>> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

>> Welcome back to New York City everybody. This is The Cube's coverage of MongoDB World 2022, Dev Ittycheria, here is the president and CEO of MongoDB. Thanks for spending some time with us. >> It's Great to be here Dave, thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome. So your keynotes this morning, I was hearkening back to Steve Ballmer, running around the stage screaming, developers, developers, developers. You weren't jumping around like a madman, but the message was the same. And you've not deviated from that message. I remember when it was 10th Gen, so you've been consistent. >> Yes. >> Why is Mongo DB so alluring to developers? >> Yeah, because I would say the reason we're so popular Dave is that our whole business was founded on the ethos, so making developers incredibly productive. Just getting the infrastructure out of the way so that the developers is really focused on what's important and that's building great applications that transform their business. And the way you do that is you look at where they spend most of the time. and they spend most of the time working with data. How do you present data, the right data, the right time, at the right place, and the right way. And when you remove the friction of working with data, you unleash so much more productivity, which people just say, oh my goodness, I can move so much faster. Product leaders can get products out the door faster than the competitors. Senior level executives can seize new opportunities or respond to new threats. And that was so profound during COVID when everyone had to think about pivoting their business. >> When you came to MongoDB, why did you choose this company? What was it that excited you about it? >> I get that question a lot. I would say conventional wisdom would suggest that MongoDB was not a great choice. There weren't that many companies who were very successful in open source, Red Hat was the only one. No one had really built a deep technology company in New York city. They say, you got to do it in the valley. And database companies need a lot of capital. Now turns out that raising capital of this past decade was a lot easier, but it still takes a lot of time, and a lot of capitals, you have to have a lot of patience. When I did my diligence, I was actually a VC before I joined MongoDB. The whole next generation database segment was really taking off. And actually I looked at some competing investments to MongoDB, and when I did my diligence, it was clear even then. And this is circa 2012, that MongoDB is way ahead in terms of customer attraction, commercials, and even kind of developer mind share. And so I ended up passing those investments. and then lo and behold, I got a call from a very senior executive recruiter who said, Dev, you got to take a meeting with MongoDB, there's something really interesting going on. And they had raised a lot of capital and they had just not been able to kind of really execute in terms of the opportunity. And they realized they needed to make a change. And so one thing led to another. One of the things that really actually convinced me, is when I did my diligence, I realized the customers they had loved MongoDB. They just really weren't executing on all cylinders. And I always believe you never bet against a company whose customers love the product. And said, that's something here. The second thing I would say is open source. Yes, is true that open source was not very successful, but that was open source 1.0. Open source 2.0, the technology is much better than the commercial options. And so that convinced me. And then New York, I lived in New York a big part of my life. I think New York's a fabulous place to build a business. There's so much talent, your customers are right... You walk out the door, there's customers all over the place. And getting to Europe is very easy, Almost like flying to the west coast. So it's a very central place to build a business. >> And it's easier to fix execution, wouldn't you say? And maybe even go to market than it is to fix a product that customers really don't love. >> Correct, it's much easier to fix leadership issues, culture issues, execution issues. Nailing product market fit is very, very hard. And there were signs, there's still some issues, there's still some rough spots, but there a lot of signs that this company was very, very close, and that's why I took the bet. >> And this is before there was that huge influx of capital into the separating compute from storage and the whole cloud thing, which is interesting. Because you take a company like Cloudera, they got caught up in that and got kind of washed over. And I guess you could argue Hortonworks did too, and they could have dead ended both. And then that just didn't work. But it's interesting to see Mongo, the market kind of came to you. And that really does speak to the product. It wasn't a barrier for you. You guys have obviously a lot of work to get into the cloud with Atlas, but it seemed like a natural fit with the product. It wasn't like a complete fork. >> Well, I think the challenge that we had was we had a lot of adoption, but we had tough time commercializing the business. And at some point I had to tell the all employees, it's great that we have all these people who are using MongoDB, but if you don't start generating revenue, our investors are going to get tired of subsidizing this company. So I had to try and change the culture. And as you imagine, the engineers didn't really like the salespeople, the salespeople thought the engineers didn't really want to make any money. And what I said, like, let's all galvanize around customers and let's make them really excited and try and create a lot of value. And so we just put a lot more discipline in terms of how we prosecuted deals. We put a lot more discipline in terms of what are the problems we're trying to solve. And one thing led to another, we started building the business brick by brick. And one of the things that became clear for me was that the old open source model of trying to find that happy medium between what you give away and what you charge for, is always a tough game. Like because finding that where the paywall is, if you give away too much new features, you don't make any money. If you don't give away enough, you don't have any adoption. So you're caught in this catch-22. The best way to monetize open source, is open source as a service. And we saw Amazon do that frankly. We learned a lot from how Amazon did that. And one of the advantages that MongoDB had that I didn't fully appreciate when I joined the company, but I was very grateful. It is that they had a much more restrictive license. Which we ended up actually changing and made it even more restrictive, which allowed us to perfect ourselves from being cannibalized by the cloud providers, so that we could build our own business using our own IP that we had invested in and create a cloud service. >> That was a huge milestone. And of course you have great relationships with all the cloud providers, but it got contentious there for a while, but, you give the cloud providers an inch, they're going to take a mile. That's just the way, they're aggressive like that. But thank you for going through the history with me a little bit, because when you go back to the IPO, IPO was 2017, right? >> Correct. >> I always tell young investors, my kids especially, don't buy a stock at IPO, you're going to have a better chance, but the window from Mongo was very narrow. So, you didn't really get a much better chance a little bit. And then it's been a rocket ship since then. Sure, there's been some volatility, but you look at some of the big IPOs, like Facebook, or Snap, or even Snowflake, there was better opportunities. But you guys have executed really, really well. That's part of your ethos in your management team. And it came across on the earnings call recently. >> Yep. >> It was very optimistic, yet at the same time you set cautious tones and you got, I think high marks. >> Yes. >> For some of that caution but that execution. So talk about where you feel the business is today given the economic uncertainty? >> Well, what I'd say is we feel really good about the long term. We feel like the secular trends are really in our favor. Software's fundamentally transforming every industry. And people want to use modern software to either automate inefficient processes, enable new capabilities, drive better customer experiences. And the level of performance and scale you need for today's modern applications is profoundly different than applications yesterday. So we think we're well positioned for that. What we said on the earnings call was that we started seeing a moderation of growth, slight moderation of growth in our low end of the business in Europe. It was in our self-serve business and in the SMB space for the NQ1, towards the end of Q1. And we saw a little bit of that show up in the self-serve business in may in Q2. And that's why while we raised guidance, we basically quantified the impact, which is roughly about 30 to 35 million for the year, based on what we saw. And in that assumption, we assumed like... We just can't assume it's going to only be at the low in the market, probably some effect at the enterprise market. Maybe not as much, but there'll be some effect. So we need to factor that in. And we wanted to help kind of investors have some sort of framework to think about what the impact is. We don't want to be one of those companies that said absolutely nothing. And we don't want to be one of those companies that just waves the hand, but then it wasn't really that useful for investors. >> Yeah, I thought it was substantive. You talked about those market trends, you cited three things. The developers recognize that there are limits to legacy RDBMS. You talked about the, what I call point solutions creep. And then the document model is the best for developers. >> Great. >> And when the conversation turned to consumption, everybody's concerned about consumption obviously. You said... My take, somewhat insulated from that because you're running mission critical apps. It's not discretionary. My question to you is, should we rethink the definition of mission-critical? You think of Oracle mission critical running a bank. Mission -critical today in this digital world seems to be different, is that fair? >> Gosh, when's the last time you ever saw a website down? Like if you're running like any kind of digital channel, or engaging with the customers, or your partners, or your suppliers, you need to be up all the time. And so you need a very resilient, highly available data platform. It needs to be highly performance as you add more users, you need to be scale. And we saw a lot of that when COVID hit. Like companies had to completely repovit. And we talked about some examples where like a health and beauty retailer who was all kind of basically retail, had to suddenly pivot to e-commerce strategy. We've had streaming and gaming companies suddenly saw this massive influx of data that they scaled their operations very, very quickly. So I would say anytime you're engaging with customers, customers they're so used to the kind of the consumer facing applications. I almost joke like slow is the old down. If you're not performant, it doesn't matter. They're going to abandon you and go somewhere else. So if you're an e-commerce site and you're not performing well and not serving up the right skews, depending on what they're looking for, they're going to go somewhere else. >> So it's a click away. You talk about a hundred billion TAM, maybe that's even undercounted as you start to bring new capabilities in there. But there's no lack of market for you. >> Correct. >> How do you think about the market opportunity? >> Well, we believe... Again, software is transforming so many industries. IDC says that 715 million applications will be built over the next two to three years by 2025. To put that number of perspective, that's more apps that will be built the next three to four years than were built in the last 40. The rate and pace of innovation is as exploding. And people are building custom applications. Yes, Workday, Salesforce, other companies, commercial companies are great companies, but my competitors can use Workday or Salesforce, some of those commercial companies. That doesn't gimme a competitive advantage, what gives me a competitive advantage is building custom software that better engage my customers, that transforms my business in adding new capabilities or drives more efficiency. And the applications are only getting smarter. And so you're seeing that innovation explode and that plays to our strength. People need platforms like MongoDB to build the next generation of applications. >> So Atlas is now roughly 60% of your business, think is growing at 85%. So it's at least the midterm future. But my question to you is, is it the future? 'Cause when we start to think about the edge, it's not necessarily the cloud. You're not going to be able to go that round trip and the latency. And we had Verizon on earlier, talking about what they're doing with 5G, and the Mobile Edge. Is Mongo positioning for that edge? And is our definition of cloud changing? Where it's not just OnPrem and across clouds, but it's also out to the edge, this continuous experience. >> So I'll make two points. One, definitely we believe the applications of the future will be mobile first or purely mobile. Because one with the advent of 5G, the distinction between mobile and web is going to blur, with a hundred times faster networking speeds. But the second point I make is that how that shows up on our revenue on our income table will look like Atlas. Because we don't charge nothing for the end point, it's basically driving consumption of the back end. And so we've introduced a bunch of very, very sophisticated capabilities to synchronized data from the edge to the backend and vice versa with things like flexible sync. So we see so many customers now using that capability, whether you're field service technicians, whether you're a mobile first company, et cetera. So that will drive Atlas revenue. So on an income statement, it'll look like Atlas, but we're obviously addressing those broader set of mobile needs. >> You talk a lot about product market fit former VC, of course, Mark Andreen says, product market fit you kind of know when you see it, your hair's on fire, you can't buy a service. How do you know when you have product market fit? >> Well, one, we have the luxury of lots of customers. So they tell us pretty clearly when they're happy, and we can see that by usage behavior. Now the other benefit of a cloud service, is we can see the level of activity. We can see the level of engagement. We can see how much data they're consuming. We can see all the actions they're taking. So you get the fidelity of feedback you get from Atlas versus someone doing something behind their own firewall. And you kind of call 'em and check in on them is very, very different. So that level of insight gives us visibility in terms of what products and features have been used, gives us a sense how things going well, or is there something awry. Maybe they have misconfigured something or they don't know how to use some capabilities. So the level of engagement that we can have with a customer using a service is so much different. And so we've really invested in our customer success organization. So the byproduct of that is that our retention rates are also very, very strong. Because you have such better information about what's happening in terms of your customers. >> See retention in real time. You've been somewhat... Is just so hard to say this 'cause you're growing at 50% a year. But you're somewhat conservative about the pace of hiring for go to market. And I'm curious as to how you think about scaling, especially when you introduce new products. Atlas is several years ago. But as you extend your capabilities and add new products, how do you decide when to scale? >> So it's a constant process. We've been quite aggressive in scaling organization for a couple reasons. One, we have very low market share, so the market's vastly under penetrated. We still don't have reps in every NFL sitting in the United States, which just kind of crazy. There's other parts of the world that we are just still vastly under penetrated in. But we also look at how those organizations are doing. So if we see a team really killing it, we're going to deploy more resources. Because one, it tells us there's more opportunity there, and there's a strong team there. If we see a team that maybe is struggling a little bit, we'll try and uncover. Rather than just applying more resources in, we'll try and uncover what are the issues and make sure we stabilize the organization and then devote resources. It's all in the measure of like being very disciplined about where we deploy our resources, to get those kind of returns. And on the product side, we obviously go through a very iterative process and kind of do rank order all the projects and what we think the expected returns are. Obviously, we look at the customer feedback, we look at what our strategic priorities are. And that informs what projects we fund and what projects kind of are below the line. And we do that over and over again every quarter. So every quarter we revisit the business, we have a very QBR centric culture. So we're constantly checking in and seeing how the business is operating. And then we make those investment decisions. In general, we've been investing very aggressively in terms of expanding our reach around the world. >> It seems like, well, with Mongo, your product portfolios... From an outside observer standpoint, it seems like you've always had pretty good product market fit. But I was curious, in your VC days, would you ever encourage companies to scale go to market prior to having confidence in product market fit? Or did you always see those as sequential activities? >> Well, I think the challenge is this part it's analysis part is judgment. So you don't necessarily have to have perfect product market fit to start investing. But you also don't want to plow a bunch of resources and realize the product doesn't work and then how you're burning through a lot of cash. So there's a little bit of art to the process. When I joined MongoDB, I could tell that we had a strong engineering team. They knew how to build high quality products, but we just struggled with commercialization. The culture wasn't great across the company. And we had some leadership challenges. So that's when I joined, I kind of focused on those things and tried to bring the organization together. And slowly we started chipping away and making people feel like they were winners. And once you start winning, that becomes contagious. And then the nice thing is when you start winning, you get a lot more customer feedback. That feedback helps you refine your products even more, which then adds... It's like the flywheel effect that starts taking off. >> So it seems the culture's working now. Do you have a favorite product from the announcements today? >> Well, I really like our foray to analytics. And essentially what we're seeing is really two big trends. One you're seeing applications get smarter. What applications are doing is really automating a lot of processes and rather than someone having to press a button. Based on analytics, you can automate a lot of decision making. So that's one theme that we're seeing as applications get smarter. The second theme is that people want more and more insight in terms of what's happening. And the source of that is insights is your operational database. Because that's where you're having transactions, that's where you know what products are selling, that's where you know what customers are buying. So people want more and more real time data versus waiting to take that data, put it somewhere else and then run reports and then get some update at the end of the night or maybe at the week. So that's driving a lot of really interesting use cases. And especially when you marry in things like time series use cases where you're collecting a lot of data people want to see trend analysis what's happening. Which I think it's a very exciting area. We introduced a very cool feature called Queryable Encryption, which basically... The problem with encrypting data, is you can't really query it because my definition's encrypted. >> Yeah, you're right. >> But obviously data security is very important. What we announced, is we're using very sophisticated cryptography. People can query the data, but they don't have really access to the data. So it really protects you from like data breaches or malicious users accessing your data, but you still can kind of make that data usable. So that was a very interesting announcer that we made today. >> Sounds like magic without the performance hit. >> Yes. >> You can do that. Dev, thanks so much for coming in The Cube. Congratulations on all activity, bumper sticker on day one. >> Oh, it's super exciting. The energy was palpable, 3,300 people in the room, lots of customers, lots of users. We had lots of investors here as well for our investor day, have a dinner tonight with a bunch of senior execs, so it's been a busy day. >> Future is bright for MongoBD. Dev, thanks for so much for coming on The Cube. And thanks for watching, this is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Man Offscreen: Standby. Dave is coming you in 5, 4, 3, 2. >> We're back at the Big Apple, theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. Sahir Azam is here, he's the Chief Product Officer of MongoDB, and Guillermo Rauch who's the CEO of Vercel. Hot off the keynotes from this morning guys, good job. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for joining us here. Thanks for having us. Guillermo when it comes to modern web development, you know the back-end, the cloud guys got to it kind of sewn up, >> you know- >> Guillermo: Forget about it. >> But all the action's in the front end, and that's where you are. Explain Vercel. >> Yeah so Vercel is the company that pioneers front-end development as serverless infrastructure. So we built Next.js which is the most popular React framework in the world. This is what front-end engineers choose to build innovative UI's, beautiful websites. Companies like Dior and GitHub and TikTok and Twitch, which we mentioned in the keynote, are powering their entire dot-coms or all of their new parts of their dot-coms with Next.js. And Vercel is the serverless platform where you can deploy frameworks like in Next.js and others like Svelte and Vue to create really fast experiences on the web. >> So I hear, so serverless, I hear that's the hot trend. You guys made some announcements today. I mean when you look at the, we have spending data with our friends at ETR right down the street. I mean it's just off the charts, whether it's Amazon, Google, Azure Functions, I mean it's just exploding. >> Sahir: Yeah, it's I think in many ways, it's a natural trend. You know, we talk a lot about, whether it be today's keynote or another industry talks you see around our industry that developers are constantly looking for ways to focus on innovation and the business logic that defines their application and as opposed to managing the plumbing, and management of infrastructure. And we've seen this happen over and over again across every layer of the stack. And so for us, you know MongoDB, we have a bit of, you know sort of a lens of a broad spectrum of the market. We certainly have you know, large enterprises that are modernizing existing kind of core systems, then we have developers all over the world who are building the next big best thing. And that's what led us to partner with Vercel is just the bleeding edge of developers building in a new way, in a much more efficient way. And we wanted to make sure we provide a data platform that fits naturally in the way they want to work. >> So explain to our audience the trade-offs of serverless, and I want to get into sort of how you've resolved that. And then I want to hear from Guillermo, what that means for developers. >> Sahir: Yeah in our case, we don't view it as an either or, there are certain workloads and definitely certain companies that will gravitate towards a more traditional database infrastructure where they're choosing the configuration of their cluster. They want full control over it. And that provides, you know, certain benefits around cost predictability or isolation or perceived benefits at least of those things. And customers will gravitate towards that. Now on the flip side, if you're building a new application or you want the ability to scale seamlessly and not have to worry about any of the plumbing, serverless is clearly the easier model. So over the long term, we certainly expect to see as a mix of things, more and more serverless workloads being built on our platform and just generally in the industry, which is why we leaned in so heavily on investing in Atlas serverless. But the flexibility to not be forced into a particular model, but to get the same database experience across your application and even switch between them is an important characteristic for us as we build going forward. >> And you stressed the cost efficiency, and not having to worry about, you know, starting cold. You've architected around that, and what does that mean for a developer? >> Guillermo: For a developer it means that you kind of get the best of both worlds, right? Like you get the best possible performance. Front-end developers are extremely sensitive to this. That's why us pioneering this concept, serverless front-end, has put us in a very privileged position because we have to deliver that really quick time to first buy, that really quick paint. So any of the old trade-offs of serverless are not accepted by the market. You have to be extremely fast. You have to be instant to deliver that front-end content. So what we talked about today for example, with the Vercel Edge network, we're removing all of the cost of that like first hit. That cold start doesn't really exist. And now we're seeing it all across the board, going into the back-end where Mongo has also gotten rid of it. >> Dave: How do you guys collaborate? What's the focus of integration specifically from, you know, an engineering resource standpoint? >> Yeah the main idea is, idea to global app in seconds, right? You have your idea. We give you the framework. We don't give you infrastructure primitives. We give you all the necessary tools to start your application. In practice this means you host it in a Git repo. You import it onto Vercel. You install the Mongo integration. Now your front-end and your data back-end are connected. And then your application just goes global in seconds. >> So, okay. So you've abstracted away the complexity of those primitives, is that correct? >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> Do do developers ever say, "That's awesome but I'd like to get to them every now and then." Or do you not allow that? >> Definitely. We expose all the underlying APIs, and the key thing we hear is that, especially with the push for usage-based billing models, observability is of the essence. So at any time you have to be able to query, in real time, every data point that the platform is observing. We give you performance analytics in real time to see how your front-end is performing. We give you statistics about how often you're querying your back-end and so on, and your cache hit ratios. So what I talked about today in the keynote is, it's not just about throwing more compute at the problem, but the ability to use the edge to your advantage to memoize computation and reuse it across different visits. >> When we think of mission critical historically, you know, you think about going to the ATM, right? I mean a financial transaction. But Mongo is positioning for mission critical applications across a variety of industries. Do we need to rethink what mission critical means? >> I think it's all in the eye of the beholder so to speak. If you're a new business starting up, your software and your application is your entire business. So if you have a cold start latency or God forbid something actually goes down, you don't have a business. So it's just as mission critical to that founder of a new business and new technology as it is, you know, an established enterprise that's running sort of a more, you know, day-to-day application that we may all interact with. So we treat all of those scenarios with equal fervor and importance right? And many times, it's a lot of those new experiences that the become the day-to-day experiences for us globally, and are super important. And we power all of those, whether it be an established enterprise all the way to the next big startup. >> I often talk about COVID as the forced march to digital. >> Sahir: Mm-Hmm. >> Which was obviously a little bit rushed, but if you weren't in digital business, you were out of business. And so now you're seeing people step back and say, "All right, let's be more thoughtful about our digital transformation. We've got some time, we've obviously learned some things made some mistakes." It's all about the customer experience though. And that becomes mission critical right? What are you seeing Guillermo, in terms of the patterns in digital transformation now that we're sort of exiting the isolation economy? >> One thing that comes to mind is, we're seeing that it's not always predictable how fast you're going to grow in this digital economy. So we have customers in the ecommerce space, they do a drop and they're piggybacking on serverless to give them that ability to instantly scale. And they couldn't even prepare for some of these events. We see that a lot with the Web3 space and NFT drops, where they're building in such a way that they're not sensitive to this massive fluctuations in traffic. They're taking it for granted. We've put in so much work together behind the scenes to support it. But the digital native creator just, "Oh things are scaling from one second to the next like I'm hitting like 20,000 requests per second, no problem Vercel is handling it." But the amount of infrastructural work that's gone behind the scenes in support has been incredible. >> We see that in gaming all the time, you know it's really hard for a gaming company to necessarily predict where in the globe a game's going to be particularly hot. Games get super popular super fast if they're successful, it's really hard to predict. It's another vertical that's got a similar dynamic. >> So gaming, crypto, so you're saying that you're able to assist your customers in architecting so that the website doesn't crash. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> But at the same time, if the the business dynamic changes, they can dial down. >> Yeah. >> Right and in many ways, slow is the new down, right? And if somebody has a slow experience they're going to leave your site just as much as if it's- >> I'm out of here- >> You were down. So you know, it's really maintaining that really fast performance, that amazing customer experience. Because this is all measured, it's scientific. Like anytime there's friction in the process, you're going to lose customers. >> So obviously people are excited about your keynote, but what have they been saying? Any specific comments you can share, or questions that you got that were really interesting or? >> I'm already getting links to the apps that people are deploying. So the whole idea- >> Come on! >> All over the world. Yeah so it's already working I'm excited. >> So they were show they were showing off, "Look what I did" Really? >> Yeah on Twitter. >> That's amazing. >> I think from my standpoint, I got a question earlier, we were with a bunch of financial analysts and investors, and they said they've been talking to a lot of the customers in the halls. And just to see, you know, from the last time we were all in person, the number of our customers that are using multiple capabilities across this idea of a developer data platform, you know, certainly MongoDB's been a popular core database open source for a long time. But the new capabilities around search, analytics, mobile being adopted much more broadly to power these experiences is the most exciting thing from our side. >> So from 2019 to now, you're saying substantial uptick in adoption for these features? >> Yeah. And many of them are new. >> Time series as well, that's pretty new, so yeah. >> Yeah and you know, our philosophy of development at MongoDB is to get capabilities in the hands of customers early. Get that feedback to enrich and drive that product-market fit. And over the last three years especially, we've been transitioning from a single product kind of core, you know, non relational modern database to a data platform, a developer data platform that adds more and more capabilities to power these modern applications. And a lot of those were released during the pandemic. Certainly we talked about them in our virtual conferences and all the zoom meetings we had over the years. But to actually go talk to all these customers, this is the largest conference we've ever put on, and to get a sense of, wow all the amazing things they're doing with them, it's definitely a different feeling when we're all together. >> So that's interesting, when you have such a hot product, product-led growth which is what Mongo has been in, and you add these new features. They're coming from the developers who are saying, "Hey, we need this." >> Yip. >> Okay so you have a pretty high degree of confidence, but how do you know when you have product-market fit? I mean, is it adoption, usage, renewals? What's your metric? >> Yeah I think it's a mix of quantitative measures that you know, around conversion rates, the size of your funnel, the retention rate, NPS which obviously can be measured, but also just qualitative. You know when you're talking to a developer or a technology executive around what their needs are, and then you see how they actually apply it to solve a problem, it's that balance between the qualitative and the quantitative measurement of things. And you can just sort of, frankly you can feel it. You can see it in the numbers sure, but you can kind of feel that excitement, you can see that adoption and what it empowers people to do. And so to me, as a product leader, it's always a blend of those things. If you get too obsessed with purely the metrics, you can always over optimize something for the wrong reason. So you have to bring in that qualitative feedback to balance yourself out. >> Right. >> Guillermo, what's next? What do you not have that you want from Sahir and Mongo? >> So the natural next step for serverless computing is, is the Edge. So we have to auto-scale, we have to tolerate fares. We have to be avail. We have to be easy, but we have to be global. And right now we've been doing this by using a lot of techniques like caching and replication and things like this. But the future's about personalizing even more to each visitor depending on where they are. So if I'm in New York, I want to get the latest offers for New York on demand, just for me, and using AI to continue to personalize that experience. So giving the developer these tools in a way where it feels natural to build an application like this. It doesn't feel like, "Oh I'm going to do this year 10 if I make it, I'm going to do it since the very beginning." >> Dave: Okay interesting. So that says to me that I'm not going to make a round trip to the cloud necessarily for that experience. So I'm going to have some kind, Apple today, at the Worldwide Developer Conference announced the M2, right. I've been looking at the M1 Ultra, and I'm going wow look at that! And so- >> Sahir: You were talking about that new one backstage. >> I mean it's this amazing pace of Silicon development and they're focusing on the NPU and you look at what Tesla's doing. I mean it's just incredible. So you're going to have some new hardware architecture that emerges. Most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. You're going to have a real time inferencing at the Edge. So that's not going to do the round trip. There's going to be a data store there, I think it has to be. You're going to persist some of the data, maybe not all of it. So it's a whole new architecture- >> Sahir: Absolutely. >> That's developing. That sounds very disruptive. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> How do you think about that, and how does Mongo play there? Guillermo first. >> What I spent a lot of time thinking about is obviously the developer experience, giving the programmer a programming model that is natural, intuitive, and produces its great results. So if they have to think about data that's local because of regulatory reasons for example, how can we let the framework guide them to success? I'm just writing an application I deployed to the cloud and then everything else is figured out. >> Yeah or speed of light is another challenge. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> How can we overcome the speed of light is our next task for sure. >> Well you're working on that aren't you? You've got the best engineers on that one. (Sahir and Guillermo laugh) >> We can solve a lot of problems, I'm not sure of that one. >> So Mongo plays in that scenario or? >> Yeah so I think, absolutely you know, we've been focused heavily on becoming the globally distributed cloud data layer. The back-end data layer that allows you to persist data to align with performance and move data where it needs to be globally or deal with data sovereignty, data nationalism that's starting to rise, but absolutely there is more data being pushed out to the Edge, to your point around processing or inference happening at the Edge. And there's going to be a globally distributed front-end layer as well, whether data and processing takes apart. And so we're focused on one, making sure the data connectivity and the layer is all connected into one unified architecture. We do that in combination with technologies that we have that do with mobility or edge distribution and synchronization of data with realm. And we do it with partnerships. We have edge partnerships with AWS and Verizon. We have partnerships with a lot of CVM players who are building out that Edge platform and making sure that MongoDB is either connected to it or just driving that synchronization back and forth. >> I call that unified experience super cloud, Robbie Belson from Verizon the cloud continuum, but that consistent experience for developers whether you're on Prim, whether you're in you know, Azure, Google, AWS, and ultimately the Edge. That's the big- >> That's where it's going. >> White space right now I'm hearing, Guillermo, right? >> I think it'll define the next generation of how software is built. And we're seeing this almost like a coalition course between some of the ideas that the Web3 developers are excited about, which is like decentralization almost to the extreme. But the Web2 also needs more decentralization, because we're seeing it with like, the data needs to be local to me, I need more privacy. I was looking at the latest encryption features in Mongo, like I think both Web2 need to incorporate more of the ideas of Web3 and vice versa to create the best possible consumer experience. Privacy matters more than ever before. Latency for conversion matters more than ever before. And regulations are changing. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> And you talked about Web3 earlier, talked about new protocols, a new distributed you know, decentralized system emerging, new hardware architectures. I really believe we really think that new economics are going to bleed back into the data center, and yeah every 15 years or so this industry gets disrupted. >> Sahir: Yeah. >> Guillermo: Absolutely. >> You know you ain't see nothing yet guys. >> We all talked about hardware becoming commoditized 10, 15 years ago- >> Yeah of course. >> We get the virtualization, and it's like nope not at all. It's actually a lot of invention happening. >> The lower the price the more the consumption. So guys thanks so much. Great conversation. >> Thank you. >> Really appreciate your time. >> Really appreciate it I enjoyed the conversation. >> All right and thanks for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. Dave Vellante for theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. >> Man Offscreen: Clear. (clapping) >> All right wow. Don't get up. >> Sahir: Okay. >> Is that a Moonwatch? >> Sahir: It is a Speedmaster but it's that the-

>>Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're back at the center of the coverage of the world 20 twenty-two, the first live event in three years. Pretty amazing. And I'm really excited to have Tony Coleman. Here is the c e o of those who changing the finance and banking industry. And this is the global head of industry solutions. That would be welcome. Back to the cube. Welcome. First time. Um, so thanks for coming on. Thank you. >>Thanks for having us, >>Tony. Tell us about what are you guys up to? Disrupting the finance world. >>So tomorrow is everyone's banking platform. So we are a software company. We have over 3000 financial institutions around the world. Marketing tell me that that works out is over 1.2 billion people rely on terminal software for their banking and financial needs. 41 of the top 50 banks in the world run software and we are very proud to be powering all of those entities on their innovation journeys and bringing you know, that digital transformation that we've seen so much all over the past few years and enabling a lot of the world's unbanked through digital banking become, you know, members of the >>community. So basically you're bringing the software platform to enable that to somebody you don't have to build it themselves because they never get there. Absolutely. And and so that's why I don't know if you consider that disruptive. I guess I do to the industry to a certain extent. But when you think of disruption in the business, you think of Blockchain and crypto, and 50 is that is completely separate world and you guys participate in that as well. Well, I >>would say it's related right? I mean, I was doing a podcast recently and they had this idea of, um, buzzword jail where you could choose words to go into jail and I said 50 not because I think they're intrinsically bad, but I think just at the moment they are a rife for scam area. I think it's one of those one of these technologies and investment area that people don't understand it, and there's a lot of a lot of mistakes that can be made in that, >>Yeah, >>I mean, it's a fascinating piece that it could be truly transformative if we get it right, but it's very emerging, so we'll see so don't play a huge part in the Blockchain industry directly. We work with partners in that space, but in terms of digital assets and that sort of thing. Yeah, absolutely. >>So, Boris, you have industry solutions in your title. What does that entail? So >>basically, I'm responsible for all the verticals, and that includes great partners like Tony. And we're doing a lot of verticals by now. When you listen. Today in all these various talks, we have so much stuff ranging from banking, go retail, healthcare, insurance, you name it, we have it by now. And that's obviously the clients moving from the edge solution. Like touching a little toe in the water, but longer to going all in building biggest solutions you saw on stage the lady from this morning. These are not second Great. Yeah, we do something small now. We're part of the transformation journey. And this is where Tony and I can regularly together how we transform things and how we built a new way of banking is done with Michael services and technology surrounding it. Yeah, >>but what about performance in this world? Can you tell me about that? >>Yeah. This is an interesting thing because people always challenging what is performance and document databases. And Tony challenged us actually, six weeks before his own show several weeks ago in London and says, Boris, let's do a benchmark And maybe you bring your story because if I get too excited, I follow. >>Yeah, sure, that performance and efficiency topics close close to my heart. I have been for for years. And so, yeah, we every two or three years, we run a high water. We've got a high water benchmark, and this year we sort of double down literally double down on everything we did previously. So this was 200 million accounts, 100 million customers, and we were thrashing through 102,800 seventy-five transactions a second, which is a phenomenal number. And, uh, >>can I do that on the Blockchain? >>Wow. Yeah, exactly. Right. So this is you know, I get asked why we do such high numbers and the reason is very straightforward. If somebody wants 10,000 transactions a second, we're seeing banks now that need that sort of thing. If I can give them a benchmark report, this is 100,000. I don't need to keep doing benchmarks. 10. >>Yeah. Tell me more about the Anytime you get into benchmarks, you want to understand the configuration. The workload. Tell me more about that. So we have >>a pretty well path of a standard transaction mix. We call it a retail transaction mix. And so it's the tries to the workload. Is that because it's a simulation right around what you would do in your daily basis? So you're going to make payments you're going to check? Your balance is you're going to see what he's moved on your account. So we do all of that and we run it through a proper production, good environment. And this is really important. This is something we do in the lab you couldn't go live on. This is all all of the horrible, non functional requirements around high availability, >>security, security passes, private wings, all these things. And one thing is, they're doing this for a long time. So this is not like let's define something new for the world. Now, this is something Tony's doing for literally 10, 15 years now, right? >>It was only 15 years, but this >>is your benchmark >>top >>developed Okay, >>so we run it through and, um yeah, some fantastic numbers. And not just on the share sort of top-level numbers 100,000 transactions. A second response time out of it was fantastic. One-millisecond, which is just brilliant. So it means you get these really efficient numbers what that helped us do with, you know, some of the other partners that are involved in the benchmark as well. It meant that our throughput court, which is a really good measure of efficiency, is up to four times better than we ran it three years ago. So in terms of a sustainability piece, which is so important that that's really a huge improvement, that's down to application changes, architect changes as well as using appropriate technology in the right place. >>How important? With things like the number, of course, the memory size is the block sizes. All that stuff. >>We are very tiny. So this is the part. When I talk to people, we have what we call a system in the back of people. Look at me. Um, how many transactions on that one? So, to be fair, three-quarters, we're going to be one quarter or something else because we're still putting some components of and start procedures for disclosure. But when I think Seventy-five 1000 transactions on a single single 80 system, which is thirty-two cause you're saying correctly, something like that. This is a tiny machine in the world of banking. So before this was the main friends and now it's wonderful instance on a W s. And this is really amazing. Costed and environmental footprint is so, so important >>and there's a heavy right heavy environment. >>So the the way we the way we architect the solution is it follows something called a command query responsibility, segregated segregation. So what we do, we do all the commands inappropriate database for that piece, and that was running at about Twenty-five 1000 transactions a second and then we're streaming the data out of that directly into So actually I was doing more than the Seventy-five 1000 queries. A second, which is the part of it was also investing Twenty-five 1000 transactions the second at the same time >>and okay, and the workload had a high locality medium locality. It was just give us a picture of what that's like. Sorry. So, >>yeah, >>we don't have that. Yeah, >>so explain that That's not That's not the mindset for a document. Exactly. >>Exactly. In the document database, you don't have the hot spotting the one single field off the table, which is suddenly hot spotting. And now you have literally and recovery comes up and we say, What goes, goes together, get together belongs together, comes out together. So the number of, for example, it's much, much smaller and the document system, then historically, relationship. >>So it is not a good good indicator, necessarily >>anymore. That's what this is so much reduced. The number of access patterns are smaller, and I mean it is highly optimized, for example, internally as well. The internal structures, so that was very close to a >>traditional benchmark, would have a cash in front of a high cash rate. So 100 and 99% right, That's a high locality reference. But that's that's irrelevant. >>It's gone. There's no cashing in the middle anymore. It goes straight against the database. All these things are out, and that's what makes it so exciting and all the things in a real environment. I think we really need to stress it. It's not a test that at home. It's a real life environment out into the wild with the benchmark driving and driving. >>How did your customers respond? You did this for your recent event? >>Yeah, we did it for our use. A conference, our community for, um, which was a few weeks ago in London. Um, and the You know, the reaction was Certainly it was a great reception, of course, but the main thing that people are fascinated about, how much more efficient the whole platform it's explaining. So you know when we can run and it's a great number that we've got the team pulled out, which is so having doubled throughput on the platform from what we did three years ago, we're actually using 20% less infrastructure to give double the performance. Uh, macro-level, that's a phenomenal achievement. And that means that these changes that we make everything that we're doing benefits all of our customers. So all of the banks, when they take the latest release, is they get these benefits. Everything is that much more efficient. So everybody benefits from every investment, >>and this was running in the cloud. Is that correct? You're running out of this. >>So this was list, Um, 80 on a W s with a W s cases and processes. And so it was a really reality driven environment, >>pure pure cloud-native or using mana services on a W s. And then at least for the peace. It's >>awesome. I mean, uh, So now how convenient for the timing from, uh, the world. How are you socializing with your community? >>We're having this afternoon session as well, where we talk a little bit more detail about that, and he has a session as well tomorrow. So we see a lot of good feedback as well when we bring it up with clients. Obviously some clients get very specific because this reduction footprint is so huge when you think a client has 89 environments from early development systems to production to emergency standby, maybe a different cloud. All these things what day talks about the different Atlas features multi cloud environmentally. All this stuff comes to play. And this is why I'm so excited to work with them. We should bring up as well the other things which are available to ready already with your front and solutions with Infinity services because that's the other part of the modernization, the Michael Services, which Tony so politely not mentioning. So there's a lot of cool technology into that one, which fits to how it works in micros services. Happy I first all these what they called factors. Micro service a p. I cloud-native headless. I think that was the right order now. So all these things are reflected as well. But with their leadership chief now, I think a lot of companies have to play Catch-up now to what Tony and his team are delivering on the bank. This >>gets the modernization. We really haven't explicitly talks about that. Everything you've just said talks to modernization. So you typically in financial services find a lot of relation. Database twenty-year-old, hardened, etcetera, high availability. Give them credit for that. But a lot of times you'll see them just shift that into the cloud. You guys chose not to do that. What was the modernization journey look like? >>So it's a bit of, um yeah, a firm believer in pragmatism and using. I think you touched on earlier the appropriate technology. So >>horses for courses >>exactly right out of my mouth. And I was talking to one of the uh, the investor analysts earlier. And you know, the exact same question comes up, right? So if you've got a relation database or you've got a big legacy system and you're not gonna mainframe or whatever it is and you wanna pull that over when you it's not just a case of moving the data model from one paradigm to another. You need to look at it holistically, and you need to be ambitious. I think the industry has got, you know, quite nervous about some of these transformation projects, but in some ways it might be counter intuitive. I think being ambitious and being in bold is a better way. Better way through, you know, take take of you, look at it holistically. Layout of plan. It is hard. It is hard to do these sorts of transformations, but that's what makes it the challenge. That's what makes it fun. Take take those bold steps. Look at it holistically. Look at the end state and then work out a practical way. You can deliver value to the business and your customers as you deliver on the road. So >>did you migrate from a traditional R D B. M s to go. >>So So, Yeah, this is a conversation. So, uh, in the late nineties, the kind of the phrase document model hasn't really been coined yet. And for some of our work at the time, we refer to as a hierarchical model. Um, And at that point in time, really, if you wanted to sell to a bank, you needed to be running Oracle. So we took this data model and we got it running an article and then other relational databases as well, but actually under the colors there it is, sort of as well. So there is a project that we're looking at to say Well, okay, taking that model, which is in a relational database. And of course, you build over time, you do rely on some of the features of relations databases moving that over to something like, isn't it? You know, it's not quite as simple as just changing the data model. Um, so there's a few bits and pieces that we need to work through, but there is a concept that we are running, which is looking really promising and spurred on by the amazing results from the benchmark. That could be something That's really >>yeah, I think you know, 20 years ago you probably wouldn't even thought about it. It's just too risky. But today, with the modern tools and the cloud and you're talking about micro services and containers, it becomes potentially more feasible. >>But the other side of it is, you know, it's only relatively recently the Mongo who's had transaction support across multiple document multi collection transactions and in banking. As we all know, you know, it's highly regulated. That is, all of your worst possible non functional requirement. Security transaction reality. Thomas City You know, the whole the whole shebang. Your worst possible nightmare is Monday morning for >>us. So and I think one part which is exciting about this Tony is a very good practical example about this large scale modernization and cutting out by cutting off that layer and going back to the hierarchical internal structures. We're simply find a lot of the backing components of our because obviously translation which was done before, it's not need it anymore. And that is as well for me, an exciting example to see how long it takes what it is. So Tony space in my life experiments so to speak >>well, you're right because it used to be those migrations. Where how many line of code? How long do I have to freeze it? And that a lot of times lead people to say, Well, forget it, because the business is going to shut down. >>But now we do that. We do that. So I'm working, obviously, besides the work with a lot of financial clients, and but now it's my job is normally shift and left a pain in the game because the result of the work is when they move everything to the cloud and it was bad before. It will not be better in the cloud only because it's in somebody else's data center. So these modernization and innovation factor is absolutely critical. And it's only said that people get it by now. This shift and left over it is how can I innovate? How can accelerate innovation, and that leads very quickly to the document model discussion. >>Yeah, I think the world practitioners will tell you, if you really want to affect the operational model, have a meaningful impact on your business. You have to really modernized. You can't just lift shift that they're absolutely. You know, what's the difference between hundreds of millions or billions in some cases, versus, you know, some nice little hits here or there. >>So we see as well a lot of clients asking for solutions like the terminal solutions. And like others where there is not anymore discussion about how to move to the The question is how fast how can accelerate. We see the services request the first one. It's amazing. After the event, what we had in London, 100 clients calling us. So it's not our sales people calling upon the clients, the clients coming in. I saw it. How do we get started? And that is for me, from the vendor perspective, so to speak. Amazing moment >>yourself. You go, guys, we're gonna go. Thanks so much for that. You have to have you back and see how that goes. That. Yeah, that's a big story of if you're a great All right, keep it right there. Everybody will be right back. This is David for the Cube. You're watching our live coverage of mongo D B World 20 twenty-two from New York City. >>Yeah, >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>>Welcome back to NYC the Cube's coverage of Mongo DB 2022, a few thousand people here at least bigger than many people, perhaps expected, and a lot of buzz going on and we're gonna talk devs. I'm really excited to welcome back. Robbie Bellson who's the developer relations lead at Verizon and Ian Massingham. Who's the vice president of developer relations at Mongo DB Jens. Good to see you. Great >>To be here. >>Thanks having you. So Robbie, we just met a few weeks ago at the, the red hat summit in Boston and was blown away by what Verizon is doing in, in developer land. And of course, Ian, you know, Mongo it's rayon Detra is, is developers start there? Why is Mongo so developer friendly from your perspective? >>Well, it's been the ethos of MongoDB since day one. You know, back when we launched the first version of MongoDB back in 2009, we've always been about making developers lives easier. And then in 2016, we announced and released MongoDB Atlas, which is our cloud managed service for MongoDB, you know, starting with a small number of regions built on top of AWS and about 2,500 adoption events per week for MongoDB Atlas. After the first year today, MongoDB Atlas provides a managed service for MongoDB developers around the world. We're present in almost a hundred cloud regions across S DCP and Azure. And that adoption number is now running at about 25,000 developers a week. So, you know, the proof are in proof is really in the metrics. MongoDB is an incredibly popular platform for developers that wanna build data-centric applications. You just can't argue with the metrics really, >>You know, Ravi, sometimes there's an analyst who come up with these theories and one of the theories I've been spouting for a long time is that developers are gonna win the edge. And now to, to see you at Verizon building out this developer community was really exciting to me. So explain how you got this started with this journey. >>Absolutely. As you think about Verizon 5g edge or mobile edge computing portfolio, we knew from the start that developers would play a central role and not only consuming the service, but shaping the roadmap for what it means to build a 5g future. And so we started this journey back in late 20, 19 and fast forward to about a year ago with Mongo, we realized, well, wait a minute, you look at the core service offerings available at the edge. We didn't know really what to do with data. We wanted to figure it out. We wanted the vote of confidence from developers. So there I was in an apartment in Colorado racing, your open source Mongo against that in the region edge versus region, what would you see? And we saw tremendous performance improvements. It was so much faster. It's more than 40% faster for thousands and thousands of rights. And we said, well, wait a minute. There's something here. So what often starts is an organic developer, led intuition or hypothesis can really expand to a much broader go to market motion that really brings in the enterprise. And that's been our strategy from day one. Well, >>It's interesting. You talk about the performance. I, I just got off of a session talking about benchmarks in the financial services industry, you know, amazing numbers. And that's one of the hallmarks of, of Mongo is it can play in a lot of different places. So you guys both have developer relations in your title. Is that how you met some formal developer relations? >>We were a >>Program. >>Yeah, I would say that Verizon is one of the few customers that we also collaborate with on a developer relations effort. You know, it's in our mutual best interest to try to drive MongoDB consumption amongst developers using Verizon's 5g edge network and their platform. So of course we work together to help, to increase awareness of MongoDB amongst mobile developers that want to use that kind of technology. >>But so what's your story on this? >>I mean, as I, as I mentioned, everything starts with an organic developer discovery. It all started. I just cold messaged a developer advocate on Twitter and here we are at MongoDB world. It's amazing how things turn out. But one of the things that's really resonated with me as I was speaking with one of, one of your leads within your organization, they were mentioning that as Mongo DVIA developed over the years, the mantra really became, we wanna make software development easy. Yep. And that really stuck with me because from a network perspective, we wanna make networking easy. Developers are not gonna care about the internals of 5g network. In fact, they want us to abstract away those complexities so that they can focus on building their apps. So what better co-innovation opportunity than taking MongoDB, making software easy, and we make the network easy. >>So how do you think about the edge? How does you know variety? I mean, to me, you know, there's a lot of edge use cases, you know, think about the home Depot or lows. Okay, great. I can put like a little mini data center in there. That's cool. That's that's edge. Like, but when I think of Verizon, I mean, you got cell towers, you've got the far edge. How do you think about edge Robbie? >>Well, the edge is a, I believe a very ambiguous term by design. The edge is the device, the mobile device, an IOT device, right? It could be the radio towers that you mentioned. It could be in the Metro edge. The CDN, no one edge is better than the other. They're all just serving different use cases. So when we talk about the edge, we're focused on the mobile edge, which we believe is most conducive to B2B applications, a fleet of IOT devices that you can control a manufacturing plant, a fleet of ground and aerial robotics. And in doing so you can create a powerful compute mesh where you could have a private network and private mobile edge computing by way of say an AWS outpost and then public mobile edge computing by way of AWS wavelength. And why keep them separate. You could have a single compute mesh even with MongoDB. And this is something that we've been exploring. You can extend Atlas, take a cluster, leave it in the region and then use realm the mobile portfolio and spread it all across the edge. So you're creating that unified compute and data mesh together. >>So you're describing what we've been expecting is a new architecture emerging, and that's gonna probably bring new economics of new use cases, right? Where are we today in that first of all, is that a reasonable premise that this is a sort of a new architecture that's being built out and where are we in that build out? How, how do you think about the, the future of >>That? Absolutely. It's definitely early days. I think we're still trying to figure it out, but the architecture is definitely changing the idea to rip out a mobile device that was initially built and envisioned for the device and only for the device and say, well, wait a minute. Why can't it live at the edge? And ultimately become multi-tenant if that's the data volume that may be produced to each of those edge zones with hypothesis that was validated by developers that we continue to build out, but we recognize that we can't, we can't get that static. We gotta keep evolving. So one of our newest ideas as we think about, well, wait a minute, how can Mongo play in the 5g future? We started to get really clever with our 5g network APIs. And I, I think we talked about this briefly last time, 5g, programmability and network APIs have been talked about for a while, but developers haven't had a chance to really use them and our edge discovery service answering the question in this case of which database is the closest database, doesn't have to be invoked by the device anymore. You can take a thin client model and invoke it from the cloud using Atlas functions. So we're constantly permuting across the entire portfolio edge or otherwise for what it means to build at the edge. We've seen such tremendous results. >>So how does Mongo think about the edge and, and, and playing, you know, we've been wondering, okay, which database is actually gonna be positioned best for the edge? >>Well, I think if you've got an ultra low latency access network using data technology, that adds latency is probably not a great idea. So MongoDB since the very formative years of the company and product has been built with performance and scalability in mind, including things like in memory storage for the storage engine that we run as well. So really trying to match the performance characteristics of the data infrastructure with the evolution in the mobile network, I think is really fundamentally important. And that first principles build of MongoDB with performance and scalability in mind is actually really important here. >>So was that a lighter weight instance of, of Mongo or not >>Necessarily? No, not necessarily. No, no, not necessarily. We do have edge cashing with realm, the mobile databases Robbie's already mentioned, but the core database is designed from day one with those performance and scalability characteristics in mind, >>I've been playing around with this. This is kind of a, I get a lot of heat for this term, but super cloud. So super cloud, you might have data on Preem. You might have data in various clouds. You're gonna have data out at the edge. And, and you've got an abstraction that allows a developer to, to, to tap services without necessarily if, if he or she wants to go deep into the S great, but then there's a higher level of services that they can actually build for their customers. So is that a technical reality from a developer standpoint, in your view, >>We support that with the Mongo DB multi-cloud deployment model. So you can place Mongo DB, Atlas nodes in any one of the three hyperscalers that we mentioned, AWS, GCP or Azure, and you can distribute your data across nodes within a cluster that is spread across different cloud providers. So that kinds of an kind of answers the question about how you do data placement inside the MongoDB clustered environment that you run across the different providers. And then for the abstraction layer. When you say that I hear, you know, drivers ODMs the other intermediary software components that we provide to make developers more productive in manipulating data in MongoDB. This is one of the most interesting things about the technology. We're not forcing developers to learn a different dialect or language in order to interact with MongoDB. We meet them where they are by providing idiomatic interfaces to MongoDB in JavaScript in C sharp, in Python, in rust, in that in fact in 12 different pro programming languages that we support as a first party plus additional community contributed programming languages that the community have created drivers for ODMs for. So there's really that model that you've described in hypothesis exist in reality, using >>Those different Compli. It's not just a series of siloed instances in, >>In different it's the, it's the fabric essentially. Yeah. >>What, what does the Verizon developer look like? Where does that individual come from? We talked about this a little bit a few weeks ago, but I wonder if you could describe it. >>Absolutely. My view is that the Verizon or just mobile edge ecosystem in general for developers are present at this very conference. They're everywhere. They're building apps. And as Ian mentioned, those idiomatic interfaces, we need to take our network APIs, take the infrastructure that's being exposed and make sure that it's leveraging languages, frameworks, automation, tools, the likes of Terraform and beyond. We wanna meet developers where they are and build tools that are easy for them to use. And so you had talked about the super cloud. I often call it the cloud continuum. So we, we took it P abstraction by abstraction. We started with, will it work in one edge? Will it work in multiple edges, public and private? Will it work in all of the edges for a given region, public or private, will it work in multiple regions? Could it work in multi clouds? We've taken it piece by piece by piece and in doing so abstracting way, the complexity of the network, meaning developers, where they are providing those idiomatic interfaces to interact with our API. So think the edge discovery, but not in a silo within Atlas functions. So the way that we're able to converge portfolios, using tools that dev developers already use know and love just makes it that much easier. Do, >>Do you feel like I like the cloud continuum cause that's really what it is. The super cloud does the security model, how does the security model evolve with that? >>At least in the context of the mobile edge, the attack surface is a lot smaller because it's only for mobile traffic not to say that there couldn't be various configuration and human error that could be entertained by a given application experience, but it is a much more secure and also reliable environment from a failure domain perspective, there's more edge zones. So it's less conducive to a regionwide failure because there's so many more availability zones. And that goes hand in hand with security. Mm. >>Thoughts on security from your perspective, I mean, you added, you've made some announcements this week, the, the, the encryption component that you guys announced. >>Yeah. We, we issued a press release this morning about a capability called queryable encryption, which actually as we record this Mark Porter, our CTO is talking about in his keynote, and this is really the next generation of security for data stored within databases. So the trade off within field level encryption within databases has always been very hard, very, very rigid. Either you have keys stored within your database, which means that your memory, so your data is decrypted while it's resident in memory on your database engine. This allow, of course, allows you to perform query operations on that data. Or you have keys that are managed and stored in the client, which means the data is permanently OBS from the engine. And therefore you can't offload query capabilities to your data platform. You've gotta do everything in the client. So if you want 10 records, but you've got a million encrypted records, you have to pull a million encrypted records to the client, decrypt them all and see performance hit in there. Big performance hit what we've got with queryable encryption, which we announced today is the ability to keep data encrypted in memory in the engine, in the database, in the data platform, issue queries from the client, but use a technology called structural encryption to allow the database engine, to make decisions, operate queries, and find data without ever being able to see it without it ever being decrypted in the memory of the engine. So it's groundbreaking technology based on research in the field of structured encryption with a first commercial database provided to bring this to market. >>So how does the mobile edge developer think about that? I mean, you hear a lot about shifting left and not bolting on security. I mean, is this, is this an example of that? >>It certainly could be, but I think the mobile edge developer still stuck with how does this stuff even work? And I think we need to, we need to be mindful of that as we build out learning journeys. So one of my favorite moments with Mongo was an immersion day. We had hosted earlier last year where we, our, from an enterprise perspective, we're focused on BW BS, but there's nothing stopping us. You're building a B2C app based on the theme of the winner Olympics. At the time, you could take a picture of Sean White or of Nathan Chen and see that it was in fact that athlete and then overlaid on that web app was the number of medals they accrued with the little trumpeteer congratulating you for selecting that athlete. So I think it's important to build trust and drive education with developers with a more simple experience and then rapidly evolve overlaying the features that Ian just mentioned over time. >>I think one of the keys with cryptography is back to the familiar messaging for the cloud offloading heavy lifting. You actually need to make it difficult to impossible for developers to get this wrong, and you wanna make it as easy as possible for developers to deal with cryptography. And that of course is what we're trying to do with our driver technology combined with structure encryption, with query encryption. >>But Robbie, your point is lots of opportunity for education. I mean, I have to say the developers that I work with, it's, I'm, I'm in awe of how they solve problems and I, and the way they solve problems, if they don't know the answer, they figure out how to go get it. So how, how are your two communities and other communities, you know, how are they coming together to, to solve such problems and share whether it's best practices or how do I do this? >>Well, I'm not gonna lie in person. Events are a bunch of fun. And one of the easiest domain knowledge exchange opportunities, when you're all in person, you can ideate, you can whiteboard, you can brainstorm. And often those conversations are what leads to that infrastructure module that an immersion day features. And it's just amazing what in person events can do, but community groups of interest, whether it's a Twitch stream, whether it's a particular code sample, we rely heavily on digital means today to upscale the developer community, but also build on by, by means of a simple port request, introduce new features that maybe you weren't even thinking of before. >>Yeah. You know, that's a really important point because when you meet people face to face, you build a connection. And so if you ask a question, you're more likely perhaps to get an answer, or if one doesn't exist in a, in a search, you know, you, oh, Hey, we met at the, at the conference and let's collaborate on this guys. Congratulations on, on this brave new world. You're in a really interesting spot. You know, developers, developers, developers, as Steve bomber says screamed. And I was glad to see Dave was not screaming and jumping up and down on the stage like that, but, but the message still resonates. So thank you, definitely appreciate. All right, keep it right there. This is Dave ante for the cubes coverage of Mago DB world 2022 from New York city. We'll be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Javits in the big apple, New York City. This is theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. We're here for a full day of coverage. We're talking to customers, partners, executives and analysts as well. Peder Ulander is here. He's the Chief Marketing Officer of MongoDB and he's joined by Radhika Krishnan, who's the Chief Product Officer at Hitachi Ventara. Folks, welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you both again. >> Good to see you. >> Thank you David, it's good to be back again. >> Peder, first time since 2019, we've been doing a lot of these conferences and many of them, it's the first time people have been out in a physical event in three years. Amazing. >> I mean, after three years to come back here in our hometown of New York and get together with a few thousand of our favorite customers, partners, analysts, and such, to have real good discussions around where we're taking the world with regards to our developer data platform. It's been great. >> I think a big part of that story of course, is ecosystem and partnerships and Radhika, I remember I was at an event when Hitachi announced its strategy and it's name change, and really tried to understand why and the what's behind that. And of course, Hitachi's a company that looks out over the long term, and of course it has to perform tactically, but it thinks about the future. So give us the update on what's new at Hitachi Ventara, especially as it relates to data. >> Sure thing, Dave. As many, many folks might be aware, there's a very strong heritage that Hitachi has had in the data space, right. By virtue of our products and our presence in the data storage market, which dates back to many decades, right? And then on the industrial side, the parent company Hitachi has been heavily focused on the OT sector. And as you know, there is a pretty significant digital transformation underway in the OT arena, which is all being led by data. So if you look at our mission statement, for instance, it's actually engineering the data driven because we do believe that data is the fundamental platform that's going to drive that digital transformation, irrespective of what industry you're in. >> So one of the themes that you guys both talk about is modernization. I mean, you can take a cloud, I remember Alan Nance, who was at the time, he was a CIO at Philips, he said, look, you could take a cloud workload, or on-prem workload, stick it into the cloud and lift it and shift it. And in your case, you could just put it on, run it on an RDBMS, but you're not going to affect the operational models. >> Peder Ulander: It's just your mess for less, man. >> If you do that. >> It's your mess, for less. >> And so, he goes, you'll get a few, you know, you'll get a couple of zeros out of that. But if you want to have, in his case, billion dollar impact to the business, you have to modernize. So what does modernize mean to each of you? >> Maybe Peder, you can start. >> Yeah, no, I'm happy to start. I think it comes down to what's going on in the industry. I mean, we are truly moving from a world of data centers to centers of data, and these centers of data are happening further and further out along the network, all the way down to the edges. And if you look at the transformation of infrastructure or software that has enabled us to get there, we've seen apps go from monoliths to microservices. We've seen compute go from physical to serverless. We've seen networking go from old wireline copper to high powered 5G networks. They've all transformed. What's the one layer that hasn't completely transformed yet, data, right? So if we do see this world where things are getting further and further out, you've got to rethink your data architecture and how you basically support this move to modernization. And we feel that MongoDB with our partners, especially with Hitachi, we're best suited to really kind of help with this transition for our customers as they move from data centers to centers of data. >> So architecture. And at the failure, I will say this and you tell me if you agree or not. A lot of the failures of sort of the big data architectures of today are there's, everything's in this monolithic database, you've got to go through a series of hyper-specialized professionals to get to the data. If you're a business individual, you're so frustrated because the market's changing faster than you can get answers. So you guys, I know, use this concept of data fabric, people talk about data mesh. So how do you think, Radhika, about modernization in the future of data, which by its very nature is distributed? >> Yeah. So Dave, everybody talks about the hybrid cloud, right? And so the reality is, every one of our customers is having to deal with data that's straddled across on-prem as well as the public cloud and many other places as well. And so it becomes incredibly important that you have a fairly seamless framework, that's relatively low friction, that allows you to go from the capture of the data, which could be happening at the edge, could be happening at the core, any number of places, all the way to publish, right. Which is ultimately what you want to do with data because data exists to deliver insights, right? And therefore you dramatically want to minimize the friction in the process. And that is exactly what we're attempting to do with our data fabric construct, right. We're essentially saying, customers don't have to worry about, like you mentioned, they may have federated data structures, architectures, data lakes, fitting in multiple locations. How do you ensure that you're not having to double up custom code in order to drive the pipelines, in order to drive the data movement from one location to the other and so forth. And so essentially what we're providing is a mechanism whereby they can be confident about the quality of the data at the end of the day. And this is so paramount. Every customer that I talk to is most worried about ensuring that they have data that is trustworthy. >> So this is a really important point because I've always felt like, from a data quality standpoint, you know you get the data engineers who might not have any business context, trying to figure out the quality problem. If you can put the data responsibility in the hands of the business owner, who, he or she, has context, that maybe starts to solve this problem. There's some buts though. So infrastructure becomes an operational detail. Let's hide that. Don't worry about it. Figure it out, okay, so the business can run, but you need self-service infrastructure and you have to figure out how to have federated governance so that the right people can have access. So how do you guys think about that problem in the future? 'Cause it's almost like this vision creates those two challenges. Oh, by the way, you got to get your organization behind it. Right, 'cause there's an organizational construct as well. But those are, to me, wonderful opportunities but they create technology challenges. So how are you guys thinking about that and how are you working on it? >> Yeah, no, that's exactly right, Dave. As we talk to data practitioners, the recurring theme that we keep hearing is, there is just a lot of use cases that require you to have deep understanding of data and require you to have that background in data sciences and so on, such as data governance and vary for their use cases. But ultimately, the reason that data exists is to be able to drive those insights for the end customer, for the domain expert, for the end user. And therefore it becomes incredibly important that we be able to bridge that chasm that exists today between the data universe and the end customer. And that is what we essentially are focused on by virtue of leaning into capabilities like publishing, right? Like self, ad hoc reporting and things that allow citizen data scientists to be able to take advantage of the plethora of data that exists. >> Peder, I'm interested in this notion of IT and OT. Of course, Hitachi is a partner, established in both. Talk about Mongo's position in thinking. 'Cause you've got on-prem customers, you're running now across all clouds. I call it super cloud connecting all these things. But part of that is the edge. Is Mongo running there? Can Mongo run there, sort of a lightweight version? How do you see that evolve? Give us some details there. >> So I think first and foremost, we were born on-prem, obviously with the origins of MongoDB, a little over five years ago, we introduced Atlas and today we run across a hundred different availability zones around the globe, so we're pretty well covered there. The third bit that I think people miss is we also picked up a product called Realm. Realm is an embedded database for mobile devices. So if you think about car companies, Toyota, for example, building connected cars, they'll have Realm in the car for the telemetry, connects back into an Atlas system for the bigger operational side of things. So there's this seamless kind of, or consistency that runs between data center to cloud to edge to device, that MongoDB plays across all the way through. And then taking that to the next level. We talked about this before we sat down, we're also building in the security elements of that because obviously you not only have that data in rest and data in motion, but what happens when you have that data in use? And announced, I think today? We purchased a little company, Aroki, experts in encryption, some of the smartest security minds on the planet. And today we introduce query-able encryption, which basically enables developers, without any security background, to be able to build searchable capabilities into their applications to access data and do it in a way where the security rules and the privacy all remain constant, regardless of whether that developer or the end user actually knows how that works. >> This is a great example of people talk about shift left, designing security in, for the developer, right from the start, not as a bolt-on. It's a great example. >> And I'm actually going to ground that with a real life customer example, if that's okay, Dave. We actually have a utility company in North Carolina that's responsible for energy and water. And so you can imagine, I mean, you alluded to the IO to use case, the industrial use case and this particular customer has to contend with millions of sensors that are constantly streaming data back, right. And now think about the challenge that they were encountering. They had all this data streaming in and in large quantities and they were actually resident on numerous databases, right. And so they had this very real challenge of getting to that quality data that I, data quality that I talked about earlier, as well, they had this challenge of being able to consolidate all of it and make sense of it. And so that's where our partnership with MongoDB really paid off where we were able to leverage Pentaho to integrate all of the data, have that be resident on MongoDB. And now they're leveraging some of the data capabilities, the data fabric capabilities that we bring to the table to actually deliver meaningful insights to their customers. Now their customers are actually able to save on their electricity and water bills. So great success story right there. >> So I love the business impact there, and also you mentioned Pentaho, I remember that acquisition was transformative for Hitachi because it was the beginning of sort of your new vector, which became Hitachi Ventara. What is Lumada? That's, I presume the evolution of Pentaho? You brought in organic, and added capabilities on top of that, bringing in your knowledge of IOT and OT? Explain what Lumada is. >> Yeah, no, that's a great question, Dave. And I'll say this, I mentioned this early on, we fundamentally believe that data is the backbone for all digital transformation. And so to that end, Hitachi has actually been making a series of acquisitions as well as investing organically to build up these data capabilities. And so Pentaho, as you know, gives us some of that front-end capability in terms of integrations and so forth. And the Lumada platform, the umbrella brand name is really connoting everything that we do in the data space that allow customers to go through that, to derive those meaningful insights. Lumada literally stands for illuminating data. And so that's exactly what we do. Irrespective of what vertical, what use case we're talking about. As you know very well, Hitachi is very prominent in just about every vertical. We're in like 90% of the Fortune 500 customers across banking and financial, retail, telecom. And as you know very well, very, very strong in the industrial space as well. >> You know, it's interesting, Peder, you and Radhika were both talking about this sort of edge model. And so if I understand it correctly, and maybe you could bring in sort of the IOT requirements as well. You think about AI, most of the AI that's done today is modeling in the cloud. But in the future and as we're seeing this, it's real-time inferencing at the edge and it's massive amounts of data. But you're probably not, you're going to persist some, I'm hearing, probably not going to persist all of it, some of it's going to be throwaway. And then you're going to send some back to the cloud. I think of EVs or, a deer runs in front of the vehicle and they capture that, okay, send that back. The amounts of data is just massive. Is that the right way to think about this new model? Is that going to require new architectures and hearing that Mongo fits in. >> Yeah. >> Beautifully with that. >> So this is a little bit what we talked about earlier, where historically there have been three silos of data. Whether it's classic system of record, system of engagement or system of intelligence and they've each operated independently. But as applications are pushing in further and further to the edge and real time becomes more and more important, you need to be able to take all three types of workloads or models, data models and actually incorporate it into a single platform. That's the vision we have behind our developer data platform. And it enables us to handle those transactional, operational and analytical workloads in real time, right. One of the things that we announced here this week was our columnar indexing, which enables some of that step into the analytics so that we can actually do in-app analytics for those things that are not going back into the data warehouse or not going back into the cloud, real time happening with the application itself. >> As you add, this is interesting, as basically Mongo's becoming this all-in-one database, as you add those capabilities, are you able to preserve, it sounds like you've still focused on simplicity, developer product productivity. Are there trade off, as you add, does it detract from those things or are you able to architecturally preserve those? >> I think it comes down to how we're thinking through the use case and what's going to be important for the developers. So if you look at the model today, the legacy model was, let's put it all in one big monolith. We recognize that that doesn't work for everyone but the counter to that was this explosion of niche databases, right? You go to certain cloud providers, you get to choose between 15 different databases for whatever workload you want. Time series here, graph here, in-memory here. It becomes a big mess that is pushed back on the company to glue back together and figure out how to work within those systems. We're focused on really kind of embracing the document model. We obviously believe that's a great general purpose model for all types of workloads. And then focusing in on not taking a full search platform that's doing everything from log management all the way through in-app, we're optimizing for in-app experiences. We're optimizing analytics for in-app experiences. We're optimizing all of the different things we're doing for what the developer is trying to go accomplish. That helps us maintain consistency on the architectural design. It helps us maintain consistency in the model by which we're engaging with our customers. And I think it helps us innovate as quickly as we've been been able to innovate. >> Great, thank you. Radhika, we'll give you the last word. We're seeing this convergence of function in the data based, data models, but at the same time, we're seeing the distribution of data. We're not, you're clearly not fighting that, you're embracing that. What does the future look like from Hitachi Ventara's standpoint over the next half decade or even further out? >> So, we're trying to lean into what customers are trying to solve for, Dave. And so that fundamentally comes down to use cases and the approaches just may look dramatically different with every customer and every use case, right? And that's perfectly fine. We're leaning into those models, whether that is data refining on the edge or the core or the cloud. We're leaning into it. And our intent really is to ensure that we're providing that frictionless experience from end to end, right. And I'll give a couple of examples. We had this very large bank, one of the top 10 banks here in the US, that essentially had multiple data catalogs that they were using to essentially sort through their metadata and make sense of all of this data that was coming into their systems. And we were able to essentially, dramatically simplify it. Cut down on the amount of time that it takes to deliver insights to them, right. And it was like, the metric shared was 600% improvement. And so this is the kind of thing that we're manically focused on is, how do we deliver that quantifiable end-customer improvement, right? Whether it's in terms of shortening the amount to drive the insights, whether it's in terms of the number of data practitioners that they have to throw at a problem, the level of manual intervention that is required, so we're automating everything. We're trying to build in a lot of security as Peder talked about, that is a common goal for both sides. We're trying to address it through a combination of security solutions at varying ends of the spectrum. And then finally, as well, delivering that resiliency and scale that is required. Because again, the one thing we know for sure that we can take for granted is data is exploding, right? And so you need that scale, you need that resiliency. You need for customers to feel like there is high quality, it's not dirty, it's not dark and it's something that they can rely upon. >> Yeah, if it's not trusted, they're not going to use it. The interesting thing about the partnership, especially with Hitachi, is you're in so many different examples and use cases. You've got IT. You've got OT. You've got industrial and so many different examples. And if Mongo can truly fit into all those, it's just, the rocket ship's going to continue. Peder, Radhika, thank you so much for coming back in theCUBE, it's great to see you both. >> Thank you, appreciate it. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> All right. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante from the Javits Center in New York City at MongoDB World 2022. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to New York City everybody. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of MongoDB World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante. Pretty good attendance here. I'd say over 3000 people, great buzz, a lot of really technical sessions. There's an executive session going on. There's a financial analyst session. So a lot of diversity in this attendee base. Vadim Supitskiy is here. He's the CTO of Forbes and Abdul Razack is the vice president of Solution Engineering at Google. Gents, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks Dave. >> Happy to be here. >> So, Forbes, very interesting business. I'm interested in what occurred during the pandemic for you guys. Right? Everybody went digital. Obviously you guys have a tremendous brand. We all, in the business world reaped from it, but what happened during the isolation era? What happened to your business? >> Yeah, so we've been innovating and going through digital transformation for years, since we launched our website probably 25 years ago. >> But during the pandemic, because of our coverage, our foresight to create a breaking news team, our audiences and readership really skyrocketed. >> Really? >> Yeah, and at that point, we were very happy and really lucky to be in Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas. So when the audiences went up, we didn't feel any impact, right? Our environments auto-scaled and our users didn't experience any issues at all. So we were able to focus on innovation, our users loyalty and really building cool products. So we were very lucky and happy to be in Google Cloud and MongoDB Atlas. >> So Abdul, the solution and the title you provided, obviously worked. How did you guys end up getting together? What was that like? >> Yeah, I mean, like Vadim said, maybe there's a little bit of the right place at the right time in this case, but you can see the need for digital transformation and the pandemic really accelerated that. And like Vadim said, primarily Forbes wanted to focus on innovation and customer loyalty and the way that comes to bear, is that you have a technology platform that can serve those needs. Right? Whether it is through unique applications that can be delivered, the ability for developers to build those applications quickly and seamlessly and then remove the intangibles of scalability, performance, latency, and things of that nature. So, you can see this all coming together in this scenario. >> So as consumers, we see the website, we read online, maybe sometimes in the laptop, mostly on mobile. What is it that we don't see? I mean, the apps that Abdul talked about, community. What else is there? Paint a picture of that for us. >> Yeah. There is a lot going on behind the scene. Right? So focusing on audience, building communities, but also what it allowed us to do while everything was working well, we were scaling up. Right? We were able to focus on a lot of innovation. And one of those was first-party data platform that we built. We call it Forbes One. And that's in the center of everything that we do at Forbes right now. Right? So it allows us, one, to connect our partners, advertising partners with the audiences that they're looking to engage and to connect with. And then we are growing our consumer business as well and what that allows us to do is target the right products at the right time, to the right people, on the web website and our domain. So, that's just one of the examples that we've built our full first-party data platform on these technologies and we now know our customers so well that we are able to provide them with what they want. >> So the first-party data platform is what? A self-serve for advertiser, so they can identify? >> Not just advertisers. So it's in the center of everything. So advertiser comes in, we provide the segments and users that they want to reach. Now, we are creating products as well, building cool, innovative products and offering our journalism and everything there to our readers and we are able to connect them to the right audiences at the right time, as well as personalization. Right? You come onto the website, you want to read what you want to read. So we able to create that as well, using machine learning and AI. >> So a product, it might be a data product or it might be a content product? >> It could be a data product. It could be like just personalization or something like that. It could be newsletter. Right? It could be a stand-alone product, like investing product. So, there is a lot going on there, but we want to offer the right ones at the right time, to the right audiences and building that platform has allowed us to do that. >> Okay. Now Google's got great tech. What's the tech behind all this? >> Yeah. So when Vadim talked about segmenting to personalize something that is relevant to you and providing recommendations to you. Right? And all that is based on machine learning, AI technology. The fact that Vadim has all the data curated in a in a first-party data platform gives the ability to create a seamless profile. Right? You could be interested in a couple of products. Right? And then the underlying technology can tailor that to bring what is it that you're looking for at the right place at the right time. Right? So those are recommendations, things of that nature that's all powered by AI and machine learning technology. >> So it's running on Mongo, and then you're bringing in Google AI and machine intelligence tools? Can you double click on that? >> Yeah. It's basically a combination of both, using both platform to the deploy it and we embrace Cloud. Right? So we using all the Cloud native technologies. Right? We didn't want to just lift and shift. We wanted to make sure we do it right. And we focused on automation, even if we had to take a step back, we knew that automating things was a key for us. So yes, it's been really successful, but also really informative for us to use the right tools for the job. >> And you had prior experience with Mongo, or? >> We did. >> What's your journey been like there? >> Yeah, we actually were one of the first clients of Mongo. I think we were number 11 at that time. >> 10gen. >> Yes. It was. >> We remember. >> Many years ago it was MongoDB one, right? >> Yeah. >> And at that time we we introduced contributor network for us and our audiences were scaling as well. And we used Out-of-the-Box WordPress as our publishing platform, which couldn't scale. So we had to rethink and figure out, "Alright, so what do we do?" We compared couple of no SQL databases and Mongo was a winner because they checked all the boxes and developers loved it right away. Right? They're like, "All right, this is so much faster to develop on. It's just a great tool for the job going from SQL to, to no SQL". And we scaled and we never looked back. And then obviously Atlas came, so there are kind of two inflection points here. One switch into no SQL and two going away from managing databases. Like we don't want to be in that business. Right? Updates, patches, all of that, that we had to do manually, over-provision in our environments and kind of wasteful. So being on Atlas, that was a second kind of inflection point for us, which opened it up for us to do even more innovation and move faster. >> Okay. And you're happy about this partnership, despite, I mean, you partner with Mongo obviously, Google has its own databases, that's just the nature of the world we live in, isn't it? >> No and fundamentally like that, we always believe that customer choice is the primary notion. Right? I mean, and Google Cloud platform is more of a platform and the ecosystem is critical to that. Right? It's imperative. So, like Vadim said, the combination of Google and Mongo provides a truly Cloud native platform that can serve the needs for years to come, rather than from looking at it from a legacy perspective. And that's the way we look at it. Right? I mean, there is choices all the time and sometimes it's competition. >> Yeah. Yeah. And you're still selling a lot of compute and storage and machine intelligence, so machine learning. This morning in the keynotes, we heard a lot about a lot of different capabilities. We've certainly watched Mongo evolve its platform over the last half a decade or more really. But you've mentioned the developers loved it. Right? As Mongo evolves its platform, is there trade off from a developer simplicity standpoint? Are they able to preserve that from your perspective? >> I think with Atlas, it actually makes it easier now. So when they need to create an environment, they can do it on the fly. When they need to test something, also things available to them right away. So it actually, in general, as the platform becomes more mature and more stable, which is very important, but at the same time, the flexibility remains for development and for creation of environments and things like that. So we've been pretty happy with how it transitioned, to being a more mature platform. >> Did the move to Google Cloud and Atlas change the way that you're able to deliver high availability versus what you were doing when you were self-managing? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. We were in a data center, so kind of one location and moving to MongoDB Atlas and Google Cloud, now we're multi region. Right? So we have a full DR strategy and we feel a lot more secure and we feel very confident that anything that happens, we can scale, we can fail over. So absolutely, this helps us a lot. And the feature that was introduced probably a few years ago to auto scale MongoDB environments as well, that has been really key for us, so we can sleep well. >> Meaning you can scale while you sleep. >> Right, exactly. Exactly. >> Yeah. Plus the other part is you don't size for peak. right? You size as you grow, and then you, you have that elasticity built in. Right? That it is the nature. And then Mongo is available on multiple Google Cloud regions. So as you expand, you don't worry about all the plumbing that you need to do and things of that nature. >> They asked us serverless this morning. >> Yeah. >> How does that affect what you guys are doing together and what are your thoughts from Google's perspective and then of course, from Forbes? >> And that's the trend that we see constantly. Right? Serverless really decouples the tie to the VMs. Right? And so it makes it much more easier to provide the elasticity and have function calls across. Right? Function as a service and things of that nature. Right? So we see a lot of promise in that. Right? We do that even within our own products and we see that giving the ability to decompose and recompose applications and would love to hear how you're leveraging that. Right? >> Yeah. We fully embrace serverless. So we use all the tools you provide, I think. If you look at our architectural diagrams, it's like all these pops-up, cloud functions, composer, app engine. So we use the full suite and we love it. >> Yeah, Yeah. Okay. And then you talked this morning about the eliminating, the trade-offs with serverless of having to either when you dial it down You have to restart, but you've solved that problem, or I guess Mongo's helped you solve that problem. Can you explain that a little bit from a technical standpoint? >> Yeah. From a technical standpoint, if you look at, like as a developer, right? If you're building an intelligent app, it has multiple components within it. Right? There is pops-up for messaging, there is cloud functions and things of that nature. So you don't worry about, when it's encompassed in a serverless architecture, you don't worry about a lot of the complexities that go on behind it and so that makes the abstraction much more easier. And it eliminates the friction that a developer goes through. I think they've talked about removing friction and that's the primary source of productivity loss, which is the friction. We used to come from a world where developers were more worried. 80% of the time they would spend on plumbing this thing and then only 20% writing code. Right? And then now this whole paradigm should flip that. Right? That's where we see the promise of it. >> Do you still do stuff on Prem or are you pretty much all in the Cloud? >> Fully in the Cloud. >> How long did that take? What was that like? >> It actually was really fast. We had a real aggressive timeline. It took us six months. >> Really? >> Yeah. Yeah. And it was aggressive, but I was happy that we did it in a short period of time. >> And what was the business impact that you saw moving to the Google Cloud? >> Yeah, so obviously after we moved to the Cloud, we wanted to measure, especially the first year, how it affected us and what were the positives out of it. And yeah, we've seen tremendous results. 58% increase in speed to market. We were releasing four times more often than when we were on Prem. We saw 73% increase in initiatives delivered and while our velocity was scaling up, we also saw 30% decreased in hot fixes and rollbacks. So it became more stable while we scaled up the velocity and obviously very happy with those results. >> Wow. Do you golf? >> I don't actually. >> Do you golf? >> No. I watch golf. >> I used to watch. Okay. Do you know what a mulligan is? >> Yeah. >> Okay. mulligan is like a do-over right. If you had a mulligan, would you do anything differently? >> You know, we learned a lot and one of the keys for me was definitely automate everything, make sure that you automate as much as possible, even if it slows you down because in the future that will help you so much and use the platform and the tools that available to you. So, serverless. Right? Use Cloud the way it's supposed to be, as much as possible and I think that's the advice I would give. >> Are there any cautions with regard to automation, either of you that you see? I mean because sometimes automation brings unintended consequences and "Oops" happens really fast. >> Yeah. It's a little bit of a process. Right? If you take a step back, right, and typically what people tend to do is, there is a standardization process and once it's standardized, the next step is you gain efficiencies by automation. Right? In this whole thing, what is underestimated is change management. And we see a lot of room for improvement around educating on change management, getting ahead of that so that you can see what is coming. So that the organization moves across that. I don't know if you saw that in your case, but we see this predominantly in other other cases. >> Yeah. I mean, for us, we wanted to make sure that all the testing was in place and things like that. So not just automation of deploying or anything like that, but make sure that there is something there to catch if something goes wrong and roll back and things like that. So you want to make sure that you protected in many areas. >> So square this circle for me, because especially with COVID, so many unknowns and one of the benefits of document database is you're not tied into a schema. You got a flexible schema. Okay. So you're changing, you can change things much more easily. So when you talk about standardization, you're talking about standardizing, what at the infrastructure layer, or where does that standardization occur? Where should it occur. >> I mean, you could have it at the business process level. >> Okay. >> You could have it at the infrastructure level. You could also have it on the administration aspect of it. So there are three areas where you could apply automation to. >> So is there an analog to flexible schema at the business process level? Is that kind of how to think about it, whereas I'm not locked into a business process schema? I have to build flexibility into that as I change my? >> No, I mean, you can apply it any which way. I mean, I don't think the schema matters so much. Right? Like, for example, if you take the Forbes US case. Right? There is content curation, for example. Right? >> Yeah, okay. >> You could take content curation. Content curation in the previous world, like in the WordPress world, was not very flexible. Right? Like that it wouldn't scale. And now you are in a world where you have a very flexible schema, but the process of curating the content can be standardized. Right? And then the next step of that is to automate that. Right? And so you could apply it in any manner if you will. >> So have you built a custom CMS? Is that what you've done there? >> Yeah. We built our own custom CMS. It's AI powered. We want to make our journalist lives easier. So we're constantly trying to figure out what can we give them to make their day-to-day job much easier. >> So the machines can curate and find the best content. >> We do recommend things. Yes, absolutely. We curate, we tell them what would be the best headline, for example, what would >> Prior to them publishing? >> Yeah. Yeah. What would be the better keywords to include and things like that, what images. Just recommendations. >> And you can automate the insertion of those WordPress to go every time they do, even though they're writing about the same topic. >> It's a recommendation process obviously, but >> There is a human intelligence to that at the end. Right? I mean, but you can create a much more informed view by curating and recommending content rather than a myopic view. >> And you're eliminating that mundane keystroke task. Wow. Amazing story guys. Thanks so much for sharing. >> Absolutely. >> All right. Keep it right there. We're live from MongoDB World 2022 in New York city. Be right back. (upbeat music)

>>Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the Cubes. Coverage of Mongo db World 2022. This is the first Mongo live mongo DB World. Since 2019, the Cube has covered a number of of mongo shows actually going back to when the company was called Engine. Some of you may recall Margo since then has done an i p o p o in 2017, it's It's been a rocket ship company. It's up. It'll probably do 1.2 billion in revenue this year. It's got a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. Uh, despite the tech clash, it's still got a 19 or $20 million valuation growing above 50% a year. Uh, company just had a really strong quarter, and and there seems to be hitting on all cylinders. My name is Dave Volonte. And here to kick it off with me as Sanjeev Mohan, who was the principal at Sanremo. So great to see you. You become a wonderful cube contributor, Former Gartner analyst. Really sharp? No, the database space in the data space generally really well, so thanks for coming back on >>you. You know, it's just amazing how exciting. The entire data space is like they used to say. Companies are All companies are software companies. All companies are data >>companies, >>so data has become the the foundation. >>They say software is eating the world. Data is eating software and a little little quips here. But this is a good size show. Four or 5000 people? I don't really know exactly. You know the numbers, but it's exciting. And of course, a lot of financial services were here at the Javits Centre. Um, let's let's lay down the basics for people of Mongo, DB is a is a document database, but they've been advancing. That's a document database as an alternative to R D. B M s. Explain that, but explain also how Mongo has broadened its capabilities and serving a lot more use cases. >>So that's my forte is like databases technology. But before even I talk about that, I have to say I am blown away by this mongo db world because mongo db uh, in beckons to all of us during the pandemic has really come of age, and it's a billion dollar company. Now we are in this brand new Javits Centre That's been built during the pandemic. And and now the company is holding this event the high 1000 people last year. So I think this company has really grown. And why has it drawn is because its offerings have grown to more developers than just a document database document databases. Revolution revolutionised the whole DBM s space where no sequel came up. Because for a change, you don't need a structured schema. You could start bringing data in this document model scheme, uh, like varying schema. But since then, they've added, uh, things like such. So they have you seen such? They added a geospatial. They had a time series last year, and this year they keep adding more and more so like, for example, they are going to add some column store indexes. So from being a purely transactional, they are now starting to address analytical. And they're starting to address more use cases, like, you know, uh, like what? What was announced this morning at keynote was faceted search. So they're expanding the going deeper and deeper into these other data >>structures. Taking Lucy made a search of first class citizens, but I want to ask you some basic questions about document database. So it's no fixed schemes. You put anything in there? Actually, so more data friendly. They're trying to simplify the use of data. Okay, that's that's pretty clear. >>What are the >>trade offs of a document database? >>So it's not like, you know, one technology has solved every problem. Every technology comes with its own tradeoffs. So in a document, you basically get rid of joining tables with primary foreign keys because you can have a flexible schemer and so and wouldn't sing single document. So it's very easy to write and and search. But when you have a lot of repeated elements and you start getting more and more complex, your document size can start expanding quite a bit because you're trying to club everything into a single space. So So that is where the complexity goes >>up. So what does that mean for for practitioner, it means they have to think about what? How they how they are ultimately gonna structure, how they're going to query so they can get the best performances that right. So they're gonna put some time in up front in order to make it pay back at the tail end, but clearly it's it's working. But is that the correct way of thinking about >>100% in, uh, the sequel world? You didn't care about the sequel. Analytical queries You just cared about how your data model was structured and then sequel would would basically such any model. But in the new sequel world, you have to know your patterns before you. You invest into the database so it's changed that equation where you come in knowing what you are signing up. >>So a couple of questions, if I can kind of Colombo questions so to Margo talks about how it's really supporting mission critical applications and at the same time, my understanding is the architecture of mongo specifically, or a document database in general. But specifically, you've got a a primary, uh, database, and you and that is the sort of the master, if you will, right and then you can create secondaries. But so help me square the circle between mission critical and really maybe a more of a focus on, say, consistency versus availability. Do customers have to sort of think about and design in that availability? How do they do that? How a Mongol customers handling that. >>So I have to say, uh, my experience of mongo db was was that the whole company, the whole ethos was developed a friendly. So, to be honest, I don't think Mongo DB was as much focused on high availability, disaster, recovery, even security. To some extent, they were more focused on developer productivity. >>And you've experienced >>simplicity. Make it simple, make the developers productive as fast as you can. What has really, uh, was an inflexion point for Mongo DB was the launch of Atlas because the atlas they were able to introduce all of these management features and hide it abstracted from the end users. So now they've got, you know, like 2014 is when Atlas came out and it was in four regions. But today they're in 100 regions, so they keep expanding, then every hyper scale cloud provider, and they've abstracted that whole managed. >>So Atlas, of course, is the managed database as a service in the cloud. And so it's those clouds, cloud infrastructure and cloud tooling that has allowed them to go after those high available application. My other question is when you talk about adding search, geospatial time series There are a lot of specialised databases that take time series persons. You have time series specialists that go deep into time series can accompany like Mongo with an all in one strategy. Uh, how close can they get to that functionality? Do they have to be? You know, it's kind of a classic Microsoft, you know, maybe not perfect, but good enough. I mean, can they compete with those other areas? Uh, with those other specialists? And what happens to those specialists if the answer is yes. What's your take on that? If that question >>makes sense So David, this is not a mongo db only issue This is this is an issue with, you know, anytime serious database, any graph database Should I put a graph database or should I put a multifunctional database multidimensional database? And and I really think there is no right or wrong answer. It just really comes down to your use case. If you have an extremely let's, uh, complex graph, you know, then maybe you should go with best of breed purpose built database. But more and more, we're starting to see that organisations are looking to simplify their environment by going in for maybe a unified database that has multiple data structures. Yeah, well, >>it's certainly it's interesting when you hear Mongo speak. They don't They don't call out Oracle specifically, but when they talk about legacy r d m r d B m s that don't scale and are complex and are expensive, they're talking about Oracle first. And of course, there are others. Um, And then when they talk about, uh, bespoke databases the horses for courses, databases that they show a picture of that that's like the poster child for Amazon. Of course, they don't call out Amazon. They're a great partner of Amazon's. But those are really the sort of two areas that mangoes going after, Um, now Oracle. Of course, we'll talk about their converged strategy, and they're taking a similar approach. But so help us understand the difference. There is just because they're sort of or close traditional r d B M s, and they have all the drawbacks associated with that. But by the way, there are some benefits as well. So how do you see that all playing >>out? So you know it. Really, uh, it's coming down to the the origins of these databases. Uh, I think they're converging to a point where they are offering similar services. And if you look at some of the benchmark numbers or you talk to users, I from a business point of view, I I don't think there's too much of a difference. Uh, technology writes. The difference is that Mongo DB started in the document space. They were more interested in availability rather than consistency. Oracle started in the relation database with focus on financial services, so asset compliance is what they're based on. And since then they've been adding other pieces, so so they differ from where they started. Oracle has been in the industry for some since 19 seventies, so they have that maturity. But then they have that legacy, >>you know, I love. Recently, Oracle announced the mongo db uh, kpi. So basically saying why? Why leave Oracle when you can just, you know, do the market? So that, to me, is a sign that Mongo DB is doing well because the Oracle calls you out, whether your workday or snowflake or mongo. You know, whoever that's a sign to me that you've got momentum and you're stealing share in that marketplace, and clearly Mongo is they're growing at 50 plus percent per year. So thinking about the early I mentioned 10 gen Early on, I remember that one of the first conferences I went to mongo conferences. It was just It was all developers. A lot of developers here as well. But they have really, since 2014, expanded the capabilities you talk about, Atlas, you talked about all these other you know, types of databases that they've added. If it seems like Mongo is becoming a platform company, uh, what are your thoughts on that in terms of them sort of up levelling the message there now, a billion dollar plus company. What's the next? You know, wave for Mongo. >>So, uh, Oracle announced mongo db a p i s a W s has document d. B has cost most db so they all have a p. I compatible a p. I s not the source code because, you know, mongo DB has its own SPL licence, so they have written their own layer on top. But at the end of the day, you know, if you if you these companies have to keep innovating to catch up with Mongo DB because we can announce a brand new capability, then all these other players have to catch up. So other cloud providers have 80% or so of capabilities, but they'll never have 100% of what Mongo DB has. So people who are diehard Mongo DB fans they prefer to stay on mongo db. They are now able to write more applications like you know, mongo DB bought realm, which is their front end. Uh, like, you know, like, if you're on social media kind of thing, you can build your applications and sink it with Atlas. So So mongo DB is now at a point where they are adding more capabilities that more like developers like, You know, five G is coming. Autonomous cars are coming, so now they can address Iot kind of use cases. So that's why it's becoming such a juggle, not because it's becoming a platform rather than a single document database. >>So atlases, the near the midterm future. Today it's about 60% of revenues, but they have what we call self serve, which is really the traditional on premise stuff. They're connecting those worlds. You're bringing up the point that. Of course, they go across clouds. You also bring up the point that they've got edge plays. We're gonna talk to Verizon later on today. And they're they've got, uh, edge edge activity going on with developers. I I call it Super Cloud. Right, This layer that floats above. Now, of course, a lot of the super Cloud concert says we're gonna hide the underlying complexity. But for developers, they wanna they might want to tap those primitives, so presumably will let them do that. But But that hybrid that what we call Super Cloud that is a new wave of innovation, is it not? And do you? Do you agree with that? And do you see that as a real opportunity from Mongo in terms of penetrating a new tan? >>Yes. So I see this is a new opportunity. In fact, one of the reasons mongo DB has grown so quickly is because they are addressing more markets than they had three pandemic. Um, Also, there are all gradations of users. Some users want full control. They want an eye as kind of, uh, someone passed. And some businesses are like, you know, we don't care. We don't want to deal with the database. So today we heard, uh, mongo db. Several went gear. So now they have surveillance capability, their past. But if you if you're more into communities, they have communities. Operator. So they're addressing the full stack of different types of developers different workloads, different geographical regions. So that that's why the market is expected. >>We're seeing abstraction layers, you know, throughout the started a physical virtual containers surveillance and eventually SuperClubs Sanjeev. Great analysis. Thanks so much for taking your time to come with the cube. Alright, Keep it right there. But right back, right after this short break. This is Dave Volonte from the Javits Centre. Mongo db World 2022. Thank you. >>Mm.

>> theCube presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to Dell Technologies World 2022. You're watching theCube's coverage of this, three-day coverage wall to wall. My name is David Vellante John Furrier's here, Lisa Martin, David Nicholson. Talk of the town here is data. And one of the big announcements at the show is Snowflake and Dell partnering up, building ecosystems. Snowflake reaching into on-prem, allowing customers to actually access the Snowflake Data Cloud without moving the data or if they want to move the data they can. This is really one of the hotter announcements of the show. Martin Glynn is here, he's the Senior Director of Storage Product Management at Dell Technologies. And Clark Patterson, he's the Head of Product Marketing for Snowflake. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> So a lot of buzz around this and, you know, Clark, you and I have talked about the need to really extend your data vision. And this really is the first step ever you've taken on-prem. Explain the motivation for this from your customer's perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you step back and think about Snowflake's vision and our mission of mobilizing the world's data, it's all around trying to break down silos for however customers define what a silo is, right? So we've had a lot of success breaking down silos from a workload perspective where we've expanded the platform to be data warehousing, and data engineering, and machine learning, and data science, and all the kind of compute intensive ways that people work with us. We've also had a lot of success in our sharing capabilities and how we're breaking down silos of organizations, right? So I can share data more seamlessly within my team, I can do it across totally disparate organizations, and break down silos that way. So this partnership is really like the next leg of the stool, so to speak, where we're breaking down the silos of the the data and where the data lives ultimately, right? So up until this point, Cloud, all focus there, and now we have this opportunity with Dell to expand that and into on-premises world and people can bring all those data sets together. >> And the data target for this Martin, is Dell ECS, right? Your object store, and it's got S3 compatibility. Explain that. >> Yeah, we've actually got sort of two flavors. We'll start with ECS, which is our turnkey object storage solution. Object storage offers sort of the ultimate in flexibility, you know, potential performance, ease of use, right? Which is why it fits so well with Snowflake's mission for sort of unlocking, you know, the data within the data center. So we'll offer it to begin with ECS, and then we also recently announced our software defined object scale solution. So add even more flexibility there. >> Okay. And the clock, the way it works is I can now access non-native Snowflake data using what? Materialized views, external tables, how does that work? >> Some combination of all the above. So we've had in Snowflake a capability called external tables which we refer to, it goes hand in hand with this notion of external stages. Basically through the combination of those two capabilities, it's a metadata layer on data wherever it resides. So customers have actually used this in Snowflake for data lake data outside of Snowflake in the Cloud up until this point. So it's effectively an extension of that functionality into the Dell on-premises world, so that we can tap into those things. So we use the external stages to expose all the metadata about what's in the Dell environment. And then we build external tables in Snowflake so that data looks like it is in Snowflake. And then the experience for the analyst or whomever it is, is exactly as though that data lives in the Snowflake world. >> Okay. So for a while you've allowed non-native Snowflake data but it had to be in the Cloud. >> Correct. >> It was the first time it's on-prem, >> that's correct >> that's the innovation here. Okay. And if I want to bring it into the Cloud, can I? >> Yeah, the connection here will help in a migration sense as well, right? So that's the good thing is, it's really giving the user the choice. So we are integrating together as partners to make connection as seamless as possible. And then the end user will say like, look I've got data that needs to live on-premises, for whatever reasons, data sovereignty whatever they decide. And they can keep it there and still do the analytics in another place. But if there's a need and a desire to use this as an opportunity to migrate some of that data to Cloud, that connection between our two platforms will make that easier. >> Well, Michael always says, "Hey, it's customer choice, we're flexible." So you're cool with that? That's been the mission since we kind of came together, right? Is if our customers needed to stay in their data center, if that makes more sense from a cost perspective or, you know, a data gravity perspective, then they can do that. But we also want to help them unlock the value of that data. So if they need to copy it up to the public Cloud and take advantage of it, we're going to integrate directly with Snowflake to make that really easy to do. >> So there are engineering integrations here, obviously that's required. Can you describe what that looks like? Give us the details on when it's available. >> Sure. So it's going to be sort of second half this year that you'll see, we're demoing it this week, but the availability we second half this year. And fundamentally, it's the way Clark described it, that Snowflake will reach into our S3 interface using the standard S3 interface. We're qualifying between the way they expect that S3 interface to present the data and the way our platform works, just to ensure that there's smooth interaction between the two. So that's sort of the first simplest use case. And then the second example we gave where the customer can copy some of that data up to the public Cloud. We're basically copying between two S3 buckets and making sure that Snowflake's Snowpipe is aware that data's being made available and can easily ingest it. >> And then that just goes into a virtual warehouse- >> Exactly. >> and customer does to know or care. >> Yep Exactly. >> Yeah. >> The compute happens in Snowflake the way it does in any other manner. >> And I know you got to crawl, walk, run second half of this year, but I would imagine, okay, you're going to start with AWS, correct? And then eventually you go to other Clouds. I mean, that's going to take other technical integrations, I mean, obviously. So should we assume there's a roadmap here or is this a one and done? >> I would assume that, I mean, based on our multi-Cloud approach, that's kind of our approach at least, yeah. >> Kind of makes sense, right? I mean, that would seem to be a natural progression. My other thought was, okay, I've got operational systems. They might be transaction systems running on a on a PowerMax. >> Yeah. >> Is there a way to get the data into an object store and make that available, now that opens up even more workloads. I know you're not committing to doing that, but it just, conceptually, it seems like something a customer might want to do. >> Yeah. I, a hundred percent, agree. I mean, I think when we brought our team together we started with a blank slate. It was what's the best solution we can build. We landed on this sort of first step, but we got lots of feedback from a lot of our big joint customers about you know, this system over there, this potential integration over here, and whether it's, you know, PowerMax type systems or other file workloads with native Snowflake data types. You know, I think this is just the beginning, right? We have lots of potential here. >> And I don't think you've announced pricing, right? It's premature for that. But have you thought about, and how are you thinking about the pricing model? I mean, you're a consumption based pricing, is that kind of how this is going to work? Or is it a sort of a new pricing model or haven't you figured that out yet? >> I don't know if you've got any details on that, but from a Snowflake perspective, I would assume it's consistent with how our customers engage with us today. >> Yeah. >> And we'll offer both possibilities, right? So you can either continue with the standard, you know, sort of CapEx motion, maybe that's the most optimal for you from a cost perspective, or you can take advantage through our OpEx option, right? So you can do consumption on-prem also. >> Okay. So it could be a dual model, right? Depending on what the customer wants. If they're a Snowflake customer, obviously it's going to be consumption based, however, you guys price. What's happening, Clark, in in the market? Explain why Snowflake has so much momentum and, you know, traction in the marketplace. >> So like I spent a lot of time doing analysis on why we win and lose, core part of my role. And, you know, there's a couple of, there's really three things that come up consistently as to why people people are really excited about Snowflake platform. One is the most simplest thing of all. It feels like is just ease of use and it just works, right? And I think the way that this platform was built for the Cloud from the ground up all the way back 10 years ago, really a lot allows us to deliver that seamless experience of just like instant compute when you want it, it goes away, you know, only pay for what you use. Very few knobs to turn and things like that. And so people absolutely love that factor. The other is multi-Cloud. So, you know, there's definitely a lot of organizations out there that have a multi-Cloud strategy, and, you know, what that means to them can be highly variable, but regardless, they want to be able to interact across Clouds in some capacity. And of course we are a single platform, like literally one single interface, consistent across all the three Cloud providers that we work upon. And it gives them that flexibility to mix and match Cloud infrastructure under any Snowflake however they see fit. The last piece of it is sharing. And, you know, I think it's that ability as I kind of alluded to around like breaking down organizational silos, and allow people to be able to actually connect with each other in ways that you couldn't do before. Like, if you think about how you and I would've shared data before, I'd be like, "Hey, Dave, I'm going to unload this table into a spreadsheet and I'm going to send it over in email." And there's the whole host of issues that get introduced in that and world, now it's like instantly available. I have a lot of control over it, it's governed it's all these other things. And I can create kind of walled gardens, so to speak, of how far out I want that to go. It could be in a controlled environment of organizations that I want to collaborate with, or I can put it on our marketplace and expose it to the whole world, because I think there's a value in that. And if I choose I can monetize it, right? So those, you know, the ease of use aspect of it, absolutely, it's just a fantastic platform. The multi-Cloud aspect of it and our unique differentiation around sharing in our marketplace and monetization. >> Yeah, on the sharing front. I mean, it's now discoverable. Like if you send me an email, like what'd you call that? When did you send that email? And then the same time I can forward that to somebody else's not governed. >> Yeah. >> All right. So that just be creates a nightmare for the compliance. >> Right. Yeah. You think about how you revoke access in that situation. You just don't, right? Now I can just turn it off and you go in to run your query. >> Don't get access on that data anymore. Yeah. Okay. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you, Clark is Snowflake started really as analytics platform, simplifying data warehousing, you're moving into that world of data science, you know, the whole data lake movement, bringing those two worlds together. You know, I was talking to Ben Ward about this, maybe there's a semantic layer that helps us kind of talk between those two worlds, but you don't care, right? If it's in an object store, it can play in both of those worlds, right? >> That's right. >> Yeah, it's up to you to figure it out and the customer- >> Yeah. >> from a storage standpoint. Here it is, serve it up. >> And that's the thrust of this announcement, right? Is bringing together two great companies, the Dell platform, the Snowflake platform, and allowing organizations to bring that together. And they decide like it, as we all know, customers decide how they're going to build their architecture. And so this is just another way that we're helping them leverage the capabilities of our two great platforms. >> Does this push or pull or little bit of both? I mean, where'd this come from? Or customers saying, "Hey, it would be kind of cool if we could have this." Or is it more, "Hey, what do you guys think?" You know, where are you at with that? >> It was definitely both, right? I mean, so we certainly started with, you know, a high level idea that, you know, the technologies are complimentary, right? I mean, as Clark just described, and at the same time we had customers coming to us saying, "Hey, wait a minute, I'm doing this over here, and this over here, how can I make this easier?" So that was like I said, we started with a blank sheet and lots of long customer conversations and this is what resulted. So >> So what are the sequence of events to kind of roll this out? You said it's second half, you know, when do you start getting customers involved? Do you have your already, you know, to poke at this and what's that look like? >> Yeah, sure. I can weigh in there. So, absolutely. We've had a few of our big customers that have been involved sort of in the design already who understand how they want to use it. So I think our expectation is that now that the sort of demonstrations have been in place, we have some pre functionality, we're going to see some initial testing and usage, some beta type situations with our customers. And then second half, we'll ramp from there. >> It's got to be a huge overlap between Dell customers and Snowflake customers. I mean, it's hundred billion. You can't not bump into Dell somewhere. >> Exactly. Yeah, you know. >> So where do you guys want to see this relationship go, kind of how should we measure success? Maybe you could each give your perspectives of that. >> I mean, for us, I think it's really showing the value of the Snowflake platform in this new world where there's a whole new ecosystem of data that is accessible to us, right? So seeing those organizations that are saying like, "Look, I'm doing new things with on-premises data that I didn't think that I could do before", or, "I'm driving efficiency in how I do analytics, and data engineering, and data science, in ways that I couldn't do before," 'cause they were locked out of using a Snowflake-like technology, right? So I think for me, that's going to be that real excitement. I'm really curious to see how the collaboration and the sharing component comes into this, you know, where you can think of having an on-premises data strategy and a need, right? But you can really connect to Cloud native customers and partners and suppliers that live in the Snowflake ecosystem, and that wasn't possible before. And so that is very conceivable and very possible through this relationship. So seeing how those edges get created in in our world and how people start to collaborate across data, both in the Cloud and on-prem is going to be really exciting. >> I remember I asked Frank, it was kind of early in the pandemic. I asked him, come on, tell me about how you're managing things. And he was awesome. And I asked him to at the time, you know, "You're ever going to do, you know, bring this platform on-prem?" He's like unequivocal, "No way, that's never going to happen. We're not going to do it halfway house ware Cloud only." And I kept thinking, but there's got to be a way to expand that team. There's so much data out there, and so boom, now we see the answer . Martin, from your standpoint, what does success look like? >> I think it starts with our partnership, right? So I've been doing this a long time. Probably the first time I've worked so closely with a partner like Snowflake. Joint customer conversations, joint solutioning, making sure what we're building is going to be really, truly as useful as possible to them. And I think we're going to let them guide us as we go forward here, right? You mentioned, you know, systems or record or other potential platforms. We're going to let them tell us where exactly the most value will come from the integration between the two companies. >> Yeah. Follow data. I mean, remember in the old days a hardware company like Dell would go to an ISP like Snowflake and say, "Hey, we ran some benchmarks. Your software runs really fast on our hardware, can we work together?" And you go, "Yeah, of course. Yeah, no problem." But wow! What a different dynamic it is today. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right guys. Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCube. It's great to see you. We'll see you at the Snowflake Summit in June. >> Snowflake Summit in a month and a half. >> Looking forward to that. All right. Thank you again. >> Thank you Dave. >> All right. Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante, wall to wall coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. We'll be right back. (gentle music)

>> The Cube presents Dell Technologies World brought to you by Dell. >> Good evening, welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. We've been here two and a half days. We've unpacked a lot of announcements in the last couple days, and we're going to be doing a little bit more of that for our final segment. We've got a couple of guests joining us. Itzik Reich, the VP of the Technologist ISG at Dell and Magi Kapoor Director of Storage Product Management at Dell. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you for having us. >> So great to be back in person. I'm sure great for all of you to see customers and partners and your team that you probably haven't seen in quite a while. But Itzik we want to, we want to start with you VP of the Technologists. That sounds like a, like you need to wear a cape or something. >> Right? Yeah. I wish I do sometimes >> Talk about that role and what you do. >> Right, so our role, we have an outbound part and an inbound part. From an outbound perspective, our role is to ensure that our customers are knowing where we going from a technology perspective. And we do it via conferences or customer calls or via blogs, and think of that nature. But as important, we also have an inbound role to ensure that our employees are knowing where we're going. You can imagine they're a very large company. Not every engineer or any other role knows exactly what we are doing in that space, especially around innovation. So we also ensure that they understand it internally about where we going into that nature. And as a side role, I also have a side job which is to be responsible for our container strategy which has started couple of years ago which I'm sure we're going to talk about today. >> Yeah, that's-- >> Got a side gig. My goodness. >> That's right. >> Maggie, lots of announcements in the last couple of days. Great attendance here. Seven to 8,000 people. Dell's coming off its best year ever, north of 100 billion in revenue and FY 22, 17% year on year growth. What are some of the things that excite you about the strategic direction that Dell is going in with its partners, with the hyperscalers storage bringing it to the hyperscalers? >> Yeah. No lots of great announcements. It's been an exciting week. Like you said, it's been great to be back in person, have these face to face meetings and, you know, see the customers, have presentations in person. Like I feel like we haven't done that in forever. So it's felt really, really great. And announcements, it's been incredible. Like the two keynotes that we had on Monday and Tuesday were both incredible. And so I'd like to talk about a couple of key ones, you know, so just to let you know, I'm a director of product management and I'm responsible for a bunch of pan-ISG initiatives, DevOps and our container strategy being one of those items. And so, you know, we're at this cusp where there are, you know, customers that are on this journey of, you know, developers coming up to speed with multicloud being one of the key areas. We've heard that a lot this week, right? And what I loved about Chuck's keynote when he talked about, you know, a multicloud by default and how we're working to change that to be multicloud for design by design, right? And so what we mean by that is, and DevOps plays a very key role there, right? In the last few years developers have had this opportunity to pick different multi from different multi clouds, right? And develop the applications wherever they find the right tool sets. But that's creating havoc with IT operations because IT has worked in it in different ways, right? So what we're trying to do with DevOps is really bridge the gap between the developers and the IT ops and make it more frictionless. And project Alpine is one of the key ones to make that, you know, to bring that bridge together. Really bring that operational consistency across on-prem and the public clouds and colo facilities and Edge and everything that we've talked about. So project Alpine is really key to the success of DevOps that we're driving across. And then the other thing that I would like to call out in terms of announce and Chuck brought that up on Monday was our focus on developers. And we have a portal called developer.dell.com which we announced and launched in January of this year. Right? It's think of that as our one stop shop for all of our APIs. You heard from Caitlin, you heard from a lot of our leaders that we have been on this journey of having a API first approach to everything we're doing be it products, be it features, functionality. And so the developer portal is the place where we're putting all of our ISG APIs and not just having a one stop shop but standardizing on APIs, which is really key. >> We just spoke to Shannon Champion and Gemma from Salesforce. And we talked about how we entered last decade for visioning lungs. And now we're programming infrastructure. So really interested in your container strategy, your DevOps strategy. How did it start? How was it evolving? Where are you in the spectrum? You know, where are customers in that maturity? Let's dig in >> 2015, I believe was the year when DockerCon their CTO went on stage and they explained their customer that they shouldn't care about storage. They should design their applications running in containers in the 12 factor way, designed to fail, storage doesn't matter. And I remember scratching my head because I was hearing this one before. If there's one thing that I've learned both as a customer and later on as an employee of a storage company at the time, is that customers care about data and they care a lot about their data. Especially if it's not available. It's a bad day for the customer and possibly a very bad day for me as well. And so we actually, at the time, work with a startup called Cluster HQ to offer persistent volumes for Kubernetes. That startup eventually went down of business. But Google took over the some part of the intellectual property and came with an API called CSI. Which does not stand for your famous TV show. It's actually an acronym for container storage interface. And the CSI role in life is to be able to provide persistent volume from a storage array to Kubernetes. So we start working with Google, just like many other vendors in order to ensure that our stands outs are part of the CSI stand out. And we start to providing CSI interfaces for our storage arrays. And that's how all of these things started. We started to get more and more customers telling us I'm going all in with Kubernetes and I need you to support me in that journey. But what we've also learned is that Kubernetes similarly in a way to the open stock days is very fragmented. There are many distributions that are running on the top of Kubernetes. So seed side itself is not just the end of it. Many customer wants day to be working with VMware (indistinct) with zoo or with red OpenShift or with Rancher. So we need to do different adjustments for each one of these distributions in order to ensure that we are meeting the customer where they are today but also in the future as well. >> Yeah, and Kubernetes back in 2015 was, you know, pretty immature. We were focused on simplicity. You had Mesos doing, you know, more sophisticated things, you know, cluster HQ, obvious. And now you see Kubernetes moving into that realm tackling all those, a lot of those problems. So where does storage fit into that resilient resiliency equation? >> Yeah, so, you know, I think storages are key. What we're hearing a lot from customers is they have infrastructure in place already and they want to take advantage of cloud native and modernizing their applications whether they're the legacy applications or as they're building new applications. So how do really take advantage of the infrastructure that they have invested in? And they love, and they need. I mean, the reason why our customers love our products is because of the enterprise and the data management capabilities that we provide, right? Be it PowerMax for our gold standards on SRDF replication, for instance, they want to make sure that they leverage all of that as they are containerizing their applications. So the piece that Itzik talked about with the CSI plugins, that gives customers the opportunity to take advantage of the infrastructure that's already in place, take advantage of all the enterprise capabilities that it provides but yet take advantage of cloudifying, if I can say, the applications that they're doing, right? And then on top of that we also have what we call our CSM modules which is the container storage modules which is so, you know, going back again, we, CSI industry stack spec standards, you know, customers started to use it. And what we heard from our customers was, this is great but it has very minimum capabilities, right? Very basic ones. And we love your enterprise products. We want enterprise capabilities with it. So we've been working with CNCF very closely on, you know, working on contributions. But what we have realized is that they're, the community is still far from delivering some of these enterprise capabilities. So we came up with container storage modules which is an extension of CSI modules but to add those enterprise capabilities, you know, be it observability, be it replication, authorization, resiliency. These are the things that customers wanted to use enterprise storage when it comes to containers. And that's what we've been delivering on with our container storage modules. I do want to call out that all of our CSM modules just like CSI are all open source. That's what developers want. They don't want it closed source. And so we're listening to them and we're creating all of this in open source waiting, you know, and wanting them to contribute to the court. So it's not just us doing, you know and writing what we want but we also want the community to contribute. >> You're committing resources there, publishing them, it's all open source? >> Exactly. >> That's the contribution. >> And working with CNCF to see if they can be standardized across the board not just for Dell customers. >> Is that a project going, is that your ideal? It that becomes a project within CNCF or is it? >> That's our goal. Yes. We're definitely working and influencing. We'll see how it goes. >> More committers. Just keep throwing committers at it. >> Support these day is done via slack channel. So if we're changing the way that we run interacting with our customers that are now the developers themselves via slack channel. You don't need to call 100, 800 Dell to get a support case. >> So I'm interested in, you mentioned project Alpine, and it was very interesting to me to see that. You know, you guys talk about multicloud. I try to take it to another level. I call it super cloud and that's this abstraction layer. You know, some people laugh at that, but it has meaning. Multi-cloud is going to multivendor by default. And my premise is data ultimately is going to stay where it belongs in place. And then this mesh evolves, not my word, Jamoc Degani kind of invented. And there needs to be standards to be able to share data and govern that data. And it's wide open now. There are no standards there. And I think open sources has an opportunity as opposed to a defacto standard that would emerge. It seems to be real white space there. I think a company like Dell could provide that self-service infrastructure to those data points on the mesh and standards or software that governs that in a computational way. Is that something that's, you know, that super cloud idea is a reality from a technologist perspective? >> I think it is. So for example, Katie Gordon, which I believe you interviewed earlier this week, was demonstrating the Kubernetes data mobility aspect, which is another project. That's exactly power part of the its rational, the rationale of customers being able to move some of their Kubernetes workloads to the cloud and back and between different clouds. Why we doing it? Because customers wants to have the ability to move between different cloud providers using a common API that will be able to orchestrate all of those things with a self-service that may be offered via the apex console itself. So it's all around enabling developers and meeting them where they are today and also meeting them in tomorrow's world where they actually may have changed their mind to do those things. So, yes, we are working on all of those different aspects. >> Dell meeting the developers where they are. Guys thank you so much for joining David and me and unpacking that. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much for having us. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Speaking of unpacking, Lisa. We're unpacking Dell tech world. >> They're packing up around us. Exactly. We better go. We want to thank you for watching The Cube's two and a half days of live coverage of Dell Technologies world. Dave it's been great to co-host with you, be back in person. >> Thank you Lisa. It was really a pleasure. >> Of course. My pleasure too. >> Let's do more of this. >> Let's do it! >> All right. >> We want to thank you again for watching. You can catch all of this on replay on thecube.net. We look forward to seeing you next time. (soft music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin and Dave Vale are live in Las Vegas. We are covering our third day of covering Dell technologies world 2022. The first live in-person event since 2019. It's been great to be here. We've had a lot of great conversations about all the announcements that Dell has made in the last couple of days. And we're gonna unpack a little bit more of that. Now. One of our alumni is back with us. Shannon champion joins us again, vice president product marketing at Dell technologies, and she's a company by Pete Robinson, the director of infrastructure engineering at Salesforce. Welcome. Thank >>You. >>So Shannon, you had a big announcement yesterday. I run a lot of new software innovations. Did >>You hear about that? I heard a little something >>About that. Unpack that for us. >>Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, it's so exciting to be here in person and have such a big moment across our storage portfolio, to see that on the big stage, the boom to announce major updates across power store, PowerMax and power flex all together, just a ton of innovation across the storage portfolio. And you probably also heard a ton of focus on our software driven innovation across those products, because our goal is really to deliver a continuously modern storage experience. That's what our customers are asking us for that cloud experience. Let's take the most Val get the most value from data no matter where it lives. That's on premises in the public clouds or at the edge. And that's what we, uh, unveil. That's what we're releasing. And that's what we're excited to talk about. >>Now, Pete, you, Salesforce is a long time Dell customer, but you're also its largest PowerMax customer. The biggest in the world. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing with PowerMax and your experience. >>Yeah, so, um, for Salesforce, trust is our number one value and that carries over into the infrastructure that we develop, we test and, and we roll out and Parex has been a key part of that. Um, we really like the, um, the technology in terms of availability, reliability, um, performance. And it, it has allowed us to, you know, continue to grow our customers, uh, continue needs for more and more data. >>So what was kind of eye popping to me was the emphasis on security. Not that you've not always emphasized security, but maybe Shannon, you could do a rundown of, yeah. Maybe not all the features, but give us the high level. And at Pete, I, I wonder how I, if you could comment on how, how you think about that as a practitioner, but please give us that. >>Sure. Yeah. So, you know, PowerMax has been leading for, uh, a long time in its space and we're continuing to lean into that and continue to lead in that space. And we're proud to say PowerMax is the world's most secure mission, critical storage platform. And the reason we can say that is because it really is designed for comprehensive cyber resiliency. It's designed with a zero trust security architecture. And in this particular release, there's 19 different security features really embedded in there. So I'm not gonna unpack all 19, but a couple, um, examples, right? So multifactor authentication also continuous ransomware anomaly detection, a leveraging cloud IQ, which is, uh, huge. Um, and last but not least, um, we have the industry's most granular cyber recovery at scale PowerMax can do up to 65 million imutable snapshots per array. So just, uh, and that's 30 times more than our next nearest competitor. So, you know, really when you're talking about recovery point objectives, power max can't be beat. >>So what does that mean to you, Pete? >>Uh, well, it's it's same thing that I was mentioning earlier about that's a trust factor. Uh, security is a big, a big part of that. You know, Salesforce invests heavily into the securing our customer data because it really is the, the core foundation of our success and our customers trust us with their data. And if we, if we were to fail at that, you know, we would lose that trust. And that's simply not, it's not an option. >>Let's talk about that trust for a minute. We know we've heard a lot about trust this week from Michael Dell. Talk to us about trust, your trust, Salesforce's trust and Dell technologies. You've been using them a long time, but cultural alignment yeah. Seems to be pretty spot on. >>I, I would agree. Um, you know, both companies have a customer first mentality, uh, you know, we, we succeed if the customer succeeds and we see that going back and forth in that partnership. So Dell is successful when Salesforce is successful and vice versa. So, um, when we've it's and it goes beyond just the initial, you know, the initial purchase of, of hardware or software, you know, how you operate it, how you manage it, um, how you continue to develop together. You know, our, you know, we work closely with the Dell engineering teams and we've, we've worked closely in development of the new, new PowerMax lines to where it's actually able to help us build our, our business. And, and again, you know, continue to help Dell in the process. So you've >>Got visibility on the new, a lot of these new features you're playing around with them. What I, I, I obviously started with security cuz that's on top of everybody's mind, but what are the things are important to you as a customer? And how do these features the new features kind of map into that? Maybe you could talk about your experience with the, I think you're in beta, maybe with these features. Maybe you could talk about that. >>Yeah. Um, probably the, the biggest thing that we're seeing right now, other than OB the obvious enhancements in hardware, which, which we love, uh, you know, better performance, better scalability, better, and a better density. Um, but also the, some of the software functionality that Dells starting to roll out, you know, we've, we've, we've uh, implemented cloud IQ for all of our PowerMax systems and it's the same thing. We continue to, um, find features that we would like. And we've actually, you know, worked closely with the cloud IQ team. And within a matter of weeks or months, those features are popping up in cloud IQ that we can then continue to, to develop and, and use. >>Yeah. I think trust goes both ways in our partnership, right? So, you know, Salesforce can trust Dell to deliver the, you know, the products they need to deliver their business outcomes, but we also have a relationship to where we can trust that Salesforce is gonna really help us develop the next generation product that's gonna, you know, really deliver the most value. Yeah. >>Can you share some business outcomes that you've achieved so far leveraging power max and how it's really enabled, maybe it's your organization's productivity perspective, but what are some of those outcomes that you've achieved so far? >>Um, there there's so many to, to, to choose from, but I would say the, probably the biggest thing that we've seen is a as we roll out new infrastructure, we have various generations that we deploy. Um, when we went to the new PowerMax, um, initially we were concerned about whether our storage infrastructure could keep up with the new compute, uh, systems that we were rolling out. And when we went through and began testing it, we came to realize that the, the performance improvements alone, that we were seeing were able to keep up with the compute demand, making that transition from the older VMAX platforms to the PMAX practically seamless and able to just deploy the new SKUs as, as they came out. >>Talk about the portfolio that you apply to PowerMax. I mean, it's the highest of the highest end mission critical the toughest workloads in the planet. Salesforce has made a lot of acquisitions. Yeah. Um, do you throw everything at PowerMax? Are you, are you selective? What's your strategy there? So >>It's, it's selective. In other words that there's no square peg that meets every need, um, you know, acquisitions take some time to, to ingest, um, you know, some run into cloud, some run in first, in, in first party. Um, but so we, we try to take a very, very intentional approach to where we deploy that technology. >>So 10 years ago, someone in your position, or maybe someone who works for you was probably do spent a lot of time managing lawns and tuning performance. And how has that changed? >>We don't do that. <laugh> we? >>We can, right. So what do you do with right. Talk, talk more double click on that. So how talk about how that transition occurred from really non-productive activities, managing storage boxes. Yeah. And, and where you are today, what are you doing with those resources? >>It, it, it all comes outta automation. Like, you know, the, you know, hardware is hardware to a point, um, but you reach a point where the, the manageability scale just goes exponential and, and we're way, well past that. And the only way we've been able to meet that, meet that need is to, to automate and really develop our operations, to be able to not just manage at a lung level or even at the system level, but manage at the data center level at the geographical, you know, location level and then being able to, to manage from there. >>Okay. Really stupid question. But I'm gonna ask it cause I wanna hear your answer. True. Why can't you just take a software defined storage platform and just run everything on that? Why do you need all these different platforms and why do you gotta spend all this money on PowerMax? Why, why can't you just do >>That? That's the million dollar question. Uh, I, I ask that all the time. <laugh>, um, I think software defined is it's on its way. Um, it's come a long way just in the last decade. Yeah. Um, but in terms of supporting what I consider mission critical, large scale, uh, applications, it's, it's not, it's just simply not on par just yet with what we do with PowerMax, for example. >>And that's exactly how we position it in our portfolio. Right? So PowerMax runs on 95% of the fortune 100 companies, top 20 healthcare companies, top 10 financial services companies in the world. So it's really mission critical high end has all of the enterprise level features and capabilities to really have that availability. That's so important to a lot of companies like Salesforce and, and Pete's right, you know, software define is on its way and it provides a lot of agility there. But at the end of the day for mission critical storage, it's all about PowerMax. >>I wonder if we're ever gonna get to, I mean, you, you, you, it was interesting answer cuz you kind of, I inferred from your that you're hopeful and even optimistic that someday will get to parody. But I wonder because you can't be just close enough. It's almost, you have to be. >>I think, I think the key answer to that is it's it's the software flying gets you halfway there. The other side of the coin is the application ecosystem has to change to be able to solve that other, other side of it. Cuz if you simply simply take an application that runs on a PowerMax and try to run it, just forklift it over to a software defined. You're not gonna have very much luck. >>Recovery has to be moved up to stack >>Operations recovery, the whole, whole whole works. >>Jenny, can you comment on how customers like Salesforce? Like what's your process for involving them in testing in roadmap and in that direction, strategic direction that you guys are going? Great >>Question. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, customer feedback is huge. You've heard it. I'm sure this is not new right product development and engineering. We love to hear from our customers. And there's multiple ways you heard about beta testing, which we're really fortunate that Salesforce can help us provide that feedback for our new releases. But we have user groups, we have forums. We, we hear directly from our sales teams, our, you know, our customers, aren't shy, they're willing to give us their feedback. And at the end of the day, we take that feedback and make sure that we're prioritizing the right things in our product management and engineering teams so that we're delivering the things that matter. Most first, >>We've heard a lot of that this week. So I would agree guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Salesforce. What you doing with PowerMax? All the stuff that you announced yesterday, alone. Hopefully you get to go home and get a little bit of rest. >>Yes. >>I'm sure that there's, there's never a dull moment. Never. Can't wait guys. Great to have you. >>Thank you. You guys, >>For our guests on Dave Volante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the queue. We are live day three of our coverage of Dell technologies world 2022, Dave and I will be right back with our final guest of the show.

>> "theCube" presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, Welcome back to "theCube's" continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the show floor in Las Vegas. We have been here since Monday evening. About seven to 8,000 folks here. It's been a fantastically well-attended event that Dell has done. Lots of talk about announcements, including APEX. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante are going to unpack more of APEX with our next two Cube alumni who are returning, Akanksha Mehrotra, VP of APEX product marketing joins us, and Chad Dunn, VP of product management APEX. Guys, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> It is really great to be back. >> So just in case there's anybody out there that's been under a rock since Monday, APEX has now been what GA for a year, celebrating a momentous year and some big news. Akanksha, walk us through that and then talk about some of the feedback that you've gotten on what you guys announced just two days ago. >> Yeah. So it's been an exciting week like you said. APEX just for sort of background is our portfolio of as-a-service solutions, we introduced it a year ago. We have now 10 plus services in our portfolio. We added our very first full stack managed service for cyber recovery this week. The feedback from customers over the past year and then the conversations we've had, you know, over the course of this week has been phenomenal. If I had to really summarize it, I would say the pain point that we're looking to solve, helping organizations manage data across disparate and fragmented environments across a variety of clouds, you know, on-premises, in a co-lo, on the far edge, at a hyperscale or in the telco edge is resonating. This is a pain point... This is very real pain point for them. And our goal in our vision to create a consistent and a secure experience across all of these different, you know, silos of data, if you will. It's something that they really want more of from us. >> Chad, talk a little bit about the influence of the customer in the last couple of years. Well, in the last year, in terms of releasing the cyber recovery solution on APEX, we have seen the threat landscape massively change. >> It increases every day. >> It increases every day, ransomware is no longer a... Is it going to happen too? It's a matter of when? >> Yes. >> Talk to us about the influence of the customer of this being the first full stack solution on APEX. >> Sure, like I don't think there's a boardroom in the world where this isn't being discussed as just such a high risk environment for cyber techs. It's damaging to lose your data. It's damaging to your reputation, it's financially damaging. So it's incredibly important into our customers. And we're finding that, you know, many of them don't necessarily have all the expertise to be able to defend against it themselves. And so that's where an as-a-service solution, like the one that we're offering really makes sense to them, right? They're much more apt to consume as-a-service when the competency doesn't necessarily already exist in their IT organizations. So we've been doing this for a few years as a solution with managed services. And in fact, we've deployed over 2000 of these, and making that a standardized offering with T-shirt sizing, subscription basis, really seems to be a winner. And every customer I've talked to has been absolutely over the moon with it. >> All right, so we have Chad in product management, Akanksha, you're in product marketing. So you knew going into this, that it was going to be different. So I'm interested in kind of what your learnings were, that internal transformation, which is ongoing now, I understand that, but how did it change how you manage, you know, deploy the life cycle of the product and communicate that. >> I'll get us started and I'm sure Chad will add on. So, you know, to your point, when we started this journey internally before we started it externally, we knew this was going to be a multi-year transformation for us. And a multi-year transformation that affects every part of the company, how we build products, how we market products, how we bring them to market, how we sell them, et cetera. And so we made a very conscious effort to kind of secure that buy-in early on. And it starts Michael on down. This is a strategic priority for him as I'm sure both of you know. And each function has kind of established, you know, areas where they know they need to transform and a north star goal for where they want to get to. So I'll speak for marketing as a place that's, you know, close to my heart. One, we know as we get into this space, we're going to be talking to different types of folks and having conversations with different types of personas within an account than we have had before. Using cyber recovery solution as an example, yes, we want to talk to, you know, IT administrators and CIO who we've been talking to. But as Chad said, this is something that CISOs care about. This is something that security teams care about. That those are a different set of personas for us to market to, to communicate with, whose pain points we need to understand better. So that's an example of a change. Another one is moving from a... I mean, events like this are great, and we certainly love to be back in person, but in as-a-service model, you want to have much more frequent communication with your intended audiences. So we've moved to more of an always on-marketing motion leveraging our blog, leveraging other vehicles. And that's that has also been a transformation for us. >> On the marketing side, I'm curious, sorry, Dave. Chad, you brought up one of the big things that is a huge challenge for any organization and any industry with respect to the cybersecurity in that threat landscape is brand reputation. >> Yeah. >> Are you having more conversations at the CMO level? I'm just curious if they're involved in this. We got to make sure that we don't have... We're not the next one on the news because customers will churn like crazy. Is that at all part of the conversation than persona change? >> It is certainly part of it. But, you know, we don't want to be motivated by fear, right? We want to be motivated by preparation and securing the business and growing the business. So, you know, it is a sea level discussion to, you know, understand how we need to protect our critical data. But it's really from a lens of, you know, how do we grow and we grow more quickly? And you know, if you look at APEX overall, yes, we've made a lot of internal changes to get where we are and we're going to continue to make those. And I'll talk through some examples. But this is also a journey for our customers, right? The change to, you know, consuming by the drip, consuming APEX, consuming as-a-service, you could take two companies with identical size and an identical vertical, and they're going to have different priorities about how they want to consume this infrastructure and these services. So we're on that journey with them just as we have to transform ourselves internally, from the way that we do accounting, from the way that we do sales compensation, from the way that we actually build product. And in fact, we just changed up the model by which we're, you know, developing product in APEX today. So I'm about 90 days into my role in APEX. I came from the HCI business. And I'm here with my engineering leader who was also in the HCI business. So we were able to be fortunate enough to work in an organization that went from zero to 4 billion in pretty quickly. So, Hey, let's see if we can apply some of that learning to this. But it's an incredible partnership inside of Dell with people like Dell Digital and our transformation office. Because we've done things roughly the same way for about 30 years. And this is all very new to us. So it's pretty amazing journey. >> I'm interested in what's different. You weren't first to market. The public cloud guys might say, "Eh, it's not cloud." >> No. >> Okay, so how are you different than public cloud and how are you different from your traditional on-prem competitors? >> Again, I'll get us started and chime in. I would say... I'll take your first example. I want to go back to kind of what our customers... Where they want help from us and what are they're asking us for. As I said, the debate is over. They have told us pretty definitively, and our data and your data shows it, that they will and the data will continue to grow in all these different fragmented silos. What they want is an experience that orchestrated across all of these different environments, by a vendor that they trust, right? And that's what we are committed to delivering to them. That's our north star, that's where we're going. I would argue that any one of the hyperscalers don't have incentives to kind of make that same experience happen across all those different environments. A vendor like Dell, who has been trusted by many years... You know, for many years from our customer, who doesn't have a single dog in the race, but is looking to partner with folks across the entire ecosystem, is looking to innovate with our software, our services, and our infrastructure is best positioned to help them orchestrate across. >> Yeah. Well, you know, if you're wondering what's different, you really have to look at what the value proposition is for public clouds versus keeping data on-prem or keeping it in a place where it's accessible to multiple clouds. You know, I think if you haven't been under a rock here at the show, you know it is all about multi-cloud, and you know that we're, you know, absolutely embracing it from, you know, Project Alpine where we're putting storage endpoints in public cloud, to what we're doing with APEX and our data storage services and the move of our customers into co-locations where the data can be accessible to multiple clouds. I think that getting the commerce capabilities in place that we've done over the course of the last year is a great first step. But look for us to double down on the day two management and operations, using that platform that we've created for APEX. And that's going to allow us to create more velocity and bring more solutions into the fold more quickly, and then provide more day two management optimization operation of the solutions by our customers. >> Okay. Sorry. So definitely agree with the public cloud. And I got to trust them to do my multi-cloud or what I call super-cloud. What about your traditional competitors? Is it the normal sort of what we'd expect for the Dell differentiators portfolio, supply chain, et cetera, or are there APEX specific differentiators? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there are absolutely the Dell differentiators of the breadth of our sales force through both our direct sales teams as well as our partners, our secure supply chain, our services team, and the expertise that they've built, which we're obviously bringing to bear with this market and this offer. Those are kind of the Dell wide advantages that we bring to bear with this. But specifically for APEX against the traditional on-prem competitors, I would say the simplicity with which we are bringing our offers to market is a differentiator for us. And it's one that our customers in the past year have retreated back to us. So the commerce experience that Chad was just talking about, we have made very conscious efforts to simplify and abstract the way that complexity from our customers, so that they are picking very easy to understand outcomes that they care about. And then not really worry about the peace parts, whether it's the hardware, the software, or the services that help make that service level outcome happen. I would argue, you know, some of the other competitors, traditional competitors that we have haven't done that. And it's more of a... You know, that complexity is still there. And what we hear from our customers is, I want the simplicity and agility that public cloud provides. That's something that hyperscalers did get right. And we're bringing that experience to our infrastructure. >> Yeah. Like I think the other way that we'll differentiate ourselves is going to be by the breadth of the solutions, right? So we've got a tremendous amount of IP in solutions like cyber recovery, right? This wasn't a new thing for us. This is something we've been doing for a few years as there's tremendous consulting capabilities, services capabilities, the underlying products of course. Well, there's a pipeline of solutions lined up behind that. So as we move into high performance computer as-a-service, MLOps as-a-service, we can draw on those solutions that we've offered, but in a very custom way in the past now at a high velocity manner in the console. >> Well, the high velocity these days is critical. As we've seen the last two years, things have changed so dramatically for customers in every industry that needed to pivot with speed and accelerate their transformation. >> And the transparency. Right? So going back to his example, having that price transparency. You can go to our website and look at the pricing, pick in the two or three very simple options and see it right there and order it through the console. In a matter of minutes versus, you know, wait for two weeks to get the code and then wait for a month to get the hardware, and then wait for the services team to show up. So what we are hearing... I mean, we have truly been able to take deployments that used to take several months to a matter of days. And so that's how the simplicity kind of, you know, pays off not only in that initial deployment, but over the course of the subscription, the day two operations that Chad was just talking about and the innovation and the work that we're doing to simplify their lives in that process, allow them to focus in other areas. >> Oh, absolutely. That time to value, time to market has never been more critical. And the ability, to your point, Akanksha, to allow folks to be able to focus more on the strategic initiatives that will actually help move the business for... Add value, move the business forward and allow it to be competitive and differentiate itself is critical for everybody in every industry. Chad, I wanted to kind of pivot on multi-cloud for a second. You talked about that. And we had Chuck Whit on yesterday. He was talking about, you know, multi-cloud. A lot of organizations, many, many, many in multi-cloud by default. But what Dell wants to do is change that, multi-cloud by design. Is APEX going to be a facilitator of multi-cloud by design? Talk to us about that for customers. >> We absolutely will be. So if you look at what made customers multi-cloud by default, it's them going for the services that exist in the cloud and looking for best of breed services. Whether it's machine learning, speech recognition, database, they're going to those best of breed players. And so the value proposition for us is since you're in those clouds, you want access to your data and you want it centrally, so you can see it, leverage it, use it from any of those clouds, but you may have other reasons for keeping your data or even your compute on-prem or in a co-location. It could be data sovereignty, it could be policy compliance, it could be data gravity. So we want to make the concept of having your workloads or your data anywhere, very seamless for our customers, right? So it's really embracing the concept of multi-cloud and making it easier. >> The cyber recovery solution is really interesting to me. I was talking to one of the partners here and they said, "Dave, this was a really good show for us." And they probably had a quasi competitive solution. I don't really know. But like a lot of customers and, you know, got a lot of leads out of it. So it's the hot topic and that's what they said. This is cyber, everybody wants cyber. So how did that solution come together? Because I know you... You really... You've always been security conscious. But I never really full cracked the security solution. And now here it is in APEX, it's like, boom, out of the box or out of the service. How'd that come about? >> It really started back in 2014, specifically. It's funny when you can point to an event where, you know, something started like this. So there was a fairly high profile ransomware attack in 2014. And that caused us to look at the assets that we had from our data protection portfolio, from a software and storage perspective and say, "Hey, we can put something together that can really address this, right? Through novel use of existing technology." So we built out reference architectures. We built out the consulting service on how you protect your data. We partnered and built software to be able to secure the data in an air gaped imutable vault and offer the services to be able to manage that, monitor that, restore the data when needed. So we did that in a very custom way for years. In fact, as I said, over 2,000 systems deployed this way. So having a vehicle like APEX that has the as-a-service capability built in, the subscription capability built in, the ease and velocity of purchasing and operating was really a natural fit. So you know, we expect this is going to be a very high volume solution for us. >> Great. Awesome. >> Akanksha, can you talk a little bit about the partner ecosystem involved here in APEX? You know, when I think about ransomware in data protection, I think organizations need to be able to protect apps, users, data platforms. But we think of how data is so spread out, customers want that single pane of glass to be able to manage all that and know that that data is protected. Talk to us about how you're working with partners. I know the partner ecosystem at Dell's huge. How are you working with partners and how can they build upon APEX? >> Yeah So our partners are a very important part of our ecosystem. They help expand our reach. They also help complement our capabilities. You know, for example, in specific verticals. They may have services or expertise in a particular area. For the APEX portfolio, we actually offer a wide variety of ways for partners to engage with us. Starting out, they could refer our solutions and refer, you know, some of our services, if they want to take more of an advisory role in some capacity. They could resell our services with additional services included. In this scenario, for example, they would leverage our console, include some of their services in there and then offer it to their end customers. They could host APEX offers in their own data center or in a co-lo data center and build their practice on top of it. A lot of our partners and customers, we've got kind of joint customer partners that for example, have built a healthcare practice on top of an APEX solution, where they've added their services or built their business on top of it. And then finally, there's of course, technology and ISV partners, right? And that is where we might leverage, you know, some of their technology, built it to be part of a service or a solution that we're doing and join the go-to market. So I think the answer is lots of ways for partners to engage with APEX. And we absolutely are engaging with them in a wide variety of ways. And I think cyber recovery is no different. >> Well, there must be not a dull moment with what you guys have going on with APEX. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us about that. Sounds like the momentous year that you've had is going to continue. And it sounds like you've gotten great feedback from the customers and the partner so far. Thank you for joining "theCube" and telling us what's going on. And we can't wait to hear more next year. I'm sure there will be lots more next year. >> Yes indeed. >> Absolutely. Thank you very much. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching "theCube's" coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> TheCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day three. From the show floor of Dell Technologies World 2022. We've been here with about seven to 8,000 people. It's been outstanding since Monday night, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we have two of the ladies from Dell digital with us, excited to welcome Jaynene Hapanowicz and Betsy Davis, leaders in Dell digital, which is Dell's IT organization. Ladies, thanks for joining Dave and me. >> Thanks for having us. Great to be here. >> Jaynene, let's start with you. We've heard a lot this week about the need for IT leaders to think very meaningfully on how to leave a lasting legacy. How in today's dynamic environment do IT leaders do that? >> Yeah. Well look, let's start with IT leaders have a pretty tough job. You're trying to stabilize an environment. You're trying to take care of anomalies, security incidents. Like that's the blocking and tackling, except you also have to transform your organization at the same time. And I think it's really important that you build a strategy that enables you to do both those things. So you have to do, you have to do the blocking and tackling or you don't get a seat at the table, but the other things that you have to prioritize are things like building the business relationships, putting your customer at the center of what you do, and building great teams that trust you and you trust them to develop capabilities that you need for the future. And your strategy has to support both of those things. >> We've heard a lot about trust this week, specifically from Mr. Dell himself, Betsy you've spoken in the past about the need for IT and the business to collaborate. There has to be trust there. How do you advise folks to accomplish that true collaboration? >> Yeah, it's look, trust is so important and it's funny because last time we were here live at a CUBE session, we were talking about the product model, which is how we do things in Dell Digital now. And it's all focused on jointly with the business, agreeing on human-centered outcomes, starting small, iterating and together you deliver extraordinary things. And so over the last few years, building collaboration through that product model has done tremendous things. I would say what we're learning more about more recently is how to extend that. Especially when you're taking multiple legacy regional tools and globalizing them, how do you extend it to policies and processes? But what we're finding that's interesting is, the same principles apply, agree on outcomes. What are you going for? And then work through it together. You don't assign it to one side or the other. It's truly a collaboration exercise. >> You know, I want to comment. So Dell has a culture, obviously. Founder led company, chairman's name is on the name of the company, Say:Do ratio, trust, et cetera. It seems like Dell Digital has its own little culture going on. And the reason I say that is, when Jen felt was up on stage yesterday, I heard a lot of yelling, screaming, hooping, people were standing up. That didn't seem like a typical IT department thing. You know, that was pretty cool. So what's the Dell Digital culture like, is it just an extension? Is it? What's it like? >> Yeah, yeah. Well, I think our leader who we admire very much, which you saw yesterday has built a great leadership team and a culture that her leaders trust each other and that cascades down. And I think our employees, like all of our folks, they love working in Dell Digital, and they love working at Dell digital because we empower them to do their jobs. We let them work where they need to work, and we have, I think, great leadership at every level to really help people propel the company forward. We have a single mission and that mission is to make Dell better. >> I like the, thank you for that. I like the way Betsy, you were talking about the, I called the product mindset. >> Yep. >> As opposed to commonly in IT, there's a project mindset. Ah, I got another project to do. >> Yeah. >> Explain the difference. >> So a project is, some people might say waterfall, it's a very old school way of doing things where you say, okay, business give me requirements. They take six months, They come up with a list of requirements. Your IT team goes off and deliver in those requirements. And two years later you come back together and go, oh, that's not what we were looking for, and it's delayed by now. So product model is really focused on, hey, let's do short sprints. Let's agree the outcome, let's attempt to deliver it, but if we deliver it and then find out, oh, that's actually not what we were looking for, then you just iterate and you haven't wasted two and a half years. And it's also quite frankly, as a leader, it's a lot more fun to lead teams in that environment, because you're constantly getting wins and they're getting that constant reinforcement of look at the impact you're making for the business. Which is a great motivator for all of us at Dell Digital. >> Quick follow up if I may, is the enabler there a mindset or is it technology? Why are you able to do that? >> It's both. So part of what makes that possible, is our modern environment. Jaynene has done an incredible job, really building a modern toolkit for our developers that makes it easier to collaborate and move quickly and iterate. But so much of it is that product model mindset of, okay, what outcomes are we delivering? What's the smallest unit of work we can break that into and let's just go and iterate. >> And you put the user in the center, like it's so much easier to develop what a customer needs, if the customer is at the center of what you're trying to do, and you iterate from there. That wasn't the way that it has historically worked. >> So how do you advise it leaders to become transformational like this rather than traditional? Because I imagine those traditional ones, those businesses may not survive the changing times that we're living in, but being transformational that's a challenging mindset, especially for organizations that are legacy or history, have been there a while. Can you advise? >> I mean, you have to fire on all cylinders, that old people process and technology is actually still true. Building a great culture and building a culture of trust, super important, but you got to pull your folks along with you on a journey. You have to have leadership that buys into doing both transformation and running the business. You have to, your technology has to support what you're trying to do. You can't expect great outcomes from things that are 20 years old, You're not going to get it. And your processes, they have to be adjusted to reflect a cloud operating model. A lot of companies even struggle with that, because they're using processes from a decade ago, and they need to update those policies to reflect what it is to operate like a cloud, in a cloud. And how have you guys accelerated this culture and this mindset during the last couple of years where things just went crazy overnight? What was that acceleration like? 'Cause we talked about digital transformation acceleration with your customers, but you guys have had to transform too. >> Yeah, and you know, I look at it from a leadership angle. I think these last couple years have really given us an opportunity to take what we took in the product model of human-centered experiences for our customers and business partner, and really focus on, hey, we need to be human centered leaders. So in some ways that was easier to do with Dell because we were always very flexible on where people work, when they work, et cetera. But I think we've had the opportunity these last couple years to demonstrate, hey, it really is about our people first, we set our people up for success. We help them take care of their immediate needs, whether those be personal or work and everything else works out. And I think companies that keep that in the forefront and always approach things from a human center perspective, whether that's leadership or experiences in the product model, always come out ahead. >> How are you faring in the talent war? My specific question is, if I were younger and a perspective employee, how would you recruit me in terms of how you would nurture my career? What's my future look like? What would you tell me? >> Yeah, I, well, first of all, let's start with the talent war. That, I mean, look, it's real. Our folks are getting recruited like crazy too. Except I think there is a cultural aspect that really causes folks to pause. I also think enabling people to work where they want to work or where they need to work, it's both, that has helped us in our recruitment because the advantage of people do not want to go back to the office. Like, I don't know, I'm speaking for like probably myself and everybody I talk to. I just don't think people want to go back to the office, but we're benefiting from that, because we are actually drawing in talent from companies that are sending folks back to the office. And we gave our employees remotely great tools to be able to work from home. And that has all been a win for us in terms of retaining our staff and drawing in new talent. And I think the other thing and it's a very important point that you raise, is that the future is working in modern tool sets. And one of the things that we did and Jen spoke about yesterday, was around developers want to develop and you've got to give them the tools that they need to perform their jobs as quickly as possible, because digital transformation is ultimately about creating applications that drive business value. >> I think I'm the only one that probably here that wants to go back to the office. If I do one more Zoom call from home, I might go puke. >> I go to the office, but I'm like 15 minutes away, so. >> Oh, I'm about 30 seconds away to really look at my commute. Let's talk about from that cultural perspective and the great resignation, all the things that are going on. You talked about folks getting recruited, that flexibility of meeting your, as you said Jaynene meeting the employees where they are is the same culture that Dell has about meeting its customers where they are. And that's really kind of the foundation of a lot of the announcements that we've heard over the last few days, is really that flexibility to be able to deliver what a great customer experience and a great employee experience. I think to me, they're inextricably linked. >> So I totally agree. >> So this notion of work remotely, et cetera, great. Most people, like you said right now are saying I'm not going back. And I think some kind of hybrid is probably going to be the norm. >> Agree. >> That's cool. But we have a tendency to work longer laps times from home. And so there's that even weekends, it's like everybody's always on we should never get emails on Saturday, now I'm like, I got to look, of course spend an hour or two hour, whatever it is. So how do you balance that with folks? What do you tell people in your organization? >> Yeah, I mean, we're very focused on our employees having quality of life, now we're in IT. Like, let's be real. We have always worked weekends. But I think what we're really really being very thoughtful about, is that balance for our employees that we're not creating more stress in their lives. Like we want them to have a great quality experience. A lot of that happens with the technology that we have built under the covers, because that has allowed our developers to work less weekends and has allowed our folks to release independently, which is kind of in the world of IT, that's the utopia, you want to get to let folks work independently. And that has actually freed up the time for developers to have to work as if we all work together, and now they can work independently. And that has actually helped with quality of life. So it's, it is still though a combination of all those things. It is also having leadership team that values that. And I think that's what we have. >> What's cool about this conversation. We're talking about IT, we haven't even, we haven't talked tech. Now are you guys techies? >> Yeah. >> You are? >> Yeah. >> Okay. So one of the things, I was in one of these private analyst meetings, a handful of analysts with (indistinct) and I was asking her about the cloud migration, that's a lot of CIOs top priority. It's obviously, her response essentially was, yeah, well, we are modernizing our infrastructure, That's essentially our cloud. We've got our own cloud. I wonder if you could like double click on that a little bit. 'Cause security number one for most IT organizations, cloud number two, she translated that into, way I interpret that data is modernization. I wonder if you could give us your perspective on that. >> I think the first thing as you map out, hey, what do we want our modern environment to be? And you make those technology decisions, just like with our people, we need to design optionality in and make sure that we stay as flexible and nimble as we can. The same is true for our technology environment. So that's why you see whether we're talking about what we offer to our customers or how we're modernizing our environment. We want to make sure we've got flexibility and optionality because what we do all know is we don't know what the future will bring. >> How did you guys get into tech? When did you fall in love with technology? >> How many years ago? >> No, like, like what was, was there something in your life that like appealed to you or? >> It's actually really funny story. My father was a mainframe programmer, so. >> Okay, So he was doing COBOL. >> I swear I wanted nothing to do with it. And then I found myself in those shoes. >> Yeah. Horrible. >> Yeah, horrible. >> It's in your DNA. >> I think so. I think so. >> Okay. So you just, when things started to get more modern. >> I just thought it was interesting. Like I'm almost 30 years in. Like I just thought it was really interesting. >> That's awesome. >> And I still think it is. >> How about you Betsy? >> I actually started on the business side, so I worked with IT through my 20 years at Dell. And when they started shifting to the product model, I was a business partner and I saw these incredible outcomes we were delivering to. And I'm like, oh, look at that cool technology. We were doing like optical character recognition to automate it. It was just, it was super cool. And you know, I'd known Jen for a long time and she said, well, why don't you come over to Dell Digital? And I did, it's been, it been a blast but I started as a business partner. >> But you, then you bring that understanding of the business the outcomes focused to the IT side. And that's probably why you guys make it sound like it's so simple to facilitate the IT business collaboration that so many businesses struggle with >> The magic is to make it simple. >> I agree. >> Yeah totally. >> It's not easy. >> No, it's not easy, but it's possible. >> Well, and that's what drives adoption. >> How have in our final minute or so here, how have the customers, we know what 15,000 customers globally, great customers on stage. We've had some customers on the show this week. How have they been influential in terms of the modernization of Dell Digital in especially the last two years, any interesting stories of customer influence you can share. >> In terms of our modernization efforts? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, I mean, look, we share all the time with customers on best practices in IT. And I would really say we have also moved an organization and solved many of the problems, the very problems our customers are trying to address through much of what we've developed within IT. And I think customers are very interested in learning from us and helping them on their own transformation journey. >> Excellent, ladies thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about really what's under the covers of Dell Digital, but it's really about people, process and technologies and collaboration. >> That's right. >> Great use case (indistinct). We appreciate your time. >> We appreciate it back. >> Thanks for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube's coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Stick around and be right back with our next guest. (gentle music)

>> theCube presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to Dell Technologies World 2022. You're watching theCube's coverage of this, three-day coverage wall to wall. My name is David Vellante John Furrier's here, Lisa Martin, David Nicholson. Talk of the town here is data. And one of the big announcements at the show is Snowflake and Dell partnering up, building ecosystems. Snowflake reaching into on-prem, allowing customers to actually access the Snowflake Data Cloud without moving the data or if they want to move the data they can. This is really one of the hotter announcements of the show. Martin Glynn is here, he's the Senior Director of Storage Product Management at Dell Technologies. And Clark Patterson, he's the Head of Product Marketing for Snowflake. Guys, welcome. >> Thanks for having us. >> So a lot of buzz around this and, you know, Clark, you and I have talked about the need to really extend your data vision. And this really is the first step ever you've taken on-prem. Explain the motivation for this from your customer's perspective. >> Yeah. I mean, if you step back and think about Snowflake's vision and our mission of mobilizing the world's data, it's all around trying to break down silos for however customers define what a silo is, right? So we've had a lot of success breaking down silos from a workload perspective where we've expanded the platform to be data warehousing, and data engineering, and machine learning, and data science, and all the kind of compute intensive ways that people work with us. We've also had a lot of success in our sharing capabilities and how we're breaking down silos of organizations, right? So I can share data more seamlessly within my team, I can do it across totally disparate organizations, and break down silos that way. So this partnership is really like the next leg of the stool, so to speak, where we're breaking down the silos of the the data and where the data lives ultimately, right? So up until this point, Cloud, all focus there, and now we have this opportunity with Dell to expand that and into on-premises world and people can bring all those data sets together. >> And the data target for this Martin, is Dell ECS, right? Your object store, and it's got S3 compatibility. Explain that. >> Yeah, we've actually got sort of two flavors. We'll start with ECS, which is our turnkey object storage solution. Object storage offers sort of the ultimate in flexibility, you know, potential performance, ease of use, right? Which is why it fits so well with Snowflake's mission for sort of unlocking, you know, the data within the data center. So we'll offer it to begin with ECS, and then we also recently announced our software defined object scale solution. So add even more flexibility there. >> Okay. And the clock, the way it works is I can now access non-native Snowflake data using what? Materialized views, external tables, how does that work? >> Some combination of all the above. So we've had in Snowflake a capability called external tables which we refer to, it goes hand in hand with this notion of external stages. Basically through the combination of those two capabilities, it's a metadata layer on data wherever it resides. So customers have actually used this in Snowflake for data lake data outside of Snowflake in the Cloud up until this point. So it's effectively an extension of that functionality into the Dell on-premises world, so that we can tap into those things. So we use the external stages to expose all the metadata about what's in the Dell environment. And then we build external tables in Snowflake so that data looks like it is in Snowflake. And then the experience for the analyst or whomever it is, is exactly as though that data lives in the Snowflake world. >> Okay. So for a while you've allowed non-native Snowflake data but it had to be in the Cloud. >> Correct. >> It was the first time it's on-prem, >> that's correct >> that's the innovation here. Okay. And if I want to bring it into the Cloud, can I? >> Yeah, the connection here will help in a migration sense as well, right? So that's the good thing is, it's really giving the user the choice. So we are integrating together as partners to make connection as seamless as possible. And then the end user will say like, look I've got data that needs to live on-premises, for whatever reasons, data sovereignty whatever they decide. And they can keep it there and still do the analytics in another place. But if there's a need and a desire to use this as an opportunity to migrate some of that data to Cloud, that connection between our two platforms will make that easier. >> Well, Michael always says, "Hey, it's customer choice, we're flexible." So you're cool with that? That's been the mission since we kind of came together, right? Is if our customers needed to stay in their data center, if that makes more sense from a cost perspective or, you know, a data gravity perspective, then they can do that. But we also want to help them unlock the value of that data. So if they need to copy it up to the public Cloud and take advantage of it, we're going to integrate directly with Snowflake to make that really easy to do. >> So there are engineering integrations here, obviously that's required. Can you describe what that looks like? Give us the details on when it's available. >> Sure. So it's going to be sort of second half this year that you'll see, we're demoing it this week, but the availability we second half this year. And fundamentally, it's the way Clark described it, that Snowflake will reach into our S3 interface using the standard S3 interface. We're qualifying between the way they expect that S3 interface to present the data and the way our platform works, just to ensure that there's smooth interaction between the two. So that's sort of the first simplest use case. And then the second example we gave where the customer can copy some of that data up to the public Cloud. We're basically copying between two S3 buckets and making sure that Snowflake's Snowpipe is aware that data's being made available and can easily ingest it. >> And then that just goes into a virtual warehouse- >> Exactly. >> and customer does to know or care. >> Yep Exactly. >> Yeah. >> The compute happens in Snowflake the way it does in any other manner. >> And I know you got to crawl, walk, run second half of this year, but I would imagine, okay, you're going to start with AWS, correct? And then eventually you go to other Clouds. I mean, that's going to take other technical integrations, I mean, obviously. So should we assume there's a roadmap here or is this a one and done? >> I would assume that, I mean, based on our multi-Cloud approach, that's kind of our approach at least, yeah. >> Kind of makes sense, right? I mean, that would seem to be a natural progression. My other thought was, okay, I've got operational systems. They might be transaction systems running on a on a PowerMax. >> Yeah. >> Is there a way to get the data into an object store and make that available, now that opens up even more workloads. I know you're not committing to doing that, but it just, conceptually, it seems like something a customer might want to do. >> Yeah. I, a hundred percent, agree. I mean, I think when we brought our team together we started with a blank slate. It was what's the best solution we can build. We landed on this sort of first step, but we got lots of feedback from a lot of our big joint customers about you know, this system over there, this potential integration over here, and whether it's, you know, PowerMax type systems or other file workloads with native Snowflake data types. You know, I think this is just the beginning, right? We have lots of potential here. >> And I don't think you've announced pricing, right? It's premature for that. But have you thought about, and how are you thinking about the pricing model? I mean, you're a consumption based pricing, is that kind of how this is going to work? Or is it a sort of a new pricing model or haven't you figured that out yet? >> I don't know if you've got any details on that, but from a Snowflake perspective, I would assume it's consistent with how our customers engage with us today. >> Yeah. >> And we'll offer both possibilities, right? So you can either continue with the standard, you know, sort of CapEx motion, maybe that's the most optimal for you from a cost perspective, or you can take advantage through our OpEx option, right? So you can do consumption on-prem also. >> Okay. So it could be a dual model, right? Depending on what the customer wants. If they're a Snowflake customer, obviously it's going to be consumption based, however, you guys price. What's happening, Clark, in in the market? Explain why Snowflake has so much momentum and, you know, traction in the marketplace. >> So like I spent a lot of time doing analysis on why we win and lose, core part of my role. And, you know, there's a couple of, there's really three things that come up consistently as to why people people are really excited about Snowflake platform. One is the most simplest thing of all. It feels like is just ease of use and it just works, right? And I think the way that this platform was built for the Cloud from the ground up all the way back 10 years ago, really a lot allows us to deliver that seamless experience of just like instant compute when you want it, it goes away, you know, only pay for what you use. Very few knobs to turn and things like that. And so people absolutely love that factor. The other is multi-Cloud. So, you know, there's definitely a lot of organizations out there that have a multi-Cloud strategy, and, you know, what that means to them can be highly variable, but regardless, they want to be able to interact across Clouds in some capacity. And of course we are a single platform, like literally one single interface, consistent across all the three Cloud providers that we work upon. And it gives them that flexibility to mix and match Cloud infrastructure under any Snowflake however they see fit. The last piece of it is sharing. And, you know, I think it's that ability as I kind of alluded to around like breaking down organizational silos, and allow people to be able to actually connect with each other in ways that you couldn't do before. Like, if you think about how you and I would've shared data before, I'd be like, "Hey, Dave, I'm going to unload this table into a spreadsheet and I'm going to send it over in email." And there's the whole host of issues that get introduced in that and world, now it's like instantly available. I have a lot of control over it, it's governed it's all these other things. And I can create kind of walled gardens, so to speak, of how far out I want that to go. It could be in a controlled environment of organizations that I want to collaborate with, or I can put it on our marketplace and expose it to the whole world, because I think there's a value in that. And if I choose I can monetize it, right? So those, you know, the ease of use aspect of it, absolutely, it's just a fantastic platform. The multi-Cloud aspect of it and our unique differentiation around sharing in our marketplace and monetization. >> Yeah, on the sharing front. I mean, it's now discoverable. Like if you send me an email, like what'd you call that? When did you send that email? And then the same time I can forward that to somebody else's not governed. >> Yeah. >> All right. So that just be creates a nightmare for the compliance. >> Right. Yeah. You think about how you revoke access in that situation. You just don't, right? Now I can just turn it off and you go in to run your query. >> Don't get access on that data anymore. Yeah. Okay. And then the other thing I wanted to ask you, Clark is Snowflake started really as analytics platform, simplifying data warehousing, you're moving into that world of data science, you know, the whole data lake movement, bringing those two worlds together. You know, I was talking to Ben Ward about this, maybe there's a semantic layer that helps us kind of talk between those two worlds, but you don't care, right? If it's in an object store, it can play in both of those worlds, right? >> That's right. >> Yeah, it's up to you to figure it out and the customer- >> Yeah. >> from a storage standpoint. Here it is, serve it up. >> And that's the thrust of this announcement, right? Is bringing together two great companies, the Dell platform, the Snowflake platform, and allowing organizations to bring that together. And they decide like it, as we all know, customers decide how they're going to build their architecture. And so this is just another way that we're helping them leverage the capabilities of our two great platforms. >> Does this push or pull or little bit of both? I mean, where'd this come from? Or customers saying, "Hey, it would be kind of cool if we could have this." Or is it more, "Hey, what do you guys think?" You know, where are you at with that? >> It was definitely both, right? I mean, so we certainly started with, you know, a high level idea that, you know, the technologies are complimentary, right? I mean, as Clark just described, and at the same time we had customers coming to us saying, "Hey, wait a minute, I'm doing this over here, and this over here, how can I make this easier?" So that was like I said, we started with a blank sheet and lots of long customer conversations and this is what resulted. So >> So what are the sequence of events to kind of roll this out? You said it's second half, you know, when do you start getting customers involved? Do you have your already, you know, to poke at this and what's that look like? >> Yeah, sure. I can weigh in there. So, absolutely. We've had a few of our big customers that have been involved sort of in the design already who understand how they want to use it. So I think our expectation is that now that the sort of demonstrations have been in place, we have some pre functionality, we're going to see some initial testing and usage, some beta type situations with our customers. And then second half, we'll ramp from there. >> It's got to be a huge overlap between Dell customers and Snowflake customers. I mean, it's hundred billion. You can't not bump into Dell somewhere. >> Exactly. Yeah, you know. >> So where do you guys want to see this relationship go, kind of how should we measure success? Maybe you could each give your perspectives of that. >> I mean, for us, I think it's really showing the value of the Snowflake platform in this new world where there's a whole new ecosystem of data that is accessible to us, right? So seeing those organizations that are saying like, "Look, I'm doing new things with on-premises data that I didn't think that I could do before", or, "I'm driving efficiency in how I do analytics, and data engineering, and data science, in ways that I couldn't do before," 'cause they were locked out of using a Snowflake-like technology, right? So I think for me, that's going to be that real excitement. I'm really curious to see how the collaboration and the sharing component comes into this, you know, where you can think of having an on-premises data strategy and a need, right? But you can really connect to Cloud native customers and partners and suppliers that live in the Snowflake ecosystem, and that wasn't possible before. And so that is very conceivable and very possible through this relationship. So seeing how those edges get created in in our world and how people start to collaborate across data, both in the Cloud and on-prem is going to be really exciting. >> I remember I asked Frank, it was kind of early in the pandemic. I asked him, come on, tell me about how you're managing things. And he was awesome. And I asked him to at the time, you know, "You're ever going to do, you know, bring this platform on-prem?" He's like unequivocal, "No way, that's never going to happen. We're not going to do it halfway house ware Cloud only." And I kept thinking, but there's got to be a way to expand that team. There's so much data out there, and so boom, now we see the answer . Martin, from your standpoint, what does success look like? >> I think it starts with our partnership, right? So I've been doing this a long time. Probably the first time I've worked so closely with a partner like Snowflake. Joint customer conversations, joint solutioning, making sure what we're building is going to be really, truly as useful as possible to them. And I think we're going to let them guide us as we go forward here, right? You mentioned, you know, systems or record or other potential platforms. We're going to let them tell us where exactly the most value will come from the integration between the two companies. >> Yeah. Follow data. I mean, remember in the old days a hardware company like Dell would go to an ISP like Snowflake and say, "Hey, we ran some benchmarks. Your software runs really fast on our hardware, can we work together?" And you go, "Yeah, of course. Yeah, no problem." But wow! What a different dynamic it is today. >> Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. >> All right guys. Hey, thanks so much for coming to theCube. It's great to see you. We'll see you at the Snowflake Summit in June. >> Snowflake Summit in a month and a half. >> Looking forward to that. All right. Thank you again. >> Thank you Dave. >> All right. Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante, wall to wall coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. We'll be right back. (gentle music)