>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas! It's theCUBE. Covering Edge 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Welcome back to IBM Edge everybody. This is theCUBE's fifth year covering IBM Edge. We were at the inaugural Edge five years ago in Orlando. Marc Linster is here and he's joined by Lenley Hensarling. Marc is the Senior Vice President of Product Development. And Lenley is the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Strategy at EDB, Enterprise Database. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Male Voice: Thank you. >> Okay, who wants to start. Enterprise Database, tell us about the company and what you guys are all about. >> Well the company has been around for little over 10 years now. And our job is really to give companies the ability to use Postgres as the platform for their digital business. So think about this, Postgres is a great open source database. Great capabilities for transactional management of data. But also multi-model data management. So think about standard SQL data but think also about document oriented, think about key-value pair. Think about GIS. So a great capability that is very, very robust. Has been around for quite a few years. And is really ready to allow companies to build on them for the new digital business but also to migrate off their existing commercial databases that are too expensive. >> What's the history of Postgres? Can you sort of educate me on that? >> Sort of the same roots back with System R, where DB2 came from, Oracle came from. So Berkeley, that's where the whole thing started out. Postgres is really the successor to Ingres. >> Dave: Umhmm. >> And then it turned into PostgreSQL. And it has been licensed under open source license, the Postgres license since 1996. And it's a very, very vibrant open source community that has been driving forward for many years now. And our view is the best available relational and multi-model database today. >> It's the mainspring of relational database management systems essentially >> Marc: Yeah. >> is what you're saying. And Lindley, from a product standpoint, how do you productize that, open source. >> Open source really, companies that have a distribution of open source for database and operating system, whatever the open source company most people are acquainted with, is Red Hat and Linux right. And so, we do the same thing that they do but for Postgres database. We take the distribution, we add testing, we add some other functionality around it so you can run Postgres responsively as Marc likes to say. So high availability, capability, fail-over management, replication, a backup solution. And instead of leaving it as an exercise for a customer, who wants to use open source, we test all this together. And then we validate it and we give them a complete package with documentation and services that they can access to help them be successful it. >> So if Michael Stonebraker were sitting right here, I say Michael, what do you think about Postgres? I'd say I had to start Vertica because we needed a new way. Yet, sort of PostgreSQL, is the killer remains the killer platform in the industry, doesn't it? >> Male Voice: Umhmm. Why is that? It's interesting when you talk to guys like Stonebraker, it's sort of dogma almost. But yet, customers, talk with their wallet. >> And it is, >> He did a very, very nice job of architecting it. It is a database that is extensible. The reason we add the first JSONB or document oriented implementation in the relational database space is because it was designed to make it easy to add new capabilities, new datatypes, new indexes, et cetera, into the same transactional model. That's why we have JSONB. That's why we have PostGIS. That's why we have key-value pair. So it was really well architected. And when you think about who else, not just Vertica has taken this engine >> Dave: Yeah. >> It is in Netezza, it is in a bunch of other. >> Dave: Master Data. >> Lenley: Greenplum. >> Greenplum yes. So it's a really robust architecture. Very, very nicely designed. It just does the job and it does it really well. Which is, what you want a database to do, right. It's not that exciting but it's really stable. It really works. The data is still there tomorrow. That's what really the requirements are. >> And to translate a little bit, Marc mentioned PostGIS, which is geo spacial capability for the Postgres database. And so we distribute that along with Postgres and test it so that you know it works. And he mentioned H-Store, so that's how you can actually store internet of things data really well into Postgres. And we talk about SQL, noSQL databases, so they're document databases. And the ability to have personalization at the same level you can in a document oriented database but in a structured SQL database are the kinds of things that have been added to Postgres over the years. Again, it's because of the basic architecture that Stonebraker put in place as an object relational database. >> It's so interesting to look at the history of database. Talk about Stonebraker, he's been on a number of times. It's just fascinating to listen to one of the fathers of this industry. But 10 years ago, database was like such a boring topic. And now it's exploded. Now you got Amazon going after Oracle. Oracle fighting the good fight. So many noSQL databases coming in. SQL becoming the killer big data app if you will. >> Male Voice: Umhmm. >> Why all of a sudden did database get so interesting? >> What happened was, application models changed. Led by Facebook, led by Amazon and Google. They said, let's refactor the applications and let's refactor the way we handle storage. >> Dave: Umhmm. >> And that led to the rise of the polyglot of databases is what a lot of people are saying. You have fit for purpose solutions and you may have three or four or five of them in your overall architecture. One thing about Postgres is, we're able to, because of the datatypes support that Marc mentioned, fit into that well. We don't try and do everything so if somebody says, I'm going to use Mongo for data capture, or I'm going to use Cassandra for capturing my internet of things data. We have what we call foreign data wrappers in the Postgres world. We call them just Enterprise DB Adapters but to Mongo, to Casandra, to Hadoop and can do bidirectional data there and just keep that data at rest over there in the other world. But be able to project relational schema onto it. We can push our data into those. We've got a great use case we've been talking about with a customer who had over a petabyte of data. And in the past what you do is, you'd go buy an expensive archiving solution and add that to it. Now, you just use Hadoop distributed file system. Push the data off there as it ages and have a foreign data wrapper that allows you to still query that data when it's out of your basic operational dataset. And move forward. >> Can I call that a connector or? >> Lenley: Yeah, a connector, that's not a bad idea. >> And it's interesting because If you guys remember Hadapt, probably. [Male Voices] Yeah. Yes. >> They came out, they were the connector killer. >> Male Voice: Umhmm. >> And it failed. >> Male Voice: Yeah. >> Seems like connectors are just fine. >> Male Voice: Yeah. >> And one of the really interesting things is, we call it data federation right. With philosophy here is, leave the data where it is. There are some data that should live in Hadoop or Cassandra. If I'm doing an e-commerce site with transactions and click streams, well, the click streams really should live in Hadoop. That the night natural place for them. The transactions should be in a transactional database. With the foreign data wrapper, I can run queries without moving the data, that will allow me to say, well, before you bought the brown teddy bear, which pages did you look at? >> Dave: Yeah. >> And I can do that integrated system and I can do a fit for purpose architecture. And that's what we think is really exciting. >> And that's fundamental to this new sort of programming or application models. >> Male Voice: That's right. >> The one that you were talking about is moving five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data. As opposed to moving data which we know has gravity and speed of light issues and so forth. >> Thank you for that little brief education. Appreciate it. So let's get into your business now, your relationship with IBM. What customers are doing. You mentioned IoT data so talk more about your business and your relationship with IBM and what you guys are doing for customers. >> There are a couple of things. We mentioned Oracle. And there are all the new databases. And then there's your, dare we say, legacy, proprietary databases as well. And people are looking to become more efficient in how they spend. We've done another thing with Postgres. We've added Oracle compatibility in terms of datatypes. So we support all the datatypes that Oracle does. And we support PL/SQL, they're sort of variant of stored procedure language. And implemented a lot of the packages that they have as well. So we can migrate workloads from Oracle over into an open source based solution. And give a lot cost effectiveness options to customers. >> Dave: Steal. This is a way that I can sort of have Oracle licensed database licensed and maintenance avoidance. >> Lenley: Yes. Yeah. >> Where possible, right. >> Where it makes sense. Where it makes sense. >> Obvious my quorum, I keep, but let's face it, the number one cost component of a TCO analysis of an Oracle customer is the database license and maintenance cost. >> Male Voice: That's right. >> It's not the people. One of the few examples I can think of where that's the case. There's always the people cost. [Male Voice] That's right, that's right. IT is very labor intensive. But for an Oracle customer, it's the database license. Cuz they license by Core. >> Male Voice: Yup. Cores are going through the roof. >> Male Voice: That's right. It's been great for Oracle's business. Although, wouldn't you agree, Oracle sees the writing on the wall that the SAS is really sort of the new control point for the industry. You see the acquisition of NetSuite and competition with Workday >> Male Voice: Yup. >> and the like. >> But the database remains the heart of the business. >> And really it's movement to the cloud, both private cloud and public cloud. And so we've been doing work there. We've had public cloud database as a service solution on Amazon for, what, [Marc] Four years. >> Four years, Marc. And have gained a lot experience with that. And were running that sort of running a retail, you can license the database and we'll provision it there. And so what we've done recently is change our perspective and said, let's put this into hands of customers. And let them standup their own database as a service. But also do it in a way that they can choose what workload should go to Amazon and what workload might go to their private cloud, built on open stack. And be able to arbitrage that if you will. Because they now have a way to provision the databases and make a choice about where to put it. >> So that's a bring your own license model that you just talked about? >> Bring your own license model or >> Are you in the Marketplace and, >> We're in the Marketplace in Amazon, where we can supply it that way. But customers have shown a preference for bring your own license. They want to make the best enterprise deal they can with a vendor like us or whomever else. And then have control over it. >> Amazon obviously wants you to be in the Marketplace. I won't even mention but I talked to some CEOs of database companies and they say, you know, we're in the Marketplace but we get in the Marketplace, next thing you know, Amazon is pushing them towards DynamoDB or you know. >> Male Voice: That's right, that's right. >> Now Amazon's come out with Aurora and Oracle migration and you know the intent to go after that business. Amazon's moving up the stack and you got to be careful. >> They are. But the thing about Amazon is that, they're a pure play in the cloud company. >> Dave: Yup. >> And all of the data shows that it's like a mix, it's going to be a hybrid cloud. Half the company in this world [Dave] Not Angie Jassie's data >> Eighty percent of the people in the cloud are going to be on-prem, still continuing their journey through virtualization. >> Dave: Yeah, that's right. >> Let along going to the cloud. But we want to be something that let's them put what they want in the public cloud and let's them manage on the private cloud in the same manner. So they can provision databases with a few clicks. Just like they do on Amazon. But do it in their data center. >> You doing that with Softlayer as well or not yet? >> Lenley: Not yet. >> Marc: Not yet. >> We've built this provisioning capability ourselves. And it came out of the work we did putting up databases on Amazon. >> So what are you guys doing here at Edge. Edge is kind of infrastructure show. Database is infrastructure. >> We're talking about our work with Power. >> Power is a big partner for us. Power is I think very, very interesting for our database customers. Because of the much higher clock speeds and the capabilities that the Power processor has. When I'm looking at Power, I get more oomph out of a single core which really for a database customer is very, very interesting. Because all databases are licensed by Core. >> Dave: Right. >> So it's a much better deal for the customer. And specifically for Postgres, Postgres scales very well with higher clock speeds. So by having, let's say, by growing performance, not by adding more cores but by making the individual cores faster, that plays very, very well to the Postgres capabilities. >> Okay, so you are a Power partner, part of that ecosystem that IBM is appealing to to grow the OpenPOWER base. And what kind of workloads are you seeing your customers demand and where you're having success? >> Across the board. Database is mostly infrastructure capabilities so there's a lot of interest that we're seeing that, for all kinds of applications really. >> What's the typical Power customer look like these days? You got some Oracle, you got some DB2, you guys are running on there, what's the mix? Paint the picture for us. >> I think the typical Power customer is the typical enterprise company. And, [Dave] Little bit of everything. >> It's a little bit of everything. But one of the key things is that, people are also looking at what they've got and the skills they have in place. You were talking about people cost right. [Dave] Yeah. >> And their understanding of management. Their understanding of how to manage the relationship with the vendor even. And then saying, look, how can I move into the new world of digital transformation and start my own private cloud options and things like that in an efficient way. That makes efficient use of hardware I have in place and has a growth curve and new hardware that's coming out that fits my workloads. >> Dave: Umhmm. >> And the profiles that Marc was talking about. >> And also the resources. Which is very interesting when we look at these new digital applications with Postgres. Because you can do so much in Postgres from geographic information systems to document oriented to key-value. But you can do that with your existing developers through existing DBAs. They don't need to go to school to learn a new database. And that's also a very, very, interesting capability. So you can use your existing team to do new stuff. [Male Voice] Yup. >> What's happening in IoT, what problems are you solving there and where's the limit? >> Sensor data collection. >> Lenley: Yeah. Real interesting because sensor data tends to come in all different forms. We have customer who collects temperature sensor, temperature data. But the sensors are all sending different data packets. So because we can do document oriented or key-value, we can easily accommodate that. In the old days with the relational model, I had to do all kinds of tricks to sort of stuff all that into a relational table. My table would be almost empty at the end because I'd have to add columns for every vendor et cetera. Here, now I can use put all that into the same format and provide it for analysis. So that's a real interesting capability. >> And it's interesting too because we've got really strong geo spacial data support. And the intersection of that, with IoT is a big deal. They track your iPhone, they know where we are. They know what's going on. That's sensor data. They know which lights in which building, which you know, louvers that are controlling HVAC are malfunctioning or not. They want to know specifically where it is, not just what the sensor is. And some of that stuff moves around. And it gets replaced in a new place in the building and such. So we're well setup to handle those types of workloads. >> What's interesting, when IBM bought the weather company, [Lenley] Yeah. >> And they thought okay great, they're getting all these data scientists and weather data, that's cool. They can monetize that but it's an IoT play, isn't it? [Male Voice] Right. Right. >> Talk about sensor. >> It's reference data. It's reference data for other company specific IoT plays. To have a broader set of sensors out there in their region and understand what's happening with weather and things. And then play that against what their experience is, managing new building or manufacturing processes, everything. >> So what's the engagement model. I'm a customer, I want to do business with you. How do I do it, how do I engage? >> Well, a lot of our businesses direct with us. Others through partners. And then a lot of customers come to us because they want to get off legacy systems. But really, what they do is, once they understand the database and the capabilities, they say, okay yeah, you can do the Oracle stuff. But what I'm really going to do with you is my new things. Because that's really exciting and it helps me kind of put a lid on the commercial license growth. So maybe I'm not going to get off it, but I will stop growing it. So I will start doing my new stuff on Postgres. Whenever I modernize something, Postgres is going to be my database of choice. If I already open up an application with its whole stack, this is one of the changes I'm going to make. And then the database as service, is very, very interesting. So these four entry vectors and what happens is, quite a few customers after a short time when they started with project or applications, they end up making Postgres as one of their database standards. Not the only one. But they make it one of the database standards so it gets into the catalog and every new project then has to consider Postgres. >> It's interesting, there's a space created as Microsoft sort of put all their wood behind the era of becoming a competitor to high end Oracle. And with this last release, they probably are on there, arguable. But they've also raised their prices too. And they've made the solution more complex. So there's this space that was vacated for like a ton of workloads and Postgres fits in there just about perfectly. We see enterprise after enterprise come to us with a sheet that says, now we're going to get some of this noSQL stuff. We're going to keep Oracle or DB2 over here for these really high end things. Run my financials, run my sales order processing, my manufacturing. And then we got this space in here. We got a slot for relational database and we want to go open source. Because of the cost savings. Because of other factors. It's ability to grow and not be bound to, hey, what if the vendor decides they're going to go for a new cooler thing and make me upgrade. >> Dave: Right. >> And I want to stay there and know that there's still being an investment made. And so there's a vibrant community around it. And it just fits that slot perfectly. >> You got to pay for that digital transformation and all these IoT initiates. You can't just keep pouring [Male Voice] Somehow. >> down to database licenses. [Male Voice] That's right. >> Tell me, we have to leave it there. >> Thanks very much >> Male Voice: Alright. >> for coming to theCUBE. >> Thanks so much. >> We appreciate the time. You welcome. [Male Voice] Enjoy it. Keep it right there buddy. We'll be right back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from IBM Edge 2016, be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Postgres vision 2021 brought to you by EDB. >> Welcome back to Postgres Vision 21. My name is Dave Vellante. We're thrilled to welcome Carl Olofsen to theCUBE. Carl is a research vice president at IDC focused on data management. The long-time database analyst is the technologist and market observer. Carl, good to see you again. >> Thanks Dave. Glad to be here. >> All right. Let's let's get into it. Let's talk about, let's go right to the, to the source the open source database space. You know, how, what changes have you seen over the last couple of years in that marketplace? >> Well, this is a dynamic area and it's continuing to evolve. When we first saw the initial open source products like mysQl and PostgreSQL on the early days they were very limited in terms of functionality. They were espoused largely by sort of true believers. You know, people who said everything should be open source. And we saw that mainly they were being used for what I would call rather prosaic database applications. But as time has gone by they both of these products improve. Now there's one key difference, of course, which is a mySQL is company owned open source. So the IP belongs to Oracle corporation. Whereas PostgreSQL is community open source, which means that the IP belongs to the PostgreSQL community. And that can have a big difference in terms of things like licensing and so forth, which really matters now that we're coming into the cloud space because as open-source products moving into the cloud space the revenue model is based on subscriptions. And of course they are always based on subscription to open source cause you don't charge for the license. So what you charge for its support, but in the cloud what you can do is you can set up a database service, excuse me, a database service and then you charge for that service. And if it's open source or it's not open source that actually doesn't matter to the user. If you see what that I mean because they still are paying a subscription fee for a service and they get the service. The main difference between the two types is that if you're a commercial provider of PostgreSQL like enterprise DB, you don't have control over where it goes and you don't have control over the IP and how people use it in different ways. Whereas Oracle owns mySQL so they have a lot more control and they can do things to it on their own. They don't have to consult the community. Now there's also, non-relational open source including MongoDB. And as you may be aware, MongoDB has changed their license. So that it's not possible for third party to offer Mongo DB as a complete managed database service without paying a license fee to MongoDB for that. And that's because they own the IP too. And we're going to see a lot more of this sort of thing. I have conversations with open source all the time and they are getting a little concerned that it has become possible for somebody to simply take their technology, make a lot of money off that. And no money goes back to the community. No money goes back to the IRS. It's a company it's just stays with the supplier. So I think, you know it'll be interesting to see how all this is over time. >> So you're suggesting that the Postgres model then is, is I guess I'll use the word cleaner. And so that feels like it's a it's a benefit or is it a two-edged sword kind of thing? I mean, you were saying before, you know a company controls the IP so they could do things without having to go to the community. So maybe they can do things faster. But at the other hand like you said, you get handcuffed. You think you're going to be able to get a, you know a managed service, but then all of a sudden you're not and the rules change midstream saying it, am I correct? That Postgres, the model is cleaner for the customer? >> Well, you know, I mean, a lot of my friends who are in the open source community don't even consider company owned open source to be true open source because the IP is controlled by a company, not by a community. >> Dave: Right >> So from that perspective certainly Postgres SQL is considered, I don't know if you want to use the word cleaner or more pure or something along those lines, but also because of that the nature of community open source it can be used in many different ways. And so we see Postgres popping up all over the place sometimes partially and sometimes altogether, in other words, a service, a cloud service, we'll take a piece of Postgres and stick it on top of their own technology and offer it. And the reason they do that is they know there are a lot of developers out there who already know how to code for Postgres. So they are immediately first-class users of the service that they're offering. >> So, talk a little bit more about what you're seeing. You just mentioned a lot of different use cases. That's interesting. I didn't realize that was, that was happening. The, what are you seeing in terms of adoption in let's say the last 18, 24 months specific to Postgres? >> Yeah, we're seeing a fair amount of adoption in especially in the middle market. And of course there is rapid adoption in the tech sector. Now, why would that be? Well it's because they have armies of technologists. Who know how to program this stuff. You know, when you, you know, a lot of them will use PostgreSQL without a contract without a support contract, they'll just support themselves. And they can do that because they have the technicians who are capable of doing it. Most regular businesses can't do that. They don't have the staff so they need that support contract. And so that's where a company like enterpriseDB comes. I mentioned them only because they're the leading supplier Postgres to all their other suppliers. >> I was talking to Josh Burgers, red hat and he was, you know, he had just come off a Cubacon and he was explaining kind of what's happening in that community. Big focus of course on security and the whole, you know, so-called shift left. We were having a good discussion about, you know when does it make sense to use, you know Postgres in a container environment should you use Postgres and Kubernetes and he sort of suggested that things have rapidly evolved. There's still, you know, considerations but what are you seeing in terms of the adoption of microservices architectures containers, generally Kubernetes how has that affected the use of things like postsgres? >> So those are all different things or need to be kind of custody. >> Pick your favorite. >> They're related then. So microservices, the microservice concept is that you take an application break it up into little pieces and each one becomes a microservice that's invoked through an API. And then you have this whole structure API system that you use to drive the application and they run. They typically, they run in containers usually Kubernetes govern containers but the reason you do this and this is basically a efficiency because especially in the cloud, you want only to pay for what you use. So when you're running a microservice based application. Applications have lots of little pieces when something needs to be done, microservice fires up it does the thing that needs to be done. It goes away. You only pay for that fraction of a second that the microservice is running. Whereas in a conventional application you load this big heavyweight application. It does stop. It sets some weights with things and does more stuff and sits and waits for things. And you pay for compute for that entire period. So it's much more cost effective to use a microservices application. The thing is that microservice, the concept of microservices is based on the idea that the code is stateless but database code isn't stateless cause it has its attraction to the database which is the ultimate kind of like stateful environment right? So it's a tricky business. Most database technologies that are claimed to be container-based actually run in containers the way they run in servers. In other words, they're not microservice-based they do run in containers. And the reason they're doing that is for portability so that you can deploy them anywhere and you can move them around. But you know deploying a microservice based database is, well, it's it's a big technical project. I mean, that is hard to do. >> Right and so talk about, I mean again we're talking to Josh it was clear that that Kubernetes has evolved, you know quite rapidly at the same time there were cautions. In other words, he would say I think suggested things like, you know, there were known at one point, there were known, you know flaws and known bugs that ship the code that's been been remediated or moderated in terms of that practice but still there's there's considerations just in terms of the frequency of updates. I think he gave the example of when was the last time you know, JVM got, you know, overhauled. And so what kind of considerations should customers think about when considering them, they want the Kubernetes they want the flexibility and the agility but at the same time, if they're going to put it production, they've got to be careful, right? >> Yeah, I think you need to make sure you're using you're using functions that are well-established, you know you wouldn't want to put something into production that's new. They say, oh, here's a new, here's a new operation. Let's try that. And then, you know, you get in trouble. So you want to deal conservative that way you know, Kubernetes is open-source so and the updates and the testing and all that follows a rather slow formal process, you know from the time that the submission comes in to the time that it goes out, whereas you mentioned JVMs JV, but it was owned by Oracle. And so JVMs are managed like products. Now there's a whole sort of legal thing I don't want to get into it as to whether it's legal. They claim it's not libero third parties to build JVMs without paying a licensing. I don't want to talk about that, but it's based on a very state that has a very stable base, you know whereas this area of Kubernetes and govern containers is still rapidly evolving but this is like any technology, right? I mean, when you, if you're going to commit your enterprise to functions that run on an emerging technology then you are accepting some risk. You know, that there's no question about it. >> So we talked about the cloud earlier and the whole trend toward managed services. I mean, how does that specifically apply to Postgres? You can kind of imagine like a sidecar, a little bit of Postgres mixed in with, you know, other services. So what do you see and what do you, what's your telescope say in terms of the the Postgres adoption cloud? How do you see that progressing? >> I think there's a lot of potential. There's a lot of potential there. I think we are nowhere near the option that it should be able to achieve. I say that because for one thing, even though we analyze the future at IDC, that doesn't mean we actually know the future. So I can't say what its adoption will be but I can say that there's a lot of potential there. There's a tremendous number of Postgres developers out there. So there's a huge potential for adoption. And especially in cloud adoption, the main thing that would help that is independent. And I know that enterpriseDB has one independent a managed cloud service. So I think they do. >> Yeah I think so. >> But you know, why do I say that? I say that because alternatives these days there are some small companies that maybe they'll survive and maybe they won't, but that, you know, do you want to get involved with them or the cloud platform providers, but if you use their Postgres you're locked into that cloud platform. You know, if you use Amazon, go press on RDS, right? You're not, you become quickly locked in because you're starting using all the AWS tools that surround it to build and manage your application. And then you can't move. If you see what I mean. >> Dave: Yeah . >> They have have an RDS labor Aurora, and this is actually one of the things that it's really just a thin layer of Postgres interaction code underneath Aurora is their own product. so that's an even deeper level of commitment. >> So what has to happen for, so obviously cloud, you know, big trend. So the Postgres community then adopts the code base for the cloud. Obviously EDB has, you know hundreds of developers contributing to that, but so what does that mean to be able to run in the cloud? Is that making it cloud native? Is that extensions? Is it, you know, what technically has to occur and what has occurred and how mature is it? >> Well, so smaller user organizations are able to migrate fairly quickly cloud because most of their applications are you know, commercially purchased. They're like factories applications. When they move to the cloud, they get the SAS one and often the SAS equivalent runs on Postgres. So that's just fine. Larger enterprises are a real mess. If you've ever been in a large enterprise data center you know what I'm talking about? It's just, there's just servers and storage everywhere. There's, all these applications, databases connections. They are not moving to the cloud anytime soon. But what they are doing is setting up things like private cloud environments and applying in there. And this is a place where if you're thinking about moving to something like a Postgres you know most of these enterprises use the big commercial databases. Oracle SQLserver DB two and so forth. If you're thinking of moving from that to a a PostgreSQL development say, then the smart thing to do would be first to do all your work in the private cloud where you'd have complete control over the environment. It also makes sense still to have a commercial support contract from a vendor that you trust, because I've said this again, unless you are, you know, Cisco or somebody, you know, some super tech company that's got all the technicians you need to do the work. You really don't want to take on that level of risk. If you see that, I mean. Another advantage to working with a supplier, a support supplier, especially if you have a close, intimate relationship is they will speed your security patches on a regular basis which is really important these days, because data security is as you know, a growing concern all over the place. >> So let's stay on the skillsets for a minute. Where do you see the gaps within enterprises? What kind of expertise you mentioned, you know support contracts, what are the types of things that a customer should look for in terms of the the expertise to apply to supporting Postgres databases? >> Well, obviously you want them to do the basics that any software company does, right? You want them to provide you with regular updates and binary form that you can load and, you know test and run. You want to have the you know, 24 hour hotline you know, telephone support, all that kind of thing. I think it's also important to have a solid ability on the part of the vendor that you're working with to provide you with advice and counseling as you, especially, if you're migrating from another technology, help your people convert from what they were using to what they're going to be using. So those are all aspects that I would look for in a vendor for supporting a product like PostgreSQL. >> When you think about the migration to the cloud, you know of course Amazon talks a lot about cloud migration. They have a lot of tooling associated with that. >> Carl: Right. >> But when you step back and look at it it did to a point earlier, I mean a lot of the hardcore mission, critical stuff isn't going to move it, hasn't moved, but a lot of the fat middle, you know, is, are good candidates for it. >> Carl: Right. >> How do you think about that? And how do you look at that? I mean, obviously Oracle is trying to shove everything into OCI and they're, you know, they're all in because they realized that could make a lot of money doing that. But what do you, what are the sort of parameters that we should think about when considering that kind of migration, moving a legacy database into the cloud? >> Well, it has to be done piecemeal. You're not going to be able to do it all at once. You know, if you have hundreds of applications, you're not just you don't even want to, you know, it's a good time to take you into it. And what you've got running, ask yourself are these applications really serving the business interests today and will they in the future or is this a good time to maybe consider something else? Even if you have a packaged application, there might be one that is more aligned with your future goals. So it's important to do that. Look at your data integration, try to simplify it. You know, most data integration that most companies has done piecemeal project by project. They don't reference each other. So you have this chaos of ETL jobs and transformation rules and things like that that are just, you know, even difficult to manage. Now, just forget about any kind of migration or transformation considerations, just trying to run it now is becoming increasingly difficult. You know, maybe you want to change your strategy for doing data integration. Maybe you want to consolidate you want to put more data in one database. I'm not an advocate of the idea that you can put all application data in one database by the way, we know from bitter experience that doesn't work, but we can be rational about the kinds of databases that we use and how they sit together. >> Well, I mean, you've been following this for a long time and you saw the sort of rise and fall of the big data meme. And you know, this idea that you can shove everything into a single place, have a single version of the truth. It's like, it's just never seemed to happen. >> Carl: Right. >> So, you know, Postgres has been around a long time. It's evolved. I mean, I remember when, you know, VMware's ascendancy and people are like, okay, should I, you know should I virtualize my Postgres database is your, you know similar conversations that we were having earlier about Kubernetes. You've seen the move to the cloud. We're going to have this conversation about the edge at some point in time. So what's your outlook for Postgres, the Postgres community and, you know database market overall? >> Well, I really think the future for database growth is in the cloud. That's what all the data we're looking at and the case that's what our recent surveys indicate. As I said before, the rate of change depends on the size of the enterprise. Smaller advices are moving rapidly, large enterprises much more slowly and cautiously for the very simple reason that it's a very complex proposition. And also in some cases, they're wondering if they can move certain data or will they be violating your some sort of regulatory constraint or contractual issue. So they need to deal with those things too. That's why the private cloud is the perfect place to get started and get technology all lined up storing your data center is still under your control no legal issues there, but you can start, you know converting your applications to micro-service architected applications running in containers. You can start replacing your database servers with ones that can run in a container environment and maybe in the future, maybe hope that in the future, some of those will actually also be able to run as microservices. I don't think it's impossible but it just involves programming the database server in a very different way than we've done in the past. But you do those things. You can do those things under your own control over time in your own dataset. And then you reach a point where you want to take the elements of your application environment and say, what pieces of this, can I move to the cloud without creating disruption and issues regarding things like data egress and latency from cloud to data center and that kind of thing. And prepare for that. And then you're doing the step wise and then you start converting in a stepwise manner. I think ultimately it just makes so much sense to be in the cloud that the cloud vendors have economies of scale. They can deploy large numbers of servers and storage systems to satisfy the needs of large numbers of customers and create, you know great considerable savings. Some of which of course becomes their profit which is what's due to them. And some of that comes back to the users. So that's what I expect. We're going to see. And oh gosh, I would say that starting from about three years from now the larger enterprises start making their move and then you'll really start to see changes in the numbers in terms of cloud and cloud revenue. >> Great stuff, Carl, thank you for that. So any cool research you're working on lately, how you're spending your your work time, anything you want to plug? >> Well, working a lot on just as these questions, you know cloud migration is a hot topic, another which is really sort of off the subject. And what we've been talking about is graph database which I've been doing a fair amount of research into. I think that's going to be really important in the coming years and really, you know working with my colleagues in a project called the future of intelligence which looks at all the different related elements not just database, data integration but artificial intelligence, data communications and so on and so forth and how they come together to create a more intelligent enterprise. And that's a major initiative that I see. It's one of the, we call the future of initiatives. >> Great, Carls, thanks so much for coming back to theCUBE. It's great to have you, man. I appreciate it. >> Well, I enjoyed it. Now I have to do it again sometime. >> All right you got it. All right thank you everybody for watching theCUBEs. Continuous coverage of Postgres vision 21. This is Dave Vellante keep it right there. (upbeat music)

[Voiceover] - Live from Washington D.C. It's theCUBE covering dot next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the district everybody. This is Nutanix NEXTconf, hashtag NEXTconf. And this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Stephanie Chiras is here. She's the Vice President of IBM Power Systems Offering Management, and she's joined by Raja Mukhopadhyay who is the VP of Product Management at Nutanix. Great to see you guys again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah thank you. Thanks for having us. >> So Stephanie, you're welcome, so Stephanie I'm excited about you guys getting into this whole hyper converged space. But I'm also excited about the cognitive systems group. It's kind of a new play on power. Give us the update on what's going on with you guys. >> Yeah so we've been through some interesting changes here. IBM Power Systems, while we still maintain that branding around our architecture, from a division standpoint we're now IBM Cognitive Systems. We've been through a change in leadership. We have now Senior Vice President Bob Picciano leading IBM Cognitive Systems, which is foundationally built upon the technology that's comes from Power Systems. So our portfolio remains IBM Power Systems, but really what it means is we've set our sights on how to take our technology into really those cognitive workloads. It's a focus on clients going to the cognitive era and driving their business into the cognitive era. It's changed everything we do from how we deliver and pull together our offerings. We have offerings like Power AI, which is an offering built upon a differentiated accelerated product with Power technology inside. It has NVIDIA GPU's, it has NVLink capability, and we have all the optimized frameworks. So you have Caffe, Torch, TensorFlow, Chainer, Theano. All of those are optimized for the server, downloadable right in a binary. So it's really about how do we bring ease of use for cognitive workloads and allow clients to work in machine learning and deep learning. >> So Raja, again, part of the reason I'm so excited is IBM has a $15 billion analytics business. You guys talk, you guys talked to the analysts this morning about one of the next waves of workloads is this sort of data oriented, AI, machine learning workloads. IBM obviously has a lot of experience in that space. How did this relationship come together, and let's talk about what it brings to customers. >> It was all like customer driven, right? So all our customers they told us that, look Nutanix we have used your software to bring really unprecedented levels of like agility and simplicity to our data center infrastructure. But, you know, they run at certain sets of workloads on, sort of, non IBM platforms. But a lot of mission critical applications, a lot of the, you know, the cognitive applications. They want to leverage IBM for that, and they said, look can we get the same Nutanix one click simplicity all across my data center. And that is a promise that we see, can we bring all of the AHV goodness that abstracts the underlying platform no matter whether you're running on x86, or your cognitive applications, or your mission critical applications on IBM power. You know, it's a fantastic thing for a joint customer. >> So Stephanie come on, couldn't you reach somewhere into the IBM portfolio and pull out a hyper converged, you know, solution? Why Nutanix? >> Clients love it. Look what the hyper converged market is doing. It's growing at incredible rates, and clients love Nutanix, right? We see incredible repurchases around Nutanix. Clients buy three, next they buy 10. Those repurchase is a real sign that clients like the experience. Now you can take that experience, and under the same simplicity and elegance right of the Prism platform for clients. You can pull in and choose the infrastructure that's best for your workload. So I look at a single Prism experience, if I'm running a database, I can pull that onto a Power based offering. If I'm running a BDI I can pull that onto an alternative. But I can now with the simplicity of action under Prism, right for clients who love that look and feel, pick the best infrastructure for the workloads you're running, simply. That's the beauty of it. >> Raja, you know, Nutanix is spread beyond the initial platform that you had. You have Supermicro inside, you've got a few OEMs. This one was a little different. Can you bring us inside a little bit? You know, what kind of engineering work had to happen here? And then I want to understand from a workload perspective, it used to be, okay what kind of general purpose? What do you want on Power, and what should you say isn't for power? >> Yeah, yeah, it's actually I think a power to, you know it speaks to the, you know, the power of our engineering teams that the level of abstraction that they were able to sort of imbue into our software. The transition from supporting x86 platforms to making the leap onto Power, it has not been a significant lift from an engineering standpoint. So because the right abstractions were put in from the get go. You know, literally within a matter of mere months, something like six to eight months, we were able to have our software put it onto the IBM power platform. And that is kind of the promise that our customers saw that look, for the first time as they are going through a re-platforming of their data center. They see the power in Nutanix as software to abstract all these different platforms. Now in terms of the applications that, you know, they are hoping to run. I think, you know, we're at the cusp of a big transition. If you look at enterprise applications, you could have framed them as systems of record, and systems of engagement. If you look forward the next 10 years, we'll see this big shift, and this new class of applications around systems of intelligence. And that is what a lot-- >> David: Say that again, systems of-- >> Systems of intelligence, right? And that is where a lot of like IBM Power platform, and the things that the Power architecture provides. You know, things around better GPU capabilities. It's going to drive those applications. So our customers are thinking of running both the classical mission critical applications that IBM is known for, but as well as the more sort of forward leaning cognitive and data analytics driven applications. >> So Stephanie, on one hand I look at this just as an extension of what IBM's done for years with Linux. But why is it more, what's it going to accelerate from your customers and what applications that they want to deploy? >> So first, one of the additional reasons Nutanix was key to us is they support the Acropolis platform, which is KVM based. Very much supports our focus on being open around our playing in the Linux space, playing in the KVM space, supporting open. So now as you've seen, throughout since we launched POWER8 back in early 2014 we went Little Endian. We've been very focused on getting a strategic set of ISV's ported to the platform. Right, Hortonworks, MongoDB, EnterpriseDB. Now it's about being able to take the value propositions that we have and, you know, we're pretty bullish on our value propositions. We have a two x price performance guarantee on MongoDB that runs better on Power than it runs on the alternative competition. So we're pretty bullish. Now for clients who have taken a stance that their data center will be a hyper converged data center because they like the simplicity of it. Now they can pull in that value in a seamless way. To me it's really all about compatibility. Pick the best architecture, and all compatible within your data center. >> So you talked about, six to eight months you were able to do the integration. Was that Open Power that allowed you to do that, was it Little Endian, you know, advancements? >> I think it was a combination of both, right? We have done a lot from our Linux side to be compatible within the broad Linux ecosystem particularly around KVM. That was critical for this integration into Acropolis. So we've done a lot from the bottoms up to be, you know, Linux is Linux is Linux. And just as Raja said, right, they've done a lot in their platform to be able to abstract from the underlying and provide a seamless experience that, you know, I think you guys used the term invisible infrastructure, right? The experience to the client is simple, right? And in a simple way, pick the best, right for the workload I run. >> You talked about systems of intelligence. Bob Picciano a lot of times would talk about the insight economy. And so we're, you're right we have the systems of records, systems of engagement. Systems of intelligence, let's talk about those workloads a little bit. I infer from that, that you're essentially basically affecting outcomes, while the transaction is occurring. Maybe it's bringing transactions in analytics together. And doing so in a fashion that maybe humans aren't as involved. Maybe they're not involved at all. What do you mean by systems of intelligence, and how do your joint solutions address those? >> Yeah so, you know, one way to look at it is, I mean, so far if you look at how, sort of decisions are made and insights are gathered. It's we look at data, and between a combination of mostly, you know we try to get structured data, and then we try to draw inferences from it. And mostly it's human beings drawing the inferences. If you look at the promise of technologies like machine learning and deep learning. It is precisely that you can throw unstructured data where no patterns are obvious, and software will find patterns there in. And what we mean by systems of intelligence is imagine you're going through your business, and literally hundreds of terabytes of your transactional data is flowing through a system. The software will be able to come up with insights that would be very hard for human beings to otherwise kind of, you know infer, right? So that's one dimension, and it speaks to kind of the fact that there needs to be a more real time aspect to that sort of system. >> Is part of your strategy to drive specific solutions, I mean integrating certain IBM software on Power, or are you sort of stepping back and say, okay customers do whatever you want. Maybe you can talk about that. >> No we're very keen to take this up to a solution value level, right? We have architected our ISV strategy. We have architected our software strategy for this space, right? It is all around the cognitive workloads that we're focused on. But it's about not just being a platform and an infrastructure platform, it's about being able to bring that solution level above and target it. So when a client runs that workload they know this is the infrastructure they should put it on. >> What's the impact on the go to market then for that offering? >> So from a solutions level or when the-- >> Just how you know it's more complicated than the traditional, okay here is your platform for infrastructure. You know, what channel, maybe it's a question for Raja, but yeah. >> Yeah sure, so clearly, you know, the product will be sold by, you know, the community of Nutanix's channel partners as well as IBM's channels partners, right? So, and, you know, we'll both make the appropriate investments to make sure that the, you know, the daughter channel community is enabled around how they essentially talk about the value proposition of the solution in front of our joint customers. >> Alright we have to leave there, Stephanie, Raja, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. It's great to see you guys. >> Raja: Thank you. >> Stephanie: Great to see you both, thank you. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest we're live from D.C. Nutanix dot next, be right back. (electronic music)