(upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCube's extended hours. Things are starting to settle down. Dinner has started being served. We're here with Prince Alvarez, has an invitation for the VIP gala. Part of Monaco leaning into crypto, we're reporting on it. Not our normal set, more of an after hours vibe. We're here with Iman Bashir, found of Craftly.ai. Thanks for coming on theCube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So I love your story. You're a coder, built some code, started a company. Now you're the CEO. You hired some people to wrap around support you. Now you're running the show. What a great story. How did you get here? Give me the origination story >> Basically, for as long as I can remember, I've been an entrepreneur. My parents have stories of me being too young to babysit, but I would create a babysitting agency and have sent babysitters out or I would sell my lunches. Throughout school, I would always find some kind of entrepreneurship endeavor. And when I came out of school, I kept finding myself lacking the necessary skills to really do a startup. And so that's when I discovered coding. And I took myself through coding boot camps, and I started websites and I'm like, no, I want something more perpetual. I want to make money when I sleep. And then from there I found search engine optimization. So how to get to the top of Google. And I started working really quickly with like really big companies. And immediately I realized my full budget's spent on copywriting. And so that's when I discovered you could have that written by AI. Not going to replace you, but it's there to enhance you. And so built an AI copywriter. >> And so what does it do? >> Basically you type in a couple words. It could be anything, any use case. So product descriptions for eCommerce, blog articles for any company really, web copy, even does songs. Or your next breakup text, which we'll get to that. But it does basically anything. You type in a couple words and it generates text for you. All original and plagiarism free. >> Okay. Can you write our blog post for us? >> Yeah. >> Say, hey, we're covering the crypto-con in Monaco. >> Could even do a summary of this interview, yeah. >> Well, we get that transcribed in the cloud. We'll get that in a second. First. I love the story. Okay. So now you're the CEO. Great application. So imagine you're scraping pages. You looking at summaries, doing any extraction, looking at word combinations. What were some of the tech behind it? >> We use, we leverage a bunch of different models. We use GPT3, which was founded by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, all major players that basically allows you to pull 175 billion parameters of data. Anything before it was 2 billion. So now you're talking, I'm able to pull like basically the whole internet. And from there we added different models to provide learning and to get the best quality AI out there. There's a lot of bad quality. And so from there, we're able to take it, mix and match, and have it formulate the best things. >> So where are you now? So you're in your journey, the CEO, how many people in your staff, what's the status? >> So right now we have eight full time people and a bunch of contractors. Before I was the lead developer. But now as the company's growing, I have to take a backseat and be more in a sales role versus being the one to develop it every single day. And so right now we're hiring more developers as we go. >> So the funding options must be off the charts. Offers coming in left and right. >> So tons, but definitely we're in a different market environment than we were two months ago. So as you may have heard, crypto's down, possibly, but so we were - >> On temporary basis, not truly down. >> But in the beginning, I wanted to hold as much equity as possible by bootstrapping, proving concept, doing it. I have a lot of the background and skillset to have it there. So I hired the best people. And once we prove concept, we were prepared to raise and then the market kind of slowed us down. So right now, luckily our company is self-funded and supporting itself. >> Good. >> So we're making money. We're profitable. >> What you want to do. >> Yeah. >> As much as possible. >> Yeah. And so right now we do, we are looking for growth options, funding options. We're talking to a lot of people. That's why I'm here in Monaco. But it's a good place to not be desperate. It's a good place to not need the money, but. >> You know, I always said when I was running companies and to my team, my a friend gave me great advice. You can't go out of business when you have money in the bank. >> Yeah. >> So don't run out of money. >> Basically. Luckily our product, it's a subscription basis and it's a monthly, so we're making money immediately. >> All right. So I got to ask. What's the biggest challenge you've had and putting this because it's great, great story. You're really impressive. Great vision. You coded your own product. Now you got put the team around you. >> Yeah. >> What's been the challenge. How have you handled the grind? Cuz it's, the joy in the grind can be fun. >> Yeah. >> But then it gets complicated. Start adding people to the mix and you got to get milestones. You're self-funding. Which by the way, self-funding is the hardest part. >> Yeah. >> It is difficult. >> Yeah. >> Most people think like raising a big round is the top of the mountain. No, no, no, no. Self-funding is the A-1 player. That's an A play move, A player move right there. >> Definitely. I would say if I were to go back I would get funded a lot earlier, especially with the market conditions eight months ago. But one of the biggest struggles I would, I feel I have faced was just being a younger founder. Sometimes you're, there's imposter syndrome in your, within yourself. But otherwise, a lot of times people don't take you seriously immediately. Everyone always assumes that I'm someone's girlfriend at an event. Or I, they say that's cute when talking about your business. And so you have to deal with that. Yeah. Or one time I was at a conference and someone asked how I funded the company. And I said, I created ancillary revenue streams to be able to support it. And their response was, oh, I love it when my OnlyFans funds my business. And that, immediately, >> Oh my God, that is... That is total. >> But now I use it as fire to ignite me and kind of prove everyone wrong. But I definitely would say that the journey of falling in love with the journey and realizing that no matter how big you get, your problems only get bigger. So it's choosing the right problems to solve and realizing that every day there's going to be a fire. Just living in the moment. >> Well, you're such an inspiration to me and anyone. I'm going to share your story because what you just talked about, a lot of people, being a startup, you're eating glass, you're falling on your face. You're tripping all the time. Hopefully you don't get hurt. But when people make comments like that to you, given how smart you are, and how brilliant you are, how beautiful you are, that is just unacceptable. And I think that is just a really weird thing. Like that has to change. It's like, its so unacceptable. >> I feel like the world's heading in the right direction and it's up to people to use those setbacks to ignite them and push them forward, which I'm trying to. >> You know, I was, I read a book about trauma and how trauma defines you, right? >> Yeah. >> And trauma is little trauma, family trauma and and trauma's defined >> All perspective. >> Trauma's defined as not like, oh, something dire, like little things could be like little traumas. Oh yeah, I was offended by my brother. This happened there. So experiences define you. >> Yeah. >> And I think one of the things that you just mentioned is you've made it stronger, made you stronger. >> Yeah. >> The comments made you stronger. >> Oh, I definitely see, even everything that I've been through. And this is the same for a lot of first time founders. All my previous companies I've had the blessing of working with like an older mentor that had done it before. This was the first where I kind of was on my own. And when you do that, now, if I look back on the last year and a half, I could probably do the same thing in a week. Once you do it the first time you really do learn. >> I'll just tell you. You're brilliant, beautiful. You're very impressive. >> Thank you. >> Theresa Carlson, who used to run all Amazon's web services, business and public sector. She's a Renaissance woman. She's an amazing friend. Great power. That's she always, she always says to me, and she's like you know, my father was a basketball coach. I can handle with those men. And she would say, but she said it with proud, like leaning in like, hey, that's life. I'll take what life gives me. And I think that's a lesson we're seeing more of. Because you're seeing a lot more women in tech. I did 30 interviews in Europe, the past March 7th. Okay. In three weeks. >> Yeah. >> So a lot of stuff. Well, thanks for coming on. We got the events starting. I'll let you go. Thanks for sharing your story. >> Thanks for having me. >> Well, what's next for you? What's next? >> Next is, I'm going to I'm going to build the word processor of the future and be the future of writing. >> Okay. And thank you for coming out. >> There you go. I appreciate it. All right. This is theCube coverage here at the event. we'll be back with more after this break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to the first interview of theCube in our Boston area studio for 2020. And to help me kick it off, Jeremy Daly who is the host of Serverless Chats as well as runs the Serverless Day Boston. Jeremy, saw you at reInvent, way back in 2019, and we'd actually had some of the people in the community that were like hey, "I think you guys like actually live and work right near each other." >> Right. >> And you're only about 20 minutes away from our office here, so thanks so much for making the long journey here, and not having to get on a plane to join us here. >> Well, thank you for having me. >> All right, so as Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes says, "It's a new decade, but we don't have any base on the moon, "we don't have flying cars that general people can use, "but we do have serverless." >> And our robot vacuum cleaners. >> We do have robot vacuum cleaners. >> Which are run by serverless, as a matter of fact. >> A CUBE alum on the program would be happy that we do get to mention there. So yeah, you know serverless there are things like the iRobot, as well as Alexa, or some of the things that people, you know usually when I'm explaining to people what this is, and they don't understand it, it's like, Oh, you've used Alexa, well those are the functions underneath, and you think about how these things turn on, and off, a little bit like that. But maybe, we don't need to get into the long ontological discussion or everything, but you know you're a serverless hero, so you know give us a little bit, what your hearing from people, what are some of the exciting use cases out there, and you know where serverless is being used in that maturity today. >> Yeah, I mean well, so the funny thing about serverless and the term serverless itself, and I do not want to get into a long discussion about this, obviously. I actually wrote a post last year that was called stop calling everything serverless, because basically people are calling everything serverless. So it really, what it, what I look at it as, is something where, it just makes it really easy for developers to abstract away that back end infrastructure, and not having to worry about setting up Kubernetes, or going through the process of setting up virtual machines and installing software is just, a lot of that stuff is kind of handled for you. And I think that is enabled, a lot of companies, especially start-ups is a huge market for serverless, but also enterprises. Enabled them to give more power to their developers, and be able to look at new products that they want to build, new services they want to tackle or even old services that they need to, you know that may have some stability issues or things like long running ETL tasks, and other things like that, that they found a way to sort of find the preferal edges of these monolithic applications or these mainframes that they are using and find ways to run very small jobs, you know using functions as a server, something like that. And so, I see a lot of that, I think that is a big use case. You see a lot of large companies doing. Obviously, people are building full fledged applications. So, yes, the web facing user application, certainly a thing. People are building API's, you got API Gateway, they just released the new HEDP API which makes it even faster. To run those sort of things, this idea of cold starts, you know in AWS trying to get rid of all that stuff, with the new VPC networking, and some of the things they are doing there. So you have a lot of those type of applications that people are building as well. But it really runs the gambit, there are things all across the board that you can do, and pretty much anything you can do with the traditional computing environment, you can do with a serverless computing environment. And obviously that's focusing quite a bit on the functions as a service side of things, which is a very tiny part of serverless, if you want to look at it, you know sort of the broader picture, this service full or managed services, type approach. And so, that's another thing that you see, where you used to have companies setting up you know, mySQL databases and clusters trying to run these things, or even worse, Cassandra rings, right. Trying to do these things and manage this massive amount of infrastructure, just so that they could write a few records to a database and read them back for their application. And that would take months sometimes, for them to get it setup and even more time to try to keep running them. So this sort of revolution of managed services and all these things we get now, whether that the things like managed elastic search or elastic search cloud doing that stuff for you, or Big Table and Dynamo DB, and Manage Cassandra, whatever those things are. I'm just thinking a lot easier for developers to just say hey, I need a database, and okay, here it is, and I don't have to worry about the infrastructure at all. So, I think you see a lot of people, and a lot of companies that are utilizing all of these different services now, and essentially are no longer trying to re-invent the wheel. >> So, a couple of years ago, I was talking to Andy Jassy, at an interview with theCube, and he said, "If I was to build AWS today, "I would've built it on serverless." And from what I've seen over the last two or three years or so, Amazon is rebuilding a lot of there servers underneath. It's very interesting to watch that platform changing. I think it's had some ripple effect dynamics inside the company 'cause Amazon is very well known for their two pizza teams and for all of their products are there, but I think it was actually in a conversation with you, we're talking about in some ways this new way of building things is, you know a connecting fabric between the various groups inside of Amazon. So, I love your view point that we shouldn't just call everything serverless, but in many ways, this is a revolution and a new way of thinking about building things and therefore, you know there are some organizational and dynamical changes that happen, for an Amazon, but for other people that start using it. >> Yeah, well I mean I actually was having a conversation with a Jay Anear, whose one of the product owners for Lambda, and he was saying to me, well how do we sell serverless. How do we tell people you know this is what the next way to do things. I said, just, it's the way, right. And Amazon is realized this, and part of the great thing about dog fooding your own product is that you say, okay I don't like the taste of this bit, so we're going to change it to make it work. And that's what Amazon has continued to do, so they run into limitations with serverless, just like us early adopters, run into limitations, and they say, we'll how do we make it better, how do we fix it. And they have always been really great to listening to customers. I complain all the time, there's other people that complain all the time, that say, "Hey, I can't do this." And they say, "Well what if we did it this way, and out of that you get things like Lambda Destinations and all different types of ways, you get Event Bridge, you get different ways that you can solve those problems and that comes out of them using their own services. So I think that's a huge piece of it, but that helps enable other teams to get past those barriers as well. >> Jeremy, I'm going to be really disappointed if in 2020, I don't see a T-shirt from one of the Serverless Days, with the Mandalorian on it, saying, "Serverless, this is the way." Great, great, great marketing opportunity, and I do love that, because some of the other spaces, you know we're not talking about a point product, or a simple thing we do, it is more the way of doing things, it's just like I think about Cybersecurity. Yes, there are lots of products involved here but, you know this is more of you know it's a methodology, it needs to be fully thought of across the board. You know, as to how you do things, so, let's dig in a little bit. At reInvent, there was, when I went to the serverless gathering, it was serverless for everyone. >> Serverless for everyone, yes. >> And there was you know, hey, serverless isn't getting talked, you know serverless isn't as front and center as some people might think. They're some people on the outside look at this and they say, "Oh, serverless, you know those people "they have a religion, and they go so deep on this." But I thought Tim Wagner had a really good blog post, that came out right after reInvent, and what we saw is not only Amazon changing underneath the way things are done, but it feel that there's a bridging between what's happening in Kubernetes, you see where Fargate is, Firecracker, and serverless and you know. Help us squint through that, and understand a little bit, what your seeing, what your take was at reInvent, what you like, what you were hoping to see and how does that whole containerization, and Kubernetes wave intersect with what we're doing with serverless? >> Yeah, well I mean for some reason people like Kubernetes. And I honestly, I don't think there is anything wrong with it, I think it's a great container orchestration system, I think containers are still a very important part of the workloads that we are putting into a cloud, I don't know if I would call them cloud native, exactly, but I think what we're seeing or at least what I'm seeing that I think Amazon is seeing, is they're saying people are embracing Kubernetes, and they are embracing containers. And whether or not containers are ephemeral or long running, which I read a statistic at some point, that was 63% of containers, so even running on Kubernetes, or whatever, run for less than 10 minutes. So basically, most computing that's happening now, is fairly ephemeral. And as you go up, I think it's 15 minutes or something like that, I think it's 70% or 90% or whatever that number is, I totally got that wrong. But I think what Amazon is doing is they're trying to basically say, look we were trying to sell serverless to everyone. We're trying to sell this idea of look managed services, managed compute, the idea that we can run even containers as close to the metal as possible with something like Fargate which is what Firecracker is all about, being able to run virtual machines basically, almost you know right on the metal, right. I mean it's so close that there's no level of abstraction that get in the way and slow things down, and even though we're talking about milliseconds or microseconds, it's still something and there's efficiencies there. But I think what they looked at is, they said look at we are not Apple, we can't kill Flash, just because we say we're not going to support it anymore, and I think you mention this to me in the past where the majority of Kubernetes clusters that were running in the Public Cloud, we're running in Amazon anyways. And so, you had using virtual machines, which are great technology, but are 15 years old at this point. Even containerization, there's more problems to solve there, getting to the point where we say, look you want to take this container, this little bit of code, or this small service and you want to just run this somewhere. Why are we spinning up virtual containers. Why are we using 15 or 10 year old technology to do that. And Amazon is just getting smarter about it. So Amazon says hay, if we can run a Lambda function on Firecracker, and we can run a Fargate container on Firecracker, why can't we run, you know can we create some pods and run some pods for Kubernetes on it. They can do that. And so, I think for me, I was disappointed in the keynotes, because I don't think there was enough serverless talk. But I think what they're trying to do, is there trying to and this is if I put my analyst hat on for a minute. I think they're trying to say, the world is at Kubernetes right now. And we need to embrace that in a way, that says we can run your Kubernetes for you, a lot more efficiently and without you having to worry about it than if you use Google or if you use some other cloud provider, or if you run on-prem. Which I think is the biggest competitor to Amazon is still on-prem, especially in the enterprise world. So I see them as saying, look we're going to focus on Kubernetes, but as a way that we can run it our way. And I think that's why, Fargate and Kubernetes, or the Kubernetes for Fargate, or whatever that new product is. Too many product names at AWS. But I think that's what they are trying to do and I think that was the point of this, is to say, "Listen you can run your Kubernetes." And Claire Legore who showed that piece at the keynote, Vernor's keynote that was you know basically how quickly Fargate can scale up Kubernetes, you know individual containers, Kubernetes, as opposed to you know launching new VM's or EC2 instances. So I thought that was really interesting. But that was my overall take is just that they're embracing that, because they think that's where the market is right now, and they just haven't yet been able to sell this idea of serverless even though you are probably using it with a bunch of things anyways, at least what they would consider serverless. >> Yeah, to part a little bit from the serverless for a second. Talk about multi-cloud, it was one of the biggest discussions, we had in 2019. When I talk to customers that are using Kubernetes, one of the reasons that they tell me they're doing it, "Well, I love Amazon, I really like what I'm doing, "but if I needed to move something, it makes it easier." Yes, there are some underlying services I would have to re-write, and I'm looking at all those. I've talked to customers that started with Kubernetes, somewhere other than Amazon, and moved it to Amazon, and they said it did make my life easier to be able to do that fundamental, you know the container piece was easy move that piece of it, but you know the discussion of multi-cloud gets very convoluted, very easily. Most customers run it when I talk to them, it's I have an application that I run, in a cloud, sometimes, there's certain, you know large financials will choose two of everything, because that's the way they've always done things for regulation. And therefore they might be running the same application, mirrored in two different clouds. But it is not follow the sun, it is not I wake up and I look at the price of things, and deploy it to that. And that environment it is a little bit tougher, there's data gravity, there's all these other concerns. But multi-cloud is just lots of pieces today, more than a comprehensive strategy. The vision that I saw, is if multi-cloud is to be a successful strategy, it should be more valuable than the sum of its pieces. And I don't see many examples of that yet. What do you see when it comes to multi-cloud and how does that serverless discussion fit in there? >> I think your point about data gravity is the most important thing. I mean honestly compute is commoditized, so whether your running it in a container, and that container runs in Fargate or orchestrated by Kubernetes, or runs on its own somewhere, or something's happening there, or it's a fast product and it's running on top of K-native or it's running in a Lambda function or in an Azure function or something like that. Compute itself is fairly commoditized, and yes there's wiring that's required for each individual cloud, but even if you were going to move your Kubernetes cluster, like you said, there's re-writes, you have to change the way you do things underneath. So I look at multi-cloud and I think for a large enterprise that has a massive amount of compliance, regulations and things like that they have to deal with, yeah maybe that's a strategy they have to embrace, and hopefully they have the money and tech staff to do that. I think the vast majority of companies are going to find that multi-cloud is going to be a completely wasteful and useless exercise that is essentially going to waste time and money. It's so hard right now, keeping up with everything new that comes out of one cloud right, try keeping up with everything that comes out of three clouds, or more. And I think that's something that doesn't make a lot of sense, and I don't think you're going to see this price gauging like we would see with something. Probably the wrong term to use, but something that we would see, sort of lock-in that you would see with Oracle or with Microsoft SQL, some of those things where the licensing became an issue. I don't think you're going to see that with cloud. And so, what I'm interested in though in terms of the term multi-cloud, is the fact that for me, multi-cloud really where it would be beneficial, or is beneficial is we're talking about SaaS vendors. And I look at it and I say, look it you know Oracle has it's own cloud, and Google has it's own cloud, and all these other companies have their own cloud, but so does Salesforce, when you think about it. So does Twilio, even though Twilio runs inside AWS, really its I'm using that service and the AWS piece of it is abstracted, that to me is a third party service. Stripe is a third-party service. These are multi-cloud structure or SaaS products that I'm using, and I'm going to be integrating with all those different things via API's like we've done for quite some time now. So, to me, this idea of multi-cloud is simply going to be, you know it's about interacting with other products, using the right service for the right job. And if your duplicating your compute or you're trying to write database services or something like that that you can somehow share with multiple clouds, again, I don't see there being a huge value, except for a very specific group of customers. >> Yeah, you mentioned the term cloud-native earlier, and you need to understand are you truly being cloud-native or are you kind of cloud adjacent, are you leveraging a couple of things, but you're really, you haven't taken advantage of the services and the promise of what these cloud options can offer. All right, Jeremy, 2020 we've turned the calendar. What are you looking at, you know you're planning, you got serverless conference, Serverless Days-- >> Serverless Days Boston. >> Boston, coming up-- >> April 6th in Cambridge. >> So give us a little views to kind of your view point for the year, the event itself, you got your podcast, you got a lot going on. >> Yeah, so my podcast, Serverless Chats. You know I talk to people that are in the space, and we usually get really really technical. So if you're a serverless geek or you like that kind of stuff definitely listen to that. But yeah, but 2020 for me though, this is where I see what is happened to serverless, and this goes back to my "Stop calling everything serverless" post, was this idea that we keep making serverless harder. And so, as a someone whose a serverless purist, I think at this point. I recognize and it frustrates me that it is so difficult now to even though we're abstracting away running that infrastructure, we still have to be very aware of what pieces of the infrastructure we are using. Still have setup the SQS Queue, still have to setup Event Bridge. We still have to setup the Lambda function and API gateways and there's services that make it easier for us, right like we can use a serverless framework, or the SAM framework, or ARCH code or architect framework. There's a bunch of these different ones that we can use. But the problem is that it's still very very tough, to understand how to stitch all this stuff together. So for me, what I think we're going to see in 2020, and I know there is hints for this serverless framework just launched their components. There's other companies that are doing similar things in the space, and that's basically creating, I guess what I would call an abstraction as a service, where essentially it's another layer of abstraction, on top of the DSL's like Terraform or Cloud Formation, and essentially what it's doing is it's saying, "I want to launch an API that does X-Y-Z." And that's the outcome that I want. Understanding all the best practices, am I supposed to use Lambda Destinations, do I use DLQ's, what should I throttle it at? All these different settings and configurations and knobs, even though they say that there's not a lot of knobs, there's a lot of knobs that you can turn. Encapsulating that and being able to share that so that other people can use it. That in and of itself would be very powerful, but where it becomes even more important and I think definitely from an enterprise standpoint, is to say, listen we have a team that is working on these serverless components or abstractions or whatever they are, and I want Team X to be able to use, I want them to be able to launch an API. Well you've got security concerns, you've got all kinds of things around compliance, you have what are the vetting process for third-party libraries, all that kind of stuff. If you could say to Team X, hey listen we've got this component, or this piece of, this abstracted piece of code for you, that you can take and now you can just launch an API, serverless API, and you don't have to worry about any of the regulations, you don't have to go to the attorneys, you don't have to do any of that stuff. That is going to be an extremely powerful vehicle for companies to adopt things quickly. So, I think that you have teams now that are experimenting with all of these little knobs. That gets very confusing, it gets very frustrating, I read articles all the time, that come out and I read through it, and this is all out of date, because things have changed so quickly and so if you have a way that your teams, you know and somebody who stays on top of the learning this can keep these things up to date, follow the most, you know leading practices or the best practices, whatever you want to call them. I think that's going to be hugely important step from making it to the teams that can adopt serverless more quickly. And I don't think the major cloud vendors are doing anything in this space. And I think SAM is a good idea, but basically SAM is just a re-write of the serverless framework. Whereas, I think that there's a couple of companies who are looking at it now, how do we take this, you know whatever, this 1500 line Cloud Formation template, how do we boil that down into two or three lines of configuration, and then a little bit of business logic. Because that's where we really want to get to. It's just we're writing business logic, we're no where near there right now. There's still a lot of stuff that has to be done, around configuration and so even though it's nice to say, hey we can just write some business logic and all the infrastructure is handled for us. The infrastructure is handled for us, if we configure it correctly. >> Yeah, really remind me some of the general thread we've been talking about, Cloud for a number of years is, remember back in the early days, is cloud is supposed to be inexpensive and easy to use, and of course in today's world, it isn't either of those things. So serverless needs to follow those threads, you know love some of those view points Jeremy. I want to give you the final word, you've got your Serverless Day Boston, you got your podcast, best way to get in touch with you, and keep up with all you're doing in 2020. >> Yeah, so @Jeremy_daly on Twitter. I'm pretty active on Twitter, and I put all my stuff out there. Serverless Chats podcast, you can just find, serverlesschats.com or any of the Pod catchers that you use. I also publish a newsletter that basically talks about what I'm talking about now, every week called Off by None, which is, collects a bunch of serverless links and gives them some IoPine on some of them, so you can go to offbynone.io and find that. My website is jeremydaly.com and I blog and keep up to date on all the kind of stuff that I do with serverless there. >> Jeremy, great content, thanks so much for joining us on theCube. Really glad and always love to shine a spotlight here in the Boston area too. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm Stu Miniman. You can find me on the Twitter's, I'm just @Stu thecube.net is of course where all our videos will be, we'll be at some of the events for 2020. Look for me, look for our co-hosts, reach out to us if there's an event that we should be at, and as always, thank you for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering com vault go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of day one of convo go and 19 from Colorado. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu minimum and we have a cube alumni back with us. Arch, not van Venkatraman. You are the research manager for storage and data center for IDC. Welcome back. Thank you. Always a pleasure. Likewise, so here we are. Day one of con BOGO, lots of stuff. Nutrition's I stopped coming out in the last day and a half or so, but also lots of momentum that really kind of the dust kicked up when Sanjay Mirchandani took over the home from Bob hammer just about nine months ago. You've been covering combo for about three years. Just love to get your perspective on the last three years and what you've seen particularly in the last nine months. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. I've been tracking them for three years and they've been slowly making that pivot to the cloud world to changing how they're pricing to, you know, to really break free from that perception that they're very traditional, they're very cumbersome, they're expensive, they're trying to break through that and hiring Sanjay was kind of validation that Hey we are committed to the future and Sanjay comes from this very agile DevOps seed, open sores, containerized property worlds. >>So he, he is new culture and Sandra came in and he started, I think he started making a lot more changes. We saw that their journey to the cloud was a lot more accelerated and they're starting to talk this new language that is attracting developers. So they talk about cloud native technologies. They're talking about database and data as the bottleneck in development life cycle, which is all new music to develop us ears. And then that means you're going to bring in data management, which is a huge issue right to the developer strategy, right to the boardroom strategy. That's where it needs to be because data is actually at the heart of what companies are doing. And we keep talking about speed of fins, speed of development and speed of applications. I think it's time we start talking about speed of intelligence and speed of insights because that's what's going to give companies a competitive difference. >>And that's what Sanjay brought in in the last nine months. And I was tracking the Hedwig acquisition as well and a lot of companies, a lot of people who I spoke to here were extremely excited about what Hedwig brings into the table and there was a lot of interest in what they bring in. So I think Sanjay brought in a new culture to come ball and he cemented that new culture with Hedwig because with Hedwig they acquired that new startup culture as well. So it's really coming together of a lot of new culture and that's going to overpower the old culture and going to bring a lot transformation within. >>So as arch and I, but I'd love to get your insights into how that that changed and you said, right. Do you know Sandra came from puppet? We talked to them earlier today about moving faster and CIC D and all this wonderful things. But how that aligned with customers. We talked to customers that are seven or 10 years working with convolve inside the organization. You know the person that owned the backup and recovery process, you know, how familiar are they with their developer team and how that's coming together in an organization. So is Convolt meeting the customers where they are? Are they skating to the puck? How does that alignment? >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's, it's imperative that come moved and a lot of traditional data protection vendors move because customers are moving as well and they are forced to move because they are seeing lot of onslaught of data. Data's corporate data is growing 50 to 60% every year. That's just business data. So they're grappling with data growth and they're expected to do more with less and data is fragmented everywhere. So they are forced to make that change as well. So they are employing data protection officers, but at the same time they're also employing data scientists and newer data model architects to do new things with data because they are under pressure to deliver that better customer experiences. So companies are going through that change and we, in August we did a research and asked organizations, are you happy with your existing data protection tools and are you going to change it? >>And interestingly, 60% of those who are operating in multicloud environments want to change their data protection environment. And that shows because until now there was this huge power of incumbency, right? I will, I'm okay with this, I'll probably buy the next version of this and try and do iterative improvements. But now companies realize that this data growth and fragmentation and multicloud environment represents a new frontier and they need to move from this thinking that they've had and they're willing to change and work with the newer kind of companies that provide them what they want around unification and simplification. >>Yeah, I think you brought up some great points there. We've found when we talked to customers, they seem to be more open than ever to try something new. I kind of wonder if that's why metallic almost has a separate brand, a separate web website. It is a Convult venture because you know Combalt has incumbency and it has a pedigree. But if I'm trying something new, Convolt might not be the first one that I think of. >>Yeah. So today was the first time I heard about metallic and there is some, I love the branding and there's so much of gloss and shines, I need to get behind the gloss and shine. But I've seen that was one of the busiest places that we have seen today in the exhibition. And that shows commitment to the, it's, it's, it's, it's, they're entering the SAS world and they're talking that cloud likes scalability and it's also more than applications. They're talking about the pricing is a like consumption base, that cloud language and it's going to propel them along the way. And your perspective as customers that you talk to in any industry have so much choice. You're saying, Hey, the customers are recognizing in this multicloud world in which they find themselves operating. We've gotta be able to change our data protection strategy. I imagine things like the rise in cyber attacks or GDPR or the new law in California. >>That's coming are some compelling events. But when customers look at the landscape, and as was saying, they're so much more open to maybe trying new vendors, for example, how does Combalt part, you know, significant part and combat maybe new part with Hedvig and with metallic as a sort of this startup within combo. How did they elevate and differentiate themselves in your opinion, in a competitive landscape? Interesting. Yep. So when you look at startups, they have a lot of agility, but they're not able to bring that enterprise grade skill. Excuse me. And if you look at a lot of traditional vendors, they have that scale and enterprise grade guarantees, but they don't have that agility. But with this initiative, they've done some clever things and brought agility and skill together. That's their differentiator to see no, grab some water, we'll talk for a second. You probably even taught all day. >>That's the hazard, right, of going to these events is your voice, especially with the altitude. But, but as, as we've seen other large incumbents do the same thing. Absolutely. Everyone's pivoting to the same. It is. But also integration of technologies is not easy. Right. And that's sort of the table stakes is how are they, for example, going to integrate Hedvig such that one had bigs installed. ACE has a smooth, seamless transition and this opens up more opportunity for them and vice versa that that Combolt's install base now has more opportunity. Talk to us about what you've seen. They talked a little bit yesterday about some of the integration connections that they've made so far, but that's really key because a lot of companies don't do integrations. Well yeah, there've been some big acquisitions and they do integrations for years and years, right? It's been just 13 days since the acquisition closed. >>So it's still early days, but they need to keep that momentum up and I see a lot of synergy. So bringing storage and data management together is a good idea. But at the same time, I heard Sanjay alluded to it on the stage as well, where they're talking about application and data and moving away from that infrastructure. Right. And that that view is very important because companies need to move from protecting data centers to protecting centers of data. That's what they need to think about. So they need to abstract from infrastructure, but which is why when you look at it all though it's software defined storage. The language that they use is very clever. They're talking about APIs, they're talking about newer workflows, they're talking about changing business processes, they're talking about enabling data, they're talking about controlling data and using it data, using data for insights. >>So they're putting in a lot of newer perspective to this infrastructure view and taking a software defined container defined API defined view, and that's kind of very, very modern. I think that's going to bring a huge amount of difference. So thinking about some of the customers that you've spoken to will say in the last year that are either using Combolt or evaluating combo, some of the positioning that you just talked about to kind of very interesting, but I presume quite strategic with how they're talking about protect, use, manage control data. Are you hear from Comvalt are you hearing and seeing this is what I've been hearing from customers, is there an alignment? Are you hearing from custom what you heard from customers? I'll start over like in the last year, what combat is now delivering and the messaging that they're articulating. Are you now, are you seeing alignment like they're going in the direction that I'm hearing with what customers are wanting. >>He has, the customers are grappling with multicloud data services, so it's not just data protection but they need to get visibility of data across their, all the data sets across the board that they're challenged not just with structured data but growth in unstructured and semi-structured data as well. So they need to look at newer kinds of storage like object storage and all that. So they are grappling with newer kinds of challenges and that's why this new language is going to be hugely useful. And that's why this coming together of storage and data management can actually make a big difference because together they can paint a picture for the organization and tell them these are the challenges you're grappling. You don't need to buying different solutions from different places and buy it and bring it all together. We have deeper level of integration and we can solve it and convert. >>We'll be able to get to the customer at the storage level before they hit the customer, hits the data management problem and then starts hunting for a newer solution. So they're getting in early before the problem actually becomes an operational issue and that the Hey red, they are ready with the solution when the customer gets there. You might, you mentioned data visibility a minute ago and that's critical, right? For organizations that are, whether it's a smaller organization or one that's heavily matrix, if you don't have, and a lot of them don't have visibility into all of the data. Something that you talked about in the very beginning of the interview, that speed of intelligence and speed of insights, it can't take advantage of that. Yeah, yeah. Yes. So companies are investing into a lot of data scientists. But then so, so I was talking to actually three, I was doing a CIO executive dinner on this whole topic about data driven. >>And then so some of organizations, some of the CIS put their hands up and said, Hey, we have actually employed new data scientists. These data engineers and data scientists don't come cheap, right? They're very heavily skilled, talented, talented professionals. So you employ them. And now we're working backwards. Now we are trying to do what we can do with the data models and there's so much problem we are facing. We don't know what data is good data to be analyzed, what data we can delete, what data is cold data that we can send to archives and what do we need to, what are the use cases that we need big data analytics for? So they're working backwards and they're not able to leverage and capitalize on all the resources that they've spent on hiring these kinds of data scientists and data engineers. So I think they need to start that. Organizations need to get a hygiene about their data first and then take the next step around analytics and hiring these kind of data scientists is the first step. Sorry >>are tryna just, I was curious if you could comment on a statement that Sanjay Mirchandani made this morning. He says we need to rethink the kind of the lines and into definitions between primary and secondary storage. What do you think of that statement and where do you think vault ultimately will fit in the broader marketplace? >>You's quite aligned with what I see when I talk to customers as well. So, so companies, data is growing and it's fragmented, but at the same time the lines between primary storage and secondary storage are blurring as well. So the data that's cold today may be hot data tomorrow. So they need to understand, get visibility into data. Just 10% of data is hard data today. So that data needs to sit in the most expensive storage environments. They can leverage it and the rest needs to be, needs to go into tiered, into other colder storage, cheaper alternatives. But at the same time, when you want to access that data, it should not be difficult because now when you push it to a cloud archive your, that's your archive and be damned, right? You're not going to get that data back on in the format you want at the time you want, at the cost you want. So you need to make sure that you invest in storage technologies and you make that data tiering in such a way that when that called data is suddenly becoming warm data or hot data, you need to have access to it instantly in the format you like. Archna thank you for sharing your insights and recommendations and just your view on the industry and combat. We appreciate your time. No problem at all. Thank you very much. First, zoom and a man. I am Lisa Martin and you're watching the cube from combat go 19.