(lively peaceful music) >> Live, from New York, it's The Cube. Covering "The Cube New York City 2018." Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, everyone, welcome back to The Cube special conversation here in New York City. We're live for Cube NYC. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem, now evolved into AI, machine learning, cloud. All things data in conjunction with Strata Conference, which is going on right around the corner. This is the Cube studio. I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Mick Hollison, who is the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, of Cloudera. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Cloudera, obviously we love Cloudera. Cube started in Cloudera's office, (laughing) everyone in our community knows that. I keep, keep saying it all the time. But we're so proud to have the honor of working with Cloudera over the years. And, uh, the thing that's interesting though is that the new building in Palo Alto is right in front of the old building where the first Palo Alto office was. So, a lot of success. You have a billboard in the airport. Amr Awadallah is saying, hey, it's a milestone. You're in the airport. But your business is changing. You're reaching new audiences. You have, you're public. You guys are growing up fast. All the data is out there. Tom's doing a great job. But, the business side is changing. Data is everywhere, it's a big, hardcore enterprise conversation. Give us the update, what's new with Cloudera. >> Yeah. Thanks very much for having me again. It's, it's a delight. I've been with the company for about two years now, so I'm officially part of the problem now. (chuckling) It's been a, it's been a great journey thus far. And really the first order of business when I arrived at the company was, like, welcome aboard. We're going public. Time to dig into the S-1 and reimagine who Cloudera is going to be five, ten years out from now. And we spent a good deal of time, about three or four months, actually crafting what turned out to be just 38 total words and kind of a vision and mission statement. But the, the most central to those was what we were trying to build. And it was a modern platform for machine learning analytics in the cloud. And, each of those words, when you unpack them a little bit, are very, very important. And this week, at Strata, we're really happy on the modern platform side. We just released Cloudera Enterprise Six. It's the biggest release in the history of the company. There are now over 30 open-source projects embedded into this, something that Amr and Mike could have never imagined back in the day when it was just a couple of projects. So, a very very large and meaningful update to the platform. The next piece is machine learning, and Hilary Mason will be giving the kickoff tomorrow, and she's probably forgotten more about ML and AI than somebody like me will ever know. But she's going to give the audience an update on what we're doing in that space. But, the foundation of having that data management platform, is absolutely fundamental and necessary to do good machine learning. Without good data, without good data management, you can't do good ML or AI. Sounds sort of simple but very true. And then the last thing that we'll be announcing this week, is around the analytics space. So, on the analytic side, we announced Cloudera Data Warehouse and Altus Data Warehouse, which is a PaaS flavor of our new data warehouse offering. And last, but certainly not least, is just the "optimize for the cloud" bit. So, everything that we're doing is optimized not just around a single cloud but around multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, and really trying to bridge that gap for enterprises and what they're doing today. So, it's a new Cloudera to say the very least, but it's all still based on that core foundation and platform that, you got to know it, with very early on. >> And you guys have operating history too, so it's not like it's a pivot for Cloudera. I know for a fact that you guys had very large-scale customers, both with three letter, letters in them, the government, as well as just commercial. So, that's cool. Question I want to ask you is, as the conversation changes from, how many clusters do I have, how am I storing the data, to what problems am I solving because of the enterprises. There's a lot of hard things that enterprises want. They want compliance, all these, you know things that have either legacy. You guys work on those technical products. But, at the end of the day, they want the outcomes, they want to solve some problems. And data is clearly an opportunity and a challenge for large enterprises. What problems are you guys going after, these large enterprises in this modern platform? What are the core problems that you guys knock down? >> Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. And we sort of categorize the way we think about addressing business problems into three broad categories. We use the terms grow, connect, and protect. So, in the "grow" sense, we help companies build or find new revenue streams. And, this is an amazing part of our business. You see it in everything from doing analytics on clickstreams and helping people understand what's happening with their web visitors and the like, all the way through to people standing up entirely new businesses based simply on their data. One large insurance provider that is a customer of ours, as an example, has taken on the challenge and asked us to engage with them on building really, effectively, insurance as a service. So, think of it as data-driven insurance rates that are gauged based on your driving behaviors in real time. So no longer simply just using demographics as the way that you determine, you know, all 18-year old young men are poor drivers. As it turns out, with actual data you can find out there's some excellent 18 year olds. >> Telematic, not demographics! >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly! >> That Tesla don't connect to the >> Exactly! And Parents will love this, love this as well, I think. So they can find out exactly how their kids are really behaving by the way. >> They're going to know I rolled through the stop signs in Palo Alto. (laughing) My rates just went up. >> Exactly, exactly. So, so helping people grow new businesses based on their data. The second piece is "Connect". This is not just simply connecting devices, but that's a big part of it, so the IOT world is a big engine for us there. One of our favorite customer stories is a company called Komatsu. It's a mining manufacturer. Think of it as the ones that make those, just massive mines that are, that are all over the world. They're particularly big in Australia. And, this is equipment that, when you leave it sit somewhere, because it doesn't work, it actually starts to sink into the earth. So, being able to do predictive maintenance on that level and type and expense of equipment is very valuable to a company like Komatsu. We're helping them do that. So that's the "Connect" piece. And last is "Protect". Since data is in fact the new oil, the most valuable resource on earth, you really need to be able to protect it. Whether that's from a cyber security threat or it's just meeting compliance and regulations that are put in place by governments. Certainly GDPR is got a lot of people thinking very differently about their data management strategies. So we're helping a number of companies in that space as well. So that's how we kind of categorize what we're doing. >> So Mick, I wonder if you could address how that's all affected the ecosystem. I mean, one of the misconceptions early on was that Hadoop, Big Data, is going to kill the enterprise data warehouse. NoSQL is going to knock out Oracle. And, Mike has always said, "No, we are incremental". And people are like, "Yeah, right". But that's really, what's happened here. >> Yes. >> EDW was a fundamental component of your big data strategies. As Amr used to say, you know, SQL is the killer app for, for big data. (chuckling) So all those data sources that have been integrated. So you kind of fast forward to today, you talked about IOT and The Edge. You guys have announced, you know, your own data warehouse and platform as a service. So you see this embracing in this hybrid world emerging. How has that affected the evolution of your ecosystem? >> Yeah, it's definitely evolved considerably. So, I think I'd give you a couple of specific areas. So, clearly we've been quite successful in large enterprises, so the big SI type of vendors want a, want a piece of that action these days. And they're, they're much more engaged than they were early days, when they weren't so sure all of this was real. >> I always say, they like to eat at the trough and then the trough is full, so they dive right in. (all laughing) They're definitely very engaged, and they built big data practices and distinctive analytics practices as well. Beyond that, sort of the developer community has also begun to shift. And it's shifted from simply people that could spell, you know, Hive or could spell Kafka and all of the various projects that are involved. And it is elevated, in particular into a data science community. So one of additional communities that we sort of brought on board with what we're doing, not just with the engine and SPARK, but also with tools for data scientists like Cloudera Data Science Workbench, has added that element to the community that really wasn't a part of it, historically. So that's been a nice add on. And then last, but certainly not least, are the cloud providers. And like everybody, they're, those are complicated relationships because on the one hand, they're incredibly valuable partners to it, certainly both Microsoft and Amazon are critical partners for Cloudera, at the same time, they've got competitive offerings. So, like most successful software companies there's a lot of coopetition to contend with that also wasn't there just a few years ago when we didn't have cloud offerings, and they didn't have, you know, data warehouse in the cloud offerings. But, those are things that have sort of impacted the ecosystem. >> So, I've got to ask you a marketing question, since you're the CMO. By the way, great message UL. I like the, the "grow, connect, protect." I think that's really easy to understand. >> Thank you. >> And the other one was modern. The phrase, say the phrase again. >> Yeah. It's the "Cloudera builds the modern platform for machine learning analytics optimized for the cloud." >> Very tight mission statement. Question on the name. Cloudera. >> Mmhmm. >> It's spelled, it's actually cloud with ERA in the letters, so "the cloud era." People use that term all the time. We're living in the cloud era. >> Yes. >> Cloud-native is the hottest market right now in the Linux foundation. The CNCF has over two hundred and forty members and growing. Cloud-native clearly has indicated that the new, modern developers here in the renaissance of software development, in general, enterprises want more developers. (laughs) Not that you want to be against developers, because, clearly, they're going to hire developers. >> Absolutely. >> And you're going to enable that. And then you've got the, obviously, cloud-native on-premise dynamic. Hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. So is there plans to think about that cloud era, is it a cloud positioning? You see cloud certainly important in what you guys do, because the cloud creates more compute, more capabilities to move data around. >> Sure. >> And (laughs) process it. And make it, make machine learning go faster, which gives more data, more AI capabilities, >> It's the flywheel you and I were discussing. >> It's the flywheel of, what's the innovation sandwich, Dave? You know? (laughs) >> A little bit of data, a little bit of machine itelligence, in the cloud. >> So, the innovation's in play. >> Yeah, Absolutely. >> Positioning around Cloud. How are you looking at that? >> Yeah. So, it's a fascinating story. You were with us in the earliest days, so you know that the original architecture of everything that we built was intended to be run in the public cloud. It turns out, in 2008, there were exactly zero customers that wanted all of their data in a public cloud environment. So the company actually pivoted and re-architected the original design of the offerings to work on-prim. And, no sooner did we do that, then it was time to re-architect it yet again. And we are right in the midst of doing that. So, we really have offerings that span the whole gamut. If you want to just pick up you whole current Cloudera environment in an infrastructure as a service model, we offer something called Altus Director that allows you to do that. Just pick up the entire environment, step it up onto AWUS, or Microsoft Azure, and off you go. If you want the convenience and the elasticity and the ease of use of a true platform as a service, just this past week we announced Altus Data Warehouse, which is a platform as a service kind of a model. For data warehousing, we have the data engineering module for Altus as well. Last, but not least, is everybody's not going to sign up for just one cloud vendor. So we're big believers in multi-cloud. And that's why we support the major cloud vendors that are out there. And, in addition to that, it's going to be a hybrid world for as far out as we can see it. People are going to have certain workloads that, either for economics or for security reasons, they're going to continue to want to run in-house. And they're going to have other workloads, certainly more transient workloads, and I think ML and data science will fall into this camp, that the public cloud's going to make a great deal of sense. And, allowing companies to bridge that gap while maintaining one security compliance and management model, something we call a Shared Data Experience, is really our core differentiator as a business. That's at the very core of what we do. >> Classic cloud workload experience that you're bringing, whether it's on-prim or whatever cloud. >> That's right. >> Cloud is an operating environment for you guys. You look at it just as >> The delivery mechanism. In effect. Awesome. All right, future for Cloudera. What can you share with us. I know you're a public company. Can't say any forward-looking statements. Got to do all those disclaimers. But for customers, what's the, what's the North Star for Cloudera? You mentioned going after a much more hardcore enterprise. >> Yes. >> That's clear. What's the North Star for you guys when you talk to customers? What's the big pitch? >> Yeah. I think there's a, there's a couple of really interesting things that we learned about our business over the course of the past six, nine months or so here. One, was that the greatest need for our offerings is in very, very large and complex enterprises. They have the most data, not surprisingly. And they have the most business gain to be had from leveraging that data. So we narrowed our focus. We have now identified approximately five thousand global customers, so think of it as kind of Fortune or Forbes 5000. That is our sole focus. So, we are entirely focused on that end of the market. Within that market, there are certain industries that we play particularly well in. We're incredibly well-positioned in financial services. Very well-positioned in healthcare and telecommunications. Any regulated industry, that really cares about how they govern and maintain their data, is really the great target audience for us. And so, that continues to be the focus for the business. And we're really excited about that narrowing of focus and what opportunities that's going to build for us. To not just land new customers, but more to expand our existing ones into a broader and broader set of use cases. >> And data is coming down faster. There's more data growth than ever seen before. It's never stopping.. It's only going to get worse. >> We love it. >> Bring it on. >> Any way you look at it, it's getting worse or better. Mick, thanks for spending the time. I know you're super busy with the event going on. Congratulations on the success, and the focus, and the positioning. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming on The Cube. >> Absolutely. Thank you gentlemen. It was a pleasure. >> We are Cube NYC. This is our ninth year doing all action. Everything that's going on in the data world now is horizontally scaling across all aspects of the company, the society, as we know. It's super important, and this is what we're talking about here in New York. This is The Cube, and John Furrier. Dave Vellante. Be back with more after this short break. Stay with us for more coverage from New York City. (upbeat music)