>>Welcome everyone. I'm Dave Nicholson with the cube. This is a special Q conversation. That is part of the AWS startup showcase. Season two. Got a very interesting conversation on deck with Steve Francis who joins us from Instaclustr. Steve is the chief revenue officer and executive vice president for go-to-market operations for Insta cluster. Steve, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you, Dave. Good to be here. >>It looks like you're on a, uh, you're you're you're coming to us from an exotic locale. Or do you just like to have a nautical theme in your office? >>No, I'm actually on my boat. I have lots of kids at home and, uh, it can be very noisy. So, uh, we call this our apartment in the city and sometimes when we need a quiet place, this, this does nicely >>Well, fantastic. Well, let's, let's talk about Instaclustr. Um, first give us, give us a primmer on Instaclustr and, uh, and what you guys do. And then let's double click on that and go into some of the details. >>Sure. So in sip cluster, we offer a SAS platform for data layer, open source technologies. And what those technologies have in common is they scale massively. We re curate technologies that are capable of massive scale. So people use them to solve big problems typically. And so in addition to SAS offerings for those open source projects where people can provision themselves clusters in minutes, um, we also offer support for all of the technologies that we offer on our SAS platform. We offer our customer support contracts as well. And then we have a consulting team, a global consulting team who are expert in all of those open source projects that can help with implementations that can help with design health checks, uh, you name it. So most of what they do is kind of short term expert engagements, but we've also done longer-term projects with them as well. >>So your business model is to be a SAS provider as opposed to an alternative, which would be to, uh, provide what's referred to as, uh, open core software. Is that, is that right? >>Yeah, that's exactly right. So you, so when, when our customers have an interest in using community open source, we're the right partner for them. And so, you know, really what that means is if they, whether it's our SAS platform, if, if they want the flexibility to say, we want to take that workload off of your SAS platform, maybe at some point operated ourselves because we're not throwing a bunch of PROPRICER proprietary stuff in there. They have the flexibility to do that. So they always have an exit ramp without being locked in and with our support customers, of course, it's very easy. What we support is both the open source project. And if there's a gap in that open source project, what we'll do is rather than create a proprietary piece of software to close the gap, we'll source something from the community and we'll support that. Or if it, or if something does not exist in the community, in many cases, we'll write it ourselves and open source it and then, and then support it. >>Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, supposedly Henry Ford made a comment once that if you ask customers what they want, they'll tell you they want a faster horse, uh, but he was inventing the automobile and some people have, have likened open core to sort of the faster mechanical horse version of open source where you're essentially substituting an old school legacy vendor for a new school vendor. That's wrapping their own proprietary stuff around a delicious core of open source, but it sort of diminishes the value proposition of open source. It sounds like that's, that's the philosophy that you have adopted at this point. That's >>I love that story. I haven't heard that before. One that I like, uh, you know, matching metaphor for metaphor, uh, is, uh, the, um, is the Luddites, right? You know, the Luddites didn't want to lose their weaving jobs. And so they would smash weeding looms and, um, you know, to, to protect their reading jobs. And I think it's the same thing with the open core model they're protecting, uh, you know, they're creating fear, uncertainty and doubt about open, open sourcing. Oh, it isn't secure. And, you know, the, those, those arguments have been used for 15 years or 20 years. And, you know, maybe 15 years ago there were some truth to it. But when you look at who is using open source community open source now for huge projects, you know, if you just do a search for Apache coffee users and go to the Apache Apache website, you know, it's kind of the who's who in big business, and these are people using community open source. And so, um, a lot of the fear and uncertainty and doubt is still used, and it's just, you know, it's just kind of hanging on to a business model that isn't really it's for the benefit of the, of the vendor and not the benefit of the customer. >>Well, so I can imagine being a customer and realizing several years into an open core journey that I basically painted myself into a similar corner that I was in before. Um, and so I can see where that, you know, that can be something that is a realization that, that creeps up over time from a customer perspective, but from your business model perspective, um, if I'm understanding correctly, your, when you scale, you're scaling the ability to, um, take over operations for our customer, uh, that, that some level, I'm sure you've got automation involved in this. Uh, but at some level you've got to scale in terms of really smart people, um, has that limited your ability to scale. So first talk about what have the results been. You guys we've been covering you since 2018. What have your results been over time and has that sort of limited that that limit to your scalability, uh, been an issue at all. >>It's hard to find people, uh, it's hard, it's hard for our customers to find people and it's hard for us to find people. So we have an advantage for two reasons. Number one, we have a really good process for hiring people, hiring graduates, recent computer science graduates typically, and then getting them trained up and productive on our platform and within a pretty short timeframe of three or four months. And, um, you know, so we we've, we've, uh, we have a really well-proven process to do that. And then the other thing that you've already alluded to is automation, right? There's a ton of automation built into our platform. So we have a big cost advantage over our customers. So, you know, our, our customers, you know, if they want to go hire a seasoned, you know, Kafka person or PostGrest personal work, a person, these people are incredibly expensive in the market, but for us, we can get those people for relatively less expensive. And then with the automation that we have built into our platform to do all the operational tasks and handle all the operational burdens on those different open source projects, it's a lot of it's automated. And so, uh, you know, where one of our experts can use, you know, the number of workloads that they can operate is usually, you know, many times more than what someone could do without all of the operational capability or all the automated capabilities that we have. >>So what has your, what is your plan for scaling the business look like into the future? Is it a additional investment in those core operators? Uh, are you looking at, uh, uh, expansion, geographically acquisition? What, what can you share with us? >>We've done some acquisition. We added a Postgres capability. We recently added a last, further Alaska search capability and really buttressed our capabilities there. I think we'll do more of that. And, um, we, we will continue to add technologies that we find interesting and, and federal model, usually what we look for technologies that are pretty popular. They're used to solve big problems and they're complicated to manage, right? If something's easy to manage, people are less likely to perceive our value to be that great. So we look for things that, um, you know, are we kind of take the biggest areas, gnarliest, um, open-source projects for people to manage, and we handle the heavy lifting. >>Well, can you give me an example of something like that? You don't have to, you don't have to share a customer name if you don't, if it's not appropriate, but give us a, give us an example of, of Instaclustr inaction pretend I'm the customer. And, uh, and, uh, you know, you mentioned elastic search. Let's say that, let's say that that is absolutely something that's involved. And I have a choice between some open, open core solution and throwing my people at it to manage it, uh, and, and, and operate at the data layer, uh, versus what you would do. What does that interaction look like? How do, how does the process, >>Um, so one thing that we hear from elastic search customers a lot is, uh, their customers, some of them are unhappy. And what they'll tell us is look, when we get an operational problem with Alaska search, we go to Alaska search. And the answer we get from them is we gotta buy, you know, you gotta buy more stuff, you got to add more nodes, and they're in the business of, uh, you know, that's, that's our business. And, uh, you know, they do have a SAS offering, but, um, you know, they're, they're also in the business of selling software. And so when those customers, those same customers come to us, our answer is often, well, Hey, we can help you optimize your environment. And, you know, a lot of times when we onboard people into our platform, they'll achieve cost savings because maybe they weren't on the cloud. Maybe they weren't completely optimized there. And, um, you know, we want to make sure that they get a good operational experience and that's how we felt lock customers in, right. We don't lock them in with code. We make sure that they have a positive experience that we take a lot of that operational stuff off their hands. And so there's just a good natural alignment between what we want to provide that customer and what they ultimately want to consume. Uh, you know, that, that alignment I think is, is uniquely high within our business. >>Well, so how, how have things changed just in the last several years? Obviously, I mean, you know, the, the pandemic has, has affected everything in, in one way or another, but, but in terms of things that live at the data layer being important, um, I mean, just in the last three or four years, the talk of various messaging interfaces and databases has shifted to a degree. Um, what do you see on the horizon? What's, what's, what's, what's getting buzz that maybe didn't get buzz a year ago. What, what, what are you looking for as well? If you're out looking for people with skill sets right now, what are those skill sets you're hiring to? >>I don't hire engineers, right. I run the go to market organization. I hire marketers, salespeople, consultants, but, uh, so it's probably different. I'm maybe not the best person to ask from an engineering standpoint, but, uh, your question about the data layer, um, and how, you know, that's evolving trends that we see it's becoming increasingly strategic. You know, every, there's a couple of buzzwords out there that, you know, for years now, people have been talking about, um, modernization, digital transformation, stuff like that, but, you know, there's, there's a lot to it like digital, you know, every business kind of needs to become a digital business. And as that happens, the amount of data that's produced is, is just as mushrooming, right. You know, the amount of data on the planet doubles about every two years. And so for a lot of applications for a lot of enterprise mission-critical applications, data is the most expensive layer of the application. >>You know, much more expensive than delivering a front end, much more expensive than delivering a military when you just, when you factor in storage, um, uh, just the kind of moving data in and out, you know, data transfer fees, the cost of engineering resources that it's, it's incredibly expensive. So data layers are becoming strategic because organizations are looking at it and realizing, you know, the amount that they're spending on this is eye-popping. And so that's why it's becoming strategic. It's on the radar, just due to the, uh, the size of bills that organizations are looking at. Um, and we could drive those bills down. You know, our value proposition is really simpler. It's a better, faster, cheaper, and we eliminate the license fees. We can, you know, we are operational experts, so we can get people architected in the cloud more efficiently, and probably about a third of the time we save our customers cloud fees. Um, so it's, you know, it's a pretty simple model that some of those things that are strategically more, or are there, sorry, traditionally more tactical or becoming strategic, just because of the scope and scale of them. >>We, uh, we're having this conversation as part of the AWS startup showcase, which basically means that AWS said, Hey, Silicon angle, have your cube guys go talk to these people because we think they're cool. So, um, so why, why, why do they think you're cool? Are you a wholly owned subsidiary of AWS? Did you, did you and your family, uh, uh, exceed the 300 order, uh, Amazon threshold last year? Y what's your relationship with Amazon? >>I bought an elf on the shelf from, I don't know, I don't know why. Um, you know, we're, we're growing fast and we're, we're growing north of 50% last year in 21 and closer to 60%. Um, you know, we certainly, I think, uh, when our customers sign up for our services, you know, Amazon gets more workloads. That's, that's probably a positive thing for Amazon. Um, we're certainly not, you know, there's much, much, much bigger vendors and partners than us that they have, but, uh, but you know, they're, I think they're aware that there's, there's some, some of the smaller vendors like us will grow up to be, you know, the, you know, the bigger vendors of tomorrow. Um, but they've kind of, they've been a great partner. You know, we, we support multiple, we do support multiple clouds, and Amazon's cool with that. You know, we support GCP, we support Azure and kind of give our customers the choice of what clouds they want to run on. Uh, most of our customers do run an Amazon that seems to be sort of a defacto standard, but, um, they haven't been a great partner, >>But, but AWS, it's not a dependency. Uh, if you're, if you're working within the cluster, it doesn't mean that you must be in AWS. >>Nope. We can support customers. Uh, that's a great question. So we can support customers and multiple clouds, and we even support them on prem, right? If they, if organizations that have their own data center, we actually have an on-premise managed service offering. And if that's not a fit, we even have, um, we can offer support contracts, like if they want to do it themselves and do a lot of the heavy lifting and just need sort of a red phone for emergency situations. Uh, we offer 24 by 7, 365 support with 20 minutes service levels for urgent issues. >>So your chief revenue officer, that means that you write the code that runs operations in your system. I'm not smiling, but I'm at, but I'm, but I am actually joking. So that's what the dry sense of humor. Uh, but, but, but seriously, let's talk about the business end of this, right? We have, uh, we have a lot of folks who, uh, who tuned into the queue because of the technology aspect of it, but let's talk about your, your growth trajectory over time. Um, uh, this isn't a drill down. I'm not asking for your, your pipeline, Steve, but, uh, but, but, you know, give us an idea of what that trajectory has looked like. Um, what's going on. >>Yeah. I mean the most recent year, you know, we're, we're getting, uh, to be, um, I, I don't know what I'm permitted to share expect, but I, you know, we've, we've had a lot of growth, you know, if we've won a couple, a couple of hundred percent, our revenue has in the amount of time that I've been here, which is three years, and we're the point now, or pretty good size. Uh, and that gives us, uh, it's cool. It's exciting. You know, we're, we're noticing in the market is people who traded two years ago. People, no one knew who we were. And now we're beginning to talk to some partners, some resellers, some customers, and they will say things like, oh yeah, we've heard of you. We didn't know what you did, but we've heard of you. And, you know, that's, that's fun. That's a great place to be. Uh, you know, it becomes a little bit self-sustaining at that point. And, um, we, you know, we are about to launch, I, it's not a secret because this isn't public preview. So I think >>Was there, I noticed the pause where you're like, can I say this or not? Go ahead and say, go ahead and say, >>Really we, uh, I was trying to think, wait, am I revealing anything here? I shouldn't. But, uh, we did just go public preview, uh, probably a month ago with a project called Aiden's, uh, cadence workflow. Uh, you can actually, um, go to the Instaclustr website and look up cadence. Um, it's run their homepage, or you can, if you want to go to the open source project itself, you can go to cadence, workflow.io. Uh, this is a project that's trending pretty highly on Google. It's got a lot of important movers in the technology business that are using it and having a lot of success with it. Uh, and we're going to be first to market globally with a SAS offering for cadence, port flop. And, um, it's an incredibly exciting project. And it's exciting for us to specifically, because it's a little different, right? It's not, it's a middle tier project that is targeted at developers to increase developer productivity and developer velocity. >>Um, you joked about my being a CRO writing code, but I actually used to be a coder long time ago. I was not very good at it, but what I did enough of it to remember that a lot of what I did as a coder was right. Plumbing code, you know, rather than writing that code that makes the business application function a huge amount of my time as a developer was spent writing, you know, just the plumbing code to make things work and to make it secure and to make a transactional and just all that, you know, kind of nitty gritty code that you gotta do in a nutshell, cadence makes writing that code way easier. So especially for distributed applications that have workflow like capabilities requirements, uh, it's a massive productivity and PR increaser. So it's cool. Exciting for us is now we can, rather than just target data operators, we can actually target developers and engage, not just at the data layer, but kind of at that middle tier as well, and begin to, uh, identify and, um, uh, synergies between the different services that we have and, and our customers will obviously benefit from that. >>So that's a big part of our growth strategy. >>Yeah. So more, more on from a business perspective and a go to market perspective. Um, what is your, what is your go to market strategy or, uh, do you have, do you have a channel strategy? Are you working with partners? >>He is pretty nascent. You know, our go to market strategy for the most part has been, you know, we, uh, pay the Google gods and, and lots of people come to our website and say, they want to talk to us. You know, we talked to them and we get them signed up with, uh, uh, on our, our, our SAS platform or with a support contract or with our consulting team. Um, we also do outbound, you know, we do, we have an inside sales team that does outbound prospecting and we have, um, and we also have some self-service. We have some, some self service customers as well that just, you know, anyone can go to our website, swipe a credit card, sign up for one of our SAS offering and begin, literally get fired up in minutes and PR and using the platform. Uh, so, you know, it's a bit of a mix of high touch, low touch, I think are, you know, we have tons of big logos. >>We know lots and lots of our customers are household name, really big organizations solving big problems. And, um, that's kind of where the bulk of our businesses. And so I think we've been a little more focused there and go to market than we have sort of a know startup selling to startups and the people that just from super developer focused, wanting low touch. So, but I think we need to do better at that part of the market. And we are investing some resources there so that, you know, we're not so lopsided at the high end of the market. We want kind of a, more of a balanced approach because, you know, some of those, some of those, um, younger companies are going to grow up to be big massively successful companies. We've had that, you know, door dash is a tough class, has been a customer of ours for years, and they were not nearly, you know, we, there were a prepayment, there were custom bars, pre pandemic, and we all know what happened to them, uh, during the pandemic. And so, you know, we know there's other door dashes out there. >>Yeah. Yeah. Uh, uh, final question, geography, uh, you guys global. I, uh, I know you're in north America, but, um, what, what, what does that look like for you? Where are you at? >>We're super global. So, you know, in my go-to-market organization, we have sellers in, um, uh, AsiaPac and Europe, you know, multiple in Asia, multiple in Europe, uh, you know, lots of lots in the, in the states, uh, same with marketing, uh, same with engineering, same with our tech ops delivery team. We have most of them, uh, in Australia, which is where we were founded. Uh, but we also have a pretty good sized team, uh, out of Boston and, um, kind of a nascent team, uh, in India as well, to help to tell it, to help them out. So yeah, very much global and, um, you know, getting close to 300 employees, um, you know, when I started, I think we're about 85 to 90, >>That's it, that's an exciting growth trajectory. And, uh, I'm just going to assume, because it just feels awesome to assume it that since you're on a boat and since you were founded in Australia, that that's how you go back and forth to, uh, to visit the most. >>Yeah. Yeah. It takes a while. It takes a while. >>So with that, Steve, I want to say a smooth sailing and, uh, and, uh, thanks for joining us here on the cube. I'm Dave Nicholson. Uh, this has been part of the AWS startup showcase my conversation with Steve Francis of Instaclustr again. Thanks Steve. Stay tuned. >>Thanks very much to you, >>Your source for hybrid tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this "CUBE" conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE", Here in Palo Alto, California, beginning in 2022, kicking off the new year with a great conversation. We're with folks from down under, two co-founders of Instaclustr. Peter Lilley, CEO, Ben Bromhead, the CTO, Intaclustr success. 'Cause he's been on "theCUBE" before, 2018 at Amazon re:Invent. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on "theCUBE". Thanks for piping in from Down Under into Palo Alto. >> Thanks, John, it's really good to be here, I'm looking forward to the conversation. >> So, I love the name, Instaclustr. It conjures up cloud, cloud scale, modern application, server list. It just gives me a feel of things coming together. Spin me up a cluster of these kinds of feelings. The cloud is here, open sources is growing, that's what you guys are in the middle of. Take a minute to explain what you guys do real quick and this open source cloud intersection that's just going supernova right now. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Instaclustr is on a mission to really enable the world's ambitions to use open source technology. And we do that specifically at the data layer. And we primarily do that through what we call our platform offering. And think of it as the way to make it super easy, super scalable, super reliable way to adopt open source technologies at the data layer, to build cutting edge applications in the cloud. Today used by customers all over the world. We started the business in Australia but we've very quickly become a global business. But we are the business that sits behind some of the most successful brands that are building massively scalable cloud based applications. And you did right. We sit at a real intersection of kind of four things. One is open source adoption which is an incredibly powerful journey and wave that's driving the future direction of IT. You've got managed services or managed operations and moving those onto a platform like Instaclustr. You've got the adoption of cloud and cloud as a wave, like open source is a wave. And then you've got the growth of data, everything is data-driven these days. And data is just excellent for businesses and our customers. And in a lot of cases when we work with our customers on Instaclustr today, the application and the data, the data is the business. >> Ben, I want to get your thoughts as a CTO because open source, and technology, and cloud, has been a real game changer. If you go back prior to cloud, open source is very awesome, still great, freedom, we've got code, it's just the scale of open source. And then cloud came along, changed the game, so, open source. And then new business models became, so commercial open source software is now an industry. It's not just open source, "Hey, free software." And then maybe a red hat's out there, or someone like a red hat, have some premium support. There's been innovation on the business model side. So, matching technology innovation with the business model has been a big change in the past, many, many years. And this past year in particular that's been key. And open source, open core, these are the things that people are talking about. License changes, this is a big discussion. Because you could be on the wrong side of history if you make the wrong decision here. >> Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think it's also worth, I guess, taking a step back and understanding a little bit about why have people gravitated towards open source and the cloud? Beyond kind of the hippie freedoms of, I can see the code and I have ownership, and everything's free and great. And I think the reason why it's really taken off in a commercial setting, in an enterprise setting is velocity. How much easier is it to go reach and grab a open-source tool? That you can download, you can grab, you can compile yourself, you can make it work the way you want it to do to solve a problem here and now. Versus the old school way of doing it which is with I have to go download a trial version. Oh no, some of the features are locked. I've got to go talk to a procurement or a salesperson to kind of go and solve the problem that I have. And then I've got to get that approved by my own purchasing department. And do we have budget? And all of a sudden it's way, way, way harder to solve the problem in front of you as an engineer. Whereas with open source I just go grab it and I move on. I've achieved something for the day. >> Basically all that friction that comes, you got a problem to solve, oh, open-source, I'm going to just get a hammer and hammer that nail. Wait, whoa, whoa. I got to stand in line, I got to jump over hoops, I got to do all these things. This is the hassle and friction. >> Exactly, and this is why it's often called one of the most impressive things about that. And I think on the cloud side it's the same thing, but for hardware, and capability, and compute, and memory. Previously, if you wanted to compute, oh, you're going to lodge a ticket. You've got to ask someone to rack a server in a data center. You've got to deal with three different departments. Oh my goodness. How painful is that just to get a server up to go run and do something? That's just pulling your hair out. Whereas with the cloud, that's an API call or clicking a few buttons on a console and off you go. You'd have to combine those two things. And I would say that software engineers are probably the most productive they've ever been in the last 20 years. I know sometimes it doesn't look like that but their ability to solve problems in front of them, especially using external stuff is way way, way better. >> Peter: I think when you put those two things together you get an- >> The fact of the matter is they are productive. They're putting security into the code right in the CICD pipeline. So, this is highly agile right now. So, coders are highly productive and efficient in changing the way people are rolling out applications. So, the game is over, open source has won, open core is winning. And this is where the people are confused. This is why I got you guys here? What's the difference between open source and open core? What's the big deal? Why is it so important? >> Yeah, no, great question. So, really the difference between open source and open core, it comes down to, really it's a business model. So, open core contains open-source software, that's a hundred percent true. So, usually what will happen is a company will take a project that is open source, that has an existing community around it, or they've built it, or they've contributed it, or however that genesis has happened. And then what they'll do is they'll look at all the edges around that open-source project. And I think what are some enterprise features that don't exist in the open-source project that we can build ourselves? And then sprinkle those around the edges and sell that as a proprietary offering. So, what you get is you get the core functionality is powered by an open-source project. And quite often the code is identical. But there's all these kinds of little features around the outside that might make it a little bit easier to use in an enterprise environment. Or might make it a bit easier to do some operations side of things. And they'll charge you a license for that. So, you end up in a situation where you might have adopted the open source project, but then now if you want a feature X, Y, or Z, you then need to go and fork over some money and go into that whole licensing kind of contract. So, that's the core difference between open core and open-source, right? Open core, it's got all these little proprietary bits kind of sprinkled around the outside. >> So, how would you describe your platform for your customers? Obviously, you guys are succeeding, your growth is great, we're going to get that second. But as you guys have been steadily expanding the platform of open source data technologies, what is the main solution that you guys are offering customers? Managing open source technologies? What's the main value that you guys bring to the customer? >> Yeah, definitely. So, really the main value that we bring to the customer is we allow them to, I guess, successfully adopt open source databases or database technologies without having to go down that open core path. Open core can be quite attractive, but what it does is you end up with all these many Oracles drivers. Still having to pay the toll in terms of license fees. What we do, however, is we take those open-source projects and we deliver that as a database, as a service on our managed platform. So, we take care of all the operations, the pain, the care, the feeding, patch management, backups. Everything that you need to do, whether you're running it yourself or getting someone else to run it, we'll take care of that for you. But we do it with the pure upstream open source version. So, that means you get full flexibility, full portability. And more importantly you're not paying those expensive license fees. Plus it's easy and it just works. You get that full cloud native experience and you get your database right now when you need it. >> And basically you guys solve the problem of one, I got this legacy or existing licensed technology I've got to pay for. And it may not be enabling modern applications, and they don't have a team to go do all the work (laughing). Or some companies have like a whole army of people just embedded in open-source, that's very rare. So, it sounds like you guys do both. Did I get that right, is that right? >> Yeah, definitely. So, we definitely enable it if you don't have that capability yourself. We are the outsourced option to that. It's obviously a lot more than that but it's one of those pressures that companies nowadays face. And if we take it back to that concept of developer velocity, you really want them working on your core business problems. You don't want them having to fight database infrastructure. So, you've also got the opportunity cost of having your existing engineers working on running this stuff themselves. Or running a proprietary or an open call solution themselves, when really you should be outsourcing preferably to Instaclustr. But hey, let's be honest, you should be outsourcing it to anyone so that your engineers can be focusing on your core business problems. And really letting them work on the things that make you money. >> That's very smart. You guys have a great business model. Because one of the things we've been reporting on "theCUBE" on SiliconANGLE as well, is that the database market is becoming so diverse for the right reasons. Databases are everywhere now and code is becoming horizontally scalable for the cloud but vertically specialized with machine learning. So, you're seeing applications and new databases, no one database rules the world anymore. It's not about Oracle anymore, or anything else. So, open source fits nicely into this kind of platform view. How do you guys decide which technologies go in to the platform that you support? >> Yeah, great question. So, we certainly live in a world of, I call it polyglot persistence. But a simple way of referring to that is the right tool for the right job. And so, we really live in this world where engineers will reach for a database that solves a specific problem and solves it well. As you mentioned, companies, they're no longer Oracle shops, or they're no longer MySQL shops. You'll quite often see services or applications of teams using two or three different databases to solve different challenges. And so, what we do at Instaclustr is we really look at what are the technologies that our existing customers are using, and using side-by-side with, say, some of the existing Instaclustr offerings. We take great lead from that. We also look at what are the different projects out there that are solving use cases that we don't address at the moment. So, it's very use case driven. Whether it's, "Hey, we need something that's better at," say, "Time series." Or we need something that's a little bit better at translatable workloads. Or something a bit of a better fit for a case, right? And we work with those. And I think importantly, we also have this view that in a world of polyglot persistence, you've also got data integration challenges. So, how do you keep data safe between these two different database types? So, we're also looking at how do we integrate those better and support our users on that particular journey. So, it really comes down to one, listening to your customers, seeing what's out there and what's the right use case for a given technology and then we look to adopt that. >> That's great, Ben, machine learning is completely on fire right now. People love it, they want more of it. AI everything, everyone's putting AI on every label. If it does any automation, it's magic, it's AI. So, really, we know what that's happening, it's just really database work and machine learning under the covers. Pete, the business model here has completely changed too, because now with open source as a platform you have more scale, you have differentiation opportunities. I'm sure business is doing great. Give us an update on the business side of Instaclustr. What's clicking for you guys, what's working? What's the success trajectory look like? >> Yeah, it's been an amazing journey for us. When you think about it we were founded it in 2013, so, we're eight years into our journey. When we started the business we were focused entirely on Cassandra. But as Ben talked about, we've gone in diversified those technologies onto the platform, that common experience that we offer customers. So, you can adopt any one to a number of open source technologies in a highly integrated way and really, really grow off the back of that. It's driving some phenomenal growth in our business and we've really enjoyed growth rates that have been 70, 80, 100 year on year since we've started the business. And that's led to an enormous scale and opportunities for us to invest further in the platform, invest further in additional technologies in a really highly opinionated way. I think Ben talked about that integrations, then that becomes incredibly complex as you have many, many kinds of offerings on the platform. So, Instaclustr is much more targeted in terms of how we want to take our business forward and the growth opportunity before us. We think about being deeply expert and deeply capable in a smaller subset of technologies. But those which actually integrate and inter operate for customers so they can build solutions for their applications. But do that on Instaclustr using its platform with a common experience. And, so we've grown to 270 people now around the world. We started in Australia, we've got a strong presence in the US. We recently acquired a business called credativ in Europe, which was a PostgreSQL specialist organization. And that was because, as Ben said before, talking about those technologies we bring onto our platform. PostgreSQL, huge market, disrupting Oracle, exactly the right place that we want to be as Instaclustr with pure open source offerings. We brought them into the Instaclustr family in March this year and we did that to accelerate it on our platform. And so, we think about that. We think about future technologies on their platform, what we can do, and introduced to even provide an even greater and richer experience. Cadence is new to our platform. Super exciting for us because not only is it something that provides workflow as code, as an open source experience, but as a glue technology to build a complex business technology for applications. It actually drives workloads across Cassandra, PostgreSQL and Kafka, which are kind of core technologies on our platform. Super exciting for us, a big market. Interesting kind of group of adopters. You've got Uber kind of leading the charge there with that and us partnering with them now. We see that as a massive growth opportunity for our business. And as we introduce analytics capabilities, exploration, visibility features into the platform all built on open source. So, you can build a complete top to bottom data services layer using open source technology for your platform. We think that's an incredibly exciting part of the business and a great opportunity for us. >> Opportunities to raise money, more acquisitions on the horizon? >> Well, I think acquisitions where it makes sense. I talked about credativ, where we looked at credativ, we knew that PostgreSQL was new to our market, and we were coming into that market reasonably late. So, the way we thought about that from a strategy perspective was we wanted to accelerate the richness of the capability on our platform that we introduced and became GA late last year. So, we think about when we're selecting that kind of technology, that's the perfect opportunity to consider an acquisition for us. So, as we look at what we're going to introduce in the platform over the next sort of two, three, four years, that sort of decision that will, or that sort of thinking, or frames our thinking on what we would do from an acquisition perspective. I think the other way we think about acquisitions is new markets. So, thinking about globally entering, say into the Japanese market. does that make sense because of any language requirements to be able to support customers? 'Cause one of the things that's really, really important to us is the platform is fantastic for scaling, growing, deploying, running, operating this very powerful open source technology. But so too is the importance of having deep operational open source expertise backing and being there to call on if a customer's having an application issue. And that kind of drives the need for us to have in country kind of market support. And so, when we think about those sort of opportunities, I think we think about acquisition there, isn't it like another string to the bow in terms of getting presence in a particular or an emerging market that we're interested in. >> Awesome, Ben, final question to you is, on the technology front what do you see this year emerging? A lot of changes in 2021. We've got another year of pandemic situation going on. Hopefully it goes by fast. Hopefully it won't be three years, but again, who knows? But you're seeing the cloud open source actually taking as a tailwind from the pandemic. New opportunities, companies are refreshing, they have to, they're forced. There's going to be a lot more changes. What do you see from a tech perspective in open-source, open core, and in general for large companies as opensource continues to power the innovation? >> So, definitely the pandemic has a tailwind, particularly for those companies adopting the cloud. I think it's forced a lot of their hands as well. Their five-year plans have certainly become two or three year plans around moving to the cloud. And certainly, that contest for talent means that you really want to be keeping your engineers focused on core things. So, definitely I think we're going to see a continuation of that. We're going to say the continuation of open source dominating when it comes to a database and the database market, the same with cloud. I think we're going to see the gradual march towards different adoption models within the cloud. So, server lists, right? I think we're going to see that kind of slowly mature. I think it's still a little bit early in the hype cycle there, but we're going to start to see that mature. On the ML, AI side of things as well, people have been talking about it for the last three or four years. And I'm sure to people in the industry, they're like, "Oh, we're over that." But I think on the broader industry we're still quite early in that particular cycle as people figure out, how do they use the data that they've got? How do they use that? How do they train models on that? How do they serve inference on that? And how do they unlock other things with lower down on their data stack as well when it comes to ML and AI, right? We're seeing great research papers come out from AI powered indexes, right? So, the AI is actually speeding up queries, let alone actually solving business problems. So, I think we're going to say more and more of that kind of come out. I think we're going to see more and more process capabilities and organizational responses to this explosion of data. I'm super excited to say people talking about concepts and organizational concepts like data mesh. I think that's going to be fundamental as we move forward and have to manage the complexities of dealing with this. So, it's an old industry, data, when you think about it. As soon as you had computers you had data, and it's an old industry from that perspective. But I feel like we're only just getting started and it's just heating up. So, we're super excited to see what 2022 holds for us. >> Every company will be an source AI company. It has to be no matter what. (Ben laughing) Well, thanks for sharing the data Pete and Ben, the co-founders of Instaclustr. We'll get our "CUBE" AI working on this data we got today from you guys. Thanks for sharing, great stuff. Thanks for sharing the open core perspective. We really appreciate it and congratulations on your success. Companies do need more Instaclustrs out there, and you guys are doing a great job. Thanks for coming on, I appreciate it. >> Thanks John, cheers mate. >> Thanks John. >> It's "theCUBE" Conversation here at Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back, here on theCUBE, along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls and now we're joined by Peter Nichol, who's the CEO of Instaclustr. Peter, good to see you this morning sir. >> Thank you very much John. Nice to meet you. >> and Todd Greene, CEO of PubNub. >> Good to see ya. >> Good morning Todd. >> Good morning. >> First off, let's just talk about what the two of you guys do or specifically what Instaclustr does and PubNub. Peter, if you would. >> Basically at a high level, what Instaclustr does is, we help customers to build applications that have to scale massively in a reliable way. Massive scale means terabytes or petabytes of data or even more. Reliability means the application has got to be up and running all of the time. The way we do that is, we focus on technologies in the data layer and we allow companies to essentially outsource the management of those technologies to us. So they can focus on building their application, which is what they do best, and we focus on taking a lot of the complexity away, which is helping to manage the technologies in the data layer. And the technologies that we focus on are basically in the area of storage, search, messaging, and analytics. Those technologies are Cassandra, for storage, Kafka, for messaging, Spark, for analytics, and Elasticsearch for search. We can manage all of those technologies, in any of the cloud providers, including AWS, and essentially this allows customers to outsource that and focus on their core business. We've got some great customers, PubNub being one of our best customers, a hot startup in Silicon Valley, and we're really proud to have them here with us today. >> So Todd, >> Thanks Peter. >> if you will, give us the PubNub story. >> PubNub is a company that provides a global network, which is infrastructure for real-time applications. What's a real-time application? When we started the company six, seven years ago, we made this realization that, the world was moving from applications that sort of requested data when they needed to, you know, you pull up social information, you wanted to see where something was, you ask a question, to ones where things were constantly moving and changing. So devices were emitting data and consuming data all the time. Uber was launching and everyone wanted to see where their taxi was now. Chat applications were getting big inside, dating apps and B to B apps, and B to C apps, and on top of that IoT was exploding and people needed a way to control devices and turn lights on and off. And all the infrastructure that existed at the time, didn't really address these real-time use cases. So these companies were building that stuff themselves. So PubNub launched this thing we call a Data Stream Network, but it effectively does three things. It allows you to connect to devices and leave an always-on connection over the internet, to deliver data bidirectionally to those devices. Real-time message signaling in under a quarter of a second, and then control that data going back and forth, so being able to provide logic. That core infrastructure, that sort of connect, deliver, control, powers everything from Peloton exercise bikes to Symphony Investor chat applications, athenahealth doctor, patient, nurse, kinds of collaboration and lots of IoT companies, from Logitech Harmony to Samsung smart refrigerators. Across the board, it turns out, our infrastructure has been the key to making these real-time experiences come alive. >> So you had this moment, and startups usually do, they have, you hope you do, they reach a tipping point, right, of success And things work great and you hit a boiling point (laughs) in a way, a few years back, to where things were working almost too well, and that's how you got in to Instaclustr. Tell us, give me that story if you would, or share that with our folks watching. >> Yeah absolutely, you know, it's funny, I was talking to someone recently at Amazon, at AWS, who said we rarely talk to a company your size that actually is doing more traffic than AWS is and we discovered we were doing more than twice as many messages, these control signals we talked about, around our network, more than twice as many as the world's global SMS traffic. We were doing close to 50 billion of these messages per day. So as you can imagine, that's not a simple infrastructure. We store that data, we process it, we route it, we do all these things and in one of our storage layers, built on Cassandra, we were really struggling with the expertise needed to scale this thing at the size that we needed to scale it. And we hit a tipping point about two years ago, when we realized we really needed help and we needed help immediately. We had a lot of outreach to a lot of companies, including the company themselves that had created Cassandra. But once we stumbled on Instaclustr, it was like, you know, the clouds parting, right? All of the sudden we had folks from Instaclustr on with us 24 by 7, helping us migrate, helping us move to a more stable and scaled infrastructure and we've had this ongoing relationship ever since. We now have them managing a lot of different uses of Cassandra within PubNub. >> Yeah, so, infrastructure is, (stammers) sorry, Instaclustr is built on all these open-source technologies you mentioned, like Cassandra and Spark and Kafka, but what made you choose those technologies? What was it that was attractive about them that said, you know what, this is what we want to base our company on? >> Customers are always basically looking for three things, and I think Todd summed it up very well in his business, it's basically all about scalability. If your business is successful, you want to be able to scale massively as you get more and more customers. The second thing is reliability, which means the applications have got to be always on, always up and running. The third thing is performance, which is all about latency and speed and feed and all that type of thing. We chose Cassandra because it is one of the most popular, highly scalable data bases. It's used by Apple and Netflix and big companies that have got millions of customers. We generally pick technologies, based on those three criteria, but we also focus on open-source only, for two reasons. Number one, open-source doesn't involve expensive license fees, so customers don't get locked in with expensive license fees and number two, open-source provides a degree of flexibility, cloud independence, so if you don't want to be locked in to a specific cloud provider, and you want to keep your options in the future, choose open-source. >> Okay, that's a pretty compelling sort of argument there and certainly I think the world has discovered that open-source is totally a thing that we should all be using. I'm old enough to remember when open-source was verboten and you shouldn't be using it and now it just seems to be everywhere. What is it about Instaclustr that makes you special though, because open-source, anyone could use it. I could go and download it >> Yep, yep. >> for free tomorrow, so maybe I could attempt to steal PubNub's customers, steal your customers away. So clearly that's not going to be possible for me to be able to do tomorrow. What is it about Instaclustr that you've invested in this company that makes you so special, that means that PubNub was able to rely on you? >> Right, so I think the main thing is, we have 100% of our focus on operations, not on developing proprietary IP, which we sell, which is the typical software model, we take the open-source software and we actually manage it for our customers. Basically what that means is, if they want to use Cassandra, they go to our website, they go to the customer portal, they choose the cloud provider they want to use, they choose the technology they want to use, what regions do they want to run in, what size is their cluster? They press a button and everything else is done behind the scenes by us. We do the provisioning, we install the software, and from that point on, we're managing it 24 by 7. So instead of, for example, PubNub having to build their own team for each one of these technologies, they can outsource it to us, we can do it much cheaper and we can get them to market much faster, if we're doing our job right. It's all about the operations. We can do it much cheaper and faster and that's our main advantage. The other advantage is we manage all of these different technologies in the data layer, which means that customers have one vendor they can go to, to manage several different technologies. It's all heavily, highly, integrated from one vendor. That's a big, rather than having five different vendors to manage five different technologies, we provide the complete platform. >> So Todd, what does this mean for you, now that you have this partner that you can rely on and that you can trust? What does that change for the business? What has that enabled you to be able to do now that you can look forward to saying, you know what, we can do this to grow our business. >> Well that's a good question. Like Instaclustr, we operate PubNub. Customers pay us, not for our technology, but for our ability to operate our technology at massive scale. And we provide five nines SLA, which is a fancy way for saying, if we have an outage for more than 26 seconds in a month, we provide credits back to our customers. That's a really hard, high bar to fill. And so philosophically, we see ourselves as an operations company ourselves, right? And so we're very careful about who we would bring in to the fold as part of operations, right? And so it has to be an organization that has the same security levels that we do, SOC 2 Type II Compliance, has the same understandings and philosophy around operating things at high availability, and can do it in a way that we feel like, you know, in many ways is a part of our team and not some vendor that we don't know how to get on the phone. Not some vendor that we don't really trust, right? It has to feel like it's part of our company. So really it's only been Instaclustr that we've been able to develop that trust around. And so it is actually in all of us to sort of focus on areas where we can do more innovation while keeping the five nines SLAs at 26 seconds minimum, you know, maximum, of issues any month, but allow us to focus a lot more on innovation and not on the things that, frankly, Instaclustr, as far as we can tell, is best in the world at, which is really operating this infrastructure, the Cassandra piece. >> And what do you want to take on then? You told about innovation. If there's an area of your business, you say alright, this is where 2019, where I want it to take us, what would that be? >> It's a great question. One of the big changes for PubNub, was that we built our initial business on the backs of other startups and it was great. We got to some level of scale by powering a lot of innovative interesting applications that were themselves trying to be the first real-time this and the first real-time that and the first real-time the other thing. And then about two years ago something happened, a year and a half ago, that need for real-time, for having things update in real time, inventory, prices, chat applications, moving things on a map, seeing where your trucks were, that went mainstream, and now even the largest app companies in the world, if they release any kind of application, whether it's a business application or a consumer app, if it doesn't have that same real-time experience like an Uber or like a Snapchat, people kind of look at it and say, well this feels like it was built 20 years ago, right? And so what's happened to our industry, has been the moving of the need for this real-time experience, into the mainstream. Now that's been great for us, but it also means as we are selling to a larger and larger group of, we call mainstream larger enterprise customers, the way we package our product, the way we make it consumable by larger companies, make it easier to deploy our product, make it easier to understand and adding features that round that out, is really the core of our focus right now. Is really being able to appeal to those larger companies. We already have the scale, in fact, we recently participated in an event which was the Guinness Book of World (stammers) Record's largest online event in history. And we powered the source in India for Cricket, we powered the largest social interaction, over 10 million people synchronously going through our network, all in one virtual environment. So we know we can scale this thing beyond any existing human need and now it's really about making sure it's accessible to the world's largest companies. >> So it was cricket in India? >> Yes, yes. >> I would've thought it was the Justin Warren fan club, but I guess not, I (stammers) second online, right? >> Yeah, probably. >> There's a lot of people in India who love cricket, and they all have mobile phones. >> Yes, well gentlemen, thanks for being with us, Peter, Todd, continued success and then thanks for being here on theCUBE. >> Okay, thank you very much. >> Thank you so much, it's been a pleasure, thank you. >> We continue live coverage here from Las Vegas. We're in the Sands. We're here all week at AWS re-Invent. (calm digital music)