(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for wall-to-wall coverage. It is re:Invent 2022, our 10th year with theCUBE. Dave and I started this journey 10 years ago here at re:Invent. There are two sets, here, a set upstairs. Great content, I'm here with Paul Gillin, my cohost. Paul's out reporting on the floor, doing some interviews. Paul, what do you think so far? It's pretty crazy activity going on here. >> Well, the activity hasn't declined at all. I mean here we are in day three of the show and it's just as busy out there as it was in day one. And there's just an energy here that you can feel, it's palpable. There is a lot of activity around developers, a lot around data. Which actually brings us a good segue into our next guest because one of the leaders in data management in the cloud is MariaDB. And John Bakke is the CRO at MariaDB, and here to talk to us about your cloud version and how open source is going for you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Paul: Thanks for joining us. >> To get the update on the product, what do you guys do on the relation to AWS? How's that going? Give us a quick update. >> In the relational database? >> No, no. The relationship with AWS >> Oh, with AWS? >> And SkySQL, what's the update? >> There's no relationship that we have that's more important than the AWS relationship. We're building our cloud, our premier cloud service called SkySQL on AWS. And they offer the best in class infrastructure for a SaaS company to build what they're building. And for us, it's a database service, right? And then beyond that, they help you from the business side, right? They try to get you lined up in the marketplace and make it possible for you to work best with customers. And then from a customer perspective, they're super helpful in not only finding prospective customers, but making that customer successful. 'Cause everybody's got a vested interest in the outcome. Right? >> Yeah, a little tongue twister there. Relational data-based relationship. We've got relational databases, we've got unstructured, data is at the center of the value proposition. Swami's keynote today and the Adam CEO's keynote, data and security dominated the keynotes >> John: Yes. >> and the conversations. So, this is real. The customers are really wanting to accelerate the developer experience, >> John: Yep. >> Developer pipe lining, more code faster, more horsepower under the hood. But this data conversation, it just never goes away. The world's keeping on coming around. >> John: It never goes away. I've been in this business for almost 30 years and we're still talking about the same key factors, right? Reliability, availability, performance, security. These things are pervasive in the data management because it's such a critical aspect to success. >> Yeah, in this case of SkySQL, you have both a transactional and an analytical engine in one. >> John: That's correct. >> Right? >> John: Yep. >> And that was a, what has the customer adoption been like of that hybrid, or I guess not a hybrid, but a dual function? >> Yeah. So the thing that makes that important is that instead of having siloed services, you have integrated data services. And a lot of times when you ask a question that's analytical it might depend on a transaction. And so, that makes the entire experience best for the developer, right? So, to take that further, we also, in SkySQL, offer a geospatial offering that integrates with all of that. And then we even take it further than that with distributed database with Xpand or ready to be Xpand. >> A lot of discussion. Geospatial announcement today on stage, just the diversity of data, and your experience in the industry. There's not the one database that rule them all anymore. There's a lot of databases out there. How are customers dealing with, I won't say database for all, 'Cause you need databases. And then you've got real time transactional, you got batch going on, you got streaming data, all kinds of data use cases now, all kind of having to be rolled together. What's your reaction? What's your take on the state of data and databases? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when I started in this business, there were four databases, and now there's 400 databases. And the best databases really facilitate great application development. So having as many of those services in real time or in analytics as possible means that you are a database for everyone or for all users, right? And customers don't want to use multiple databases. Sometimes they feel like they're forced to do that, but if you're like MariaDB, then you offer all of those capabilities in an integrated way that makes the developer move faster. >> Amazon made a number of announcements this morning in the data management area, including geospatial support on RDS, I believe. How do you, I guess, coordinate yourself, your sales message with their sales message, given that you are partners, but they are competing with you in some ways? >> Yeah, there's always some cooperatition, I guess, that happens with AWS in the various product silos that they're offering their customers. For us, we're one of thousands of obviously partners that they have. And we're out there trying to do what our customers want, which is to have those services integrated, not glued together with a variety of different integration software. We want it integrated in the service so that it's one data provision, data capability for the application developer. It makes for a better experience for the developer in the end. >> On the customer side, what's the big activity? I mean, you got the on-premises database, you've got the cloud. When should a customer decide, or what's the signals to them that they should either move to the cloud, or change, be distributed? What are some of the forcing functions? What does the mark look like? >> Yeah, I've come a long way on this, but my opinion is that every customer should be in the cloud. And the reason simply is the economies that are involved, the pace of execution, the resilience and dependability of the cloud, Amazon being the leader in that space. So if you were to ask me, right now is the time to be in SkySQL because it's the premier data service in the cloud. So I would take my customer out of their on-prem and put them all in AWS, on SkySQL, if I could. Not everybody's ready for that, but my opinion is that the security is there, the reliability, the privacy, all of the things that maybe are legacy concerns, it's all been proven to be adequate and probably even better because of all of the economies of scale that you get out of being in the cloud just generally. >> Now, MariaDB, you started on-premise though. You still have a significant customer base on-premise. What, if anything are you doing to encourage them to migrate to the cloud? >> Well, so we have hundreds and hundreds of customers as MariaDB, and we weren't the first database company to put their database in the cloud, but watching it unfold helped us realize that we're going to put MariaDB in its best form factor in SkySQL. It's the only place you could get the enterprise version of MariaDB in a cloud service, right? So when we look at our customers on-prem, we're constantly telling them, obviously, that we have a cloud service. When they subscribe, we show them the efficiencies and the economies, and we do get customers that are moving. We had a customer go to Telefonica over in the UK that moved from an on-premise to manage their wifi services across Europe. And they're very happy. They were one of our very first SkySQL customers. And that has routinely proven itself to be a path towards not only a better operation for the customer, they're up more, they have fewer outages because they're not inflicting their own self wounds that they have in their own data center. They're running on world class infrastructure on world class databases. >> What are some of those self wounds? Is it personnel, kind of manual mistakes, just outages, reliability? What's the real cause, and then what's the benefit alternative in the cloud that is outside? >> Yeah. I mean, I think, when you repeat the same database implementation over and over on the infrastructure, it gets tested thousands and thousands of times. Whereas if I'm a database team and I install it once, I've tested it one time, and I can't account for all of the things that might happen in the future. So the benefit of the cloud is that you just get that repeat ability that happens and all of the sort of the kinks and bugs and issues are worked out of the system. And that's why it's just fundamentally better. We get 99.9999% uptime because all of those mistakes have been made, solved, and fixed. >> Fully managed, obviously. >> Yes. Right. >> Huge benefit. >> John: Right. >> And people are moving, it's just a great benefit. >> John: Yeah. >> So I'm a fan obviously. I think it's a great way to go. I got to ask about the security though, because big conversation here is security. What's the security posture? What's the security story to customers with SkySQL and MariaDB? >> Right, right, right. So we've taken the server, which was the initial product that MariaDB was founded upon, right? And we've come a long way over the several years that we've been in business. In SkySQL, we have SOC 2 compliance, for example. So we've gone through commercial certifications to make sure that customers can depend that we are following processes, we have technology in place in order to secure and protect their data. And in that environment, it is repeatable. So every time a customer uses our DBaaS infrastructure, databases a service infrastructure called SkySQL, they're benefiting from all of the testing that's been done. They go there and do that themselves, they would've to go through months and months of processes in order to reach the same level of protection. >> Now MariaDB is distributed by design. Is that right? >> Yes. So we have a distributed database, it's called Xpand, MariaDB Xpand. And it's an option inside of SkySQL. It's the same cost as MariaDB server, but Xpand is distributed. And the easiest way to understand what distributed database is is to understand what it is not first. What it is not is like every other cloud database. So most of the databases strangely in the cloud are not distributed databases. They have one single database node in a cluster that is where all of the changes and rights happen. And that creates a bottleneck in the database. And that's why there's difficulties in scale. AWS actually talked about this in the keynote which is the difficulty around multi writer in the cloud. And that's what Xpand does. And it spreads out the reads and the rights to make it scalable, more performant, and more resilient. One node goes down, still stays up, but you get the benefit of the consistency and the parallelization that happens in Xpand. >> So when would a customer choose Xpand versus SkySQL Vanilla? >> So we have, I would say a lot of times, but the profile of our customers are typically like financial services, trade stores. We have Samsung Cloud, 500,000 transactions per second in an expand cluster where they run sort of their Samsung cloud for their mobile device unit. We have many customers like that where it's a commercial facing website often or a service where the brand depends on uptime. Okay. So if you're in exchange or if you are a mobile device company or an IOT company, you need those databases to be working all the time and scale broadly and have high performance. >> So you have resiliency built in essentially? >> Yes, yeah. And that's the major benefit of it. It hasn't been solved by anybody other than us in the cloud to be quite honest with you. >> That's a differentiator for sure. >> It is a huge differentiator, and there are a lot of interested parties. We're going to see that be the next discussion probably next year when we come back is, what's the state of distributed database? Because it's really become really the tip of the spear with the database industry right now. >> And what's the benefits of that? Just quickly describe why that's important? >> Obviously the performance and the resilience are the two we just talked about, but also the efficiency. So if you have a multi-node cluster of a single master database, that gets replicated four times, five times over, five times the cost. And so we're taking cost out, adding performance in. And so, you're really seeing a revolution there because you're getting a lot more for a lot less. And whenever you do that, you win the game. Right? >> Awesome. Yeah, that's true. And it seems like, okay, that might be more costly but you're not replicating. >> That's right. >> That's the key. >> Replicating just enough to be resilient but not excessively to be overly redundant. Right. >> Yeah. I find that the conversation this year is starting to unpack some of these cloud native embedded capabilities inside AWS. So are you guys doing more around, on the customer side, around marketplace? Are you guys, how do people consume products? >> Yeah. It's really both. So sometimes they come to us from AWS. AWS might say, "Hey, you know what," "we don't really have an answer." And that's specifically true on the expand side. They don't really have that in their list of databases yet. Right. Hopefully, we'll get out in front of them. But they oftentimes come through our front door where they're a MariaDB customer already, right? There's over a hundred thousand production systems with MariaDB in the world, and hundreds of thousands of users of the database. So they know our brand, not quite as well as AWS, but they know our brand... >> You've got a customer base. >> We do. Right. I mean people love MariaDB. They just think it's the database that they use for application development all the time. And when they see us release an offering like Xpand just a few years ago, they're interested, they want to use that. They want to see how that works. And then when they take it into production and it works as advertised, of course, success happens. Right? >> Well great stuff, John. Great to have you on theCUBE. Paul, I guess time we do the Insta challenge here. New format on theCUBE, we usually say at the end, summarize what's most important story for you or show, what's the bumper sticker? We kind of put it around more of an Instagram reel. What's your sizzle reel? What's your thought leadership statement? 30 seconds >> John: Thought leadership. >> John? >> So the thought leadership is really in scaling the cloud to the next generation. We believe MariaDB's Xpand product will be the the technology that fronts the next wave of database solutions in the cloud. And AWS has become instrumental in helping us do that with their infrastructure and all the help that they give us, I think at the end of the day, when the story on Xpand is written, it's going to be a very fun ride over the next few years. >> John, thank you. CRO, chief revenue officer of MariaDB, great to have you on. >> Thank you. >> 34-year veteran or so in databases. (laughs) >> You're putting a lot of age on me. I'm 29. I'm 29 again. (all laugh) >> I just graduated high school and I've been doing this for 10 years. Great to have you on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks guys. Yeah. >> Thanks for sharing. >> Appreciate it. >> I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin here live on the floor, wall-to-wall coverage. We're already into like 70 videos already. Got a whole another day, finish out day three. Keep watching theCUBE, thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (calm music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote sites, and over a hundred guests on the program talking about the next decade in cloud innovation. I'm pleased to welcome Jon Bakke, Chief Revenue Officer from Maria DB as my next guest. Jon, welcome to the program. >> Thanks for having me, Lisa. >> Talk to me a little bit about MariaDB. What makes it unique? What differentiates it? What gaps in the market does it address? >> Yeah, so we have a lot of passion here at MariaDB because we are, at the end of the day, we're the backbone of services used by people everyday, all over the world. In fact, you might not realize that, but you've probably hit a MariaDB database in the past 60 minutes. It's true. For example, if you're using a Samsung mobile phone, we provide data services for the Samsung cloud. In fact, we've provided services for 5G networks all over the globe. And so at the end of the day, we actually process trillions of transactions per day. And I think that's really cool. >> Awesome. Talk to me a little bit about the key problems. You mentioned Samsung. Big fan, lots of Samsung devices in the house. Talk to me about some of the key problems that MariaDB SkySQL specifically solves for customers. What are they coming to you, looking for them, looking for help for? >> Yeah, so we launched SkySQL and AWS earlier this year. It's become wildly popular. And so SkySQL overcome some of the limitations of the cloud. 1.0, 2.0 era. In fact, we went from having zero customers to a slew of customers in just a short period of time. There are a ton of pent up demand from MariaDB and distributed SQL in particular, and that's our Xpand product. And where Samsung uses Xpand is, they use it to store data for the phones, just like, you might if you're an iPhone user on the iCloud, they have the Samsung cloud. So what we do is we provide expanding database services for them, for a large user base across the globe. And they do that because they just can't get the scale out of some of the community databases that are offered by the major CSPs. >> And obviously that scale is critical. We've seen so much change in the last year and a half, two years with growth, with acceleration to cloud acceleration of digital. Talk to me about what you seen as the CRO of the company from a customer lens perspective. How has the last 20 months really affected acceleration, adoption, of Maria's technologies? >> Yeah, so, I'm a geek at heart. I grew up in the database business. In fact, I've been in the database business for 30 years and during the last 20 months during the pandemic, and even before that, companies like MariaDB strive to create a beautiful database and what it really is a beautiful database. It's a database that is flushed with features that make applications work. Lightweight, portable, and fast for the cloud, but still reliable and familiar so that application developers can use it for multiple workloads. So when it comes to the database industry, we're still going after those characteristics and we provide world-class support. My team just rocks it for our customers. And it's really important to them to get that. And at the end of the day, our costs while at the end of the day, we're the least expensive. So it really is a beautiful database and we're very proud of it. >> Beautiful database that's the least expensive. That sounds like music to probably a lot of companies ears. Talk to me about where it went. Obviously AWS, you mentioned SkySQL was launched earlier this year on AWS? >> That's correct. Yep. >> Talk to me a little bit more about the capabilities there, the partnership that Maria and AWS have, what you bring to your customers. >> Yeah, so we have a great partnership with AWS. They provide a tremendous levels of support to help startups like MariaDB get going satisfactory and everything about their go-to market strategy to make enabled partners like us. But we have a customer that is, well, they're a major trading application on the internet and they were an AWS customer, right? So they were an existing AWS customer, but they were struggling with some of the community databases in AWS to find that scale and that elasticity that they were looking for on their platform. So enter MariaDB Xpand, where we can scale a relational database out far and wide to make it possible for a customer like that. Who's really pushing the limits of what a database needs to do to remain an AWS customer. So in this particular case, we worked with AWS to land them on SkySQL and use Xpand, a distributed database technology. So we went together and that's a really great story for everybody. >> Talk to me about some of the technical requirements, as we've seen so much change in the last 20 months, as I said, but so much growth and scale and needs are changing so dynamically. What are some of the key technical requirements of the database to keep up with that? And how does MariaDB exhibit those? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So in distributed SQL, in particular, which I see as sort of the next wave of database, particularly in the cloud, right? The database needs to leverage familiar application paradigms like relational and document databases do and connection protocols so that existing applications connect to those. But at the end, they have to be highly scalable for the cloud by design and highly available in the cloud by design. Xpand just screams. It's really fast. It's really reliable. And transactional integrity is inherent to the architecture. So our customers love it. And so really, what's not to love about a database that does all of those things? >> What's not to love about a beautiful database? That speed. I mean, the speed is critical. I think one of the many things that we've learned in the last interesting couple of years of our lives is that real time is no longer a nice to have, right? Nobody wants a less data, slower. That ability to deliver real-time data, real-time analytics is critical for businesses in any company as we're seeing. And you're probably seeing this as a CRO, every company becoming a software company, or leaning to. >> Absolutely, yeah. Some of our biggest customers are major SAS providers. So if you work for a business that is using ServiceNow, one of the largest SAS companies in the world, you're using MariaDB every day, billions and billions of transactions by service, now on an hourly basis and it's all in the cloud. So when we look at how we've evolved to this point, we're offering services to companies big and small, we're being tested by companies like ServiceNow and their infrastructure on a regular basis. >> What are some of the trends that you're seeing as we... And 22 months or so in this pandemic, what are some of the market trends that you're seeing from a scalability perspective? And what is it that a distributed SQL database can deliver to help customers meet those trends? >> Well, certainly, I think when you look at what is a good database for the cloud in the future, it really does need to have the features that make applications work. So you had mentioned analytical databases and transactional databases. One thing that is inherent to our strategy, is the ability to use hybrid approach to transactional and analytical because a lot of applications are both at the end of the day. And why use two different databases in order to get there? Right? Our database is lightweight and fast. It's portable. It's reliable and familiar to the customer and versatile in the workload. So those are the things that are trending at the conclusion of sort of this year going into next year, as we roll out more technology in subsequent versions, we'll just enhance those capabilities, make it possible for even more and more workloads to find their way into SkySQL. >> And talk about the adoption of cloud, the acceleration. We've been talking about that a lot in the last year and a half about the acceleration of digital transformation, the acceleration to cloud. It was so critical for so many businesses, especially if you think of the SAS adoption, the collaboration tools, but what are some of the things that you're seeing? How are you helping customers on that migration journey? >> Yeah. So migration is a key element there. there are customers leading older proprietary database technology. There are customers trying to enhance their cloud experience and go from the early cloud databases up to more modern architectures. And so migration is a constant activity that we work with our customers on. And so over the years, just as a matter of course, we've become better and better at getting database workloads from proprietary, older databases, even other open source databases onto MariaDB, so that we can consume those workloads and get those in the cloud and make them work for customers better than they ever have before. >> And I'm curious as the Chief Revenue Officer, how your customer conversations have evolved in the last year or so, where is cloud database security? Where are those things with respect to the level of conversations that you're having with customers? And is that conversation going up the stack? >> Yeah, so the security has always been a key cornerstone of the database industry, really, when you think about it, database is information assurance and confidentiality is a key tenant to information security and information assurance in general. So it's always an ever present in the discussion. MariaDB is enhancing its list of compliance that we've gone through, like SOC 2, we're on the precipice of that. We've got ISO certifications and we have US Department of Defense install guys that are secure for a MariaDB. All sorts of activity around that, to make it possible for customers to standardize on MariaDB. We have customers that have taken out every ounce of their legacy, relational database, the older incumbents, and replace that with lighter weight MariaDB, because we have the security qualifications, but we also meet their functional needs and their information assurance needs. And so that's whats made us really successful. >> In addition to compliance, you talked about this database being beautiful. You described what you meant by that, but also you said least expensive. So I'm wondering from a business outcome perspective, are customers all across the board, reducing TCO, leveraging MariaDB? >> Absolutely. And in cases where we displace a proprietary database, the TCO can reduce by as much as 90%. And so it's very attractive to customers that are looking for the next wave. Not only do we take them to a lower cost, but we bring them to a more modern multi-cloud architecture. So AWS is our primary focus for certain in this conversation but also just generally because there's such a huge install base. But they do like the option of being able to say, "Hey, I can use this database on any cloud. It works everywhere. And the vendor that makes it is supporting it in all environments." So for us, that's a huge strong point in terms of what makes our business run. >> And we're seeing so much, we're talking so much about Hybrid, Hybrid IT, Hybrid Cloud, Hybrid work from anywhere environments. So I imagine MariaDB runs on, obviously AWS, but Azure, Google cloud platform, so that customers that are in that multi-cloud world and those that will be can take advantage of the services. >> That's correct. So Azure is in our near term pipeline or roadmap for the cloud, but we're already present in GCP and we're available in other clouds as well. >> Excellent. So talk to me a little bit about what customers can do. Can they test out MariaDB? Can they test out SkySQL, Xpand? If so, where do they go? How do they get their hands on it? >> Right, so existing AWS customers, they can get to SkySQL on the AWS marketplace, right? It's incredibly easy. AWS customers go to the marketplace. They can find us by doing a search. But not to be outdone, there are customers that aren't on AWS and they can come to MariaDB.com. You can start SkySQL there and select AWS as the deployment cloud and try it for free. It's super cool. It's really easy. >> I'm just curious. What's the typical deployment time from the free trial POC to deployment? What do you normally see from a time distinct band perspective? >> Oh yeah, customers are up and running with a live database in just a few minutes. >> Minutes? >> Yep. >> Minutes up to 90% TCO. Big business outcomes there that affect every business in every industry. John, we appreciate you coming on, talking to us about MariaDB, the solutions that you offer, and how you're partnering with AWS and where folks can go to get started. >> Thank you. >> He's Jon Bakke. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. Stick around, more coverage coming up next. (peaceful music)