Understanding Web3 and Decentralized Cloud with Davy Wittock, CBO, InFlux Technologies - Episode 13

Understanding Web3 and Decentralized Cloud with Davy Wittock, CBO, InFlux Technologies - Episode 13

Show Video

Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode  of ExtraMile by HiTechNectar, an interview series   that bridges the gap between the industry leaders  and enthusiasts. I am your host Sudakshina,   and we are here to discuss the latest innovation,  tech trends, marketing practices, expert insights   and a lot more. In today's conversation, we are  excited to introduce our guest, Davy Wittock,   the Chief Business Development Officer of InFlux  Technologies, the world's first and largest Web3   and decentralized cloud computing company. Davy leads the business development team   and specializes in customer relationship  management. He has a strong background in   healthcare IT management, system performance  analysis, architecture and enterprise   solutions. Let's discover his professional  experiences and gain insights into the world  

of computer networking products. Welcome, Davy. Greetings for   the day. I hope you're doing well. I'm doing great. Thank you. That's a   great introduction. Thank you.  So before joining InFlux Technologies, you owned  DNC IT Solutions INC and worked at MiFair. Can   you share some key strategies or practices you  implemented to ensure rigorous audits and maintain   high standards of hygiene to protect patient data? Oh, that's quite the question straight away from   the bat. Yeah. So as you can see, my  background is medical IT and the biggest  

piece with medical IT is uptime, right? We cannot be down and have patients in a   hospital or a clinic and then having to tell them,  hey, hold on, we're rebooting the servers. That's   something that doesn't fly. So for the last  20 years, my drive has been high availability,   make sure everything keeps up and running. And that goes from implementing all types of   strategies, right? So the strategy first is, of  course, making sure your end users know what to   do and what to expect, even if there's  an outage. So it starts with training.  And then secondly, you start working with all  the potential technologies that your vendors   offer when it comes to the software you use.  And of course, any type of implementation you  

do yourself. So especially when you start  working with some custom implementations,   then all of it falls on your shoulders  to make sure it's always available.  So things like active, passive type of  environments, making sure you have a   production environment and a test environment,  making sure you have data that's in the cloud or   at least offsite to make sure that you don't lose  anything if something happens catastrophically at   one of the data centers, so you have always a  backup. So it's been always my drive to make  

sure that nothing got centralized and there's  not one point of failure. So that was biggest   drives for me, making sure we have systems  in play with all sorts of sponsors to make   sure that we do that correctly. So, business type of sponsoring,   that means the training piece, making sure  your folks know anything about security,   fising, all of that piece. And then on the  technical side of things, working with the IT   admins to make sure that we have an uptime that  basically no doctor or patient, any hindrance   of this. And we did a good job on this. We followed like patch Tuesday, as they call  

it for Microsoft, when they released their new  patching, we made sure that those got implemented   ASAP just in case anything catastrophic happens  on the patching side of things. We made sure we   tested that first in our test environments. We  did that with and work together with our vendors.  So, we were a very high demanding customer in  that regard. And I was a very high demanding   person when it came to that uptime, but I  can vouch for basically 90.999% uptime for   the things that we did. And then before that  with Axa Healthcare, I was the person you  

didn't want to see showing up at your hospital  because that was at that point, unfortunately,   something catastrophic was happening or there was  some outages or delays and all that fun stuff.  So, it was my job at that point to find the needle  in the haystack that was causing it. And then of   course, prevention as well and making sure that  uptime was guaranteed. So yeah, that's been my   driving factor for the last 20 years is making  sure my systems are up and running at all times. 

And I took that with me to Flux. So, kind of  that thinking, that mentality, but then in a   decentralized way. So that's been my go-to so now. Great. That sounds really interesting. So,   what inspired you to focus on decentralized  cloud computing and BEP3 technology?  One of my pet peeves was that I always ended up  talking with the same people. And that's not a   bad thing. These folks know what they're doing,  but I always felt that the cost was really high.  And like I said, you talk with the same people,  so it's not like there's much alternatives out   there. And so, I started looking for alternatives  way back myself with the idea is always trying to  

find how do I make sure that I have no single  point of failure. So to that regard, I would   work with two vendors instead of just one way  where most folks pick one vendor and stick with   that vendor and they put all their trust in it. We did the same, but I always had a second one   as well, just in case. That came with the costs  again. And so it got me thinking really hard.  And around 2017, 2018, I already was  playing in the blockchain space. So,  

I was a miner, I was a pool operator.  So, I was dabbling in the technology,   trying to learn what that was all about. And then I came across this project that   was trying to focus on a decentralized  infrastructure at that point, Flux at its   infant stage. And it got me really intrigued.  So I started working with them at that point.  And I quickly learned that that was still a young  project. There was still some gotchas to it. But  

I quickly learned that this was something  that the world was kind of looking for.  And we see that type of sharing your computes.  We see that in the daily today with sharing   your car. You basically do an Uber or  you share your house, you do an Airbnb. 

And Flux is kind of like that Airbnb type of  thing where you basically unused compute space,   you're basically giving that to somebody else  to utilize it and you get rewarded for it. I   thought it was a really cool concept. So  I basically reached out to the team, we   started talking and I ended up working with them. And here we are a few years later now, and I'm the  

business officer. So at this point, I'm trying to  develop strategic partnerships, particularly in   the tech and in the decentralized cloud compute  space. So yeah, I love the innovation of it.  I love the opportunities that it's going to give  folks like you and I to make some extra cash,   but at the same time, be completely  decentralized and have less point of   failures. And that's the biggest drive for me. That was really great insights. It's quite   exciting to see how these technologies  are evolving in future technologies.   So would you shed some light on strategic  planning and project management skills?  How would you emphasize  teamwork and project success?  Project managers are a special breed in my  book. I love them and I hate them at the   same time. And I think that's the case for a lot  of folks out there who have to work with them. 

And I know from PMs, that's how they often  see themselves as well. They're sticklers and   I love that they're sticklers. They're the  guys who take the heat when a project gets   delayed and they never get the praise when a  project is delivered on time, unfortunately.  And I've worked with a lot of PMs in my day so  far. But some of the greatest ones that I've   worked with, they were the ones who basically were  able to put them behind the team and really push   the team forward instead of trying to lead the  team and dragging everybody with. And when a PM  

realizes the strength of his team or her team, and  he's able to push them forward with some guidance,   but keeping them to the timelines, I've  seen a lot of success in that regard.  And PMs basically able to take a step  back and let the experts actually do the   work properly and listening to the feedback and  properly conveying feedback from your technical   SMEs correctly to your customer or your partner  you're working with. I think that's a big, big,   big plus. I know everybody has their own style  when they do PM and their strategy around it.  There's hours upon hours of curriculum you  can read up on. But from the day to day   that I've seen, those PMs who really push  somebody forward and really work with the   skillset that these guys have, they seem to  deliver versus those who think they need to   know everything and want to know everything  and take up a lot of time that way. Those are  

most often the projects that seem delayed,  even though it's with the right intentions.  As the PM, you're not supposed to be  the one who knows everything. As a PM,   you're supposed to be the one who drives it  and leans on the technical skills. And yeah,   that's something that I've noticed in my  day-to-days with the PMs. We've got some great  

PMs as well on our team. They each have their  style and they each do it their way, but they   seem to deliver. And that's the great piece of it.  At the end of the day, that's the important piece.  Make sure that you deliver and So, can you  explain what a Flux Cloud is and how does   InFlux Technologies reach the gap between the  traditional Web2 and decentralized future Web3?  Yeah. So, the original Flux, as we stated a few  times already, we started as a blockchain project,   still is a blockchain project at the core.  So, we use blockchain to help with standing   up the nodes that folks like you and I can run. So, we basically teach people how to run your  

own nodes with the intent that you can then run  websites and the new Web3, or you can run game   servers, you can use it for AI and all other fun  stuff. But the blockchain is there to guide us and   unorchestrate the applications that get deployed  on the network. So, if you run your game server,   you basically register that on the blockchain. That sounds very technical. That was technical,  

but we made that all a lot easier and I'll go  to that in a sec. But the blockchain is there to   take in the signature, make sure that it knows  that there's a new application being spawned.  So, you know your game server is coming online  and then it propagates it to the network. The   network will pick it up. One of the nodes will  then spawn that application and report back to   the blockchain saying, yeah, we're good to go. And you basically are up and running in a few  

minutes. You have your own game server  running for pennies on the dollar. Now,   I did say that used to be very technical and  we can still go very technical on that as well.  But one of my driving pieces, my strategy  for InFlux was to make sure that we cater   as well to your everyday user. It's great in  the blockchain to produce awesome products,   but if nobody's using them, that's kind  of sad. And a big hurdle is adoption. 

A lot of folks in the blockchain projects will  talk about adoption. We took a step back. We said,   look, we got all of these folks who  come out of a Web2 space like myself.  We know what folks are looking for when we  purchase products or services. Let's make  

sure we implement that as well. So, one of the  things that we did at the beginning of this year   actually was allowing folks to utilize  your regular day-to-day fiat currency.  So, you actually sign in with your  single sign-on. So, you use Google,   which is a very common signature approach. I  think we do GitHub and GitLab as well, or you   stay with the traditional Flux sign-in option. But at that point, it looks and feels like any   other provider out there. You sign in with  your Google account, you pay with PayPal,  

you launch your server, and the backend, Flux  takes care of the rest. We purchase the Flux.  We register it on a chain. None of that is  something that you need to do. And that's the   biggest driver, I think, for a lot of folks. And I apologize for the cat in the background   here. But that's one of the biggest drivers  is ease of use. Folks don't need to know   that they're on a Web3 environment  or they're on a Web2 environment.  They don't care. They just want to be able to  utilize it. And as a business developer as well,  

it's my job to make strategic partnerships. So, we have partnerships with Lumen in North   America. We got partnerships with OVH. Those  are your typical Web2 type of providers.  But they also see Web3 is coming, and  they want to be prepared for it. So,   they want to make sure that they partner with  folks who are in the space who can teach them.   And ultimately, they can utilize us as well. So, they can run the same type of applications,   but on our network via them. So, there's  Bricsys here, definitely already built. And  

I think the future is a hybrid model where  you will have centralized entities working   together with decentralized entities,  providing a more inexpensive cost for   you to run your websites, your WordPress sites. To give you an idea, it costs you $5 a month for   a fully decentralized WordPress environment. That  doesn't go down. That's the beauty of it, right?  So, if one of your servers goes down,  there's two others ready to rock and roll,   and it doesn't cost you anything extra.  And you can spin up a hundred if you like,  

if you really want to be redundant.  But yeah, that's the beauty of it.  Decentralization is coming, and decentralization  is here, and it allows us to be less expensive,   less points of failure, and a  more transparent world as well,   because you can literally see on the blockchain  who's paid for what, which is kind of cool.  Absolutely amazing. So, what are some challenges  that generally arise in transitioning from Web 2.0   to Web 3.0 technologies, and how would  you suggest tackling such challenges?  Let's take a step back. Let's think about how  folks were very hesitant on the cloud solutions   before it even became a decentralized cloud.  So, when I started having conversations, and  

I'm talking about 10 years ago,  and even longer actually already,   and I brought up cloud storage at one point as  an offset to make sure that your data is not   just on site, but you have a backup elsewhere. At that point, it was still frowned upon. What   do you mean the cloud? What's the cloud? It was a bad terminology in my book,   cloud solutions. People thought it was just in  the air. I explained to a lot of sponsors at that   point that no, we're just moving data off sites. It's stored elsewhere. It's not in the sky   as people were thinking of it. So, it  was a lot of education at that point.  And to this day, I still know a lot of folks  out there who still have nothing in the cloud,   who still believe in tapes and discs. And  every day, they take a backup, take the   tape with them home. I've been there myself,  but I'm talking back in 2005 at that point. 

It's tape storage. And I pray for everybody out  there that they never have to use it to restore   something because that's a pain. So, going from  Web2 to Web3 now, it's kind of the same challenge.  And one of the pieces that I really focus  hard on is making it so that it's almost not   a discussion point. So, having folks that  think about, let's say, a game provider,   for instance, or a big game studio wants  to use Flux. How would they go forward?  And we would have to talk about, hey, these are  what we can offer. This is the cost. And one   of the challenges you can put forward to any  regular user of the cloud today is the cost. 

Egress, ingress costs, those take up a lot of  somebody's budget on a daily just for that. And   that goes for medical too. If you store medical  data in the cloud, uploading it and downloading   it when you need it is a costly endeavor. So, cost is the definite point of talking.   We can make it a lot more affordable. Then the  question, of course, is how are you making it   so much less expensive than the big players? We talk about blockchain and how that works,   but it's a lot of education that  goes into it. And then ultimately,  

with more education comes more thrust. And the  moment you have trust build up, that's where you   start seeing a lot of adoption happening as well. The same happened with clouds at the very start.   There was no trust. So, people were very hesitant  and they slowly, but surely got accustomed to it   with products like Dropbox, Google Drive. People slowly, but surely started accepting   it. Now, the biggest driveway to regular  companies is, okay, you can do the storage   piece now in the cloud, but do you know where  your data is? And that's the next step for a   lot of companies out there is that they did  jump into the clouds, but they didn't think   further about the security piece of it. And that's one of the pieces that we're  

fixing as well is that you basically get  your own private clouds at that point,   and then you do your own thing going forward. So,  that's a big driver as well. So, cost, security,   scalability, all of those are the talking  points when I'm talking with regular businesses.  And the more folks learn, the more trust  will grow, and the more adoption will happen. 

These were really valuable insights.  So, what trends in technology excite   you the most right now? And how do  you stay updated with these trends?  Of course, AI. AI is the topic for everybody  out there. And I approach AI from a business   side of things as well, again. So, I approach it with the intent   of how do we utilize it in a business  sense, and how do we make sure, again,   it's decentralized if need be. Does it need to  be decentralized? That's a question by itself.  And then, of course, what type of models are  involved? What type of hardware is involved?   That got me going about two years ago already. And I quickly came to the conclusion that for   your everyday user, AI might always be a  little out of reach. ChatGPT definitely was  

a big plus in that regard. But then, again,  everybody's flocking to that one product,   not fully understanding the pitfalls of it. And don't get me wrong. The folks that created   ChatGPT did an awesome job. It feels great. It's easy to use. The problem that I always have   with it is that it's one big company. You put your  data in there, you don't really control that data.  That's always a concern. And so, with Flux, we  basically created our own product called FluxEdge,  

and now FluxAI. And the FluxAI basically runs  on top of FluxEdge, basically GPU compute,   folks like yourself and myself providing it,  all the way up to larger data centers that we   bring new live into by literally using their  GPU compute and provide it on the marketplace.  Now, our FluxAI product, similar to a ChatGPT,  you can create your images on it. You can   do your own text and prompting, but we have  the option that it's your data. It's secure. 

We don't use it. We don't have  access to the data. And ultimately,   you can even white label FluxAI and then use  it in your own companies and use it internally.  And talking with a lot of companies out  there, a lot of software developers as well,   who use ChatGPT's APIs, again, to help create  other products or create it as a chat prompt and   internally use it. But the biggest pet peeve  is that if I upload my documents to it, what   happens with that data again? So, a lot of folks  are out there now looking to utilize their own   open source products, but a lot of folks out there  as well don't really know exactly how to use it.  So, one of the things that we do with InFlux is  as well as provide that type of training, that   type of advisement to get your company basically  up and running with the latest and greatest AI   and how to utilize it, how to protect yourself,  your intellectual property, protect that as well.   Because what you hate to see happen is you upload  your code base or whatever or your documentation,   ChatGPT learns about it and now it provides it to  your competitor, something you want to avoid. So,  

that's what we're trying to now as well  roll out is create your own private cloud,   even do it on-prem, roll out your own ChatGPT  and your own open source one, and we teach   people how to use it, how to implement it. That's the way forward for us. That's what   I've been really focusing on  the last few weeks, months.  Great, amazing, really dynamic innovations.  So, how do you see the future of decentralized   computing impacting businesses and individuals? And I'll add one more, governments as well. So,   these are the three levels that I see happening.  Individuals, you won't probably always see it  

that you're on a decentralized environment. You log in, go to runofflux.com right now.   It looks like any other website, but it's  running fully on a decentralized network.   You don't realize it, it's happening. So, for your end users, it's not going   to be that big of an impact personally, unless  you actually participate in those pieces and   you provide your own compute, then it's a really  big win for yourself. But the utilization itself,   you're not going to really notice this.  It's going to just be less expensive,   which is a big plus, but the technology-wise is  going to be in the backend, not on the front end. 

When it comes to companies, however, it's a bit  of a different story. I think it's going to be   more of a hybrid solution for companies out there.  You're going to have databases and the question,   of course, with the security of it, do you  want to have that in the cloud or do you   want to keep that more centralized? The front end of all of these things,   that's a different story. You can definitely put  that on a public cloud and have it interact with   that database via APIs. So, companies are  definitely going to start looking at it,  

especially, and then we've seen that already with  Microsoft putting out announcements saying, hey,   we're not going to charge as much anymore for  your egress, or we might waive it altogether,   but it's still up to them to make that decision. What companies are looking for is ultimately   saving costs, basically means more profit.  And so, you're going to start seeing them   utilize the likes of Flux and other companies  out there who do decentralized storage, for   instance. That's definitely a big push forward. And at the same time, it creates less points   of failure and that's where a company is  always important, right? Uptime is big.   And then the last level is the governments. So, governments out there, they still are   struggling with this entire concept. What do you  mean it's in the hands of people like you and me?  

What does it mean regulation-wise and all that? So, we definitely see some adoption coming on   that end to the point even that even governments  are starting to look at utilizing decentralized   networks, again, for less points of  failure, but also in less points of   attack as governments then are dealing with  other pieces, safer for businesses out there.   Hacks is definitely a concern for a lot  of folks. And decentralized options give   more security that way as well, because even  if one of these pieces goes down, there's so   many other ones that are still up and running. And the U.S. government is interested in that.   I've talked with Canadian governments, talked  with some Indian governments at this point. So,   on local levels and more government levels,  there's definitely an interest going forward. 

And people seem to see that it's  something they should look into,   learn about, as it will basically cover  all the bases when it comes to security   and the points of failures. Absolutely, right. So, what advice would you give to someone   starting the career in the tech industry? Well, that almost sounds like I'm talking   to my kids. I got one who's about to go into  college. We have that conversation quite often.  The only thing that I teach my kids and everybody  who asks for that type of advice is be willing to   learn, right? My dad said that back when I was  still in high school and college, he's like,   even though you get your diploma at the end of  this course, you're not going to be done learning.   And I remember thinking, sure, dad, whatever. Yeah, he was right. It doesn't stop. When I   got out of college, we didn't even  have proper Google yet, right?  So, Google was just a new fad at  that point. People were starting to  

learn about it. And then the same that  was the discussion today is about AI.  Same happened back then with Google. Oh,  it's too easy. It's kind of kids are not   going to learn anymore, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I see that now with AI as well. School has  

blocked check GPT, for instance. Okay, I get it. But you need kids to learn to adopt technology and   not be afraid of technology. And we are so good  these days at protecting and not at educating. And   the protection is always with the right mindset. But if you do too much protection, you basically   cover. And at that point, you basically shield  people from technology. So, anybody out there  

that I can give one word of advice, learn. Even if it's scary, learn about it. Get   yourself educated. Get yourself up  to speed on what the technology is.  You don't have to understand it like an expert,  but be able to at least grasp it so that you can   have your own opinion on it, your own use case  for it. And that's how I teach my kids with AI,  

for instance. If they have to write an article  on something, I have no issue with them using   chat GPT or Flux AI in our case and ask them,  hey, can you give me more information on this?  Can you give me some information on that?  What are the pros and the cons? Use it.  If you can get more efficient with it, you  should learn to use it. What I don't like seeing,   of course, is that, okay, now write me an article  about all of these things and then sign off on it,   send it off to the teacher and  be done. Now you didn't learn. 

Now you learn to avoid things. So, in my book,  it's learning to use the technology correctly.   Learn, learn, learn, never stop learning. I meet folks in their 70s in the IT space and   they're still learning and they're still enjoying  it. That's the way forward. Don't be complacent.  That was indeed great advice. So, thank  you so much, Devy, for sharing your  

valuable insights and experiences with us.  It was really a pleasure to host you today.  Absolutely. It was a pleasure  being here. Thank you.  Thank you so much. Thank  you everyone for joining us.

2025-02-17 19:19

Show Video

Other news

Salesforce to Buy Informatica, Apple’s Tariff Headwinds | Bloomberg Technology 5/27/2025 2025-05-29 12:47
What's new in Flutter 2025-05-27 08:21
John Roese, Dell | Dell Technologies World 2025 2025-05-24 00:43