(upbeat music) >> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 15th annual ACG SV GROW! Awards. Can you hear the energy and all the innovation happening behind me? Well, I'm here with one of the board members of ACG SV, Ashley Tarver, big data evangelist for Cloudera. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, I'm glad to be here. >> Lot of collaboration going on behind us, right? >> It's a great networking event. >> It is. >> 'Cause so many people have showed up. >> There's over 230 people. >> Oh, easily. >> Expected tonight, over 100 of those are C-levels. Before we get into your association with ACG SV, talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cloudera, just the Hortonworks acquisition was just completed, the merger, a couple months ago, what's going on there? >> It's very exciting. As most people might know, we just did a major collaboration merger with a company called Hortonworks. And the two companies together, we're about twice the size as we were before and for the industry and for our customers, it's been really exciting because we've been able to really create what we call the enterprise data cloud that really enables our customers to bring all their data together into one single platform and we call it an edge-to-AI solution. We're really one of the only companies right now in the world who have the ability to do that in a comprehensive manner and we can do it on the premise, we can do it in the cloud, a hybrid cloud environment, so it gives you the ultimate flexibility and the merger has allowed us to really accomplish that for our customers. >> As we and every company that's succeeding today is living in this hybrid, multi-cloud environment where the edge is proliferating, the security perimeters are morphing dramatically, companies need to be able to transform digitally in a secure way, but also enable access to data from decades ago. >> Yeah, most anybody's who's listening to the media will hear IoT is really the big play and the ability to capture all that data from multiple in-points, edge devices, and bring it all into a single data repository is a major challenge. So, having the ability to do that in a. You can do it now with the way we're doing it, the way your company wants to do it. So if you're already in the cloud, you can stay there, if you wanted to keep it on the premise. So there's a lot of options that we now bring to the table. So hopefully, it becomes a little easier for our customers. >> So when you're talking with customers that maybe have a lot of workloads, enterprise workloads, maybe legacy still on prem, and you're talking to them in your role as the big data evangelist, where does the topic of AI come up? I mean, are you talking to them about here is a massive opportunity for you to actually leverage AI, you got to go to the cloud to do it? >> Absolutely. I mean, AI is kind of a marketing term that you hear a lot about. For us, it's really about machine learning and machine learning is taking large sets of data and putting logic on top of it and so you can tease out valuable insights that you might not otherwise get. So the ability to then apply that in an AI environment becomes extremely important and the ability to do that across a large data set is what's really complicated. But if you're a real data scientist, you want to have as much data as you can so your models can run more accurately. And as soon as you can do that, you'll have the ability to really improve your models, extract better insights out of the data you do own, and provide more value to your own company and your own customers. >> Absolutely, it's a fascinating topic, but since we're low on time here, we are at the 15th annual GROW! Awards. ACG SV recognizing Arista Networks for the Outstanding Growth Award and Adesto Technologies for the Emerging Growth Award. You've been involved as a board member of ACG SV for about a year now. What makes this organization worthy of your time? >> Well, it's really exciting 'cause in Silicon Valley, it's unique 'cause it's all about collaboration. The innovation that we create out of this location of the globe is through networking with our peers and ACG opens up that window, provides a door that allows you to meet with your peers, your competitors, your friends, and as a result, you can create insights and capabilities about your own company and technology directions that's really helpful. So, it's the networking, they also put on excellent C-circle events, which is really good because if your company is looking at growing as a startup, you might be able to get some valuable insights from peers who know how to do HR, merger acquisitions, finance. And so, the ability to do networking like at an event like this, the ability to come in and learn how to do business processes more effectively, it all plays a really important role at ACG. >> Well Ashley, thank you so much for carving out some time to join us on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)