>>Hey guys and girls, welcome back to Motor City, Lisa Martin here with John Furrier on the Cube's third day of coverage of Coon Cloud Native Con North America. John, we've had some great conversations over the last two and a half days. We've been talking about identity and security management as a critical need for enterprises within the cloud native space. We're gonna have another quick conversation >>On that. Yeah, we got a great segment coming up from someone who's been in the industry, a long time expert, running a great company. Now it's gonna be one of those pieces that fits into what we call super cloud. Others are calling cloud operating system. Some are calling just Cloud 2.0, 3.0. But there's definitely a major trend happening around how cloud is going Next generation. We've been covering it. So this segment should be >>Great. Let's unpack those trends. One of our alumni is back with us, O Rika Zi, co-founder and CEO of Aerio. Omri. Great to have you back on the >>Cube. Thank you. Great to be here. >>So identity move to the cloud, Access authorization did not talk to us about why you found it assertive, what you guys are doing and how you're flipping that script. >>Yeah, so back 15 years ago, I helped start Azure at Microsoft. You know, one of the first few folks that you know, really focused on enterprise services within the Azure family. And at the time I was working for the guy who ran all of Windows server and you know, active directory. He called it the linchpin workload for the Windows Server franchise, like big words. But what he meant was we had 95% market share and all of these new SAS applications like ServiceNow and you know, Workday and salesforce.com, they had to invent login and they had to invent access control. And so we were like, well, we're gonna lose it unless we figure out how to replace active directory. And that's how Azure Active Directory was born. And the first thing that we had to do as an industry was fix identity, right? Yeah. So, you know, we worked on things like oof Two and Open, Id Connect and SAML and Jot as an industry and now 15 years later, no one has to go build login if you don't want to, right? You have companies like Odd Zero and Okta and one login Ping ID that solve that problem solve single sign-on, on the web. But access Control hasn't really moved forward at all in the last 15 years. And so my co-founder and I who were both involved in the early beginnings of Azure Active directory, wanted to go back to that problem. And that problem is even bigger than identity and it's far from >>Solved. Yeah, this is huge. I think, you know, self-service has been a developer thing that's, everyone knows developer productivity, we've all experienced click sign in with your LinkedIn or Twitter or Google or Apple handle. So that's single sign on check. Now the security conversation kicks in. If you look at with this no perimeter and cloud, now you've got multi-cloud or super cloud on the horizon. You've got all kinds of opportunities to innovate on the security paradigm. I think this is kind of where I'm hearing the most conversation around access control as well as operationally eliminating a lot of potential problems. So there's one clean up the siloed or fragmented access and two streamlined for security. What's your reaction to that? Do you agree? And if not, where, where am I missing that? >>Yeah, absolutely. If you look at the life of an IT pro, you know, back in the two thousands they had, you know, l d or active directory, they add in one place to configure groups and they'd map users to groups. And groups typically corresponded to roles and business applications. And it was clunky, but life was pretty simple. And now they live in dozens or hundreds of different admin consoles. So misconfigurations are rampant and over provisioning is a real problem. If you look at zero trust and the principle of lease privilege, you know, all these applications have these course grained permissions. And so when you have a breach, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when you wanna limit the blast radius of you know what happened, and you can't do that unless you have fine grained access control. So all those, you know, all those reasons together are forcing us as an industry to come to terms with the fact that we really need to revisit access control and bring it to the age of cloud. >>You guys recently, just this week I saw the blog on Topaz. Congratulations. Thank you. Talk to us about what that is and some of the gaps that's gonna help sarto to fill for what's out there in the marketplace. >>Yeah, so right now there really isn't a way to go build fine grains policy based real time access control based on open source, right? We have the open policy agent, which is a great decision engine, but really optimized for infrastructure scenarios like Kubernetes admission control. And then on the other hand, you have this new, you know, generation of access control ideas. This model called relationship based access control that was popularized by Google Zanzibar system. So Zanzibar is how they do access control for Google Docs and Google Drive. If you've ever kind of looked at a Google Doc and you know you're a viewer or an owner or a commenter, Zanzibar is the system behind it. And so what we've done is we've married these two things together. We have a policy based system, OPPA based system, and at the same time we've brought together a directory, an embedded directory in Topaz that allows you to answer questions like, does this user have this permission on this object? And bringing it all together, making it open sources a real game changer from our perspective, real >>Game changer. That's good to hear. What are some of the key use cases that it's gonna help your customers address? >>So a lot of our customers really like the idea of policy based access management, but they don't know how to bring data to that decision engine. And so we basically have a, you know, a, a very opinionated way of how to model that data. So you import data out of your identity providers. So you connect us to Okta or oze or Azure, Azure Active directory. And so now you have the user data, you can define groups and then you can define, you know, your object hierarchy, your domain model. So let's say you have an applicant tracking system, you have nouns like job, you know, know job descriptions or candidates. And so you wanna model these things and you want to be able to say who has access to, you know, the candidates for this job, for example. Those are the kinds of rules that people can express really easily in Topaz and in assertive. >>What are some of the challenges that are happening right now that dissolve? What, what are you looking at to solve? Is it complexity, sprawl, logic problems? What's the main problem set you guys >>See? Yeah, so as organizations grow and they have more and more microservices, each one of these microservices does authorization differently. And so it's impossible to reason about the full surface area of, you know, permissions in your application. And more and more of these organizations are saying, You know what, we need a standard layer for this. So it's not just Google with Zanzibar, it's Intuit with Oddy, it's Carta with their own oddy system, it's Netflix, you know, it's Airbnb with heed. All of them are now talking about how they solve access control extracted into its own service to basically manage complexity and regain agility. The other thing is all about, you know, time to market and, and tco. >>So, so how do you work with those services? Do you replace them, you unify them? What is the approach that you're taking? >>So basically these organizations are saying, you know what? We want one access control service. We want all of our microservices to call that thing instead of having to roll out our own. And so we, you know, give you the guts for that service, right? Topaz is basically the way that you're gonna go implement an access control service without having to go build it the same way that you know, large companies like Airbnb or Google or, or a car to >>Have. What's the competition look like for you guys? I'm not really seeing a lot of competition out there. Are there competitors? Are there different approaches? What makes you different? >>Yeah, so I would say that, you know, the biggest competitor is roll your own. So a lot of these companies that find us, they say, We're sick and tired of investing 2, 3, 4 engineers, five engineers on this thing. You know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. We have to maintain this thing and so we can, we can use your solution at a fraction of the cost a, a fifth, a 10th of what it would cost us to maintain it locally. There are others like Sty for example, you know, they are in the space, but more in on the infrastructure side. So they solve the problem of Kubernetes submission control or things like that. So >>Rolling your own, there's a couple problems there. One is do they get all the corner cases who built a they still, it's a company. Exactly. It's heavy lifting, it's undifferentiated, you just gotta check the box. So probably will be not optimized. >>That's right. As Bezo says, only focus on the things that make your beer taste better. And access control is one of those things. It's part of your security, you know, posture, it's a critical thing to get right, but you know, I wanna work on access control, said no developer ever, right? So it's kind of like this boring, you know, like back office thing that you need to do. And so we give you the mechanisms to be able to build it securely and robustly. >>Do you have a, a customer story example that is one of your go-tos that really highlights how you're improving developer productivity? >>Yeah, so we have a couple of them actually. So there's the largest third party B2B marketplace in the us. Free retail. Instead of building their own, they actually brought in aer. And what they wanted to do with AER was be the authorization layer for both their externally facing applications as well as their internal apps. So basically every one of their applications now hooks up to AER to do authorization. They define users and groups and roles and permissions in one place and then every application can actually plug into that instead of having to roll out their own. >>I'd like to switch gears if you don't mind. I get first of all, great update on the company and progress. I'd like to get your thoughts on the cloud computing market. Obviously you were your legendary position, Azure, I mean look at the, look at the progress over the past few years. Just been spectacular from Microsoft and you set the table there. Amazon web service is still, you know, thundering away even though earnings came out, the market's kind of soft still. You know, you see the cloud hyperscalers just continuing to differentiate from software to chips. Yep. Across the board. So the hyperscalers kicking ass taking names, doing great Microsoft right up there. What's the future? Cuz you now have the conversation where, okay, we're calling it super cloud, somebody calling multi-cloud, somebody calling it distributed computing, whatever you wanna call it. The old is now new again, it just looks different as cloud becomes now the next computer industry, >>You got an operating system, you got applications, you got hardware, I mean it's all kind of playing out just on a massive global scale, but you got regions, you got all kinds of connected systems edge. What's your vision on how this plays out? Because things are starting to fall into place. Web assembly to me just points to, you know, app servers are coming back, middleware, Kubernetes containers, VMs are gonna still be there. So you got the progression. What's your, what's your take on this? How would you share, share your thoughts to a friend or the industry, the audience? So what's going on? What's, what's happening right now? What's, what's going on? >>Yeah, it's funny because you know, I remember doing this quite a few years ago with you probably in, you know, 2015 and we were talking about, back then we called it hybrid cloud, right? And it was a vision, but it is actually what's going on. It just took longer for it to get here, right? So back then, you know, the big debate was public cloud or private cloud and you know, back when we were, you know, talking about these ideas, you know, we said, well you know, some applications will always stay on-prem and some applications will move to the cloud. I was just talking to a big bank and they basically said, look, our stated objective now is to move everything we can to the public cloud and we still have a large private cloud investment that will never go away. And so now we have essentially this big operating system that can, you know, abstract all of this stuff. So we have developer platforms that can, you know, sit on top of all these different pieces of infrastructure and you know, kind of based on policy decide where these applications are gonna be scheduled. So, you know, the >>Operating schedule shows like an operating system function. >>Exactly. I mean like we now, we used to have schedulers for one CPU or you know, one box, then we had schedulers for, you know, kind of like a whole cluster and now we have schedulers across the world. >>Yeah. My final question before we kind of get run outta time is what's your thoughts on web assembly? Cuz that's getting a lot of hype here again to kind of look at this next evolution again that's lighter weight kind of feels like an app server kind of direction. What's your, what's your, it's hyped up now, what's your take on that? >>Yeah, it's interesting. I mean back, you know, what's, what's old is new again, right? So, you know, I remember back in the late nineties we got really excited about, you know, JVMs and you know, this notion of right once run anywhere and yeah, you know, I would say that web assembly provides a pretty exciting, you know, window into that where you can take the, you know, sandboxing technology from the JavaScript world, from the browser essentially. And you can, you know, compile an application down to web assembly and have it real, really truly portable. So, you know, we see for example, policies in our world, you know, with opa, one of the hottest things is to take these policies and can compile them to web assemblies so you can actually execute them at the edge, you know, wherever it is that you have a web assembly runtime. >>And so, you know, I was just talking to Scott over at Docker and you know, they're excited about kind of bringing Docker packaging, OCI packaging to web assemblies. So we're gonna see a convergence of all these technologies right now. They're kind of each, each of our, each of them are in a silo, but you know, like we'll see a lot of the patterns, like for example, OCI is gonna become the packaging format for web assemblies as it is becoming the packaging format for policies. So we did the same thing. We basically said, you know what, we want these policies to be packaged as OCI assembly so that you can sign them with cosign and bring the entire ecosystem of tools to bear on OCI packages. So convergence is I think what >>We're, and love, I love your attitude too because it's the open source community and the developers who are actually voting on the quote defacto standard. Yes. You know, if it doesn't work, right, know people know about it. Exactly. It's actually a great new production system. >>So great momentum going on to the press released earlier this week, clearly filling the gaps there that, that you and your, your co-founder saw a long time ago. What's next for the assertive business? Are you hiring? What's going on there? >>Yeah, we are really excited about launching commercially at the end of this year. So one of the things that we were, we wanted to do that we had a promise around and we delivered on our promise was open sourcing our edge authorizer. That was a huge thing for us. And we've now completed, you know, pretty much all the big pieces for AER and now it's time to commercially launch launch. We already have customers in production, you know, design partners, and you know, next year is gonna be the year to really drive commercialization. >>All right. We will be watching this space ery. Thank you so much for joining John and me on the keep. Great to have you back on the program. >>Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. >>Our pleasure as well For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube Live. Michelle floor of Con Cloud Native Con 22. This is day three of our coverage. We will be back with more coverage after a short break. See that.

>>Ed, welcome to the Cube. All right, Thanks guys. Good >>To see you. Thanks. Good to see you as well, >>John. Okay. Ed runs Biz dev for Cloudera, Industry veteran, worked at VMware. Ed, gotten to know you the past year. You guys have been doing great. What a difference one year makes, right? I mean, absolutely. Tell us, just let's start it off with what's happened in a year. I mean, you know, here at Hadoop World Cloudera, the ecosystem. Just give us your view of your perspective of what a difference one year makes. >>I think more than double is probably the, the fastest answer I could give you, which is, I mean, even looking around at the conference, it's, it itself is literally double from what it was last year. But in terms of the number of partners that have entered the market and really decided to work with, with Cloudera, but also in general, just the, the, the, the scope and size of the ecosystem itself, investors from every angle. You've got companies really well-branded marquee companies like Oracle coming into the mix and saying, Hey, Hadoop is the, is the real deal and we need to invest here. Marquee companies like IBM and EMC also doing the same. And of course, you know, as a result, you know, lots and lots of customer interest in the technology. And Cloudera's been fortunate to have been in the market early and really made the right investments with the right team. And so we're able to serve a lot of those customer needs. So it's been really, it's been a fantastic year for the company. >>So we had a great day yesterday with Cloudera. We had Kirk on, we had AER on twice, who by the way went viral with his modern warfare review, but we had Jeff Harmar Baer on, so we had pretty much the brain trust, Mike and Michaelson. Yep. The brain trust, the Cloudera. So we talked about the risk factors for Cloudera. Obviously you guys are number one, you've been kind of had untouchable lead and then all of a sudden boom competition. So Mike talked about that. So the strategy and the product side, they addressed, you're on the, the biz dev side, so you know, when you were number one, everyone wants to stand next to you and your phone rings off the hook from tier one partners all the way down to anyone's just getting in the business. Who wants a big data strategy on the execution. Now, what are you guys doing right now to, to continue your lead on the, on the sales marketing biz dev? I mean, I know you get the partner program, but what's your strategy for Phil, how to continue >>In that lead? The, the beautiful thing is honestly, our strategy hasn't changed at all. And I know that might sound counterintuitive, but we started off with a, a really crisp vision. And we want, what we wanna do is create a very attractive platform for partners. And, and, you know, one of the core, you know, sort of corporate strategy, Edix for Quadera is a recognition that the end of the day, the platform itself, Hado is an input into a solution. And Quadra is not likely to deliver the complete solution to market. Instead, it's going to be companies like Dell, for example, or it's going to be companies on the, on the ISV side like Informatica, which you're gonna deliver not only a base platform, but also the, the, the, the BI or analytics or data integration technologies on top. And as a result, what we've done is we've really focused in on creating a very attractive platform to vendors to build on. >>And one of the, I think one of the biggest misconceptions that I'm excited about that, you know, we are now having an opportunity to correct and that's a result, frankly, of the additional competitive dynamic. And I think the, the Wiki bond team pointed that out rather pointedly in their most recent articles. But is, is the sort of the lack of understanding around what CDH is and also the, some of the other investments that we're making to create a truly attractive platform for vendors to build on. And you know, I mean, I think you, you may have familiarity with exactly what CDH is, but for the sake of the audience here, what I'd like to do is say, say, first off, you know, first and foremost this is a hundred percent free in Apache license open source. But more importantly, it is everything that we build on the platform, meaning it's completely full featured. >>We put all of that out in the open. There's no turbo version of Hadoop that we've got hiding in the closet for our, our four pay customers. We're absolutely making investment. But I think, you know, when you think about it from the vendor perspective, and that's my bias. So I always think about, I treat all of the potential partners as really my customer. And when you think about it from that perspective, the things that matter most to vendors, number one, transparency. They need to understand exactly what our business model is, where we plan to make money and where we plan, don't make money. They need to know what we're really good at developing and what we're not so good at developing. And sort of where we draw the, the boundaries around that investment. I think, you know, a testament to that, for example, is tomorrow we're hosting a partner summit. >>So after this event, there are gonna be over 60 individuals, but they max two per per vendor. So we're gonna have over 35 vendors attending this event. And what they're gonna hear from is our entire management team is as deeply as we can and as open as we can. And you know, it, it's, it's, it's funny, you know, I think I saw this article in Forbes the other day about Cloudera. It was this, the title of the article was something like Spies Like Us. And it it, and it, what it highlighted was that some, some competitor of Cloudera had actually hired a, a, a competitive intelligence agency to go on and, and try to engage with, you know, and, and try to learn more about Cloudera. And so they went on to Cora, which we have a lot of active engineers on Cora. And they, you know, they went out and they asked a bunch of product related questions to our to, to someone on Cora. And our engineers immediately responded and they started being very transparent, completely open to what, what they're building and why they're building it. And the article basically summarized to say, Hey, you know what, you know, clearly some people aren't all that sophisticated in figuring out, you know, who they're talking to. And it's really important to do that. And they got the absolute wrong conclusion. Our engineers are actually encouraged and in fact rewarded for being extremely transparent in the market because we believe that it's transparency will ultimately allow us to be that platform vendor. >>And that's what attracts me. Jeff Hummer Bucker, who's active on core as well, he's recruiting there too. So you guys are out engaging the community. Yeah. So just let me just review, cuz this is cool that you're addressing this because Hortonworks and others, and I'll say the name Hortonworks has been pumping up the PR and creating a lot of noise around open and kind of Depositioning Cloudera. So you guys are completely open, a hundred percent Hadoop, open source, everything you build in, in every way, in every way. You have engineers building core, you've got tools and all the other stuff is being built in Cloudera then contributing into the community. >>Actually it's the other way around. We build it and the community@apache.org. So all of our technology is built@apache.org. It's, it's developed there. It's, it's, it's initially shared there. And then we have another team inside our company that pulls down bits from apache.org and then assembles them and integrates them. So it's really, it's a really key thing. And there's no, we do, we have no bits that we don't develop@apache.org that are part of cdh. So there, I mean there can be no mistake that everything that that is in CDH is everything we got. >>So CDH is free. >>It is free >>And every it's open source. It's open you >>Charge enterprise edition. That's the only thing that's different you guys charge >>Yeah. Which is your management console, right. >>Management >>Suite and all kinds of >>The tools. And that's not free and that's not open source. That's correct. Just to be clear. Yep. But so AER took us yesterday through, I don't know, half a dozen probably open source projects and then the one is the, the management console. And that's what you charge for, that's where you're gonna make money? >>Yeah. We, we manufacture, essentially we manufacture two products, but we sell one. So we manufacture the Quadera distribution, including Apache Duke, that's free. It's free. And then we all in open source and built it Apache and, and really heavily tested and well documented and, and, and well integrated. And then we also manufacture quadera Enterprise, which includes support and indemnities and warranties for that full featured CDH product and also includes the Quadra management suite. And >>That's a subscription. >>And that's a subscription. And so customers can, can run cdh, they can then buy and license Cloudera Enterprise and then someday if they decide they don't need Cloud Air Enterprise for whatever reason, if they're, if their team are scripting wizards and they've decided that they, you know, they don't need the extra opportunity for being able to track all of the things that Cloudier Enterprise allows 'em to, they can step off of cloud enterprise and continue to use full feature to do as they see >>Fit. So take an example of one of your partners that you announced this week. NetApp NetApp's gonna package your cdh CDH and the subscription Correct. To their, their customers. And then they're gonna let their channel either, you know, they'll pre bule it or do a reference architecture, you'll get paid for that subscription that's bundled. That's correct. Will make money off of its filers. Yes. And the customer gets a package solution. >>Exactly. Right. And in fact, that's another important thing that you know, is probably worth discussing, which is our go to market model. I don't know if you guys had a chance to talk with anyone yesterday on that, but I'm responsible for our channel strategy and one of the key things that we've agreed to as a, as a company is that we really are gonna go to market through channel partners. Yeah. >>We covered sgi, that was a great announcement. >>Yep, a >>Hundred percent >>As, as close as we can get. Okay. I mean that is our, he's >>Still doing the direct deals. You still have that belly to belly sales force because it's still early, right? So there's a mix of direct and indirects, not a pure >>Indirect, but as, and that's only, that's only as we're able to, until we're able to ramp up our partners fully, in which case we really want our, the current team that is working belly to belly to really support our partners. >>So all so VMware like, but I I wanted to ask >>You VMware, like NetApp, like very similar. >>Yes. Very, very NetApp. Like NetApp probably 75%, you know. Exactly. What are the similarities and differences with VMware in, in the ecosystem? You know it well, >>I do know it well. Yeah. I spent several years working at VMware and you know, I think, I mean the first and most obvious difference is that when you think, when I think about platform software in general, you know, there are a few different flavors of platform. One of the things that makes Hadoop very unique, very unique relative to other platforms is that it, not only is it Apache license, but it really is, it's dependent upon other external innovators to, to create the entire full value of the ecosystem. So, or, or you know, of the solution, right? So unlike for example, so like, let's take a platform like everyone's familiar with like Apple iTunes, right? What happens is Apple creates the platform and they put it kind of in the middle on top of and behind the scenes is the innovator, the app builder, he builds it, he publishes it on Apple, and then Apple controls all access to the >>Customer. Yep. >>That's not adu, right? Right. Let's take VMware or Red Hat for example. So in that case, they publish a platform they own and control the, the absolute structure and boundaries of what that platform is. And then on top of that application vendors build and then they deliver to the, the customer. But you know, at the end of the day, the, you know, the relationship really is, you know, from that external innovator straight down, and there's no, there's, you know, there's no way for them to really modify the platform. And you take kadu, which is a hundred percent Apache licensed to open source, and you really, you really open up the opportunity for vendors to take ADU as an input into their system and then deliver it straight to their customers or for customers themselves to say, I want straight up vanilla Hadoop, I'm gonna go this way and I'm gonna add on my own be app of applications. So you're, we're seeing all sorts of variants right now in the market. We're seeing software as a service being delivered that's based on Hadoop. There was a great announcement a few weeks ago from a company named Tidemark, previously known as Per Ferry, and they're taking all of cdh. They're, but they're, the customer doesn't know that they're, and what they're doing is they're delivering software as a, as a service based on adu. >>Yeah. So I mean, you know, we are psyched that you're clearing this up because obviously we're seeing, we saw all that stuff, but I really think that indirect strategy as a home run, I'm said it when we talked about the SGI thing, and it's accelerates you guys, you enable, but you know, channels is an interesting business. I mean the, you have to have pure transparency as you mentioned, but they need comp, people need confidence and, and they don't, they worry about competition. So channel conflict is always the big issue, right? Right. Is Cloudera gonna compete with us? So talk that, talk us through that, that strategy. So obviously the market's growing, new solutions are coming around the corner, These guys wanna make money. I mean channel, it's all about, you know, what have you done for me today? >>Right. That, that is exactly right. And you know what, that's, that's why we decided on the channel strategy specifically around our product is because we recognize that each and every single potential channel partner of ours can actually innovate themselves on top of and create differentiation. And we're not an obstacle to that process. So we provide our platform as an input and we're capable of managing that platform, but ultimately creating differentiation is all in the hands of our partners and we're there to help, but it gives them wide latitudes. So take for example, the differences between Dell and NetApp solution, they are very different reference architectures leveraging the exact same platform. >>Yeah. And they have to make money. I mean, the money making side of it is, you know, people have kind of, don't really talk about that, but, you know, channel partners loyalty is all about who can help them make cash. Right. Right. Exactly. What are you hearing there in terms of the ecosystem? Has the channels Bess and the partnerships or the more as size, what's the profile of your, of your partners? I mean, can you give us the breakdown of Sure. We have what you look like from Dell. We know Dell and NetApp, but they're gear guys. But, >>So a big part of our strategy is to work with IHVs and then Ihv resellers. So you're talking about companies like Dell, like sgi, like NetApp, for example, independent hardware manufacturers. Another part of our strategy though, and a key, a key requirement from our customers is to work with a whole variety of ISVs, particularly in the data management space. So you've got really marquee companies in the database space like IBM's Netezza or Terradata. You've got in companies like Informatica and Talent, you've got companies on the BI side, like Micro Strategy and Tableau. These kinds of technologies are currently in play at our customers that have made substantial investments. And ultimately they want to be able to continue to leverage them with the data platform, whichever data platform that they end up choosing. So we invest considerably there. A big part of that has been our Qera Connect partner program. >>It's an opportunity for us to help the customer to understand which technologies work and work well with, with our platform. It's also an opportunity for us to engage directly and assist the vendor. So one of the things that we created as part of that program is first off, immediate and absolute discounted access to any part of our training. Second, lots of free information, access to our world class knowledge base, access to our support team, direct access to our support team. The, the vendors also get access to a developer portal that would created specifically for them. So if, if you think about it this way, Hadoop gets built@apache.org, but solutions don't get built@apache.org. Right? So what we're really trying to help our vendors do is be able to develop their solutions by having real clear visibility to the API level points of Hadoop. They're not necessarily interested in, in trying to figure out how, how MR two works or, or contributing code to that. >>But they absolutely are interested in figuring out how to run and execute their software on top of a do. So when I think about the things that matter to create an attractive platform, and at the end of the day, that's what we're really trying to do, first and foremost is transparency, right? Second really ultimately is really clear visibility to the APIs and the documentation of that platform so that there's no ambiguity that the, the vendor, this is the user in this case, it's building a solution, can absolutely absorb all of that content really cleanly. And then ultimately, you know, I think it's customers, right? Users of the technology. And I think our download numbers are, they're, they're, there's something we're proud of. >>We, we are, we're hearing good feedback. I mean, the feedback we hear from folks is, yeah, I love how they take away the complexity of handling versions and whatnot. So, you know, I think totally is a great way, The CDH is a great bundle. You know, the questions that we have for you is what are you hearing about the other products, the ones you're actually selling? Does that create the lock in? So that's something that we asked Elmer directly, you know, is that the, is that the lock in and what happens when the deployments get so big? You know, >>I mean, the way, I >>Don't really see an issue there, but that's what people are afraid of. I mean, that's kind of the, it's more of fear. I mean, some people can use that fear and, and >>Play against. I think, I think what we've seen in other markets is that management tools are ultimately interchangeable. And the only way that we're gonna retain a customer is by out innovating the competition on the management side, the lock in, the lock in component, as you will, is not really part of our business model. It's very difficult to achieve with an Apache licensed platform and a management suite that sits on outside of that, that licensed artifact. So ultimately, if we don't owe innovate, we're gonna lose. So we're working on the innovation and that's, >>How's the hiring go? Oh, go ahead. >>I, I had a, I wanted to come back to that. You mentioned download numbers. Can you share the numbers >>With the others? I can't, I can't share them publicly, but what I can say is that they've been on an incredible trajectory. Okay. That, and what we've seen is month to month growth rates, every single month we continue to see really significant growth rates. >>And then I, I had a follow up question on, you talked about the, the partner program. How do you manage all those partners? How do you prioritize them? I mean, the, the hardware vendors, it's pretty easy. There's a few big whales, but the, the ISVs, they're, I mean, your phone, like John said, must be ringing off the hook. How do you juggle that and, and can you do it better than VMware, for example? >>Well, we do it, we handle the, the influx of partner interest in two ways. One, we've been relatively structured with the Quadra Connect partner program, and we make real investments there. So we have dedicated folks that are there to help. We have our engineering team that is actually feeding inputs, and we're, we're leveraging some of the same resources that we provide to our customers and feeding those directly to our partners as well. So that's one way that we handle it. But the other way, frankly, is, I mean, customers help here having access to and, and a real customer population, they help you set priorities pretty quickly. And so we're able to understand what we track in inside of our systems, which, which technologies our customers use. So we know, for example, what percentage of our customer base has has SaaS installed, and we'd like to use that with a, do we know which percentage of our customer base is currently running on Red Hat and which is not. So having core visibility, that helps us to prioritize. >>How about incentives? I mean, obviously channel businesses as, like I said, very fickle people, you know, you know the channel business, I spent, you know, almost a decade in, in HP's channel organization and you know, you have to provide soft dollars. There's a lot of kind of blocking and tackling. You guys are clearly building out that tier one with the SGIs of the world and other vendors, and then get the partner connect program for kinda everyone else who's gonna grow up into a tier one. Yeah. Training, soft dollars incentives. You guys have that going yet, or is the >>Roadmap? We do. And in fact, you know, in addition to the sort of more wide publicized relationships you see with companies like Dell and Cloudera, we're actually building a very successful network of independent ours. And the VAs in general. What we do is we prioritize and select ours based on the top level relationships that we have, because that really helps them to hone in. They've got validation from, for, for example, someone that sells resells. SGI is an organization that now is heard really loud and clear from sgi the, the specific platform configurations that they're gonna represent to their customers, and they ultimately wanna represent them directly. And how we make investments is we're, I mean, the investments we're making ultimately in our sales org, I'm gonna lose the word direct from that conversation because our sales org is being built to help our partners succeed. And I think that's where you're, >>The end game is to go completely indirect and have all your support go into managing that channel. What, what's the mix of revenue generation from your partners? Obviously as a, you know, with sgi they have pre-built channels that you're funneling in, you got NetApp and they're wrapping their products and services around it. How much is services and how much is a solution specifically? Do you have any visibility or a feel for that at this >>Point? I mean, services relative to, You mean for Cloudera particularly, or for our >>Partner? No, for the, for the part. I mean, if I'm a partner, I'm like, Hey, okay, I'm gonna use cdh. I'm on bundles. I don't mind paying you a wholesale if I'm gonna be able to throw off more cash on, you know, deployment and cloud and services, et cetera. And or if I'm a product manufacturer, a product, a solution I fund you in. I need to have that step >>Up a absolutely great question. So depending upon the partner we're dealing with, they like to either monetize or generate their revenue in different ways. So for example, NetApp, NetApp is a company that has very limited services, and their, their focus is a business is really on delivering hardware and software configured together. And they, they rely heavily on a services channel to fulfill, you take in, in contrast to a company like, for example, Dell, which has a very successful services business and really is excited about having service offerings around Hadoop. So it depends upon the company. But when we talk about our VAR channel in particular, one of the things that's a, in an internal acronym, but I'll share it publicly here. We, we call our, our supervisors and what makes them super and why, why we've selected the, the, the organizations that we are selecting right now to be our bar is that they not only can fulfill orders for hardware and software, particularly data management or infrastructure software, but they also have a services team on hand because we recognize that there is a services opportunity with every Hadoop deployment. And we want our partners to have that. So as an organization, we're structuring our, our services staff to facilitate and enable our partners not to be sold >>Directly. Okay. So that's the follow up that I had tomorrow when the partners ask, Okay, what do you want to be when you're really growing up? Is it services, is it software? >>Is it Carter is a software company, Crewing through, >>Oh, er we kind of got ett, well, he didn't say it, but we said it's a operating system. Yeah. >>So given that, so given that, I mean, you can make money on services, right? People need services. Okay, great. >>And partners will make that money for >>Us. And, and you know, early on you, you had to do some of that and you're, you've been very clear about where it's going. It's hard to make money in software when you're given all the software away for free. Well, >>We're not giving all >>The software. I know you've got that piece now, but, but here's my question. As ADU goes into the enterprise, which is clearly doing, is that that whole bundling, like what you're doing with NetApp is that really ultimately how you're gonna start to, to monetize and, and successfully monetize your software, >>Is by pushing it through >>Yeah. Packaging and that bundling that solution, in other words, our enterprise customer is gonna be more receptive to that solution package than say the, the fridge that has been using Hadoop for the last >>Two or three years. I think there's no question about it. If you, if you look at what Quadra Enterprise does, I don't know if, if you've had a chance to attend any of the sessions, maybe where Quadra Enterprise is, is currently being demonstrated. >>We just had Alex Williams as about on the air. Did a review, >>Okays >>Been going good and impressed with it? >>Yeah, there's no question about it. And I, I don't, and Alex probably hasn't seen the new version that, you know, our team is working on and it's, you know, quietly working on in the background. Incredible, incredible developments in, And that's really a function of when you have direct access to so many customers and you're getting so much input and feedback and they're the kinds of access to the kinds of customers we ultimately wanna serve. So real enterprises, what you get is really fast innovation from a really talented team that knows to do well. I mean, we are years ahead on the management side. Absolutely. Years ahead. And you know, I, so I was a guy who worked at VMware for several years, and I can tell you that while the hypervisor itself was, was a core component to VMware success, the monetization strategy was very squarely around vCenter. Yeah. Yes. Out. And we're not ignorant to that. Yeah. >>You can learn a lot from your VMware experience cause absolutely. The, the market changed significantly. And, you know, >>There were free hypervisors available all of a sudden. VMware itself had a free hypervisor. We had, we had VMware server and we had also our VMware player products, right? And those were all free. And they were very good technology. They were the best available in the market for free. And they were better, in my opinion, they were better than anything else. Open or not. No, our time >>Too, since still >>Are, they were, they, they were, they were superior products in every way. But yet how VMware was successful was recognizing that in the interest of running a production environment with an sola, you need management software. And they've also built the best management software. And there's no question that we understand that strategy and >>A phenomenal ecosystem. I mean, there's the >>Similarities, right? They did. And you, and the, and the ecosystem was in, in large part predicated on transparency act, very clear access to the APIs and a willingness to help partners be successful with those APIs. And ultimately drawing a very tight box about what the company wanted to do and didn't want to do. >>I mean, look, you're not, you're not gonna lose friends when you make people money. That's my philosophy, right? I agree. So when you're in that business where you can come in and enable a channel and have options on your growth strategy, which you do, I mean, you can say, Okay, bundling, I can go, you know, I can have this sold direct, or at least as long as you've got the options, you can grow with that market. So, you know, again, the, it's a money making opportunity for the partnerships, but there's >>More than that, right? Because you mentioned Apple, iTunes, Oracle's another example. And the way you make money with Apple and the way you make money with Oracle is different than the way you make money with VMware and presumably Cloudera. >>Yeah, I mean, our strategy is, if you make this base platform easier to install, more reliable, and you make it ultimately, you know, really rock solid from an integration standpoint, more people are gonna use it. So what happens when more people use it? First thing that happens is more solu, it's out there. So it's more solutions get built. When more solutions get built, then you see more clusters get developed. When more clusters are out there, they start to move into production. And then they, they need an sla when they need an sla, Cloudera and Enterprise gets purchased. But along that path, when those solutions got built, guess what else happened? More cloud units got sold, more servers got sold, more networking. Gear got sold, more services got created. You get, you get ultimately more operating systems got sold, more databases, got data into them, more BI clients got created. The ecosystem is deep and rich, and a lot of people stand to make money hop >>In people. The water's great. >>What about, what about support? Okay, so, you know, the other guys are saying, We're just gonna make money on support. I mean support, You guys still are doing support, right? I mean, you're selling >>Support. There's no question. Quad Enterprise contains two things, right? The management suite and support this is, this is not uncomplicated technology and having a world class support team is of value and customers do want to pay for that value. But we, we believe that support in and of itself is not enough. And that ultimately, when you wanna deliver an sla, being able to call when you have a problem is the wrong approach. You want to be proactive and understand the problem well in advance of it actually occurring. That's really important. When, for example, if you're a customer, a lot of our customers have a data pipeline that >>They, they're building out basically. I mean they're, it's, it's new and emerging. So they're building out, It's not just support. They need other tools. >>Yeah. And it building out I think is an understatement for some, where some of our customers are. I mean, when you have a thousand node cluster that you're operating Yeah, Yeah. To, that's mission critical to your business. I don't think that's building out anymore. I think that's an investment in a technology that's mission critical. And what you wanna see when you have a mission critical technology is you wanna know early and often when a problem may emerge. Not, Oh, oh my gosh, we have a problem now I need to go, you know, phone a friend, phone a friend is, is kind of a last resort. We offer that. But what we really do is, and that's the, that's the beau, That's why we don't decouple our support from our management suite. It's not about phone a friend. It's about understanding the operation of your cluster the entire way through 24. >>And the other op the other thing that people don't talk about in the support is that with open source, a lot of support gets handled in the community as well. So like That's right. So in a way, you're already pre cannibalized with the community >>By us and by others. Absolutely. But you, you'll never see to that Forbes article I referenced earlier. You will never, you will not see our, our engineers are not trained to withhold information and under any circumstances to anyone free or paying. Yeah. This is about getting, You >>Don't wanna hold back your business. I mean, you have nothing to hide. It's open rights. >>Open source. It's open. And we're here to help. We're here to help. Whether you're paying us or not, >>This is value to that anticipatory >>Remediation. Yeah. That's what you're packaging and clearing up the air. Great. Great cube guest, you're awesome on the cube. Gonna have you more on because great to get the info out there. Really impressed with the channel strategy. Love the love the growth strategy, the cloud air. You guys are really impressive. I'm really, really impressed to see that you guys got everything pumping on all cylinders, Kirk, and you are cranking out on the business execution. We're in the team playing this chest mask open. Perfect. So great. Congratulations. Great. Thanks. You guys just in the financing. >>Oh, thank you as >>Well. Hey, Ed from Cloudera, clearing it up here inside the cube. We're gonna take a quick break and we'll be right back with more video. >>Thanks guys. All right.