Chris Degnan, Snowflake & Anthony Brooks Williams, HVR | AWS re:Invent 2019
>>LA Las Vegas. It's the cube hovering AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services and along with its ecosystem partners. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube. Our day one coverage of AWS reinvent 19 continues. Lisa Martin with Dave Volante. Dave and I have a couple of guests we'd like you to walk up. We've got Anthony Brooks billions, the CEO of HBR back on the cube. You're alumni. We should get you a pin and snowflake alumni. But Chris, your new Chris Dagon, chief revenue officer from snowflake. Chris, welcome to the program. Excited to be here. All right guys. So even though both companies have been on before, Anthony, let's start with you. Give our audience a refresher about HVR, who you guys are at, what you do. >>Sure. So we're in the data integration space, particularly a real time data integration. So we move data to the cloud in the in the most efficient way and we make sure it's secure and it's accurate and you're moving into environments such as snowflake. Um, and that's where we've got some really good customers that we happy to talk about joint custody that we're doing together. But Chris can tell us a little bit about snowflake. >>Sure. And snowflake is a cloud data warehousing company. We are cloud native, we are on AWS or on GCP and we're on Azure. And if you look at the competitive landscape, we compete with our friends at Amazon. We compete with our friends at Microsoft and our friends at Google. So it's super interesting place to be, but it very exciting at the same time and super excited to partner with Anthony and some others who aren't really a friends. That's correct. So I wonder if we could start by just talking about the data warehouse sort of trends that you guys see. When I talk to practitioners in the old days, they used to say to me things like, Oh, infrastructure management, it's such a nightmare. It's like a snake swallowing a basketball every time until it comes out with a new chips. We chase it because we just need more performance and we can't get our jobs done fast enough. And there's only three. There's three guys that we got to go through to get any answers and it was just never really lived up to the promise of 360 degree view of your business and realtime analytics. How has that changed? >>Well, there's that too. I mean obviously the cloud has had a big difference on that illustrious city. Um, what you would find is in, in, in yesterday, customers have these, a retail customer has these big events twice a year. And so to do an analysis on what's being sold and Casper's transactions, they bought this big data warehouse environment for two events a year typically. And so what's happening that's highly cost, highly costly as we know to maintain and then cause the advances in technology and trips and stuff. And then you move into this cloud world which gives you that Lester city of scale up, scale down as you need to. And then particular where we've got Tonies snowflake that is built for that environment and that elicited city. And so you get someone like us that can move this data at today's scale and volume through these techniques we have into an environment that then bleeds into helping them solve the challenge that you talk about of Yesi of >>these big clunky environments. That side, I think you, I think you kind of nailed it. I think like early days. So our founders are from Oracle and they were building Oracle AI nine nine, 10 G. and when I interviewed them I was the first sales rep showing up and day one I'm like, what the heck am I selling? And when I met them I said, tell me what the benefit of snowflake is. And they're like, well at Oracle, and we'd go talk to customers and they'd say, Oracles, you know, I have this problem with Oracle. They'd say, Hey, that's, you know, seven generations ago were Oracle. Do you have an upgraded to the latest code? So one of the things they talked about as being a service, Hey, we want to make it really easy. You never have to upgrade the service. And then to your point around, you have a fixed amount of resources on premise, so you can't all of a sudden if you have a new project, do you want to bring on the first question I asked when I started snowflake to customers was how long does it take you to kick off a net new workload onto your data, onto your Vertica and it take them nine to 12 months because they'd have to go procure the new hardware, install it, and guess what? >>With snowflake, you can make an instantaneous decision and because of our last test city, because the benefits of our partner from Amazon, you can really grow with your demand of your business. >>Many don't have the luxury of nine to 12 months anymore, Chris, because we all know if, if an enterprise legacy business isn't thinking, there's somebody not far behind me who has the elasticity, who has the appetite, who's who understands the opportunity that cloud provides. If you're not thinking that, as auntie Jessie will say, you're going to be on the wrong end of that equation. But for large enterprises, that's hard. The whole change culture is very hard to do. I'd love to get your perspective, Chris, what you're seeing in terms of industries shifting their mindsets to understand the value that they could unlock with this data, but how are big industries legacy industries changing? >>I'd say that, look, we were chasing Amad, we were chasing the cloud providers early days, so five years ago, we're selling to ad tech and online gaming companies today. What's happened in the industry is, and I'll give you a perfect example, is Ben wa and I, one of our founders went out to one of the largest investment banks on wall street five years ago, and they said, and they have more money than God, and they say, Hey, we love what you've built. We love, when are you going to run on premise? And Ben, Ben wa uttered this phrase of, Hey, you will run on the public cloud before we ever run in the private cloud. And guess what? He was a truth teller because five years later, they are one of our largest customers today. And they made the decision to move to the cloud and we're seeing financial services at a blistering face moved to the cloud. >>And that's where, you know, partnering with folks from HR is super important for us because we don't have the ability to just magically have this data appear in the cloud. And that's where we rely quite heavily on on instance. So Anthony, in the financial services world in particular, it used to be a cloud. Never that was an evil word. Automation. No, we have to have full control and in migration, never digital transformation to start to change those things. It's really become an imperative, but it's by in particular is really challenging. So I wonder if we could dig into that a little bit and help us understand how you solve that problem. >>Yes. A customer say they want to adopt some of these technologies. So there's the migration route. They may want to go adopt some of these, these cloud databases, the cloud data warehouses. And so we have some areas where we, you know, we can do that and keep the business up and running at the same time. So the techniques we use are we reading the transactional logs, other databases or something called CDC. And so there'll be an initial transfer of the bulk of the data initiative stantiating or refresh. At that same time we capturing data out of the transaction logs, wildlife systems live and doing a migration to the new environment or into snowflakes world, capturing data where it's happening, where the data is generated and moving that real time securely, accurately into this environment for somewhere like 1-800-FLOWERS where they can do this, make better decisions to say the cost is better at point of sale. >>So have all their business divisions pulling it in. So there's the migration aspects and then there's the, the use case around the realtime reporting as well. So you're essentially refueling the plane. Well while you're in mid air. Um, yeah, that's a good one. So what does the customer see? How disruptive is it? How do you minimize that disruption? Well, the good thing is, well we've all got these experienced teams like Chris said that have been around the block and a lot of us have done this. What we do, what ed days fail for the last 15 years, that companies like golden gate that we sold to Oracle and those things. And so there's a whole consultative approach to them versus just here's some software, good luck with it. So there's that aspect where there's a lot of planning that goes into that and then through that using our technologies that are well suited to this Appleton shows some good success and that's a key focus for us. And in our world, in this subscription by SAS top world, customer success is key. And so we have to build a lot of that into how we make this successful as well. >>I think it's a barrier to entry, like going, going from on premise to the cloud. That's the number one pushback that we get when we go out and say, Hey, we have a cloud native data warehouse. Like how the heck are we going to get the data to the cloud? And that's where, you know, a partnership with HR. Super important. Yeah. >>What are some of the things that you guys encountered? Because we many businesses live in the multi-cloud world most of the time, not by strategy, right? A lot of the CIO say, well we sort of inherited this, or it's M and a or it's developers that have preference. How do you help customers move data appropriately based on the value that the perceived value that it can give in what is really a multi world today? Chris, we'll start with you. >>Yeah, I think so. So as we go into customers, I think the biggest hurdle for them to move to the cloud is security because they think the cloud is not secure. So if we, if you look at our engagement with customers, we go in and we actually have to sell the value snowflake and then they say, well, okay great, go talk to the security team. And then we talked to security team and say, Hey, let me show you how we secure data. And then then they have to get comfortable around how they're going to actually move, get the data from on premise to the cloud. And that's again, when we engage with partners like her. So yeah, >>and then we go through a whole process with a customer. There's a taking some of that data in a, in a POC type environment and proving that after, as before it gets rolled out. And a lot of, you know, references and case studies around it as well. >>Depends on the customer that you have some customers who are bold and it doesn't matter the size. We have a fortune 100 customer who literally had an on premise Teradata system that they moved from on prem, from on premise 30 to choose snowflake in 111 days because they were all in. You have other customers that say, Hey, I'm going to take it easy. I'm going to workload by workload. And it just depends. And the mileage may vary is what can it give us an example of maybe a customer example or in what workloads they moved? Was it reporting? What other kinds? Yeah. >>Oh yeah. We got a couple of, you mean we could talk a little bit about 1-800-FLOWERS. We can talk about someone like Pitney Bowes where they were moving from Oracle to secret server. It's a bunch of SAP data sitting in SAP ECC. So there's some complexity around how you acquire, how you decode that data, which we ever built a unique ability to do where we can decode the cluster and pool tables coupled with our CDC technique and they had some stringent performance loads, um, that a bunch of the vendors couldn't meet the needs between both our companies. And so we were able to solve their challenge for them jointly and move this data at scale in the performance that they needed out with these articles, secret server enrollments into, into snowflake. >>I almost feel like when you have an SAP environment, it's almost stuck in SAP. So to get it out is like, it's scary, right? And this is where it's super awesome for us to do work like this. >>On that front, I wanted to understand your thoughts on transformation. It's a word, it's a theme of reinvent 2019. It's a word that we hear at every event, whether we're talking about digital transformation, workforce, it, et cetera. But one of the things that Andy Jassy said this morning was that got us start. It's this is more than technology, right? This, the next gen cloud is more than technology. It's about getting those senior leaders on board. Chris, your perspective, looking at financial services first, we were really surprised at how quickly they've been able to move. Understanding presumably that if they don't, there's going to be other businesses. But are you seeing that as the chief revenue officer or your conversations starting at that CEO level? >>It kinda has to like in the reason why if you do in bottoms up approach and say, Hey, I've got a great technology and you sell this great technology to, you know, a tech person. The reality is unless the C E O CIO or CTO has an initiative to do digital transformation and move to the cloud, you'll die. You'll die in security, you'll die in legal lawyers love to kill deals. And so those are the two areas that I see D deals, you know, slow down significantly. And that's where, you know, we, it's, it's getting through those processes and finding the champion at the CEO level, CIO level, CTO level. If you're, if you're a modern day CIO and you do not have a a cloud strategy, you're probably going to get replaced >>in 18 months. So you know, you better get on board and you'd better take, you know, taking advantage of what's happening in the industry. >>And I think that coupled with the fact that in today's world, you mean, you said there's a, it gets thrown around as a, as a theme and particularly the last couple of years, I think it's, it's now it is actually a strategy and, and reality because what Josephine is that there's as many it tech savvy people sit in the business side of organizations today that used to sit in legacy it. And I think it's that coupled with the leadership driving it that's, that's demanding it, that demanding to be able to access that certain type of data in a geo to make decisions that affect the business. Right now. >>I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about some of the innovations that are coming up. I mean I've been really hard on data. The data warehouse industry, you can tell I'm jaded. I've been around a long time. I mean I've always said that that Sarbanes Oxley saved the old school BI and data warehousing and because all the reporting requirements, and again that business never lived up to its promises, but it seems like there's this whole new set of workloads emerging in the cloud where you take a data warehouse like a snowflake, you may be bringing in some ML tools, maybe it's Databricks or whatever. You HVR helping you sort of virtualize the data and people are driving new workloads that are, that are bringing insights that they couldn't get before in near real time. What are you seeing in terms of some of those gestalt trends and how are companies taking advantage of these innovations? >>I think one is just the general proliferation of data. There's just more data and like you're saying from many different sources, so they're capturing data from CNC machines in factories, you know like like we do for someone like GE, that type of data is to data financial data that's sitting in a BU taking all of that and going there's just as boss some of data, how can we get a total view of our business and at a board level make better decisions and that's where they got put it in I snowflake in this an elastic environment that allows them to do this consolidated view of that whole organization, but I think it's largely been driven by things that digitize their sensors on everything and there's just a sheer volume of data. I think all of that coming together is what's, what's driven it >>is is data access. We talked about security a little bit, but who has rights to access the data? Is that a challenge? How are you guys solving that or is it, I mean I think it's like anything like once people start to understand how a date where we're an acid compliant date sequel database, so we whatever your security you use on your on premise, you can use the same on snowflake. It's just a misperception that the industry has that being on, on in a data center is more secure than being in the cloud and it's actually wrong. I guess my question is not so much security in the cloud, it's more what you were saying about the disparate data sources that coming in hard and fast now. And how do you keep track of who has access to the data? I mean is it another security tool or is it a partnership within owes? >>Yeah, absolutely man. So there's also, there's in financial data, there's certain geos, data leaves, certain geos, whether it be in the EU or certain companies, particularly this end, there's big banks now California, there's stuff that we can do from a security perspective in the data that we move that's secure, it's encrypted. If we capturing data from multiple different sources, items we have that we have the ability to take it all through one, one proxy in the firewall, which does, it helps him a lot in that aspect. Something unique in our technology. But then there's other tools that they have and largely you sit down with them and it's their sort of governance that they have in the, in the organization to go, how do they tackle that and the rules they set around it, you know? >>Well, last question I have is, so we're seeing, you know, I look at the spending data and my breaking analysis, go on my LinkedIn, you'll see it snowflakes off the charts. It's up there with, with robotic process automation and obviously Redshift. Very strong. Do you see those two? I think you addressed it before, but I'd love to get you on record sort of coexisting and thriving. Really, that's not the enemy, right? It's the, it's the Terra data's and the IBM's and the Oracles. The, >>I think, look, uh, you know, Amazon, our relationship with Amazon is like a, you know, a 20 year marriage, right? Sometimes there's good days, sometimes there's bad days. And I think, uh, you know, every year about this time, you know, we get a bat phone call from someone at Amazon saying, Hey, you know, the Redshift team's coming out with a snowflake killer. And I've heard that literally for six years now. Um, it turns out that there's an opportunity for us to coexist. Turns out there's an opportunity for us to compete. Um, and it's all about how they handle themselves as a business. Amazon has been tremendous in separation of that, of, okay, are going to partner here, we're going to compete here, and we're okay if you guys beat us. And, and so that's how they operate. But yes, it is complex and it's, it's, there are challenges. >>Well, the marketplace guys must love you though because you're selling a lot of computers. >>Well, yeah, yeah. This is three guys. They, when they left, we have a summer thing. You mean NWS have a technological DMS, their data migration service, they work with us. They refer opportunities to us when it's these big enterprises that are use cases, scale complexity, volume of data. That's what we do. We're not necessary into the the smaller mom and pop type shops that just want to adopt it, and I think that's where we all both able to go coexist together. There's more than enough. >>All right. You're right. It's like, it's like, Hey, we have champions in the Esri group, the EEC tuna group, that private link group, you know, across all the Amazon products. So there's a lot of friends of ours. Yeah, the red shift team doesn't like us, but that's okay. I can live in >>healthy coopertition, but it just goes to show that not only do customers and partners have toys, but they're exercising it. Gentlemen, thank you for joining David knee on the key of this afternoon. We appreciate your time. Thank you for having us. Pleasure our pleasure for Dave Volante. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the queue from day one of our coverage of AWS reinvent 19 thanks for watching.
SUMMARY :
AWS reinvent 2019 brought to you by Amazon web services Dave and I have a couple of guests we'd like you to walk up. So we move data to the cloud in the in the most efficient way and we make sure it's secure and And if you look at the competitive landscape, And then you move into this cloud world which gives you that Lester city of scale to customers was how long does it take you to kick off a net new workload onto your data, from Amazon, you can really grow with your demand of your business. Many don't have the luxury of nine to 12 months anymore, Chris, And they made the decision to move to the cloud and we're seeing financial services And that's where, you know, partnering with folks from HR is super important for us because And so we have some areas where we, And so we have to build a lot of that into how we make this successful And that's where, you know, a partnership with HR. What are some of the things that you guys encountered? And then we talked to security team and say, Hey, let me show you how we secure data. And a lot of, you know, references and case studies around it as well. Depends on the customer that you have some customers who are bold and it doesn't matter the size. So there's some complexity around how you acquire, how you decode that data, I almost feel like when you have an SAP environment, it's almost stuck in SAP. But are you seeing that And that's where, you know, So you know, you better get on board and you'd better take, you know, taking advantage of what's happening And I think that coupled with the fact that in today's world, you mean, you said there's a, it gets thrown around as a, like there's this whole new set of workloads emerging in the cloud where you take a factories, you know like like we do for someone like GE, that type of is not so much security in the cloud, it's more what you were saying about the disparate in the organization to go, how do they tackle that and the rules they set around it, Well, last question I have is, so we're seeing, you know, I look at the spending data and my breaking analysis, separation of that, of, okay, are going to partner here, we're going to compete here, and we're okay if you guys to us when it's these big enterprises that are use cases, scale complexity, that private link group, you know, across all the Amazon products. Gentlemen, thank you for joining David knee on the key of this afternoon.
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