that work with already existing infrastructures.
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“The number one threat to any organization is the insider threat. So you don't trust your own people and that's very brutal. It's borderline non humanitarian, but if you're a business owner, especially at scale, the number one thing you're worrying about, the thing you're most proud about is your employees. Something you're worried about is your employees most. That's the one that takes companies down.”
“Really at the end of the day, remote desktops and remote applications run in the cloud. So, if we take something like Amazon, AppStream, or Amazon workspaces, they give you an inherently improved security posture. You get to govern and control in ways that you couldn't before.”
“We're focused on taking the technologies that customers use to manage their buildings and delivering it back to them as a service so that they can get off their traditional racks and consume those things that are either video surveillance or access control, the physical security world, or things like escalators, elevators, and commercial controls. They can consume that as a service and by service. In the end, our mission is to say, those workloads that you have in your building, it's not about the rack. It's about the fact that you, the customer, are having to constantly install it, or you're having to pay someone to install it. This is undifferentiated heavy lifting. What if we gave it back to you as a service that you consume and let you choose where to place it on the hardware? And so, we're really working with these customers to take these workloads, deliver them back to them as single tenant SAS services that they can consume. They don't have to put their people on it to build them. They can just use it in a consumption way and then they can put it where they want.”
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(02:15) Getting into Technology
(04:00) Transitioning into Software
(05:05) Nostalgia Software Language
(06:00) Editor of Choice
(07:30) Career Journey
(09:45) Working for Amazon
(13:15) Working in a Remote Desktop World
(16:00) Working in Amazon Data Centers
(19:05) Founding Hypersive
(22:15) Physical Security and Technology
(27:00) Important Considerations for Building Security
(31:00) Surveillance Cameras
(36:30) Hypersive’s Focus on Cloud Security
(41:00) Interacting with and Future of the Edge
(48:45) The Future World of Video Technology and Security
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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Connect with Steve on LinkedIn
[00:00:00] Narrator 1: Hello and welcome to Over the Edge.
This episode features an interview between Matt Trifiro and Steve Mueller, Chief Technology Officer at Hypersive. Considered one of the world’s leading experts in remote technologies, Steve has spent the past 25 years providing his technical expertise to more than 300 of the largest enterprises across 5 continents. He spent his early years building core devops and virtualization principles to achieve automation and scale, has worked for VMware and AWS addressing customer needs, and is now CTO of a startup focused on next-generation edge, end-user compute, and device virtualization.
In this episode, Steve evaluates what the edge is today and how it has changed overtime. He talks about cloud computing and working in a remote desktop world. Steve addresses the future of physical security and technology, and why he is so excited about what’s in store for the use of video. He also explains how his company Hypersive provides a platform for building management and security through ready-to-run cloud services that work with already existing infrastructures.
But before we get into it, here’s a brief word from our sponsors…
[00:01:13] Narrator 2: Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting Dell.com for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
[00:01:36] Narrator 1: And now, please enjoy this interview between Matt Trifiro and Steve Mueller, Chief Technology Officer, Hypersive.
[00:01:43] Matt Trifiro: Hey, Steve, how you doing today? Good, Matt. How
[00:01:45] Steve Mueller: are you doing? A little
[00:01:46] Matt Trifiro: busy here. Yeah, it's super busy here.
So I'm glad that you took some time to, to answer my questions. I'm sure we could go more than an hour, but we'll try to keep to
[00:01:53] Steve Mueller: an hour. Yeah, we won't. We won't punish your audience here. Yeah.
[00:01:57] Matt Trifiro: So I know we have lots of interesting stories we're gonna cover, but I, I really wanna go way back. Like how did you even get into technology?
[00:02:04] Steve Mueller: Well, it's funny when I was a kid, my father was an electrical engineer, focused on RF and satellites. Fairchild. Honeywell was also involved in the Intel stuff. So at an early age of six, I was, there was these books in the early eighties that helped you transcribe how to, how to write basic. And you would just go enter.
You would just type it into a PC or at the time, a small 80, 88 PC by bite magazine. Yeah, bite magazine. I, and they would have this funny, like binder on the back. Like, you'd go to Kinko's or FedEx office now and you'd open it up and you'd be like, awesome. And you had no idea what it did, but you would just type this into.
Basic interpreter and then run it and you'd be like, oh, that was either really awesome or really disappointing. But it started back as early as that, when I was a kid, well, the still scopes, my mom would have a, she'd have aScopes on the dinner table and she would yell at my dad to get these, the scopes off the table so we could actually have dinner.
But then when I, my more, my, my more professional years, I got my bachelor's of electrical engineering at Arizona state. And at the time this kid was falling asleep behind me in my calc three. And I said to him in like 94, I was like, bro, you're sleeping all the time. What's up. And he goes, I worked for this internet company.
We didn't call startups back then. And I was on the VAs machines in my sophomore year at college at Arizona state doing internet stuff and working with Trump wins. So, and think this whole internet thing was gonna blow up. [00:03:20] And one thing led to another and I got an interview down there in 95 and I hired on in may of 1995 at what we would now call startup.
They were an ISSP that was also an eCommerce platform. And that really started my trajectory. I, I finished with a bachelor's in undergrad, electrical engineering, and I was working full time. And then when I graduated from school, I went full time into professional services for a, a company out of Boston and never looked back.
And in 2000, really the turning event was, and that was in 98, in 2000. I got a job with a company called B at the time. Mm-hmm, focused on WebLogic server, which was acquired by Oracle in 2008 for 9 billion. And the rest is history. So
[00:03:55] Matt Trifiro: you mentioned aScopes in electrical engineering, but I tend to think of you as a software guy.
What's the, yep. What's the transition to software.
[00:04:02] Steve Mueller: I wanted a degree that it was hard to see where it was gonna go. I felt like computer science or computer science engineering. Either of those two was gonna typecast me too much into one specific role. And my father said two things to me in my early years, before going to college, he's like find a degree in engineering.
You're an engineer at heart. Find something that gives you the breadth of skill, and doesn't really specialize in you one area. And then right before I graduated, I did four years of that. He said to me, whatever you do, don't go into electrical engineering. That's gonna be commoditized heavily. The foundries have moved overseas and it's all being done software and you're really smart, smart software guy.
I was like, well, gee, thanks. I just did four years of extreme mathematics for that. So, uh, that's really where it went, but software was always my passion. The electoral engineering was really more an emphasis on mathematics and how the world really works and really an effort to not specialize in one thing.
So
[00:04:47] Matt Trifiro: I spent a lot of my, my time around software engineers and they all have a favorite language and two favorites, like the favorite that you like to program in today, but the, the one that has the nostalgia. So I'm interested in the nostalgia [00:05:00] one, what's the nostalgia
[00:05:00] Steve Mueller: language for you? I have so much root in Java and Java has such a bad connotation now.
And there's been efforts like Scala and Ling to modernize that. Although I think they failed miserably in the end. They're very difficult. If you said which one or would I would, I love to go back to the most and really dive into. Again is, uh, C plus plus with an effort in visual C plus, plus my earliest days, I was programming in visual C plus plus for Honeywell, R and D, where we were in the aerospace labs.
Java is clearly the one. And then on the alternate side, if you ask me the, the language I hate the most, and it's gonna, there's so many people are gonna hate me for this, but I hate Python. I hate Python. The, the Python 2 63 war is a disaster. The backwards compatibility between that is a disaster. The management deployment of Python is a disaster.
Can I do PIP install as, as root or not root home brew. It's just a tremendously fractured organization. And any language that punishes you for the use of inate indent over space. And by the way, I'm an indent guy, not a space guy is, and we mix match. Those two is just a disaster. Yeah. But what's your what's, what's your editor of
[00:06:02] Matt Trifiro: choice.
[00:06:03] Steve Mueller: VI
[00:06:04] Matt Trifiro: to this day. I that's amazing. Yeah. I, I learned on VI. I could never wrap my head around EAX and now I don't do any programming. Like the closest I get is like writing Excel
[00:06:12] Steve Mueller: formula. And the funny thing about VI is there was, you know, I grew up on the suns four one, so 25 systems. That was my at the internet company.
I started at. And I will tell you right now that there was some really old dudes who were suspenders. Like it was that way for me. And this is my formative years of my career, 20 years old, 19 95, 96, 97, 98, before I actually go out to the real world and get a job right before the internet bubble hits, these dudes have suspenders and they'd come from Boeing and other places.
And they were like, look, kid [00:06:40] VI is installed by default on these operating systems. We didn't really have pseudo yum and pseudo PT, you know, PT and repos at the time we were getting there. And Emax was a third party that had to get installed. So you booted a system up, you had fi that was it. . Yeah. It's funny story in, in fact, just as a side note, not that you asked me the question, but you know, there's this argument about using VIM too?
I will literally go back into the systems and try to disable them and go back to VI. Oh, that's
[00:07:06] Matt Trifiro: amazing. Yeah. Well, I've, I've got those keystrokes in my motor memory. So, so even, even though there's a lot of VIM, I'm okay with it. Cuz it's close enough to BI .
[00:07:14] Steve Mueller: Yeah. It's not Mex. And, and I, and you can chalk this in.
I'm not that old. You guys can figure out how old I am, but even color coding. I'm like, Ooh, this feels boring. What are we doing here? It's dirty. Yeah, I hear you. .
[00:07:25] Matt Trifiro: So, so at some point you did a, a tour through Amazon. Can you tell me how, how that came about
[00:07:30] Steve Mueller: my career for the majority of my career? I, I transitioned finally outta I started professional services in 98 and then moved over to more internal to what we would consider at the time systems engineering and then eventually solutions architect.
And that took me through the be WebLogic days into small run through computer associates and then some end user companies, but eventually back to the vendors for the most part I've been in vendors, I've been working for the vendors. And in 2012, I joined VMware and I was at that point. Oh, how many employees really were VMware then?
Oh man. I think the question is how many were not leaving at that time? Right? I mean, this is 2012. So it was, uh, right after the, the confusing acquisition of EMC and the heyday of like 2004 to 2007. Right. Uh, sales guys standing by the fax machine, just collected orders. I don't know, probably 10,000. I wanna say it was right at the other side of the Aday, [00:08:20] but my career, you asked a question on very specific on Amazon, my career.
It really taken me through focusing on applications. So application workloads is always been my thing, highly distributed transactional systems was certainly there. I was not an infrastructure guy until I got into. I left. I kind of, I left the be WebLogic world and where I was really focused for customer application workloads, and then eventually make my way over to VMware through small two year duty and Pearson.
And that's where I started really getting focused on infrastructure and really the elasticity of infrastructure provisioning, underlying infrastructure. To support these applications, right? I had never really cared about San or NAS or storage. Didn't really care about networks. And I think in about early 2010, 2011, as right as I get into VMware, it becomes infrastructure and really the interest of how do I provision infrastructure to support my applications and lots of these stacks of applications without relying on traditional physical, cloudedt really become a thing at that point yet jungle disc and those players were starting to work with Amazon S3, but it hadn't really become mainstream.
And then I left, I was at VMware for. And VMware's a great company. It wasn't for me. And my guys knew that, and there was an individual there who was looking to lead for a Nutanix and he said, you know, I think you're better suited for a company like Amazon. And he said, I just happened to interview with them.
I'm gonna turn it down. This is 2013 at this point. Mm-hmm and yeah, so he, he said, look, I'm gonna give you the intro to this person over at Amazon. I still remember her name and her email address to this day. And in April of 2013, I interviewed at Amazon and I was hired at June. And then they did about a seven year run through the.
And what, what was
[00:09:50] Matt Trifiro: the first role you had at Amazon
[00:09:51] Steve Mueller: enterprise solutions architect out of the New York city office on, uh, 56 and six and focused primarily on customers in that area, New York and [00:10:00] New Jersey, which spanned it wasn't specific to any one area like financial or healthcare insurance, which are the big three in New York, but definitely some public facing customers.
The most public would be HES and helping them in their migration, out of their physical data centers, into AWS as part of their broad. Divestiture, they were selling off their businesses and they needed to move the assets over to. Like marathon oil, for example, bought the gas stations from HES. And part of that deal included the infrastructure technology.
Well, this stuff's all sitting in a physical data center, it's all multi-tenant. And so you really can't just remove the host, put 'em on a truck, the other parts of your business. So HES migrated all of their stuff for that business out to AWS first and then turned those accounts over to marathon's very public story.
And it was actually me sitting at the table when I watched marathon. And. Sit down and say, what's the password and here's the MFA key. And here, it's now your AWS account. Very
[00:10:48] Matt Trifiro: interesting. Yeah. Moment in history. And so did you spend your entire career at, at Amazon when the customer facing solutions?
[00:10:55] Steve Mueller: No, actually I thought I was going to, I did about a year and a half in the enterprise SA world.
And for very practical purposes, I wanted to leave that role to be very honest with you. I lived in New Jersey and I was 60 miles out of New York city. And the time they were asking us to come into New York every day, that's a brutal commute. Sometimes it could be 30 minutes and sometimes it could be four hours.
And there was an opportunity that was presented to me that said, Hey, we've got this emerging technology, 2014 timeframe called Amazon workspaces. It had an internal code. Which you can actually see some hint, hint of that in the product today, they referenced it in the registration code with the prefix SL that hint set the, the internal code name that they used for it.
And they said, we're looking to start, we're looking for some specialists to help us drive the workspaces story. [00:11:40] And it was an opportunity for me to kind of get out of the enterprise churn of driving around New York city and. New Jersey and up to Connecticut, which I love my customers there. I absolutely did, but I personally wanted to grow further than that.
And it gave me an opportunity to get back into Seattle with the product teams, which is also my goal. And so I took on the VDI role. We would call desktop as a service at Amazon historically, and companies call it VDI for virtual desktop infrastructure. And it was born at a very practical purpose for me, but it really spun me into getting into Seattle, working with the product teams and really focusing on workspaces and getting out of the desk in New York city.
And that was the key moment for me to transition internally to Amazon while that was a very public facing role. People know me for that public facing role. I'm still considered one of the world's leading experts in remote technologies on Amazon. It eventually led me to the database data center. Side note, by the way, it was funny.
Somebody asked me what my qualifications were for VDI and remote desktop and end user compute. And I laughed. I said, have you ever provided end user compute support to your family or your parents like that, that qualifies you, right? Like we try to get outta that business. that's right. Yeah.
[00:12:43] Matt Trifiro: Well, it was interesting.
We, you know, getting set up for this podcast and you mentioned that you're a remote desktop company in, in their entirety. That really surprised me cuz I very few people say that it's a really interesting approach. Tell me a little bit about that. We'll go back to Amazon, but tell me a little bit about that.
[00:12:58] Steve Mueller: What that were remote desktop
[00:12:59] Matt Trifiro: company. Well, yeah, I mean, I, I depend on my laptop and granted 90% of what I do is in a browser, but I depend on my laptop and I depend on being able to use things without connectivity. How, how do you like. Yeah. Tell me
[00:13:13] Steve Mueller: think about it. The attack surface in a company comes in multiple forms in my company in, we think about this all [00:13:20] the time.
Separating church and state infrastructure for use. And I argue both by the way, services, product and services, roll up to me as CTO and desktop in corporate infrastructure rolls up to me as well. And we've done this very specifically because we think the into a service model that customers use externally is through social engineering of a life for your corporate infrastructure employees.
And part of that attack surface is on the desktops that we use. In fact, I mean, I think anybody be foolish to try to penetrate. Server infrastructure through the front door. At this point, you're basically going to FedEx and you're trying to put a box on that truck before it goes to a building. That's, that's kinda the attack factor you're using now to get to a company's assets or their services, and the same holds true with desktops.
And it's one of those areas where the mission really becomes. We used to talk about this all the time, that laptop that was lost or left in the cabin, New York city. Is the attack vector to everything. In fact, just a little perspective too. I mean, there's a culture at Amazon and other companies. So not to implicate just one where we love to put stickers on our laptops.
In fact, I mean, I, I certainly love to too, but from an attack vector perspective, it really gives a lot of information about where you work and what might be on that laptop. So, you know, I've always challenged that paradigm to say, yes, there's a very human element to this, but really at the end of the day, Remote desktops and remote applications run running in the cloud.
Right? So if we take like Amazon AppStream or Amazon workspaces, they give you an inherently improved security posture. You get to govern and control in ways that you couldn't before it actually our entire company, my entire company, everybody, all of my employees, all 23 of them. Run on Amazon [00:15:00] workspaces today.
It lets us scale without having much staff here. It lets us focus on automation and it really lets us think about not only just the security implications, but I have had two employees. During the pandemic, their first mission on hiring was drive to invest, buy, or a target or an apple store and getting a device and food trapping themselves up in two hours on all systems.
And because we went with a rogue perspective, it was an improved security posture, but the ease of deployment with very little overhead on our part was, was astounding. That
[00:15:29] Matt Trifiro: makes so much it's interesting because I was thinking in my head it was for cost or convenience or all those other things being went right to security, which actually makes sense.
Like you are in security. Let's let's go back a little bit. We'll we'll, we'll hit security pretty deeply, but you, you said that you moved into the, the datas the data center group within Amazon. I
[00:15:47] Steve Mueller: did how I got there. I have to be very specific about what it, there were some people inside the data center that were very interested in what I was doing in remote desktops.
And because of that, they invited me into the data center world. And it's funny rights data centers are a black box as they should be. Customers should focus on the. Not the underlying infrastructure and it allows the service provider like Amazon, or, you know, even Microsoft to really focus on implementation specific details in the data centers.
But I will tell you, you have to get invited into that world and you have to have a business reason as to why you're being invited very
[00:16:18] Matt Trifiro: ING. Can you tell me that business reason you were
[00:16:20] Steve Mueller: invited? Again, there were things that we were doing in the end user compute space that were interesting to them. And I can't go into that much further other than to say the, the number one mission at Amazon inside the data centers is to.
Provide the level of security and responsibility towards those at adaptations that they make at SOC [00:16:40] two or ISO 27,001 or 9,001, whatever they certify on your mission is to, to guard the Fort. And it's always day one inside the IIO data centers, processes that worked a year prior. Oftentimes are, are critically looked at the next year.
And as part of those processes, especially in the security area, they were very interested in what I was doing in end user compute and some of those things, and that led them to me. And that really spun me into three years within the data center team, where eventually I moved beyond just the initial end user compute going into the DN world at Amazon is all about earning.
Demonstrating value. How do you improve those? It is, it is mind boggling the scale of their data centers and the employees that they have around the globe to support those. I can't talk obviously about those numbers. Yeah. Anybody who today says that? I, I think private data centers are coming back in a different way and we can talk about that if you want later.
But in a new way, kind of from an edge perspective near prem on-prem type world. But yeah, the, the, eventually in three years time, I, I transitioned over to, I got to know the inside of the data centers very well on how they operated and got to look at, I brought with me. Less of a sense of electrical or mechanical engineering, which is a large part of what any data center runs on.
Right? Data centers have three properties that are like, there are three fun, fundamental properties to a data center anywhere in the world. And it doesn't have to be Amazon's could be Equinox or core site or anybody else, one air handling. If you're not moving air, you're melting everything. Two power.
Actually, if you it's really number one power, if you don't have power it's, you're just done. Two air handling. You gotta move. Gotta move air. It's not about keeping it cool. It's about moving air. And then three is network. Those are the three physical characteristics. And so in that domain, at the core of it, you're really focusing on electrical engineering and, and mechanical engineering with [00:18:20] definitely some computer science on networking.
Then the physical security technology and physical security traditional measures come into place. But those are really only to guard the assets that a finance, uh, finance division, our organization has funded and has interest in, in those data centers. Did you
[00:18:34] Matt Trifiro: found hyper of right out of. .
[00:18:37] Steve Mueller: Yes, I did. Yeah.
So, so I, I finished my, my three years in the data center. Got hooked up with the physical security team that was responsible for the highest levels of personnel at Amazon mm-hmm . I did two and a half years there and then double oh seven stuff. , that's a good way of thinking about it. Although we didn't wear the tuxes and the black ties, I was responsible for software development and technology operations for that team for the highest levels of personnel at Amazon.
And so I had a very unique insight into what physical security meant with folks. Who've done time in. Various government organizations and, or have law enforcement and, or military backgrounds. It's interesting. You, you learn things, that's not your world, right? Like I don't come from that world. Those guys spent long times, like a lot of time in that world that was new to me.
But you learn quickly,
[00:19:21] Matt Trifiro: right? Yeah. I mean, you're in that world now. You're a leader in that
[00:19:23] Steve Mueller: world. Oh yeah. . Yeah, definitely. And you know, you're in that world and you, you see things like, it's funny. I was watching on TV the other night, just kind of between current geopolitical situation, right? Keeping it as diplomatic as possible.
You watch events from both sides. You watch how people move in protective services teams. Uh, I watched an interview on 60 minutes with presidents, Linsky mm-hmm and he's got this concentric ring of people. And I was talking to my friends and I said, oh, that person over there is doing this. And these people are doing this.
And you, you, you learn that in that role at Amazon in a very physical. But, but you also are focused. You bring in a corporate infrastructure, it background, application, [00:20:00] background, and an InfoSec background, more on the logical side of things to that world. You, you get invited in, you learn things, you, you help them help coach them too.
And, and eventually you realize you're in this broader industry focused on things that are just. So from a, an era that that has not yet moved to cloud and has not yet moved to a service model that cloud provides. And so, yes, I left Amazon after seven years and decided to start a company and register to the partner network at Amazon, where we focused on those types of workloads.
Yes. Hyper person's
[00:20:27] Matt Trifiro: been around for a couple years, but up until very recently in stealth. So very few people probably know what hyper Sive is. So what, what, what is hyper
[00:20:34] Steve Mueller: Sive? Yeah, so, so there, there's two parts of it like that answer. And I'm trying to make this as interesting as I can for. There's the, what you think it should be when you start the company.
And then there's the, what is it actually customers gonna pay for? Right. So at the core, I left Amazon with a really strong two and a half year presence in a security organization that most will never get to see or be part of if, if not all, and learning some very interesting things about the way that works.
But I also spend a deep amount of time focused on building technologies too three years in the data center, world, mechanical electrical properties, networking properties, how we think about things there. And then, and, and from like a, a building management system, kind of like a power management controls, commercial controls, we would call it.
But then I also had a great tenure in, in end user compute and works in things like workspaces and Amazon apps streaming and, and redefining thin clients. And what we realized. When we, when I started hyper, uh, party of one, and then it, and it quickly grew in the about the 12 month mark is where we started getting the first route of hires.
And we were starting to prove it. I was very focused on physical security technology. That was where the [00:21:40] customer demand was externally, regardless of my time at Amazon's. What does, what does that mean?
[00:21:43] Matt Trifiro: What does fiscal security technology mean?
[00:21:46] Steve Mueller: Ah, yeah. Good question. It, it video surveillance, badge access control, right?
Okay. So access control and cameras. Yeah. Yeah. So if you go to like a mall or if you go to like a, a bank or if you go to like a home Depot, for example, Anywhere you go including corporations, you'll see video surveillance all over the wall as ceilings, walls, and, and then badge access control. What that means is, especially in the corporate world, if you hit a badge on a door and it goes, beep red light blinks in the door, clicks open that's access control, right?
Where, what part of the building do you get into? Uh, those are the two first areas that we focused on at IIV. But what you realize is you can sell into the physical security domain. But what you're building and how you approach that is actually broader to the building itself. And, and in the end you asked the question which I'm gonna pay off right now.
Hyper is a company that's a, a startup that's been operating for two years and we're focused on taking the technologies that customers use to manage their buildings and delivering it back to them as a service so that they can get off their traditional racks and consume those things that are either video surveillance or access control in the physical security world or things like escalators elevators, commercial control.
They can consume that as a service and by service. I mean, as a Amazon or Microsoft provision for them, and really in the end, that's our mission is to say, Hey, those workloads that you have in your building, it's, it's not about the rack. It's about the fact that you, Mr. Or Mrs. Customer are having to constantly install it, or you're having to pay Ava to install it.
This is on differentiate to heavy lifting. What if we gave that back to you as a service that you consume? and let you choose where to place it on the hardware. So it could [00:23:20] be something like an Aw south post hardware, or it could be a Dell, HPV, VMware stack. Or it could be remote in E C, two or equivalent and Microsoft Azure, VM or Azure stack.
And so we're really working with these customers to take these workloads delivered back to them as single tenant SAS services that they can consume. They don't have to put their people on it to build them. They can just use it in a consumption way and then they can put it where
[00:23:40] Matt Trifiro: they want. I'm gonna make a stretch and we could connect something.
You said earlier to something you just said, and you can tell me if I'm right or not. it sounds like you're also eliminating a threat factor. A
[00:23:49] Steve Mueller: hundred percent. Yeah. That's, that's the, that, that is correct. That's that virtual
[00:23:53] Matt Trifiro: desktop. I mean, cause I, cause I imagine we've all seen these video walls of the guard, you know, sitting in there, watching these things and I've, I've heard stories that a lot of times it's a window server sitting on the desk and you know, he's dropping his Doritos on it and, and I mean, maybe it's not that bad.
Maybe it's actually a closet, but it does seem like a threat
[00:24:09] Steve Mueller: factor. Oh, it's, it's, there's a tremendous amount of threat factors. The number one threat to any organization is the insider threat. So you don't trust your own people. Interesting. That's brutal. Number one, very brutal. It's very brutal. It's, it's borderline non humanitarian, but if you're a business owner, especially at scale, you the number one thing, and you're worrying about the thing you're most proud about is your employees.
The thing you worry about is your employees. Right. That's the one that takes companies down. So you have to think of it from that perspective, buildings, themselves, commercial controls are long, an attack vector sucks at the malware program. That's always the biggest thing. That's actually the number one thing that commercial controls guys worry about people worry about is a malware hitting the network and getting to this industrial controls.
And, and then it's really, you're in a very largely non-deterministic state of. But in the physical security world in video surveillance in particular video, surveillances is by far and away. [00:25:00] The biggest customer demand on us right now is video surveillance in the building management space. The number one thing you think about is worry about is those video, uh, surveillance feeds and an example here, there's that movie trope
[00:25:09] Matt Trifiro: where the guy like inserts the, the loop of the empty of the empty hallway and then does steals all the jewels
[00:25:16] Steve Mueller: Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think about it more practically, right? Like if you look at theme of Thrones, if you followed that TV show at all, I did. Disappointing season seven and eight, but that's for your audience to decide what was the biggest thing that they were doing? The fans were going out there with cameras and getting seen video of the, yeah.
Of the studio. And that was an eye opener for the industry because people realized that like video surveillance is usually a function of legal right. Function of legal, in fact, at the end of the day, it's the last, it's the last line of defense for legal. I
[00:25:46] Matt Trifiro: mean, it, it reports, reports up into legal or what, what do you by.
[00:25:50] Steve Mueller: some organizations, it does some organizations, it reports into corporate infrastructure, but at the end of the day, who is one customer video surveillance, it's not your security,
[00:25:59] Matt Trifiro: the insurance companies and the
[00:26:00] Steve Mueller: lawyers, lawyers. Yeah. And in fact, to be honest cameras in particular video surveillance, part of that, right?
Those feeds have to be defended in a court law when necessary. And sometimes it's the last line of defense for the business. But if you look at a very physical world, if you're a, a McDonald's franchise owner, if you're a. It's the thing that can tell the difference between who robbed you or who presented a case of sexual dis discrimination, harassment, video feeds.
Ultimately they are the last line of defense for a legal team, and they oftentimes have to go in front of a court of law and in local municipalities or federal courts and have to be defended there. So, so the
[00:26:37] Matt Trifiro: chain of custody issues, there's validation issues. [00:26:40] Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.
[00:26:41] Steve Mueller: Chain of custody is a huge piece, but also people are now viewing video feeds as intellectual.
[00:26:47] Matt Trifiro: As a, as a, just a, a person who's not in the security business, I tend to think visually. So maybe you could describe something to me. So you ever seen those, those 3d cross sections of like the city of New York and it shows you what's layer one layer two and layer three. Can you sort of give me a, like a what's inside?
A building that's providing the security. I mean, obviously there's cameras, but you mentioned access controls. There's gotta be wires and wireless and servers. Like, can you just walk me through the, the, the parts and all the pieces? Like if I was gonna really secure a building, what do I need to be thinking about?
[00:27:18] Steve Mueller: Yeah. I mean, perimeter defense, number one. And do you have, is it a free moving door? Is it a door that rotates there's companies in the industry today? Like Boone Edem and ALO who really focus on door? Yale is a big one as well. I Allegion, how do you let people into the building at the perimeter? Right? Is it a one way door?
Is it a, is it a two way door? Is it a rotating door man? Trap? Does it require badge? Is it a man trap? Correct. Does it permit one person at a time? Does it permit? Is it free flowing? Right? You have multiple people going in by the way. The factors on that is always flow and, and just FYI too, for the audience here, there's no one right.
Answer for security in any of the domains, it's always a balance between. Human, what has to be done and what is perceived by humans and what you wanna do. So like, to be honest, and, and I'll get back to your question in a minute, like there's a lot of security people who wanna be very draconian about their security model, it's gonna be this, and it's gonna be rock solid Fort Knox.
But the reality is like, it's always tempered against the needs of the business and not just business people saying, Hey, talking business, speak and saying, we gotta do this. But more like, [00:28:20] no, really come on. We're human. At the end of the day, all of us are human. Right. I think, and. How we want to walk through a door.
You don't wanna walk through a door one at a time in a busy shopping center. That's re pointless. I don't even wanna pull a badge outta my pocket. No. So flow right. Flow control. So security principles are always measured against, always measured against what the right measure is for, for humans. But back at the building metal detectors, potentially, and metal detectors look for different things.
You might look for Ferris material, you might look for explosive material. It depends on what you're trying to do. Right. Does a knife cause damage? Yes. Does it cause chaos and terror Absolut. But is it on the threat level vector of, to an I E D and improvised explosive device? It has, there's no comparison, right?
Yeah. A gun is just as equally as bad, or if not worse than a, than a knife, but compared to an I eed, no, I mean like, so what you're looking for there, metal detectors, scanners, traditional IR systems that kind of do people tracking. And then of course you get into what parts of the building are you allowed access control and, and, and that.
And video surveillance. I think an effective security posture for a building would be what you do at the perimeter perimeter, right? Meaning at the, actually at the door, if you're like in New York city or a fence line, if you're out in the country, as you then think about as you come in from that fence line or the perimeter, what's the zone concept, right.
Am I into a more restricted area or should I be concerned with what, what are what's in this area? Like if you're in. If you're in a shopping mall, like a Walmart or a target in the back, there's gonna be dumpsters that you don't really care about the security profile there. You might be concerned if there's some electrical material there.
Maybe not. Maybe it gets that, that electrical, that profile of electrical material generators, and the like gets more sensitive when you get into more critical infrastructure [00:30:00] type things. Whereas you like, if you attack my electrical at a shopping mall. Okay. Fine. You don't wanna do that, but if you get into more critical infrastructure like private or, or government, that that is a really big attack vector that you have to think about.
So an effective physical security strategy ends up is of course, cameras for a minimum recording, some element of visualization. Definitely. We're moving into computer vision and referencing of models there, access control for, for certain, and then door hardware, how doors work against flow and then metal detectors.
Those four things are really good. Good, effective. Yeah. Interesting.
[00:30:30] Matt Trifiro: So I, I recently walked into a retail store that she remain nameless. It was big store, 30,000 square feet, and I was really bored. And so I started counting the cameras and I assume those like smoke, smoke, color domes are, are, are camera on probably a, a three dimensional access or something at least two dimensional.
Um, I started counting. I stopped counting at a hundred and to, to a person who's not in this world, that just sounds like an immense amount number of cameras, an immense amount. Like fiber or coax or wireless and like how, how much resolution those cameras have. Where's all that data going. How's it getting to where it needs to go?
Like what's, what's out
[00:31:06] Steve Mueller: there. So the way we talk about it in the industry is there's really a billion video surveillance cameras, and I'm not talking consumer, I'm talking commercial grade now mm-hmm stuff you put in a corporation building or a nameless shopping center. For example, there's about a billion of them.
Worldwide. Half of that five, 500 million are really marked in. And if you're not in China, if you're not, if you're not a Chinese citizen, generally speaking, the industry just doesn't even acknowledge. 'em. It's not that we don't acknowledge China. We just you'll never get to them. So we talk in terms of, um, the other half, which is 500 million cameras in the non-Chinese markets today, video surveillance.
[00:31:40] Most of them are almost all of them are wired RJ 45. Cause those cameras get power over, over ethernet. It's really tough to put a camera up in a ceiling and try to be like, okay, can somebody plum me some RO. And power outlets here. So that's just not gonna happen. and then the, the cameras themselves have an API from what we'll consider a control plane.
They generally have a video codex or H 2 64 H 2 65. That's the most common, usually wrapped up in R TSP, which is a legacy protocol and a four letter word for certain people in video and really at the end of the day, those cameras at scale. And I'm gonna come back to an interesting fact for you, those cameras at scale, a fleet scale, right.
Hundred in your example, or even more upwards of three or four, I stopped at a hundred. Oh yeah. Yeah. OK. They're a lot more than a hundred. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, those, those get managed by what we call video management systems. VMs is for short, which is really software windows based software. Most likely in the industry, the leaders are milestone Gentech, followed by BOS, Avigilon Vitech and others milestone and Gentech are really the, the, the one two, and they take up the majority of 500.
They manage the majority of 5 million cameras. You have to manage those cameras at scale, right? Cause you can't point a web browser at each camera and say, Hey set, you set your frame rate or resolution this way at this. You have to do that from a scale perspective and think about fleet and that's what the VMSs do a couple things for you before we get off this topic as well.
Resolutions vary. Historically, the resolutions were low nowadays. They're at 4k. 4k is overkill. 4k is a really good sell point for a camera manufacturer, but in practice, humans have to look at this and 4k versus 1922 K resolution. Not really a big deal. You talk about frame rates. It's not coax anymore. So you're dating self a bit.
Uh, legacy cameras are coax, but in early two thousands, [00:33:20] they moved to IP based cameras. So it's almost exclusively at this point, ethernet, any coax would be really round more of a traditional closed circuit TV system. And then fun. Funny enough, you stop counting. So here's a, here's a fast formula we use.
Okay. It turns out that there's a general formula. That's kind of like hand wavy. How many cameras per square foot. Right. Okay. So if you said to me like, Hey, there's a 2 million square foot property. How many cameras do you think are gonna be? I would tell you three to 5,000, probably on the order of 3,500.
If you said I've got like a chase bank or a Wells Fargo bank and I'm using specific names. So apologies here to any other bank. I didn't name 50 cameras. If you said I walk into a subway or McDonald's, I'm gonna go with 15 to 20. So there definitely are profiles that you associate to foot, uh, square foot, really at the end of the day and the class of the building that you're trying to.
Uh, and how many cameras, if you come back to like a building in New York city, that's 50 stories high you'll probably see, and it's dependent on the tenants. You probably get to a couple thousand cameras. If you get to like a one or two story building with six, 700 employees, I'm gonna go with 350 to 500 cameras.
[00:34:24] Matt Trifiro: So if I'm a McDonald's or subway, and again, apologies for not mentioning all the other fast food restaurants, a franchise owner, and. I run a hundred stores. Does that mean I have a hundred windows servers in yes. The stock room of my
[00:34:38] Steve Mueller: stores. Yeah. That's the dirty secret, right? Yeah, you've got, uh, at the end of the day, all of these scammers have to be managed by these big industry video management products, which are exclusively windows based.
So yes you're. So the industry historically, and today, Are still running all of these windows workloads, these video management systems on windows boxes in there. And it could be if you're McDonald's, if you ever [00:35:00] here's a little, like next time you drive through for like, let's say your kid, or maybe your grand kid, I don't know exactly what you have in your life, but somebody in your family and you're buying that thing.
Look through the drive-through window. You're gonna see probably two things. You're gonna see a rats nest of wires up there, and you're gonna, because you're gonna see what. More often than not. It's funny. You'll see, like there, there electronic equipment there, what we would normally put into an IDF or MDF closet that is usually there.
You can see it through the drive through, and probably somewhere in there is a windows machine. Maybe it's a little box, like. A more consumer grade box or maybe a one you or two you host, but yes, exclusively in every building, in every corporate building in every franchise, there are windows boxes. The total adjustable market here is ridiculous.
I, I would venture, there are probably for every, for, for 500 million cameras out there across 57 million corporate buildings and all of the franchises. You're probably looking upwards of quarter billion, 250 million windows machines out there running the stuff or more. And, and that stuff is you have to move to.
Yeah,
[00:35:52] Matt Trifiro: well, that's that's and that's high person's role, right? Like that's what you're trying to, to bring to the industry. Tell me, tell me how you're approaching that.
[00:35:59] Steve Mueller: Yeah, so you are correct. That's what we're focused on in this, in this world. There's there's the early thinking 5, 6, 7 years ago was Hey.
We need to move these cameras to cloud. Assuming we have networked to do it and the security guidance to do it, and the security approval and compliance approvals to do it. Cool. We're gonna move it to cloud. But at the end of the day, the VAs, the resellers and integrators didn't know how to, they don't know they don't have those skills.
And so, and the corporate infrastructure and InfoSec teams, weren't willing to take that on as part of their, it function to the business. So everybody was going to the vendor saying, Hey, give us a cloud based solution. And they did. And they responded in. And they've come to market over the last two years with cloud based stuff.
So like, if you look at for kata or Morra arches, like all really good products, [00:36:40] but at the end of the day, those require a large rip and replace. And one of the things that the industry flat out missed was finance teams at the end of the day, are, are gonna ask you like, Hey, we've already capitalized this building.
We've already built it out. Why are we ripping and replacing this, right? It's usually one point a half to 2%. The total spend on physical secur is about one and 2% of it overall build out of a building. And once it's capitalized finance people, don't like to go back and do something again. So the technical guy's like, well, we differentiate this way, but it gets to be very specific and kind of borderline at the tech gobbly cook phase and finance people are like, not enough for reason to reject.
And that's the headwind that those companies are facing today. As you move to cloud. The other side of this is these systems, especially for corporate, as I said earlier, have been. They have to go up in front of the judges and the lawyers have to bring 'em to the courts of law to defend, especially, I mean, that's, that's the last line of defense.
And so introducing new systems that in don't have that 30 year history in those courts is very difficult. The features are oftentimes just not there. So you're asking a lot for your customers to rip and replace at the tune sometimes with millions of dollars, with very little net effects that the finance teams don't wanna move on the courts don't understand it.
And the, in the installers and bars just aren't there. We identified this and we said, listen, our mission is really to take what you have on that rack, drop that rack out and then deliver it back to you as a service as is the same product as if you did it yourself. Right. And from a service based bottle, which means you can run a Naus or Microsoft eventually.
Remotely as a service or you can run on prem or near prem. And that means back on a rack and that rack can be cloud-based hardware like Amazon or Microsoft hardware or traditional hardware like Dell, HPV, VMware. And that's our mission is you want the choice of running. You [00:38:20] wanna run in a cloud based model, service based model without the rip and replace and something that's congruent with your operational runbook and your security practices that your lawyers in the courts of law understand that has that chain of custody that has a 30 year history.
You don't have to change anything. And so our mantra is pretty simple. Five, five basics use what you have, don't rip and replace pay for only what you use use only what you want. So decompose it down if you just need the client or the server absolutely run where you want OnPrem near Preem or in the cloud.
And then finally leave when you want to leave. Right. That's that's the number one problem at the end of the day is, is people in the physical security world when they have to think about the traction, Matt, I know you were in, in the commercial side of the world, right? Sales. It's a very long sales cycle to convince somebody, to rip that rack out and move everything to a cloud-based position and move to a whole new system.
You're kind of like, well, what happens if I don't like you, or you start to boil the frog or you start to do things that I don't agree with, I'm kind stuck now. What? It's not just data anymore. It's your whole infrastructure is up with that partner or that vendor. And we see this and it leads to long, long, long protracted sales cycles.
And it really doesn't give the customer much. So believe it or not our business, the fifth bullet point of leave one you won is our strongest values. Business is it's not just your data. It's your infrastructure. You, you buy out the contract on a co and we'll hand it right over to you. We'll disconnect the service provider model from it.
And it's yours the next day. You already P into it. You don't lose that. And that is a really big commitment to the customer.
[00:39:45] Matt Trifiro: Yeah. That's interesting. I've been spending the last few weeks looking at the hospital industry and it sounds like they're facing a lot of the same internal desires, which is I'd like to get rid of my servers, my server room.
I don't wanna manage that. I'd like somebody else to like to buy it on a [00:40:00] consumption basis, but they have that same, that same hesitancy, which is, well, I don't wanna get locked into some vendor. And so what they. What they really respond to is growing into an ecosystem. Right? So that, yes, you've got lots of vendors competing from your business and lots of opportunities.
You don't feel locked into anything. So I, I understand what they're saying, what you're saying. So not only this is, we've been geeking out on security, and I really love this, Steve, but not only this is show about edge computing. so how, how does your business video security intersect with the, the new concepts around edge computing?
Yeah,
[00:40:34] Steve Mueller: it's a really good question. I think it's at the cutting edge to be. Let's step back and ask ourselves what edge historically was. Right. We tend to think of edge as like on premises is what edge was. Yeah. Free cloud. There's no cloud I'm here. And then there was this mass migration over the last 10, 11, 12 years.
And it's like, now I'm in the cloud, but then there's this intro of things that are left behind that are kind like the stragglers and the, and we're like, oh, that's a, yeah, we left you behind. And then we're like, oh, that's the edge. Right. So like a cool marketing term. And so edge was really left as being anything that was on-prem that really didn't go to cloud historically associated with of course, bare metal, edge devices, type those types of things.
But we kind of let me step back on edge. We in hyper PERA, look at edge as an overloaded term and we have to actually figure out what it really means. Edge to us is really more of a concentric ring. And so if you, if you think about a concentric ring right at the center of that concentric circle, that kind of expands out like, like layers in a tree as it grows older, mm-hmm, at the core.
What you really now have are the service providers, uh, clearly Amazon Microsoft at this point. I mean, I could acknowledge Google, but the majority of customers are Amazon, Microsoft for traditional. Services [00:41:40] that you can build on top of, right. Google is huge in consumer grade services that you consume.
They definitely have a, so Amazon, Microsoft, and to some extent, Google, but they're now at the core. And they represent in my old electrical engineering days, we would've called those, uh, feeders circuits, right in power, power distribution in the modern era, we would think of those as the big Amazon warehouse fulfillment center type activities that feed out to the prime nows.
Right? So at the center you have these service provider. And that is the new basis of on-prem today, right? It's it's but we call it cloud and then what's really happening is you go one ring out of that. The next ring around that is you start to get out of the traditional cl central cloud model and more towards this concept of edge, you get into the colos.
And so of course, the leaders here in the us are of core site and, and maybe not in that order, cor site, of course just got bought by American towers, digital, real. Yep. Yep. D yep. DRT. It's not surprising for the acquisition of core site. It, it actually hints at where the edge is going. We think from a public perspective, but that whole second layer of colo is now really becoming, Hey, we're, we're one layer removed from the service provider central model we're direct, connected, or circuit connected back to those providers.
And we can get too close. We can get closer to your buildings. And then historically, we were good with that. And then really the next historical ring was cool. Let's just go straight to the buildings, which. But we actually see the second circle outside of the colos. Now getting into what we'll call near.
We generally think of near as, as on-prem, but things that aren't in a building, I'm gonna talk about that in a second, but to be in open, like this is the vapor.io of the world, right? This is the idea that we can put this, meet me room, this small two, two unit as small as two rack unit Conex container shipping container into a [00:43:20] neighborhood that has connectivity to the IX and the circuit and the city around.
And can uplink into those colos or the service providers, but can get downstream into the buildings as well. And that, that solves a really interesting place because at the third ring then around that is really in the building. And the freeways actually, no, sorry. Before I even go to buildings, it can even be the, the wireless power sites.
I think wireless power sites are something people should be focusing on heavily American tower, crown castle SBA. What's interesting, by the way about wireless sites is to understand that industry and where it really is gonna go. You have to look at a map. And when you look at a map of where those wireless tower sites pop up, they're along us freeways and somebody like American towers, like 25 countries worldwide.
Those are place where people go. And so this gets into this new order of like, Hey, we've got this edge compute now at these freeways into this, what gets into this mobile edge compute me, me world. That's interesting for when we think of like autonomous vehicles and act content delivery into those vehicles, like what does Meck mean here now?
And so. Wireless sites are a new dimension, really at the third ring, kind of next to buildings. And so I think you start with this concentric server service provider then to colos then to players like vapor. And then you get finally out to the last ring, which is the traditional buildings and like wireless power sites.
[00:44:34] Matt Trifiro: You think about it? I mean, no enterprise that's in the business of making sandwiches or housing, retail stores or building things. Should wanna have a data center like that's that's brain damaging. They do it cuz you have to, but it's not their expertise. I mean, Amazon can run a data center hundreds of times, more efficiently than, than a private person with, with increased resilience and security and, and cost [00:45:00] efficiencies, at least from a scale perspective.
And then you get these network effects, right? You get these other services that. Inter interacting with each other. I mean, one of the things that, that, that I know you're working on is the ability to take the video management system and connect it to AI inferencing systems. And it'd be very hard to do on premise at scale.
Right. You'd have to put a server in everybody's thing, but if, if it's part of the infrastructure, it's. It's
[00:45:23] Steve Mueller: it's there. Yeah. It's a really good call out. It's less to do about being on prem with the traditional servers. It has everything to do about the, the challenge that the tradition look, we're huge fans of Dell, HP, and VMware.
We have relationships with all three of those companies. Yeah. But the challenge that they know they face, which is why they partner with the like Amazon, Microsoft is the next level of services. Right. So for us compute never can storage is a primitive Al service, right. It's kinda ringing zero. But when you start to move up the stack into containers or high rate ingested systems, like the Essis or Kinesis video streams, or like a video distribution platform, like AWS element, which really focuses on live streaming and, and, and live ingestion of, of, of video at scale.
These are just, these are the services that are now native to the service providers, not to the traditional on-prem. And when you're talking about like AI and in, right, yes. You have players out there who can install into a virtual machine running on VMware, but. There's a whole world where like companies like Amazon are building machine learning models and SageMaker and recognition and native services, you just can't get anywhere else.
And so again, I think the long term here is it's less to do about the compute and the need for the rack. It's more of, I'm trying to get out of a world where I'm only left with primordial infrastructure, compute network and storage and moving into second or third tier services from these providers. And right now those [00:46:40] services of course are totally.
We do see a world one day where the companies like Amazon and Microsoft bring the services back to their cloud edge hardware. And I think in 10 years, time or less, we will see a rise in cloud based to hardware infrastructure on back OnPrem or near. That has these types of native services that are more than just premial infrastructure.
And I
[00:46:58] Matt Trifiro: think you're skirting around a really interesting point that I've arrived at. I mean, like I I've been in the edge industry for five years and I'm actually tired of talking about edge because yeah. It doesn't really mean anything. Right. I mean, I've, I've asked, I've asked 20 of the top edge people what's to do edge on-prem and they, they look at me like, like, The control plane goes up to the cloud.
It's like, there's no difference. Right? And the enterprise is all, all they care about is can I get my service in a secure and reliable and relatively inexpensive way? When I need it and scale it on demand. Like that's all they care about. They don't care whether it's running in Oregon or down the street, as long as it meets those check boxes.
So we've talked about the present, right. And when I kind of go forward into the future into star wars, or, you know, I think like minority report and video video is just such a rich media and it's, it's obviously used tremendously for security.
[00:47:49] Steve Mueller: What are you excited about? I love it video. And one of the ways we talk about this is totally hyper person, right?
Is there's a world where we're gonna go where it's blanket the earth. Like, let me give some big projections here at the risk of we're sharing some of our potential IP. Let me to answer that question. I'm again, pull back some stuff you already thrown at me. So referencing in AI is the star wars and the star Trek of the world, which is like, Hey, we can do more with less.
It's like, oh, I wanna be on a factory line. And I wanna measure defects with the camera and I don't ever want people to do that. Absolut. That's that's [00:48:20] kind of a holy grail that you're trying to get to doesn't really exist today. It exists in concept and that's what a lot of the manufacturers are working towards first and third party analytic firms.
But, but what's funny too, nothing replaces human eye. So the human eye has an interesting problem. We suffer fatigue, try watching TV and not zoning out or thinking about like, you know, how you did yesterday at work or building that patio in the summertime. Whatever it is that you think about. So humans have a tremendous problem with eye fatigue.
So it's really hard to watch video streams, even four of them at one time. So the natural tendency is, yeah, we should do more with the analytics so that humans don't process these things. But at the same time, too, for every, every AI fanatic, who's like, we can totally get rid of the human need to look at any video streams.
I'm like, great. Here, poke your eyes out. Take a fork Ram Ram Ram. Now you can't see you're blind. How do you feel? And the five senses we have the Nu the most important sense we have a site. I think everybody would give up. Sound smell and feel. I mean, it's the highest
[00:49:13] Matt Trifiro: bandwidth.
[00:49:14] Steve Mueller: Yeah, I think you're right.
And so when you work from that perspective, again, all of this world is not technical. It's human. I started this podcast off by talking about the human element of how we secure buildings and how we move people through. You have to come back to the human element, right? Humans want to have the option to know that they can see at any point in time, they might not look at it.
They might store for. But I can go back and look at something if I absolutely have to. And we have to remember that as we move forward. And I think this opens up two really interesting domains for us. One, there's a world where it really, we wanna blanket the earth with cameras. Okay. And, and that's just being, that means buying more cameras to see in areas that we can't see today.
That's a function of, of labor and balance of finance and return on investment measured against the capital cost of that. [00:50:00] But two there's a world where. Historically cameras are usually an it's by an owner. The owner wanted to see the owner could be a security team. The owner could be a person who runs a bodega in New York city.
That person wanted to see and record things, right. But we're now emerging into a new territory where there's a multi-tenant need for that camera. You're looking at something that's interesting to me. Uh, very easy example is a security team that puts cameras. On a ceiling in a corporate building and maybe the human, the HR team wants to see where people are spending their time, how long they're dwelling at the coffee machine or, or
[00:50:35] Matt Trifiro: the motion study on nurses in a hospital.
Cause you can save a minute per nurse per shift. That's a lot of money. Cause a lot of nurses in a big
[00:50:42] Steve Mueller: hospital. Yeah, totally. So from a human and a business perspective, there's this idea of, Hey, somebody owns that camera. I want access to that feed. And that comes with a lot of security implications. Like if you said to me, Hey Matt, if Matt, you said to me, Hey, Steve, gimme access to your video streams.
And I technically, there's a way I could distribute those to you. Now I start to worry about like, did you take those and post 'em on the New York times, right. Front page and make me look bad. So we, we start to think about things like watermarking, but where I'm going with this is have you ever looked at a building and seen two or three cameras in the same exact location and said to yourself, what did idiot install those.
I I have
[00:51:16] Matt Trifiro: actually, yeah. Tell me why is that the case? Cause they got three different, you got the HRS, got their own camera.
[00:51:21] Steve Mueller: Security's got their own camera. yeah. It's it's actually not an idiot who did that? There's an old saying that the security industry will have, which is the only thing that two security principles can agree upon is the third is wrong.
Right. So right. When you see a cluster of cameras and solve the same thing, it's usually that applies to marketers and engineers by the way also. Oh, oh, absolutely. Yeah, [00:51:40] totally. And, and being you be on the marketing side, me on the engineering technical side. It's usually representative of, of an interest in something that, that location can get an insight into where those parties can agree upon.
And I think the blanket, the earth, and, and this isn't really star Trek, star wars kind of stuff, but I'm gonna get you there. Right. And humans wanna inherently see. It's the number one sense that we, we think of and they wanted the option to see. And so they wanna blanket the earth and, and that comes about lots of different reasons.
Rain camera does a lot to prove that by the way, right. Like we wanna see, but, but then there's like, I want access to your streams. Cause I wanna do some analysis. I dwell something for not security and not legal reasons, more marketing or more HR driven or whatever the, whatever it is, but there's a world we're going into and it's, we're still findings out.
Maybe 10. Where the, the first party world, like, Hey, you want my video streams? Cause you want to do some processing on, OK. That's first party, that's you and me. That's source and target in the I in the ITP networking world, we call that layer two. There's a world where we think we're going to layer three video, which is to say, it's not you, but somebody beyond you, I don't know that person, but I need to route that video down to that person or those people down there who wanna see my feed.
[00:52:49] Matt Trifiro: Do I also need to attach the limitations and constraints on usage and copyright and all of that, to that video? chain
[00:52:56] Steve Mueller: of custody and everything. And then there's other interesting things here, and you should expect that this isn't domain, I can't really get into this any further, but this, this is the, this is my tenure view out.
I smell blockchain here somewhere. Uh, you didn't, you didn't hear me say that. And blockchain is only part of it just yeah, but yes, it does. It does open up very interesting ideas. And I think we're just starting to uncover this idea of, because we've [00:53:20] just come to this place where it's like, Hey, you've got a video stream and I like the services like SageMaker and AI models that people write.
These third party companies like Q right. These are really awesome things, but it's really a first party negotiation. Now it opens up the door for. Who's downstream from you at a second or third or fourth hop that wants that video stream as well. That I don't know. And you don't know, and we don't trust each other.
And what are the things that you want it for? Why do you want it like those are
[00:53:44] Matt Trifiro: and what are the potential unintended consequences?
[00:53:47] Steve Mueller: Yeah. And so you get into this world where you're starting to say, well, humans like to see things. And I might, I might want data all the way on the other side to train my model, right?
Hot dog.hot dog type thing. There's a lot of business reasons why you wanna do this. And I think that's where, where in the early stages of exploring that and some early prototype work, but that, that is where that's where the industry goes. And, and in this industry in particular for your. Follow the humans, it, it always comes.
This is, this is not a website. This is not serverless. This is not container or tech for sake of tech. This is straight. What humans do. And what, uh, when you talk about video surveillance and physical security technology, and really the broader building management, building management and those things that I've just marked off all follow hu, the movement of humans and the, the concern around humans.
And it's, it's always the human factor that drives the, the decisions around the technology. And where it
[00:54:36] Matt Trifiro: goes. Yeah, that that's really insightful. I mean, it's, it's a little counterintuitive, but once you think about it, you're absolutely right. Like that's the whole, the whole point of it. Hey, Steve, this has been an amazing interview.
I really appreciate you spending the time for people who wanna learn more about hyper cursive or get ahold of you. What's the best way to find you guys online.
[00:54:51] Steve Mueller: Yeah, uh, simple dub dub, dub.hyper.com. You could also find us in LinkedIn, Steve Mueller. I think it's, if I recall easiest way to find us is that way.
And [00:55:00] then if you wanna get in touch with us sales, hyper.com is easy. Awesome. Perfect, Steve. That's great. Hey, appreciate the time, Matt. And, uh, thank you for the opportunity that
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