(upbeat music) >> 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, where theCUBE is covering the innovations in open source trends in this new age of application development and how to leverage open source database technologies to create world-class platforms that are cost-effective and also scale. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is Roberto Giordano, who is the End User Computing, Corporate, and Database Services Manager at Borsa Italiana, the Italian Stock Exchange. Roberto, great to have you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, and thanks to the interview friend for the invitation. >> Okay, and we're going to dig in to the great customer story here. First, Roberto, tell us a little bit more about Borsa Italiana and your role at the organization. >> Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, Borsa is the Italian Stock Exchange. We used to be part of the London Stock Exchange, but last month we left that group, and we joined another group called Euronext, so we are now part of another group, I would say. And right now within Euronext, Euronext provide the biggest liquidity pool in Europe, just to mention something. And basically we provide the market infrastructure to our customers across Europe and the whole world. So probably if it happens for you to buy a little of, I don't know, Ferrari for instance, probably use our infrastructure. >> So I wonder if you could talk about the key drivers in the exchange business in Italy. I don't know how closely you follow what's going on in the United States, but it's crypto madness, there's the Reddit army driving up stocks that have big short positions, and of course the regulators have to look at that, and there's a big debate going on. Well, I don't know what's it like in Italy, but what are the key drivers that are really informing the priorities for your technology strategy? >> Well, you mentioned, for instance, the stereotypical cases that are a little bit of laterally to the global markets and also to our markets as a it professional running market infrastructure is our first the goal to provide an infrastructure that is reliable and be with the lowest possible latency. So we are very focused on performance and reliability just to mention the two main drivers within our systems. >> Well, and you have end-user computing in your title and we're going to get into the database discussion, but I presumably with with COVID you had to pivot and that that piece of your job was escalated in 2020, I would imagine. And you mentioned latency which is a key factor in obviously in database access but that must've been a big challenge last year. >> Well, it was really a challenge, but basically we move just within a weekend, the wall organization working remotely. And it has been like this since February, 2020. Think about the challenge of moving almost 1000 people that used to come to the office every day to start to work remotely. And as within my team of the end user computing this was really a challenge but it was a good one at the end. We, we, we succeeded and everything work. It's fine from our perspective, no news is is a good news, you know, because normally when something doesn't work, we are on newspapers. So if you didn't heard about us it means that everything worked out just fine. >> Yeah. It's amazing, Roberto. We both in the technology business that you'll be you're a practitioner observer, but I mean if you're in the tech business most companies actually pivoted quite well. You're have always been a digital business, different. I mean, if you're a Ferrari and making cars and you can't get semiconductors, but but most technology companies actually made the transition you know, quite amazingly, let's get into the, the case study a bit of it. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your organization's infrastructure and applications what it looks like and and particularly your database infrastructure what does that look like? >> Well, we are a multi-vendor shop. So we would like to pick the right technology for for the right service. This means that my database services teams currently manage several different technology where possible that plays a big role in, in, in our portfolio. And because we, we, we currently support both the open source, fully open source version of Postgres, but also the EDB distribution in particular we prefer to use EDB distribution where we did specific functionalities that just EDB provide. And we, when we need a first class level of support that EDB in recent year was able to provide to us. >> When you say full functioning, are you talking about things like acid compliance, two phase commits? I mean, all these enterprise capabilities, is that right? Or maybe you could be >> Just too much just to mention one, for instance we recently migrated our wire intrasite availability solution using the ADB fail-over manager. That is an additional component that just it'll be provide. >> Yeah. Okay. So, so par recovery obviously is, is and so that's a solution that you to get from the EDB distro as opposed to having to build it yourself with open source tooling. >> Yeah, correct. Well, basically sterically, we used to rely on OSTP clustering from, from, from that perspective. But over the years we found that even if it's a technology that works fine, it has been around for four decades. And so on. We faced some challenges internally because within my team we don't own also the operative system layers. So we want a solution that was 100% within our control and perimeter. So just few months ago we asked the EDB EDB folks if they can provide something. And after a couple of meetings also with their pre-sales engineers, we found the the right solution for us. So we launched long story short, just a quick proof of concept to a tissue test together, again using the ADB consultancy. And, and then we, beginning of this year, we, we went live with the first mission critical service using this brand new technology, well brand new technology for us. You know, it'd be created a few years ago >> And I do have some follow-up questions but I want to understand what catalyzed the, you know what was the motivation for going with an open source database? I mean, you're, you're a great example because you have your multi-vendor so you have experienced with all of it, the full spectrum. What was it about open source database generally EDB specifically that triggered the, the choice? >> Well thanks for the question. It is, this is one of the, or one of the questions that I always, like. I think what really drove us was the right combination between easy to use, so simplicity and also good value for money. So we like to pick the right database technology for the right kind of service slash budget that the survey says and, and the open source solution for a specific service. It, it, it's, it's our, you know, first, first, first choice. So we are not going to say a company that use just one technology. We like to take the best of breed that the market can offer. In some cases, the open source and Postgres in particular is, is our choice. How involved was >> The line of business in this both the decision and the implementation? Was it kind of invisible to them, or this was really more of a technology decision based on the your interpretation of the requirements I'm interested in who was involved and how you actually got it done? >> Well, I, I think this decision was transplant for, for, for, for the business at the end of the day don't really have that kind of visibility. You know, they just provide requirements in particular in terms of performance and rehabil area, the reliability. And so, so this this is something they are not really involved about. And obviously if they, if we are in opposition to save a little bit of money everybody's at the, even the business >> No. So what did you have to do? So that makes sense to me, I figured that was the case. Who would, who were the stakeholders on your team? I mean, what kind of technical resources did you require an implementation resources? What take us through what the project if you will look like, wh how did you do it? >> Well, it's a combination of database expertise. I got the pleasure to run a team that is paid by very, very senior, very, very skilled database services professional that are able to support more than one more than what the county and also are very open to innovation and changes. Plus obviously we need also the development teams the relevant development teams on board, when you when you run this kind of transformations and it looks like also, they liked the idea to use PostgreSQL for for this specific service I got in mind. So it, it, it was quite, quite easy, not be discussion. You know. >> What was the, what was the elapsed time from from when you said, okay, we're in, you know signed the agreement we're going here you made the decision to actually getting into production. >> Well, as I mentioned, we, we, we were on we're on services and application that are really focused on high availability and performance. So generally speaking, we are not a peak organization. Also we run a business that is highly regulated. So as you know, as you can imagine we are an organization that don't have a lot of appetite for risk, you know, so generally speaking in order to run this kind of transformation is a matter of several months, I will say six nine months to have something delivered in that space. >> Okay. Well, that's, I mean, that's reasonable. I mean, if you could do it inside of a year that's I think quite good especially in the highly regulated industry. And then you mentioned kind of the fail over the high availability Cape Cape capabilities. Were there other specific EDB tools that that you utilize to sort of address the objectives? >> Yeah, absolutely. We were in particular, we used Postgres enterprise, AKA Pam. Okay. And very recently we were involved within ADB about per se specifically developing one functionality that, that that we needed back in the day. I think together with Bart these are the free EDB specific tools that, that we, that that we use right now. >> And, and I'm, I'm interested in, I want to get to the business impact and I know it's early days for you but the real motivation was to save money and simplify. I would actually, I would imagine your developers were happy because they get to use modern tooling and open source. But, but really though if your industry is bottom line, right, I mean that's really what the, the business case was all about. But I wonder if you could add some color there in terms of the business impact that you expect. And then, I mean I don't know how much visibility you have now but anything you can share with us. >> Well, thinking about the EFM implementation that the business impact the, was that in case of a failure or the DBA team that a services team is it is able to provide a solution that is within our 100% within our perimeter. So this means that we are fully accountable for it. So in a nutshell, when you run a service, the less people the less teams you have to involve the more control you can deliver. And in some, again, very critical services that is a great value. >> Okay. So, and, and where do you want to take this? I mean, how do you see w what's your, if you're thinking about your Postgres and, and generally an EDB you know, roadmap, where do you want it to go? >> Well, I stay to, to trends within within the organization, the, the, the, the the first one is about migrating more existing services to open source solution for database is going to be, is going to be prosperous. And other trends that I see within my organization is about designing applications, not really to be, to to use PostgreSQL as the base, as it does a base layer. I think both trends are more or less surroundings at the same state right now. >> Yeah. A lot of the audience members at Postgres vision 21 is just like you they they're managing day-to-day infrastructure. They're there they're expert practitioners. What advice would you give to somebody that is thinking about, you know taking this journey, maybe if you had to do something over again maybe what would you do differently? How can you help your peers here? >> Well, I think in particular, if you are going to say a big organization that runs a highly regulated business in some cases, you are a little bit afraid of open source because there is this, I can say general consideration about the lack of enterprise level support. I would like to say that it is just about the past because they're around bunch of companies like EDB that are we're a hundred percent capable of providing enterprise level of support, even on, on, on even on the open source distribution of Paul's presser. Obviously Dan is you're going to go with their specific distribution. The level of support is going to be even more accurate but as we know, it could be currently is they across say main contributor of the pollsters community. And I think is, is that an insurance for every organization? >> Your advice is don't be afraid. >> Yeah. My advice is done is absolutely, don't be, don't be afraid. And if, if, if I can, if we can mention about also about, you know, the cloud called technologies this is also another, another topic where if possible I would like to suggest to not being afraid EDB as every every I would say organization within the it industry is really pushing for it. And I think for a very, for, for a lot of cases not all of them, but a lot of cases, there is a great value about the design services application to be cloud native or migrating existing application into the cloud. >> Okay. But, but being a highly regulated industry and being a, you know, very much aware of the the narrative around open source, et cetera, you, you must've had just a little piece of your mind saying, okay I have to manage this risk. So there's anything specifically you did with managing the risks that you would advise? Was it, was it or is it really just about good change management? >> I think it was mainly about a good change management when you got, you know the relevant stakeholders that you need on board and we are, everybody's going the same direction. That basically is about executing. >> Excellent. Well, Roberto, I really appreciate your time and your knowledge that you share with the audience. So thanks so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a great pleasure. >> And thank you for watching the cubes continuous coverage of Postgres vision 21. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> 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, where theCUBE is covering the innovations in open source trends in this new age of application development and how to leverage open source database technologies to create world-class platforms that are cost-effective and also scale. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is Roberto Giordano, who is the End User Computing, Corporate, and Database Services Manager at Borsa Italiana, the Italian Stock Exchange. Roberto, great to have you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave, and thanks to the interview friend for the invitation. >> Okay, and we're going to dig in to the great customer story here. First, Roberto, tell us a little bit more about Borsa Italiana and your role at the organization. >> Absolutely. Well, as you mentioned, Borsa is the Italian Stock Exchange. We used to be part of the London Stock Exchange, but last month we left that group, and we joined another group called Euronext, so we are now part of another group, I would say. And right now within Euronext, Euronext provide the biggest liquidity pool in Europe, just to mention something. And basically we provide the market infrastructure to our customers across Europe and the whole world. So probably if it happens for you to buy a little of, I don't know, Ferrari for instance, probably use our infrastructure. >> So I wonder if you could talk about the key drivers in the exchange business in Italy. I don't know how closely you follow what's going on in the United States, but it's crypto madness, there's the Reddit army driving up stocks that have big short positions, and of course the regulators have to look at that, and there's a big debate going on. Well, I don't know what's it like in Italy, but what are the key drivers that are really informing the priorities for your technology strategy? >> Well, you mentioned, for instance, the stereotypical cases that are a little bit of laterally to the global markets and also to our markets as a it professional running market infrastructure is our first the goal to provide an infrastructure that is reliable and be with the lowest possible latency. So we are very focused on performance and reliability just to mention the two main drivers within our systems. >> Well, and you have end-user computing in your title and we're going to get into the database discussion, but I presumably with with COVID you had to pivot and that that piece of your job was escalated in 2020, I would imagine. And you mentioned latency which is a key factor in obviously in database access but that must've been a big challenge last year. >> Well, it was really a challenge, but basically we move just within a weekend, the wall organization working remotely. And it has been like this since February, 2020. Think about the challenge of moving almost 1000 people that used to come to the office every day to start to work remotely. And as within my team of the end user computing this was really a challenge but it was a good one at the end. We, we, we succeeded and everything work. It's fine from our perspective, no news is is a good news, you know, because normally when something doesn't work, we are on newspapers. So if you didn't heard about us it means that everything worked out just fine. >> Yeah. It's amazing, Roberto. We both in the technology business that you'll be you're a practitioner observer, but I mean if you're in the tech business most companies actually pivoted quite well. You're have always been a digital business, different. I mean, if you're a Ferrari and making cars and you can't get semiconductors, but but most technology companies actually made the transition you know, quite amazingly, let's get into the, the case study a bit of it. I wonder if you could paint a picture of your organization's infrastructure and applications what it looks like and and particularly your database infrastructure what does that look like? >> Well, we are a multi-vendor shop. So we would like to pick the right technology for for the right service. This means that my database services teams currently manage several different technology where possible that plays a big role in, in, in our portfolio. And because we, we, we currently support both the open source, fully open source version of PostgreSQL, but also the EDB distribution in particular we prefer to use DDB distribution where we did specific functionalities that just EDB provide. And we, when we need a first class level of support that ADB in in recent year was able to provide to us. >> When you say full functioning, are you talking about things like acid compliance, two phase commits? I mean, all these enterprise capabilities, is that right? Or maybe you could be >> Just too much just to mention one, for instance we recently migrated our wire intrasite availability solution using the ADB fail-over manager. That is an additional component that just it'll be provide. >> Yeah. Okay. So, so par recovery obviously is, is and so that's a solution that you to get from the EDB distro as opposed to having to build it yourself with open source tooling. >> Yeah, correct. Well, basically sterically, we used to rely on OSTP clustering from, from, from that perspective. But over the years we found that even if it's a technology that works fine, it has been around for four decades. And so on. We faced some challenges internally because within my team we don't own also the operative system layers. So we want a solution that was 100% within our control and perimeter. So just few months ago we asked the EDB EDB folks if they can provide something. And after a couple of meetings also with their pre-sales engineers, we found the the right solution for us. So we launched long story short, just a quick proof of concept to a tissue test together, again using the ADB consultancy. And, and then we, beginning of this year, we, we went live with the first mission critical service using this brand new technology, well brand new technology for us. You know, it'd be created a few years ago >> And I do have some follow-up questions but I want to understand what catalyzed the, you know what was the motivation for going with an open source database? I mean, you're, you're a great example because you have your multi-vendor so you have experienced with all of it, the full spectrum. What was it about open source database generally EDB specifically that triggered the, the choice? >> Well thanks for the question. It is, this is one of the, or one of the questions that I always, like. I think what really drove us was the right combination between easy to use, so simplicity and also good value for money. So we like to pick the right database technology for the right kind of service slash budget that the survey says and, and the open source solution for a specific service. It, it, it's, it's our, you know, first, first, first choice. So we are not going to say a company that use just one technology. We like to take the best of breed that the market can offer. In some cases, the open source and Pasquesi in particular is, is our choice. How involved was >> The line of business in this both the decision and the implementation? Was it kind of invisible to them, or this was really more of a technology decision based on the your interpretation of the requirements I'm interested in who was involved and how you actually got it done? >> Well, I, I think this decision was transplant for, for, for, for the business at the end of the day don't really have that kind of visibility. You know, they just provide requirements in particular in terms of performance and rehabil area, the reliability. And so, so this this is something they are not really involved about. And obviously if they, if we are in opposition to save a little bit of money everybody's at the, even the business >> No. So what did you have to do? So that makes sense to me, I figured that was the case. Who would, who were the stakeholders on your team? I mean, what kind of technical resources did you require an implementation resources? What take us through what the project if you will look like, wh how did you do it? >> Well, it's a combination of database expertise. I got the pleasure to run a team that is paid by very, very senior, very, very skilled database services professional that are able to support more than one more than what the county and also are very open to innovation and changes. Plus obviously we need also the development teams the relevant development teams on board, when you when you run this kind of transformations and it looks like also, they liked the idea to use PostgreSQL for for this specific service I got in mind. So it, it, it was quite, quite easy, not be discussion. You know. >> What was the, what was the elapsed time from from when you said, okay, we're in, you know signed the agreement we're going here you made the decision to actually getting into production. >> Well, as I mentioned, we, we, we were on we're on services and application that are really focused on high availability and performance. So generally speaking, we are not a peak organization. Also we run a business that is highly regulated. So as you know, as you can imagine we are an organization that don't have a lot of appetite for risk, you know, so generally speaking in order to run this kind of transformation is a matter of several months, I will say six nine months to have something delivered in that space. >> Okay. Well, that's, I mean, that's reasonable. I mean, if you could do it inside of a year that's I think quite good especially in the highly regulated industry. And then you mentioned kind of the fail over the high availability Cape Cape capabilities. Were there other specific EDB tools that that you utilize to sort of address the objectives? >> Yeah, absolutely. We were in particular, we used Postgres enterprise, AKA Pam. Okay. And very recently we were involved within ADB about per se specifically developing one functionality that, that that we needed back in the day. I think together with Bart these are the free EDB specific tools that, that we, that that we use right now. >> And, and I'm, I'm interested in, I want to get to the business impact and I know it's early days for you but the real motivation was to save money and simplify. I would actually, I would imagine your developers were happy because they get to use modern tooling and open source. But, but really though if your industry is bottom line, right, I mean that's really what the, the business case was all about. But I wonder if you could add some color there in terms of the business impact that you expect. And then, I mean I don't know how much visibility you have now but anything you can share with us. >> Well, thinking about the EFM implementation that the business impact the, was that in case of a failure or the DBA team that a services team is it is able to provide a solution that is within our 100% within our perimeter. So this means that we are fully accountable for it. So in a nutshell, when you run a service, the less people the less teams you have to involve the more control you can deliver. And in some, again, very critical services that is a great value. >> Okay. So, and, and where do you want to take this? I mean, how do you see w what's your, if you're thinking about your Postgres and, and generally an EDB you know, roadmap, where do you want it to go? >> Well, I stay to, to trends within within the organization, the, the, the, the the first one is about migrating more existing services to open source solution for database is going to be, is going to be prosperous. And other trends that I see within my organization is about designing applications, not really to be, to to use PostgreSQL as the base, as it does a base layer. I think both trends are more or less surroundings at the same state right now. >> Yeah. A lot of the audience members at Postgres vision 21 is just like you they they're managing day-to-day infrastructure. They're there they're expert practitioners. What advice would you give to somebody that is thinking about, you know taking this journey, maybe if you had to do something over again maybe what would you do differently? How can you help your peers here? >> Well, I think in particular, if you are going to say a big organization that runs a highly regulated business in some cases, you are a little bit afraid of open source because there is this, I can say general consideration about the lack of enterprise level support. I would like to say that it is just about the past because they're around bunch of companies like EDB that are we're a hundred percent capable of providing enterprise level of support, even on, on, on even on the open source distribution of Paul's presser. Obviously Dan is you're going to go with their specific distribution. The level of support is going to be even more accurate but as we know, it could be currently is they across say main contributor of the pollsters community. And I think is, is that an insurance for every organization? >> Your advice is don't be afraid. >> Yeah. My advice is done is absolutely, don't be, don't be afraid. And if, if, if I can, if we can mention about also about, you know, the cloud called technologies this is also another, another topic where if possible I would like to suggest to not being afraid EDB as every every I would say organization within the it industry is really pushing for it. And I think for a very, for, for a lot of cases not all of them, but a lot of cases, there is a great value about the design services application to be cloud native or migrating existing application into the cloud. >> Okay. But, but being a highly regulated industry and being a, you know, very much aware of the the narrative around open source, et cetera, you, you must've had just a little piece of your mind saying, okay I have to manage this risk. So there's anything specifically you did with managing the risks that you would advise? Was it, was it or is it really just about good change management? >> I think it was mainly about a good change management when you got, you know the relevant stakeholders that you need on board and we are, everybody's going the same direction. That basically is about executing. >> Excellent. Well, Roberto, I really appreciate your time and your knowledge that you share with the audience. So thanks so much for coming on the cube. >> Thank you, Dave. It was a great pleasure. >> And thank you for watching the cubes continuous coverage of Postgres vision 21. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

Live from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering theCUBE, New York City 2018. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE live in New York City for our CUBE NYC event, #cubenyc. This is our ninth year covering the big data ecosystem going back to the original Hadoop world, now it's evolved to essentially all things AI, future of AI. Peter Burris is my cohost. He gave a talk two nights ago on the future of AI presented in his research. So it's all about data, it's all about the cloud, it's all about live action here in theCUBE. Our next guest is David Richards, who's been in the industry for a long time, seen the evolution of Hadoop, been involved in it, has been a key enabler of the technology, certainly enabling cloud recovery replication for cloud, welcome back to theCUBE. It's good to see you. >> It's really good to be here. >> I got to say, you've been on theCUBE pretty much every year, I think every year, we've done nine years now. You made some predictions and calls that actually happened. Like five years ago you said the cloud's going to kill Hadoop. Yeah, I think you didn't say that off camera, but it might (laughing) maybe you said it on camera. >> I probably did, yeah. >> [John] But we were kind of pontificating but also speculating, okay, where does this go? You've been right on a lot of calls. You also were involved in the Hadoop distribution business >>back in the day. Oh god. >> You got out of that quickly. (laughing) You saw that early, good call. But you guys have essentially a core enabler that's been just consistently performing well in the market both on the Hadoop side, cloud, and as data becomes the conversation, which has always been your perspective, you guys have had a key in part of the infrastructure for a long time. What's going on? Is it still doing deals, what's? >> Yes, I mean, the history of WANdisco's play and big data in Hadoop has been, as you know because you've been with us for a long time, kind of an interesting one. So we back in sort of 2013, 2014, 2015 we built a Hadoop-specific product called Non-Stop NameNode and we had a Hadoop distribution. But we could see this transition, this change in the market happening. And the change wasn't driven necessarily by the advent of new technology. It was driven by overcomplexity associated with deploying, managing Hadoop clusters at scale because lots of people, and we were talking about this off-camera before, can deploy Hadoop in a fairly small way, but not many companies are equipped or built to deploy massive scale Hadoop distributions. >> Sustain it. >> They can't sustain it, and so the call that I made you know, actions speak louder than words. The company rebuilt the product, built a general purpose data replication platform called WANdisco Fusion that, yes, supported Hadoop but also supported object store and cloud technologies. And we're now seeing use cases in cloud certainly begin to overtake Hadoop for us for the first time. >> And you guys have a patent that's pretty critical in all this, right? >> Yeah. So there's some real IP. >> Yes, so people often make the mistake of calling us a data replication business, which we are, but data replication happens post-consensus or post-agreement, so the very heart of WANdisco of 35 patents are all based around a Paxos-based consensus algorithm, which wasn't a very cool thing to talk about now with the advent of blockchain and decentralized computing, consensus is at the core of pretty much that movement, so what WANdisco does is a consensus algorithm that enables things like hybrid cloud, multi cloud, poly cloud as Microsoft call it, as well as disaster recovery for Hadoop and other things. >> Yeah, as you have more disparate parts working together, say multi cloud, I mean, you're really perfectly positioned for multi cloud. I mean, hybrid cloud is hybrid cloud, but also multi cloud, they're two different things. Peter has been on the record describing the difference between hybrid cloud and multi cloud, but multi cloud is essentially connecting clouds. >> We're on a mission at the moment to define what those things actually are because I can tell you what it isn't. A multi cloud strategy doesn't mean you have disparate data and processes running in two different clouds that just means that you've got two different clouds. That's not a multi cloud strategy. >> [Peter] Two cloud silos. >> Yeah, correct. That's kind of creating problems that are really going to be bad further down the road. And hybrid cloud doesn't mean that you run some operations and processes and data on premise and a different siloed approach to cloud. What this means is that you have a data layer that's clustered and stretched, the same data that's stretched across different clouds, different on-premise systems, whether it's Hadoop on-premise and maybe I want to build a huge data lake in cloud and start running complex AI and analytics processes over there because I'm, less face it, banks et cetera ain't going to be able to manage and run AI themselves. It's already being done by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, and others in the cloud. So the ability to run this simultaneously in different locations is really important. That's what we do. >> [John] All right, let me just ask this directly since we're filming and we'll get a clip out of this. What is the definition of hybrid cloud? And what is the definition of multi cloud? Take, explain both of those. >> The ability to manage and run the same data set against different applications simultaneously. And achieve exactly the same result. >> [John] That's hybrid cloud or multi cloud? >> Both. >> So they're the same. >> The same. >> You consider hybrid cloud multi cloud the same? >> For us it's just a different end point. It's hybrid kind of mean that you're running something implies on-premise. A multi cloud or poly cloud implies that you're running between different cloud venues. >> So hybrid is location, multi is source. >> Correct. >> So but let's-- >> [David] That's a good definition. >> Yes, but let's unpack this a little bit because at the end of the day, what a business is going to want to do is they're going to want to be able to run apply their data to the best service. >> [David] Correct. >> And increasingly that's what we're advising our clients to think about. >> [David] Yeah. >> Don't think about being an AWS customer, per se, think about being a customer of AWS services that serve your business. Or IBM services that serve your business. But you want to ensure that your dependency on that service is not absolute, and that's why you want to be able to at least have the option of being able to run your data in all of these different places. >> And I think the market now realizes that there is not going to be a single, dominant vendor for cloud infrastructure. That's not going to happen. Yes, it happened, Oracle dominated in relational data. SAP dominated for ERP systems. For cloud, it's democratized. That's not going to happen. So everybody knows that Amazon probably have the best serverless compute lambda functions available. They've got millions of those things already written or in the process of being written. Everybody knows that Microsoft are going to extend the wonderful technology that they have on desktop and move that into cloud for analytics-based technologies and so on. The Google have been working on artificial intelligence for an elongated period of time, so vendors are going to arbitrage between different cloud vendors. They're going to choose the best of brood approach. >> [John] They're going to go to Google for AI and scale, they're going to go to Amazon for robustness of services, and they're going to go to Microsoft for the Suite. >> [Peter] They're going to go for the services. They're looking at the services, that's what they need to do. >> And the thing that we'll forget, that we don't at WANdisco, is that that requires guaranteed consistent data sets underneath the whole thing. >> So where does Fusion fit in here? How is that getting traction? Give us some update. Are you working with Microsoft? I know we've been talking about Amazon, what about Microsoft? >> So we've been working with Microsoft, we announced a strategic partnership with them in March where we became a tier zero vendor, which basically means that we're partnered with them in lockstep in the field. We executed extremely well since that point and we've done a number of fairly large, high-profile deals. A retailer, for example, that was based in Amazon didn't really like being based in Amazon so had to build a poly cloud implementation to move had to buy scale data from AWS into Azure, that went seamlessly. It was an overnight success. >> [John] And they're using your technology? >> They're using our technology. There's no other way to do that. I think the world has now, what Microsoft and others have realized, CDC technology changed data capture. Doesn't work at this kind of scale where you batch up a bunch of changes and then you ship them, block shipping or whatever, every 15 minutes or so. We're talking about petabyte scale ingest processes. We're talking about huge data lakes, that that technology simply doesn't work at this kind of scale. >> [John] We've got a couple minutes left, I want to just make sure we get your views on blockchain, you mentioned consensus, I want to get your thoughts on that because we're seeing blockchain is certainly experimental, it's got, it's certainly powering money, Bitcoin and the international markets, it's certainly becoming a money backbone for countries to move billions of dollars out. It's certainly in the tank right now about 600 million below its mark in January, but blockchain is fundamentally supply chain, you're seeing consensus, you're seeing some of these things that are in your realm, what's your view? >> So first of all, at WANdisco, we separate the notion of cryptocurrency and blockchain. We see blockchain as something that's been around for a long time. It's basically the world is moving to decentralization. We're seeing this with airlines, with supermarkets, and so on. People actually want to decentralize rather that centralize now. And the same thing is going to happen in the financial industry where we don't actually need a central transaction coordinator anymore, we don't need a clearinghouse, in other words. Now, how do you do that? At the very heart of blockchain is an incorrect assumption. So must people think that Satoshi's invention, whoever that may be, was based around the blockchain itself. Blockchain is pieced together technologies that doesn't actually scale, right? So it takes game-theoretic approach to consensus. And I won't get, we don't have enough time for me to delve into exactly what that means, but our consensus algorithm has already proven to scale, right? So what does that mean? Well, it means that if you want to go and buy a cup of coffee at the Starbucks next door, and you want to use a Bitcoin, you're going to be waiting maybe half an hour for that transaction to settle, right? Because the-- >> [John] The buyer's got to create a block, you know, all that step's in one. >> The game-theoretic approach basically-- >> Bitcoin's running 500,000 transactions a day. >> Yeah. That's eight. >> There's two transactions per second, right? Between two and eight transactions per second. We've already proven that we can achieve hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of agreements per second. Now the argument against using Paxos, which is what our technology's based on, is it's too complicated. Well, no shit, of course it's too complicated. We've solved that problem. That's what WANdisco does. So we've filed a patent >> So you've abstracted the complexity, that's your job. >> We've extracted the complexity. >> So you solve the complexity problem by being a complex solution, but you're making and abstracting it even easier. >> We have an algorithmic not a game-theoretic approach. >> Solving the scale problem Correct. >> Using Paxos in a way that allows real developers to be able to build consensus algorithm-based applications. >> Yes, and 90% of blockchain is consensus. We've solved the consensus problem. We'll be launching a product based around Hyperledger very soon, we're already in tests and we're already showing tens of thousands of transactions per second. Not two, not 2,000, two transactions. >> [Peter] The game theory side of it is still going to be important because when we start talking about machines and humans working together, programs don't require incentives. Human beings do, and so there will be very, very important applications for this stuff. But you're right, from the standpoint of the machine-to-machine when there is no need for incentive, you just want consensus, you want scale. >> Yeah and there are two approaches to this world of blockchains. There's public, which is where the Bitcoin guys are and the anarchists who firmly believe that there should be no oversight or control, then there's the real world which is permission blockchains, and permission blockchains is where the banks, where the regulators, where NASDAQ will be when we're trading shares in the future. That will be a permission blockchain that will be overseen by a regulator like the SEC, NASDAQ, or London Stock Exchange, et cetera. >> David, always great to chat with you. Thanks for coming on, again, always on the cutting edge, always having a great vision while knocking down some good technology and moving your IP on the right waves every time, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Always on the next wave, David Richards here inside theCUBE. Every year, doesn't disappoint, theCUBE bringing you all the action here. Cube NYC, we'll be back with more coverage. Stay with us; a lot more action for the rest of the day. We'll be right back; stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCube covering PentahoWorld 2017 brought to you by Hitachi Ventara. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of PentahoWorld brought to you by Hitachi Ventara. My name is Rebecca Knight, I'm your host along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Michael Weiss, he is the senior manager at NASDAQ, and Shere Saidon, who is analytics manager at NASDAQ. Thanks so much for coming back to theCube, I should say, you're Cube veterans now. >> We are, at least I am. This is his first year, this is his first time at PentahoWorld. So, excited to bring him along. >> Okay so you're a newbie but you're a veteran so. (laughing) >> Great. So, tell us a little bit about what has changed since the last time you came on, which was 2015, back then? >> So the biggest thing that's happened in the past 18 months is we've launched seven new exchanges. Integrated seven new exchanges. We bought the ISE, the International Stock Exchange, which is three options markets. We just completed that integration in August. We've also bought the Canadian, CHI-X, the Canadian Exchange, which also had three equities markets, so we integrated them, and we went live with a dark pool offering for Goldman back in June. So now we operate a dark pool for Goldman Sachs, and we're looking to kind of expand that offering at this point. >> So you're just getting bigger and bigger. So tell our viewers a little bit how Pentaho fits into this. >> So Pentaho is the engine that kind of does all our analytics behind the scenes at post trade, right. So we do a lot of traditionally TL, where we're doing batch processing. In the back-end we're doing a little bit more with the Hadoop ecosystem leveraging things like EMR, Spark, Presto, that type of stuff, And Pentaho kind of helps blend that stuff together a little bit. We use it for reporting, we do some of the BA, we're actually now looking to have the data Pentaho generates plug in a little bit of Tableau. So, we're looking to expand it and really leverage that data in other ways at this point. Even doing some things more externally, doing more data offerings via Pentaho externally. >> So I got to do a NASDAQ 101 for my 13 year-old. Came up to me the other day and said, "Daddy, what's the NASDAQ index and how does it work?" Well, give us a 20 second answer. >> Michael: On the NASDAQ index? >> Yeah, what's the NASDAQ Index and how does it work? >> Probably the wrong person to answer that one but, the index is generally just a blend of various stocks. So the S&P 500 is a blend of different stocks, much like that the cues, are NASDAQ's equivalent of the S&P, right, so, we use a different algorithm to determine the companies that make up that blend, but it's an index just like at the S&P. >> They're weighted by market cap- >> Michael: Right, yeah. >> And that determines the number at the end- >> Michael: Correct. >> And it goes up and down based on what the stock's index. >> Right, and that's how most people know NASDAQ, right. They see the S&P went up by 5 points, The Dow went down by 3 and the NASDAQ went up by a point, right. But most people don't realize that NASDAQ also operates 27 exchanges worldwide, I think it is now. So, probably a little bit more, maybe closer to 32, but... >> So you mentioned that you're doing a dark pool for Goldman >> Michael: Yes. >> So that's interesting. We were talking off camera about HFT and kind of the old days, and dark pools were criticized at the time. Now Goldman was one of the ones shown to be honest and above board, but what does that mean the dark pool for your business and how does that all tie in? >> Michael: So, dark pools are isolated markets, right, so they don't necessarily interact with the NASDAQ exchange themselves, it's all done within the pool. You interact with only people trading on that pool. What NASDAQ has done is we took our technology and we now host it for Goldman so, we have I-NETs our trading system, so we gave them I-NET, we built all the surrounding solutions, how you manage symbols, how you manage membership. Even the data, we curate their data in the AWS. We do some Pentaho transformations for them. We do some analytics for them. And that's actually going to start expanding, but yeah, we've provided them an entire solution, so now they don't have to manage their own dark pool. And now we're going to look to expand that to other potential clients. >> Dave: So that's NASDAQ as a technology >> Yes. >> Dave: Provider. Very interesting. So I was saying, earlier, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange is basically closing the facility where they house humans, again another example of machines replacing humans. So the joining, well NASDAQ, kind of, but NYSE, London Stock Exchange, Singapore, now Hong Kong... Essentially, electronic trading. So, brings us to the sort of technology underpinnings of NASDAQ. Shere, maybe you can talk a little bit about your role, and paint a picture of the technology infrastructure. >> Yeah so I focus primarily on the financial side of corporate finance. So we leverage Pentaho to do a lot of data integration, allow us to really answer our business questions. So, previously it would take days to put basic reporting together, now you've got it all automated, or we're working towards getting it mostly automated, and it just answer the questions that we need. And no longer use our gut to drive decisions, we're using hard data. And so that's helped us instrumentally in a lot of different places. >> Dave: So, talk more about the data pipeline, where the data's coming from, how you're blending it, and how you're bringing it through the pipeline and operationalizing it. >> Yeah, so we've got a lot of different billing systems, so we integrate companies, and historically we've let them keep their billings systems. So just kind of bring it all together into our core ERP, seeing how quantities...and just getting the data, and just figuring out on the basic side, how much do we make from a certain customer? What are we making from them? What happens in different scenarios if they consolidate, or if they default? And some of the pipeline there is just blending it all together, normalizing the data, making sure it's all in the same format, and then putting it in a format where our executives or business managers can actually make decisions off of it. >> Well you're talking about the decision making process, and you said it's no longer gut, you're using data to drive your decisions, to know which direction is the right direction. How big a change is that, just culturally speaking? How has that changed? >> Yeah, it's huge, at least on our side, it's making us a long more confident in the decisions we're making. We're no longer going in saying, hey this is probably how we should do it. No, the numbers are showing us that this is going to pay off, and we stick to it and look at the hard facts, rather than what do we think is going to happen? >> So, talk a little bit about what you guys are seeing here, and you're doing a lot of speaking here, we were joking earlier, you're kind of losing your voice. You're telling your story, what kind of reactions you getting? Share with us the behind the scenes at the conference. >> I think at this conference you're seeing a lot of people kind of fall in line with similar ideas that we're trying to get to. Taking advantage more instead of your traditional MPPs, or your traditional relational databases, moving more towards this Hadoop ecosystem. Leveraging Spark, Presto, Flume, all these various new technologies that have emerged over the past two to five years, and are now more viable than ever. They're easier to scale, if you look at your traditional MPPs, like we're a big Redshift user, but every time you scale it there's a cost with that, and we don't necessarily need to maintain all that data all the time, so something in the Hadoop ecosystem now lets us maintain that data without all the unnecessary cost. I see a lot of more of that than I did two years ago, a lot more people are following that trend. I think the other interesting trend I've seen this week is this idea of becoming more cloud agnostic. Where do you operate, and how do you store your data should be irrelevant to the data processing, and I think it's going to be a tough nut to crack for Pentaho, or any vendor. But if you can figure out a way to either do some type of cloud parity, where you have support across all your services, but you don't have to know which service you deploy to when you design your pipelines, I think that's going to be huge. I think we're a little ways from that, but that's been a common theme this week as well, both private and your big three cloud providers right now, your Googles, your Azures, and your AWS. >> So when I asked you said cloud agnostic, that's great, good vision and aspiration. The follow up would be, am I correct that you don't see it as data location agnostic, right, you want to bring the cloud model to your data, versus try to force your data into a cloud? Or not necessarily? >> A lot of it I think is being driven by not wanting to be vendor locked in, so they want to have the ability to, and I think this is easier said than done, the ability to move your data to different cloud providers based on pricing or offerings, right, and right now going from AWS to Google to Azure would be a very painful process. So you move petabytes of data across, it's not cost efficient and all the savings you want to realize by moving to maybe a Google in the future, are not going to be realized cause of all the effort it's going to take to get there. >> Dave: We had CERN on earlier, and they were working on that problem... >> Yeah, it's not a trivial problem to solve, but if you can crack that, and you can then say hey I wanna...even if I have a service offering, Like our operating a dark pool for Goldman. We also have a market tech side, where we sell our trading platform and various solutions to other exchanges worldwide. If we can come up with a way to be able to deploy to any cloud provider, even on an on-prem cloud, without having to do a bunch of customizations each time, that would be huge, it would revolutionize what we do. We're, as our own company, starting to look at that, and talking with Pentaho, they're also... are going to eye that as a potential way to go, with abstractions and things like that, but it's going to take some time. >> We're you guys here yesterday for the keynotes? >> Michael: Saw some of the keynotes, yes. >> The big messaging, like every conference that you go to, is be the disruptor, or you're going to get disrupted. We talked earlier off camera... Trading volumes are down, so the way you traditionally did business is changing, and made money is changing. >> Michael: Right. >> We talked earlier about you guys becoming a technology provider, I wonder if you could help us understand that a little bit, from the standpoint of NASDAQ strategy, when we hear your CEOs talk, real visionary, technology driven transformations. >> Yeah, I think Adena's coming in is definitely looking at that as a trend, right? Trading volumes are down, they've been going down, they've kind of stabilized a little bit, and we're stable able to make money in that space, but the problem is there's not a ton of growth. We acquire the ISE, we acquire the CHI-X, we're buying market share at that point. So you increase revenue, but you also increase overhead in that way. And you can only do so many major acquisitions at a time, you can only do how many one billion dollar acquisitions a year before you have to call it a day. And we can look at more strategic, smaller acquisitions for exchanges, but that doesn't necessarily bring you the transformation, the net revenue you're looking for. So what Adena has started to look at is, how do we transform to more of a technology company? We're really good at operating exchanges, how do we take that, and we already have market tech doing it, but how do we make that more scalable, not just to the financial sector, but to your other exchanges, your Ubers or your StubHubs of the world? How do you become a service provider, or a platform as a service for these other companies, to come in and use your tech? So we're looking at how do we rewrite our entire platform, from trading to the back-end, to do things like: Can we deploy to any cloud provider? Can we deploy on-prem? Can we be a little bit more technology agnostic so to speak, and offer these as services, and offer a bunch of microservices, so that if a startup comes up and wants to set up an exchange, they can do it, they can leverage our services, then build whatever other applications they want on top of it. I think that's a transformation we need to go through, I think it's good vision, and I'm looking forward to executing it. It's going to be a couple years before we see the fruits of that labor, but Adena's really doing a great job of coming in, and really driving that innovation, and Brad Peterson as well, our CIO, has really been pushing this vision, and I think it's really going to work out for us, assuming we can execute. >> Well you know what's interesting about that, if I may, is financial services is usually so secretive about their technology, right? But your business, you guys are becoming a technology provider, so you got to face the world and start marketing your capabilities now, and opening about that. It's sort of an interesting change. >> I think you'll see that starting to become more of a thing over the next year or two, as we start actually looking to build out the platform and figure it out. We do market on the market tech side, I mean it's not a small business, but we're more strategic about who we market to, cause we're still targeting your financial exchanges, more internationally than in the U.S., but there's only so many of them, again you have to start looking at rebranding, rebuilding, and rethinking how we think about exchanges in general, and not thinking of them as just a financial thing. >> Well that's what I wanted to get into, because you're talking about this rebranding, and this rebuilding, this transformation, to the backdrop within an industry that is changing rapidly, and we have sort of the threat of legislative reform, perhaps some administrative reforms coming down all the time, so how do you manage that? I mean, those are a lot of pressures there, are you constantly trying to push the envelope right up until any changes take place? Or what would you say Shere and Michael? >> Probably again not the right person to ask about this, but we're definitely trying to stay on top of the cutting edge in innovation and the technologies out there that, whether it be Blockchain, or different types of technologies. I mean we're definitely trying to make sure we're investing in them, while maintaining our core businesses. >> Right, it's trying to find that balance right now of when to make the next step in the technology food chain, and when to balance that with regulatory obligations. And if you look at it, going back to the idea of being able to launch marketplaces, I think what you're ending up seeing over the coming years is your Ubers, your StubHubs, I think they're going to become more regulated at some level. And we're good at operating more regulated markets, so I think that's where we can kind of come in and play a role, and help wade through those regulations a little bit more, and help build software to adhere to those regulations. >> Since you brought up Blockchain, Jamie Dimon craps all over Blockchain, or you know, Bitcoin, and then clarifies his remarks, saying look, technology underneath is here to stay. Thoughts on Blockchain? Obviously Financial Services is looking at it very closely, doing some really advanced stuff, what can you tell us? >> Yeah, I think there's no argument that it's definitely an innovation and a disruptive technology. I think that it's definitely in it's early stages across the board, so we're investing in it where we can, and trying to keep a close eye on it. We think that there's a lot of potential in a lot of different applications. >> As the NASDAQ transforms its business, how does that effect the sort of back-end analytics activity and infrastructure? >> The data is just growing, that's like the biggest challenge we have now. Data that used to be done in Excel, it's just no longer an option, so now in order to get the insights that we used to get just from having a couple people doing Excel transformations, you need to now invest in the infrastructure in the back-end, and so there's a lot that needs to go into building out an infrastructure to be able to ingest the data, and then also having the UI on the front-end, so that the business can actually view it the way they want. >> So skills wise, how's that affecting who you guys are hiring and training? And how's that transformation going? >> Michael: I'll let you go first. >> I think there's definitely, data analytics is a hot field. It's very new, there's definitely a big skills gap in administrative work and in the analytics side. Usually you have people could perform analytical functions just by being administrative or operational, and now it's really, we're investing in analysts, and making sure that we have the right people in place to be able to do these transformations, or pull the data and get the answers that we need from them. >> I mean from the tech side, I think what you're seeing is where we traditionally would just plug a developer in there, whether a Java developer, or an ETL developer, I think what you're seeing now is we're looking to bring more of a business minded data analyst to the tech side, right? So we're looking to bring a data engineer, so to speak, more to the tech side. So we're not looking to hire a traditional four year Computer Science degree, or Software Engineering degree, you're looking for a different breed of person, cause quite honestly because you're traditional Java dev. or C++ developer, they're not skilled or geared towards data. And when we've tried to plug that paradigm in, it just doesn't really work, so we're looking now to hiring more of an analyst, but someone who's a little bit more techie as well. They still need to have those skills to do some level of coding, and what we are finding is that skill gap is still very much... There's a gap there. There's a huge gap. And I think it's closing, but- >> And as you have to fund those for the new areas, I presume, like many companies in your business, you're trying to move away from the sort of undifferentiated low-level infrastructure deployment hassles, and the IT labor costs there, especially as we move to the cloud, presumably, so is that shift palpable? I mean, can you see that going on? >> Yeah, I think we made a lot of progress over the past couple years in doing that. We do more one button deployments, where the operation cost is a lot lower, a lot more automation around alerting, around when things go wrong, so there's not necessarily a human being sitting there watching a computer. We've invested a lot in that area to kind of reduce the costs, and make the experience better for our end user. And even from a development side, the cost of a new application is a lot less every time you have to do a release. The question is, how do you balance that with the regulations, and make sure you still have a good process in place. The idea of putting single button deployments in place is a great one, but you still have to balance that with making sure that what you push to productions been tested, well defined, and it meets the need, and you're not just arbitrarily throwing things out there. So we're still trying to hit that balance a little bit, it's more on the back-end side. The trading system is not quite there for obvious reasons, we're way more protective of what goes out there, then surrounding it a lot of the times, but I can see a future where, again going back to this idea of transforming our business, where you can stand up and do an exchange with the click of a button. I think that's a trend we're looking at. >> Rebecca: It's not too far in the future. >> No, I don't think it is. >> Last question, Pentaho report card. What are they doing really well? What do you want to see them do better? >> I think they continue to focus in the right areas, focusing more on the data processing side, and with the big data technologies, trying to fill that gap in the big data, and be the layer that you don't have to tie yourself to ike vCloud Air or MapR, you can kind of be a little bit more plug and play. I think they still need to do some improvements on there visualizations in their front-ends. I think they've been so much more focused on the data processing, that part of it, that the visualization's kind of lacked behind, so I think they need to put a little more focus into that, but all in all, they're an A, and we've been extremely happy with them as a software provider. >> Great. >> Shere: I think the visualization part is the part that allows people to understand that value being created at Pentaho. So I think being able to maybe improve a little bit on the visualization could go a far way. >> Michael, Shere, it's been so much fun having you on theCube, and having this conversation, keep that bull market coming please, do whatever you can. >> We'll do our best. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. We are here at PentahoWorld, sponsored by Hitachi Vantara. For Dave Vellante, we will have more from theCube in just a little bit.